Laughter Through Tears

Today (actually yesterday) in BRAAAINS: Reading Tiger Eye and then learning about aggression in psychobiological processes some two weeks later leads me to muse. Currently, the musing is that Hari (while not really my type) is a successful male lead, probably because he has high testosterone and high serotonin in his prefrontal cortex.

Prefrontal cortex: everybody's favorite part of the brain.

It's a hippocampus! Pretty sure it's the wrong kind, though.

Movement Intention After Parietal Cortex Stimulation in Humans: Conscious intention and motor awareness thus arise from increased parietal activity before movement execution. One Ed Yong, science blogger, generalizes this to a neorological theory of free will.

Much more interesting than the neurology of vision, which is what I'm meant to be listening to in class. Also, I got an 84 in my second bio hand-in, which is better than 82 (hand-in #1) but not as good as I'd hoped. Is there hope in Brodmann 8?

Maybe I'm underreacting for once, but I think this whole ordeal is hilarious. A couple of hackish pseudo-scientists come up with a leading survey about women and slashfic. They are trying to figure out how women's brains are "hardwired". Like most evo-psych, it's lulzy and unscientific as fuck, because they make all sorts of assumptions, reach conclusions before they start their research, use dubious data-gathering methods, and generally ignore a whole lot of variables and factors.

Evo-psych in general is disappointing to me, because while it could be used to learn new and interesting things about cognition and survival, and ways in which human minds (plural!) have or have not caught up to the rapidly changing environment we create for ourselves. Instead it is used as a crummy figleaf under which a bunch of over-privileged man-children try to excuse their bad behavior. "Honey, sure I was leering at your fifteen year old niece, but evolution made me do it! Look, it's science!" I suspect that the fallacy at the root of this is the idea that "evolution is magic" or rather, that evolution works. I will have to go into detail at a later date.

Regarding EP, I think Volcanista wrote something about it that I want to link (regarding my disappointment, above). I cannot find the post, though. Maybe it was a comment to Kate or Shakesville.

In other and less exciting news, yesterday I finally gave up on my ailing earphones and got a new set for 89.77 NIS. I was wondering if not getting the cheapest set, for once, might make them last a little longer. I'm not hopeful, but at least they come with a windup case to keep the cord connections from dying too soon.