Sex addiction is big business, there is an American Society of Addictive Medicine that says addiction is a “chronic brain disorder” but this is unsupported by research. There are many clinics where the wealthy (males) can go to be cured. About 900 people have been certified as sex addiction therapists (CSAT) at a cost of about $5000. Chapter 4 covers this well.

Check out Chapter 3, Valley Girl Science, for an interesting view of sex addiction being “like” so many other things. If you are feeling sexy, go to Chapter 6. Chapter 13 is “The Ignored Aspects of Masculinity” where the sex addiction field focuses on men as intrinsically selfish, focused on “scoring” and virility. It ignores the part of men that are seeking love and trying their best to please their partners. This is an especially powerful chapter. Actually, there are no chapters in this book that you would want to skip over.

{ Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality | Continue reading }

photo { Lee Friedlander, R. O. Blechman, New York City, 1968 }

{ Vincent del Brouck }

Sexual selection is a variant of natural selection in which one gender prefers certain traits be present in their mate. Thus individuals with those attractive traits will have a high reproductive success, spreading their genes (and the trait) through the population.

This can also cause the attractive trait to become greatly exaggerated, so as to exploit the other gender’s preference for it. This is the process which resulted in the large, elaborate tails of peacocks.

Given the influence sexual selection can have on a population, researchers started to wonder if there were any traits in humans that were the product of mate-choice preferences. (…)

Women, it would seem, look for men who are taller than they are (but only by ~9%) and with a good covering of chest hair. Men look for women who are shorter and with a 0.7 waist-hip ratio (i.e. the waist is 70% the width of the hip).

Curiously, women also liked men having a specific waist-hip ratio. Even more curiously, they liked the same (0.7) figure men liked.

{ EvoAnth | Continue reading }

Neuroscientists have uncovered the first evidence of a common genetic thread, which links together multiple senses in humans.

The new findings suggest our sense of touch is genetically intertwined with our sense of hearing; in practice this means if you’ve got a good sense of hearing, it’s highly likely you also have a high touch performance.

{ Cosmos | Continue reading }

Well-meaning friends and family members may suggest that you have a couple of drinks after living through a stressful event. A friend of mine had a bike accident recently that sent her over a car door and miraculously left her with only a few bruises. Having a couple of drinks immediately after this will of course dull her nerves, since ethanol is an anxiolytic. But is it really a good idea to get tipsy (or worse) after living through a stressful event?

lt’s well known that acute stress modulates memory in a powerful way. People who have lived through a traumatic event will often either have either perfect photographic memory of the event or partial or total amnesia. Untreated, exposure to a traumatic event can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which causes long-term problems. There exist preventive treatments that, when applied immediately after the traumatic event, have been shown to decrease the likelihood of getting PTSD. This includes antagonists of adrenaline and NMDA receptors; this messes with the acquisition of memory.

Of course good ol’ beer will mess with the acquisition of memory; that’s why people get brownouts and blackouts. It is also an antagonist of NMDA receptors (among many other systemic effects). So given that alcohol is an anxiolytic and that it causes amnesia, it doesn’t seem such a stretch to think that having a beer right after very a stressful event (within the next, say, 6 hours) will decrease the likelihood of long-term negative consequences (say, developing a phobia of biking).

This is of course the sort of hypothesis that is very hard to get funding to test. We do know that PTSD sufferers frequently turn to alcohol after their trauma and that this negatively affects outcome. And drowning your sorrows is never the solution. To be clear, taking an anxiolytic and amnesiac acutely to avoid acquiring a potentially adverse memory of a traumatic event and taking it in a sustained way after the memory is consolidated to drown it out are two completely different things.

{ xcorr | Continue reading }

artwork { Joel Shapiro, Untitled, 1980 }

Are straight people born that way? (…) We have to start with a more fundamental question: What do we mean when we say someone is “straight”? At the most basic level, we seem to be imagining female bodies that are specifically sexually aroused by male bodies, and vice versa.

Laboratory studies (…) suggest that, while such people probably do exist — at least in North America, where many sexologists have focused their attentions – it’s not uncommon for straight-identified people to be at least a little aroused by the idea of same-sex relations.

The media has tended to broadcast the news that gay-identified men and straight-identified men have quite discernible arousal patterns when they are shown various kinds of sexual stimuli. And that’s true. But if you look closely at the data, you’ll see that most straight-identified men do tend to show a little bit of arousal across sex categories (as do gay-identified men).

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

painting { Ingres, Madame Moitessier, 1856 }

Cockroaches are actually highly social creatures; they recognize members of their own families, with different generations of the same families living together.

Cockroaches do not like to be left alone, and suffer ill health when they are.

And they form closely bonded, egalitarian societies, based on social structures and rules. Communities of cockroaches are even capable of making collective decisions for the greater good.

By studying certain species of cockroach, we may even be able to learn some insights into how more advanced animal societies evolved, including our own.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

From what I previously understood, people would ingest mushrooms, and if they were in a negative state of mind, they’d have a “bad trip.” If they were with friends, with other people tripping, they were more likely to have a “good trip.” Aspects of these trips seemed to include lots of visual and auditory hallucinations: “halos” glowing around light sources, warping colors, maybe some synesthesia.

So I just figured that magic mushrooms must hyper-activate the parts of the brain that perceive color and sound, to the point where people perceive things that aren’t even there.

However, recent research out of the U.K. says that, surprisingly, I’ve got it all backwards. (…)

Within a minute or two, the test subjects started to feel the effects of the psilocybin, and the researchers gave them fMRIs during their trips. Surprisingly to me, and to the scientists, brain activity and blood flow decreased by up to 20% during the influence of the drug, and these decreases were proportional to the reported intensity of the trip. (…) The thought behind this finding is that when people do shrooms, pathways in the brain that would normally restrict cognition are temporarily turned off, allowing people to cognate at higher levels than ever before. Some of these same cognition-restraining pathways are overactive in cases of depression, but I won’t go so far as to suggest shrooms as a treatment for depressive disorders.

{ Try Nerdy | Continue reading }

photo { Stefan Heyne }

Drawing on the metaphor of ‘Prozac’, Prozac leadership encourages leaders to believe their own narratives that everything is going well and discourages followers from raising problems or admitting mistakes. Prozac is used to denote and symbolize a widespread social addiction to excessive positivity. Problems can occur, particularly if this positivity is seen to be discrepant with everyday experience. For example, if leaders repeatedly promise that ‘things can only get better’ but over time this does not happen, followers can become increasingly sceptical and cynical. This article warns that Prozac leadership, whether in corporate, political or other settings, can damage performance by eroding trust, communication, learning and preparedness.


{ SAGE | Continue reading }

photo { Erik Wåhlström }

Brain neuroimaging studies continue to outline the structural and functional abnormalities in disorders of mood. A relatively consistent finding has been a reduced volume of the brain hippocampus in major depressive disorder. Studies of hippocampal volume in the less common bipolar disorder have been inconsistent–some studies have found reduced hippocampal volumes while others have not.

The hippocampus is an important brain region to understand in the mood disorders. The hippocampus has a key role in memory. Patients with mood disorders commonly display impairments in mood including deficitis in autobiographical memory. Unipolar depression appears to increase risk for later development of Alzheimer’s disease. Hippocampal volume reduction is a common finding in Alzheimer’s disease. (…)

Lithium is noted to have significant neuroprotective effects.  (…) It is possible that bipolar patients treated with lithium may experience less hippocampal atrophy than those not treated with lithium.

{ Brain Posts | Continue reading }

charcoal on paper { Marius de Zayas, John Marin and Alfred Stieglitz, ca. 1912–13 }

For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong.

Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.

Yet in recent years, the climate change skeptics have seized on one last argument that cannot be so readily dismissed. Their theory is that clouds will save us.

They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds — which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location — will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends.

Their theory exploits the greatest remaining mystery in climate science, the difficulty that researchers have had in predicting how clouds will change. The scientific majority believes that clouds will most likely have a neutral effect or will even amplify the warming, perhaps strongly, but the lack of unambiguous proof has left room for dissent.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Whitman }

In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna restaurant could only remember orders that were in progress. As soon as the order was sent out and complete, they seemed to wipe it from memory.

Zeigarnik then did what any good psychologist would: she went back to the lab and designed a study. A group of adults and children was given anywhere between 18 and 22 tasks to perform (both physical ones, like making clay figures, and mental ones, like solving puzzles)—only, half of those tasks were interrupted so that they couldn’t be completed. At the end, the subjects remembered the interrupted tasks far better than the completed ones—over two times better, in fact. (…)

Your mind (…) wants to finish. It wants to keep working – and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete. Psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls this a Need for Closure, a desire of our minds to end states of uncertainty and resolve unfinished business. This need motivates us to work harder, to work better, and to work to completion.

The Zeigarnik Effect that has been demonstrated many times, in many contexts – but each time I see it or read about it, I can’t help but think of (…) Socrates’ reproach in The Phaedrus that the written word is the enemy of memory. (…)

Ernest Hemingway telling George Plimpton in his 1958 Paris Review interview that, “though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”

{ Maria Konnikova/Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Picasso, Le peintre et son modèle, 1914 }

The universal nature of human facial preferences suggests the possibility that such preferences are adaptations to the problem of mate choice. Sexual selection will have favored preferences for facial traits which are associated with reproductive success. (…)

One way facial traits may signal mate quality is by indicating the health of the individual displaying them. Healthy individuals confer a reduced risk of infection as well as the possibility of heritable immunity for their suitors’ offspring. Preferences for facial traits that are linked with health are therefore expected to be present.

One facial cue used in the judgment of a woman’s attractiveness is facial femininity. While facial proportions diverge between the sexes in particular ways, within each sex, the extent to which an individual typifies the prototypical face structure of his or her sex varies. Given that women have smaller jaws, lighter brow-ridges, higher cheekbones and larger foreheads than men , facial femininity represents the degree to which such traits are exaggerated in a woman’s face. (…)

The present study sought to address the relationship between female facial femininity, attractiveness and perceived/actual health. It was assumed that for femininity to signal health, it must be perceived as healthy and consequently be rated as attractive. Actual health was assessed by multiple self-reports detailing the number of colds, stomach illnesses and frequency of antibiotic use across a number of time periods, including some more recent and therefore less susceptible to error than previous studies employing such a measure. Based on previous results, we would predict that the rated femininity, healthiness and attractiveness of the faces would negatively correlate with self-reported ill-health in shorter-term time periods, as well as over the preceding three years. (…)

This study supports the finding that facial femininity and attractiveness may indicate women’s health history, which partially supports (although without confirmation of such relationships in future health, does not confirm) the hypothesis that female facial structure is a direct indicator of health functioning.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | PDF }

photo { Ed van der Elsken }

When objects are arranged in an array from left to right, the central item (…) calls out to you “Pick me, pick me!” (…)

In a new study psychologists have provided further evidence for what’s called the “Centre Stage effect” - our preferential bias towards items located in the middle.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

David Eagleman, neuroscientist: Take the vast, unconscious, automated processes that run under the hood of conscious awareness. We have discovered that the large majority of the brain’s activity takes place at this low level. The conscious part – the “me” that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is only a tiny bit of the operations. This understanding has given us a better understanding of the complex multiplicity that makes a person. A person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state. As a consequence, people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection. (…)

Raymond Tallis, former professor of geriatric medicine: [You] present us as more helpless, ignorant and zombie-like than is compatible with the kinds of lives we actually live and, what’s more, with doing brain science.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

related { How free is the will? }

photo { Heiner Luepke }

Research that I have done over the past decade suggests that a chemical messenger called oxytocin accounts for why some people give freely of themselves and others are coldhearted louts, why some people cheat and steal and others you can trust with your life, why some husbands are more faithful than others, and why women tend to be nicer and more generous than men. In our blood and in the brain, oxytocin appears to be the chemical elixir that creates bonds of trust not just in our intimate relationships but also in our business dealings, in politics and in society at large.

Known primarily as a female reproductive hormone, oxytocin controls contractions during labor, which is where many women encounter it as Pitocin, the synthetic version that doctors inject in expectant mothers to induce delivery. Oxytocin is also responsible for the calm, focused attention that mothers lavish on their babies while breast-feeding. And it is abundant, too, on wedding nights (we hope) because it helps to create the warm glow that both women and men feel during sex, a massage or even a hug.

Since 2001, my colleagues and I have conducted a number of experiments showing that when someone’s level of oxytocin goes up, he or she responds more generously and caringly, even with complete strangers. (…)

In our studies, we found that a small percentage of subjects never shared any money; analysis of their blood indicated that their oxytocin receptors were malfunctioning.

{ Paul J. Zak/WSJ | Continue reading }

polaroid { Robert Whitman }

The scientists individually told each member of another group of randomly selected people, “I hate to tell you this, but no one chose you as someone they wanted to work with.” (…) the whole point of going through all of this as far as the students knew, was to sit in front of a bowl containing 35 mini chocolate-chip cookies and judge those cookies on taste, smell, and texture. The subjects learned they could eat as many as they wanted while filling out a form commonly used in corporate taste tests. The researchers left them alone with the cookies for 10 minutes.

This was the actual experiment – measuring cookie consumption based on social acceptance. How many cookies would the wanted people eat, and how would their behavior differ from the unwanted? (…) Why did the rejected group feel motivated to keep mushing cookies into their sad faces? (…)

The answer has to do with something psychologists now call ego depletion, and you would be surprised to learn how many things can cause it, how often you feel it, and how much in life depends on it.

{ You Are Not So Smart | Continue reading }

A single-celled organism in Norway has been called “mankind’s furthest relative.” It is so far removed from the organisms we know that researchers claim it belongs to a new base group, called a kingdom, on the tree of life. (…)

The organism, a type of protozoan, was found by researchers in a lake near Oslo. (…) They found it doesn’t genetically fit into any of the previously discovered kingdoms of life. It’s an organism with membrane-bound internal structures, called a eukaryote, but genetically it isn’t an animal, plant, fungi, algae or protist (the five main groups of eukaryotes).

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

Physicists from the University of Zurich have discovered a previously unknown particle composed of three quarks in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator. (…)

In particle physics, the baryon family refers to particles that are made up of three quarks. Quarks form a group of six particles that differ in their masses and charges. The two lightest quarks, the so-called “up” and “down” quarks, form the two atomic components, protons and neutrons. All baryons that are composed of the three lightest quarks (”up,” “down” and “strange” quarks) are known. Only very few baryons with heavy quarks have been observed to date. They can only be generated artificially in particle accelerators as they are heavy and very unstable.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

previously { A new experiment indicates that neutrinos don’t move faster than the speed of light, adding to evidence that an earlier measurement may have been inaccurate. }

Women differ from men in circulating levels of certain hormones, and some of those hormones change across the menstrual cycle. Estradiol, progesterone, the lutenizing hormone, and the follicle-stimulating hormone all change over the menstrual cycle. (…)

We find that naturally cycling women bid significantly higher than men and earn significantly lower profits than men except during the midcycle when fecundity is highest. We suggest an evolutionary hypothesis according to which women are predisposed by hormones to generally behave more riskily during their fecund phase of their menstrual cycle in order to increase the probability of conception, quality of offspring, and genetic variety. We also find that women on hormonal contraceptives bid significantly higher and earn substantially lower profits than men. This may be due to progestins contained in hormonal contraceptives or a selection effect.

{ University of California | PDF }

related { The Impact of Female Sex Hormones on Competitiveness }

photos { Raymond Meeks }