The Bikini Effect Makes Men Impulsive, by Robin Nixon, Special to LiveScience.
Bikinis and other sexy stimuli can make men more prone to seek immediate gratification — leading to blown diets, budgets and bank accounts, new research suggests.
In the study, detailed in the Journal of Consumer Research, men alternately fondled t-shirts and bras (which were not being worn during the test). After touching the bras, men valued the future less and the present more, said lead researcher Bram Van Den Bergh of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Viewing ads with women in bikinis had the same effect.
It wasn't that the men were simply distracted by their sexual arousal, which caused them to choose more impulsively. On the contrary, they exhibited improved cognition and creativity after exposure to sexy stimuli.
The researchers conclude that there is one common appetite system in the brain monitoring our desire for a host of pleasures from sweets to pretty faces, alcohol to lotto winnings. When it is stimulated by, say, a sexy picture or the smell of baked goods, we experience a general craving for anything pleasant. "Basically, you just want to be rewarded," explained Barbara Briers, a researcher at HEC Paris School of Management. Briers, who has conducted related research, was not involved with this study.
OK, they really needed a study to know that men get impulsive when they see partially-clad women? That we think more rationally is quite a surprise, however. Good study, and I'm sure the marketing folks loved it -- more bikini beer ads.
Why the Brain Follows the Rules, from Scientific American.
People are incredibly social beings, and we rely heavily on our interactions with others to thrive, and even survive, in the world. To avoid chaos in these interactions, humans create social norms. These rules and regulations establish appropriate and acceptable ways for us to act and respond to each other. For instance, when waiting in line, we expect people also to wait their turn. As a result, we get upset when someone decides to cut in line: they violated a social norm.
But how are social norms maintained? And what makes us comply with social norms? Primarily, the answer is that, if we don’t follow the rules, we might get in trouble. Numerous studies demonstrate that, when the threat of punishment is removed, people tend to disregard social norms. The neat and orderly line disintegrates.
It remains unclear, however, how the brain processes the threat of punishment when deciding whether or not to comply with a social norm. A recent study conducted by neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer and his colleagues at the University of Ulm in Germany and the University of Zurich in Switzerland tried to shed light on this mystery. The researchers put 24 healthy male students in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to see what parts of the brain were activated during a two-person social exchange with real monetary stakes.
New Theory For Evolution Of Brain Power from Medical News Today.
"Human intelligence has little to do with having a big brain", theThis is actually good science. The same is true in muscles. A big muscle is not necessarily stronger than a smaller muscle -- it comes down to muscle cell density.headline suggested today. The newspaper report is based on a study that compared human brains with the brains of other species. The study found that "mammals have a higher percentage of proteins" in the regions where nerves connect to each other, called synapses. The researchers found that of the 600 proteins found in mammalian synapses, half were found in invertebrates, and only a quarter in single-celled organisms, which don't have nerves.
The newspaper quoted the lead researcher as saying, "This work leads to a new and simple model for understanding the origins and diversity of brains and behaviour in all species. We are one step closer to understanding the logic behind the complexity of human brains."
This complex study contributes to knowledge about the differences in one important group of proteins between the species. This study did not compare the relative contributions of differences in these proteins and brain size to intelligence in humans or any other species, therefore it is not possible to draw any conclusions about their relative importance. The brain is hugely complex, and there will be many internal and external factors contributing to differences in behaviour and learning both between and within species.
The New York Times riffed on the same study in "Brainpower May Lie in Complexity of Synapses."
Evolution’s recipe for making a brain more complex has long seemed simple enough. Just increase the number of nerve cells, or neurons, and the interconnections between them. A human brain, for instance, is three times the volume of a chimpanzee’s.This article is a little easier to get since it focuses on one aspect of the study.A whole new dimension of evolutionary complexity has now emerged from a cross-species study led by Dr. Seth Grant at the Sanger Institute in England.
Dr. Grant looked at the interconnections between neurons, known as synapses, which until now have been regarded as a standard feature of neurons.
But in fact the synapses get considerably more complex going up the evolutionary scale, Dr. Grant and colleagues reported online Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. In worms and flies, the synapses mediate simple forms of learning, but in higher animals they are built from a much richer array of protein components and conduct complex learning and pattern recognition, Dr. Grant said.
The finding may open a new window into how the brain operates. “One of the biggest questions in neuroscience is to answer what are the design principles by which the human brain is constructed, and this is one of those principles,” Dr. Grant said.
If the synapses are thought of as the chips in a computer, then brainpower is shaped by the sophistication of each chip, as well as by their numbers. “From the evolutionary perspective, the big brains of vertebrates not only have more synapses and neurons, but each of these synapses is more powerful — vertebrates have big Internets with big computers and invertebrates have small Internets with small computers,” Dr. Grant said.
And now for a few book reviews, some psychology and some others.
From Prospect (both these books are reviewed in the same article):
Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate
by Kenan Malik (Oneworld, £18.99)
The Great Hall at the University of Reading is a lively piece of Victoriana: a broad neo-Romanesque structure suggestive of a nave, with a concave arched ceiling of gilt-edged rectangular sections painted a pastel green and decorated with rosettes.
The uniformity of its architectural style contrasts with the people I can see under its roof. Perhaps 200 students are at work here, and my guess, from their faces, is that between them they could trace their ancestry to Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the far east and perhaps the Indian subcontinent.
These observations collide with Kenan Malik's insistence in his new book, Strange Fruit, that there is no such thing as race: that it is nothing more than a social construct, having little to do with biology. It is true that the history of racial thinking is mostly an odious embarrassment. And using the idea of race as an assertion of abrupt or clear genetic boundaries between peoples is wrong. All of humanity shares the same genes, and we can all happily and successfully interbreed. And, contrary to the pronouncements of some well-known public figures, there is no evidence that human groups differ in the genetic factors that cause intelligence or even cognitive abilities in general. But we mustn't take this to mean that there are no differences among us. Variants of our shared genes do differ among human groups. If my ancestors were from the far east, I would have the epicanthal fold of skin above my eyes so distinctive of peoples from that region. Were I able to trace my ancestry to the Ethiopian highlands, it is likely that I would have a wiry frame and sinewy muscles. And were my ancestors from the Tibetan plateau, it is likely that my body shape would be good at conserving heat. I could go on; and the list could contain far more than morphological characters—just think, for example, of who carries genes to protect against malaria or to digest milk proteins as adults.
_____
Trust: Self-interest and the Common Good
by Marek Kohn (OUP, £10.99)
Co-operation among unrelated humans is a different matter. If you help someone and they don't help you back, you lose. Co-operative societies can soar to great heights, but they can cost you dearly, as when cheats take the spoils of co-operation without returning the benefits. This means that humans have evolved sensitive mechanisms to discriminate between people likely to share their co-operative values from those that do not.
Trust, the topic of Marek Kohn's book of the same name, is what arises from this discrimination—and Kohn rightly recognises that trust promotes both self-interest and the common good. As individuals, we toil to build reputations as a way of advertising our trustworthiness and of attracting like-valued people. Indeed, it is hard to overstate the importance of co-operative social systems to our psychology and social behaviour. If trust is the fuel of our co-operation, reputation is the currency with which we buy it. Apes, dolphins and ants don't feel shame or engage in honour killings.
This view of what makes humans tick also helps us to understand the awkwardness of the public debate about multiculturalism. Malik asserts that there is a tendency for what he calls the liberal left to "resurrect racial concepts" in framing their views on multiculturalism. Thus we grant authenticity, and equal but separate status, to the different desires and practices of some groups on the basis of their deep cultural heritage: consider the recent uproar over sharia law. Malik doesn't suggest these liberals are racist, just that the language they use—of ethnicity, authenticity and identity—is laden with racial baggage and reminiscent of that used by the old racists when justifying their exclusionary views.
Next up, two reviews from Metapsychology Online Reviews.
Review - The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, by Mark Johnson; University Of Chicago Press, 2007. Review by Tom Sparrow.
Mark Johnson's book is a welcome contribution to the recent philosophical literature meant to expound the ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, and moral implications of research coming out of second-generation cognitive science. It belongs in the company of theorists like George Lakoff, Antonio Damasio, Eugene Gendlin, Shaun Gallagher, and Francisco Varela. Its specific aim is to develop and defend a theory of embodied cognition which gets beyond objectivist and dualist metaphysics, and which is intended to ground the meaning of human experience in body-environment interactions. As Johnson puts it: "This book is about meaning--what it is, where it comes from, and how it is made" (ix). This engagement with the whence and whither of meaning is situated by Johnson in the field of aesthetics, by which he means "the study of everything that goes into the human capacity to make and experience meaning" (x). Using this broadened definition, The Meaning of the Body argues for the bodily/aesthetic basis of all philosophy--as well as logic, mathematics, and language (cf. 102, 181, 195)--and for an expansive understanding of meaning as such. In Johnson's words, "meaning is not just a matter of concepts and propositions, but also reaches down into the images, sensorimotor schemas, feelings, qualities, and emotions that constitute our meaningful encounter with our world. Any adequate account of meaning must be built around the aesthetic dimensions that give our experience its distinctive character and significance" (xi-xii).Review - The Situated Self, by J. T. Ismael; Oxford University Press, 2007. Review by James Dow.
J. T. Ismael's The Situated Self provides a unique account of the relation between self and world. The book has three major parts. The first part explores an account of the situated mind with emphasis on reflexive representation-- the self is situated in the physical world through mental representations defined as egocentric maps that enable navigation through an environment. The second part employs ideas developed in the first part to address traditional problems in philosophy: Frank Jackson's (1986) argument for dualism, the problem of the inverted spectrum, and McTaggart's (1908) argument against time as an intrinsic property of events. The third part provides details for Ismael's account of the self, which is defined as "a sealed pocket of world-representing structure" (182).
Alrighty then, that's a wrap.
No comments:
Post a Comment