Here's a couple of interesting reports on love and marriage. The first discusses a study in which marital strife was found to slow wound healing. The second reports on a study finding that a brain chemical called nerve growth factor increases when people fall in love, and the intensity of the feeling is related to the level of this chemical. Noone knows yet quite why that is, but it may have something to do with nerve growth factor releasing a hormone (vasopressin) that plays an important role in the formation of social bonding.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Monday, February 06, 2006
More on the subject of lying: the New York Times has a long magazine article on the various strategies being tried to enable us to tell when someone is lying, and discusses, among other things, the complications that make it unlikely we'll reliably recognize lying by looking directly at the brain. It also discusses Paul Ekman's work (I'm a big fan), and the philosophical issue of whether we really want to be able to tell when someone is lying.
