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Men and women literally see the world differently
Guys' eyes are more sensitive to small details and moving objects, while women are more perceptive to color changes, according to a new vision study that suggests men and women actually do see things differently. "As with other senses, such as hearing and the olfactory system, there are marked sex differences in vision between men and women," researcher Israel Abramov, of the City University of New York (CUNY), said in a statement. Research has shown women have more sensitive ears and sniffers than men. "[A] recent, large review of the literature concluded that, in most cases females had better sensitivity, and discriminated and categorized odors better than males," Abramov and colleagues write Tuesday (Sept. 4) in the journal Biology of Sex Differences. Abramov and his team from CUNY's Brooklyn and Hunter Colleges compared the vision of males and females over age 16 who had normal color vision and 20/20 sight — or at least 20/20 vision with glasses or contacts.
The great illusion of the self
(Image: Darren Hopes) As you wake up each morning, hazy and disoriented, you gradually become aware of the rustling of the sheets, sense their texture and squint at the light. One aspect of your self has reassembled: the first-person observer of reality, inhabiting a human body.
Three Huge Mistakes We Make Leading Kids…and How to Correct Them
Recently, I read about a father, Paul Wallich, who built a camera-mounted drone helicopter to follow his grade-school-aged son to the bus stop. He wants to make sure his son arrives at the bus stop safe and sound. There’s no doubt the gizmo provides an awesome show-and-tell contribution.
Why do straight men devote so much headspace to those big, bulbous bags of fat drooping from women's chests? Scientists have never satisfactorily explained men's curious breast fixation, but now, a neuroscientist has struck upon an explanation that he says "just makes a lot of sense." Larry Young, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University who studies the neurological basis of complex social behaviors, thinks human evolution has harnessed an ancient neural circuit that originally evolved to strengthen the mother-infant bond during breast-feeding, and now uses this brain circuitry to strengthen the bond between couples as well. The result? Men, like babies, love breasts .
New Theory on Why Men Love Breasts | Breast Evolution
TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful "idea worth spreading" every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week's TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post from the featured speaker, along with new op-eds, thoughts and responses from the HuffPost community. Watch the talk above, read the blog post and tell us your thoughts below. Become part of the conversation!
Ben Thomas: We're Pretty Much All Tripping, All the Time
Volunteers unload and organize emergency supplies near Midland Beach as New York recovers from Hurricane Sandy Photograph by Mehdi Taamallah/AFP/Getty Images. On Thursday, three days after Hurricane Sandy swept across the Eastern Seaboard, darkening power grids, flooding neighborhoods, and killing at least 74 people, former Star Trek actor and social-media dynamo George Takei posted a lovely photo to his Facebook timeline. It showed two power strips draped over the gratework of a fence, phone cords tendrilling from each one. A sign said, “We have power. Please feel free to charge your phone!”
Looting after Hurricane Sandy: Disaster myths and disaster utopias explained
Childhood stimulation key to brain development, study finds | Science
Brain scans of participants aged in their late teens showed a correlation between cognitive stimulation at the age of four and a thinner, more developed, cortex Photograph: David Job/Getty Images An early childhood surrounded by books and educational toys will leave positive fingerprints on a person's brain well into their late teens, a two-decade-long research study has shown. Scientists found that the more mental stimulation a child gets around the age of four, the more developed the parts of their brains dedicated to language and cognition will be in the decades ahead. It is known that childhood experience influences brain development but the only evidence scientists have had for this has usually come from extreme cases such as children who had been abused or suffered trauma.Why We Need to Study the Brain’s Evolution in Order to Understand the Modern Mind | Brainwaves
Image via Wikimedia Commons, adapted from Christopher Walsh, Harvard Medical School, by Gary2863 In the September 17th issue of The New Yorker , Anthony Gottlieb analyzes Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature , a new book by David Barash , a psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Gottlieb’s article is more than just a book review—it’s also the latest in a long line of critiques of evolutionary psychology, the study of the brain, mind and behavior in the context of evolution. Gottlieb makes several excellent points, describing the same major shortcomings of evolutionary psychology that critics and proponents alike have named many times before: frustratingly scant evidence of early humans’ intellect, the immense difficulty of objectively testing hypotheses about how early humans behaved, the allure of convenient just-so stories to explain the origins of various mental quirks and talents.
A laughing matter
Dishing up tacos and burritos to hungry college students may not sound like much fun, but the women behind the counter at Salsa Rico look like they're having a pretty good time. Their heads are thrown back in laughter as they yell out to each other from either end of the steam tables. Meanwhile, a student grabbing a quick solo meal stands straight-faced near the cash register. Psychology professor Robert Provine, PhD, nods in the direction of the Salsa Rico trio as he takes in the student commons scene.Why 6-Year-Old Girls Want To Be Sexy (STUDY)
By: Jennifer Abbasi, LiveScience Contributor Published: 07/16/2012 12:18 PM EDT on LiveScience Most girls as young as 6 are already beginning to think of themselves as sex objects, according to a new study of elementary school-age kids in the Midwest. Researchers have shown in the past that women and teens think of themselves in sexually objectified terms, but the new study is the first to identify self-sexualization in young girls . The study, published online July 6 in the journal Sex Roles, also identified factors that protect girls from objectifying themselves.
‘Mind uploading’ featured in academic journal special issue for first time
(Credit: iStockphoto) The Special Issue on Mind Uploading (Vol. 4, issue 1, June 2012) of the International Journal of Machine Consciousness , just released, “constitutes a significant milestone in the history of mind uploading research: the first-ever collection of scientific and philosophical papers on the theme of mind uploading,” as Ben Goertzel and Matthew Ikle’ note in the Introduction to this issue. “Mind uploading” is an informal term that refers to transferring the mental contents from a human brain into a different substrate, such as a digital, analog, or quantum computer. It’s also known as “whole brain emulation” and “substrate-independent minds.” Serious mind uploading researchers have emerged recently, taking this seemingly science-fictional notion seriously and pursuing it via experimental and theoretical research programs, Goertzel and Ilke’ note.Stone Age artists were painting red disks, handprints, clublike symbols, and geometric patterns on European cave walls long before previously thought, in some cases more than 40,000 years ago, scientists reported Thursday, after completing more reliable dating tests that raised a possibility that Neanderthals were the artists. A more likely situation, the researchers said, is that the art - 50 samples from 11 caves in northwestern Spain- was created by anatomically modern humans fairly soon after their arrival in Europe. The findings seem to put an exclamation point to a run of recent discoveries: direct evidence from fossils that Homo sapiens populations were living in England 41,500 to 44,200 years ago and in Italy 43,000 to 45,000 years ago, and that they were making flutes in German caves about 42,000 years ago.
Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
The Psychology of Human Sexuality - What Do Men and Women Focus On When They Watch Porn? The Answer Will Probably Surprise You
When someone watches pornography, what is it that first captures their attention? Most people would probably guess the actors’ bodies and/or genitals, especially if they’re talking about male porn viewers. Although this would seem to make intuitive sense, is it really the case?Five myths about marriage
Late spring is upon us, and with it comes wedding season. It’s a magical time of year that inspires a peculiar mix of sentimental stories about chance meetings that led to love and gloomy commentaries about the chances of actual marital bliss. Both the sentiment and the gloom are based on misguided ideas about the history and evolution of modern marriage — myths that, from this day forward, we should divorce from our notion of wedded bliss.Group Marriage and the Future of the Family
With the traditional nuclear family well on its way to extinction, we are faced with a question of critical importance: who will mind the children? Neither two-career nor single-parent families offer children full-time, loving caretakers, and quality day care is both scarce and expensive. Nanny's are a luxury out of reach for most families making up the 99 percent.health