“The things that we call beautiful are all different.” This is a
phrase that Dutton speaks in the first minute of his TED talk. When I think of
beauty, I tend to picture concrete, feasible things such as beautiful people or
beautiful places. For whatever reason, this phrase caused me to really think
about the idea of beauty. We use beauty to explain more abstract things, such
as actions or ideas. I never bothered to stop and think about just how
far-reaching and diverse the idea of beauty is. The term can be used to
describe just about anything, come to think of it. While this is cool, the idea
that all the things in life we find beautiful are different makes me seriously
question just exactly what how frequently I use the word. Dutton’s TED talk,
while very insightful and interesting, kind of rattled me. I racked my brain
for the amount of times I had used the word beautiful to describe something
today alone.
This, I think translates to the bigger picture. Why do we do what
we do? Why do we describe things the way that we do? This is something that
makes us truly unique and is something I find that we keep coming back to in
class and in the articles we read. To be quite frank, we really have no idea why
we do anything and that is quite terrifying. Ultimately this TED talk makes me
think about a neuroscience class I recently took. On the first day of the
class, our professor stated that we have no idea how the brain works. For an
instant, I was a bit mad that my major was requiring that I take a class in a
topic where little is known, but thinking back now I can see that this is just
something that is and we will probably not ever really know or understand
ourselves, our motivations, or our purposes and that scares me.
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