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Monday, April 18th, 2011
An interesting new study by psychological scientist, Gabriela Jiga-Boy of Swansea University in Wales, explores the inter-relationship between our perception of time and the effort needed to complete a project. Did the difficulty of a task expand or compress our perception of time? The results? They discovered that tasks that were judged to be complex and difficult, like planning a wedding or an elaborate vacation, but without specific deadlines, seemed more distant than less demanding activities. Their findings suggest that our minds correlate complexity and effort with time.
Conversely, tasks with specific deadlines, even as distant as eight months, were viewed as closer in time. So if you have multiple simultaneous and significant deadlines: filing income taxes, planning a family reunion over spring break, and organizing a college graduation, while also running your day-to-day business, your stress may be that the way in which our minds truncate the real time remaining to the complete the tasks in order to force us to plan to meet the challenges on deadline.
Tags: planning, stress, time
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Friday, January 7th, 2011
Israeli neurobiologists have discovered that “merely sniffing negative-emotion-related odorless tears obtained from women donors, induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces.” Dr. Noam Sobel, a professor of neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel suggests that tears are a chemical form of language, saying, “basically what we’ve found is the chemo-signaling word for ‘no’ — or at least ‘not now.’ ” http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/01/05/science.1198331
That tears serve a biochemical communication function doesn’t particularly surprise me, but I think their evolutionary role is vastly broader than merely suppressing sexual arousal in men. Psychic tears can also be socially adaptively helpful in a wider array of situations – at work or home — by communicating submission. Tom Lutz, a University of Iowa professor and author of Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears, describes such crying as “the human equivalent of a dog putting its tail between its legs – please, we can say with tears, I am already abased, do me no further harm.”
We know that psychic or emotional tears, because they are exceptional, force us and those around us to acknowledge that something important has just happened – my boyfriend proposed to me, my boss yelled at me, I was deeply moved by a sense of the divine, my dog died – and that we should pause and take a moment for reflection.
Tags: crying, John Boehner
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