Effing the Ineffable

How do we express what cannot be said?

By ROGER SCRUTON

Thomas Aquinas, who devoted some two million words to spelling out, in the Summa Theologica, the nature of the world, God’s purpose in creating it and our fate in traversing it, ended his short life (short by our standards, at least) in a state of ecstasy, declaring that all that he had written was of no significance beside the beatific vision that he had been granted, and in the face of which words fail. His was perhaps the most striking example of a philosopher who comes to believe that the real meaning of the world is ineffable. Having got to this point, Aquinas obeyed the injunction of Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concludes with the proposition: “that whereof we cannot speak we must consign to silence.”

But Aquinas was exceptional. The history of philosophy abounds in thinkers who, having concluded that the truth is ineffable, have gone on to write page upon page about it. One of the worst offenders is Kierkegaard, who argues in a hundred ways that the ultimate is inexpressible, that truth is “subjectivity,” that the meaning of life can be given by no formula, no proposition, no abstraction, but only by the concrete experience of surrender whose content can never be given in words.

The same idea occurs in Schopenhauer, for whom the truth of the world is Will, which cannot be represented in concepts. Schopenhauer devoted roughly 500,000 words to this thing that no words can capture. And he set a fashion that continues to this day.

I am currently reading a mercifully short book by Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, in which the argument is stated on the first page  — namely, that since music works through melodies, rhythms and harmonies and not through concepts, it contains no messages that can be translated into words. There follows 50,000 words devoted to the messages of music — often suggestive, poetic and atmospheric words, but words nevertheless, devoted to a subject that no words can capture.

The temptation to take refuge in the ineffable is not confined to philosophers. Every inquiry into first principles, original causes and fundamental laws, will at some stage come up against an unanswerable question: what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid? What explains those original causes or initial conditions? And the answer is that there is no answer — or no answer that can be expressed in terms of the science for which those laws, principles and causes are bedrock. And yet we want an answer. So how should we proceed?

There is nothing wrong with referring at this point to the ineffable. The mistake is to describe it. Jankélévitch is right about music. He is right that something can be meaningful, even though its meaning eludes all attempts to put it into words. Fauré’s F sharp Ballade is an example: so is the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa; so is the evening sunlight on the hill behind my house. Wordsworth would describe such experiences as “intimations,” which is fair enough, provided you don’t add (as he did) further and better particulars. Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world — a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.

I too am tempted to eff the ineffable. Like my philosophical predecessors, I want to describe that world beyond the window, even though I know that it cannot be described but only revealed. I am not alone in thinking that world to be real and important. But there are many who dismiss it as an unscientific fiction. And people of this scientistic cast of mind are disagreeable to me. Their nerdish conviction that facts alone can signify, and that the “transcendental” and the eternal are nothing but words, mark them out as incomplete. There is an aspect of the human condition that is denied to them.

Moreover, this aspect is of the first importance. Our loves and hopes in some way hinge on it. We love each other as angels love, reaching for the unknowable “I.” We hope as angels hope: with our thoughts fixed on the moment when the things of this world fall away and we are enfolded in “the peace which passes understanding.” Putting the point that way I have already said too much. For my words make it look as though the world beyond the window is actually here, like a picture on the stairs. But it is not here; it is there, beyond the window that can never be opened.

But a question troubles me as I am sure it troubles you. What do our moments of revelation have to do with the ultimate questions? When science comes to a halt, at those principles and conditions from which explanation begins, does the view from that window supply what science lacks? Do our moments of revelation point to the cause of the world?

When I don’t think about it, the answer seems clear. Yes, there is more to the world than the system of causes, for the world has a meaning and that meaning is revealed. But no, there is no path, not even this one, to the cause of the world: for that whereof we cannot speak, we must consign to silence — as Aquinas did.

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 

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

Related Links:

  Love Really Can Cure a Broken Heart 

  All You Need is Love 

  Love is a Drug 

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."

• New Theory for Why We Cry
• Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind
• Top 10 Things That Make Humans Special

Scientists prove principle of astrology and how birth month imprint your brain

Anatomical Man. Image source: Wikipedia

(NaturalNews) Mention the word "astrology" and skeptics go into an epileptic fit. The idea that someone's personality could be imprinted at birth according to the position of the sun, moon and planets has long been derided as "quackery" by the so-called "scientific" community which resists any notion based on holistic connections between individuals and the cosmos.

According to the conventional view, your genes and your parenting determine your personality, and the position of planet Earth at the time of your birth has nothing to do with it.

Then again, conventional scientists don't believe the position of the moon has anything to do with life on Earth, either. They dismiss the wisdom that farmers have known for ages -- that planting seeds or transplanting living plants in harmony with the moon cycles results in higher crop yields. Even the seeds inside humans are strongly influenced by the moon, as menstruation cycles and moon cycles are closely synchronized (28 days, roughly).

Researchers demonstrate scientific principle of astrology

Skeptics must be further bewildered by the new research published in Nature Neuroscience and conducted at Vanderbilt University which unintentionally provides scientific support for the fundamental principle of astrology -- namely, that the position of the planets at your time of birth influences your personality.

In this study, not only did the birth month impact personality; it also resulted immeasurable functional changes in the brain.

This study, conducted on mice, showed that mice born in the winter showed a "consistent slowing" of their daytime activity. They were also more susceptible to symptoms that we might call "Seasonal Affective Disorder."

The study was carried out by Professor of Biological Sciences Douglas McMahon, graduate student Chris Ciarleglio, post-doctoral fellow Karen Gamble and two additional undergraduate students, none of whom believe in astrology, apparently. They do, of course, believe in science, which is why all their study findings have been draped in the language of science even though the findings are essentially supporting principles of astrology.

"What is particularly striking about our results is the fact that the imprinting affects both the animal's behaviour and the cycling of the neurons in the master biological clock in their brains," said Ciarleglio. This is one of the core principles of astrology: That the position of the planets at the time of your birth (which might be called the "season" of your birth) can actually result in changes in your brain physiology which impact lifelong behavior.

Once again, such an idea sounds preposterous to the scientifically trained, unless of course they discover it for themselves, at which point it's all suddenly very "scientific." Instead of calling it "astrology," they're now referring to it as "seasonal biology."

How to discredit real science

It all reminds me of the discovery of cold fusion in 1989 by Fleishmann and Pons, who were widely ridiculed by the arrogant hot fusion researchers who tried to destroy the credibility (and careers) of cold fusion researchers (http://www.naturalnews.com/025925_c...). After the very idea of "cold fusion" was attacked and demolished by these arrogant scientists, it soon returned under a new name: Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR).

LENR has now been verified as true by none other than the U.S. Navy -- along with hundreds of other researchers around the world (see link above). And yet, even today, the conventional scientific community still insists cold fusion doesn't exist and cold fusion researchers are frauds.

Just as there is a solid scientific basis for LENR, there is a scientific basis for astrology, too. The relationship between the Earth, Moon and Sun naturally alter light exposure, temperature, gravitational pull and other conditions that may be sensed by living organisms. To believe in astrology, all that's really required is to grasp the basic concepts of the interrelationships between all living things. Does the position of the sun or moon influence life on Earth? Of course it does: Life as we know it wouldn't even exist without the moon tugging on Earth and preventing its rotational axis from shifting around to the point where radical changes in seasonal temperatures would make life far more challenging. (The moon, in other words, is one of the key "stabilizers" of life on planet Earth because it tends to stabilize the seasons and keep the Earth on a steady rotational plane.)

None of this, of course, means that the position of Saturn today is going to make you win the lottery or find a new love. That's the tabloid version of astrology, not real astrology.

Don't confuse tabloid astrology with real astrology

Even astronomy has its tabloid versions, too, which are entirely non-scientific. For example, every model of our solar system that I've ever seen is a wildly inaccurate tabloid version of reality, with planet sizes ridiculously exaggerated and planet distances not depicted to scale. These silly, non-scientific solar system models imprint a kind of solar system mythology into the minds of schoolchildren and even school teachers. Virtually no one outside the communities of astrophysics and astronomy has any real grasp of the enormity of not merely our solar system, but of our galaxy and the space between neighboring galaxies.

To show a giant sun the size of a basketball, with a depiction of the Earth as a marble-sized planet three inches away is the astronomical equivalent of a gimmicky horoscope claiming you're going to win the lottery today because you were born under the sign of Pisces. Both are fictions. And both are an insult to real science.

In fact, even the whole idea that an "electron" is a piece of physical matter, made up of other "particles" is an insult to real science. The sobering truth of the matter is that "particle physics" doesn't have much to do with actual particles at all. It's all about energies that might, on occasion, vibrate in just the right way so that they momentarily appear to take on the illusion of a particle as measured by our observers -- observers who inevitably alter the outcome of the entire experiment, by the way, once again proving the interrelated nature of things in our universe, including observer and experiment.

The horoscope predictions in the Sunday paper -- as well as much of the hilarious mythology found in the modern description of an atom -- are both simplified, comic-book versions of a larger truth -- the truth that we live in a holistic universe where every bit of physical matter, every bit of energy and every conscious mind impacts the rest of the universe in subtle ways. There is no such thing as an individual who is isolated from the cosmos, because we areof the cosmosand we exist as the physical manifestations of energies that, for our lifetimes, are momentarily organized as beings.

We are made of star stuff, says Carl Sagan. He he's right: We are not only made of star stuff, we are influenced by that stuff, too. And finally, modern science is beginning to catch up to this greater truth that astrologers have known since the dawn of human existence on our tiny planet.

(NaturalNews)

Blogging out of Balance

SEVERAL INDEPENDENT ASSESSMENTS HAVE REACHED IDENTICAL CONCLUSIONS: IN THE SCIENCE BLOGOSPHERE, MEN SIGNIFICANTLY OUTNUMBER WOMEN. IS THIS EVIDENCE OF DISCRIMINATION?


Could the disparity in numbers of bloggers be related to a difference in the underlying population of scientists? A recent report (PDF) by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) showed that in 2009, women received more PhDs than men in the U.S. But do those numbers hold for science PhDs as well?


While men do slightly outnumber women in science, math, and engineering PhDs, the disparity in numbers is much smaller than the disparity we see on the major blogging networks, including ResearchBlogging, where male bloggers outnumber female bloggers by over three to one in the same fields as the CGS report. 


Of course, even though women have nearly drawn equal with men in earning science PhDs, men still far outnumber women in tenured- and tenure-track positions. At MIT, for example, a 2006 report found no department with more than 30 percent women faculty, and just three of six with more than 20 percent women. Could this male dominance in the upper echelons of academe be discouraging women from blogging?
§ SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
>> more: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/blogging_out_of_balance/

Which way is she turning?

The Right Brain vs Left Brain test ... 
do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

A spinning dancer has been fascinating me for a long time now. I am sure you have seen it online somewhere already....
Few years back I got an email with animated (gif) image with a silhouette of dancing ballerina. I took time to further analyze it. And I couldn't decide why the direction of her movement sometimes would change during the spin. Sometime, but not always. My eyes and my feelings played tricks on me!? Why the perception was not stable? It's been puzzling me ever since.

I have tried with few of my friends. It didn't help me — the tricky spinning/pirouetting ballerina still dances tirelessly... So lets see if we can find out how my readers perceive her movement. [I put a poll above, on the top of this page, please make your choice.]

If you are a left brainer, you will see the ballerina turning anti-clockwise.
The left brain function includes:

1. uses logic
2. detail oriented
3. facts rule
4. words and languages
5. present and past
6. math and science
7. can comprehend
8. knowing
9. acknowledges
10. knows object name
11. reality based
12. forms strategies
13. practical
14. safe

And if you are a right brainer, you will see the ballerina turning clockwise.
The right brain function includes:

1. uses feelings
2. ‘big picture’ oriented
3. imagination rules
4. symbols and images
5. present and future
6. philosophy & religion
7. can ‘get it’
8. believes
9. appreciates
10. spatial perception
11. knows object function
12. fantasy based
13. presents possibilities
14. impetuous
15. risk taking

So, which side of the brain do you think with most of the time? You can see for yourself how the ballerina turns and you will get the answer.But there again, the human mind is never one sided. We all have the ability to ‘see’ the ballerina turning both clockwise and anti-clockwise.

Read more > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spinning_Dancer

Scent of a woman: Men's testosterone responses to olfactory ovulation cues

Scent of a woman: Men's testosterone responses to olfactory ovulation cues

Women around the world spend billions of dollars each year on exotic smelling perfumes and lotions in the hopes of attracting a mate. However, according to a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, going "au natural" may be the best way to capture a potential mate's attention.

Smells are known to be critical to animal mating habits: Animal studies have shown that male testosterone levels are influenced by odor signals emitted by females, particularly when they are ovulating (that is, when they are the most fertile). Psychological scientists Saul L. Miller and Jon K. Maner from Florida State University wanted to see if a similar response occurs in humans. In two studies, women wore tee shirts for 3 nights during various phases of their menstrual cycles. Male volunteers smelled one of the tee shirts that had been worn by a female participant. In addition, some of the male volunteers smelled control tee shirts that had not been worn by anyone. Saliva samples for testosterone analysis were collected before and after the men smelled the shirts.

Results revealed that men who smelled tee shirts of ovulating women subsequently had higher levels of testosterone than men who smelled tee shirts worn by non-ovulating women or men who smelled the control shirts. In addition, after smelling the shirts, the men rated the odors on pleasantness and rated the shirts worn by ovulating women as the most pleasant smelling.

The authors note that "the present research is the first to provide direct evidence that olfactory cues to female ovulation influence biological responses in men." In other words, this study suggests that testosterone levels may be responsive to smells indicating when a woman is fertile. The authors conclude that this biological response may promote mating-related behavior by males.

Dear Darwin,

I’m seeking the ideal mate, and I just don’t know what to do. I could mate with the biggest, strongest male in my niche, but all the other females are just as interested in him as I am, and I’m worried he won’t give our offspring and me the attention we deserve. I could have a less-attractive male all to myself, but then I run the risk of having inferior offspring. I’m half-tempted to pair up with a runt, but then mate with the hunk on the side. What do you think? Is monogamy all it’s cracked up to be?

— Evolving in Evanston

Dear Evolving,

You said it, sister! True monogamy is actually quite rare among animals. Take birds, for example. While there are lots of socially monogamous birds, pairing up for a season or even for life, true loyalty is much more rare. As Jeremy Yoder, a graduate student who studies symbiosis in moths and Joshua trees notes on his blog, as many as 90 percent of bird species “cheat” on their mates, and about 11 percent of chicks aren’t fathered by the bird the mother has paired with.

As you point out, female birds may be cheating in order to improve the fitness of their offspring, choosing a social partner for loyalty but getting their eggs fertilized by a stronger, more attractive male, and also possibly to reduce the chances of inbreeding. Males are motivated to cheat by the prospect of disseminating their genes more widely. But in the real world, the results aren’t always as straightforward. Yoder points to a 2010 study led by Andrea Townsend and published in The American Naturalist. The researchers found that female crows, while exhibiting social monogamy, did indeed engage in “infidelity,” both with males inside and outside the family group.

But far from being more fit, the offspring that resulted from such promiscuity tended to be more inbred than the “legitimate” offspring of a pair. The only beneficiaries seemed to be the adulterous male crows, who indeed did disseminate their genes more widely.

So for a female like you, cheating might seem like a good option, but it may not pay off as handsomely as you might hope.

— Darwin

{TO CHEAT OR NOT TO CHEAT? / BY DAVE MUNGER }

The Achilles’ Heel of Aging: a proven method to extend life exists

....a proven method to extend life already exists; scientists have known about it since the 1930s. It’s called calorie restriction, or CR. Feed a mouse a nutritious diet that has 30 percent fewer calories, and she lives 30 percent longer than the one in the next cage.

Emotion’s Alchemy

New insights into the science of emotion unravel the seeming neurological magic that turns emotions into social expressions. 


Our brains can “mirror” the actions of those we watch. We feel our muscles clench when we watch a figure skater twist in the air, or when we crack a smile as a stage performer grins. That’s the work of the proposed “human mirror neuron network,” part of our visual brain. Basically, swaths of neurons in the human premotor cortex activate both when we are performing an action and watching someone else perform that action. The young science of our mirroring ability is rapidly gaining a spot in emotional neurobiology. After all, “motion” and “emotion” live just one letter apart.


Laughing and crying provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain.

Laughter, real laugh-till-you-cry laughter, is one of many human emotional expressions. Arguably, laughing and its tearful counterpart, crying, are the loudest, most intrusive non-linguistic expressions of our species. But for all of that familiarity, they are little-understood behavioral mysteries parading in the light of everyday experience. Though evolutionary biologists have long explored the mammalian origins of emotional expression, human laughs and cries only rarely become subjects of cognitive neuroscience. But that may not stay the case. Laughing and crying, being live demonstrations of emotion and its social expression, provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain.

For centuries, philosophers and physiologists have puzzled over the phenomenon of emotion. Where are joy, sadness, fear located in the “gelatinous substance” of the brain? wondered nineteenth century phrenologist Franz Gall. How is emotion’s expression related to subjective feeling? In the 1890s, psychologists William James and Carl Lange suggested we don’t cry because we are sad, rather, “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble,” but other theories reigned. And though the James-Lange theory has had a resurgence in recent decades, not until fMRI technology revealed images of the emotional brain could we begin to empirically explore Shakespeare’s musing in The Merchant of Venice: “Tell me where is fancy bred / Or in the heart, or in the head?”

>> more at: Emotion’s Alchemy