Do You Believe in Love at First Sight? The Science of First Impressions
They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Here's the detailed science of human attraction.
His eyes opened wide as he saw a vague figure coming closer to him. He was standing on the light tile floor beneath the beaming white lights of the shopping mall, waiting for his Tinder date. They’d matched a few weeks prior and exchanged some fun, witty banter before agreeing to meet. A bookstore with a coffee shop nestled in the back is to his left.
That’s where it’ll all go down.
As the figure gets closer, his brain begins to interpret the shape of a woman. He feels a sudden pounding in his chest. His palms begin to sweat. He’s anxious about how he’ll be received by his new Tinder date and wonders whether the date will go smoothly.
Epinephrine and cortisol levels spike in his body. His stress response kicks into high gear.
The figure has come closer and now passed. It’s not her. Thus, he waits. Within a few seconds, he turns around, wondering where the bathroom is. He spots her a few feet away coming out of a department store.
“Heyyy, so good to finally meet you,” she says with a smile and a drawl.
“Likewise,” he replies.
For a few seconds, the two lock eyes. They observe each other with outsized smiles, taking in one another’s essences. Their brains accelerate and start processing information at an unusually high pace.
At this point, the two have mostly made up their minds about one another already. Much of the process was unconscious.
Crunching the Numbers
People call it “chemistry,” but really, it’s this beautiful squishy flesh machine we have in our skulls called the human brain, doing what it does best — processing and interpreting its environment.
The human eye takes in 57.6 GB of information per day.
It transmits that information to the brain at about 10 Mbps — the speed of your high-speed internet. Rough calculations have estimated that the eye processes 4.8 GB of information per second.
That’s as much information as it takes to run many smartphones.
That’s 1,329.6 pictures taken with the 12-megapixel camera of your smartphone — every single second.
Research has shown that it only takes 50 milliseconds, 1/20th of one second, to judge whether something is aesthetically pleasing or not. Scary, I know, but it’s not the whole story. We’ve got a long way to go and a lot to clarify.
Within 1/20th of a second, the two people know whether they’re attracted to one another or not.
Not even 1/10th of a second into this first date, and they’ve summed one another up. According to research from Princeton University, that’s how long it takes for humans to make judgments about someone’s face.
Personally, this is why I believe in “love” at first sight.*