The Global Wellness Summit (GWS) has announced that three leading experts on the neuroscience of beauty will keynote at this year’s conference, being held at The Breakers-Palm Beach in Florida from October 9-11. The three experts include Anjan Chatterjee M.D., Nancy Etcoff Ph.D., and Lisa Ishii M.D.
Chatterjee is an Elliott Professor of Neurology at The University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art. Etcoff is an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. Ishii is the chief quality officer for Clinical Best Practices at Johns Hopkins Health System; her research on facial perception will present the latest findings on how beauty impacts the brain.
GWS announced the topic was chosen for this year’s summit because the beauty sector of the global wellness industry is just an undiscovered silver in a much larger wellness-oriented world. The beauty industry on the rise, however, knowledge about beauty’s scientific basis, and its emotional effects on individuals, is beginning to emerge as a new field of research.
“Given the massive size of the beauty market and the fact that studies show that people respond automatically at a deep neural level to beauty, it’s time to pay attention to the emerging scientific research on why we pursue beauty so fervently, rather than continue to dismiss it as a somehow misguided or superficial quest,” says Susie Ellis, GWS chairman and CEO. “These three thinkers’ insights will help us forge disruptive and evidence-based connections between beauty and human wellness for the very first time. It will be groundbreaking.”