New research out of Brigham Young University finds that couples who wait to have sex are happier, and that delaying sex could lead to a healthier marriage. “I think it’s because [those who waited] learned to talk and have the skills to work with issues that come up,” says scientist Dean Busby, the study’s lead author. (…)


It’s possible for a man to be allergic to his own semen, according to Dutch scientists who have been studying post-orgasmic illness syndrome, a condition in which men develop flu-like symptoms after ejaculating.

{ The Week | Continue reading }

photo { Dominico Albion | more }

When adding up the benefits from three centuries of species discoveries, I’m tempted to start, and also stop, with Sir Hans Sloane.

A London physician and naturalist in the 18th century, he collected everything from insects to elephant tusks. And like a lot of naturalists, he was ridiculed for it, notably by his friend Horace Walpole, who scoffed at Sloane’s fondness for “sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese!” Sloane’s collections would in time give rise to the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum, London.

Not a bad legacy for one lifetime. But it pales beside the result of a collecting trip to Jamaica, on which Sloane also invented milk chocolate.

We still scoff at naturalists today.  We also tend to forget how much we benefit from their work. (…) Large swaths of what we now regard as basic medical knowledge came originally from naturalists.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photos { Simen Johan | Roxanne Jackson }

A review of more than 160 studies of human and animal subjects has found “clear and compelling evidence” that – all else being equal – happy people tend to live longer and experience better health than their unhappy peers.


{ News Bureau | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Avedon, Veruschka, New York, 1972 }

Not only do insincere apologies fail to make amends, they can also cause damage by making us feel angry and distrustful towards those who are trying to trick us into forgiving them.

Even sincere apologies are just the start of the repair process. Although we expect the words “I’m sorry” to do the trick, they don’t do nearly as much as we expect.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Misrach }

Swedish scientists have explored how a brain identifies its own body and how body image can change by successfully creating the illusion of owning three arms or being the size of a Barbie doll in a laboratory setting.

The research not only addresses some of the oldest philosophical and psychological questions about the relationship between body and mind, but also has potential applications in prosthetics and robotics. (…)

Ongoing projects question whether the perceived body can be shrunk to the size of a Barbie doll or if the brain can accept a body of a different sex.

Other seemingly bizarre recent projects have included giving participants the illusion of shaking hands with themselves, having their stomachs slashed with a kitchen knife and seeing themselves from behind. All were designed to trick participants into a false perception of owning another body.

{ Cosmos | Continue reading }

photo { David Fenton, Nurses on the Sidewalk, Chicano Moratorium, Los Angelos, CA, February 28th, 1970 }

We usually think of emotions as conveyed through facial expressions and body language. Science too has focused on these forms of emotional communication, finding that there’s a high degree of consistency across cultures. It’s only in the last few years that psychologists have looked at whether and how the emotions can be communicated purely through touch.

A 2006 study by Matthew Hertenstein demonstrated that strangers could accurately communicate the ‘universal’ emotions of anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy, purely through touches to the forearm, but not the ‘prosocial’ emotions of surprise, happiness and sadness, nor the ’self-focused’ emotions of embarrassment, envy and pride.

Now Erin Thompson and James Hampton have added to this nascent literature by comparing the accuracy of touch-based emotional communication between strangers and between those who are romantically involved. (…)

The key finding is that although strangers performed well for most emotions, romantic couples tended to be superior, especially for the self-focused emotions of embarrassment, envy and pride.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

images { The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968, directed by Norman Jewison }

…Known as mnemonists, they have unfathomable memories and data recall. (…)

Shereshesvkii was reporting on a talk given by Luria. At one point Luria looked around the room and noticed that, unlike all the rest of the journalists, there was an individual not taking any notes. Luria confronted Shereshesvkii asking why he was not taking notes, at this point Shereshesvkii recited his entire talk back to word for word. (…)

Luria’s studies revealed many interesting things about the workings of Shereshesvkii mind. His descriptions indicate that Sherevskii had “at least six different types of synaesthesia” triggered by at least four different sensations.

{ B Good Science | Continue reading }

image { Maybe the dumbest Photoshopped ad ever | copyranter | related: Rubik’s Brain Cube }

The current pace of population aging is without parallel in human history but surprisingly little is known about the human aging process, because lifespans of eight decades or more make it difficult to study. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have replicated premature aging in the lab, allowing them to study aging-related disease in a dish.

In the February 23, 2011 advance online edition of the journal Nature, Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, Ph.D. a professor in the Salk Institute’s Gene Expression Laboratory, and his team report that they have successfully generated induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from skin cells obtained from patients with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome—who age eight to 10 times faster than the rest of us—and differentiated them into smooth muscle cells displaying the telltale signs of vascular aging. (…)

Progeria’s striking features resemble the aging process put on fast-forward and afflicted people rarely live beyond 13 years.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Brandon Pavan }

Most of my interest in the use of biology in economics concerns humans being subject to the forces of selection like any other biological organism. With this starting point, it is natural to pull across many of the tools, models and methods of analysis that evolutionary biologists use.

Sometimes those models and tools are of value without the biological underpinnings. Evolutionary economics is one of the major areas where this is done, with the concepts of selection applied at the level of firms.

Another instance of this crossover was in an article published three weeks ago by Andrew Haldane and Robert May, who have proposed that analysis of complexity and stability in ecosystems (dating from the 1970s) is of some use in examining financial systems.

{ Evolving Economics | Continue reading }

photo { Justin Fantl }

The 21-year-old woman was carefully trained not to flirt with anyone who came into the laboratory over the course of several months. She kept eye contact and conversation to a minimum. She never used makeup or perfume, kept her hair in a simple ponytail, and always wore jeans and a plain T-shirt.

Each of the young men thought she was simply a fellow student at Florida State University participating in the experiment, which ostensibly consisted of her and the man assembling a puzzle of Lego blocks. But the real experiment came later, when each man rated her attractiveness. Previous research had shown that a woman at the fertile stage of her menstrual cycle seems more attractive, and that same effect was observed here — but only when this woman was rated by a man who wasn’t already involved with someone else.

The other guys, the ones in romantic relationships, rated her as significantly less attractive when she was at the peak stage of fertility, presumably because at some level they sensed she then posed the greatest threat to their long-term relationships. To avoid being enticed to stray, they apparently told themselves she wasn’t all that hot anyway.

This experiment was part of a new trend in evolutionary psychology to study “relationship maintenance.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ Leonard Johnson, A traveler palm tree, Philippine Islands, 1926 }

What can waiters, the TV series ‘Lost’ and the novelist Charles Dickens teach us about avoiding procrastination?

One of the simplest methods for beating procrastination in almost any task was inspired by busy waiters.

It’s called the Zeigarnik effect after a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, who noticed an odd thing while sitting in a restaurant in Vienna. The waiters seemed only to remember orders which were in the process of being served. When completed, the orders evaporated from their memory.

Zeigarnik went back to the lab to test out a theory about what was going on. She asked participants to do twenty or so simple little tasks in the lab, like solving puzzles and stringing beads (Zeigarnik, 1927). Except some of the time they were interrupted half way through the task. Afterwards she asked them which activities they remembered doing. People were about twice as likely to remember the tasks during which they’d been interrupted than those they completed.

What does this have to do with procrastination? (…)

When people manage to start something they’re more inclined to finish it. Procrastination bites worst when we’re faced with a large task that we’re trying to avoid starting. It might be because we don’t know how to start or even where to start.

What the Zeigarnik effect teaches is that one weapon for beating procrastination is starting somewhere…anywhere.

Don’t start with the hardest bit, try something easy first.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

Imagine that someone committed a murder. Now imagine that the murderer risked his own life to save another person. Would you forgive the murderer for his crime?

No?

So, how many lives would the murderer need to save to balance out his original sin?

5?

10?

In one study, the median answer was 25.

This is an example of what psychologists call the negativity bias, which is a powerful part of the human mind.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2 }

Cognition researchers should beware assuming that people’s mental faculties have finished maturing when they reach adulthood. So say Laura Germine and colleagues, whose new study shows that face learning ability continues to improve until people reach their early thirties.

Although vocabulary and other forms of acquired knowledge grow throughout the life course, it’s generally accepted that the speed and efficiency of the cognitive faculties peaks in the early twenties before starting a steady decline. This study challenges that assumption.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

painting { Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (Spanish for “The Maids of Honour”), 1656 | Las Meninas has long been recognised as one of the most important paintings in Western art history. Foucault viewed the painting without regard to the subject matter, nor to the artist’s biography, technical ability, sources and influences, social context, or relationship with his patrons. Instead he analyses its conscious artifice, highlighting the complex network of visual relationships between painter, subject-model, and viewer. For Foucault, Las Meninas contains the first signs of a new episteme, or way of thinking, in European art. It represents a mid-point between what he sees as the two “great discontinuities” in art history. | Wikipedia }

{ Computer’s depiction of the “average” female face by country. | Daily Mail | More: Mike Mike, The Face of Tomorrow }

What happens in our bodies when we kiss?

In a good kiss, our pupils dilate, which is one of the reasons we close our eyes, our pulse quickens, and our breathing can deepen and become irregular. But we’re also hard at work on a subconscious level. Scent plays a really powerful role in whether it’s a good kiss or not. Women are actually most attracted to the natural scents of men who have a different set of genes called the major histocompatability complex that codes for immunity. We’re most attracted to people whose MHC genes have a lot of diversity from ours—the advantage of that would be if you reproduce, that child’s probably going to have a stronger immune system, and so be more likely to survive to pass on their genes. This isn’t something that we’re consciously aware of, but we do seem to know if something feels off. And actually, more than half of men and women—fifty-eight per cent of women, fifty-nine per cent of men—report ending a budding relationship because of a bad kiss.

How important is a couple’s first kiss?

A first kiss has the power to shape the future of a relationship for a particular couple. Of course, there are other factors that play a role, but kissing is really nature’s ultimate litmus test. It puts us right up close so that we can sense whether this is someone we want to continue a relationship with.

{ New Yorker | Continue reading }

A recent meta-analysis has indicated that falling in love can take a little as a fifth of a second and can produce similar euphoric effects to cocaine.

“These results confirm love has a scientific basis,” says Stephanie Ortigue who conducted the study at Syracuse University. (…)

Ortigue claims that while this is interesting in terms of being a neuroscience curiosity it could have potential therapeutic possibilities for those suffering depression after heartbreak.

{ B Good Science | Continue reading }

related { Researchers have identified five distinct styles of communicating romantic interest. }

painting { Gustav Klimt, Water Serpents I, 1904–1907 }

At its heart, cancer is caused when our genes – the instructions encoded in the DNA found within our cells – go wrong. Without the correct instructions, cells start to multiply out of control, fail to die when damaged, and begin to spread around the body.

Scientists studying the precise nature of these microscopic – yet potentially disastrous – errors have found all kinds of weird and wonderful mistakes. These range from very specific ‘typos’ to large scale rearrangements.

To use an analogy, if the entire DNA of a cell (its genome) is a bit like a recipe book, then some genetic faults are the equivalent of simply changing ‘tomato’ into ‘potato’, while others are akin to ripping whole pages out and shuffling them around.

But recent revolutionary research from scientists in the US and UK has revealed a completely different – and catastrophic – way for DNA to get messed up.

Published in the prestigious journal Cell, this groundbreaking work comes from the Cancer Genome Project team, who brought us the first fully mapped cancer genomes at the end of 2009. Since then they’ve been busy analysing DNA from samples taken from many different types of cancer and trying to spot interesting patterns in the data.

Since the 1970s, the prevailing view has been that cancers ‘evolve’ gradually, picking up a few new faults each time a cell divides.  This idea is supported by plenty of research into cancer genomes over the years.

But in their latest investigations, the Cancer Genome team noticed a few examples that bucked this trend. (…)

Within our cells, our DNA is arranged into individual pieces known as chromosomes, and 46 chromosomes are found in virtually all human cells.  If the entire DNA of a cell is analogous to an instruction manual, then chromosomes would be individual ‘chapters’.

In a few cancer samples, the scientists found that one or two whole chromosomes had been literally shattered to pieces and stitched back together in a haphazard way – not so much shuffling the pages of the genetic recipe book as completely ripping them to pieces and randomly gluing the bits back together. The researchers call this “chromothripsis” – thripsis being Greek for “shattered into pieces”.

This didn’t seem to be a vanishingly rare event either. Two to three per cent of cancers studied by the team so far show the signs of chromothripsis (across a wide range of different cancer types). And in some cancer types it seemed to be even more common – for example, around a quarter of bone cancer samples had shattered chromosomes.

{ Cancer Research UK | Continue reading }

artwork { Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937 }

Here’s a paper from 1985 titled, EEG during masturbation and ejaculation. In this study, they had three men masturbate and ejaculate while undergoing EEG (ElectroEncephaloGraphy). (…)

The authors didn’t really do any strong quantitative analyses of their EEG. More just qualitative observations. The methods in this paper are a great read, though. They recorded 14 channel scalp EEG. In addition, they also recorded:

“Anal Contractions” with a “pressure-sensitive anal probe”.

“Penile Tumescence” with a “mercury strain gauge”. Unfortunately, “[t]he masturbatory movements interfered with the recording”.

“Wrist Accelerometer” that was “taped to the dorsum of the hand (right) used in masturbation”.

And the procedures really give you a sense of the beauty of the entire setup: “Subjects were instructed to avoid unnecessary movements, and their compliance was verified by video monitoring of head and torso throughout the session. (…) The average length of masturbation to the first anal contraction was 402 seconds.”

{ Oscillatory Thoughts | Continue reading }

photo { David Stewart }

Is it reasonable to fear death? If you agree with Lucretius, you will say no. In what is known as the Symmetry Argument, Lucretius contends that that the time before our existence is similar to the time of our future non-existence. And since we do not fear the time before we existed, it is not reasonable to fear our future non-existence i.e. death.

However, even if you concede to Lucretius’s argument, the fact remains that the awareness of our mortality generates a significant threat to our psychological well-being. A large corpus of research on terror management theory details how mortality saliency affects our self-esteem, worldview, among others.

In a recent fMRI study, Quilin and colleagues (2011) extends our knowledge on terror management theory by exploring the neural correlates of mortality salience.

{ Psychothalamus | Continue reading }

photo { Tierney Gearon }

First we must ask Why does a woman (or a man, for the matter) vocalize during sex at all? Sure, there might be a host of valid social reasons - one might be to boost the ego of the man [92% of the women in study agreed to this statement, and 87% reported vocalizing for this very purpose] (Brewer and Hendrie, 2010), or to deceive the man that they are a competent lover (68% of women reported wanting to stay with a man even though he never helped her climax) (Brewer and Hendrie, 2010).

But from an evolutionary perspective we must be mindful of a few things: First, men do not vocalize in the same manner as women. Second, comparative evidence in chimps suggests that vocalizations are for attracting more males to a sexual encounter (in order to have more sex), which is further supported by the fact that when chimps are engaging in down-strata copulation (that is, if the women is having sex with someone she ’shouldn’t’ be having sex with) she still makes chimpanzee sex-faces, but fails to make the vocalizations.

{ Psycasm | Continue reading }

painting { Erik Mark Sandberg }