Positivity Dogma

via RSAnimate, a talk by Barbara Ehrenreich about the dangers of installing positivity as an unchallengeable dogma.

Prenatal Learning

via TED.com - a talk about how much we are already primed to expect from the outside world, even before we are born.

Wired to Connect

Mothers and babies really do connect on a very fundamental level - babies and their biological mothers synchronize heartbeats when they are engaging in mutually cheerful behavior - smiling, cooing, or laughing.

The article is great, but the picture of the mother and baby smiling at each other is really priceless. Do yourself a favor and click through.

ScienceShot: Human Hearts Beat Together

Crying Means Distress

I could rant a lot more about this subject so I will restrain myself. Psychology Today has a really great article describing the impact that being left alone to "cry it out" has on babies and toddlers. In a nutshell, it makes kids grow up less intelligent, more anxious, unable to integrate socially, and highly liable to pass on those same unwanted traits to further generations.

Dangers of “Crying It Out”

Dancing Around the Subject

Psychology Today has run a really great article about dancing and how it allows us to access the wisdom of our bodies. We regularly stifle our body-wisdom in favor of our overactive minds. We're supposed to sit quietly and work only with our brains. Ugh! Kimerer LaMothe puts us right:

To Dance Is a Radical Act

Nuke Lint?

Afraid all life on earth is destined to die in a global thermonuclear holocaust? Check out the strange "lint" growing in tanks of water around spent fuel rods at the Savannah River Nuclear Site. We might bomb ourselves into oblivion, but fungus may yet prevail. Via the Augusta Chronicle.

Strange nuclear waste lint might be "biological in nature"

Bee Brains

SciGuru reports on new work showing similarities between how bees communicate and come to consensus to choose a new nesting site after a swarm, and how neurons in a human brain communicate to achieve consensus during the act of making a decision.

“This research shows that a key feature of a human brain – cross inhibition between evidence-accumulating populations of subunits – also exists in a swarm as it chooses its nesting site."

Basically, a quiet debate goes on between factions of bees - and between factions of neurons - and the process makes sure that different pros and cons are weighed before conscious choice is made. So when we spend an election season arguing with each other back and forth about the merits of any particular candidate or political stance, are we recreating the same process on a different scale? Interesting stuff.

House-hunting honey bees shed light on how human brains come to a decision

Expectations

Bobby McFerrin on the mysteries of the pentatonic scale.

The Language of Tantrums

Scientists have now studied and deconstructed the toddler temper tantrum, giving us a much better idea of what's actually going on behind all of that screaming...and a few better pieces of advice on how to deal with them. The old common wisdom is that tantrums always begin in anger and progress towards ending in tears, but vocal analysis shows that kids actually sway back and forth between anger and sadness as the tantrum goes on. There's a kind of pattern to them that can help us understand what's going on for the child a little better.

The best way to defuse a tantrum? Don't react. Rising with anger to the child's anger, or even just addressing it in any way, just prolongs it.

What's Behind A Temper Tantrum? Scientists Deconstruct The Screams

Child Abuse Never Really Stops

Kids who were abused as children grow up with brains tuned to be hypervigilant - similar changes have been observed in the brains of soldiers. Abused kids have a kind of permanent, low-grade Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that never really goes away. We have long known that abused kids grow up to be more anxious and depressed, and now we have the brain imaging showing permanent neural rewiring to go with that data.

Don't hit your kids. Just don't.

via SciGuru, Child abuse changes the brain

Honest Babies

Live Science reports on research showing that babies are inherently turned off by people who are dishonest or unreliable. Humans are, from an extremely early age, able to judge the behavior of others around them and to develop preferences for people they can rely upon. They also prefer to imitate and learn from those people. Let's live up to their expectations, shall we?

Babies Picky About Who They Imitate

Knowing

The Boston Globe has run a wonderful story about a set of identical twins, born as Jonas and Wyatt, who nevertheless have developed very differently. Wyatt, from as early as age 3, always self-identified as a girl. Now 14, Wyatt is now known as Nicole, and she is undergoing treatment to postpone male puberty until she can make the decision to undergo full male-to-female gender reassignment surgery after she's 18. The Globe's article details the tricky navigation of this social adjustment and the heartwarming bravery of Nicole and her family. Must-read.

Led by the child who simply knew

Crafty Buggers, part III

Bedbugs. Icky, icky, bedbugs. While they are undoubtedly becoming more resistant to pesticides, just like the corn borers that Monsanto has tried to thwart with GMO seeds, they also undoubtedly utilize the hearing-body-hair that all other insects and spiders have to help them locate predators and prey.

In case you were wondering about the superpowers of YOUR OWN leg hair, wonder no more. Body hair has been shown to help protect against bedbug bites. The bugs disturb your hairs as they crawl across your skin in the night, and you will twitch and flick them away in your sleep, apparently. This is also why bedbugs apparently have an evolved liking for the wrists and ankles, as these areas have less body hair on pretty much all humans (even Robin Williams). The BBC reports:

Hairy limbs keep bed bugs at bay

Crafty Buggers, part II

Recent work has shown that the hairs on spiders' and insects' legs act in the same way as the cilia in the cochlea of the mammalian inner ear - they pick up vibrations in the air, allowing the animals to hear each other. Wired has a great post on the story, including video of the laser and camera setup the researchers used to capture ultrafast images of the hairs doing their vibrational work.

Spiders’ Hundreds of Fine Hairs Are Hundreds of Ears

Crafty Buggers

Via Grist, a report on the burgeoning failure of Monsanto's GMO pesticide-resistant and pesticide-producing crops. Basically, in an evolutionary race against insects we will never win on any permanent basis by poisoning them, because their life cycles are so short that they can simply evolve around the obstacle.

The bugs that ate Monsanto

Frankl on Attitude

Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor and respected psychiatrist, discusses the value of holding ourselves and others to a high standard of ethics and compassion. Footage is from 1972, via TED.




Viktor Frankl: Why to believe in others