Mummies were stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites. Gravediggers robbed and sold body parts.

“The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. […]

Blood was procured as fresh as possible, while it was still thought to contain the vitality of the body. This requirement made it challenging to acquire. The 16th century German-Swiss physician Paracelsus believed blood was good for drinking, and one of his followers even suggested taking blood from a living body. […]

As science strode forward, however, cannibal remedies died out. The practice dwindled in the 18th century, around the time Europeans began regularly using forks for eating and soap for bathing. But Sugg found some late examples of corpse medicine: In 1847, an Englishman was advised to mix the skull of a young woman with treacle (molasses) and feed it to his daughter to cure her epilepsy. (He obtained the compound and administered it, as Sugg writes, but “allegedly without effect.”)

{ Smithsonian | Continue reading }

photo { Volgareva Irina }

When you “lose yourself” inside the world of a fictional character while reading a story, you may actually end up changing your own behavior and thoughts to match that of the character, a new study suggests.

Researchers at Ohio State University examined what happened to people who, while reading a fictional story, found themselves feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of one of the characters as if they were their own - a phenomenon the researchers call “experience-taking.”

They found that, in the right situations, experience-taking may lead to real changes, if only temporary, in the lives of readers.

{ Ohio State University | Continue reading }

photo { Joel Sternfeld }

{ Aimée Brodeur | via je suis perdu }

“Illusory Power Transference” is the academic name for feeling powerful due to a superficial connection to a powerful person, such as having once been in the same room.

{ OvercomingBias | Continue reading }

In a Dutch study performed by Pieter van Baal and colleagues, the authors compared the annual and lifetime health care costs of three cohorts, namely the obese, the smokers, and the healthy living people. […]

The lifetime costs for an obese person amounted to € 399,000, compared to which the smoker comes at a 14% discount of € 341,000, but the healthy living person with a 17% premium at € 468,000.

{ Chronic Health | Continue reading }

artwork { Dan Voinea }

One of the most important things to remember when thinking about pitching is that there are huge numbers of pitches in the world. Venture capitalists hear quite a few of them. And they find the process frustrating because it is such a low yield activity (a tiny fraction of first pitches lead to subsequent diligence and even fewer of those lead to a deal). So if you want VCs to listen to you, you need to force them to listen—to break through the clutter. Doing so requires you to hack into the VC mind. 

Conceptually, pitching sounds easy. You are smart. You have a great idea and you tell people with money that great idea. They’re rational; they give it to you. 

But it’s not that easy. What you essentially have to do is convince a reasonably smart person to exchange his capital for your piece of paper (a stock certificate) that is really nothing more than a promise about something that may be valuable later but, on a blind statistical basis, probably won’t be. It turns out that this is difficult.

Humans are massively cognitively biased in favor of near-term thinking. VCs are no different. That’s curious, because you’d think they would have overcome it, since good long-term thinking is sort of the entire nature of venture capital. But humans are humans. VCs are just sacks of meat with the same cognitive biases as everyone else. (…)

You must address both sides of their brains; you have to convince VCs that your proposal is economically rational, and then you must exploit their reptilian brains by persuading their emotional selves into doing the deal and overcoming cognitive biases (like near-term focus) against the deal. You should also offer VCs entertainment. They see several pitches a day (most bad) and that gets boring. Be funny and help your cause. In the tech community, even one joke will suffice.

{ Blake Masters | Continue reading }

synthetic polymer paint on paper { Mike Kelley }

Poltergeists are defined as paranormal, mischievous ghostly presences that appear to a select group of people. As paranormal entities, they are beyond investigation by rational scientific means. Or are they? Odd sensations, visions, felt presences, out-of-body experiences, etc. have all been explained by unusual brain activity. Hence, neuroscientists should consider that poltergeists exist in the mind of the perceiver, not as a physical reality in the external world.

A new paper by parapsychologist William G. Roll and colleagues reported on the case of a woman who experienced paranormal phenomenon after suffering a head injury. (…)

[After the head injury,] …the relationship with her first husband deteriorated because he insisted she was not the same person. According to her reports one night he tried to kill her. The anomalous phenomena began that night and have been intermittent since that time. Their intensity and frequency have increased during the last 2–3 years.

EEG recordings revealed chronically abnormal activity at a right temporal lobe electrode.

{ The Neurocritic | Continue reading }

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 }

{ Brazil retailer using Facebook likes… on its clothing hangers }

As you know, the latest generation with a formal name is “The Millennials,” and they are basically the worst, continuing the grand tradition of every new generation being the worst.

{ Hamilton Nolan/Gawker | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Avedon | Murals and Portraits at Gagosian, until July 6, 2012 }

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 }

Efron observed the conversations of 1,250 Lithuanian and Polish Jews and 1,100 Italians from Naples and Sicily in and around New York City. In each group, about half were recent immigrants and half were “assimilated.” They were observed in a range of settings: parks, markets, social clubs, schools, universities, Catskills resorts, Adirondack hotels, and the Saratoga racetrack. He recorded five thousand feet of film and, with an artist, produced two thousand sketches of spontaneous gestures.

The results paint a picture of a stereotype, but a lovingly detailed and specific one. According to Efron, Jews used a limited range of motion, mostly from the elbow. Their movements were more angular, jabbing, intricate, and vertical than those of the Italians, who used larger, smoother, more curved lateral gestures which pivoted from the shoulder. Jews tended to use one hand, Italians both. Italians touched their own bodies, Jews touched the bodies of their conversational partners.

{ Lapham’s Quaterly | Continue reading }

How much is a recipe worth? About $1.8 million, according to the owner of Kay Lee Roast Meat Joint, who boosted the sale price of her Singapore eatery by that amount when she put it on the market this year.

Betty Kong and her husband want S$3.5 million ($2.8 million) for their 60-plastic-stool establishment, a premium over the S$1.25 million assessed value of the site. The price includes the property, their recipe for roasting duck, pork ribs and crispy pig skin as well as other Cantonese-style classics, plus three months of cooking lessons — and, presumably, the loyal clientele that lines up outside, sometimes for more than an hour. (…)

While the food may be good, a buyer could find better things to do with the more than S$2 million premium than become the owner of some roast-pork recipes, writes Singaporean food blogger, K.F. Seetoh.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

photo { Brian Finke }

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 }

{ Mary E. Frey, Real Life Dramas, 1984-87 }

Surgery is a profession defined by its authority to cure by means of bodily invasion. The brutality and risks of opening a living person’s body have long been apparent, the benefits only slowly and haltingly worked out. Nonetheless, over the past two centuries, surgery has become radically more effective, and its violence substantially reduced — changes that have proved central to the development of mankind’s abilities to heal the sick.

The first volume of the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and the Collateral Branches of Science, published in 1812, gives a sense of the constraints faced by surgeons, and the mettle required of patients, in the era before anesthesia and antisepsis.

{ New England Journal of Medicine | Continue reading }

artwork { Picasso, Standing Female Nude, 1910 }

The bear famously tranquilized on the University of Colorado campus last week, and immortalized in a viral photo by CU student Andy Duann, met a tragic death early Thursday morning in the southbound lanes of U.S. 36.

{ DailyCamera | Continue reading }

After a busy week with short nights, many use the weekend to make up for lost hours of sleep. Not a healthy habit, says researcher Paulien Barf. On the long run it could result into the development of obesity or even diabetes. (…) Previous studies have shown that sleeping to recover from sleep shortage is of importance for a variety of physiological processes.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

photo { Lee Friedlander, Nude, 1980 }

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 }