How Happy are the Forgetful

Hey, it's already Christmas Eve. I said there would be more posts, and this will be the first! Several more massively substantive ones are in the works, and I'm still trying to come up with a couple of holiday season ones for this week. To say the least, I'll be posting a lot more than usual to make up for lost time this and next week.

I could do a healthcare followup, but at this time of the year, most don't want to think about the sad turns that took, since we sacrificed many of the best things we were fighting for just to appease Joe Lieberman (Amongst others) in the Senate, and a large number of people will continue to go without healthcare access and inevitably die because of the compromises made. (It's kind of funny how when compromise comes up in government, it's always from the Democrats, while the Republicans seem to believe they can simply get away with outright obstructing government function now, showing how broken our congressional system is getting, as slanted against the interests of the American people as it now is.) We're turning "healthcare reform" into a giveaway to the insurance industry, propping up a system citizens need to be able to circumvent, as healthcare does not work as a for-profit industry. But of course, like all things noble, the right-wing would have to turn this into a farce, their interests vested elsewhere than the best interests of the people. At this rate, I'm a still pretty skeptical that anything will get passed and that we'll see anything resembling meaningful change due to obstructionists who couldn't care less about healthcare access as a human right. As a sort of federal Xmas gift for the American people, the Senate bill passed its final hurdle this morning - though even Howard Dean has said that it wasn't worth passing as it stood - so we've got something to expand coverage to another 30 million people. Likewise, getting something passed is technically a victory over obstructionists and lays the groundwork for future revision and work on improving our healthcare system, since even in having lost the public option at this point - one of the most important things previously on the table - that's not say we can't bring it back at some point, perhaps if we can elect a congress actually interested in representing the people instead of running the country into the ground for corporate profiteering. (This is me acknowledging that I probably will have to leave this country sometime in the next several years to have any hope of living in a decent first world nation where standard of living is actually considered important - more so than corporate money.) So overall, I'm displeased about what we've ended up with, but at the same time, my feelings are mixed - we're teetering on the brink of what is technically at least some sort of reform despite all the obstructionist efforts to stop it entirely, a lot of non-insurance industry people do still stand to benefit. (We still have to reconcile the House and Senate bills in the spring before we'll see anything cross Obama's desk, but we've got two bills passed now, in the least. And I have a feeling we'll see the right fight to hold onto the House bill's Stupak-Pitts amendment, which seeks to decisively eliminate a woman's right of choice by removing the ability to purchase health insurance that covers abortion. Downright misogynistic.) But it does have to be said that our obsession with corporatism and the idea of corporatism as the "free market" guiding everything winning against humane thought once again is never pleasant to see. That kind of thinking - and seemingly intense disinterest in reform in China - made the Copenhagen climate change summit into a sad farce as well, and I hate to think about how much shrieking we're going to hear about climate change legislation here next year. (Particularly from the crowd convinced that those leaked emails including terms like "trick" and "hide the decline" that global warming deniers want to take as proof that somehow industrial pollution is having no negative effect on the world at all and it's all a big hoax. All people who have no understanding of the science, nor any interest in the objective reality of what's happening in all its complexity - it's sad that these bottom of the barrel conspiracy theories have been brought into the mainstream by today's furious Republicans in this country. They wouldn't be so angry if they actually took the time to understand what it was Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin were trying so hard to get them steamed up about.) Irate, further disillusioned political tangent over.

Time to cut to the chase instead of rambling as much. You're all overdue for another of my science posts. You can't get enough of them. In fact, I'm your only source for science news. (Don't ask me how I know that - I just know.) So it's time to drop a few more brain-factoids on you. Just like that one dream you had. You're weird.

Back in early November, a study was published in the Australian Science journal's November/December issue on the effects of good and bad moods. The study was carried out through inducing happy and sad moods in the research subjects through film viewings and recollections of positive and negative events.

Their findings included that people in negative moods were more attentive to and critical of their surroundings than happier people, who were more inclined to accept things they were told at face value. (You've heard it here first - happy people are suckers. All of them.) The findings also suggested that sadness "promotes information processing strategies best suited to dealing with more demanding situations."

Some of you happy-mongers out there might be yelling, "Hey, come on! Happiness can't be an altogether bad thing at your monitor right now!" Stop it. I can't hear you through the internet. See how happy people are!? Anyway, you should be happy to know that their findings also found that positive moods "promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation, and reliance on mental shortcuts." Good for you. You're more pleasant to be around and all these other good things - though good arguments can be made for unhappiness and creativity, as a post coming in the near future will also discuss. (Noticing the recurring trend of the power of negativity on this blog? Have a cookie.)

Despite these findings on happiness, they also found that "negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking paying greater attention to the external world." It almost seems to suggest that happiness forms sort of a shell around people that helps them filter and somewhat disconnect from the outside world. The rest of us are raw nerves who know exactly what's what. (Or so the findings in this one particular study seem to suggest. Let's all not forget to wear our critical thinking scientific method caps. The last time we forgot them, we decided getting hamsters to smoke cigarettes was a good idea - let us not repeat that tragedy.) Speaking of which, one the experiments that made up the study entailed asking the subjects to judge the truth of various rumors and urban legends, and - as you'd expect from the rest of these findings - those in negative moods were less likely to believe the statements presented to them.

Those in unpleasant moods were also found less likely to make snap decisions based on racial or religious prejudice - apparently happiness is inherently bigoted (Or that hypothetical 'happiness shell' makes you less likely to care about offending someone with your bigotry.), are you learning anything today? - and were also less likely to make mistakes when recalling events they witnessed. The happier you are, the more you forget, shrouded in your warm fog.

The sour were also found to be better at making their case in written arguments, that a "mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style." Is there no way in which misery cannot better us?

Concluding, study author psychology professor Joseph Forgas (University of New South Wales) stated that "Positive mood is not universally desirable: people in negative mood are less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages."

Begrudgingly, I'll give you that it's probably healthiest for us to live a more centered life where we maintain some sort of balance in our moods - what of one we can - as so to enjoy the positives of the ups and downs of daily human existence. But would this blog be anywhere near as sharp, biting, incisive, and impossible to tear yourself away from if not for my unrelenting negativity? I submit that it would not!

See, wasn't some more negative-thinking science exactly what you wanted for Xmas Eve? Don't worry, I'm going to come up with something weird and comical for Xmas Day within these 24 hours. And I've got a good several quality, substantive posts on the way to close the year - and decade! - on a good note here. Look forward to something goofy and likely inevitably slapdash in the next 13-14ish hours and have an enjoyable holiday, readers!

Double-Edged Optimism

Hey, look! Two and a half weeks later and another blog post! TWO posts in ONE month? Now that's something to celebrate. (On the upside, despite my lack of regular posting, I added an update to my novel info on the right column here to at least provide more of an indicator of progress. And I HAVE been productive despite how slow I've been here lately. Last ten chapters and epilogue, and then it's time to start chucking bricks through agents' windows. (Metaphorically, of course.))

At any rate, we're less than a month from the autumnal equinox, so we've arrived at last in the final weeks of summer! Summer has a track record of being a slower blogging period for me, so I should be getting back to business on this front more soon. (Especially once I've begun the agent querying process, since I'll effectively be laying the groundwork for my second novel at that time, and that tends to take longer and is generally less intensive than the main writing and editing work.) Plus, with the new TV season beginning next month, that always provides some decent pop culture babbling fodder.

Getting down to business, as some may recall, I blogged about optimism and its seeming apparent health benefits not quite half a year ago. You've all developed an appetite for my science posts by now, haven't you? Of course you have. (YOU DON'T GET A CHOICE.) Anyway, the short of it is that optimists lead longer, healthier lives than pessimists, according to University of Pittsburgh researchers. As a cynic, I was a smug jerk about the whole thing. (It's contractual.) HOWEVER! Nearly half a year later, I get to enjoy contradicting that last post (Implicitly smugly) courtesy of a recent study by Canadian psychologists.

The power of positive thinking, you say? NOT SO! The power of frustrating failure to delude one's self! We all knew that self-affirmation is a pretty weak concept to base self-improvement around - it doesn't matter how much time you invest in complimenting yourself if you don't think much of yourself, and frankly, all you're doing then is lying to yourself since you don't really believe what you're saying. The root of the problem is being ignored. But hey, who's to say you have to love yourself? You can be a real jerk sometimes, y'know. If anything, the world's far too full of people infatuated with themselves. (America's especially guilty of this problem.) It might just be better, I postulate, not to worry about loving or hating yourself, but rather finding a comfortable neutral ground: you are who you are, and self-improvement is all well and good as a concept, but if it doesn't come naturally and organically - if you force it - it's not exactly genuine, is it? Nobody's perfect.

Now that I've gone off on it (in)appropriately, the study found the long-recommended practice of self-affirmation to be flawed. For some people, forcing themselves to be positive about their undertakings or who they are doesn't make them feel any better. (Words are empty if you don't mean them, after all. Nobody can really lie to themselves, at least, barring serious mental illness.) They asked people with high and low self-esteem to repeat "I am a lovable person" to themselves, and those who started with low self-esteem came out feeling worse after having said it. Again, something that obviously stems from their immediately thinking the opposite when pushed to make a statement like that, because it's not what they really believe. And, of course, some of them probably just thought, "This is stupid." (Can you blame them?)

Of course, positive thinking is still thought to be effective when part of a broader therapy program, but the quick cure-all it's been presented as on daytime talk shows, in self-improvement books, magazines, and such? It's useless. Of course, if you already have high self-esteem, you don't need positive self-affirmations and shouldn't be feeding your ego on them. (Cut it out already. You're annoying the rest of us.)

That's it for today - I'll try to get another something up here before September crashes down on us next week. In the meantime, what you should take away from this is that we're not all Stuart Smalley. (And after months of recounts and legal jousting, he's a sitting Senator now.)

Recharging the Brain Battery

You're reading this, therefore you aren't dead.

You're reading this, therefore you're probably human.

If you're a living human being, you'll have spent a huge portion of your life sleeping. (Otherwise you'd fail the first premise.)

If you've slept, you've dreamt. Regardless of the frequency with which you dream, the fact remains that you have and probably still do. Little vacations from reality within your head, fodder for those of us paranoid about dementia, and ultimately experiences either pleasant or unpleasant and almost uniformly confusing by nature.

Sigmund Freud, father of modern psychology (And subject of some comedy in my forthcoming first novel), first posited 110 years ago in 1899 that dreams act as a sort of secret window into the unconscious mind's frustrated desires. Hence the cultural obsession we have with dream analysis. (I dreamed about flying! GET OUT OF MY OFFICE YOU WORTHLESS SCRAP OF- Uh, I guess it means you yearn for freedom. Yeah. Freedom isn't free. That'll be fifty bucks.)

As discussed last month at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, research has made evident that Freud was wrong. (What do you mean women don't suffer from anatomical envy-) Adequate sleep has been recently tied to the ability to process and understand complex emotions in waking life. (Undoubtedly part of why we get so irritable when we're sleep deprived as well.)

Director Matthew Walker of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, described sleep at the meeting as essentially being "resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass." I for one prefer to think of it as recharging our brain's emotional battery.

A recent study by Walker and colleagues examined the relationship between REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep (In which our most vividly recalled dreams occur) and our ability to read the emotions on others' faces. Those who had experienced REM sleep in a recent nap as a part of the experiment were able to better identify positive emotions on people's faces in the photographs they were shown. The volunteers who did not achieve REM sleep or nap at all were more sensitive to negative expressions like anger and fear.

Past research has also indicated that activity in the prefrontal lobe - which is involved in the control of emotion - is significantly diminished in the sleep deprived. Walker suggests that this is evident - though to a lesser extent - in the research recently presented. He also suggested that this may be an evolved survival reaction to sleep deprivation, essentially becoming hypersensitive to any and all perceived potential threats when conserving mental energy. While on the other hand, being well-rested makes you more sensitive to positive things, which obviously play an important role in survival themselves.

As lead author of the study Ninad Gujar observed, these mental processes guide and impact our personal and professional lives, being key in our ability to understand social interactions, others' emotional state of mind, and read the expression on their face. None of us would get very far or accomplish much in our day to day existence without the capacity for these things.

Walker suggests that through this connection, REM sleep helps us to round out the sharper edges of our own emotional experiences in addition to better identify positive emotions in others. Dreaming that takes place during REM sleep is suggested to put the day's events through a mental sieve of sorts, sifting out any negative emotion and stripping it from memories. This process is key in humans achieving the kind of emotional resilience that they typically do, though one would imagine that anything more deeply traumatizing would present a challenge to even REM sleep. You don't forget the emotional experience itself, but the spine of the emotion has been removed. Failing to achieve REM sleep or having it disrupted, however, leads to anxiety overwhelming people.

These findings and theorizings are consistent with recent research conducted by Rebecca Bernert at Florida State University, who presented her own findings linking sleep deprivation - typically due to insomnia and nightmares - with suicidal feelings and behaviors. While this link has been made before, Bernert separated the insomnia and nightmare cases and found that nightmares are especially predictive of suicidal behavior. She suggested that they may also have something to do with how we process emotion in our dreams.

Walker suggests that if Bernert's right, her findings may help explain the problem of recurrent nightmares characterizing numerous psychiatric conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In these cases, it's possible that "the brain has not stripped away the emotional rind from that experience memory." And as a result, the brain continues its efforts to separate the intense negative emotions from the memory, creating a grating effect like a broken record, and producing the feeling that you cannot get over the experience. And thus, trauma.

This "rind" Walker describes is, in reality, sympathetic nervous system activity during sleep, which includes a faster heart rate and the body's release of stress chemicals. It's becoming clear that understanding the relationship between REM sleep and emotional processing - especially when it seems to perpetuate problems in the face of trauma - may be crucial in finding effective treatments for more difficult mental disorders. And ideally, addressing the problem of sleep may allow for the disruption of emotional cycles that can lead to suicide.

Ultimately, researchers are finding a seemingly clear two-way relationship between psychiatric disorders and disrupted sleep. Walker observes that historically, medicine and psychiatry have looked at psychological disorders as producing the sleep problems that often occur in tandem. These recent findings have shone light on that the relationship may in fact be the other way around.

I thought that these findings would be worth sharing, at any rate, since they're not only fascinating, but also relevant to my own writing. Dreams frequently take center stage in my first novel - as do memories - though largely as narrative devices, abstracted enough to ideally in some way resemble the genuine article. (Abstraction itself also being a central focus of the story.) They function as hazy pieces of a puzzle I hope to engage the reader through, the end goal being encouraging them to piece things together themselves as the characters make their own efforts to comprehend their unconscious experiences.

The Sun is Your Enemy, You Realize

This may come as a shock to you, but it shouldn't.

Sol, taiyou, tài yáng, the sun. All names used to identify the yellow dwarf star at the center of our solar system. (Even the term solar system itself was derived from the star's original Latin name!) Sure, we rely on the sun for far more on a daily basis than any mere blog post could cover, and it could be reasonably argued that we wouldn't exist if not for the sun. But the truth is - you know it as well as I do - the sun is our enemy.

Basal Cell Carcinoma, Squamous Cell Carinoma, Melanoma. The three most common types of skin cancer. For much of human history, the sun has waged war with our very existence as a species through all forms of this particular cancer - largely suffered as a result of excessive exposure to the sun and the resulting DNA damage. Granted, skin cancer can generally be prevented through proper use of sunblock and efforts to avoid exposure to an excess of ultraviolet light. But then, we human beings are creatures of excess. We love to go outside and bake ourselves in the sunlight until we're extra crispy (Sometimes applying a secret recipe of 11 different herbs and spices for flavor), and to generally absorb every bit of the sun's rays we can. Bad idea. Perhaps, to the sun, we are the cancer.

But that's not the main focus of this post.

Last summer, director M. Night Shyamalan released yet another terrible film, The Happening, which focused on tree gas turning off the one chemical in the human brain that disabled our innate natural desire to immediately kill ourselves at all times. Because we've got a long ways to go in creating a more environmentally friendly society. Good message, terrible movie, terrible neuroscience, terrible basic concept. (If you want to make a good movie about nature taking revenge on humanity, it needs to be more of a modern day battle of Isengard from the Lord of the Rings - yes, trees uprooting themselves, walking into our cities, and beating the everloving crap out of everything. That would be a phenomenal terrible movie. (Note: As of my writing this, I'm staking my claim on this premise as my own intellectual property now. Take that, internet script thieves! You'll never have my idea that will never be made into an actual movie now!))

In reality, studies have recently indicated that excessive sunlight can increase risk of suicide - particularly as a result of the insomnia resulting from long summer days in countries like Greenland, where the sun doesn't set at all between the end of April and the end of August in parts of the country.

People like sunlight, and most tend to prefer it to the darkness of night. As such, it's a commonly held belief that suicide rates rise during fall and winter as a result of the lengthening of night and the coldness of its darkness. Constant sunlight like Greenland suffers for a significant portion of each year interferes with natural circadian rhythms. And sleep deprivation can easily wreck anyone's mental health.

When distressed, you'd be hard-pressed to find a quick fix more effective than suicide. By WHO measures, 877,000 people commit suicide every year. And for each of these deaths, 10-40 attempts are made. Puts things into perspective in regards to just how many people look for a way out each year, no?

Scientists have previously linked sleep disturbance with suicidal tendencies in adolescents and people with psychiatric disorders, though no clear findings have been made linking these issues all the way to the general populace. (Yet.)

A team of Swedish scientists studied the seasonal variation of suicides in Greenland from 1968 to 2002 and discovered that suicides tended to notably cluster in the summer - especially in the north, where the populace suffers through the aforementioned three months of incessant sunlight. Said suicides make up 82% of the yearly suicides in that region, are usually committed by young men, and are almost exclusively violent, including: shooting, hanging, and jumping from high places. These deaths accounted for nearly 95% of suicides at that time of the year.

Neuroscientific speculation is that the excessive sunlight exposure creates an imbalance in serotonin - a brain chemical linked to mood - which could lead to impulsiveness that, when paired with severe sleep deprivation, could lead to suicidal behavior. But in this case, light itself seems to just be one of many affecting factors in the tragic circumstances of suicide.

So yes, while the sun can technically be your friend and healthy for you - we all need Vitamin D, after all - it's still our enemy. We need the sun to live and maintain our health, but that which sustains us can also destroy us. Be wary of the Deathsphere! Always be wary. And wear lots of sunblock. Tanning doesn't really seem to be a good idea, either, from the health perspective. No matter how much you may like the extra color.

Yes, I'm positive you guys were just dying for another consecutive death-themed post. I'll try to find a different topic for the next one. (And try to post a bit more often again soon.)

Cheer Up or Die

Hey, it's Monday night/Tuesday morning, so you know what that means! That's right, it's time for Snack and a Commercial!

Also, it's been in the low 80s here lately (Yes, after it snowed here just a week ago), and I live in the stuffiest room in the house. Even with a couple of fans on, it's still more or less an oven in here, so I haven't exactly slept well these past couple of nights. But that isn't stopping me from your expected first weekly blog post from me - one that isn't rambling about video games, no less - so there's your cue to take a moment to bask in my dedication. (And also hope that I don't make too many typos in my exhaustion.)

The focus of this week's lovely non-nerdy-rambling post? Yes, science again! In the least, a study I recently read about on MSNBC on the health and lifespans of optimists versus those of pessimists. As a self-identifying realist - which is a "pessimist" in most people's books - you can imagine my amusement at a study on the matter.

According to the study - unshockingly - optimists lead longer and healthier lives than pessimists. University of Pittsburgh researchers arrived at this conclusion by looking at death and chronic health problem rates amongst participants in the Women's Health Initiative study. (Said study has followed over 100,000 women from age 50+ since 1994.) Optimists were simply defined as people who expected good things to happen rather than bad, and found to be 14% less likely to die from any cause than pessimists, and 30% less likely to die from heart disease after eight years of study followup. Optimists were also found to be less likely to suffer high blood pressure, diabetes, or smoke cigarettes.

The team behind the study - led by Dr. Hilary Tindle - also took into consideration women highly mistrustful of other people, who they referred to as "cynically hostile." This group was compared with more trusting women. They found that women in the "cynically hostile" group were 16% more likely to die (Within the frame of the study period itself) than the women who thought that way the least. They were also 23% more likely to die of cancer. But while negative thinking certainly does seem to wear people down, Tindle also noted that the study doesn't actually prove that negative attitudes necessarily cause negative health health effects, though there seems to be a link. She ultimately concluded that more research is necessary to design methods of therapy oriented towards attitude modification beneficial to health.

And if you're a pessimist, Tindle encourages you not to slip into a defeatist mindset. Have hope! (Even if there might not necessarily be much reason to.)

The power of positive thinking versus the power of negative thinking. Of course, realistic thinking calls for a rational analysis of each set of circumstances and adopting an appropriate mindset as such - whether positive or negative. There are times when it's just absurd to blindly think positively, and even the most optimistic of the world's walking-sunshine-buckets in humanity have their limits. Likewise, as human beings, even pessimists have things that make them smile.

In the least, there's certainly hope to be had in the medical world, with breakthrough after breakthrough and the ongoing development of life-saving technologies each year. And this week, Obama seems to be planning to lift George W. Bush's embryonic stem cell research ban, in recognizing the important link between scientific research and free thought. Eight years later, we'll be seeing an end to the significant halt the medical research community has endured here in America. And in Japan? Scientists recently identified a cancer-suppressing enzyme, which could potentially lead to some sort of cure for breast cancer in particular.

Just try not to lead a constructed life like this guy.

Science vs. Romance

Hey, look, another semi-consistent update! (Zany.)

Conan's been over for about three days now, and in the least, they're showing one last week of reruns from last fall before the show goes off the air entirely. (I've got it on in the background at the moment - after the current commercial break, they'll be reairing one of those last Triumph the Insult Comic Dog remotes. The one at Hofstra University, making fun of people at the spin room following the second presidential debate.) As such, I haven't gone into withdrawal yet. (The key term naturally being yet.)

February's winding down already, with the month coming to an end this upcoming weekend. This has been a productive month here at Spiral Reverie, as with this being my 10th post this month, this is easily the most active the blog's ever been. (And I'm hoping to better maintain this level of productivity after how much I slowed down my blogging in the latter half of 2008.) That Conan liveblog managed to bring in an astonishing number of hits for this dusty little corner of the internet (Hey there, Cone Zone fanatics finding this blog through Google!), and I'm quite happy about that too.

Anyway, I'm not sure what all I'll be writing about in the future yet - I've got some rough writing cobbled together for a series of posts on the video game industry, its current issues, and problematic attitudes online that I plan to target at normal people who might be interested in learning about the state of things on that front. (Considering how much the market has exploded in recent years thanks to the Wii and DS appealing to far more people than the usual stereotypical gaming crowd, and the severe lack of writing for people who aren't obsessive 'in the know' gamers arguing back and forth over brandnames and genres.) And I'm hoping to come up with some more interesting subjects for posts between those so that I don't just spend a month or so alienating people with video game rambling, either. (Though you've all been warned thoroughly, I am a huge nerd. Of course, the same may be true of most people who spend their time blogging or reading blogs.)

Getting back to the main subject of this post, I promised last week that I'd be doing another love and science post, as I wrote a couple of those last year. With February, the love month (Because we needed one of those to balance out the other 11 hate months. There's a precise science to that, too.), coming to a close, it's time to bring my general posts on the subject to an end for now. (Of course, who knows what else I'll blog about later this year?)

While one of those posts last year focused on the science of kissing, this year? Some new follow-up scientific findings have been announced on the matter. The very act of kissing itself apparently releases chemicals that ease stress hormones in both sexes, and encourages bonding in men. (Though not as much in women, interestingly.) So yes, kissing apparently does indeed relieve stress. Science!

According to findings in a Lafayette College study (Led by dean of faculty and neuroscience professor Wendy Hill), saliva chemical compatibility can be a means of assessing a potential mate. (To slip back into the all-important scientific/National Geographic vernacular here.) In the study, pairs of heterosexual college students kissed for 15 minutes while listening to music, during which time they saw chemical shifts in their oxytocin (Which affects pair bonding) and cortisol (Which is related to stress) levels. How did they study this? Through blood and saliva samples, of course. Science!

Cortisol levels dropped in both sexes, while oxytocin levels rose in the men and dropped in the women. A test group only held hands and experienced similar chemical changes. That seems to make it apparent that physical affection between a pair of lovers is good for reducing stress in general.

Beyond the obvious from the empirical evidence to the conclusions about stress reduction from this experiment, there's still much to be learned about what the body and brain go through chemically in love and affection. This particular experiment was conducted in a student health center, and Hill intends to repeat it in a "more romantic" setting. Lovely!

Hill announced these findings at a session on the Science of Kissing, alongside Helen Fisher of Rutgers University (Whose 2008 findings I wrote about in that last post on the science of snogging. The was also on the Colbert Report earlier tonight.) and Donald Lateiner of Ohio Wesleyan University. Fisher noted that 90+% of human societies practice kissing, and she breaks it down to three components: sex drive, romantic love, and attachment. These components can be effectively viewed as phases: you're driven to assess a variety of partners by your sex drive, then you become focused on an individual through romantic love, and ultimately through attachment you're able to tolerate that person for long enough to raise a child. (And then comes phase 4: Divorce!)

Getting more into the chemicals of kissing, Fisher found that men see kissing as a prelude to copulation. (That little thing we call foreplay.) She also noted that we apparently really like "sloppy" kisses as so to pass on chemicals including testosterone to women through our saliva. In turn, testosterone bolsters the male and female sex drive. (This space reserved for a highly inappropriate chemical date rape joke.)

Fisher also pointed out that an enormous part of your brain becomes active when kissing, and that if you kiss the right person, romantic love can last a long time. (There's a little pat on the back for those of you already completely disillusioned after reading this post.)

At the end of the session, it was naturally included that the science of kissing - philematology - is under-researched. (As such, you can no doubt look forward to more blog posts on new findings on the subject in the future. You'll learn so much that you'll begin to find the very concept of kissing reprehensible! Just remember, brain chemistry is love!)



Feeling disheartened enough yet? Don't worry, there's more! At the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, a team of scientists have successfully isolated the brain's "love circuit." This particular region of the brain has been named the ventral tegmental area. (Or VTA, for short. Very Tasty Area, indeed.)

So, how exactly does love work, you ask? (Yes, that's exactly what you're asking as you put your hands over your ears, shut your eyes, and start singing gibberish as loudly as you can to block out what I'm sharing with you here.) Functionally? Love works just like a drug addiction. The love you have for your significant other and the love an addict has for sweet, sweet crack aren't too different, as Helen Fisher pointed out. The VTA manufactures dopamine and disperses it in different brain regions, which people get hooked on pretty easily. (And quite naturally, of course.) Like any drug, love has its highs and lows - times when you feel on top of the world, and times when you want to crawl into a hole and die.

To put a more positive spin on things, though, the addiction that comes with love seems biologically ingrained as so to keep us together - to effectively add a sense of increased value to love itself. Further connections between love and addiction have been made in studies of the brokenhearted as well. The heartbroken deal with cravings not at all unlike a drug addict in withdrawal.

The most recent brain scans in the study were focused on couples who'd been married for roughly 20 years and still acted like a lovey-dovey couple of newlyweds. (Who, of course, are an absolute minority in married couples, considering the ever-increasing numbers who fall out of love and end up being deadened inside by the whole experience of matrimony.) In both the men and women in these couples, two more areas of the brain reacted in addition to the VTA: the ventral pallidum (Which is associated with attachment and stress-decreasing hormones) and raphe nucleus (Which pumps out serotonin, creating a "sense of calm"). These particular areas essentially create a general low-level feeling of happiness, like all is right with the world. (Basically, your brain is lying to you.)

Naturally, there's some controversy around this research. University of Hawaii psychology professor Elaine Hatfield cautions that we shouldn't take too much from these studies on their own, and that they should be meshed with the work of traditional psychologists. But potentially, its findings could be used to produce brain hormone-based pills to help troubled relationships in addition to therapy. ("Don't worry, honey! If we take these happy pills, you'll eventually feel okay with all those times I slept with your best friend! By the way she's coming over tonight so if you don't mind scramming and pretending you know nothing, that's be awesome.") Potentially, this research could lead to advances in understanding and treating social-interaction conditions like autism. Fisher herself is researching the brain chemistry of attraction between individuals, using her findings as of far at Chemistry.com, a popular online dating/matchmaking site for which she serves as the scientific adviser.

In facing limitations in researching living humans, brain researchers have turned to the prairie vole, as it's one of the 5% of mammals that basically bond for life. As such, they're an ideal research subject in looking to figure out what makes this lifelong bond possible. In females, the key bonding hormone was found to be oxytocin (Which is also produced in both voles and humans during childbirth). When scientists blocked the female prairie voles' oxytocin receptors, they stopped bonding.

Male prairie voles' key bonding hormone is vasopressin. In putting vasopressin receptors into brains of meadow voles - a cousin of the prairie voles that doesn't bond like the prairie voles do, instead breeding with a variety of partners - and found that they began to bond like prairie voles then. A genetic variation was found in a few non-monogamous prairie voles as well, which they also found in some human males. The men with that variation ranked lower on an emotional bonding scale, had more marital problems, and their wives were more concerned with their attachment. (As reported by Hasse Walum, a biology researcher in Sweden.)

According to Larry Young of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, romantic love can theoretically be simulated with chemicals, now that scientists have found the key chemicals and means of stimulating their production. But if you really want a damaged relationship to recover or to get that "spark" back, you need to engage in behavior that will naturally stimulate the release of these hormones and emotions. (Such as hugging, kissing, and intimate contact, as found in that earlier article.)

Yes, this was the first long one in a while. But hey, it was interesting, wasn't it? (Yes, yes it was.) The science of love is an interesting topic, but if you can, don't let science's way of draining love of its romance get you down too much. Remember, as musician Jenny Lewis has put well, we're not robots in a grid.

Because I Love You I Must Remove Your Eyes

Yet another post? Why!?

Because I can.

Just another little post-Valentine's post this time. I commented on scientific studies a couple of times around this time last year. People seemed to enjoy those. So why not do that again this year, too? (At least, now that I've found a couple of interesting studies to comment on in the past few days, the second of which I'll talk about either later this week or early next week.)

Scientific American recently reported on research that found individuals married or in a serious monogamous relationship had developed an aversion to attractive members of the opposite sex. The idea here, of course, being that there could potentially actually be something of substance to the tired romantic cliche of people claiming to "only have eyes" for one another.

The test reported on in particular involved having subjects choose between quickly displayed attractive and average faces, then proceeding to stimulate their thought processes (And in turn, stir up some chemicals in that mass of gray matter in their skulls - there's no more romantic way to put that. Brains are love. Or at least, technically speaking, as much as we love to romanticize it, love's all about brain chemistry. Dopamine and serotonin are your friends.) and had them take the test again. Half of the subjects were asked to write about their feelings for their partner, while the other half were simply asked to write about a happy experience. Those who wrote about the happy experience continued to be drawn to the attractive faces, while those who wrote about their partner found themselves unconsciously turning their focus away from the attractive faces.

The Florida State University Psychologist who conducted this research - Jon Maner - suggested that this unconscious trend in attentional bias could be a reaction evolved to help men and women maintain monogamous relationships. Of course, this is also an evolutionary psychology study - a field frequently criticized as being largely speculative, given the exceptional difficulty of pinpointing the line between learned behaviors as a result of cultural practice in human beings and what comes naturally to the species. (As well as exactly where certain behaviors effectively evolved into our unconscious behavioral processes.)

But even while it's a largely speculative science, they raise some interesting points here. The evolutionary spin's more or less an interesting possibility by which to frame the study's empirical findings. Their findings aren't exactly unbelievable, though it seems like something that could use some more research in general. (As the science of love tends to.) Unsurprisingly though, the comments on that story are loaded with disbelief of the results, given the increasingly popular cynical viewpoint on the internet that monogamy is unnatural. (Though for all the praise polyamory gets as a lifestyle from an outspoken internet minority, you'll find more horror stories than success stories on that front, running counter to the lovely arguments in favor of polyamory, looking at themselves as "more evolved" for attempting a multi-pronged relationship. Personally, I think these people are completely insane. Human relationships - deep, meaningful ones in particular - are extremely difficult to find and maintain with so much as a single human being. Polyamory generally smacks of naivete and people trying to idealistically have their cake and eat it too, so to speak.)

Don't you just love putting love under the microscope?

The Science of Smooching

The "season of love" continues. (Hey, wait, wasn't that supposed to be spring?) Has anyone come up to you on the street and waved a knife at you, threatening to "put their love inside you" yet? No? Nobody? Good. You had me worried for a second there. Man, what a bad viral marketing campaign that'd be.

Of course, by now, you're probably already making plans for Thursday night with your significant other. Romantic plans. Some bad French accents might be used to enhance the mood, maybe a seductive handshake or two. (What the hell are those, anyway?) Why, you might even "get" some of that "down" thing I've heard so much about. (It isn't related to that Down's Syndrome, is it? I couldn't see that being too romantic - maybe inwardly depressing, and fodder for an overly sentimental Hollywood cash-in.) Naturally, you might even kiss each other - on the mouth. Risque! I haven't kissed a woman in over seven years now. I'm honest, I can admit it. Sure, my attempts at something romantic with my novel are probably futile, knowing my luck, but at least I'm trying, eh?

Anyway, that's the big subject of the first V-Day entry this week - lacking more romantically-inclined inspiration at the moment. (I'll save that kind of glorious love-bitterness for Thursday morning.) And what'd put you in more of a kissing mood than discussion of science!? Why would you want to think of anything else when kissing but how your brains were responding, after all? They call the brain the love muscle for a reason, after all.

What do you mean they don't?

The scientific community has, apparently, more or less avoided tackling the matter of the science of tonsil-hockey - perhaps because they wanted to be able to continue enjoying it themselves. Lousy selfish scientists. In fact, science still hasn't unraveled and pinpointed everything that makes love what it is yet - and when they do, won't it be glorious realizing how little our emotions suddenly mean in the grand scheme of things, because they're just cerebral chemical impulses and hormonal urges? Maybe that's why everything was boring and white in all those '70s science fiction movies - everyone was too dead inside to care. Plus, we couldn't have anybody illegally stimulating their brain with anything - or anyone, for that matter. It's where we're headed if we keep trying to legislate morality and dumb it down to a black and white issue, anyway.

Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher presented her findings on kissing in the October issue of Evolutionary Psychology - light tabletop reading that I'm sure you'd find right beside the latest TV Guide on every kitchen counter in America. (Except for the fundamentalists who take everything too literally - they read Creationary Psychology, which is a lot like Tiger Beat magazine, but with more Jesus centerfolds to set young ladies' nether regions aflame. Is that a loaf of bread in his pocket? I don't think so! Man, for repressed puritans, they sure are perverts.) Fisher's findings came down to perceiving kissing to be all about choosing the right mate. (And sometimes it's about getting the boys' attention with your best friend at Mardi Gras after a few too many Brewskis, am I right, ladies? ... Ladies? Drat, they all left. What the hell was I thinking with the Brewski reference? Nobody's used that slang in twenty years.)

The mouth is one of the most sensitive areas of the body, with the brain seemingly having evolved an oral fixation that'd make Freud's head spin and perhaps dispense candy. While people have even been stabbed in the back before without noticing - their brain was having none of that - but the slightest touch to the lips or mouth is felt intensely. (Let me tell you, going through major oral surgery - jaw surgery, in my case - is no picnic as a result. And not just the whole no-solid-food-for-months part of it. I thought I would lose my mind by the end.) Naturally, this is why the mouth is often so intrinsic in romantic contact and sensuality, whether in popularized cheesiness like that whole blindfolded-strawberry-feeding thing, or something as widely beloved as oral sex. With so much of the sensing part of the brain focused on the mouth, it's only natural that kissing would be some kind of big deal.

There were some gender differences noted in their study as well. For instance, women place more importance on the taste and smell of who they kiss than men. Historically, women have always been typically known for being more sensuous than men, so this doesn't exactly come as a great surprise. (I wasn't sure how to react when my first girlfriend informed me that I had a scent she'd liked, back when I was 16. My first thought was, as I recall, something along the lines of "Holy shit, do I stink?" Of course, as a lifelong allergy sufferer, I'm lucky when I can smell anything at all, so unless there's particularly strong smelling food around or someone's wearing perfume, I don't pay much attention to that particular sense much of the time, intrinsically important as it is to taste - I pay far more attention to that one.) Likewise, there was a massive gender gap in regards to the importance of kissing before the initiation of sexual congress. (Which would be a great name for a politically-charged R&B album, you realize. Who wouldn't get down to the smooth sounds of Tax Reform and the Civil Rights Bunch? .... Yes, I realize I am quite possibly the whitest guy on the planet.) Most men, as you can imagine, were fine with the idea of getting into the horizontal mambo without so much as the slightest oral contact. (Because that's just how men are, am I right, ladies? ... Oh right, you're still gone.) Conversely, of course, most women felt the opposite. C'mon baby, all I need is 5 minutes, then you can go back to sleep.

Of course, kissing, in being a part of this National Geographic Human Mating Processes special, serves as something of a barometer as to what kind of lover someone would be. Naturally, I'm screwed in this area too, as I never had a chance to get good at kissing to begin with. Damn me and my getting severely traumatized in love halfway through my teens on top of already being an awkward, standoffish nerd to begin with. If only there were some way to twist the very fabric of reality itself in my favor...

Anyway, with these ramblings aside, hopefully they've given you something to think about. And hopefully I'll come up with something more compelling by Thursday morning, lest I just write some random love-themed comedy piece with no real point then.

Remember! Next time you're kissing your significant other, think of science!

If You Love Me, You Will Punch Me In The Face

So, I've been busy with Project 27 Days - making more good progress with editing and polishing - and am feeling kind of uninspired in regards to writing in here at the moment. But hey, you guys like it when I write about the subject of love, right? Right? (Play along, there might be a cure for syphilis in it for you later! But I make no promises.) Valentine's Day, everybody's favorite holiday scheduled right in the middle of suicide season is coming up in just under a week, so let's talk relationships! (Specifically, I'll be looking at this theme here over these next several entries. Enjoy!)

This time, we're looking at a common hurdle shared by all relationships - and yes, I do mean all relationships. (Including the ones between you and your cats, Mittens and Bootsy. What the hell were you thinking with those names? Damn, you're lonely.) This hurdle? Conflict.

Relationships can be tough on everybody involved. People, by nature, annoy the hell out of each other. Sometimes there's no real point to it - it's just a little thing we do. (For the sake of awesome, that is.) Other times, we do it because love and hate are inextricably connected as emotions go, being that they're effectively the strongest emotions the human species possesses. As creatures, we're too complex for our own good, often too much so to completely comprehend ourselves. (Brain chemistry? Neuroscience? You mean hexes concocted by witches!) So we can mix up these emotions, even if only for a moment. Bottom line, we inevitably start to bug each other if we spend too much time together. And when in love, we're prone to clinging together so closely that inevitably, the friction that comes with it leads to static buildup and discharge. (We're all really irritating sweaters. Try wrapping your brain around that one.) When this happens, we get angry with one another.

So in this situation, what do you do? Fight and get it out of your system? Try to ignore the issue, bottle up your anger, and let it corrode you inside like rust on a sewer pipe? Stratego? Given my own unhealthy penchant for bottling up my emotions, I'd probably pick the second one. But truth be told? I'm wrong. The correct answer is, as you no doubt ascertained half a minute ago already, the first one. (Sorry, Stratego fans, looks like there is a bad time for it after all. You lose this round.) When conflict arises, to put it in semi-obscure video game reference terms, you've got to Fight It Out! By which one means, as a recent study concluded, you need to be willing to let your anger out, to blow off some steam at each other - if you can't reconcile as a couple following a conflict, after all, you fail at the relationship.

Conflict resolution is serious business - it's something that you either learn in life, or you don't. As the study found, one can potentially learn from the example of one's parents, but more often than not, couples don't know how to go about handling their conflicts. Some amount of experience with serious relationships would somewhat remedy this, you'd think, but then, everybody experiences many aspects of daily life in different ways - conflict included. You can't bottle up your anger, spending your time brooding and essentially resenting the other person until that ultimately brings the relationship to an end - you aren't a teenager, are you? As such, when conflict arises, as painful as the experience may be - crucial as painful experiences are to human development - you need to address it and resolve it. Relationship problems don't just disappear, no matter how much you may wish they would.

If you simply contain your anger, it'll stress you out even more, and as I'm going to write on at some point as well - stress kills. You don't want to die from stress, do you?

Letting your anger out, on the other hand, is actually healthy, unpleasant as the emotion itself is. The study found that people tend to make better decisions when letting their anger out, with the emotion causing the brain to ignore other cues and focus on the matter of what's made you angry. (Take note that this is not always the case. Domestic abuse, for example, is often the result of a fit of unbridled rage. Despite what the study says - and this entry's title - beating your significant other is never a good decision. Don't be one of those people.) Likewise, a past study showed that release of anger can lead to feelings of optimism and control over one's situation. (Which isn't necessarily good if it isn't a situation you have any actual control over, or any real reason to be optimistic in regards to - that's pole-vaulting over into delusion territory.)

In short, though this goes without saying, as it's on every daytime TV talk show, in every self-help book, and pretty much anyone giving advice on relationships will reiterate this point - communicate with each other. Respect each other enough to be open and honest with each other, even about unpleasant things, and unpleasant emotions. Don't lock them up inside where they'll eat away at you. Trust each other to listen and try to understand one another. You might then have a legitimate shot at overcoming whatever obstacles and conflicts you yet face as a couple. Hey, who knows? You might even not be completely miserable with each other someday. Let's just try to keep the fisticuffs to a minimum, eh?

Man, what a sappy entry. Damn you, Valentine's Day!