You never get a second chance…
…to make a first impression.
First impressions are big, as any social psychologist will tell you. One way to NOT make a good first impression is to use a really cheesy pickup line. The brave souls over at Forbes.com road-tested the worst lines and captured the hilarious, albeit somewhat painful to watch, results for you to see here.
What a Bunch of Boobs…
I think this is a really good example of how a culture attaches a specific schema to an object. It’s also a little bit of functional fixedness, such that a breast is not solely a “sexual thing”, as one angry reader wrote in to the magazine. Long before they were ever sexual, breasts on all mammals served the purpose of providing nourishment to infants.
To push my own personal agenda, it really saddens me what a negative attitude Americans have towards breastfeeding and nudity. Both are very natural things and nothing to be afraid of. An infant breastfeeding is not “gross” or shameful, it’s natural and perfectly normal, and not something that should be hidden behind closed doors. I myself am still undecided if I will ever have children, but if I do, they will be breastfed. Besides, I’d like to think that these lumps of flesh on my chest serve a higher purpose than filling out a bra.
Stats rap, yo.
Statistics classes often get a bad rap as being boring or too hard. This video isn’t necessarily on the level of Jay-Z or Eminem, but you have to give these grad students credit for weaving something interesting out of stats.
Turn up your sound and see it here on Google Video.
‘Shrooms, Dude.
Confirming what thousands of hippies knew before…
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University examining the effects of the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin (or the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”) found that some of the participants in their study had “mystical experiences” after ingesting the drug.
It appears that the spirit of Timothy Leary lives on, at least in research.
CNN news article here.
Amazing Recovery
CNN reports on a man who serves as an exciting new example of brain plasticity and neurogenesis. Although his miraculous recovery from brain injury is quite rare, it’s inspiring to read about and may provide neuroscientists more clues on the ability of the brain to repair itself.
Read about it here.
