Negotiations trigger anxiety. Across four studies, we demonstrate that anxiety is harmful to negotiator performance.
Compared to negotiators experiencing neutral feelings, negotiators who feel anxious expect lower outcomes, make lower first offers, respond more quickly to offers, exit bargaining situations earlier, and ultimately obtain worse outcomes.
“It is a surprise that a jellyfish — an animal normally considered to be lacking both brain and advanced behavior — is able to perform visually guided navigation, which is not a trivial behavioral task,” said lead researcher Anders Garm of the University of Copenhagen. (…)
Box jellyfish have 24 eyes of four different types, and two of them — the upper and lower lens eyes — can form images and resemble the eyes of vertebrates like humans. The other eyes are more primitive. It was already known that box jellyfish’s vision allows them to perform simpler tasks, like responding to light and avoiding obstacles.
In the new study, scientists found that one species of the cube-shaped box jellyfish, Tripedalia cystophora, uses its upper lens eyes, which are mounted on four cuplike structures, to make sure it stays close to the prop roots of mangrove trees that define its habitat.
artwork { Ellen Gallagher, DeLuxe, 2004–05 [detail] | currently on view at the MoMA, NYC }
Scientists have untangled some — but not nearly all — of the mysteries behind our love and hatred of certain foods. (…)
Our tongues perceive only five basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salty and “umami,” the Japanese word for savory. (…)
“We as primates are born liking sweet and disliking bitter,” said Marcia Pelchat, who studies food preferences at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. The theory is that we’re hard-wired to like and dislike certain basic tastes so that the mouth can act as the body’s gatekeeper.
Sweet means energy; sour means not ripe yet. Savory means food may contain protein. Bitter means caution, as many poisons are bitter. Salty means sodium, a necessary ingredient for several functions in our bodies. (By the way, those tongue maps that show taste buds clumped into zones that detect sweet, bitter, etc.? Very misleading. Taste receptors of all types blanket our tongues — except for the center line — and some reside elsewhere in our mouths and throats.)
Researchers have found only one major human gene that detects sweet tastes, but we all have it. By contrast, 25 or more bitter receptor genes may exist, but combinations vary by person. Some genetic connections are so strong that scientists can predict fairly accurately how people will react to certain bitter tastes by looking at their DNA.
A new study finds that when a ball appears to magically change size in front of their eyes, female dogs notice but males don’t. The researchers aren’t sure what’s behind the disparity, but experts say the finding supports the idea that—in some situations—male dogs trust their noses, whereas females trust their eyes.
photos { Eylül Aslan }
Because the concept of love can mean different things across different types of relationships (e.g. friends, children, romantic relationships), researchers have worked at developing models that allow differentiation between varying experiences of love.
This study identifies the key factors underlying the most popular measures of love in use today through meta-analytic factor analysis. Findings reveal that general love, romantic obsession, and practical friendship are important measures in romantic relationships. Love was positively and obsession was negatively associated with relationship satisfaction and length.
The mathematical foundations of electronics predict the existence of four fundamental electronic devices. The resistor, capacitor and inductor are well known. The fourth device, the memristor, was only discovered in 2008 and even now remains an exotic piece of kit.
Memristors are electrical elements whose resistance depends on the current that has passed through it in the past, a phenomenon that physicists call a hysteresis. This makes these devices behave like resistors with memory, hence their name.
Memristors have generated considerable interest because they are simple and cheap to make, operate quickly and at low power and have the potential to store information even when the power is switched off.
So it’s no surprise that great things are expected of them and that various plans are afoot to build them into future generations of microchips. (…)
Today, Alexander Stotland and Massimiliano Di Ventra at the University of California-San Diego, reveal a comprehensive analysis of the effects of noise on memristors. Their conclusion is both surprising and reassuring. Not only should memristors be immune to most types of noise, their memory ought to be enhanced by it.
I’m sure most of you have heard about female ejaculation, the G-spot, and other mysterious beasts associated with the female orgasm. There is, of course, some debate about whether ALL women are capable of ejaculation, what female ejaculation means, where the G spot is located, and even if the G spot exists.
Things we currently know about female orgasm: swelling in genitalia, increases in blood flow to the clitoris, culminating in spasms of various muscle groups and a spike in heart rate and blood pressure.
As far as female ejaculation, there are definitely women who do it, no question there. The question is, what IS it, and is it necessarily a part of orgasm? Some studies have shown that the fluid which ejaculating women spurt contains fluids which are associated with prostate tissue, which some women have, and which lend credence to the idea of a separate ejaculatory ability in women. Other studies show it’s just urine, and still OTHER studies show it’s a mixture of both. (…)
Let’s just put it this way: electrode needles. IN YOUR CLITORIS.
photo { David Ersser, I Need Sexual Healing (Neon), 2007 | Balsa wood }
A rumor has gone viral in the physics community that the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has detected the long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle.” The controversial rumor is based on what appears to be a leaked internal note from physicists at CERN’s LHC, a 17-mile-long particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland.
photo { Khuong Nguyen }
People may advise you to listen to your gut instincts: now research suggests that your gut may have more impact on your thoughts than you ever realized. Scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Genome Institute of Singapore (…) reported that normal gut flora, the bacteria that inhabit our intestines, have a significant impact on brain development and subsequent adult behavior. (…)
Scientists have long recognized that the bacterial cells inhabiting our skin and gut outnumber human cells by ten-to-one. Indeed, Princeton University scientist Bonnie Bassler compared the approximately 30,000 human genes found in the average human to the more than 3 million bacterial genes inhabiting us, concluding that we are at most one percent human. We are only beginning to understand the sort of impact our bacterial passengers have on our daily lives.
previously { The human mind has no knowledge of the body }
“Neuroscience gives us a completely new perspective,” says Marco Iacoboni, UCLA professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. “For millennia we’ve relied on people’s words. Neuroscience uncovers the things that people don’t say — and often can’t say, because there is a lot that goes on in our brain that is difficult to verbalize, or that we aren’t even aware of.”
{ UCLA magazine | Continue reading }
…what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness.
What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. Its descriptions of what these phenomena are and of how they arise are incomplete in several crucial respects, as we will see. (…)
While to live a human life requires having a brain in some kind of working order, it does not follow from this fact that to live a human life is to be a brain in some kind of working order.
screenshot { Zelig, 1983 }
People who are more aware of their own heart-beat have superior time perception skills.
artwork { Ellsworth Kelly, Atlantic, 1956 | Oil on canvas on two panels }
Women, according to countless studies, are twice as prone to anxiety as men. When pollsters call women up, they always confess to far higher levels of worry than men about everything from crime to the economy. Psychologists diagnose women with anxiety disorders two times as often as men, and research confirms—perhaps unsurprisingly—that women are significantly more inclined toward negative emotion, self-criticism, and endless rumination about problems. (…)
In reality, the idea that women are “naturally” twice as anxious as men is nothing more than a pernicious illusion. (…)
A few recent studies have indicated that the hormonal differences between the sexes really do make women a touch more biologically inclined toward anxiety than men. (…) Just how big a role these biological factors play in human women’s anxiety isn’t yet clear.
But one thing we do know for certain is that the way we raise children plays a huge role in determining how disposed toward anxiety they are later in life, and thus the difference in the way we treat boys and girls explains a lot about the heightened nerves we see in many adult women.
artwork { Willem de Kooning, Woman, 1951-52 | Oil and pencil on paperboard }
The self-organizing strategies of eusocial insects are now well known and well studied in biology and applications to computation are abundant.
One of the more remarkable behaviors observed is the ability of rather simple, unintelligent agents (individual insects) to coordinate their behavior to establish a rather fluid and adaptive behavior on the colony level. The phenomenon of stigmergy (communication via the environment) has now been modeled and applied in artificial simulations to achieve similar results among rather simple artificial agents cooperating in multi-agent systems.
However, many of these applications focus on homogeneous colonies, where each agent has the same behavioral capabilities. Nonetheless, observations of insects show that in many colonies the individuals are not always homogeneous. Colonies consist of heterogeneous agents, whether these agents display morphological differences (i.e. distinct castes) or merely behavioral differences. The effects of this stratification of agents in a colony is referred to as division of labor (DOL) or by the term polyethism. (…)
The experiment detailed below involves a colony of artificial ants engaged in a foraging task.
{ Chris Marriott and Carlos Gershenson, Polyethism in a colony of artificial ants, 2011 | Arvix | Continue reading }
strip { Will Eisner }
The happiest countries and happiest U.S. states tend to have the highest suicide rates, according to research from the UK’s University of Warwick, Hamilton College in New York and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. (…)
This new research found that a range of nations - including: Canada, the United States, Iceland, Ireland and Switzerland, display relatively high happiness levels and yet also have high suicide rates.
Violence itself is a form of communication, it’s a way of sending a message and it does that through symbolic means through damaging the body. But if people can express themselves and communicate verbally they don’t need violence and they are much less likely to use their fists or weapons as their means of communication. They are much more likely to use words. I’m saying this on the basis of clinical experience, working with violent people. (…)
When people experience their moral universe as going between the polar opposites of shame versus honour, or we could also say shame versus pride, they are more likely to engage in serious violence. (…)
The emotional cause that I have found just universal among people who commit serious violence, lethal violence is the phenomenon of feeling overwhelmed by feelings of shame and humiliation.
It is difficult to understand the importance of shame in modern societies because we live inside an ethos that is highly individualistic and focused on exterior matters. When interior matters are viewed, thought and perception are recognized, but little attention is given to emotions and relationships. This essay focuses on the social-emotional world, and proposes that shame should be considered the master emotion.
Human minds evolved to constantly scan for novelty, lest we miss any sign of food, danger or, on a good day, mating opportunities.
But the modern world bombards us with stimuli, a nonstop stream of e-mails, chats, texts, tweets, status updates and video links to piano playing cats.
There’s growing concern among scientists that indulging in these ceaseless disruptions isn’t good for our brains, in much the way that excessive sugar or fat - other things we evolved to crave when they were in shorter supply - isn’t good for our bodies.
And some believe it’s time to consider a technology diet.
A team at UCSF published a study last week that found further evidence that multitasking impedes short-term memory, especially among older adults. Researchers there previously found that distractions of the sort that smart phones and social networks present can hinder long-term memory and mental performance.
artwork { Samuel Ekwurtzel, 11:34 }
If you think global warming is some distant threat, come visit Yellowstone, our most beloved national park. Acres of trees are dying, trout runs are disappearing, and starving bears are attacking campers. It’s an ecosystem in collapse, and things are only getting worse.
{ Men’s Journal | Continue reading }
After world crude oil prices collapsed in 1985 (temporarily below $5 per barrel), American SUVs began their rapid diffusion that culminated in using the Hummer H1, a civilian version of a U.S. military assault vehicle weighing nearly 3.5 tonnes, for trips to grocery stores.
Our eyes jump rapidly about three times each second to capture new visual information, and with each jump a new view of the world falls onto the retina — a layer of visual receptors on the back of the eye.
However, we do not experience this jerky sequence of images; rather, we see a stable world.
A spectacular case of psychosis, rather oddly described as ‘Methamphetamine Induced Synesthesia’, in a case report just published in The American Journal on Addictions.
The report concerns a 30-year-old gentleman from the Iranian city of Shiraz with a long-standing history of drug use who recently started smoking crystal:
Six months PTA [prior to admission] (October 2009), he started smoking methamphetamine once a day, and gradually increased the frequency to three times a day.
Two months PTA (January 2010), he developed symptoms of auditory and visual hallucinations (seeing fairies around him that talked to him and forced him to conduct aggressive behavior), self-injury, and suicidal attempts.
He developed odd behaviors such as boiling animal statues. He was hearing the voices of colors, which were in the carpet. Colors moved around and talked to each other about the patient. He also saw the heads of different kinds of animals gathering on a board, and they talked to him.
Finally, his mother brought him to the emergency room of Ebnecina Psychiatric Hospital in Shiraz.
artwork { James Marshall }
Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. (…)
Eagleman is thirty-nine now and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston. (…)
The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. It can track seconds, minutes, days, and weeks, set off alarms in the morning, at bedtime, on birthdays and anniversaries. Timing is so essential to our survival that it may be the most finely tuned of our senses. In lab tests, people can distinguish between sounds as little as five milliseconds apart, and our involuntary timing is even quicker. If you’re hiking through a jungle and a tiger growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points. The difference can be as little as nine-millionths of a second.
Yet “brain time,” as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective. “Try this exercise,” he suggests in a recent essay. “Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.” There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did the missing moments go?
The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds?
photo { Rodney Graham }
