Guns on the brain

By: | May 21, 2013

Gun_shutterstock_126668459

I recently witnessed one of the kindest, gentlest people I know fly into a momentary rage over a parking space. Such transformations used to baffle me, but after writing a Discover story about embodied cognition, I’m starting to understand why normally mild-mannered people can become uncharacteristically aggressive behind the wheel of a large automobile.

The big idea behind embodied cognition is that thoughts and perceptions are not confined to the brain, but extend to the body too. As a result, our bodily states affect how we think and our perceptions are fundamentally shaped by our ability to act.

Get behind the wheel and suddenly the world looks different. You’re protected by a big chunk of metal, and you’re navigating the world with the power of an internal combustion engine. You not only see the world differently, you may behave differently too, as my friend’s moment of road rage demonstrated.

“We think of perception as providing us with this geometrically accurate picture of the world,” says Jessica Witt, a psychologist at Colorado State University. But while we may believe that we see the world as it really is, Witt’s research suggests that our perceptions are guided by what we’re doing with our bodies.

In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance last year, Witt and her colleague James R. Brockmole at the University of Notre Dame performed a series of five experiments that asked college students to look at photos of people holding something and then indicate whether the object was a gun or something neutral like a ball or a shoe. When the participants held a plastic gun, they were about 30 percent more likely to deem the object a gun. Continue reading →

Redux: What to Wear on an Ice-Age Sea Voyage?

By: | May 20, 2013

 

If you were one of the 14 (a made-up number) people who read this back when LWON was publishing wonderful posts but was otherwise just a baby staggering around on inept little feet, we apologize for repeating ourselves.  Anyway, you probably weren’t.  One of the 14.

Several superb posts on one of my favorite blogs, Elfshot, got me thinking recently about the attire of the earliest migrants to the Americas. Despite all the festering debate over exactly when these hardy travelers set foot in the New World, most evidence suggests that they landed here during the last Ice Age, somewhere between 20,000 and 13,500 years ago.  And many researchers think they took a coastal route,  nudging gradually along the Pacific Rim from Asia by boat or canoe.

And this leads to an interesting question.  How did they manage to stay warm in the water, avoiding hypothermia in the Ice-Age cold? Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 18, 2013

6883525172_13913c8a2b_zMay 13 to 17

It’s spring! Except in London, where for the past two months, the weather has been stuck in a kind of sodden cold amalgam between spring and winter that’s probably best described as splinter.

But back to spring. Among many other eye openers you’ll learn in Ann’s post, men’s reproductive hormones peak in June, as do contraceptive sales and sexually transmitted diseases. And you’ll never feel okay walking through a cloud of gnats again.

But where Michelle lives, the spring is false and the fruit is dead.

And Cameron wraps up Spring Break with a post about the least welcome rite of spring — the frantic scramble to wash off the poison oak.

So many assumptions rest on the behavioural manipulation of toddlers and what we can extrapolate about the human condition. This week’s guest poster, Kendall Powell, reports on what happened when she sent her kids to participate in these experiments.

And Erika advances a new theory about why Henry VII had so much trouble having children.

Oh, Spring

By: | May 17, 2013

runningOutside the window, the neighborhood kids are running again.  They’re about 12 years old, a boy and a girl and the girl’s little sister, about 8, and they’re racing around the court, up the street, along the alley, through a yard, and back onto the court, altogether maybe a full block, around and around.  They’re going flat-out on long skinny legs, hair flying and completely silent.  Sometimes they’re playing tag, but mostly they’re just running, they hardly touch earth, they’re all but airborne. What is it about spring?  Continue reading →

The Darling Buds of May

By: | May 16, 2013

2012 Bloomin' OrchardsThe poets tell us that spring is for love. Tomorrow, Ann will tell you it’s for running, jumping, and giving in to hormonal chaos. Where I live, spring is for gambling.

I live in the fruit basket of Colorado, in a valley famous for peaches and cherries, and every spring the local orchardists keep a close eye on the thermometer, wondering if their luck will hold this year. Cool weather makes the fruit sweeter, they say, but a freeze at the wrong time means no fruit at all. Whenever the temperature drops close to the danger zone, the growers are up all night, running fans to keep the cold air from settling, building bonfires between the rows of trees, even hoisting giant mesh curtains over entire orchards.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Experimenting on My Kids: What’s really being tested?

By: | May 15, 2013

shutterstock_96323885For the last five years, I’ve been letting psychology graduate students experiment on my children. That, of course, sounds much worse than the reality that I take them to participate in experiments at the University of Colorado lab that probes early language development in toddlers. Still, I have a lingering unease when it comes to these sessions.

Ever since they were about 12 months old, I’ve been carting my kids down to the lab–just a couple of shoddy office rooms filled with a table, chairs, video camera, and old filing cabinets. Not a boiling beaker or electrode in sight. The kids play various “games” sorting toys into categories, or indicating where they expect a toy to be hidden. But as a former scientist and a science writer, my inner skeptic questions the validity of some of these experimental set-ups. Continue reading →

On Henry VIII and the mystery of the missing male heirs

By: | May 14, 2013

Anne_Boleyn“There are so many women in the world, so many fresh and young and virtuous women, so many good and kind women. Why have I been cursed with women who destroy the children in their own wombs?”

So complains Hilary Mantel’s fictional version of Henry VIII – and this Sunday marks the date, 477 years ago, when Anne Boleyn paid the price for his lament.

Boleyn was the second of Henry’s six wives. Though Henry broke with the Catholic church to marry Boleyn, he had her executed on May 19, 1536, three years after she became his wife. He was frustrated with her and her inability to have a male child – something which four of Henry’s other five wives also failed to do.

Reading Mantel’s enthralling novel, “Bring up the Bodies,” which documents the souring of the marriage through the lens of Henry’s adviser, Thomas Cromwell, I couldn’t help wondering how this situation – indeed, the course of history – might have turned out differently if the sixteenth-century English court had access to modern medicine.

Continue reading →

Red Badge of Courage (Or, The One Where I Jinx Myself)

By: | May 13, 2013

8110488526_194c13d266_nGuest poster Mary Caperton Morton wrote a lovely post about poison oak a few years back, but I just had this itch…

I saw an old friend—or foe, I guess—on a run last weekend. Leafless during winter, the poison oak in a nearby park has started to push out shiny green triads along the trail sides. My bare legs shivered a bit as I ran by.

Poison oak, like its kin poison ivy and poison sumac, is slick with urushiol. The lacquer tree also produces thick, urushiol-rich sap; between June and October, people tap these trees, stir the sap, and evaporate the water to create a lacquer that forms a beautiful protective coating on boxes, bowls, even pens.

But brushed on the surface of susceptible skin, urushiol produces a much less refined veneer of bumpy red rash. Continue reading →