Everyone seems to enjoy our Turducken! However, this one contained: Turkey, Goose, Duck and 12 Pheasant breasts! Layers of stuffing between the various meats made it fantastic! (Homemade corn bread stuffing and a wild rice stuffing)

Here is what I am reading today:

“Judgments we make with a moral underpinning are made more quickly and are more extreme than those same judgments based on practical considerations, a new set of studies finds. However, the findings, which appear in the journal PLOS ONE, also show that judgments based on morality can be readily shifted and made with other considerations in mind.”

“The physical connection between mother and fetus is provided by the placenta, an organ, built of cells from both the mother and fetus, which serves as a conduit for the exchange of nutrients, gasses, and wastes. Cells may migrate through the placenta between the mother and the fetus, taking up residence in many organs of the body including the lung, thyroid muscle, liver, heart…”

“Scientists have found that low-level exposure to organophosphates (OPs) produces lasting decrements in neurological and cognitive function. Memory and information processing speed are affected to a greater degree than other cognitive functions such as language.”

“The paper, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”, has since become one of the most highly cited psychology articles and has been judged by the Psychological Review as its most influential paper of all time.”

“”The assumption has been that the younger generation wants to delay marriage and parents are hassling them about when they would get married,” said Brian Willoughby, a professor at Brigham Young University and lead author of the study. “We actually found the opposite, that the parental generation is showing the ‘slow down’ mindset more than the young adults.” Willoughby and his co-authors in BYU’s School of Family Life gathered info from 536 college students and their parents from five college campuses around the country (BYU was not in the sample). As they report in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships,the scholars found the hesitation is consistent across gender.”

“The map, uncovered by scientists at UCL, is the first to reveal how finely-tuned the brain is to pain. Published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, the study uses fMRI techniques in conjunction with laser stimuli to the fingers to plot the exact response to pain across areas of the brain. “The results reveal that pain can be finely mapped in the brain,” said lead author Dr Flavia Mancini (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). “While many studies have examined the brain response to pain before, our study is the first to map pain responses for the individual digits of the human hand.””

“A great idea comes all of a sudden. In the depths of the mind, networks of brain cells perform a sublime symphony, and a twinkle of insight pops into consciousness. Unexpected as they are, these lightbulb moments seem impossible to orchestrate. Recent studies suggest otherwise. By freeing the mind of some of its inhibitions, we might improve creative problem solving.”

“Researchers examined where men and women looked while viewing still images from films and pieces of art. They found that while women made fewer eye movements than men, those they did make were longer and to more varied locations. These differences were largest when viewing images of people. With photos of heterosexual couples, both men and women preferred looking at the female figure rather than the male one. However, this preference was even stronger for women. While men were only interested in the faces of the two figures, women’s eyes were also drawn to the rest of the bodies – in particular that of the female figure. Felix Mercer Moss, PhD student in the Department of Computer Science who led the study, said: “The study represents the most compelling evidence yet that, despite occupying the same world, the viewpoints of men and women can, at times, be very different.”


2 Comments

matthahn · December 5, 2012 at 3:04 pm

The article about the magic number being four is interesting in that it does seem to debunk a very old article that was for a while highly reputable. I thought it seemed strange in that it didn’t really describe any methods of data collection or any observations.
It does make sense in the one quoted claim that the reason the other article could have been received so quickly by the psychology community was because of the evocative writing rather than pure evidence. That should be what they really study: why the original article was so widely accepted.

matthahn · December 5, 2012 at 3:16 pm

The article discussing men and women’s differences in viewing of paintings shed a lot of light on the way that men and women direct their eyes in the world they perceive. It told that men will look more towards the faces of the people painted in the pictures whereas women will look at their bodies. They explained this by saying that it is most likely due to women being more sensitive to potential threats and that faces are typically a threatening stimulus in paintings.
Men, on the other hand, would very often look over faces without really averting their eyes from the eyes of the painted face.
Though the study shows promise in being able to correlate the findings over to people’s view of the real world in front of them, it doesn’t provide any detail of men and women viewing the real world.

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