What Laziness Has to do with Beauty

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WIs it the Mona Lisa, the Taj Mahal or a dazzling natural scene that makes them so pleasant to contemplate? Is beauty truly in the eye of the beholder, or is there an inherent quality that sets it apart? It’s an age-old question.

New research suggests that a visual wow factor may be linked to a kind of laziness: that which brings the most pleasure to the mind’s eye may be that which requires the least energy to be processed by our visual system. A team from the University of Toronto recently published their results in Nexus PNAS.

Researchers have long proposed that pleasure can serve as a guide for humans and other living things as they navigate the universe: the things that are most pleasurable are also those that are most useful or beneficial to us. Some research seems to support this: depicting environmental features that help the viewer adapt to their surroundings can make an image more pleasant, while those that might be harmful, such as the potential for hidden threats, often elicit aversion.

Read more: »What is a great experience?»

But researchers at the University of Toronto wanted to see if there were more fundamental connections between visual pleasure and physical fitness. So they decided to measure the metabolic costs of aesthetic preference.

First, they tested a simplified model of the human visual system called a deep neural network by showing it nearly 5,000 real images of objects and scenes. Next, they scanned the brains of real humans while they viewed the same images, to measure the extent to which the metabolic activity of the functional human visual system – as measured by the number of active neurons – was associated with aesthetic evaluations of the images. The beauty ratings for each image were determined through surveys of a population of over 1,000 participants from Canada and the United States, who rated each image on a 5-point scale.

Both in humans and in the neural network model, less really was more. The lighter the metabolic lift, the higher the aesthetic rank. Scientists also discovered that visual pleasure or, conversely, discomfort was closely linked to the complexity and “quintessence” of an image, and therefore to its ease or difficulty in processing it.

The results are specific to the perception system, and not to any form of higher cognition, the authors emphasize. Participants were asked to rate their level of enjoyment while looking at each image, but were not encouraged to contemplate the shapes further. Complex visual stimuli could elicit more pleasure with enough contemplation, the authors speculate. The scientists also suggest that the findings might suggest a reason why certain visual properties, such as spatial frequency or contours, may influence aesthetic experience: they might make it easier for the visual system to process and categorize a scene or object.

On a purely instinctive level, the most beautiful images are perhaps those which facilitate the work of the brain.

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Main image: Kotenko Oleksandr / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on December 10, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And New York Review. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.