Studies demonstrate that people tend to associate round shapes—such as plates, glasses, and food forms—with positive taste experiences. For example, beer drunk from curved-sided glasses is rated fruitier and more intense, and round plates enhance the perception of sweetness in dishes like cheesecake.

This roundness effect extends beyond just food shapes to packaging and menus, where rounded elements are linked to sweeter taste associations.

In essence, the circle shape influences the sensory perception of taste, making food and drink seem more flavorful and enjoyable compared to angular or square shapes.

The technique of centered circles, where components are stacked or placed revolving around the plate’s center, often elevates the dish’s stature and focus. Others adopt off-center circular designs to create dynamic tension and visual interest. This approach is seen as both a classic and modern plating style among Michelin-star chefs and fine dining experts.

Cutting and serving food in circular forms or arranging elements in circles signifies a deliberate artistic choice to enhance sensory perceptions including taste, as circles are associated with sweetness and completeness in culinary psychology. This preference especially influences your enjoyment of “hedonic foods,” those foods consumed mostly for pleasure.

This shape-sweetness association is partly cultural, because today we associate circles with pies and cakes. But, this preference is also rooted in evolutionary psychology — because round foods like fruits and berries register as safe and nourishing.

So, your giant rainbow lollipop being round is not just random design, but a choice meant to draw in your brain and taste buds.

france. archeologists discover intricately engraved (often ivory) disks, that date to the ice age. these “rondelles” bear the marks of sophisticated paleolithic artistry. carved with spellbinding precision, they date back 11,000 to 18,000 years.

each rondelle, barely larger than a coin, is etched with detailed wildlife—a leaping deer, a swirling mammoth trunk—that capture prehistoric life in frozen motion. when spun, these delicate carvings mysteriously came alive. a primitive zoetrope, they melded art, life, and myth with magic.

deep with symbolic meaning, these mesmerizing artifacts, allow us to glimpse the dawn of humans fascination with illusion and storytelling—a journey that would eventually lead to the grandeur of the cinema. these discs capture one of humanity’s earliest dances of symbolic expression, under a paleolithic moon.

“The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.” — C. S. Lewis

george washington preferred circular or oval rooms for his presidential levees—formal social gatherings where he stood at the center and greeted guests, with everyone on equal standing and equidistant from him. he ordered curved walls be added to his philadelphia residence.

architect james hoban, influenced by washington, introduced an “elliptic saloon” into the design of the white house, deemed the blue room. its shape became a model for the oval office, which even today symbolizes continuity, openness, and equality in presidential receptions.

“A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.” — Mark Twain

In the cold glow of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in 1963, twenty-something Ivan Sutherland sat with the room-sized TX-2 computer. He had an idea. Others didn’t think so. Drawing on a digital screen? Impossible.

Indeed Sutherland, armed with a light pen, was about to create the first time pixels came together to form a circle.

And it conjured a  magical revolution. Sketchpad, a digital canvas where lines bent to human will, circles traced themselves with effortless grace, and shapes obeyed commands like living objects. This was new.

Sketchpad’s brilliance shone not just in interactivity, but in its visionary soul—introducing ideas decades ahead of their time. Now, objects carried relationships and rules, allowing a line to stubbornly stay parallel or a circle to remain perfectly round, no matter how they were stretched or moved.

Under the guidance of luminaries like Claude Shannon and Marvin Minsky, Sutherland’s thesis sparked entire fields: computer-aided design, 3D modeling, and virtual reality. Sketchpad was a bold, raw feast served when computers barely went beyond counting—and it still flavors every digital interaction today, born from the mind of a visionary who dared to redraw possibility’s limits.

The opposite of entropy is known as negentropy, also negative entropy, or syntropy. While entropy refers to the measure of disorder, randomness, or energy loss within a system (tending towards chaos and increasing over time according to the second law of thermodynamics), negentropy represents order, organization, and structure—essentially things becoming more organized and functional.

Negentropy is a temporary condition in which systems become more highly ordered than their surroundings. Examples of negentropy include life processes that convert less ordered materials into more ordered biological structures and social systems that organize chaos into useful order. Negentropy is often described as the force or characteristic of attraction, counterbalancing entropy’s characteristic of repulsion

A rotating spiral or pattern of concentric circles can create the sensation of movement or depth. The hypnotic effect works because of geometric tricks—often, the circles or dots within move linearly, but synchronized motion tricks the mind into seeing them as spinning or rolling around the center. This induces a sensation of movement and sometimes even trance-like states, as the visual system attempts to follow the repetitive, swirling shape.

When you see a circle from just a few scattered points, your brain is performing a remarkable trick of science.

First, your visual system, starting with the primary visual cortex, detects those points as signals. Then, higher brain areas like the fusiform gyrus assemble those dots into a familiar shape: a circle.

This is a prime example of what psychologists call “Gestalt principles,” specifically the principle of “closure.” Your brain has this incredible tendency to “fill in the gaps,” turning incomplete snapshots into whole, meaningful forms.

Neuroscientific studies also point to “illusory contour” neurons in the primary visual cortex that respond when a shape like a circle is implied. These neurons help complete visual patterns by linking sparse points into perceived continuous forms via recurrent feedback between higher and lower visual brain areas.

It’s all part of the same survival trick that saved our ancestors — spot a face in the crowd, a shape in the shadows, and know instantly whether it’s friend, food, or threat. Still…

“I like to draw circles, because you never have to worry about the corners.”  — Demetri Martin

The center holds

stern and unyielding,

the edges bloom

- bryan hammock

one child initiates stomping or other sounds in a circle, and others must copy in rhythm. here, children learn to read rhythm, watch their peers, and speak without words, practicing group cohesion through play, primordial.

1894 winter. back before helmets. back when concussions in football were just “getting your bell rung.” gallaudet university’s team stood on a field. it was a cold patch of earth pressed flat by cleats. this game had no smack talk. no snap count barking across the field. it was unusually quiet for a football game.

at the center of the action was paul hubbard, gallaudet’s quarterback, known among his

teammates as “the eel” for his sly, fluid moves. but, as the game developed, hubbard realized he faced a unique problem. you see, gallaudet is a deaf university, as was their opponent. both teams signed their plays in american sign language. the opposing team knew the signs and were stealing signals. so, mr. hubbard adapted.

he pulled his teammates in close, gathering them into the first football huddle. a shield against prying eyes. a strategic masterstroke. they won that night. they won a lot that year.

the huddle proved so effective it quickly spread. from that circle of kids to the modern day nfl super bowl, a ritual was passed and etched into the very dna of american football. gallaudet’s legacy is a testament to the power of adaptation and communication, within a game.