Brain Temperature and Animal Coloration

The hue-heat effect, interpreted as a universal preference for darker colors in hotter environments and brighter colors in colder environments, is the simplest explanation for the ecogeographical effect known as Gloger’s rule.

Thermoaesthetics
14 min readApr 17, 2022

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Richard Friese’s “Polar bear family.” Photo from WikiArt. Public domain.

“Consequently, the closer the skin is to the Equator, the darker and more melanized it is. The closer the skin is to the pole, the lighter and less melanized it is” (Cibangu 2015).

Contents

Hue Heat
Gloger
Problems With Ecological Explanations for Gloger’s Rule
Hue Heat and Brain Temperature
Common Factors and Gloger’s Rule
Other Rules and Aesthetic Structures
Works Cited

Hue Heat

Studies have shown repeatedly that human subjects adjust their determination of the temperature of an object based on its color, or the temperature of a room depending on whether it’s filled with redder or bluer light (Mogensen and English 1926, Berry 1961, Ziat et al. 2016, Albers 2015). Darker colors are judged to be cooler than brighter colors…

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Thermoaesthetics
Thermoaesthetics

Written by Thermoaesthetics

A concept of aesthetic complexity based on universal animal preferences for mixtures of simple, more and less exciting physical and psychological opposites.