#81: Pebbles
Why are pebbles so wonderful?
I think ‘pebble’ might be one of my favourite words. This object has triple the satisfaction for me: I love the physical object, I love the intangible ideas behind it, and I love its name. ‘Pebble’. I could say it all day.
I went to the beach last week and I collected a few pebbles to take home with me, as we all do at the beach, right? As I sat considering them, I started to question myself. ‘Are these pebbles?’ I found myself asking. ‘Or are they stones? Or simply rocks? Is there a technical difference between them?’ Of course, I reached for a dictionary:
Rock: a stone of any size
Stone: a small piece of rock found on the ground
Pebble: a small stone made smooth and round by the action of water or sand
For something so simple, it was quite hard to find a decent definition, particularly one which didn’t actually use the word that I was trying to define… But when we look at the definitions above, we can see a process appear: first you have a rock, which is broken down into a stone, and then it becomes a pebble. So I was right. I was collecting pebbles, stones made smooth by the sea and then washed up on the shores of Seaham beach in County Durham.
Pebbles are satisfying in multiple ways. They satisfy my sense of touch through their smoothness, my sense of sight through their softness of colour and shape, and my sense of sound as they clitter-clatter against each other, pebble against pebble.
What is it that draws me to pebbles? Or to circular shapes in general? There is actually an entire blog dedicated to ‘The Art, History, and Psychology of Circles’, which claims:
Circles are everything and they are nothing. They don’t exist in reality and yet they are the basis of all that mankind has brought into existence.
That is quite the hefty weight of importance being placed on the idea of circles, and if you share this belief, you can join the ‘Circles Only Club’ on Twitter.
Yet pebbles are not circles. They are 3D objects, closer to a sphere, yet even then, they do not have the equal curvature of the sphere. For a technical scientific definition, a pebble is ‘a rounded body with a near-gaussian distribution of curvatures’. For a simpler, if less helpful description, we can just call them ‘pebble-shaped’.
My satisfaction in pebbles and circles is not simply a personal, subjective view. A few years ago the Johns Hopkins Krieger Mind/Brain Institute and Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum teamed up to conduct an experiment, investigating whether our brains find certain shapes more attractive than others. Titled Beauty and the Brain, they set up an exhibition with abstract images, asking visitors to rate their most and least favourite, collecting data which they then combined with the results from lab participants. The result? We prefer shapes ‘with gentle curves as opposed to sharp points’, and through ‘magnetic brain imaging scans’ they revealed that these curved shapes also produced ‘stronger responses and increased activity in the brain’.
Reading about this experiment, I find myself nodding along, and thinking of my pebble collection. They are aesthetically pleasing in so many ways, and the fact that their curved shape stimulates my brain tallies up. This is probably why we have worry stones, objects which act as a ‘self-soothing exercise’ for those with anxiety.
These pebbles give my mind something simple and beautiful to focus on, using the multiple senses of sight and touch to focus my attention. They also hold memories of my escape to a beach covered in stones. Like a small child, I ran along picking up one stone after the other, trying to find the perfect collection of pebble-shaped memories.
