Judge This: No Gay Kissing On Modern Family?

I am a bit late on this story but wanted to offer a contrary viewpoint to the dominant one of the outraged blogosphere. Though I have never seen the show, I was interested in the controversy over the show Modern Family which apparently features a gay couple among its lead characters.  The controversy centers not […]

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Putting Social Brain Mechanisms To The Task Of Figuring Out Unknown Natural Phenomena

Last fall, Wired reported on a study published last fall (“Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity.” By Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Su, Frank Krueger, Jordan Grafman. Public Library of Science ONE, Vol. 4 No. 9, September 28, 2009) which finds religious people have extra activity in the neurological brain regions indispensable for social intelligence: Brain scans […]

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An Awareness Test

Keep your eye on the ball: You Are Not So Smart has more on the phenomenon of Inattentional Blindness. Your Thoughts?

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Some Suspicions About The Superiority Of Liberal Moral Values

Earlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.  If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of […]

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Are Liberal Values Objectively Better Than Conservative Ones?

In recent years, Jonathan Haidt has been influentially arguing that there are five essential modules in the mind from which human moral concerns originate.  He has made this claim in several places, most prominently among philosophers in his contribution to Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s groundbreaking […]

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Emotional Rollercoaster Relationships Harder On Young Men Than Young Women

A study of 1,000 men and women ages 18-23, “Nonmarital Romantic Relationships and Mental Health in Early Adulthood” by Robin Simon and Anne Barrett, finds that young men benefit more from a romantic relationship going well and suffer worse from the strain of a bad one, whereas young women benefit more from simply being in […]

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Oxytocin Linked To Both Trust And, Now, Defensive Aggression

A really interesting, but unfortunately unsurprising, study indicates that the same hormone that helps us bond with others, also makes us preemptively aggressive towards those outside that group with which we bond: Our findings show that oxytocin, a neuropeptide functioning as both a neurotransmitter and hormone, plays a critical role in driving in-group love and […]

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Judge Judy Berates Unqualified Evangelists Offering Drug Rehabilitation

Now if only we could get her on the case of Michelle Bachmann. Your Thoughts?

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Michael Shermer On “The Pattern Behind Self-Deception”

Shermer does TED and explains how two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired traits, useful for survival, backfire on us: Your Thoughts?

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Changing Minds

Steven Pinker compares current worries that the internet is changing how we think and making it more superficial to previous “moral panics” at the arrival of all other new media, from the printing press to newspapers to television.  (And his examples might as well have gone all the way back to Plato’s mistrust of the […]

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“Skipping Sunday School”: A Documentary On Parenting Without Religion And Growing Up Godless

(via Atheist Nexus) Learn more about the topic and the film here. Your Thoughts?

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The Secret Powers Of Time

Some interesting insights, but visually a blast to watch:  Your Thoughts?

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Children Of Lesbians Did Better In Study Than Traditionally Raised Children

Nanette Gartrell and Henny Bos (author of Parenting in Planned Lesbian Families (UvA Proefschriften) have the authored the first longitudinal study to track the outcomes of children created through artificial insemination through their teenage years.  The results? The authors found that children raised by lesbian mothers — whether the mother was partnered or single — […]

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God, Science, And Sanity: A Panel On Religion And Psychology

A panel of Richard Dawkins, Rabbi Jacqueline Ninio, Professor Patrick McGorry, Steve Fielding, and Julie Bishop discusses psychology and religion.  The reaction to the creationism of the Australian parliamentarian from the audience is heartening. Your Thoughts?

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Don’t Tell Yourself You Will Succeed, Ask Yourself If You Will

 A study led by Dolores Albarracin implies that when people ask themselves whether they will succeed, they are more often successful than when they assert to themselves that they will succeed: Albarracin’s team tested this kind of motivation in 50 study participants, encouraging them explicitly to either spend a minute wondering whether they would complete a task or […]

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Of Two Minds About The Existence Of God

Below is a discussion of the phenomenon of split-brain patients who have one half a brain that believes in God and another half that does not, by famed neurologist VS Ramachandran (author of Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers, […]

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Differently Abled Or Simply More Virtuous In One Respect

Earlier today, I made a post comparing the different routes which atheists and those with Asperger’s syndrome take to their naturalistic explanations of causes of events that more religiously inclined people tend to chalk up to supernatural agency.  Whereas religious people would attribute an illness or finding their true love to the purposeful forces, like God’s […]

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A Little Evidence That Atheists and Theists Don’t “Simply Think Differently”

In order to respond to certain misunderstandings based on this post’s original, provocative title (Do Atheists Just Have Asperger’s?) I have re-edited it and retitled it.  There is now a new opening paragraph and extra concluding paragraphs. It is often suggested that the difference between theists and atheists might simply stem from differences in their naturally given […]

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Neuroplasticity

In May 2009, Margaret Throsby interviewed Norman Doidge MD, research psychiatrist at the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Centre and the University of Toronto.  Here are a few nuggets from the fascinating, 40 minute long audio interview on neuroplasticity: a property of the brain which allows it to change its structure and its function as it goes […]

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On The Powers Of Personal And Political Bodies Over Their Apparent Mental Leaders

The Peaceful Atheist finds “consciousness-lowering” experiences in which she escapes her aloof and wandering mind to reconnect with her tangible and oft-forgotten body to be greater than her many “consciousness-raising” experiences.  She writes: It’s extremely hard for me to escape the internal labyrinth of my mind and focus completely on something external.  Often after being […]

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Teen Werewolves

Am I just getting older or are teens really becoming a whole lot less distinguishable from children? The wisdom of a teen werewolf: I don’t believe any one is just human.  Everyone’s got something else mixed in with them, just they’ve got to actually look inside themselves to see what it is. Thanks to Brandy […]

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Is Belief In Love Like Belief In God?

Roger Friedland finds an interesting correlation between the two kinds of belief and examines its possible causes and implications: We found that belief in God has no impact on young people’s sex lives. College virgins are no more likely to believe in God than non-virgins. Even those who took a virginity pledge are not sexually […]

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Miserable Pastors

Via Pharyngula comes a bleak picture of what is going on in the lives, hearts, and minds of Evangelical pastors: Another article reveals even more telling statistics based on a survey of 1,050 evangelical Pastors (note these are evangelical pastors not liberal pastors): 89% considered leaving the ministry at one time. 57% said they would leave […]

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“Boy Renter” George Rekers’s Attempts To Modify A Boy’s Effeminacy

By now, surely you know who George Rekers is—he was founding member of the Family Research Council and former officer for the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), who lost that last job when he rented a boy through a website called “Rentboy.com” to “carry his luggage” (and give him nude massages). […]

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Judging From Smells

Salon has a neat interview with Dr. Alan Hirsch, founder and neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago.  He argues here that the sense of smell immediately leads us to value judgment than the other senses are and then explains how our moms influence our tastes: And what’s the relationship between […]

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