One of my students organized a lecture by Dr. Simon LeVay on Human Sexuality. Here we are with his latest book.
Here is what I am reading today:
“Peter Schieberle, Ph.D., an international authority on food chemistry and technology, explained that scientists thought that the nose had a monopoly on olfactory receptors. Located on special cells in the mucus-covered olfactory epithelium in the back of the nose, olfactory receptors are docking ports for the airborne chemical compounds responsible for the smell of food and other substances. Those molecules connect with the receptors, triggering a chain of biochemical events that register in the brain as specific odors. But discovery of olfactory receptors on other, non-olfactory cells came as a surprise.”
“”Right now, there’s no clinically acceptable way to measure pain and other emotions other than to ask a person how they feel,” said Tor Wager, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at CU-Boulder and lead author of the paper.”
“Estimated cases of neurocysticercosis, as the tapeworm infection is called, range from 40,000 to 160,000 each year in the United States, said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “It’s been around a long time, affecting people living in severe poverty, but the disease is not well-studied or understood,” Hotez said.”
How it became one person’s favorite animal.
“This research, conducted by psychological scientists Catherine Shea, Gráinne Fitzsimons, and Erin Davisson of Duke University, is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “We all know how much effort it takes to overcome temptation,” says Shea, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in Fitzsimons’s lab. “People with low self-control could relieve a lot of their self-control struggles by being with an individual who helps them.”
“An Argentine man who thought he bought a pair of poodles at an outdoor market in Buenos Aires brought them home to the vet only to be told they were actually ferrets on steroids, reports the Daily Mail.”
“When in doubt, the human brain is more likely to tell its owner that they’re under the gaze of another person, researchers from the University of Sydney and The Vision Centre reveal in a recent article in Current Biology. “Gaze perception – the ability to tell what a person is looking at – is a social cue that people often take for granted,” says Professor Colin Clifford from the University’s School of Psychology.”
our brains respond to music differently, does that surprise you?
“”We spend a lot of time listening to music—often in groups, and often in conjunction with synchronized movement and dance,” said Vinod Menon, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the study’s senior author. “Here, we’ve shown for the first time that despite our individual differences in musical experiences and preferences, classical music elicits a highly consistent pattern of activity across individuals in several brain structures including those involved in movement planning, memory and attention.””
4 Comments
mparisi · April 16, 2013 at 11:11 am
Professor Clifford’s explanation regarding the brain being “hardwired” to recognize another person’s gaze is really interesting to me. Since it prepares us for future interaction, I wonder if a certain part of the brain of those with social anxiety or other mental disorders that make socializing difficult, is deficient in these individuals. My brother has always had a lot of social anxiety along with other mental disorders, so this could possibly explain his paranoia when surrounded by too many people.
mparisi · April 16, 2013 at 11:17 am
The influence of music on the brain seems to have more and more publicity recently. While the article says that the brain “listens” to music differently based on each individual, I wonder if this correlates much with preference to genre. I also wonder if it possibly more active in the teen/young adult years, because that age group seems to be more attached and related to music than older generations.
karlyalysonchapman · May 24, 2013 at 6:42 pm
Response to “Low on self-control? Surrounding yourself with strong-willed friends may help”
This article was particularly interesting due to the fact that it took a positive approach to low self-control. The researchers in this article did not look at self-control like past studies have when saying it has poorer academic achievement or health outcomes but rather stated, individuals with low-self control have a unique ability to pick up on self-control cues of others and therefore, can use those cues to form adaptive relationships. I was not too shocked to read about this finding that low-self control individuals look for others who are high in self-control but was more shocked about how the researchers presented this fact in such a positive light. It is interesting to realize that people can sense a self-control cue for others and from that make really helpful and beneficial relationships!
karlyalysonchapman · May 24, 2013 at 6:49 pm
Response to “Are people really staring at you?”
I was very interested in this article and the concept of “gaze perception.” After completing the article it made sense that humans have a bias towards believing that others are starting at them whether this is true or not due to the necessity of safety and communication. I thought this research was particularly accurate here because from an evolutionary standpoint humans do need to recognize threats (staring) in order to survive and they also need to know when communication is trying to take place: both of these circumstances further the human population. I thought it was interesting to read that the researchers are investing whether staring is innate or not. I would love to know this result because if the behavior is in fact a learned behavior this could lead to a lot of helpful resources to individuals who struggle with social anxiety or autism. This article sheds light on the importance on such a small yet influential behavior in the human culture and leaves me curious for the end findings.