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Here are a few articles I found interesting today:
“Millions of women take birth control pills, blithely unaware that their effects may be subtly seeping into and modulating brain structure and activity.”
“AN EXPECTANT silence has descended on the small room in the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. Alan Grafen, a theoretical biologist from the University of Oxford, is taking his time to set up his presentation. When he’s ready, he denounces three of his colleagues as “unscholarly” and “transparently wrong”, and wonders what could have led such “talented, honest biologists” to be so “misguided”.”
“Rhesus monkeys typically don’t check themselves out in a mirror — unless they’re wearing funky acrylic forehead blocks attached to hair-thin electrodes implanted in their brains.”
2 Comments
Taylor · October 1, 2010 at 3:37 pm
I found this article very interesting due to the extremely large percentage of women who are on the birth control pill. The way the beginning of the article explains the possible effects on the brain in women on the birth control pill, and makes it seem like it would be helpful to take the pill because there is a possibility that it may increase the gray matter associated with higher cognitive thinking. However, once you read the entire article, the author points out that “there likely is little good about treating a woman’s brain like a spongy accordion.” I agree that any unnatural effect on the body has to have some consequences that we do not understand, but I would also like to know what kind of effects the pill has on particularly the brain. We know that women’s behavior may change when she is taking the pill versus not taking the pill, but I am interested in further studies on this topic with variations of the amount of hormones (or different brands of the birth control pill). If future results do find either a long term advantage or a long term disadvantage of taking the pill, millions of women would be affected by these studies and they could either drastically help or hurt the market for birth control pills.
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