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This Is Your Brain on Love | Brain Pickings. 5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women. Photos.com I don't know what it's like to be a woman, so it's not easy for me to describe what it's like to be a man, because I don't know what you're using for context. I'm going to do my best: Did you ever watch old cartoons where a character is starving on a desert island, and when another character approaches, he's so hungry that he imagines the other character as a talking piece of food?

Via TV TropesThird panel omitted due to graphic content. It's like that for most men, most of the time. We're starving, and all women are various types of food. Right now I'm reading a book from mega-selling fantasy author George R. "When she went to the stables, she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. That's written from the woman's point of view. Do you see what I'm getting at? Photos.comWe also assume you have the taste of a pimp. Go look at a city skyline. All those wars we fight? It's all about you. Photos.comNope. This is really the heart of it, right here. Via Wikipedia. 5 Social Activities That Are Better To Do Alone. There have been so many times when people have they really want to see a movie, but haven't gone yet because they can't find someone to go with them, and it's like why? How exactly is that person going to enhance your experience? By making you late and making it harder for you to find a seat when you do get there?

By leaning over mid-movie and asking a really dumb question about the plot? By just assuming they can have some of your popcorn and then eating really loudly? In theory, exercising with a friend seems like a good way to make something that sucks suck a little less, but in practice it's never a good idea. I don't want to sound too extreme here, but I think that whoever invented the study group should be executed by firing squad. Sorry, children in 90's sitcoms, but hanging with your friends is not really the most fun thing you can do.

The Overthinker's Guide to Dancing at Parties. Okay, everyone else is dancing. It's going to be fine. You don't want to be the weirdo who's so self-conscious they can't even enjoy a little dancing. Let's do this. This is going great! You've joined your friends in a cute little mini dance circle, and they're all laughing at your jokingly bad "sprinkler" dance move. Okay, that's enough of that one. Huh. Whatever, joke dance moves aren't that funny after a while. Wait, is it even POSSIBLE for you to dance seriously? Ugh, you hate when the popular girls do that thing where they grab another girl's hand to dance one-on-one with them. No, stop overthinking. Where are you supposed to look? Oh, thank God, everyone's jumping up and down with the chorus. You just need to stop worrying what other people think. Oh god, now all of a sudden everyone is joke-grinding.

This is a pretty sexy song, though. Well, try not to like it THAT much. I mean, not that expressing yourself through your body is gross. Uh-oh. Why are we getting smarter? Further reading on the “Flynn effect” James Flynn points out a fascinating dynamic at TED2013, that we appear to be getting smarter. Photo: James Duncan Davidson In the 1980s, psychologist James Flynn discovered that, over the past century, our average IQ has increased dramatically. The difference, in fact, is so stark that the phenomenon garnered its own name: the Flynn effect.

In today’s talk, Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents’, given at TED2013, Flynn explains that if you scored people a century ago against today’s norms, they’d have an IQ of 70, while if you score us against their norms, we’d have an average IQ of 130. In the years since his original discovery, Flynn has investigated just what this evolution is all about. Hint: our ancestors weren’t on the verge of mental retardation, nor are we all intellectually gifted. Flynn delves into this dramatic change in his book, Are We Getting Smarter? 6 areas of research that offer fascinating conclusions on sexuality. The standard narrative of human sexual evolution says: men provide women with goods and services in exchange for women’s sexual fidelity. But is that really true or relevant today? Christopher Ryan, the co-author of Sex at Dawn with Cacilda Jethá, takes a deeper look and has quite a few bones to pick with this idea. Christopher Ryan: Are we designed to be sexual omnivores?

Ryan explains that our sexual patterns are an outgrowth of agricultural models—which accounts for only about five percent of human history. For the other 95 percent, human sexuality was “a way of establishing and maintaining the complex flexible social systems, networks, that our ancestors were very good at.” In hunter-gatherer societies, there were overlapping sexual relationships between members of a community—a more fluid system than the Victorian model we’re wedded to today. Below, read up on some more lines of research that suggest out-of-the-box ideas about our sexuality. Photo credit: iStock. This Is How You Love An Introvert. Make eye contact as frequently as possible. You should learn to know each earthy rim of her irises better than your own, so that when she doesn’t talk, you can at least understand the language of her glare. Ask her questions. Let her play the Call, not just the Response. While you are used to filling the silence with your own anecdotes and her cough-like laugh, still make the effort to hear her stories.

Touch her. Do not confuse her patience with tolerance. When you fight, do not expect her to crack. Do not start a Cold War; muteness has always been her defense. When she chooses to wear the red scarf instead of the seven other brown, black and grey ones hanging in the closet next to it, let her know how beautiful it is to see her in color. Do not, though, lose yourself for her. When you see her, smile. 5 Downsides To Being An Introvert That No One Tells You About. The science of love: How "positivity resonance" shapes the way we connect. By Maria Popova The neurobiology of how the warmest emotion blurs the boundaries by you and not-you. We kick-started the year with some of history’s most beautiful definitions of love.

But timeless as their words might be, the poets and the philosophers have a way of escaping into the comfortable detachment of the abstract and the metaphysical, leaving open the question of what love really is on an unglamorously physical, bodily, neurobiological level — and how that might shape our experience of those lofty abstractions. That’s precisely what psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, who has been studying positive emotions for decades, explores in the unfortunately titled but otherwise excellent Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become (UK; public library).

Using both data from her own lab and ample citations of other studies, Fredrickson dissects the mechanisms of love to reveal both its mythologies and its practical mechanics. Donating = Loving. The Two Best Questions For Your Sex Life. What Happens While You Sleep and How It Affects Your Every Waking Moment. By Maria Popova “We are living in an age when sleep is more comfortable than ever and yet more elusive.” The Ancient Greeks believed that one fell asleep when the brain filled with blood and awakened once it drained back out.

Nineteenth-century philosophers contended that sleep happened when the brain was emptied of ambitions and stimulating thoughts. “If sleep doesn’t serve an absolutely vital function, it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made,” biologist Allan Rechtschaffen once remarked. Most of us will spend a full third of our lives asleep, and yet we don’t have the faintest idea of what it does for our bodies and our brains. But before we get too anthropocentrically arrogant in our assumptions, it turns out the quantitative requirement of sleep isn’t correlated with how high up the evolutionary chain an organism is: Lions and gerbils sleep about thirteen hours a day. What, then, happens as we doze off, exactly? (Recall the role of REM sleep in regulating negative emotions.) The Pixel Density Race and its Technical Merits. While this has always been an issue that’s been in the background since Android OEMs started releasing devices with display PPIs above the 300-400 “retina” range, recent events have sparked a broader discussion into the value of pursuing the PPI race that is happening between Android OEMs.

Within this discussion, the key points of contention tend to center upon the various tradeoffs from increasing resolution, and whether an increase in pixels per inch (PPI) will actually have a perceivable increase. If there is any single number that people point to for resolution, it is the 1 arcminute value that Apple uses to indicate a “Retina Display”.

This number corresponds to around 300 PPI for a display that is at 10-12 inches from the eye. In other words, this is about 60 pixels per degree (PPD). While all of these resolution values are achievable by human vision, in practice, such values are highly unlikely. Thus, there are multiple sets of tradeoffs that come with increased resolution. The Science of Orgasms and Your Brain on Porn. By Maria Popova We’ve already explored the origins of sex, the neurochemistry of heartbreak, and how drugs affect desire. But what, exactly, happens in the brain when the body belts out its ultimate anthem of sexual triumph? Count on creative duo Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown, better known as AsapSCIENCE — who have previously explained how music enchants the brain and what science teaches us about curing hangovers — to break down the body’s response during orgasm: But what about sexual experiences that don’t involve direct contact with a partner?

What happens inside the brain then is arguably even more intriguing. The Art of Kissing: A 1936 Guide for Lovers. By Maria Popova “Like a bee that settles on the fragrant pistils of a flower, and sips in the nectar for honey, so should you sip in the nectar from between the lips of your love.” Between Edison’s scandalous footage of the first kiss in cinema in 1896 and Bill Plympton’s quirky animated guide to kissing a century later, the public image of lip-locking underwent some radical transformations. In 1936, the year my grandmother was born, a man named Hugh Morris penned a small illustrated pamphlet titled The Art of Kissing (public library), in which he guided young lovers through the techniques, tricks, and “approved methods of kissing,” including such varieties as “the spiritual kiss,” “the nip kiss,” “the pain kiss,” “the surprise kiss,” “the eyelash kiss,” and “the French soul kiss,” as well as tips on how to prepare for a kiss and how to approach a girl.

A section on “how to kiss girls with different sizes of mouths” advises: A kiss can never be absolutely defined. Donating = Loving. 21 Things Introverts Are Tired Of Hearing. Top 10 Things That Determine Happiness. Photo: meddygarnet Happiness is, by nature, a subjective quality with a definition like a moving target. There is scant evidence — qualitative or quantitative — to lend convincing support to those life variables most critical in determining individual happiness, which is likely why past researchers committed to the scientific method rarely tried to tackle the subject.

This is changing. Take, for example, the World Database of Happiness in Rotterdam, self-described as a, “continuous register of scientific research on subjective appreciation of life.” While we’re not entirely convinced of this marriage between science and subjectivity, we can still offer up a top 10 of things that determine human happiness, as supported by this growing body of research. No.10 – Having a short memory Are you one to hold grudges? No.9 – Exacting fairness No.8 – Having lots of friendships No.7 – Being spiritual No.6 – Thinking ahead No.5 – Developing a skill According to psychology professor Dr. No.2 – Good genes. Introverts -- Portrait of an Introvert. People don’t outgrow introversion, so the introverted adult was once an introverted child. What is true of one is true of both.

Contrary to popular opinion, introverts are not asocial, nor are they friendless loners who lack social skills. They simply have different social needs and preferences. Friendships Sebastian Pfuetze/Taxi/Getty Images It is not easy for introverts to make new friends because getting to know someone takes so much energy. Social Preferences Introverts need a lot of personal space. Preferred Activities Introverts enjoy activities they can do alone or with just a few others. Social Behavior Introverts tend to be quiet and subdued. Social Interaction While introverts may appear to lack social skills or be antisocial, neither is true. Verbal Expression If given a choice, introverts would rather express their ideas in writing than in speech. Emotions and Emotional Responses Introverts become emotionally drained after spending time with others, particularly strangers. Internal Time: The Science of Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired.

By Maria Popova Debunking the social stigma around late risers, or what Einstein has to do with teens’ risk for smoking. “Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal performance.) This perceived superiority of those who can get by on less sleep isn’t just something Napoleon shared with dictators like Hitler and Stalin, it’s an enduring attitude woven into our social norms and expectations, from proverbs about early birds to the basic scheduling structure of education and the workplace. The distribution of midsleep in Central Europe.

This myth that early risers are good people and that late risers are lazy has its reasons and merits in rural societies but becomes questionable in a modern 24/7 society. The scissors of sleep. Chronotypes vary with age: [T]he less stress smokers have, the easier it is for them to quit. (Thanks, Jalees.) 30 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Die. {Via studioflowerpower on etsy} “Rather than money, than fame, than love…give me truth.” ~ Thoreau I woke up this morning and my life clock marked 30. My first sleep-deprived idea was to pack a small suitcase, get on the first train, move to another country, change my name, change my hair color (or get plastic surgery if needed), and start from scratch.

When I don’t know how to deal with life, I hide sometimes. And others, I fight it. By now, I’m good at both: fighting and disappearing. I’m old enough to be acquainted with life’s darkest and most elevated places, and young enough to take more. A true warrior doesn’t feel forced to do either, but moves through and with and for life, like water. So after I washed my face and considered the costs of running and those of fighting, I decided to do neither and have some juice instead. {Alkaline Espresso / Click for recipe.} We are a constant process, an event, we’re change.

Loving the questions means to love yourself. How much have you loved? You. The Science of Stress, Orgasm and Creativity: How the Brain and the Vagina Conspire in Consciousness. The Pirate Bay. Internal Time: The Science of Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You're So ... Why Pink Doesn’t Exist: An Illustrated Stop-Motion Science Explanation in 60 Seconds. Best PC Multiplayer Game - IGN's Best of 2013. Our Steam Sale Confessions.

All the 2012 Best-of Reading Lists, Together at Last. The Best of Brain Pickings 2013. What Is Love? Famous Definitions from 400 Years of Literary History. 7 Essential Books on Music, Emotion, and the Brain. 16 Realistic New Year Resolutions. Try These Hilarious Life Changes And Never Be A Failure Again. | Viral Circus. If You Sit At Office, You Really Should Watch This 3-Minute Animation About Sitting.