It seems that - at least in mice - all it requires is one relatively minor manipulation of a tiny bit of brain and you can turn female mice into aggressive “pelvic thrusting lotharios.” We’re not sure yet if the reverse is true too.
“All the thinking until now was that female brains can produce feminine behaviors while male brains can produce masculine behaviors, with little or no cross talk between them,” says Marc Breedlove, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. “These results do suggest that, at least for mice, the brain retains circuitry to display both masculine and feminine behaviors into adulthood.”
Inside Every Girl Mouse Brain Is a Swaggering Boy Mouse [Video]: Scientific American
It seems that emotionally charged memories are the most difficult to lose. (A fact that I don’t find particularly surprising.) Another recent study (whose link I seem to have lost) suggests that writing down negative memories helps to alleviate their burden - and writing down positive memories seems to remove the positive effects as well. Though writing down small notes on what you’re thankful for reinforced them. Perhaps we should all be keeping journals of our most negative memories, and keeping post-its of our happiest ones.
“Our findings add to accumulating evidence that emotion places limits on the ability to control the contents of the mind,” Payne said. “Our results suggest that even a relatively mild emotional reaction can undermine intentional forgetting. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that emotional memories can never be intentionally forgotten. If the motivation to forget is powerful enough, individuals might be able to overcome the effects of emotion by enlisting additional coping strategies.”
Read: The Memories You Want To Forget Are The Hardest Ones To Lose
It turns out that the so-called education videos such as Baby Einstein that show lots of trippy visuals with little to no dialog may actually hinder a baby’s linguistic abilities. Even shows like Spongebob Squarepants were better for children than these videos.
It seems that there are only so many hours in the day, and with a developing baby’s brain constantly growing new connections and pruning old unused ones, during infancy it’s very important that children be exposed to language.
The researchers believe the content of baby DVDs and videos is different from the other types of programming because it tends to have little dialogue, short scenes, disconnected pictures and shows linguistically indescribable images such as a lava lamp. By contrast, children’s educational programs, which make up the largest viewing category at this age, are, crafted and tested to meet developmental needs of preschool children.
Read: Infants’ Language Development May Be Hindered By Baby DVDs
I’ve long noticed the “date the exciting guy when you’re younger, find the radically opposite stable nerdy guy when you’re ready to settle down and have kids” phenomenon amongst my friends. Books like Sperm Wars posit a Richard Dawkins-esque “sexy sons” evolutionary reason for this. Women are attracted to men who will produce attractive children, making the woman’s genes more likely to continue on to future generations. However, these sexy men aren’t necessarily the type to stick around and raise the kid well, so the female will find a more stable man to raise the kids, sometimes tricking him into believing that the child is his own.
I’m not sure I agree with this theory, but it’s fun to mention at parties. Still, it’s hard to deny that my female friends often do make a very sharp turn from rock star to school teacher about the time that they have, or decide that they want to have kids.
Women see masculine men as unsuitable long-term partners, new research suggests. Conversely, the psychologists from Durham and St Andrews Universities found that men with feminine facial features are seen as more committed and less likely to cheat on their partners.
Read: Women Prefer Less Macho Men For Long-Term Relationships
File this one under “even I didn’t fully expect that.” I’m a strong believer in the power of the subconscious mind, and that people make decisions before they ever consciously consider the reasons for them.
At Yale, they had a number of students bump into the lab assistant who was holding a lot of books. The assistant asked them to hold a cup of coffee and The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.
That’s pretty serious - just a small thing like that their characterization of the person changed.
Read: The Subconcious Brain - Who’s Minding the Mind? - New York Times
A recent study in the UK shows that people in skilled jobs said they were happier than people in other jobs.
Professionals including doctors, solicitors, nurses, teachers and police officers were most satisfied with their lives, scoring 7.6 out of 10 on average.
Read: Health, wealth and a skilled job is the way to happiness - Independent Online Edition > Health
UK residents as a whole scored 7.3
Most people don’t appreciate an angry look, but a new University of Michigan psychology study found that some people find angry expressions so rewarding that they will readily learn ways to encourage them.
I used to think that “people crave attention in any way they can get it, and if they can’t get it in a positive way, then they go for the destructive way.” Which, I guess is a very cliche`d movie plot - guy get spurned by beautiful girl, guy turns into psycho.
This study suggests that some people may simply crave other people’s negative emotions, but I guess it could be a “self fulfilling prophecy” type thing where the high testosterone people are more prone to piss people off, which makes them crave that emotion more etc…
Read: High-testosterone people reinforced by others’ anger, new study finds
Quite a bit, actually. Psychologists gathered students to take various personality tests, and then had a separate group of people rate their Facebook personalities against the same dimensions and found that there was a strong correlation between the two.
I wonder what my facebook profile says about me?
Read: Student Facebook Profiles Are a Match - US News and World Report
Matthieu Ricard may be the happiest man on earth. He was born in France & became a biochemist, but left his life & career behind to become a Tibetan Buddhist Monk. Several years ago, he participated in a study in which his brain was scanned while he meditated on “peace.” They found that activity in his left prefrontal cortex was off the charts - 150% more than anyone they’d scanned before. And he could do it at will. Happiness, they found, is a skill.
Now Matthieu has written a book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, in which he teaches us how to develop the skill of happiness.
Richard Davidson has been doing some some fascinating research in to brain lateralization - when he put a monk in an MRI machine, and asked him to meditate in “peace” he found that activity in the left prefrontal cortex was great than that of anyone he tested previously. Happiness, it seems is in the left hemisphere.
New research shows that this pattern shows up in activity in all sorts of animals, including the way a dog wags its tail.
Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.
At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system.
Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger).
In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain).
Read: If You Want to Know if Spot Loves You So, It’s in His Tail - New York Times