February 22nd, 2010 by Mary
When I was an undergraduate, there was a cartoon posted on the wall of a student computing cluster in Swain East at Indiana University that I really liked. (The room was full of VT100 terminals that we used to connect to the university’s VAXes, just to give you an idea how long ago this was.) In the first panel of the cartoon, a man was sitting at a desk working away with paper and pencil, and a thought balloon over his head was filled with equations. Second panel, same thing. The third panel showed his thought balloon filled with the image of a voluptuous reclining woman, and he was smiling. In the fourth, it was back to the equations. I thought this was hilarious; the value of little mental vacations in the middle of a physics problem set, for example, was obvious.
Some recent research suggests that the type of daydreaming you do could affect your capacity for creative or analytical thought. Groups of subjects were asked to think about either spending quality time with their partner or having casual sex with someone they didn’t love; other groups were subliminally primed to think about either love or sex. Then all the groups were given both creative tasks to complete and questions to answer that tested their analytical thinking skills. Those whose thoughts had turned to romance did better at the tasks requiring creativity, and those who thought about sex were better at the tasks requiring analytical thinking.
This supports the hypothesis that thinking of love broadens the mind’s focus and is associated with seeing the big picture and connecting diverse ideas, whereas thinking of sex appears to be a more concrete, in-the-minute kind of thing that is linked to a focus on details. I’m kind of curious about what happens when you think about sex with someone you love, and I’m not sure I entirely grasp the reasoning behind this hypothesis, but it’s interesting at any rate.
The research is reported briefly in Scientific American. The paper that this article refers to (citation below) is based on construal level theory, which I knew nothing about, so I looked up some information about that. In a nutshell, this theory suggests a link between how distant in space or time a person, thing, or event is from us and how concretely or abstractly we think about it, and predicts the different effects of thinking concretely or abstractly (e.g., the difference in cognitive performance reported here). This Psychlopedia page on construal level theory has a “love versus sex” section that briefly describes the paper; the page also gives some other examples of how the theory is used.
Citation:
Why Love Has Wings and Sex Has Not: How Reminders of Love and Sex Influence Creative and Analytic Thinking, by Jens Förster, Kai Epstude, and Amina Özelsel. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 11, 1479-1491 (2009). (abstract)
February 15th, 2010 by Mary
A recent find on Crete shakes up the current view of human prehistory. Archaeologists have found more than 2,000 stone tools, including hand axes, probably dating back at least 130,000 years on the southern shore of Crete. This is more than 100,000 years earlier than previously known arrivals at islands in that part of the Mediterranean, and around 70,000 years earlier than the earliest well-established maritime migration anywhere in the world. The geological strata in which the tools were found are around 100,000 to 130,000 years old, and the discoverers consider that to be a minimum age for the tools themselves, which could be considerably older. It’s not clear who made them: Homo sapiens or one of the other hominids still around 130,000 years or more ago. In any event, it’s a surprising insight into unsuspected capabilities of very early seafaring hominids. More work, planned for this summer, may narrow down the date at which the stone artifacts were produced.
The New York Times has an article about the find, with a photo of some of the stone tools.
February 14th, 2010 by Mary
This week’s physics colloquium at Indiana University is a talk by neuroscientist Olaf Sporns on “Mapping the Networks of the Human Brain” (abstract is available online). It’s at 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 17, in Swain West 119.
February 11th, 2010 by Mary
An ad appeared recently on Bloomington buses that said, “You can be good without god.” It seemed like a fairly obvious statement to me, but it took some doing to get Bloomington Transit to agree to run the ads. (Atheist ad campaigns like this one are making a modest sweep of the US; billboards with similar messages have appeared in various cities around the country.)
A recent article offers some evidence that morality and religious affiliation (or the lack thereof) are indeed two separate things. The article includes a meta-analysis of existing studies that have investigated the link between a person’s religious affiliation and the moral judgements he or she makes. The idea was to explore two divergent views on how religion evolved: Was it adaptive because it fostered cooperation between individuals who were not genetically related, or did it emerge as a side effect of other cognitive abilities that were themselves adaptations?
Current evidence shows that people make the same intuitive judgements about novel moral dilemmas regardless of their religious background, suggesting that morality and religion are not necessarily linked. It also suggests that the mental machinery underlying religious belief might be separate from that involved in making moral judgements, and that religion did not originate as an adaptation linked to cooperative behavior. One line of evidence involves studies based on responses to the online Moral Sense Test, and a study of a rural Mayan population provides further evidence.
Of course, morality and religion have become linked in the minds of many people, which is why getting those ads to run was not simple. The story of why and how that happened is yet to be fully explained.
You can read more in this article from Science Daily. The full text of the paper is available online; this was a pleasant surprise to me, and I’m not sure how long it will be true, but here’s the citation and a link:
The origins of religion: evolved adaptation or by-product? by Ilkka Pyysiäinen and Marc Hauser. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 08 February 2010.
February 8th, 2010 by Mary
Those of you here in Bloomington might be interested in hearing this week’s Patten lectures at Indiana University. Andrew Knoll of Harvard will be speaking Tuesday, February 9, on the early history of life on earth, and Thursday, February 11, on the search for life on Mars. Both lectures are at 7:30 in Rawles Hall 100. For more information, see the Patten lecture page.
