I stopped by today to show Johnny an interior layout of the new book, and found him engrossed in an article from the New York Times, which profiled software that modifies photos of faces to find the “beauty” sweet spot.
“Well, when they realize that what people see they see with their brains, not their eyes, then we’ll have some real progress,” Johnny said, reading parts of the article to me. But he also noted some flaws in the approach, which only used light-skinned models and most-likely has a Western bias. The researchers are working on something like that, he read to me.
“But look at this photo of Brigette Bardot,” he said to me, pointing at the screen. “She’s prettier in the modified picture, but you lose the playfulness, the attractiveness. Most attractive people have a personality that matches their physicality, and the two fuse well. This moves her outward appearance away from her personality, so there’s dissonance. It doesn’t work.”
Well, all this deep thinking aside, Johnny liked the book page layouts. I think we’re making good progress. But I was left thinking about how what we “see” is really what our brain processes. For instance, I can remember how Bardot looks without having to see the photo. She’s prettier as she was, because that memory also elicits my emotional response to her. She was a lot of fun, and that’s part of being attractive.
