Thoughts on the Golden Mean

I was listening to a history book on Brunelleschi and Ghiberti and how their competition was a defining moment in the birth of the renaissance and there was a discussion of how Brunelleschi discovered how to apply linear perspective to modeling. Brunelleschi seemed to be an intense student of how to represent perspectives in art and architecture and he studied the aesthetics of building shapes from the classical period. He was certainly aware of the Golden Ratio. I was intrigued by the idea that a man so obsessed with how humans perceived would be drawn to this ratio, because he was not just one to employ the pragmatics of perspective, he also seemed to understand that there were innate human cognitive processes involved in perception and aesthetics.

It dawned on me at that point that the attraction of the Golden Mean to the human eye may have a basis in how our brains actually process information. In other words the reason that we find that ration attractive is that it resonates with the transformation of information from our senses to our brain in such a way that it is a simple and pleasing experience to look at such an object. It may be that the transformation of information in our brain iterates from the basic formula of the Golden mean.