In response to yesterday’s post, Dagmar said: “A beautiful body doesn\u2019t attract me, only a beautiful mind does.” I think she was referring to the clich\u00e9 that first impressions are about appearance.<\/p>\n
But I don’t think that is true. There are a lot of objectively beautiful people out there, but for the most part we don’t find them compelling. There is actually something off-putting for many people about seeing a vacant soul within a beautiful shell.<\/p>\n
The great movie actors capture us not because of their looks — although they generally (though not always) look quite presentable — but because we are drawn in by something about their movement, the way they speak, their facial expression, a light in their eyes.<\/p>\n
Then, having seen them perform, we associate the way they look with beauty, and so we come to view their appearance as the epitome of attractiveness.<\/p>\n
I think this is also true in our personal lives. We are each far more intelligent than our conscious minds and our cultural limitations generally permit us to be. This intelligence allows us to acquire a vast amount of information about another person’s essential being in the very first moments that we meet them. But we have neither the language nor the skills even to understand that we have acquired that information, let alone to fully process it.<\/p>\n
It is this knowledge — derived not from some voodoo magic, but from the full functioning of our own brains — that can cause us to be instantly attracted to another person. It is not their physical appearance that attracts us. Yet we will persist in believing that it is, because the truth seems preposterous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In response to yesterday’s post, Dagmar said: “A beautiful body doesn\u2019t attract me, only a beautiful mind does.” I think she was referring to the clich\u00e9 that first impressions are about appearance. But I don’t think that is true. There are a lot of objectively beautiful people out there, but for the most part we … Continue reading “First impressions”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8076"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8076"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8077,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8076\/revisions\/8077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}