bonbonnie

Look at the light...












Backwaters









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Hummingbirds have a special meaning in my family. 












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aliasinkhorn -- love this post! Your pages have taken on a new look -- very elegant, and still as interesting as ever!



Anti-Love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss

From the page: " In the new issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding -- and, not incidentally, explaining humans' peculiar erotic fascination with breasts -- Dr. Young predicts that it won't be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink.

That's the bad news. The not-so-bad news is that you may enjoy this potion if you took it knowingly with the right person. But the really good news, as I see it, is that we might reverse-engineer an anti-love potion, a vaccine preventing you from making an infatuated ass of yourself. Although this love vaccine isn't mentioned in Dr. Young's essay, when I raised the prospect he agreed it could also be in the offing.

Could any discovery be more welcome? This is what humans have sought ever since Odysseus ordered his crew to tie him to the mast while sailing past the Sirens. Long before scientists identified neuroreceptors, long before Britney Spears' quickie Vegas wedding or any of Larry King's seven marriages, it was clear that love was a dangerous disease.

Love was correctly identified as a potentially fatal chemical imbalance in the medieval tale of Tristan and Isolde, who accidentally consumed a love potion and turned into hopeless addicts. Even though they realized that her husband, the king, would punish adultery with death, they had to have their love fix.

They couldn't guess what was in the potion, but then, they didn't have the benefit of Dr. Young's research with prairie voles at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University. These mouselike creatures are among the small minority of mammals -- less than 5 percent -- who share humans' propensity for monogamy. When a female prairie vole's brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she'll quickly become attached to the nearest male. A related hormone, vasopressin, creates urges for bonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles (or naturally activated by sex). After Dr. Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married. In his Nature essay, Dr. Young speculates that human love is set off by a "biochemical chain of events" that originally evolved in ancient brain circuits involving mother-child bonding, which is stimulated in mammals by the release of oxytocin during labor, delivery and nursing.

"Some of our sexuality has evolved to stimulate that same oxytocin system to create female-male bonds," Dr. Young said, noting that sexual foreplay and intercourse stimulate the same parts of a woman's body that are involved in giving birth and nursing. This hormonal hypothesis, which is by no means proven fact, would help explain a couple of differences between humans and less monogamous mammals: females' desire to have sex even when they are not fertile, and males' erotic fascination with breasts. More frequent sex and more attention to breasts, Dr. Young said, could help build long-term bonds through a "cocktail of ancient neuropeptides," like the oxytocin released during foreplay or orgasm.

Researchers have achieved similar results by squirting oxytocin into people's nostrils -- not terribly sexy, but it seems to enhance feelings of trust and empathy. Although Dr. Young is not concocting any love potions (he's looking for drugs to improve the social skills of people with autism and schizophrenia), he said there could soon be drugs .."








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Great article, Thanks Ink!  From the page:  




Dough, wonga, greenbacks, cash. Just words, you might say, but they carry an eerie psychological force. Chew them over for a few moments, and you will become a different person. Simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others. And it gets weirder: just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain.




 















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I wish I could have been so brave for my (now 34 year old) son when he was a kid...

Guitar Hero or High School? One Family’s Choice
Positive Psychology News Daily, NY (Christine Duvivier) - May 9, 2009, 10:17 am 






Blake Peebles is a high school sophomore who wakes up at noon, does a few hours of school work, and then practices Guitar Hero for 10 hours.  Are his parents crazy?   

Maybe they are, but consider this: since replacing eight hours of high school each day with three hours of home-school and tutors, Blake now tests at a 12th-grade level, he socializes more often and has more friends, according to an article in the May issue of American Way Magazine.   He is also absorbed in mastering computer gaming, one of the fastest growing fields in our economy. 

It was not an easy decision for his parents to let Blake leave high school and it continues to be a hard choice.  They are attacked by critics —most of whom they’ve never met.  If the Peebles had taken the expected path and insisted that their son stay in school, no one would be giving them flack – even if their son was bored, depressed or learning less.  Many would tell them they were doing the right thing.  

Yet, today Blake is absorbed for most of his waking hours in something that creates flow for him – a path to well-being that the majority of high school students do not achieve in class, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  



 
 
Not only that, but Blake has rid himself of the stress he felt in a public high school that was not designed to bring out the best in him. He is learning, he is engaged in flow, and he is happy.  I admire the Peebles’ courageous decision.  They listened to their child’s needs and they were willing to take a risk in the hope of improving his well-being.  Their choice is not one that many would make, but it has proven to be a good one for Blake. 








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Chicken soup trumps them all!