The funny part about this article is that they're discussing how animals have personalities.
The fascinating part is that people didnt know that animals had personalities before dudes in lab coats told them. Its just funny what science had to prove before peopel accept it as fact. It's sort of endearing actuallly. Like an autistic boy...anyway, this article chronicles some amazing squid stories and talks about the history of the recognition on an "official" (read: superego) level.
"Personality theory started showing up in the writings of Ivan Pavlov and Sigmund Freud as a somewhat vague, broadly drawn concept. It has only been in the last 60 years or so that the modern science of human personality began to emerge, a system of assessing distinct personality traits that has its roots in World War II, when the U.S. government assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of today's C.I.A.) the task of identifying which individuals had the right traits to be spies.
"A number of different personality-mapping methods and traits-assessment tests have been developed over the years, all of them pivoting around the principle that certain traits can be consistently observed in individuals across time and different situations. The most widely applied test today uses the categories defined by what is known as the Five-Factor Model (F.F.M.): openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Under each of these broad dimension headings are so-called clusters of recognizable traits: an extroverted person, for example, is more sociable, outgoing and assertive; a neurotic one, more anxious, moody and stressed."
According to the article personality has to not only be distinct reactions to stimuli, but also the consciousness of those reactions. "temperament is always invoked as a purely biological, inherited quality, whereas personality is thought of as a "higher order phenomenon" that grows out of the interaction of our inherited temperaments and our experiences."
Interestingly enough, "In the late 19th century, animal emotion and behavior were integral aspects of the newly emerging science of human psychology. Charles Darwin devoted much of his time after the publication of "The Origin of Species" to researching "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals," published in 1872...animal studies figured prominently in standard human psychology textbooks well into the 1940's. And then, steadily, the animals began to disappear."
And now they're back. So there's this 60 year lull in which animals were not considered worthy of individuality. Maybe that corresponds with the rise in factory farming or something? Industrialization?
In addition, " a recently published human-personality study of 545 people by Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle in England shows a strong parallel with some of these recent animal studies. It found that the more extroverted and outgoing people were, the more sex partners they tended to have, an evolutionary edge that was mitigated by the fact that these were the same people who were most likely to end up in the hospital because of stupid risk-taking behaviors."
This is a great quote from a paper from the 60's: "The farther removed an animal is from ourselves," Dethier writes, "the less sympathetic we are in ascribing to it those components of behavior that we know in ourselves. There is some fuzzy point of transition in the phylogenetic scale where our empathizing acquires an unsavory aura. Yet there is little justification for this schism. If we subscribe to an idea of a lineal evolution of behavior, there is no reason for failing to search for adumbrations of higher behavior in invertebrates."
This is a sort of boring but great video on your rights if cops pull you over and want to search your car or your person. It was made by the ACLU which make it reputable. I really think everyone should watch it. It's sort of long, about 1/2 hour, but you can skip the first 5 minutes but the rest is very informative.
This is St. Noam's recent interview on the state of things. One extremely interesting paragraph.
"Take, say, the invasion of Iraq again. We're told that they didn't find weapons of mass destruction. Well, that's not exactly correct. They did find weapons of mass destruction, namely, the ones that had been sent to Saddam by the United States, Britain, and others through the 1980s. A lot of them were still there. They were under control of U.N. inspectors and were being dismantled. But many were still there. When the U.S. invaded, the inspectors were kicked out, and Rumsfeld and Cheney didn't tell their troops to guard the sites. So the sites were left unguarded, and they were systematically looted. The U.N. inspectors did continue their work by satellite and they identified over 100 sites that were systematically looted, like, not somebody going in and stealing something, but carefully, systematically looted."
And on the topic of democracy in Iraq:
"Now let's talk about withdrawal. Take any day's newspapers or journals and so on. They start by saying the United States aims to bring about a sovereign democratic independent Iraq. I mean, is that even a remote possibility? Just consider what the policies would be likely to be of an independent sovereign Iraq. If it's more or less democratic, it'll have a Shiite majority. They will naturally want to improve their linkages with Iran, Shiite Iran. Most of the clerics come from Iran. The Badr Brigade, which basically runs the South, is trained in Iran. They have close and sensible economic relationships which are going to increase. So you get an Iraqi/Iran loose alliance. Furthermore, right across the border in Saudi Arabia, there's a Shiite population which has been bitterly oppressed by the U.S.-backed fundamentalist tyranny. And any moves toward independence in Iraq are surely going to stimulate them, it's already happening. That happens to be where most of Saudi Arabian oil is. Okay, so you can just imagine the ultimate nightmare in Washington: a loose Shiite alliance controlling most of the world's oil, independent of Washington and probably turning toward the East, where China and others are eager to make relationships with them, and are already doing it. Is that even conceivable? The U.S. would go to nuclear war before allowing that, as things now stand."
This is the best article I've read all month and I swear it will be the last one from the NYT for a while. It's on mirror neurons, cells in our brains that fire when we think of doing things but aren't actually doing them.
It all sort of seems liek someone's found a great new name for some old thing, but the article is fascinating nonetheless.
They write, "The human brain has multiple mirror neuron systems that specialize in carrying out and understanding not just the actions of others but their intentions, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions."
"Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking."
"Most nerve cells in the brain are comparatively pedestrian. Many specialize in detecting ordinary features of the outside world. Some fire when they encounter a horizontal line while others are dedicated to vertical lines. Others detect a single frequency of sound or a direction of movement.
"Moving to higher levels of the brain, scientists find groups of neurons that detect far more complex features like faces, hands or expressive body language. Still other neurons help the body plan movements and assume complex postures.
Mirror neurons "fire in response to chains of actions linked to intentions."
"When you see me perform an action - such as picking up a baseball - you automatically simulate the action in your own brain," said Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies mirror neurons. "Circuits in your brain, which we do not yet entirely understand, inhibit you from moving while you simulate," he said. "But you understand my action because you have in your brain a template for that action based on your own movements."
He continued: "And if you see me choke up, in emotional distress from striking out at home plate, mirror neurons in your brain simulate my distress. You automatically have empathy for me. You know how I feel because you literally feel what I am feeling."
Until now, scholars have treated culture as fundamentally separate from biology, she said. "But now we see that mirror neurons absorb culture directly, with each generation teaching the next by social sharing, imitation and observation."
Amazing.
An article from the NYT on Cuteness as an evolutionary trait.
So what is cute? "bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others."
As you may have imagined, "Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense." Our babies are so vulnerable, we are attracted to even the slightest indication of them.
"The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession."
They also say how babies did not evolve to be cute but we evolved to find them cute. So companies like disney take into consideration what is cute and put it on nonhuman things like ducks. So they give ducks forward facing eyes even though it makes no sense.
And like all good things in life, "New studies suggest that cute images stimulate the same pleasure centers of the brain aroused by sex, a good meal or psychoactive drugs like cocaine"
Also, the whole cuteness thing in Japan has a name! "kawaii." Amazing.
Yet another article from the NYT, this time on testosterone and female sexual desire. Apparently there are about a million testosterone treatment creams being researched by such altruistic angles as Proctor & Gamble (also currently marketing a tampon for girls who haven't gotten their periods yet). Once I had the opportunity to see such a testosterone cream at a Cake Party long ago. Would you believe that the instructions said to rub it in, around your clit, for like 5 minutes? This struck me as completely hillarious.
Anyway, I've been speaking with some girlfriends with babies these days about loss of desire and apparently its so widespread for like a year after birth. You don't even start ovulating again after giving birth until you're breast feeding less than 6 times a day (i.e. when your baby is on solids). So I feel like there's this MASSIVE pink elephant that no one talks about surrounding pregnancy and sexual desire. I am here, doing my part for the ladies.
Interesting factoids:
In a study from 1992 by Edward O. Laumann, a University of Chicago sociology professor, and others, 43 percent of women reported some sexual dysfunction, the most prevalent being loss of libido.
Until menopause, women produce, on average, a tenth of the amount of testosterone that men do.
Although the neuroanatomical path of testosterone can be mapped, its underlying behavioral mechanism is not known.
German researchers, writing in The Journal of Endocrinology in 2001, posited the following: "Testosterone might have direct effects on cognitive behavior, e.g., influence the awareness of sexual cues, but it is also suggested that testosterone may act peripherally to enhance sexual pleasure and thereby increase sexual desire and even sexual activity, circumstances and partner permitting."
Professor Laumann's study indicates that by age 30, three-quarters of Americans are either married or living with someone, but they are starting to have "partnered sex" less often than people in their 20's. In their 30's, more people are having sex with a partner a few times a month, and fewer are having sex a few times a week. By their 40's, this disparity more than doubles for both men and women.
Sexual incompatibility is cited as a top reason for divorce in the United States.
Helen Fishcher, our favorite oxitocin researcher, devided up human feelings about these matters into three groups:
LUST: the craving for sexual gratification; Lust is associated primarily with testosterone in both men and women
ROMANTIC LOVE:a focused attention on another, often compared to an opiate-like state; Romantic love is linked with the natural stimulant dopamine and perhaps norepinephrine and serotonin
ATTACHMENT: the feelings of calm, security and union with a long-term partner. Feelings of attachment are produced primarily by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, which at elevated levels can actually suppress the circuits for lust.
very interesting.
This is a funny story from the NYT abou thte feelings of the Ariaal, this tribe in Africa, who have been much studied by scientists due to their historical distance from "modern" culture.
''I thought I was being bewitched,'' Koitaton Garawale, a weathered cattleman, said of the time a researcher plucked a few hairs from atop his head. ''I was afraid. I'd never seen such a thing before.'' ...They have spat into vials to provide saliva samples. They have been quizzed about how often they urinate. Sometimes the questioning has become even more intimate. Mr. Garawale recalls a visiting anthropologist measuring his arms, back and stomach with an odd contraption and then asking him how often he got erections and whether his sex life was satisfactory. ''It was so embarrassing,'' recalled the father of three, breaking out in giggles even years later.
On their observations of the observers:
"The Ariaal note that foreigners slather white liquid on their very white skin to protect them from the sun, and that many favor short pants that show off their legs and the clunky boots on their feet. Foreigners often partake of the local food but drink water out of bottles and munch on strange food in wrappers between meals, the Ariaal observe."
However, in one fascinating study, "Dr. Campbell also found that Ariaal men with many wives showed less erectile dysfunction than did men of the same age with fewer spouses."
Albert Hoffman, rounding a century, talks about the possible uses of his "problem child."
Great things:
He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist.
"Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said. "All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."
Also, did you know Aldous Huxley asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his fatal throat cancer? Amazing.
In a nutshell:
MR. HOFMANN studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.
His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the body's circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it became famous. "Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child," he said. "I didn't know what caused it, but I knew that it was important."
He felt, "the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."
A new study as thrown lichens into space for two weeks and found that they can totally survive. In fact, they seem ecologically capable of living on mars.
Here is an article on the mater. The best part is where they describe lichens as "a very simply ecosystem."
This is amazing. Elephants have this gland between their eyes and ears that discharges this phermone called frontalin from their temporal lobe. As if that wasn't cool enough, there's two types of frontalin mixed in their come-hither concoction. They are called minus and plus.
Young males have more of the plus frontalin.
But as they mature, the mixtures of plus and minus even out.
So, when the elephants are young, the plus frontalin does nothing for them.
But the even mixture attracts females and repulses males.
It was also cool because they said it's easier to study this in elephants, rather than rats, because when elephants respond to something, it's easy to tell what they think.
Elephants are amazing.