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As we sat in his cluttered basement office, where his rendition of Van Gogh's
Starry Night
brought some relief to the institutional environment, Palmer told me that his interest in aesthetics came out of his own amateur photography (he painted the
Starry Night
for an art class he took to further understand artistic practice). As with all art, it involves discovering a series of preferences: What do I want to photograph? What angle would make the best photograph? Where to position the subject? Aspiring photographers like Palmer are typically taught to employ the famous “rule of thirds,” placing the focal object of the work somewhere along the lines that divide the image, horizontally and vertically, into three parts. And yet, when he has asked subjects to rate their liking for photographs, or given them cameras and asked them to produce images that most pleased them, the overwhelming preference was to have images in the
center
of the composition.

Which raises another question: Why are artists being trained to produce images that people do not seem to prefer?
Why would artists' preferences not match wider preferences?
Palmer queried a range of art and music students (for a control, he added psychology students) on their “preference for harmony,” as he called it; they would listen to different composers, see different color combinations, look at circles placed at different spots in rectangles. The participants all more or less agreed on what was harmonious (Maurice Ravel more so than the atonally inclined Arnold Schoenberg). But when it came to the art and music students, what they
liked
began to diverge from what they thought was harmonious.

Were they just being snobs? Does art training lower one's interest in harmony, or do people with lower preferences for harmony become
artists? Palmer is not sure. It could be that the more one studies art, the more one requires a “stronger” stimulus to maintain interest. “I think some of it is just sort of overexposure,” Palmer said. “I think you get bored with the same thing. You start out trying spatial compositions where the important stuff is in the middle of the frame, but it gets to be kind of boring. Moreover, the teachers reinforce novelty, and they actually tell you not to put things in the center of the frame.”

Whether artist or layperson, we all have an aesthetic response. We cannot but help think—whether consciously or not—whether we like or dislike something.
Days after being born, babies show a strong preference for looking at faces that are looking at them. So what would it be about blue, then, that would make so many people like it?
Since the dawn of psychology, when the pioneering researcher Joseph Jastrow handed out color samples at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, querying thousands of visitors, people have generally been putting blue on top.

Does it just seem to hit some chromatic sweet spot? If we were born with this love of blue, however, one might expect most infants to prefer it. In one study, Palmer had infant subjects (at least those not dismissed for “
general fussiness”) look at pairs of colored circles. “Looking time” is used as a general indicator of infant (and, less so, adult) preference: The longer you look, the more you like. Adult subjects were given the same test. While blue, predictably, was the color that adults were most likely to spend time looking at, the infants not only did not show a decided preference for blue but seemed to possess a particular liking for “dark yellow.” This happens to be one of the colors most typically
disliked
by adults (Palmer has his own scientific designation for this range of brownish yellows: “icky-poo colors”).

What was going on? Palmer, and his colleague Karen Schloss, have an idea—called the ecological valence theory—that might explain both the adult and the infant preferences. The theory is that we like the colors of the
things
we most like. Their experimental procedure was elegantly simple. First, a group of subjects was asked to rate how much they liked thirty-two colors. Then another group was asked to name, in twenty seconds, as many things as they could that had that color. A final group was then asked to rate how much they liked these things. What they liked predicted, 80 percent of the time, what colors they liked. Blue, not surprisingly, came out on top, for think of what blue
evokes: clear sky, clean water. Who does not like these things—indeed need them to survive? Might the predominance of blue shirts and khaki pants in men's wardrobes have something to do with nature? “
It happens at the beach,” the journalist Peter Kaplan once commented on his favored outfit of pale blue shirt and tan trousers. “The ocean meets the shore.” Who does not like the seashore?

A color like a brownish yellow, by contrast, which did not do well in Palmer's test, can summon a host of unpleasant connotations: dark mucus, vomit, pus, the 1970s AMC Pacer. But then why did the infants seem so fond of the dark yellowish colors?

The beauty of the theory is that it encompasses the idea that color preference, like food preference, might be both evolutionarily hard-wired (we like the things that are good for us) and a function of adaptive learning (we learn about things that make us feel good). Infants, after all, have not yet learned to associate things like feces with disgust—as any parent who has waged battle on the changing table can attest. It could also be, Palmer suggests, “to make up a story,” of the sort that evolutionary accounts must in some sense be, that infant “liking” for the dark yellow-brownish spectrum has to do with some resemblance to the mother's nipple, which they eventually turn away from, or learn to dislike.

The ecological valence theory has been tested in other ways.
When Palmer and his colleagues queried students at Berkeley and Stanford on a range of colors, they found that students at each college preferred their own school's colors to those of their rival school. The more they liked the school, the more they liked the colors. For Palmer, this hints that color preference comes more from association than from the colors themselves; it is unlikely, after all, that someone goes to Berkeley because he happens to like blue and gold. Show people images of positive things that are red (strawberries, tomatoes), and their reported liking of red goes up. Prime them with pictures of open wounds or a scab, their ardor for red dims a bit.
Query Democrats and Republicans on Election Day, and their liking for blue or red, the colors that have of late become associated with each party, goes up slightly.

Talk to people in the color industry, and they will describe a version of adaptive learning quite similar to ecological valence. Leatrice Eiseman, the noted color consultant (she urged HP to come out with a teal-colored computer some months before Apple released its groundbreaking
iMac), notes that people may have an initial aversion to a color like chartreuse—which occasionally goes through spells as a fashionable hue—but then they begin giving it a second look. “I call it your peripheral vision,” she told me. “Oh, there's yellow-green there and yellow-green there. Hmmm, it's not such a bad color; it doesn't look bad in a shirt.” And then suddenly you have forgotten why you disliked it. As Tom Mirabile, an executive at Lifetime Brands (the company that was on the cutting edge of bringing non-white appliances into the kitchen), described it to me, “You see it enough, and you start thinking it's something you want to see.”

Some have argued, suggesting that the all-choices-are-constructed theory had gone too far, that preferences for things like consumer goods can be “inherent,” in that they existed all along, buried like repressed memories, waiting to be unlocked. The iPhone, the argument goes, made us realize people actually did not prefer a mechanical keyboard on a smartphone (the way many insisted they did). And yet culture often lurks behind supposedly “natural” preferences.
The idea that pink is “naturally” a color for girls is complicated by the fact that in the early part of the last century pink was thought of as the color for
boys
. It is most probable that girls like pink because they see other girls wearing pink. For even if females did slightly favor “reddish” hues, as some studies have found, this would hardly explain why pink is not deemed an appropriate color for boys' bicycles or red is so infrequent a color for girls' bikes—and indeed why one so rarely sees an adult woman's bike in pink.

And so begins a sort of feedback loop: The more chances one has to see a color, and the more that seeing that color is associated with positive experiences (a pink cake at a girl's birthday party, a man's purple shirt), the more one's liking for that color will increase. The more one likes the color, the more one will use it to help create other positive experiences: Red is great on a Ferrari, why not on a blender? As Palmer describes it, “We go through the world accumulating these statistics about the color associations of things that we like versus what we don't like; there's a sense in which we are constantly updating these things.” Just as my daughter was constantly reassessing her favorites, we are, Palmer argues, “computing this stuff on the fly.” A favorite color is like a chromatic record of everything that has ever made you feel good.

One day, a few years ago, I suddenly began noticing how much, in the course of an average day, I was asked whether I liked something or not (sometimes I was asking myself the question) and how muddled the answer often was. To wit,

Or,

And, invariably,

But what did all this really mean? How many gradations could there be in a hedonic experience—were five enough? What did it mean when I thumbed a “like” on an Instagram post? That I liked the content of the image, the way it was shot, or the person posting it? Did my liking depend on how many others had or had not liked it? Was
not
“liking” it saying that I actually did not like it? Was I even aware of what was going on in my head as the electrical impulses traveled from brain to thumb?
Just having a face in an Instagram photograph, as research has shown, drives up liking by some 30 percent (it does not matter how old or young, whether male or female, whether one person or ten—just a face). Did this fact consciously enter into my decision to move my thumb?

We are faced with an ever-increasing amount of things to figure out whether we like or dislike, and yet at the same time there are fewer overarching rules and standards to go by in helping one decide. Online, we swim in the streams of other people's opinions—the four-star Yelp review, the YouTube dislike—but whose opinion deserves attention? When you can listen to almost any song in the world, how do you decide what to play and whether you like it? The world is topsy-turvy: Foods
and fashions that were once rarely attainable become commonplace, while things that were once commonplace are elevated into objects of connoisseurship. If it's “all good,” is anything bad?

I want to ask the questions we rarely seem to as we ever more rapidly formulate our hedonic and aesthetic responses.
Are liking and disliking merely opposite conditions on the same spectrum, or are they different things? How do we come to like things we once disliked? How much can liking be quantified? Why does the taste of experts and laypeople so often diverge? Can the pleasure of liking something that you think you are supposed to like be a sufficient substitute for liking something because you authentically like it? Do we know what we like or like what we know?

In 2000, a team of Italian neuroscientists reported an unusual case involving an older man suffering from frontotemporal dementia. He had suddenly acquired a liking for Italian pop music, a genre he had previously referred to as “mere noise” (he once liked mostly classical).
It was not so much that he “forgot” his previous tastes; in Alzheimer's patients, for example, aesthetic preferences seem to survive, even as other memories fade. Rather, the researchers suggested, the neural effects of his treatment might have awakened in him a new desire for novelty.

This rapid, wholesale switch in tastes raises a number of questions. How open are we to changing our tastes? What happens in our brain when we discover that we no longer dislike something, when we decide that “mere noise” may actually be pleasurable music? Are some of us, by dint of our neural architecture, more open to novelty or more predisposed to like certain combinations of pitch and rhythm?

Let us imagine that the man's condition actually unlocked in him an existing—but repressed—preference for pop music. The idea seems far-fetched. But how much do we actually know about our own tastes, these collections of preferences and predispositions?

In an experiment conducted at a country fair in Germany, people were asked to sample two kinds of ketchup. They were both the same variety of Kraft, but a small amount of vanillin (a flavor compound of the vanilla bean) had been added to one. Why? In Germany, infant formula typically contains small amounts of the stuff. In a list of questions about food preference, the researchers rather slyly asked visitors if they had been bottle- or breast-fed as infants. People who were breast-fed overwhelmingly preferred the “natural” ketchup, while bottle-fed
people liked the one with the hint of vanilla.
It is unlikely they made any connection; they just liked what they liked.

One often hears, and says, with a shake of the head, “There's no accounting for taste.” Typically, this comes as an incredulous response to someone
else's
taste. The person who says this rarely uses it to suggest that he might scarcely be able to explain his own tastes to himself. After all, what could be more authentic to us than the things we like? When preferences are actually tested, however, the results can be surprising, even unsettling, to those who hold them. The French social scientist Claudia Fritz has examined, in various settings, the preferences of accomplished violinists for instruments made by old Italian masters like Stradivari. Everyone knows, if only from hearing of these incredibly valuable instruments being left in the backs of taxicabs, how lush and resonant they must sound, as if bestowed with some ancient, now lost magic. Who would not want to play one?
But the expert musicians she has tested tend to prefer, under blind conditions, the sound of new violins.