Blogs

          In my last web paper, I latched onto the idea of desire preceding all sexual acts.  I found a few intriguing articles with various studies using focus groups of men and women and monitoring their response to stimuli.  It came out that desire might actually come after sex: a neurological response that allows human beings to engage emotionally with their mate/potential mate.  This time, I’m taking a look at the history of sexual response by taking a cue from Darwin.  Psychologist Geoffrey Miller wrote a paper entitled The Mating Mind which explores the evolutionary aspect of the mating game.  My quest was to find out just how much of human reaction to sexual advances is universal.  It’s a common collegiate experience to go to a bar with friends and spend half the night rejecting unwanted come-ons from gross dudes whose clothes smell as though they haven’t been washed in weeks or from frat boys dowsed in Crave body spray.  Many Bryn Mawr Women can put names to the two extremes from two neighboring schools.  I wanted to know why we’re so picky and if it’s always been that way.

Malcolm Gladwell’s, The Tipping Point, attempts to uncover the environmental inputs and functions of the human mind that influence everyday social behaviors. He focuses on behaviors for which neurobiologists may not have concrete explanations. Through his analysis Gladwell discovers some general principles that may provide reasonable frameworks for predicting human behavior in certain situations. More specifically, he identifies environmental cues that influence behavior in ways that one might not expect. He also finds that the human mind has qualities and limitations that govern social interactions. The common theme uniting these findings is that they each one involves subconscious inputs and limitations of the mind in order to contribute to behavior. Among the principles Gladwell explains are the “stickiness factor”, the “Broken Windows theory,” and the “transactive memory system”. This paper will review each of these three principles in more detail in the hopes of linking them to neurobiological explanations of behavior.

A Story of an X

A Twice Told Tale

By Liz Newbury

When two letters love each other, after a time they will naturally create a wider vocabulary. This is what happened in the case of O and P. They were expecting to create a charming little N or a curvy little C, something that would fit well into the scheme of science. That was where all the good letters went, you know. Into science or engineering or chemistry. They were quite surprised when the nurse came out and declared,

Have you ever seen a person on the streets and immediately had some sort of attraction to them?

In 1971 a question posed by Linda Nochlin changed the way art history was viewed. Her essay “Why Have There Been No Great Female Artists” explores the reasons for the severe disproportion of female to male artists throughout the course of art history (1). While this is undeniably at least in part an issue of social concern, the may be more than one answer. It is possible that art history and neurobiology can, in fact, over-lap. There are irrefutable physical, hormonal, and genetic differences between women and men. More importantly, aside from these primary and secondary sex-differences there are a wide variety of sometimes subtle, sometimes prominent neurological differences, from basic neural organization to the way female and male brains process everyday information (4). There are evolutionary advantages to having differences between the female and male members of a species. These differences in no way imply and superiority or inferiority between the sexes, especially in humans (4). In people, there is much more overlap in these dissimilarities, due largely to the fact that our own brain structure is largely malleable and able to be easily manipulated and changed due to our higher functional capabilities. It seems pertinent to investigate the fact that the reason there are “no great female artists” might because of biological differences in the creative process or ability to produce art.

If I showed you a picture of a beautiful person what would you think about their ability to fly a plane? You may think this question is absurd, how could someone’s looks tell if they would be a good pilot or not? Well, believe it or not, odds are higher that you will think that they are a better pilot than you think an average looking person would be. In fact, you will probably assume that they are also nicer, more generous, more intelligent in general and more sensitive (the list goes on) (1). Why do we generalize like this, and are there any facts to support this seemingly incredible bias?

Description of final performance:

Sky and I decided to stage one of our regular post-class lunch discussions for the class. The conversation took on the form of the discussion we would be about to have after our last Gender and Science class. We thought this would be an entirely appropriate format, given that we actually did extend our conversations beyond the classroom in this way. I can’t say that I have done that with many other classes, which is a shame, because it felt really good to have those very stereotypically “college” conversations. It was a sign that I was learning a lot from this course.

People who claim to have had religious or spiritual experiences or personal connections with a divine being often describe their experience in the same way.  They tend to report a sense of enlightenment, the loss of a sense of self and time, and feeling of being one with the world around them (1).  This description persists cross culturally, overtime and regardless of religion.  Due to the fact that so many different people have such similar mystical experiences scientists propose that there must be some common thread that links these individuals together.  Naturally, since all of our other experiences are processed in the brain, why not look for an area of the brain that processes G-d, or a G-spot?