Thursday, November 29, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Love, heart or brain?
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The 3 stages of love
Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in the States has proposed 3 stages of love – lust, attraction and attachment. Each stage might be driven by different hormones and chemicals.
Stage 1: Lust
This is the first stage of love and is driven by the sex hormones testosterone and oestrogen – in both men and women.
Serotonin
And finally, serotonin. One of love's most important chemicals that may explain why when you’re falling in love, your new lover keeps popping into your thoughts.
Does love change the way you think? A landmark experiment in Pisa, Italy showed that early love (the attraction phase) really changes the way you think.
Love needs to be blind
Newly smitten lovers often idealise their partner, magnifying their virtues and explaining away their flaws says Ellen Berscheid, a leading researcher on the psychology of love.
New couples also exalt the relationship itself. “It's very common to think they have a relationship that's closer and more special than anyone else's”. Psychologists think we need this rose-tinted view. It makes us want to stay together to enter the next stage of love – attachment.
Stage 3: Attachment
Attachment is the bond that keeps couples together long enough for them to have and raise children. Scientists think there might be two major hormones involved in this feeling of attachment; oxytocin and vasopressin.
Oxytocin - The cuddle hormone
Oxytocin is a powerful hormone released by men and women during orgasm.
It probably deepens the feelings of attachment and makes couples feel much closer to one another after they have had sex. The theory goes that the more sex a couple has, the deeper their bond becomes.
Vasopressin
Vasopressin is another important hormone in the long-term commitment stage and is released after sex.
Vasopressin (also called anti-diuretic hormone) works with your kidneys to control thirst. Its potential role in long-term relationships was discovered when scientists looked at the prairie vole.
Prairie voles indulge in far more sex than is strictly necessary for the purposes of reproduction. They also – like humans - form fairly stable pair-bonds.
When male prairie voles were given a drug that suppresses the effect of vasopressin, the bond with their partner deteriorated immediately as they lost their devotion and failed to protect their partner from new suitors.
York psychologist, Professor Arthur Arun, has been studying why people fall in love.
He asked his subjects to carry out the above 3 steps and found that many of his couples felt deeply attracted after the 34 minute experiment. Two of his subjects later got married.
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Monday, November 26, 2012
Thursday, November 22, 2012
True Story
Did you know that...
How much does human brain think? 70,000 is the
number of thoughts that it is estimated the
human brain produces on an average day.
Did you know that...
Albert Einsteins brain weighed 1,230 grams
(2.71 lbs), significantly less than the human
average of 1,300g to 1,400g (3 lbs).
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRnGYi6sO4yDFWeqq5c62hN4O7LGtqROqW88XaQCZUlc1UkyGJp5WhwyHeNOOOI_HuDS77SfDDNmycPci-U6p2AK6sEEcuv6YwdXj-z8YATsDXURjNBqFMUUK8JnKm_wQr4n1aBkFMlFAX/s320/einstein.jpg)
Did you know that...
The brain can stay alive for 4 to 6 minutes without oxygen.
After that cells begin die.
After that cells begin die.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
This week I'll upload some excellent videos that I found about many scientists who have changed the world: brilliant minds. Click on the link below!! :)
Brilliant Minds: Part 1
Brilliant Minds: Part 1
Why can’t a woman think like a man?” (and vice-versa).
Today I found an article about Why Why can’t a woman think like a man? (and vice versa).
Read it and discover all the interesting things about this subject ...
Girl Brain, Boy Brain?
The two are not the same, but new work shows just how wrong it is to assume that all gender differences are “hardwired”
By Lise Eliot
Sex differences in the brain are sexy. As MRI scanning grows ever more sophisticated, neuroscientists keep refining their search for male-female brain differences that will answer the age-old question, “Why can’t a woman think like a man?” (and vice-versa).
Social cognition is one realm in which the search for brain sex differences should be especially fruitful. Females of all ages outperform males on tests requiring the recognition of emotion or relationships among other people. Sex differences in empathy emerge in infancy and persist throughout development, though the gap between adult women and men is larger than between girls and boys. The early appearance of any sex difference suggests it is innately programmed—selected for through evolution and fixed into our behavioral development through either prenatal hormone exposure or early gene expression differences. On the other hand, sex differences that grow larger through childhood are likely shaped by social learning, a consequence of the very different lifestyle, culture and training that boys and girls experience in every human society.
At first glance, studies of the brain seem to offer a way out of this age-old nature/nurture dilemma. Any difference in the structure or activation of male and female brains is indisputably biological. However, the assumption that such differences are also innate or “hardwired” is invalid, given all we’ve learned about the plasticity, or malleability of the brain. Simply put, experiences change our brains.
Recent research by Peg Nopoulos, Jessica Wood and colleagues at the University of Iowa illustrates just how difficult it is to untangle nature and nurture, even at the level of brain structure. A first study, published in March 2008 found that one subdivision of the ventral prefrontal cortex—an area involved in social cognition and interpersonal judgment—is proportionally larger in women, compared to men. (Men’s brains are about 10 percent larger than women’s, overall, so any comparison of specific brain regions must be scaled in proportion to this difference.) This subdivision, known as the straight gyrus (SG), is a narrow strip of cerebral cortex running along the midline on the undersurface of the frontal lobe. Wood and colleagues found the SG to be about 10 percent larger in the thirty women they studied, compared to thirty men (after correcting for males’ larger brain size). What’s more, they found that the size of the SG correlated with a widely-used test of social cognition, so that individuals (both male and female) who scored higher in interpersonal awareness also tended to have larger SGs.
Monday, November 19, 2012
WELCOME!!
WELCOME!!
Hello boffins, today we begin a new chapter in this blog. This blog has been created especially for you, with relevant and interesting information about the operation and everything that surrounds the most complex organ of the human being: the brain.
You will have all kind of information, articles, videos and thoughts that will make this blog something different and unique,
Let´s make it together.
Let´s make it together.
Kisses ...
Brainy mom
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