• Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRD4gb0p5RM
• Parthenon
• Pyramids
• Pieta

When subjects viewed the pictures of the original sculptures, scans of their brains showed a strong emotional response; they were clearly moved. There was much less response to the sculptures with subtle change in proportion.

“We were very surprised that very small modifications to images of the sculptures led to very strong modifications in brain activity,” researcher Giacomo Rizzolatti tells Livescience.com. He believes that the human brain may have a special attraction to images that demonstrate the “golden ratio,” an eye-pleasing proportion of 1-to-0.618 that shows up again and again in art and nature. This ratio can be found in a nautilus shell and spiral galaxies, and in Michelangelo’s Pietá and the Pyramids. When the brain sees these magical proportions, Rizzolatti says, it interprets them as evidence of great beauty.