Spirals, a recurring motif in nature, architecture, art, etc., have exerted a great attraction on people for millennia. In his 1914 book “The Curves of Life”, the British art critic and writer Theodore Andrea Cook (1867 - 1928) examined various aspects of spirals and presented an impressive 426 examples, ranging from plant and shell structures to the human body and the Andromeda Nebula (Cook, 1914). He also examined their beauty and speculated on our reaction to them. Cook assumed that spirals are associated with growth, a fundamental principle of life, and that this is an important source of their beauty.
Although spirals have become somewhat less important as ornaments in some areas such as architecture and furniture design, they are still a universally popular theme Unfortunately, the question of why we find them beautiful is still largely unanswered.
Spirals can be categorized into different types, e.g., Archimedean spirals, logarithmic spirals, Fibonacci spirals or golden spirals, with each type having unique characteristics. Are these types all equally well liked? Hübner (2024) recently demonstrated that this is not the case, showing that the golden spiral is preferred to the Fibonacci spiral and that this is due to subtle variations in a basic feature, in this case curvature. Hübner’s (2024) result supports Fechner’s hypothesis that there are basic features that evoke universal preferences.
Short video to this study
Literature
Cook, T. A. (1914). The curves of life. Courier Corporation.
Hübner, R. (2024). Golden spiral or Fibonacci spiral: Which is more beautiful and why? i-Perception, 15(2).<Open Access>