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The Myth, the Math, the Sex – “One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5. But [...]
Depressed in the West: Cultural Neuroscience Chimes In
by Robert Lamb | October 27, 2009
Grasping: Buddhism has decried it as the source of all human suffering for millennia while the West built an entire culture around it. We want more money. We want more life. We live our self-centered lives with the demon of impermanence breathing down our neck. The idea that we might feel better if we forgot about ourselves for a little bit should seem like a no-brainer.
For years, my husband Stu has been wanting to hike the Appalachian Trail — and it’s not the thought of the Jack Russell and me pining away at home that’s stopping him. Stu wants to do it in one fell swoop. But where do you find the time to do that?
NPR’s Thomas Pierce offers one lemons-from-lemonade perspective in “On the Appalachian, Some Hike off the Recession.” Pierce acknowledges that “committing six months of your life to a project that can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000 is a gutsy thing to do in a recession.” Yet, for some people, it makes a lot of sense.
Statistics show that women are twice as likely as men to suffer from major depression. But why? Tune in as Molly and Cristen explore the science and stereotypes behind female depression in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
A big thank you to SYSK listener Ani (pronounced ah-nee) over in Madrid for sending us a link to a recent Economist article on a University of Essex study that found an optimistic outlook may be genetic.
For the most part humans tend to maintain an optimism bias; an unfounded belief (at least as far as the law of averages goes) that things will pan out well for us. There are also those among us who truly excel at irrationally processing the positive and patently ignoring the negative; we commonly refer to them as optimists.
Irrationality irks scientists like nothing else can, and so, of course, they’ve set about trying to get to the bottom of why optimists see things the way they do. Using our friend the Wonder Machine, New York University researchers conducting a 2007 study found that the area of the brain associated with clinical depression in humans activates differently in the skulls of optimists.
It’s a bird … it’s a plane … No — It’s a distraction from the economy!
Here at HowStuffWorks.com, one of our all-time favorite topics is superheroes. That’s why I jumped at the chance to blog about it when I ran across this CNN piece, which discusses how the first superheroes were born out of the Great Depression. At the tail end of the Depression (and as war was starting in Europe), Americans created such larger-than-life characters as Superman and Batman.
In Los Angeles, the Skirball Cultural Center is holding a new exhibit of these classic superheroes. Curators of the exhibit say that the characters were a form of escapism for a public who was losing faith in the American Dream.
A similar thing was already happening in America’s movies at the time. Throughout the Depression era, Hollywood produced lavish flicks that historians often chalk up to “escapism” to distract from the tough economic times.
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