How to insult in verse. By Robert Pinsky: "I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bar,
Or anything but that vain animal,
Who is so proud of being rational.
The senses are too gross, and he'll contrive
A sixth, to contradict the other five:
And before certain instinct will prefer
Reason, which fifty times for one does err."
New Scientist SPACE - News - Need a food or drug hit? Just relax: "STRESS can trigger binge eating and compulsive drug-taking. But how?
Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and colleagues suggest that stress hormones might actually change how much we value a reward, increasing our desire for something pleasurable without actually increasing our enjoyment.
Berridge's team injected the stress hormone corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) into the nucleus accumbens of rats' brains, a part of the dopamine 'reward circuitry' responsible for wanting or desire. These rats had been trained to press a lever to get a dose of sugar and to associate hearing a certain tone with getting that sugar. The stressed rats worked harder at pressing the lever when they heard the tone than rats with low stress hormones (BMC Biology, DOI: 10.1186/1741-7007-4-8).
The effect looked exactly the same as when amphetamines were injected, something well known to increase desire. 'Stress magnifies the wanting,' says Berridge - but only when there's a cue, the tone, to advertise the reward as well. It's a bit like how seeing an advert for ice cream makes you desire it, he says. You might resist when you're not stressed, but the advert and the stress together make it irresistible.
The findings could explain why some stressful pursuits can be rewarding, and also how drug paraphernalia and stress can make relapse almost inevitable."
New Scientist SPACE - Breaking News - Watching the brain 'switch off' self-awareness: "Goldberg found that when the sensory stimulus was shown slowly, and when a personal emotional response was required, the volunteers showed activity in the superfrontal gyrus – the brain region associated with self-awareness-related function.
But when the card flipping and musical sequences were rapid, there was no activity in the superfrontal gyrus, despite activity in the sensory cortex and related structures.
“The regions of the brain involved in introspection and sensory perception are completely segregated, although well connected,” says Goldberg, “and when the brain needs to divert all its resources to carry out a difficult task, the self-related cortex is inhibited.”
The brain’s ability to “switch off” the self may have evolved as a protective mechanism, he suggests. “If there is a sudden danger, such as the appearance of a snake, it is not helpful to stand around wondering how one feels about the situation,” Goldberg points out.
It is possible that research into how the brain switches self-awareness on and off will help neurologists gain a deeper understanding of autism, schizophrenia and other mental disorders where this functionality may be impaired."
New Scientist News - All the pleasures of alcohol, with no downsides: "In fact such 'partial agonists' of GABA-A receptors already exist in the form of bretazenil and pagoclone, which were developed as anti-anxiety drugs but never commercialised. These molecules also have the advantage of being instantly reversible by the drug flumazenil, which is used as an antidote to overdoses of tranquillisers such as Valium. Alcohol also inhibits NMDA receptors, which are part of a general excitatory signalling circuit, so a second ingredient of the alcohol substitute would be an NMDA antagonist such as dizoclipine, originally developed as a drug for stroke."
New Scientist SPACE - News - Lazy mole rats that get fat to have sex: "Damaraland mole rats and naked mole rats are thought to be the only mammal species that live and breed cooperatively, with some colony members devoting their lives to helping others reproduce."
The Dilbert Blog: Education and Religion: "“The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are able and willing.
If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent.
If they can but will not, then they are not benevolent.
If they are neither able nor willing, they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent.
If they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, why does it exist?”
-- Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.E.), Aphorisms"
The Dilbert Blog: Education and Religion: "“The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are able and willing.
If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent.
If they can but will not, then they are not benevolent.
If they are neither able nor willing, they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent.
If they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, why does it exist?”
-- Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.E.), Aphorisms"
Two new books about Jesus. By Richard Wightman Fox: "Emerson insisted, just wanted to impose a new conformity. 'It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.'"
On Not Wanting to Know What Hurts You - New York Times: "'It's not whether I actually bother to control it,' Dr. Sandman said. 'It's whether I feel I can.' The factors that influence worry are often linked. Familiarity, for instance, can moderate the sense of dread, said Paul Slovic, a psychologist with Decision Research, a nonprofit research institution in Eugene, Ore. Car accidents, he noted, are as horrific as cancer, yet 'we don't have the same sense of dread around cars that we do around carcinogens' because we drive all the time.
Faced with unfamiliar diseases, people rely on other measures to calculate risk. For example, they may unconsciously use prevalence as a gauge, said Howard Leventhal, a professor of health psychology at Rutgers.
'Prevalent events are seen as less serious than rare events,' Dr. Leventhal said in an e-mail message. The logic is simple, he said: if lots of people have a disease but are not hospitalized or dying, it must be relatively benign; if it is rare, it might have serious, unknown consequences."
Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy? - New York Times: "Another study that compared people in different occupations showed that those employed in middle-class jobs got upset when a friend or neighbor bought the same car as theirs because they felt that the uniqueness of their choice had been undercut. But those in working-class jobs liked it when others chose the same car because it affirmed that they had made a good choice."
Language Log: Whatever is not prohibited is permitted -- not!: "Was nicht verboten ist, ist erlaubt"
In the 1970s and 1980s, Kohlberg argued that moral reasoning is based on explicit rules and concepts, like conscious logical problem-solving; over the course of an individual’s development, the rules and concepts that he or she uses to solve moral problems unfold in a well-defined, universal sequence of stages. These stages are biologically determined but socially supported. In early stages, moral reasoning is strongly influenced by external authority; in later stages, moral reasoning appeals first to internalized convention, and then to general principles of neutrality, egalitarianism, and universal rights. It may be that what makes one culture, one sex, or one individual different from another is just how high and how fast it manages to climb the moral ladder.
...
The psychologist Carol Gilligan, for example, argued that women justify their moral choices differently from men, but with equal sophistication. Men, she claimed, tend to reason about morality in terms of justice, and women in terms of care: “While an ethic of justice proceeds from the premise of equality—that everyone should be treated the same—an ethic of care rests on the premise of non-violence—that no one should be hurt.” Similar arguments were made for non-Western cultures—that they emphasize social roles and obligations rather than individual rights and justice.
...
The current theorists take as their model for moral reasoning not conscious problem-solving, as Kohlberg did, but the human language faculty. That is, rather than “moral reasoning,” human beings are understood to be endowed with a “moral instinct” that enables them to categorize and judge actions as right or wrong the way native speakers intuitively recognize sentences as grammatical or ungrammatical.
....
The psychologist Elliott Turiel has proposed that the moral rules a person espouses have a special psychological status that distinguishes them from other rules—like local conventions—that guide behavior. One of the clearest indicators of this so-called moral–conventional distinction is the role of local authority.
We understand that the rules of etiquette—whether it is permissible to leave food on your plate, to belch at the table, or to speak without first raising your hand—are subject to context, convention, and authority. If a friend told you before your first dinner at her parents’ house that in her family, belching at the table after dinner is a gesture of appreciation and gratitude, you would not think your friend’s father was immoral or wrong or even rude when he leaned back after dinner and belched—whether or not you could bring yourself to join in.
Moral judgments, in contrast, are conceived (by hypothesis) as not subject to the control of local authority. If your friend told you that in her family a man beating his wife after dinner is a gesture of appreciation and gratitude, your assessment of that act would presumably not be swayed. Even three-year-old children already distinguish between moral and conventional transgressions. They allow that if the teacher said so, it might be okay to talk during nap, or to stand up during snack time, or to wear pajamas to school. But they also assert that a teacher couldn’t make it okay to pull another child’s hair or to steal her backpack. Similarly, children growing up in deeply religious Mennonite communities distinguish between rules that apply because they are written in the Bible (e.g., that Sunday is the day of Sabbath, or that a man must uncover his head to pray) and rules that would still apply even if they weren’t actually written in the Bible (including rules against personal and material harm).
There is one exception, though. James Blair, of the National Institutes of Health, has found that children classified as psychopaths (partly because they exhibit persistent aggressive behavior toward others) do not make the normal moral–conventional distinction. These children know which behaviors are not allowed at school, and they can even rate the relative seriousness of different offences; but they fail when asked which offences would still be wrong to commit even if the teacher suspended the rules. For children with psychopathic tendencies (and for psychopathic adults, too, though not for those Blair calls “normal murderers”), rules are all a matter of local authority. In its absence, anything is permissible.
Turiel’s thesis, then, is that healthy individuals in all cultures respect the distinction between conventional violations, which depend on local authorities, and moral violations, which do not.
...
Jacobson-Widding argues that the Manyika do not separate moral behavior from good manners. Lying, farting, and stealing are all equally violations of tsika. And if manners and morals cannot be differentiated, the whole study of moral universals is in trouble, because how—as Jacobson-Widding herself asks—can we study the similarities and differences in moral reasoning across cultures “when the concept of morality does not exist?” From the perspective of cognitive science, this dispute over the origins of the moral–conventional distinction is an empirical question, and one that might be resolvable with the new techniques of infant developmental psychology.
One possibility is that children first distinguish “wrong” actions in their third year of life, as they begin to recognize the thoughts, feelings, and desires of other people. If this is true, the special status of moral reasoning would be tied to another special domain in human cognition: theory of mind, or our ability to make rich and specific inferences about the contents of other people’s thoughts. Although this link is plausible, there is some evidence that distinguishing moral right from wrong is a more primitive part of cognition than theory of mind, and can exist independently. Unlike psychopathic children, who have impaired moral reasoning in the presence of intact theory of mind, autistic children who struggle to infer other people’s thoughts are nevertheless able to make the normal moral–conventional distinction.
Another hypothesis is that children acquire the notion of “wrong” actions in their second year, once they are old enough to hurt others and experience firsthand the distress of the victim. Blair, for example, has proposed that human beings and social species like canines have developed a hard-wired “violence-inhibition mechanism” to restrain aggression against members of the same species. This mechanism is activated by a victim’s signals of distress and submission (like a dog rolling over onto its back) and produces a withdrawal response. When this mechanism is activated in an attacker, withdrawal means that the violence stops. The class of “wrong” actions, those that cause the victim’s distress, might be learned first for one’s own actions and then extended derivatively to others’ actions.
Gandhi's belief that "civilization consists not in the multiplication of wants but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants."
And the study raises similar ethical questions to the idea of vaccinating children against drugs. Supposing a vaccination against cocaine or nicotine becomes available, should parents have their children immunised? Should some people be allowed to impose their ideas on food onto others, even if it is for their own good?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7770&feedId=online-news_rss20
And the study raises similar ethical questions to the idea of vaccinating children against drugs. Supposing a vaccination against cocaine or nicotine becomes available, should parents have their children immunised? Should some people be allowed to impose their ideas on food onto others, even if it is for their own good?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7770&feedId=online-news_rss20
from
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4149493
The upshot of the trial was that women did, indeed, find the odour of dominants sexier than that of wimps—but only in special circumstances. These circumstances were first that the woman was already in a relationship and second that she was in the most fertile phase of her cycle. In other words, dominant males' scent was only more attractive at the point where a woman could both conceive and cuckold her mate.
New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior - compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops - that could almost be mistaken for psychosis.
Now for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity, before it settles into the wine and roses phase of romance or the joint holiday card routines of long-term commitment.
In an analysis of the images appearing today in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.
It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.
The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger to anxiety, and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn. In a separate, continuing experiment, the researchers are analyzing brain images from people who have been rejected by their lovers.
"When you're in the throes of this romantic love it's overwhelming, you're out of control, you're irrational, you're going to the gym at 6 a.m. every day - why? Because she's there," said Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and the co-author of the analysis. "And when rejected, some people contemplate stalking, homicide, suicide. This drive for romantic love can be stronger than the will to live."
Brain imaging technology cannot read people's minds, experts caution, and a phenomenon as many sided and socially influenced as love transcends simple computer graphics, like those produced by the technique used in the study, called functional M.R.I.
Still, said Dr. Hans Breiter, director of the Motivation and Emotion Neuroscience Collaboration at Massachusetts General Hospital, "I distrust about 95 percent of the M.R.I. literature and I would give this study an 'A'; it really moves the ball in terms of understanding infatuation love."
He added: "The findings fit nicely with a large, growing body of literature describing a generalized reward and aversion system in the brain, and put this intellectual construct of love directly onto the same axis as homeostatic rewards such as food, warmth, craving for drugs."
In the study, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, led a team that analyzed about 2,500 brain images from 17 college students who were in the first weeks or months of new love. The students looked at a picture of their beloved while an M.R.I. machine scanned their brains. The researchers then compared the images with others taken while the students looked at picture of an acquaintance.
Functional M.R.I. technology detects increases or decreases of blood flow in the brain, which reflect changes in neural activity.
In the study, a computer-generated map of particularly active areas showed hot spots deep in the brain, below conscious awareness, in areas called the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area, which communicate with each other as part of a circuit.
These areas are dense with cells that produce or receive a brain chemical called dopamine, which circulates actively when people desire or anticipate a reward. In studies of gamblers, cocaine users and even people playing computer games for small amounts of money, these dopamine sites become extremely active as people score or win, neuroscientists say.
Yet falling in love is among the most irrational of human behaviors, not merely a matter of satisfying a simple pleasure, or winning a reward. And the researchers found that one particular spot in the M.R.I. images, in the caudate nucleus, was especially active in people who scored highly on a questionnaire measuring passionate love.
This passion-related region was on the opposite side of the brain from another area that registers physical attractiveness, the researchers found, and appeared to be involved in longing, desire and the unexplainable tug that people feel toward one person, among many attractive alternative partners.
This distinction, between finding someone attractive and desiring him or her, between liking and wanting, "is all happening in an area of the mammalian brain that takes care of most basic functions, like eating, drinking, eye movements, all at an unconscious level, and I don't think anyone expected this part of the brain to be so specialized," Dr. Brown said.
The intoxication of new love mellows with time, of course, and the brain scan findings reflect some evidence of this change, Dr. Fisher said.
In an earlier functional M.R.I. study of romance, published in 2000, researchers at University College London monitored brain activity in young men and women who had been in relationships for about two years. The brain images, also taken while participants looked at photos of their beloved, showed activation in many of the same areas found in the new study - but significantly less so, in the region correlated with passionate love, she said.
In the new study, the researchers also saw individual differences in their group of smitten lovers, based on how long the participants had been in the relationships. Compared with the students who were in the first weeks of a new love, those who had been paired off for a year or more showed significantly more activity in an area of the brain linked to long-term commitment.
Last summer, scientists at Emory University in Atlanta reported that injecting a ratlike animal called a vole with a single gene turned promiscuous males into stay-at-home dads - by activating precisely the same area of the brain where researchers in the new study found increased activity over time.
"This is very suggestive of attachment processes taking place," Dr. Brown said. "You can almost imagine a time where instead of going to Match.com you could have a test to find out whether you're an attachment type or not."
One reason new love is so heart-stopping is the possibility, the ever-present fear, that the feeling may not be entirely requited, that the dream could suddenly end.
In a follow-up experiment, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Aron and Dr. Brown have carried out brain scans on 17 other young men and women who recently were dumped by their lovers. As in the new love study, the researchers compared two sets of images, one taken when the participants were looking at a photo of a friend, the other when looking at a picture of their ex.
Although they are still sorting through the images, the investigators have noticed one preliminary finding: increased activation in an area of the brain related to the region associated with passionate love. "It seems to suggest what the psychological literature, poetry and people have long noticed: that being dumped actually does heighten romantic love, a phenomenon I call frustration-attraction," Dr. Fisher said in an e-mail message.
One volunteer in the study was Suzanna Katz, 22, of New York, who suffered through a breakup with her boyfriend three years ago. Ms. Katz said she became hyperactive to distract herself after the split, but said she also had moments of almost physical withdrawal, as if weaning herself from a drug.
"It had little to do with him, but more with the fact that there was something there, inside myself, a hope, a knowledge that there's someone out there for you, and that you're capable of feeling this way, and suddenly I felt like that was being lost," she said in an interview.
And no wonder. In a series of studies, researchers have found that, among other processes, new love involves psychologically internalizing a lover, absorbing elements of the other person's opinions, hobbies, expressions, character, as well as sharing one's own. "The expansion of the self happens very rapidly, it's one of the most exhilarating experiences there is, and short of threatening our survival it is one thing that most motivates us," said Dr. Aron, of SUNY, a co-author of the study.
To lose all that, all at once, while still in love, plays havoc with the emotional, cognitive and deeper reward-driven areas of the brain. But the heightened activity in these areas inevitably settles down. And the circuits in the brain related to passion remain intact, the researchers say - intact and capable in time of flaring to life with someone new.
Of Two Minds - New York Times: "One recent discovery to confront is that the human brain can readily change its structure -- a phenomenon scientists call neuroplasticity. A few years ago, brain scans of London cabbies showed that the detailed mental maps they had built up in the course of navigating their city's complicated streets were apparent in their brains. Not only was the posterior hippocampus -- one area of the brain where spatial representations are stored -- larger in the drivers; the increase in size was proportional to the number of years they had been on the job.
It may not come as a great surprise that interaction with the environment can alter our mental architecture. But there is also accumulating evidence that the brain can change autonomously, in response to its own internal signals. Last year, Tibetan Buddhist monks, with the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, submitted to functional magnetic resonance imaging as they practiced ''compassion meditation,'' which is aimed at achieving a mental state of pure loving kindness toward all beings. The brain scans showed only a slight effect in novice meditators. But for monks who had spent more than 10,000 hours in meditation, the differences in brain function were striking. Activity in the left prefrontal cortex, the locus of joy, overwhelmed activity in the right prefrontal cortex, the locus of anxiety."
Of Two Minds - New York Times: "Damage to the right frontal lobe, for example, sometimes led to a heightened interest in high cuisine, a condition dubbed gourmand syndrome. (One European political journalist, upon recovering from a stroke affecting this part of the brain, profited from the misfortune by becoming a food columnist.)"
Freud and His Discontents - The New York Times - New York Times: "Freud's essay rests on three arguments that are impossible to prove: the development of civilization recapitulates the development of the individual; civilization's central purpose of repressing the aggressive instinct exacts unbearable suffering; the individual is torn between the desire to live (Eros) and the wish to die (Thanatos)."
