“Mommies who drink: Sex, Drugs and other Distant Memories of an Ordinary Mom” reveals just how judgmental we can be can be when it comes to motherhood, how deeply the expectations run that women transform overnight when they become mothers, losing not only half their brains but all their previous adult tastes, becoming wholesome and somewhat childlike themselves.
A novel study tries to explain what appears to be the diametrically opposite nature of traits associated with autistic-spectrum disorders, on the one hand, and psychotic-spectrum disorders, on the other. With a particular focus on autism and on schizophrenia, the authors link social brain development and other phenotypic traits to evolutionary biology and genetics.
A study which has been all over the press reports research findings from the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, that children with one particular version of a particular gene scored higher in IQ tests, between the ages of five and thirteen, if they had been breastfed.
Rather die than go to the dentist? Contemplating our own death is a lot more pleasant than contemplating dental pain, according to research which shows that reminders of death seem to provoke a kind of tuning into positive emotional information, a way of coping which is immediate, unconscious and clearly counterintuitive.
According to an article in the Observer Food Monthly, happy cows make for better meat. As a life long vegetarian, I am not writing this as an advert for anyone’s meat or a justification for its being ‘produced’ in the first place. But I do think the experiences of farms which do everything to provide a stress-free life and death for their cattle are, as well as a lesser evil, interesting for us humans too…
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