romance & science. i'm yours! - article

happy valentine's day! :)

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Loving with all your ... brain
By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN Medical Correspondent


(CNN) -- Close your eyes for a minute and envision all the romantic parts of the human body.

Her beautiful eyes. His strong shoulders. We'll stop there, but you go right ahead and think about all the body parts you want.

Bet you didn't think about the caudate and the ventral tegmental areas, did you?

These areas of the brain, while little known to most people, are helping scientists explain the physiological reasons behind why we feel what we feel when we fall in love.

By studying MRI brain scans of people newly in love, scientists are learning a lot about the science of love: Why love is so powerful, and why being rejected is so horribly painful.

In a group of experiments, Dr. Lucy Brown, a professor in the department of neurology and neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and her colleagues did MRI brain scans on college students who were in the throes of new love.

While being scanned, the students looked at a photo of their beloved. The scientists found that the caudate area of the brain -- which is involved in cravings -- became very active. Another area that lit up: the ventral tegmental, which produces dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter that affects pleasure and motivation.

Dr. Brown said scientists believe that when you fall in love, the ventral tegmental floods the caudate with dopamine. The caudate then sends signals for more dopamine.

"The more dopamine you get, the more of a high you feel," Dr. Brown says.

Or as her colleague, Dr. Helen Fisher put it: When you fall in love, "exactly the same system becomes active as when you take cocaine. You can feel intense elation when you're in love. You can feel intense elation when you're high on cocaine."

Is it love -- or sex?

Scientists then wondered: Does a brain in love look much like a sexually stimulated brain? After all, we associate love and sex and sometimes confuse them.

The answer is: Brains in love and brains in lust don't look too much alike.

In studies when researchers showed erotic photos to people as they underwent brain scans, they found activity in the hypothalamus and amygdala areas of the brain. The hypothalamus controls drives like hunger and thirst and the amygdala handles arousal, among other things.

In the studies of people in love, "we didn't find activity in either," according to Dr. Fisher, an anthropologist and author of "Why We Love -- the Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love."

"We now have physiological data that suggests there are different brain systems for sex and love," says Dr. Fisher.

At some point, the two do become linked. People in love have elevated levels of dopamine. Lots of dopamine, in turn, triggers the production of testosterone, which is responsible for the sex drive in both men and women.

This helps explain why falling in love can make someone all of a sudden seem sexy.

"Three weeks ago he was just another nice guy in the office and now everything about him is sexual," says Dr. Fisher.

All this research into sex and love got the researchers thinking: Most other mammals don't have this drive for romantic love and attachment. Why do humans have it? After all, we could easily propagate the species just with our sexual urges.

Dr. Fisher thinks it has a lot to do with how difficult it once was to raise children.

"Go back millions of years to the grasslands of Africa. A woman was carrying the equivalent of a 20-pound bowling ball in one arm, and sticks and rocks in another arm to protect herself in this dangerous environment. She needed a partner to help her. She couldn't do it alone," Dr. Fisher says.

And even today, when we have strollers and the environment isn't quite as dangerous, having a mate still helps. "There are women who raise a baby by themselves, but it's a lot harder," she says.

Male brain - female brain

In their work with the lovestruck, the scientists found brain differences between men and women.

"The men had quite a bit more activity in the brain region that integrates visual stimuli. This isn't surprising considering that men support the porn industry and women spend their lives trying to look good for men," says Dr. Fisher.

But she adds there's probably a more anthropological reason at work. Simply put: A man's evolutionary mission is to spread his seed. That won't work if he mates with an 80-year-old grandmother.

"Men have to be able to size up a woman visually to see if she can bear babies," says Dr. Fisher.

The women's brain activities were a bit more puzzling.

The scientists found that women in love had more activity than men in the areas of the brain that govern memories. Dr. Fisher theorizes that this is a "female mechanism for mate choice." There are no visual clues for whether a man is fertile, but if a woman really studies a man and remembers things about his behavior, she can try to determine whether he'd make a reliable mate and father.

Thus, if it sometimes seems like a woman remembers everything -- good and bad -- about a man, "it's not just her being picky. It's an old Darwinian evolutionary strategy."

What's love got to do with it?

In the end, Drs. Fisher and Brown say what they learned from lovers' brains is that romantic love isn't really an emotion -- it's a drive that's based deep within our brains, right alongside our urges to find food and water.

"This helps explain why we do crazy things for love," says Dr. Brown. "Why did Edward VIII give up the throne for Wallis Simpson? The systems that are built into us to find food and water are the things that were also active when he renounced the throne of England."

Now their research is centered on the flip side of love. They've recruited college students who'd just been rejected by their sweethearts. Again, the scientists performed MRI's while these students looked at photos of the objects of their affection.

This time, the results were different, Dr. Brown says. The insular cortex, the part of the brain that experiences physical pain, became very active.

"People came out of the machine crying," she said. "We won't be doing that experiment again for a long time."

how to analyze something like love? - article

a fantastic article on the psychology of love, and mating thought processes!
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Love's Loopy Logic

Encounters with the opposite sex skew our psyches in such a special way that reason and bias climb right into bed with each other. In this mode, it sometimes pays to deceive ourselves. Welcome to the paradoxical world of mating intelligence.
By: Kaja Perina

Let's talk about the most important interview you'll ever be granted. Seated at a well-appointed table, you mull the choice between crab cakes and seared tuna, but truly you are sorting through a mental repertoire of wisecracks and war stories. If you are secure in your improvisational charms, you might use this moment to appraise the cleavage or cufflinks of the woman or man across the table. There's no predicting discussion topics, but you can be sure they'll pertain to your marital status, extracurricular activities, and your job. (There are no verboten questions at this interview.) You are applying for a new and expanded life. Or, you simply want a one-night pass that can be renewed indefinitely. And you need to know whether your dining companion is up to the task.

A date makes us both spectator and performer at a two-ring circus: We troll for wit, kindness, curiosity, and "chemistry," hoping that we radiate these same attributes in the right amounts. From strategic winks and blinks to elaborate grooming to gifts of gorgeous baubles, men and women employ an arsenal of tricks in their romantic lives, all in the service of a demanding master at the far reaches of conscious awareness. Eons of evolution have honed our behavior to aid and abet a reproductive payoff. The sum of the stratagems we employ, and the wisdom of nature in crafting them without our explicit awareness, are now the subject of intense study by evolutionary psychologists.

Our sexual calculations and character reconnaissance, it turns out, call for smart, but not always accurate, judgments. That's because mating intelligence is as oxymoronic as the term suggests. We routinely bring both cold reason and outsized misconceptions to a relationship. Both serve a purpose. A woman will accurately gauge her date's personality on first meeting, but she will grow more convinced of his good humor and charm if they stick together. To woo a woman, a guy will grossly exaggerate his income, commitment, and affection for cuddly creatures. But he may have to correctly read microgestures as fine as tea leaves to discern whether she's truly impressed.

Male and female mating intelligence part ways when it comes to each sex's competing procreative goals. Inscrutable though our machinations may be to our partners (and to ourselves), romantic behavior is driven by a deep logic. Our minds have evolved to warp reality. Even so, we have unique skews in the mating realm. We've all got blind spots about the opposite sex. And sometimes that's for the best.


"She Wants Me" and Other Erotic Errata

Jane Austen nailed women's intricate courtship calculus, but The Onion has the beat on simple male arithmetic: "Area Man Going to Go Ahead and Consider That a Date." The article in the satirical rag details a man's random encounter with a woman that blossomed into a 45-minute conversation. "It wasn't official or anything, but if I had asked her to have coffee with me, and she were to have said yes, the result would have been exactly the same," he says. "It's pretty clear that she's really into me."

Men have a notoriously elastic take on women's romantic receptivity. You might call it a "take-all-prisoners" approach to flirting, so frequently do men presume sexual interest on the part of a potentially available woman. The "She Wants Me" bias serves a convenient purpose for men—it actually increases their sexual opportunities. Because men invest less of themselves in offspring relative to women, it is in their genetic interests to reproduce as much as possible. Therefore, perceptions that promote sexual assertiveness tend to be functional. This inclination doesn't mean the average guy is delusional about his sex appeal, it just means that if he has a great date he will probably report more interest on the part of his consort than she herself reports.

Women, for their part, are biased right back. They skittishly insist that men are more keen on no-strings-attached sex than is the case. This "men are pigs" bias pits suspicious women against oversolicitous men in what Geoffrey Miller, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, labels a "never-ending arms race of romantic skepticism and excess." It could lead to great repartee: Think Bacall and Bogie, Josephine and Napoleon, Condi and Kim Jong Il.

Glenn Geher, an associate professor of psychology at SUNY at New Paltz, who, with Miller, edited a forthcoming volume on mating intelligence, is developing a mathematical model to demonstrate what many a grandmother has long cautioned: Women who are de facto skeptical of a man's intentions are almost always better off than women who spend hours deconstructing the first date. ("He gave me his home number, he asked about my family, he mentioned a concert this spring—he must be into me!") Geher found that if a woman cannot accurately judge a man's romantic designs at least 90 percent of the time, she's better off being biased. "Women using a 'men are always pigs' decision-making rule may be more likely to actually end up with honest, committed, and long-term-seeking males," insists Geher.

We have a radar for opposite-sex interest and intentions that has its own unique calibrations. And it follows Darwinian, rather than Aristotelian, logic, because the very survival of our genes is at stake. Men and women need to minimize reproductive mistakes that could thwart their mating goals: For men, missing a chance to score constitutes an error. For women it is dangerous to trust a man who simply wishes to score and move on.

Martie Haselton of UCLA and David Buss of the University of Texas, Austin, have empirically demonstrated the existence of these error-management strategies in men and women. Haselton likens a biased decision pathway to a smoke alarm that can make one of two errors. It can go off in the absence of fire—a false positive: irritating, but far from lethal. The more dangerous error is the false negative, which fails to signal a real fire. "Engineers can't minimize both errors, because there's a trade-off," explains Haselton. "If you lower the threshold for noting fires, you're going to have more false alarms. Natural selection created decision-making adaptations not to maximize accuracy but to minimize the more costly error." Faced with uncertainty about people and predators throughout human history, we again and again took the safe road.

Seeing the world through our own warped force field is standard operating procedure. "Biased mechanisms are not design defects of the human mind, but rather design features," says Haselton. We don't commit them just in mating mode. They're present in our everyday perceptions, protecting our egos and all types of relationships. We imbue the powerful and beautiful with personal and intellectual qualities that they likely don't possess, overestimate our own abilities, and downgrade the importance of skills that elude us. We're also paranoiacally primed to detect threats to our status, to our children—any domain in which the stakes are high. This is why women are fiercely protective of their newborns, why we agonize if the boss idly snaps at us.

Biases are human universals: A Park Avenue socialite may be as guarded around her suitors, or as worried about her husband's fidelity, as a Chinese field hand, though each woman will filter the concern through her own cultural prism. But the intensity of a bias may vary from person to person. Geher found that smart men are more likely to exhibit the "She Wants Me" bias. To discern this, Geher asked male subjects how they thought women would respond to personal ads in which men sought a short-term partner. He found that the most intelligent men grossly overestimated women's interest in ads offering explicit no-strings-attached sex. (Geher quips that among his research findings, this is the gem that his wife likes the least.)

It's a fact that women are more likely to have one-night stands with bright, creative men, so it's possible that Geher's smart male subjects were simply projecting their actual success onto the ads. But since overestimating a woman's interest in a short-term fling is smart insofar as it increases sexual opportunities, it's also possible that over millennia, intelligent men have unconsciously honed the bias for that purpose. Geher expects that both possibilities probably operate in the real world, and that future research will show that while smart men have more short-term success with women, they also display more bias.

Bright women, for their part, misread men in one key area. When Geher asked men and women to rate how upset their mates would be about sexual or emotional infidelity, he found that sharper people are better at the task, but smart women exhibit a markedly conservative bent: They assume men will be more distraught over a sexual affair than is in fact the case. This is beneficial, argues Geher, because "women who think that infidelity bothers men even more than it does (which is a lot), may be less likely to be the victims of relationship violence." These women may be more likely to avoid affairs and be more covert when they do engage in them.

Men are excellent judges of what women want in a long-term partner, exhibiting keen mind reading abilities on limited display in other areas of their lives. A guy who is clueless about his friends' opinions of him and oblivious to his wife's sulking can still craft a potent profile on Match.com. That's because millennia of avid pursuit have honed masculine minds into fine-tuned sensors of female interest. "Heterosexual men have a discriminating clientele," says Geher. "They need to know women's desires."

Men and women selectively tune into the noisy channel of opposite-sex interest depending on their own gender-specific needs: Men scan for sexiness and availability; women scavenge for clues to personality and commitment readiness. The errors of engagement we make in the early stages of courtship, before we're certain of opposite-sex intentions, might appear to set men and women on a permanent collision course. But each one of us is evidence that men and women do in fact connect. The sexes actually have overlapping, if not identical, goals: Men and women both want stable relationships in which to raise children. Women just tend to rally for an earlier commitment. The result: When our tracks finally converge in commitment, our biases overlap as well, because we now share important goals. The most important of these is preserving the relationship.


If You Could See What I See

If you never experience a twinge of jealousy or concern about your relationship, you may want to take a hard look at it. Established couples often reboot their emotional smoke detectors to make them extra sensitive to relationship threats. For example, both men and women who have offended a lover tend to remain overly convinced that the partner harbors resentment about the act. This "negative forgiveness" bias nudges us to err on the side of caution, rather than risk further offense by assuming we're off the hook. This bias is even stronger among men and women already in rocky romances.

Couples also grow hyperattuned to potential rivals. That's why if we see our partner in a heated exchange with an attractive member of the opposite sex, we're far more likely to assume something's afoot than is a third party observing the exchange.

Skewed thinking doesn't just make us suspicious about our lovers; some biases have a noble goal—they embellish our perception of a mate. Positive illusions turn up the volume on the traits you love: Everyone agrees that your husband comes from attractive stock, but you insist that he's the best-looking guy in the family. Your wife is no slouch, but you're convinced she's the unheralded star of the office. Faby Gagné, a research consultant and visiting scholar at Wellesley College, found that 95 percent of people think their paramour is above average in appearance, intelligence, warmth, and sense of humor. There's deep wisdom in these sunny views: People who believe they've struck romantic gold are more satisfied with their relationship and more committed to their mate.

Romantic illusions are so critical that they may actually balloon during key decision-making phases of a relationship, such as whether to get married, or when to have children. That's because, says Gagné, biases can buffer us against the angst of dicey deliberations. You might unconsciously offset your ambivalence about becoming a father by focusing on what a great mother your wife will be. I may be terrified to accept a job that keeps me on the road, but at least I know my husband will remain faithful.

When Gagné first investigated biased thinking and decision making, she assumed that tough choices would dampen positive illusions. To her surprise, she found the opposite: People are especially motivated to enhance their lover's stellar qualities at key junctures, while simultaneously becoming more accurate in judgments related to the decision. "When you enter deliberation mode, the goal is to be accurate. This accuracy can be unsettling. To cope with the anxiety, you increase your biased evaluation of a partner. But in a deliberative frame of mind, accuracy and bias do not seem to contaminate one another. So intimates gain the capacity to be accurate because of their positive bias, rather than despite their positive bias," explains Gagné. It sounds paradoxical, but reason and bias readily co-exist in every corridor of our thinking. Illusion alone makes life a dangerous joyride, but unchecked accuracy leads to a seriously depressurized flight.


Why the Wife Is Always The Last to Know

Positive illusions help us marvel at our mates; biased thinking places safe bets on their behavior. But there's a type of mating intelligence that's even more paradoxical. Self-deception softens the conjugally unpalatable and pushes the envelope on what constitutes an intelligent strategy. When it comes to defending a relationship to ourselves, we're like lawyers who routinely manipulate—but outright lie when the need arises.

Sometimes we just give irritating actions a pass: Her rudeness to telephone solicitors has an upside (decisiveness). His tax returns don't add up? OK, he massaged the numbers after one bad year, and he'll surely make up for it in charitable donations. But God help his thieving brother, who took one deduction too many.

Most people who offend us in life will be deemed thoroughly flawed rather than temporarily challenged. This rush to judge a person's disposition, rather than considering the context surrounding their actions, is known as the fundamental attribution error. This bias likely evolved to keep our ancestors from aligning with dangerous individuals, a sort of one-strike-and-you're-out law of character judgment. But for a beloved partner we will make an exception, suspending censure like a president on an executive-pardon binge.

Chronic self-deception is more complicated. Hillary Clinton's admission that she believed Bill's early protestations about Monica engendered a global eye roll. But to some, this quiet acknowledgment of her own casuistry humanized her and made her more sympathetic. She was, after all, declaring her membership in one of the oldest women's leagues: Wives Who Are the Last to Know.

Women can be highly motivated to stay in relationships, and that often means overlooking noxious male behavior, especially if a split jeopardizes children, finances, or status. Turning a blind eye to infidelity is the Faustian pact many a First Lady has made. (Among the myriad reasons women tolerate cheating husbands, a stint in the White House is surely the best payoff.) Here, too, mating intelligence is at work.

All-or-nothing thinking about infidelity (your own or your mate's), divorce, or any act that will destabilize a relationship is often a smart—if unconscious—gambit. Consider the alternative: Uncertainty, distrust, and fractured loyalties make for paranoia, heartache, and paralysis. Miller suggests that one of the very functions of mating intelligence may be to navigate the emotional tipping points at which a decision can be made or a behavior acknowledged. "If you have to settle for one strategy or another, and if in-between strategies just aren't viable, then the emotions that motivate those strategies will also have tipping points." In other words, before we make a move, we are better off if we can avoid tormenting ourselves about the signs of an affair, or equivocating about ditching a spouse. Black-or-white thinking protects us from such protracted agony. It may also make our eventual decision (to leave, to cheat) appear rapid and fickle to a perplexed partner. And it explains why, when the light finally goes on, a betrayed spouse is quickly out the door.

Self-deception is an equal opportunity bias. It's a core feature of mating intelligence both for males and females. But women display more self-serving beliefs about their own behavior in relationships. When Maureen O'Sullivan, a professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco, queried college students about their lies to the opposite sex, she found that women assert that they themselves lie less than do other women. Men have no corresponding illusions about their mendacity relative to other guys. O'Sullivan sees the gap between women's self-reported lies versus their beliefs about other women's lies as evidence of internal sophistry. Self-deception makes sense for a woman who needs male resources, even if the guy himself isn't optimally committed. "Women have to put more of their central processing units into maintaining a relationship," says O'Sullivan. "It's easier to do that emotional work if you have a certain amount of self-deception." For some women, the skepticism that comes so naturally during courtship switches off once a commitment's been made, and they may overestimate a man's investment in the relationship or the odds that he's being faithful.

Battered women may be an extreme example of self-deception, points out O'Sullivan. Women who remain convinced of an abusive partner's devotion are arguably lying to themselves with an intensity that can appear delusional. But such women may be acting on a runaway impulse to ignore objectionable male behavior, an impulse that in effect prevents them from leaving when it's clearly to their advantage.

The emotional benefits of giving men a pass also explain why females are so quick to blame the "other woman" for a partner's infidelity. "If a man is susceptible to the flirtations of another woman, it's economically and emotionally easier to think that this other woman is a slut than that your husband's a slimeball," notes O'Sullivan.

Infidelity highlights the ultimate challenge to mating intelligence: staying sexually engaged in a long-term relationship. People differ greatly in the degree to which they can dazzle during courtship or retain a plum mate. But the Hollywood glitterati struggle as epically as your local minister and postman to keep a long-term union romantically vibrant. No one is immune to habituation. This is not to say that everyone simply lusts after new partners. Humans are a moderately monogamous species: We treasure our mates and guard them assiduously. At the same time, we've inherited the tendency to have a roving eye.

Plus, our ancestors barely lived until middle age, and those who survived had more to worry about than endless seduction on the savannah. The duration of today's relationships, and our heated expectations for them, depart radically from the unions of most couples who ever walked the earth. The golden anniversary is virtually as new as air travel. And just as a plane's oxygenated cabin allows us to zip around the globe, couples need to introduce novelty into a long-term relationship to simulate a state of courtship.


Welcome to the Meet Market

If you've clocked enough years (or months) as a couple to begin taking one another for granted, you may pine for the giddy perplexity with which you first approached your relationship. That doesn't mean hot pursuit always felt good. Recall your 14-year-old self attempting big-screen seduction moves while stationed at an overflowing locker, or enduring merciless teasing for physical attributes that barely compute as your own. Such humiliation was hardly for naught: Teen angst serves a purpose.

We need reality checks to figure out how the opposite sex perceives us and how we measure up relative to the competition. Adolescence is just that gauge. Teens pull no punches in acclimating their peers to the mating market. Mating intelligence is perhaps the most important life skill cultivated during junior high and high school—the grand rollout of the traits we hope will attract partners, with an emphasis on the splashy and superficial. That's why being dateless for a dance or relegated to Friendster Siberia can be torturous; peer judgments of our social standing are the first honest appraisal of our market value. They can endure. Because self-esteem roars to life during adolescence, when rejection begins to matter in a new way, our early opposite-sex encounters can influence our self-appraisal for years to come.

Peer judgments may be supremely influential in today's world. Traditionally, teens mixed more with adults and extended family, so they received feedback on their mate value from their clan as much as from their clique. But today teens are schooled and socialized in lockstep, creating an unprecedented separation from adults that Miller argues may warp accurate self-appraisal. A 17-year-old girl, he contends, compares herself mercilessly to her equally nubile peers; she doesn't mingle with adults enough to realize that she and her friends are all in the top-10 percent of women, reproductively speaking. "Forty years ago," says Miller, "a girl might have entered the workforce at age 18 and gotten a lot of attention in the office relative to the 28-year old 'spinster.' " Today, she'll enter college, still socializing and competing with a gaggle of equally young, pretty girls.

Boys also rank themselves heavily against peers. But because high school shelters them from the status wars waged among professional men, Miller believes boys actually overestimate their mate value during adolescence, and none more so than jocks. "Young men who were captains of the football team graduate thinking they're God's gift to women, and women respond, 'I'm interested in corporate attorneys and well-cited professors. Who the hell are you?' " The bottom line, he says, is that the longer you extend age-segregated higher education, the more you delay accurate calibration to the overall mating market.

Glenn Geher argues that health class would do well to teach the rudiments of opposite-sex mind reading and mate preferences, not just opposite-sex plumbing. Miller agrees: "It would help enormously if boys were told, 'your sense of humor and ability to be interesting matter.' It would help if girls heard, 'No, you don't have to be ultrathin. If you're best friends with a guy, he might make a good boyfriend.' There's so much misunderstanding between the sexes, and adults seem unwilling to take a stand."

Teens are often equally clueless about the character strengths that make for a good partner. It takes a few years of experimental hookups and baffling breakups to learn the value of conscientiousness, trustworthiness, and emotional stability. Indeed, it is thanks in part to the cheek-scorching travails of young love that personality becomes by and large a spin-free zone. Adults' snap judgments about emotionally healthy individuals are amazingly accurate. (The personality-disordered are a more complex challenge to mating intelligence.)

Still, no personality type makes for a superior mate. Context, not character, is destiny. The extroverted dervish may have an exhausting aversion to downtime. And chances are you're not the only person drawn to a woman with an operatic ability to connect. Because they're highly sought after, extroverts tend to have more affairs and end relationships more often, reports Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle. An agreeable man may be a helpmate, power-listener, and faithful husband, but he is also less likely to be an alpha earner than is his hard-charging, narcissistic brother. Yes, highly creative men are more attractive—Nettle's colleague Helen Clegg found that artists who amassed the most gallery exhibitions also racked up the most sexual partners—but they're not always prize mates. "I'm not sure many people want to marry Salvador Dali," says Nettle. "For me that's a bad job to get."

Yet Dali was married, to a diva named Gala. The Russian-émigrée, 10 years his senior, ditched surrealist poet Paul Éluard to take up with the painter. Gala, one might presume, sat in a left-bank café and weighed the evidence ("attractive but acutely flamboyant, warped sense of time...") before accepting the tempestuous gig. It may be impossible to fully grasp the weird logic of any one person's romantic choices. But thanks to evolution, all relationships share the canny subterfuge and emotional acrobatics of mating intelligence to which, in some measure, they owe their success.

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i think my favorite tidbit is that women are more self-delusional than men, essentially - that women judge themselves to lie less than their female peers, while men have no such bias comparative to other men. :P

find the original article, and more interesting fun things, at the psychology today site.

bookworms vs. nerds - article/blog

what do you think, kids, does this explain me? a recent study by the british psychological society found that the "more fiction a person reads, the more empathy they have and the better they perform on tests of social understanding and awareness. By contrast, reading more non-fiction, fact-based books shows the opposite association."

veronica's gotta grow - article/blog post

my favorite tv show:

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Going Away To College: Or, Why We Should All Cut Riley Finn Some Slack
by Dan Carlson

In case it's escaped the notice of even the dullest reader out there, I've got a pretty special place in the black rock I call my heart for "Veronica Mars." Now cruising gamely along in its third season, despite low ratings and a network dumb enough to pair it with "Gilmore Girls" (a show about absolutely, positively nothing at all), "Veronica Mars" is still one of the best shows on TV. But after two full years of exploring high school life, Veronica up and graduated, and is now attending Hearst College. Her matriculation mirrors not just the show's transfer from the defunct UPN to the new CW, but also the fact that the show itself is at a crossroads, namely, the elimination of its premise — high-school private eye — and a gradual change in its mission statement.



This is bound to be a polarizing time for the show's hardcore fans, and it's reminiscent of the similar struggle faced by what some have called the show's ancestor, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Granted, I think that comparing any two shows beyond a certain point is unwise, and most people are just linking "Buffy" and "Veronica Mars" out of a well-meaning laziness: Both shows were centered around a strong, flawed, complex female character in high school; both shows placed a premium on witty dialogue and interpersonal relationships; both shows are on low-rated pseudo-networks; etc. But the shows do have their similarites [sic], primarily their ability to explore the hell of growing up through the archetypal lens of high school, the one experience that unites us all in common misery. After its third season, "Buffy" went through the same growing pains now working their way through "Veronica Mars," as Buffy went off to college and the show struggled to find its larger purpose even as its core dynamic was forever altered. More than just having key characters removed and assigned to a spin-off, the "Buffy" universe had to deal with its very own existential crisis: What happens when the teenage superhero starts to grow up?

The show dealt with the inevitable problems the only way it knew how: By pushing through them. The first episode of the fourth season features another pack of vampires led by one of the lamest ringleaders the show ever came up with, but the villain of the week did one thing right: She broke Buffy's umbrella, a symbol of the good work she'd done in high school. It was a crushing, visceral way for the show to proclaim that the times were changing in a big way.

The fourth season, though certainly not a favorite of some fans, nevertheless turned out some great episodes — the experimental "Hush," the crossover "Pangs," the enjoyable one-off "Superstar," the excellent "Fear, Itself" — and, much more importantly, broadened its worldview. College is a world of gray tones next to the starkly defined areas of high school, and Buffy interacted with a greater variety of people with more darkly human (as opposed to demonic) traits, including Parker, who slept with Buffy and never called her again. He wasn't supernaturally evil, just a tool. It was in important step for the show, and one that paved the way for more complex relationships in the characters' collective futures. The fourth season was radically different from the first three because it had to be.

That's the problem, and possible solution, facing "Veronica Mars." The show's first two seasons delved into the dark sides of class warfare between the haves and have-nots of the small town of Neptune, smartly recognizing that cash is the biggest dividing line between the lunch tables in the cafeteria. But university life is rarely that stratified, and the only people who cling to such dated notions of how to define themselves are the jerks who seem to think college is basically Grade 13. "Veronica Mars" is going to have to figure out how to let go of the rich-poor struggle that so often defines the stories.

Veronica used to be a high-school snoop, and but she's going to have to transform into a bigger, more nuanced character to get the show over the tough bumps coming out of two solid years of stories. The show should set about trying to define Veronica in grander terms, like what kind of person does she want to be, in order to work. The central group of characters has been altered — Duncan's gone, Beaver's dead — and the remaining ones aren't what they used to be, none more than Weevil, who's gone from ruthless gang leader to the equivalent of wacky sitcom neighbor in only a few months (seriously, making Weevil the janitor at Hearst was a low blow, especially after offering up the tantaloizing [sic] possibility that he might work with Keith). But "Veronica Mars" can and will succeed if it pushes the characters to grow, and if it becomes comfortable with somewhat redefining itself. You don't go back; you go on to the next place, whatever that is.

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find the article here, at slowly going bald.

invisibility cloaks - article

science is so awesome. and the japanese are so awesome, too. check out this article on the science behind invisibility cloaks and some potential real-world applications of this technology. i've heard of this before but it's neat to read up on exactly how far we've gotten with it, and where we could be using it.

television and learning - article

yet another great article that discusses the nexus of psychology and pop culture. i love stuff like this b/c it's rather intuitive - not necessarily obvious - but awesome to have research back it up.

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Prime time to learn
In law dramas, medical shows and comedies, science is invading TV story lines. Good thing they try to get it right.
By Susan Brink
Times Staff Writer

November 13, 2006

AMERICANS more than just believe the health information they get from fictional television shows. Spurred by what they see on shows like "ER" or "The Bold and the Beautiful," surveys suggest, they take action. They go to the doctor. They tell a friend to have that cough checked. They ask a lover to use a condom.

Fans develop trusting relationships with the characters who come into their homes each week, and industry insiders can't betray that trust. "I'm aware of the number of people who are paying attention to the facts around the fiction," says Jan Nash, executive producer of "Without a Trace." Thanks in part to the Internet, where health sites consistently rank at the top of those most visited, more and more viewers know when something doesn't ring true.

They're getting a lot of chances to make such calls. Science is invading scripts. Disease is increasingly a backdrop to plots. The woes of the nation's healthcare system are punch lines. Heroic characters have mental diseases or incurable neurological disorders.


And behind the scenes, a body of communications research and an eager network of health and policy advocates are working with writers and producers to get the facts right. The shows milking medicine for back stories or main plot lines aren't limited to the medical genre such as "ER," "Grey's Anatomy" or "Scrubs." Sick, damaged or dying characters are showing up in shows about crime, politics, the legal profession, or wacky families and friends.

But seeing how profoundly true prime-time television can be was a shock, nonetheless, for Robert T. Brennan, a statistician at the Harvard School of Medicine and his daughter, Emma Brennan-Wydra, 13. On Jan. 3, 2006, they thought the night was winding down like hundreds of others, just another evening of TV viewing in their Somerville, Mass., home. It was 10 p.m., and Emma, a devotee of "Law & Order," was curled up watching the episode "Infected" with her father. "No popcorn. Nothing special, just uneventful viewing," says Brennan.

Little did they know, within their pajama-clad coziness on the other side of the country, that they were about to get an insider's glimpse into one of the latest trends in Hollywood.

Brennan and his daughter sat, mesmerized as the crime drama got closer and closer to home. It was about a grammar school-aged boy who, after seeing his mother shot to death, killed her murderer and went on trial as an adult.

"Annie Potts is addressing the jury," Brennan says, still amazed that his study, published in the May 27, 2005, journal Science, was quoted, statistic by statistic, by actress Potts, who played the boy's defense attorney, Sophie Devere. "She talked about kids being two to three times more likely to commit gun violence after they've been exposed to gun violence." As the character gave closing arguments, she referred to Science, gave the number of study participants and said the research took place in Chicago. There was no doubt. She was talking about Brennan's study.

"Emma and I looked at each other in total disbelief. Literally, I was flushed and my hair was standing up on my neck. The exact details of the study were on television," says Brennan. "And the accuracy of it was really amazing. I hate to say this, but it was more accurate than anything I've ever had covered in a newspaper."


His research ended up on the airwaves after Dr. Neal Baer, pediatrician and executive producer of "Law & Order: SVU," read the study on childhood violence by Brennan and coauthors Jeffrey Bingenheimer and Felton Earls. With all due respect, the paper was "wonky policy stuff, research that almost nobody reads," says Baer. But for a doctor who is also a television writer, it triggered an idea for a plot. "Just as you're exposed to flu when someone sneezes on you, this boy was exposed to violence. He was infected, and he committed a violent act," Baer says of his TV character.

What Baer did with a dry study illustrates the challenge to television writers: Take timely, important topics and make them entertaining. Accuracy and responsibility matter, industry insiders say, but their job is to attract and hold television viewers, not lecture or teach.

"Ultimately, our responsibility is to the drama of the show," says Nash. If writers start getting preachy, she says, viewers will hit the button on the remote.

At a time when reliance on traditional news media is slipping, entertainment communication becomes an important health issue. Prime-time television is where Americans gather, and it's where they learn. It makes sense to put the information where people are likely to get it.

The emphasis on the human and emotional drama behind the science, it turns out, is exactly what helps messages stick with viewers, according to communications research. Movies have a powerful effect too, but television fans come to know the characters they watch each week. Done well, the messages play out in the lives of familiar characters, and viewers learn something.

Premiering a theory

One of the first proofs that popular shows can educate large numbers of people came in 1977, in Mexico. Broadcast pioneer Miguel Sabido decided to make use of a classic learning theory, called social cognitive learning, in a soap opera. The theory, developed by Stanford social scientist Albert Bandura in 1961, holds that one way people learn is from watching others, particularly if they identify with the people and observe long enough to see a successful outcome. Sabido's telenovela was called "Acompañame," or "Accompany Me." The characters, including a poor but strong young woman who had two children and didn't want any more, grappled with family planning.

In its first year, it was apparent that the people who listened also learned — and acted. The Mexican government's National Population Council reported that monthly phone calls requesting family planning information increased from next to none to 500. Contraceptive sales increased 23% the first year the show aired, compared with an increase of 7% the previous year.

Following Mexico's success, the entertainment-education movement spread to India, China and Africa, where people in even the most remote villages tune their portable radios to soap operas. Characters routinely deal with the reality of AIDS. "You put up a billboard saying 'AIDS Kills, Use a Condom,' and it doesn't tell a woman how to approach her husband to talk about condoms," says Sonny Fox, whose Studio City consulting company works internationally to advise media and public health advocates. "In a radio drama, you put that right into the story. The listener has to be able to say, 'If she can do it, I can do it.' "

At a recent workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, a survey presented Nov. 6 by researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health examined the effect of one such program. It found that reported condom use during the last sexual encounter increased from 34% among people who did not tune into a soap opera called "Tsha Tsha" to 60% among those who watched 10 or more of the programs.

Third World successes got the attention of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If people in poor countries learn from radio and television entertainment shows, maybe Americans would too.

The CDC analyzed U.S. health survey data in 1999. Researchers concluded that of the 38 million Americans who regularly watch daytime soap operas, almost half said they learned something about diseases and how to prevent them. Even better, about a third of viewers said they took some action based on what they saw on a soap opera, including 7% who visited a doctor and 6% who did something to prevent a health problem.

A year later, the CDC looked at prime-time television. It found that of Americans who tuned in twice a week or more, 52% said they trusted the health information they see to be accurate, and 26% said that prime-time TV was among their top three sources for health information.

Inspiring ideas, facts

Inspired by such research, health advocates are figuring out how to work with entertainment television, without raising the hackles of creative types. The Kaiser Family Foundation and CBS and Viacom, for example, hold annual briefings in which writers and producers hear the real-life stories of people living with HIV.

Writers listen, awaiting the muse. And advocates cross their fingers, hoping that truth morphs into broadcast fiction.


Just such a briefing sparked the imagination of Nash and Greg Walker, executive producers of "Without a Trace." "We heard these testimonials, and we were moved by the accounts," says Walker. Adds Nash, "We would drive home and think, 'We have to figure out a way to do this.' " In the 2005 HIV-AIDS briefing, they heard the true story of Jennifer Jako, a pregnant HIV-positive woman who felt the judgment of people who thought she shouldn't have risked passing the virus to her child.

Her story inspired an April 13, 2006, episode called "Expectations," about a pregnant HIV-positive woman who resents the judgmental comments of a nurse, who tells her she should never have gotten pregnant. The character disappears shortly before her baby is due. The suspense builds as the missing woman calls from her cellphone to say she is in labor. She needs a cesarean section, and she needs it now.

To get the AIDS facts straight, Nash and Walker worked with Tina Hoff, director of the Media Entertainment Program of the Kaiser Family Foundation. "We're not the creative visionaries," Hoff says. "But once a story line is developed, we can help ensure that it's accurate."

In reality, the baby of an HIV-infected mother has a less than 2% chance of being born with the disease provided the mother has taken appropriate medications during pregnancy and the delivery is cesarean. If the audience didn't know that before they saw the show, they did after.

In the show, the woman was found in time to deliver a healthy baby by cesarean section. In real life, Jako gave birth — C-section of course — to a healthy daughter in July.

The influence of a popular television show can make physicians' everyday advice pale, says Dr. Mark Morocco, an emergency room physician who was a technical advisor to "ER." "I might see 20 to 30 people a day," he says on his morning shift at the real emergency department of Brotman Medical Center in Culver City. "A show like 'ER' at one time was reaching 30 million people a week. You just can't beat that for power."

The magnitude of the impact of that one show was measured in classic studies by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the CDC. They surveyed "ER" viewers before and after specific episodes. One episode included a vignette on date rape. The victim was advised that she could take a morning-after pill to prevent pregnancy. Before it aired, the study found that only 10% of viewers were aware that high-dose birth control pills were an option to prevent pregnancy. In the week after the episode aired, 33% of viewers were aware of the morning-after option. Another episode dealt with HPV as a cause of cervical cancer, and before the show ran, 24% of "ER" viewers knew about HPV. A week after the show aired, 47% said they had heard of HPV.

"That research reinforced that you just can't ignore the role of entertainment media in people's lives," says Hoff.

Such studies have encouraged shows to use the expertise of real doctors to go deeper than helping actors correctly pronounce medical words, or showing them how to attach electrocardiographic leads. Morocco helped the show's writers figure out how to write Anthony Edwards, who played Dr. Mark Greene on "ER," out of the script after Edwards announced he'd be leaving the show. "What could we give him that would be accurate, that could kill him in 15 months?" says Morocco. The answer: glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor whose sufferers have a life expectancy of about 18 months.

Viewers watched, week after week, the dramatic arc of Dr. Greene's diagnosis, treatment success, relapse and decline. "We were able to show what people with a bad brain tumor really go through," Morocco says. "How it affects your family, the real roller coaster ride you're on when you get this kind of diagnosis." Until, finally, the fictional Dr. Greene died, in the May 9, 2002, episode.

Premiering this week may be one of the most intense efforts to get the science right. A new series, "3 Lbs.," named for the weight of the average human brain, is about two neurosurgeons. The pilot shows symptoms, brain scans and neurosurgery wrapped around the lives of two patients shocked that their brains have gone haywire. "It's all research-based," says executive producer Peter Ocko. "There's not a neurological condition we deal with that's not documented in research. We consult with two neurosurgeons. We gather case histories. There's a doctor and a nurse on the set for every medical moment. And we do just as much research on the patient's perspective." From there, poetic license comes in.

Even nonmedical shows are hiring researchers whose job it is to ferret out what's new and true in multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, cancer, diabetes or even policy issues such as the growing number of uninsured Americans or the vast disparity between donated organs and the need for organ transplants. All those topics have made their way into recent prime-time shows.

Hollywood insiders

The effort to educate while entertaining goes beyond doctors and staff researchers working within television.

The granddaddy of the industry-science collaboration is probably the Entertainment Industries Council, started in 1983, just about the time John Belushi died of a drug overdose and Richard Pryor set himself ablaze freebasing cocaine. Created to promote health and social issues via entertainment, the council first tackled drug abuse. It quickly expanded. "We're the folks who got actors to put their seat belts on for driving scenes," says Larry Deutchman, executive vice president of marketing and industry relations for the council.

Now there is a growing industry in Hollywood made up of advocates who are neither entertainers nor insiders, but who want their disease or issue to get dramatic play before a mass audience. Similar to product placement, it's a kind of ideas placement. A group called the Entertainment Professionals Resource Assn. pulls dozens of these groups together, including the American Cancer Society, Down Syndrome in Arts and Media, the American Heart Assn. and the Mental Health Media Partnership.

"We're trying to shift the norm," says Deborah Glik, director of the UCLA Health and Media Research Group, who is affiliated with the entertainment group. "When you're going to portray a health issue anyway, and you're working with a platform that reaches millions of people, you should do it accurately."

Members make themselves available with scientific facts and a bank of real citizens willing to tell their stories. They carefully push their causes, knowing they walk a delicate line between sparking creativity and triggering annoyance.

David Sampson, director of media relations at the American Cancer Society, has learned that it's better if his organization stays away from pitching specific plots. Policy wonks, it turns out, aren't so good at recognizing the germ of a compelling story line. "Writers come to us," he says, "and almost invariably, they'll pick up on some bit of information that we had no intention of relaying."

But the society doesn't hesitate to advise, when asked. When Alexis on the soap opera "General Hospital" was diagnosed with lung cancer despite being a nonsmoker, Sampson heard that writers wanted to attribute her disease to asbestos exposure. "About 4,000 non-smokers a year come down with lung cancer," he says. "But short of working in a mine, you only get lung cancer from asbestos exposure if you're also a smoker." Exposure to second-hand smoke, the society suggested, was a far better explanation.

The idea is to present entertainment insiders with powerful real stories, inundate them with facts, and then sit back and hope the creative juices take over. "I believe the writer is king or queen," says Lisa Allen, director of the Media Project, which provides entertainment industry professionals with information on reproductive issues. "We don't preach, we don't proselytize."

But sometimes, when the people who understand the power of the medium watch TV, they do a slow burn. Glik recalls one of those moments. She was watching a prime-time drama in which a character had hepatitis. "I got so upset," she says. "They should have talked about immunizations. It was a missed opportunity."

Missed opportunities and programs that are just plain wrong persist. Soap opera characters can still come out of comas as though they simply took a long nap. Prime-time shows can still depict death as though it's as quick and painless as fainting.

And while television may have become more daring in portraying how disease affects real people, network television pulls its punches on some controversial topics. Abortion, for example, has become more taboo over the years. In 1972, Maude, played by Bea Arthur, had an abortion, a decision that unfolded over two episodes on the sitcom "Maude," watched by 65 million viewers. Thirty years later, Claire Fisher, played by actress Lauren Ambrose on the HBO drama "Six Feet Under," whose viewership peaked at 5 million, had an abortion. In between the two shows, almost all unplanned television pregnancies ended either in miscarriage, adoption or a decision to keep the baby.

No issue unaired

But because truth can be stranger, and more entertaining, than fiction, increasingly even the most tedious of topics — the economics of the healthcare delivery system, for example — are finding their way onto the airwaves. What "Friends" fan will ever forget the time that Joey, an aspiring actor, faced losing his health coverage, an all too real dilemma for 46 million Americans? In the Oct. 14, 1999, episode, Joey's coverage through the Screen Actors Guild was going to lapse unless he chalked up more work hours. Then he got a hernia, the pain of which required treatment but also interfered with his ability to work the hours he needed to remain insured.


Joey does solve his problem, recalls Kate Langrall Folb of Nightingale Entertainment, who works to get stories on health policy, including the uninsured, onto television shows. "He gets a gig portraying a dying guy in pain," she says. He earned his hours, kept his insurance and got his hernia treated.

It was, after all, television. Everything must be tidied up within 30 to 60 minutes.
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from the la times.

if google were a person . . .

check this site out - ChaCha.com - it's a search engine that has actual people to assist you via live chat if you like.


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i typed in: black and white angelina jolie yelling


Status: Looking for a guide ...
Status: Connected to guide: MelissaJ
MelissaJ: Hi there. I will be helping with your search.
You: hi melissa
MelissaJ: Hi, how are you?
You: i'm looking for a specific angie photo
You: i'm good, thanks, and you!
MelissaJ: Okay, I was wondering what the search meant!
MelissaJ: Can you describe it to me?
You: lol yes, it's a b&w photo
You: from just her shoulders up
You: her hands are raised and she's grabbing her hair
You: so that it fans out above her head
You: and she looks like she's yelling
MelissaJ: Okay, do you know approximately how old it is? Recent or a few years ago
You: a few yrs ago
You: i believe from a magazine publication
MelissaJ: Okay, let me try to find it for you
You: thank you.
MelissaJ: I found one that may be it
MelissaJ: Click on the link to the right, is that it?
You: oooh almost!
MelissaJ: Ok, it's close though? Maybe from the same photo shoot?
You: i think it's from the same shoot

MelissaJ: Okay, let me keep searching for you
You: the one i recall was with her mouth open i think
MelissaJ: Okay
You: this is great, though - do you have this as anything bigger than a thumbnail?
MelissaJ: Not yet, let me check
You: oh, nm, i just erased "thumb" and got it
MelissaJ: Still searching...
You: k!
You: if it helps, i recall it being slightly closer cropped to her head
MelissaJ: Okay, thanks!
You: you know, the more i look at it, perhaps this is it after all
MelissaJ: You think?
MelissaJ: Ill keep looking anyway, give me a few more minutes
You: yeah, i keep closing it and coming back to it, it seems more familiar
You: okay!
You: thank you
MelissaJ: I'm having trouble finding anything else.
You: okay
You: this is great, thank you
MelissaJ: I looked through all of the thumbnails of photos of her on google, yahoo and dogpile
You: this is probably it
MelissaJ: just so you know what's already been looked for...
You: lol at least it was probably pretty fun doing that
MelissaJ: and i couldn't find any other from that shoot either
You: okay, this must be it then
You: thank you
MelissaJ: well, i'm a female so she really doesn't do anything for me,
MelissaJ: haha
You: lol i'm a girl, too, but she is so purdy
MelissaJ: haha okay
You: i have a question about chacha
MelissaJ: sure
You: are you guys for searching images only?
You: or websites/content as well?
MelissaJ: no not at all
MelissaJ: anything
MelissaJ: anything you can think of
You: ic
You: very good, thank you
MelissaJ: yep, have a good night!
MelissaJ: Please RATE ME. Thanks for using ChaCha.
Status: Session ended.

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this is another post brought kindly to you by kirk, who had a slightly more hilarious, slightly less angie-obsessed experience with his searchers (read it here).

freakin' finally! - article

aah. a nice follow-up to some recent thoughts.

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New male contraceptive Pill with no side effects
By JULIE WHELDON
Last updated at 22:00pm on 30th October 2006

Men could soon be able to use a 'male Pill' that has no side effects, scientists have revealed.

The chemical implant acts as a contraceptive but does not change the balance of a man's sex hormones.

Scientists have discovered a substance that can temporarily block the development of sperm without altering testosterone levels and without causing unwanted side effects.

They hope human trials of a new contraceptive for men based on their discovery could begin within a few years.

Other versions of the 'male Pill' are already in development but work by altering hormone levels in the man's body.

In trials so far these have produced no worrying side effects - however scientists think men may still worry about whether introducing female hormones could harm their virility in some way.

The new approach would therefore avoid this problem. The common perception is that few women would actually believe a man who said he was on the Pill.

However a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2000 found that only two per cent of women said they would not trust their partner to take a male Pill.

Several teams of scientists have therefore been working on trying to develop an equivalent of the female Pill for men.

Until now this has involved using hormones to try to prevent sperm production.

But the new approach reported in the latest edition of the journal Nature Medicine involves a substance called adherin.

It works by interfering with the way cells in the testes help nurture the development of mature sperm.

It blocks the normal bond which develops between immature sperm and tissue called Sertoli cells. This then stops the cells developing into mature sperm which are capable of fertilising an egg.

A study found that when given to rats, sperm production dropped to such low levels as to render them infertile.

However once the drug was stopped, the animals' sperm production soon returned to normal.

Lead researcher Chuen Yan Cheng of the Population Council in New York said this would be vital for any kind of pill to become acceptable to men.

"If you give the consumer the peace of mind that their fertility will be restored and that their hormones are not going to be affected, they may feel that it is safer to use this contraceptive," he said.

Adherin on its own is known to have toxic effects on the body, but the team overcame this problem by ensuring it would only attach to one cell in the body - the Sertoli cells.

The team tested it on vital organs such as the kidneys, liver, heart and brain, and found it had no harmful side effects.

Dr Cheng and his team hope their finding will lead to a male contraceptive - although say it is likely to be an implant rather than a pill as the tablet would be broken down in the digestive tract.

Dr Cheng said the approach taken by other researchers of using hormone-based contraceptives was not wrong. However he said it was important to give people a choice.

Earlier this year researchers working on a hormonal-based male contraceptive said an implant or injection could be available within five years.

Another study, published in the Lancet found that men given a hormonal-based contraceptive drug saw their sperm count return to normal just over three months after they stopped using it.

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thanks kirk for the heads up on this one...

no more blaming pms for being bitchy - article

i've briefly covered this topic before, but medicine, like technololgy, is always changing:

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Girl Talk
A new pill that stops your period.
By Sarah E. Richards
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2006, at 5:04 PM ET

If a new brand of birth control gets approved early next year, that time of the month could become the time of, like, the decade. Lybrel, a birth-control pill made by Wyeth, would be the first oral contraceptive to deliver an uninterrupted supply of hormones. Seventy percent of women who took it for six months were period-free, according to a preliminary study by the company.

Wyeth isn't the first pharmaceutical company to reimagine the menstrual cycle. In 1992, the FDA approved Depo-Provera, an injection that is repeated every three months. In 2003, Seasonale rescheduled the monthly period to four times a year. And in July, the government gave the go-ahead for Implanon, an implant that delivers a steady hormone stream for up to three years. But the pill is the favorite means of birth control of the nearly quarter of American women of childbearing age who take hormonal contraceptives. That means Lybrel—and the other brands that will surely follow—could change the menstrual cycle as we know it. The appeal is obvious: No more bloating, cramping, food cravings, and PMS jokes, not to mention the savings in unpurchased tampons and such. But in the end, for reasons both medical and cultural, it's not clear that putting the kibosh on the curse is a good idea.

Traditional pill packs contain a week of placebos for each monthly cycle, and, as a result, women who take them appear to menstruate. But it turns out that the bleeding serves no reproductive purpose. Since there's no egg to flush out, the bleeding is a symptom of withdrawal from progestin and estrogen, the hormones in the pill—in essence, it's a fake period. The inventors of the pill, which debuted in 1960, supposedly decided to mimic the menstrual cycle because they thought that would make women more psychologically comfortable with the product.

Western women today are estimated to average about 400 menstrual cycles over the course of their lifetimes. Pregnancy and nursing halt periods for a time, of course. And for years physicians have informally advised women with painful periods to practice "menstrual suppression" by taking hormonal contraceptives continuously. Birth-control medications tend to lessen menstrual and premenstrual symptoms to begin with, and some studies show that fewer periods may mean even more relief.

Now Lybrel is explicitly selling all of this, by prescription, at a drug store near you. Women can shut off their systems for law school, a trip around the world—even their entire 20s. Random spotting is common while using Lybrel, especially at the start. But in a study of another brand called Alesse, 90 percent of participants did not bleed at all after a year of use, according to Leslie Miller, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington. "We can manipulate menstruation," she says.

Life without getting your period, though, would be life without one of the touchstones of the female experience: a sisterhood of shared empathy, tampons and chocolate, and laundry lessons passed from grandmother to granddaughter. Liberation from premenstrual emotional peaks and valleys sounds great, but we would also lose the surge of creativity and libido that comes with the urge to strangle your houseplants. Would movies be as poignant, or garlic mashed potatoes ever taste as good?

In two different surveys of college women, Ingrid Johnston-Robledo, associate professor of psychology and women's studies at the State University of New York, College at Fredonia, found that women who were asked to name positive aspects of menstruation reported that it was a sign of health and fertility and that it helped connect them to other women and the rhythms of nature.* This may sound like an ode to the inner moon goddess, but it has relevance. Johnston-Robledo found that women who didn't like their periods were also more ashamed of their bodies.

At the same time, there may be some medical arguments for suppressing one's period, at least for a limited period of time. Hormonal contraceptives are known to decrease the risk of ovarian and endometrial cancers, so some doctors think a continual dose of the pill would further reduce those risks. No blood loss also means less anemia. And then there is the provocative argument of Brazilian gynecologist Elsimar Coutinho. In his 1999 book Is Menstruation Obsolete? (co-authored with Sheldon J. Segal), he writes that modern women experience "incessant ovulation," in contrast to our ancestors, who started menarche later and had many fewer periods because they gave birth and breastfed far more frequently. Women's bodies may not have evolved to handle so many periods and would appreciate a break, Coutinho thinks.

But if modern menstruation isn't completely natural, by prehistoric standards, suppressing one's period by taking hormones is even less so. No one knows the health effects for menstruating women of long-term continuous exposure, especially the risks of blood clots and breast cancer and the effect on later fertility. The uncertainties are especially troubling for adolescents whose reproductive systems continue to develop after they start menstruating, explains Jerilynn Prior, director of the Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research in British Columbia. Nearly one in five teens uses a form of hormonal birth control. Given the unknowns, perhaps doctors should consider setting a minimum age requirement for Lybrel, or limiting how long women can stay on it.

Nor is the pharmaceutical industry's track record on birth control exactly reassuring in weighing the risks and benefits. In 2002, the implant Norplant was pulled from the market after questions about its effectiveness and lawsuits by women claiming they were not adequately warned of side effects. In 2004, the FDA required that Depo-Provera include a label warning of risk to bone density. And last year, the FDA warned that the high levels of estrogen found in the Ortho-Evra patch increased the risk of blood clots after about a dozen young women died from clotting believed to be related to it. Maybe Lybrel will prove to be a dream drug with none of these problems; at the moment, we don't have the data to know. Periods, on the other hand, are time-tested. They tell you that you're not pregnant, and they're a sign that your body is working as it should. That's worth some fuss.

Sarah E. Richards is a freelance writer based in New York City. She can be reached at sarah@saraherichards.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2151746/

i truly, truly believe in this - article

Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing
By DANIEL GOLEMAN
Published: October 10, 2006

A dear friend has been battling cancer for a decade or more. Through a grinding mix of chemotherapy, radiation and all the other necessary indignities of oncology, he has lived on, despite dire prognoses to the contrary.

My friend was the sort of college professor students remember fondly: not just inspiring in class but taking a genuine interest in them — in their studies, their progress through life, their fears and hopes. A wide circle of former students count themselves among his lifelong friends; he and his wife have always welcomed a steady stream of visitors to their home.

Though no one could ever prove it, I suspect that one of many ingredients in his longevity has been this flow of people who love him.

Research on the link between relationships and physical health has established that people with rich personal networks — who are married, have close family and friends, are active in social and religious groups — recover more quickly from disease and live longer. But now the emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of how people’s brains entrain as they interact, adds a missing piece to that data.

The most significant finding was the discovery of “mirror neurons,” a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.

Mirror neurons offer a neural mechanism that explains emotional contagion, the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another, particularly if strongly expressed. This brain-to-brain link may also account for feelings of rapport, which research finds depend in part on extremely rapid synchronization of people’s posture, vocal pacing and movements as they interact. In short, these brain cells seem to allow the interpersonal orchestration of shifts in physiology.

Such coordination of emotions, cardiovascular reactions or brain states between two people has been studied in mothers with their infants, marital partners arguing and even among people in meetings. Reviewing decades of such data, Lisa M. Diamond and Lisa G. Aspinwall, psychologists at the University of Utah, offer the infelicitous term “a mutually regulating psychobiological unit” to describe the merging of two discrete physiologies into a connected circuit. To the degree that this occurs, Dr. Diamond and Dr. Aspinwall argue, emotional closeness allows the biology of one person to influence that of the other.

John T. Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, makes a parallel proposal: the emotional status of our main relationships has a significant impact on our overall pattern of cardiovascular and neuroendocrine activity. This radically expands the scope of biology and neuroscience from focusing on a single body or brain to looking at the interplay between two at a time. In short, my hostility bumps up your blood pressure, your nurturing love lowers mine. Potentially, we are each other’s biological enemies or allies.

Even remotely suggesting health benefits from these interconnections will, no doubt, raise hackles in medical circles. No one can claim solid data showing a medically significant effect from the intermingling of physiologies.

At the same time, there is now no doubt that this same connectivity can offer a biologically grounded emotional solace. Physical suffering aside, a healing presence can relieve emotional suffering. A case in point is a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of women awaiting an electric shock. When the women endured their apprehension alone, activity in neural regions that incite stress hormones and anxiety was heightened. As James A. Coan reported last year in an article in Psychophysiology, when a stranger held the subject’s hand as she waited, she found little relief. When her husband held her hand, she not only felt calm, but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of emotional rescue.

But as all too many people with severe chronic diseases know, loved ones can disappear, leaving them to bear their difficulties in lonely isolation. Social rejection activates the very zones of the brain that generate, among other things, the sting of physical pain. Matthew D. Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberg of U.C.L.A. (writing in a chapter in “Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About People,” M.I.T. Press, 2005) have proposed that the brain’s pain centers may have taken on a hypersensitivity to social banishment because exclusion was a death sentence in human prehistory. They note that in many languages the words that describe a “broken heart” from rejection borrow the lexicon of physical hurt.

So when the people who care about a patient fail to show up, it may be a double blow: the pain of rejection and the deprivation of the benefits of loving contact. Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon University who studies the effects of personal connections on health, emphasizes that a hospital patient’s family and friends help just by visiting, whether or not they quite know what to say.

My friend has reached that point where doctors see nothing else to try. On my last visit, he and his wife told me that he was starting hospice care.

One challenge, he told me, will be channeling the river of people who want to visit into the narrow range of hours in a week when he still has the energy to engage them.

As he said this, I felt myself tearing up, and responded: “You know, at least it’s better to have this problem. So many people go through this all alone.”

He was silent for a moment, thoughtful. Then he answered softly, “You’re right.”



Daniel Goleman is the author of “Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.”

it's like a place i remember being once

fellow collegemate and blogger jaggd has some interesting thoughts on happiness.

meanwhile, a more academic and new-york-centric look at the same topic. it's v. long but well worth a skim.

as for me, i'm not where i want to be right now, but working on it. or toughing it out at least. or surviving. aren't they all just words for each other, anyway??

quadruple bypass blogging

fellow blogger jaggd wrote a really interesting post recently about his motivation for blogging...or, as the post explains, perhaps his recent lack thereof.

ever since i moved to blogspot from pitas, i've been trying to keep my posts minimally about my personal life; i enjoy putting up interesting articles and recommendations so people can see what i am interested in, but i've been trying not to get too detailed. my biggest exception, as i think is natural, is when i am upset; this is the time when i feel most alone, and thus need to "vent" the most.

ironically, this is the time when words are most difficult for me to form. how do you talk about yourself and your issues without sounding really, painfully, self-involved? tricky.

what's more, it is during these periods that i feel zero motivation to write. part of it is that, like my friend, i think that no one is going to read it anyway. no one cares. that is a powerful toxin to creative expression, i think.

another part of it is that lack of motivation comes part and parcel with feeling blue; it's a defining characteristic, in fact.

the other thing that happens is that i write, and then i hate what i produce. i strive to be funny, insightful, interesting...then i end up positive i sound ridiculous, like i am trying too hard. it's an interesting beast. [blogger's note: another fellow blogger and old friend sakusha also has some very eloquent words about inspiration and writing. click the link & search the page for post title "broken silence" and "disjointed ramble."]

anyway, i had a blog post planned tonight to touch a bit on the topic of hospitals. my grandfather is going in for a quadruple bypass tomorrow. the post might have reflected on my decision tonight that i really do not like hospitals (tonight being only my third hospital experience i can remember), also fattened up a bit with facts that i gathered about the procedure from web md (which, if you have never visited, is an awesome site - UNLESS YOU ARE SICK), and, as can only be expected, perhaps a couple thoughts on death as well.

but you know what? it just seemed too personal.

so i got to thinking about blogging. i used to (and still do) blog about personal things, and as you can probably already tell, i certainly have no problem not shutting up! about philosophical/psychological things. so what's the issue? i'm not sure.

somewhere between planning my post tonight and typing it up, the elusive feeling i was trying to capture somehow . . . changed. and you know, maybe that is the point of blogging? to just capture those really thin slivers of perspective in that one teensy, particular moment, before all the other emotions/fears/things you are trying to express take center stage for their moment.

honey, where are my shades?

i have a ton of family staying with us this week. a fun fact i learned from my aunt, while we were chatting about the rain in seattle and the high suicide rates:

"did you know that seattle also has the highest purchasing rate for sunglasses? it's because we use our sunglasses so infrequently. lots of time to get lost. here, you use them every day - but try finding them after nine months of rain! everyone just goes out and buys a new pair!"

hehe!

mmm victory is sweeter when it's over your boss - article

i love articles about the psychology of pop culture:

Who's the Boss?
By Clive Thompson
02:00 AM May, 08, 2006
Games Without Frontiers

I was barely one hour into playing Kingdom Hearts II, gaming's latest bona-fide hit, when I encountered the first "boss battle." It was a three-story tall gray monstrosity -- I barely came up to his knee. We lunged about, frantically trading blows, until I finally located his weak spot and plunged my "keyblade" in. Boom: He dissolved into black dust, leaving me with a sore thumb and a system full of adrenaline.

And the curious sense of satisfaction that comes from a boss battle. They're among the most cherished tropes in gaming: Get a bunch of gamers together to talk about adventure games or action titles, and sure -- everyone will praise the wonderful characters, the superb graphics, the intriguing narrative. But it's the boss battles that leave scars on their souls. They wind up sounding like grizzled war veterans, reminiscing wild-eyed about facing The Flood in Halo, four-armed Goro in Mortal Kombat or even Bowser in Super Mario Bros. Bosses dominate the psychic landscape of games.

It's partly because a boss battle is the most mythopoeic part of gaming. An adventure game, after all, typically puts you on some dread quest in which the foes get bigger and nastier until you face one final, hellish climactic baddie. This is a pure apocalyptic narrative -- the same story line that has obsessed the West for millennia, from the Bible to Das Kapital to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Boss battles make games seem cosmic.

But personally, I think the allure is much more straightforward than that, and also, in its own way, more complex. We love boss battles because they represent game design at its purest and trickiest.

Every game has to strike a careful balance: It has to be teasingly difficult, but not overly frustrating. But when the boss battle comes along, the game is supposed to become suddenly more difficult. That makes the balance all the harder to strike.

"The really good bosses seem impossible at first -- but they provide incremental clues to weaken them," said Ian Bogost, a game-design theorist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, when I called him about the subject. "That's where the sense of mastery comes from. A good boss has to kill you a few times first. It has to be arduous, physically and mentally." His favorite villians were the overlords in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, partly because their gargantuan size came as a thrilling shock after the hobbit-like proportions of everyone else in the rest of the game.

The danger, of course, is a game that goes too far: Nothing grinds a game to a halt more than a boss that is hair-pulling impossible to kill. Such was the case when Luke Smith -- a friend of mine who works at 1UP -- took a band of high-level World of Warcraft characters to battle with C'Thun, a squid-like creature that spawns endless "flay eyes" and "claw tentacles". "For months it was improperly tuned, literally unkillable," Smith ranted. "You simply could not put out the damage required to kill everything before the fight spiraled out of control. It kept spawning, and you never caught up."

With an overly-fierce boss, nothing you've learned in the game seems to work -- which makes you think, I slogged through weeks of this game only to be repaid with this?

The well-tuned boss vibrates in perfect harmony with the skill level of the game. Tom Byron, the editor in chief of the Official US PlayStation Magazine, told me his favorite boss was the vizier at the end of Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. "He's flying up in the air, and whipping these stones down at you -- so you need to use literally all of the prince's acrobatics that you've learned. You're doing all these wall-runs, and there are fireballs, like, everywhere," Bryon gushed. "It's just awesome!"

That's the key: A good boss demands you to call upon every technique you've painstakingly learned over hours of play -- each special jump and magic combos. In Kingdom Hearts II, for example, I'd played around a bit with the different settings for Donald Duck's magic-healing ability (boy, that's a weird sentence) -- but I'd never understood how important it was to tweak it until I faced down the Hydra, and was getting flayed alive by its seven heads.

It's like bosses are the SATs of the game world: "It's a culmination," Byron notes. "It's not asking you to suddenly learn new skills. It's asking you to remember everything you've learned." You're aiming for that "aha" moment when, desperate for some way to topple the boss, you suddenly hit upon a clever new way to apply your powers -- and the insurmountable becomes manageable.

That's one of the best feelings ever -- and it's also one we rarely get in everyday life. The enemies we face in our contemporary world are so much more ambiguous and internal, and half the time it's ourselves. We try to find a meaningful job, to hack through a bad relationship, to blunder through the red tape of money and taxes. Even our modern literature of struggle has been blunted. The Greeks and Romans imagined their lives through metaphors of heroes facing down arcane monsters; we read The Corrections or Indecision or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, tales of neurotics struggling just to get out of bed.

Our enemies are nowhere, and everywhere. Targets of resistance melt away in all directions. Terrorists seem frightening only so long as they elude the authorities. Death creeps slowly in hospital wards. And so, perhaps, it's a comfort to see our fears rear up in an honest-to-god monstrosity. Bring it on.

i wish i had a perfect memory! - article

Woman With Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists

James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped.

McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.

Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.

Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. But not anymore.

"This is real," he says.

Soon after AJ took over his life, McGaugh teamed with two fellow researchers at the University of California at Irvine. Elizabeth Parker, a clinical professor of psychiatry and neurology (and lead author of a report on the research in the current issue of the journal Neurocase), and Larry Cahill, an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, have joined McGaugh in putting AJ through an exhaustive series of interviews and psychological tests. But they aren't a lot closer today to understanding her amazing ability than they were when they started.
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"We are trying to find out, but we haven't hit 'bingo' yet," says McGaugh.

His initial hypothesis, like several others, has turned out to be wrong -- or at least incomplete.

McGaugh has spent decades studying how such things as stress hormones and emotions affect memory, and at first he thought AJ's memories were of such emotional power that she couldn't forget them.

But that hypothesis fell short of the mark when it became obvious that "the woman who can't forget" remembers trivial details as clearly as major events. Asked what happened on Aug 16, 1977, she knew that Elvis Presley had died, but she also knew that a California tax initiative passed on June 6 of the following year, and a plane crashed in Chicago on May 25 of the next year, and so forth. Some may have had a personal meaning for her, but some did not.

"Here's a woman who has very strong memories, but she has very strong memories of things for which I have no memory at all," McGaugh says.

That became particularly clear one day when he asked her out of the blue if she knew who Bing Crosby was.

"I wasn't sure she would know, because she's 40 and wasn't of the Bing Crosby era," he says.

But she did.

"Do you know where he died?" McGaugh asked.

"Oh yes, he died on a golf course in Spain," she answered, and provided the day of the week and the date when the crooner died.

When the researchers asked her to list the dates when they had interviewed her, she "just reeled them off, bang, bang, bang."

She also told McGaugh that on the day after a particular interview, which took place several years ago, he flew to Germany.

"I said what? I went to Germany? I couldn't even remember what year I had gone to Germany," he says.

That level of recall suggests another hypothesis. Some people are able to recall past events by categorizing them. Certain events, or facts, are associated with others, and filed away together so that they may be easier to access. That's a trick that is often used by entertainers who use feats of memory to wow their audience.

AJ does have "some sort of compulsive tendencies. She wants order in her life," McGaugh says. "As a child, she would get upset if her mother changed anything in her room because she had a place for everything and wanted everything in its place.

"So she does categorize events by the date, but that doesn't explain why she remembers it."

Also, her degree of recall is so much greater than any other person's in the scientific literature that it seems unlikely to be the complete answer, McGaugh adds.

She is also quite different from savants who have surfaced from time to time with extraordinary abilities in music, art or memory.

"Some of them can remember every single detail about the particular hobby that they have, such as baseball or calendars or art, but they are very narrow," he says. McGaugh described one person who could memorize a piece of music instantly, and not forget it, but who "couldn't make change or couldn't take a bus because he didn't know where he was."

By contrast, AJ is a " fully functioning person," McGaugh says.

The researchers are preparing to take their work in a new direction in hopes of understanding what is going on here. It's possible AJ's brain is wired differently, and that may show up through magnetic resonance imaging. Testing is expected to begin within six months.

"We will be looking at her brain, using brain scanning techniques, to see if there's anything that is dramatically different that we can point to," McGaugh says.

Those of us with normal, very fallible memories function somewhat like a computer in that different areas of our brains are interconnected and thus better-suited for general memories. We know where we live and how to get to work, but we may not know what the weather was like on this date four years ago.

It's possible that AJ's brain has some "disconnections" that help her recall past events from her memory bank without interference from the parts of her brain that act as general processors. But the problem is that even if they find some interesting wiring through brain scans, the researchers will be limited in their conclusions by the fact that AJ seems to be unique.

So unique, in fact, that the Irvine team has given her condition a new name. They call it hyperthymestic syndrome, based on the Greek word thymesis for "remembering" and hyper, meaning "more than normal."

Some day, the researchers say, they hope to know what's different about AJ's brain, but they are still a ways off.

"In order to explain a phenomenon you have to first understand the phenomenon," McGaugh says. "We're at the beginning."

non-recommendations 2 - microsoft word

i fucking hate word with the loathing that most reserve for puppy kickers. i hate it so much my delicate facial features start to twitch when i think too much about it.

fucking presumptuous, piece of shit software, that thinks it knows what i want but only serves to FUCK UP MY COURSE OUTLINE. don't autoformat me, fucking bitch! no, i don't mean "torturous" when i write "tortious"! no, i dont mean "iii." indented halfway in the middle of the page when i write "2)" on the left!!

AND FUCK YOU for RETROACTIVELY CHANGING ALL MY NUMBERS TO "1." and all my LETTERS TO "a." WHEN I AM NEARLY FINISHED YOU ASSHOLE! (weeps) when i need to memorize a 5 step process, it does me no good to have all the steps labeled one!!!!

all right. in all fairness, i have a midterm on saturday, and in addition to completely ignoring my emails (that's you jess, alana, ari, em, rhi...my response is coming...) i have been shunning daylight and naps as well, so i am a tad grumpy, and part of this post is that. also, i will admit that word does not proclaim to be an outlining software, only a word processing one.

THAT SAID, I STILL FUCKING HATE IT. you do NOT know what i want, so stop changing things without at least labelling what you're changing and checking with me first. this is the second time i've had to go back over the entire thing and relabel my numbers/indentations. i know you are confused by my disorganized style of outlining, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL THAT IS HOLY LEAVE ME ALONE!!

you know what else bothers me, is that i am actually quite proficient at word. i know how to work it with relative dexterity, and i can fix most formatting problems that other people can't, just by virtue of having used it specifically for formatting purposes, etc. so, it just drives me nuts that there's no, i dunno, loyalty reciprocated at all, like, word doesn't appreciate that i know its ins and outs, it just wants to f-ing dupe me along with all the other suckers. well fuck you! word! you friggin bastard.

...i am calming down now, and adding addendums that are less screaming but not less irritated. word should let me "lock" pages. like, the first fifteen pages of my outline? i should be able to "lock" them and not let the program just shuffle margins and labels as it pleases, since, i dunno, it took me the better part of three weeks to get this shit done, and i dont think some fucking program should be allowed to fuck around with it.