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Psychologists at the University of Toronto, including UC Cognitive Science Program Director Dirk Bernhardt-Walther, 
have discovered a link between our aesthetic preferences and the amount of energy used by our brains to process what we see.

“Usually, people think we like specific images because of their cultural meanings, or specific signals we receive from them,” says Yikai Tang, “in this research, we look at the more objective measure of energy consumption to really quantify the processing cost of what we see and find pleasurable.”