Perfection in Nature: Let's Talk about "Beauty Threshold"

I moved to Southern California from the East Coast a few years ago. One thing I’ve noticed here is that there are so many flowers, and they are so beautiful. I’m not even a person who is “into” flowers, really.

Many times when I am out for a walk, I see a stray flower that completely captures my attention. Like this one.

Flowers like this just appear randomly along a walkway near my house. I don’t even know if it’s meant to be there on purpose. It might be a wild flower.

Every time I see a flower like this, I exclaim to my uninterested husband, “Look at this flower!! It’s so perfect!” and I can’t stop looking at it and commenting on it. I wonder why he doesn’t seem to give even the smallest care about it! It’s so amazing that it’s so perfect!

He’ll be like, “Yup.”

But I think there is something about this perfection in nature that gets to me. It’s like the ultimate beauty, and it seems like it’s by accident. Now, I know nature isn’t necessarily “by accident”-and that flowers look the way they do to attract pollinating bees and stuff like that-but the way the flowers just grow and reveal their flawless designs almost seems like magic. It’s almost like they did it just for us humans. How nice of them.

I did a quick search on “why are flowers beautiful?” to find some science, and a random comment caught my eye. Someone wrote, in response to the question about why flowers are beautiful:

“Bees and humans both have brains that are based on the same basic building blocks, neurons or nerve cells. These cells are linked together in networks that have predictable behaviors. First and foremost is threshold behavior. Stimuli must overcome a given amount of intensity before evoking a response. Plants have evolved flowers that evoke a response from neural networks.

An interesting behavior in neural networks is their lack of sensitivity to the idea of too much stimulus. You can’t have too much beauty.” source

WHOA. Thanks for the awesome quote, buddy!!!

First of all-disclaimer-I have NO IDEA if this person knows what they are talking about. It’s just a comment I found on the internet, so there’s no proof about anything. But the fact that they said “You can’t have too much beauty” set off bells in my head.

I wrote a post a while back about being overwhelmed by beauty. It’s about how when I see a beautiful place, like a cathedral or nice scenery, I feel like I can never appreciate it enough, and it bothers me.

Maybe I’m drawn to symmetrical, beautiful flowers because their intense beauty stimulates a response in my brain. It’s like a mini-stimulation (I hate the word arousal because it sounds sexual, even when it isn’t), and aren’t our brains always looking for stimulation?

Perhaps that flower is beautiful enough to overcome my threshold and evoke a response in me…but it’s not enough to evoke it in my husband.

So, I think I’ve found the solution. I have a lower beauty threshold than him, I guess. At least when it comes to flowers.

And I hate to make generalizations, especially with no evidence or proof, but in general, wouldn’t you say women like flowers more than men? Maybe, overall, women have a lower arousal threshold for stimulation in their neural networks from the beauty of flowers than men do.