Looking at fractals has stress-reducing effects

[Chillheimer]

Not News, but probably new to some.. at least, that the effect is scientifically proven:
http://materialscience.uoregon.edu/taylor/human_response/Response(leonardo).pdf
http://materialscience.uoregon.edu/taylor/rptlinks2.html

"The experiments - which use eye-tracking equipment to examine how people look at the patterns, and qEEG and fMRI probing techniques to quantify the resulting brain activity - indicate that people are ‘hard-wired’ to respond to a specific form of fractal found in nature, one that reduces stress levels by up to 60%. This stress-reduction is triggered by a physiological resonance that occurs when the fractal structure of the eye matches that of the fractal image being viewed."

[cKleinhuis]

didnt knew that, thank you for posting

[youhn]

Nice to see some research on subjective subjects like these. I think it was already sort of proven that people relax when they can observe nature (visuals, sound, touch). Given that fractals are the geometry of nature, these results are no suprise. But since I'm an engineer, I appreciate the methods of quantifying and proving these expectations. And more to be expected, as the conclusions reads:

"Although preliminary, the results discussed above have enormous potential --the motivation of this article is therefore to trigger further investigations."