January 30, 2011

How to Get Perky Eyes at Every Age

The secret to great eyes is to start taking care of them as soon as possible. Whether you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, or 50s and beyond, it's never too late to start giving your peepers a little TLC. Here, we show you the treatments to start now to ensuregorgeous eyes no matter how old you are.

In Your 20s...Start to Prep

Wrinkles might be the last thing you see near your eyes in your twenties, but dark circles from lack of sleep or one too many cocktails are probably frequent visitors on your face. This doesn't directly age you, but it sure as heck makes you look older. Dr. David E. Bank, MD, suggests using a good eye cream to slow down the aging process and keep wrinkles away longer. Apply a lighter cream with SPF in the morning, like Neutrogena Visibly Firm Eye Cream, and a thicker one at night like RoC Retinol Correxion Deep Wrinkle Night Cream. To avoid breakouts, steer clear of creams that contain octyl stearate, which can clog pores and leave your skin feeling greasy.

Pair this routine with getting at least seven hours of sleep, not smoking, and eating relatively healthy. You're not young forever, after all!

In Your 30s...Find a Serum

Since the first signs of aging usually happen around the eyes, you may start to see some differences in your thirties, warns Bank. "On top of the beginning appearances of crow's feet, you'll notice that your skin is drier and duller in color. This is because the rate of new cells being produced by your skin is starting to slow down."

Bank recommends investing in an eye cream to rejuvenate the skin, like Neocutis Biogel or a serum, likeLancôme Rénergie Microlift R.A.R.E Eye Serum to help tighten fine lines and brighten up dark circles. "Stay away from eye creams with sodium chloride or isopropyl myristate, as these ingredients can irritate your skin and lead to excessive dryness," says Bank.

In Your 40s...Keep Hydrated

By the time you're in your forties, the years of sun damage you did in your twenties finally start to rear its ugly head. That, on top of what Bank calls your lymphatic drainage — the way your body gets rid of toxins decreases in speed to result in puffiness around the eyes and much thinner skin. Since sebum production is also starting to slow (how your skin stays moisturized and sometimes too oily), invest in a rich moisturizer and a skin brightener to lighten up a tired complexion.

Try Olay Regenerist Eye Lifting Serum or L'Oreal Plenitude Revitalift Anti-Wrinkle Firming Cream to fix worn out eyes and tighten up puffy skin.

In Your 50s and Beyond...Squash Wrinkled Lids

"A key sign of aging around the eyes is when your eyelids become hooded and wrinkled," says Bank. "This shows that the skin's elasticity is starting to break down." Bank suggests trying a vitamin A retinol-based product to help firm up and even out skin tone. By applying regularly, you can actually speed up the production of new skin cells and collagen.

Moisturizing is even more vital for a healthy complexion now, and finding a hard working night creamcan do wonders on dry skin as you sleep. Try NeoCutis Lumiere Bio-restorative Eye Cream with PSP for day and Clinique Anti-Gravity Firming Eye Lift Cream for nighttime use.

Related Links

Deflate Puffy Eyes in a Flash
Wrinkle-Free Eyes at Every Age
Get Rid of Dark Circles
5-Minute Makeup Lessons
Beauty Tips That'll Change Your Life

January 26, 2011

Why does music make us feel?

The Neuroscience Of Music

Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. (Some speculate that this is why we begin tapping our feet.) In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. As Schopenhauer wrote, “It is we ourselves who are tortured by the strings.”

We can now begin to understand where these feelings come from, why a mass of vibrating air hurtling through space can trigger such intense states of excitement. A brand new paper in Nature Neuroscienceby a team of Montreal researchers marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of “the potent pleasurable stimulus” that is music. Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including fMRI and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people that experience “chills to instrumental music,” the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. (These were the lucky few who most reliably got chills.) The scientists then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favorite songs – virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango – and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored.

Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI) they were able to obtain an impressively precise portrait of music in the brain. The first thing they discovered (using ligand-based PET) is that music triggers the release of dopamine in both the dorsal and ventral striatum. This isn’t particularly surprising: these regions have long been associated with the response to pleasurable stimuli. It doesn’t matter if we’re having sex or snorting cocaine or listening to Kanye: These things fill us with bliss because they tickle these cells. Happiness begins here.

The more interesting finding emerged from a close study of the timing of this response, as the scientists looked to see what was happening in the seconds before the subjects got the chills. I won’t go into the precise neural correlates – let’s just say that you should thank your right NAcc the next time you listen to your favorite song – but want to instead focus on an interesting distinction observed in the experiment:

In essence, the scientists found that our favorite moments in the music were preceeded by a prolonged increase of activity in the caudate. They call this the “anticipatory phase” and argue that the purpose of this activity is to help us predict the arrival of our favorite part:

Immediately before the climax of emotional responses there was evidence for relatively greater dopamine activity in the caudate. This subregion of the striatum is interconnected with sensory, motor and associative regions of the brain and has been typically implicated in learning of stimulus-response associations and in mediating the reinforcing qualities of rewarding stimuli such as food.

In other words, the abstract pitches have become a primal reward cue, the cultural equivalent of a bell that makes us drool. Here is their summary:

The anticipatory phase, set off by temporal cues signaling that a potentially pleasurable auditory sequence is coming, can trigger expectations of euphoric emotional states and create a sense of wanting and reward prediction. This reward is entirely abstract and may involve such factors as suspended expectations and a sense of resolution. Indeed, composers and performers frequently take advantage of such phenomena, and manipulate emotional arousal by violating expectations in certain ways or by delaying the predicted outcome (for example, by inserting unexpected notes or slowing tempo) before the resolution to heighten the motivation for completion. The peak emotional response evoked by hearing the desired sequence would represent the consummatory or liking phase, representing fulfilled expectations and accurate reward prediction. We propose that each of these phases may involve dopamine release, but in different subcircuits of the striatum, which have different connectivity and functional roles.

The question, of course, is what all these dopamine neurons are up to. What aspects of music are they responding to? And why are they so active fifteen seconds before the acoustic climax? After all, we typically associate surges of dopamine with pleasure, with the processing of actual rewards. And yet, this cluster of cells in the caudate is most active when the chills have yet to arrive, when the melodic pattern is still unresolved.

One way to answer these questions is to zoom out, to look at the music and not the neuron. While music can often seem (at least to the outsider) like a labyrinth of intricate patterns – it’s art at its most mathematical – it turns out that the most important part of every song or symphony is when the patterns break down, when the sound becomes unpredictable. If the music is too obvious, it is annoyingly boring, like an alarm clock. (Numerous studies, after all, have demonstrated that dopamine neurons quickly adapt to predictable rewards. If we know what’s going to happen next, then we don’t get excited.) This is why composers introduce the tonic note in the beginning of the song and then studiously avoid it until the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. That is when we get the chills.

To demonstrate this psychological principle, the musicologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analyzed the 5^th movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with – but not submission to – our expectations of order. To prove his point, Meyer dissected fifty measures of Beethoven’s masterpiece, showing how Beethoven begins with the clear statement of a rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then, in an intricate tonal dance, carefully avoids repeating it. What Beethoven does instead is suggest variations of the pattern. He is its evasive shadow. If E major is the tonic, Beethoven will play incomplete versions of the E major chord, always careful to avoid its straight expression. He wants to preserve an element of uncertainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. Beethoven saves that chord for the end.

According to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music (arising out of our unfulfilled expectations) that is the source of the music’s feeling. While earlier theories of music focused on the way a noise can refer to the real world of images and experiences (its “connotative” meaning), Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself. This “embodied meaning” arises from the patterns the symphony invokes and then ignores, from the ambiguity it creates inside its own form. “For the human mind,” Meyer writes, “such states of doubt and confusion are abhorrent. When confronted with them, the mind attempts to resolve them into clarity and certainty.” And so we wait, expectantly, for the resolution of E major, for Beethoven’s established pattern to be completed. This nervous anticipation, says Meyer, “is the whole raison d’etre of the passage, for its purpose is precisely to delay the cadence in the tonic.” The uncertainty makes the feeling – it is what triggers that surge of dopamine in the caudate, as we struggle to figure out what will happen next. And so our neurons search for the undulating order, trying to make sense of this flurry of pitches. We can predict some of the notes, but we can’t predict them all, and that is what keeps us listening, waiting expectantly for our reward, for the errant pattern to be completed. Music is a form whose meaning depends upon its violation.

By Jonah Lehrer

January 25, 2011

reblogging is in!

It is interesting — or should I say boring — when I go from one of my most favourite blogs to another and discover the same piece of information ,or the same set of photos, being reblogged in a different format, different comments and different context?
Almost the same way as news travels, depending who gets in touch of the original piece of information first. And everyone else soon follows, reposts, reblogs, etc...
So, I am not feeling bed ever again for not being original in my posts!
Reblog is the thing! Everyone does it!
Happy reblogging!
ps. Check the blogs I am following, most of them have a lot of content in common, if not the same, just reposted in a different order. Am I right? Tell me...

January 20, 2011

Average UK woman wears 515 chemicals a day!

The average British woman "hosts" 515 chemicals on her body every day, according to a new study.

The poll of 2,016 women by deodorant-maker Bionsen said most of the pollutants are self-inflicted by women who sprayed on deodorant, slapped on body moisturiser and applied lipstick each morning.

Today's average British woman uses body and facial moisturisers, perfumes, deodorants and various other make-up products which leave them unknowingly carrying hundreds of chemicals on their bodies throughout the day, Bionsen said.

Moisturiser can contain over 30 different chemicals and perfume up to 400, it added.

More than a third of the women who took part in the study were unaware of the key ingredients in their toiletries, with only nine percent aware of most of the ingredients in the cosmetics they put on each day.

More than 70 percent of the women polled said they were not concerned about the number of chemicals they put on their skin and only one in 10 opted for chemical-free toiletries when shopping.

"Women have never been more image-conscious and their beauty regimes have changed dramatically over the years, from a simple 'wash & go' attitude, to daily fake tan applications, regular manicures, false lashes and hair extensions," Bionsen's Charlotte Smith said in a statement.

"Lots of the high-tech, new generation cosmetics and beauty 'wonder' treatments naturally contain more chemicals to be able to achieve even better results, which, of course, means that women now carry more chemicals than ever before."

8 out of the 12 areas on the body highlighted by Bionsen as places where women used cosmetic products containing chemicals were on the face or head and included moisturisers, foundation, blush, eye make-up, hair spray and perfume head or face.

(Reporting by Paul Casciato; Editing by Steve Addison)

January 15, 2011

New Zodiac Sign Dates: Ophiuchus The 13th Sign?

If you're the type of person who relies on mysterious-sounding locations of stars to determine your personality and outcome in life, get ready to be shocked.

The field of astrology, which is concerned with horoscopes and the like, felt a major disruption from astronomers, who are concerned with actual stars and planets. The astronomers from the Minnesota Planetarium Society found that because of the moon's gravitational pull on Earth, the alignment of the stars was pushed by about a month.

(More on TIME.com: See if your horoscope will change with the "new" Zodiac model.)

"When [astrologers] say that the sun is in Pisces, it's really not in Pisces," noted Parke Kunkle, a member of the group's board. Your astrological sign is determined by the position of the sun on the day you were born, so that means everything you thought you knew about your horoscope is wrong.

It turns out that astrology has had issues from its inception. (Aside from the fact that it tries to link personality traits with positions of the stars.) Ancient Babylonians had 13 constellations, but wanted only 12, so threw out Ophuchicus, the snake holder. Libra didn't even enter the picture until the era of Julius Caesar.

According to the Minnesota Planetarium Society, here is where the real signs of the Zodiac should fall. Get ready for your world to change forever.

Capricorn: Jan. 20-Feb. 16.
Aquarius: Feb. 16-March 11.
Pisces: March 11-April 18.
Aries: April 18-May 13.
Taurus: May 13-June 21.
Gemini: June 21-July 20.
Cancer: July 20-Aug. 10.
Leo: Aug. 10-Sept. 16.
Virgo: Sept. 16-Oct. 30.
Libra: Oct. 30-Nov. 23.
Scorpio: Nov. 23-29.
Ophiuchus: Nov. 29-Dec. 17. (Yep, this one is new — read all about the Ophiuchus way of life here)
Sagittarius: Dec. 17-Jan. 20.

(More on NewsFeed: See the counterpoint from American astrologers)

January 11, 2011

Falling in Love Only Takes About a Fifth of a Second

A new meta-analysis study has revealed that falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second. What's more, it can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of your brain.

When you fall in love, 12 areas of your brain work together to release euphoria-inducing chemicals. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image.

Science Daily reports:

"The study also shows different parts of the brain fall for love. For example, unconditional love, such as that between a mother and a child, is sparked by the common and different brain areas, including the middle of the brain. Passionate love is sparked by the reward part of the brain, and also associative cognitive brain areas that have higher-order cognitive functions, such as body image."

Reposted from Dr. Mercola

January 8, 2011

Scent of a woman's tears lowers men's desire

What a downer! Men who smell a woman's tears experience a dip in both sexual arousal and testosterone, a new study finds.

The libido-dampening effect occurred even when the men never saw the women cry and didn't know they were sniffing tears, researchers report online today (Jan. 6, 2011) in the journal Science.

The results are the first to suggest that humans can chemically communicate with tears.

"We conclude that there is a chemosignal in human tears, and at least one of the things the chemosignal does is reduce sexual arousal," study researcher Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, told LiveScience.

An odorless signal

It's obvious that humans communicate both verbally and visually, but recent research has shown that chemosignals also carry lots of information. Chemosignals may be entirely odorless - in Sobel's study, participants were unable to tell the difference between tears and saline solution - but they affect both behavior and physiology.

Earlier work by Sobel and others found that male sweat can boost mood and sexual arousal in women, as well as bumping up their levels of the stress hormone cortisol. And a 2004 study published in the journal Hormones and Behavior found that the scent of a lactating woman's nursing pads could increase sexual desire in other women.

Scientists have found that emotional tears contain more proteinthan do the everyday tears that protect the eyes. Until now, however, chemical signals in tears had been found only in mice and blind mole rats. To investigate the phenomenon in humans, Sobel and his colleagues put out fliers recruiting people who could cry easily. They got about 70 responses (only one of them from a man), he said. The researchers screened the volunteers and found the three best criers - women who could produce at least a milliliter of tears while watching a sad movie.

The researchers then had 24 men sniff both saline and the women's tears. Both the tears and saline had been allowed to roll down the women's cheeks, as a way to control for any odors in their skin or sweat.

None of the men could tell the difference between the two samples, and even the experimenter was kept in the dark about which she was presenting. The men then saw photos of women's faces, which they rated for sadness and sexual attractiveness. [Read Sexual Pheromones: Myth or Reality?]

"To our surprise, there was absolutely no influence on sadness or empathy or anything of that sort that we had expected," Sobel said. However, "sexual arousal dropped after sniffing tears."

Questions about crying

The researchers tried the experiment again, this time priming 50 male volunteers for sadness by showing them a depressing video clip. Again, sniffing tears instead of saline didn't make men sadder. But it did lower their sexual arousal and their testosterone levels.

As a final experiment, the researchers repeated the tear-sniffing with 16 men who were situated inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI). The fMRI shows patterns of blood flow in the brain, which coincide with brain activity.

Sure enough, the tears reduced activity in areas known to be involved in sexual arousal. Those areas included the hypothalamus, an almond-size structure just above the brainstem, and the left fusiform gyrus, which is on the surface of the left side of the brain.

The study was "very well done," said Charles Wysocki, a psychobiologist at the Monell Chemical Sense Center in Philadelphia.

"Tears contain proteins that are also found in the underarm," Wysocki told LiveScience. "And in the underarm they bind the chemicals that we think are involved with chemical communication, so it's quite possible that these proteins found in tears might be doing the same thing."

The finding is likely to remain controversial until researchers discover a specific chemical that causes the response, however. Sobel's lab is now working to identify the compound in tears that sends the signal.

"There's something that's operating at a very low concentration to cause this effect," George Preti, an organic chemist at the Monell Center who wasn't involved in the study, told LiveScience. "It's obviously a molecule with a lot of oomph."

The study also raises questions of whether children's and men's tears send signals, and what signals are conveyed within one's own gender by tears. Whether happy tears send a signal is another open question, Wysocki said.

"You can understand where women might not be aroused when they are, in fact, crying," Wysocki said. "And maybe they're telling the male, it's a chemical communication way of saying 'No' or at least 'Not now.' You can see that, it makes sense. But if doesn't make sense to have the same chemical signal being released when a guy gets back after a year of tour of duty and his wife greets him withtears of happiness and pleasure. I would speculate that those tears would be containing something else."

Given the newfound parallel between rodents and human tears, the idea that humans are the only mammals to cry emotional tears may be wrong, Sobel said.

"Human emotional tears were considered unique because they were considered purely an emotional response," he said. "But what we've shown is that they're a form of chemosignaling, at least in part, and that puts them on par with mice tears and mole-rat tears."

January 4, 2011

Style Tips From Sex And The City

Twelve years ago Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda strutted onto our TV screens and forever meshed feminism and style. Take a look back on some of those beauty moments from Season I to the big screen. (By Rose L. Thayer)

How It All Began

It all began back in 1998 with Carrie's crispy curls, white eyeliner, and those awkward interviews during each episode — nothing could stop women everywhere from being captivated by her (and her friends') trials and tribulations! Let's journey through some of the looks we've loved — and loved to hate — from Season 1 right through the Sex and the City sequel. Bring on the hats, shoes, halter tops, and hair dos and don'ts!

Classic Charlotte

Count on Charlotte to always be put-together, conservative, and simply elegant. Her style is the epitome of the classic American look, ripped straight from the pages of a Ralph Lauren catalog. Whether she's working at her art gallery, attending singles' night at a synagogue, or chasing around two children and a nanny, Charlotte never falters in her dress — or her morals.

The Ever-Evolving Carrie

No matter how you feel about the insane outfits Carrie has worn throughout the years (which change as often as she and Mr. Big break up), you can't deny that she pulls them off with her trademark je ne sais quoi. Who else could travel to Paris in such a clichéd Parisian hat and make it look so chic and effortless, or sport a petticoat and Dior fashions in the Arabian Desert? But, hey, how many of us, given the body, budget, and opportunity, can really say we wouldn't do the same?

That Is So Samantha

Samantha is a woman who knows what she wants and knows who she is. She keeps her look the same — bangs, blond hair, and hot man candy by her side — but plays it up with trendy outfits, Birkin bags, and sparkling, treading-on-gaudy jewelry.

No-Nonsense Miranda

Thank goodness Miranda's tough lawyer look wears off as the show continues. Everything about early Miranda is harsh, from her super-dark, slicked back red hair to the no-nonsense way she handles the men in her life. Before Steve, who knew she even had a soft side?

Series Finale

By the close of the series in 2004, all the women are looking their best. They have really found their groove — in their lives and in their styles. Miranda especially is dramatically and beautifully transformed by the final season. Her highlighted, layered bob softens her overall appearance, and gone is the buttoned-up, no-frills fashion sense of the earlier episodes.

The Fab Four Today

Twelve years later, these four women still look amazing — you could say they're like fine wine! And judging by the box office numbers for their latest film, it seems that America is still madly in love. We'll stay tuned for Sex and the City: The Golden Years!