healthbriefs
Looking at Beautiful Art Bumps Up Brain Activity R
esearchers from Japan’s Oita University have found that aesthetic appreciation of paintings may be linked to altering activities in specifi c areas of the brain. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of 39 people were taken as they looked at slides of still life and landscape paintings by 19th-century French painters and slides of photographs that closely replicated the paintings. While the subjects considered both the paintings and the photographic
analogs to be beautiful during the experiment—with no signifi cant differences between them—the most beautiful paintings were rated signifi cantly higher than their corresponding photographic analogs in the pre-experimental phase. The researchers cite this as evidence of feeling greater pleasure from the paintings. The MRIs showed that during the experiment, portions of the brain’s frontal lobe related to emotions, memory, learning and decision-making were activated. However, when the researchers compared the positive effects of aesthetic appreciation of the art paintings versus the photographs, they noted signifi cantly more activity at the back of the subjects’ brains, specifi cally the bilateral cuneus, a part of the occipital lobe responsible for basic visual processing; and the left lingual gyrus, or ridge, associated with vision, encoding visual memory, logical ordering and dreaming. The fi ndings suggested that these neural structures are associated with the aesthetic appreciation for paintings.
Organics Boast More Nutrients, Fewer Toxins C
onventionally-grown foods contain pesticide residues that are three to four times higher than those found in organic foods (traces may be due to atmospheric drift from other fi elds or soils), according to a review of 343 research studies published last June in the British Journal of Nutrition. The review, which included studies of food grown in different regions and seasons,
also determined that organic foods contained higher levels of healthy nutrients such as minerals, vitamins and antioxidants (specifi cally polyphenols), compared to conventional foods, which also contained signifi cantly higher levels of cadmium, a heavy metal toxin. The study’s authors found evidence that the higher antioxidant and lower cadmium concentrations are linked to specifi c organic growing practices such as avoiding mineral nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers, respectively. They commented, “Results indicate that switching from conventional to organic crop consumption would result in a 20 to 40 percent increase in crop-based antioxidant/polyphenolic intake levels.”
Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.
~Benjamin Disraeli
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