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You've seen it all too often. Three seconds left in the big game. Your team is down and the play of the century is about to unfold, one to be used in epic boasts in bars for years to come. You were there, about to witness…and then boom! More quickly than Madden can deliver a blindingly obvious line, the wife pulls the plug and nags you to do chores.
A man weeps for times past of a bachelor's life.
Of all animals, humans display a very unique range of emotion. While animals have the ability to produce tears, some aspects of crying may be unique to humans. Though the scientific study of crying still leaves many things unanswered and is quite complex, there are some basics and cool things to know on the subject.
In Soviet Russia, Tears Cry You!
Imagine taking a nice, long yawn. The simple mention of the yawn, and the mental image of taking a nice gulp of air, may have triggered you to actually yawn along with anyone sitting around you.
Though scientists feel that yawning may have both physiological and evolutionary aspects, as we yawn even before birth, there is an enigmatic behavioral aspect to the process. A similar perspective is given to aspects of crying.
We are naturally equipped to cry and produce tears. Tears are produced by the lacrimal gland, which is located in the outer, upper portion of each of your eyes. Upon release tears flow down the ocular surface of your eye and on to your tear ducts and nasolacrimal ducts. If you are sitting at a Kevin Federline and Shaquille O'Neill singing hour, your emotional tears will overwhelm your ducts and tears will flow down your cheek.
What's The Point Of Tears?
The tears of villainy produced by a mocking Sean Connery cutting into the brigand Trebek about his mother are not the same, as say, the tears shed by a Susy Homemaker who is cutting into onions to place on her Garden Burger. Though the ethics of a villain and those who put vegetables on a veggie-burger may be similar, the tears produced in each case are distinctly different.
There are three types of tears produced by our eyes which are classified as basal, reflex and emotional (psychogenic) tears .
Basal tears, which are the primary tear, help keep the eye surface nice and moist. The chemical components of this tear class allow it to form an adherent, thin film over the eye to provide general protection and moisture.
Sometimes we may get things like dust or a pellet from a Red Ryder BB gun in the eye. We all make mistakes. Such irritants will induce the response of reflex tears. Reflex tears hold similarity to basal tears, but are distinct in having chemical components that more readily allow elimination of particles and irritants (like dust or onion vapors) and microorganisms.
The final class of tears, and the ones that produce many scientific questions, are emotional tears. Some studies and scientists indicate this class of tear, within humans, are different within males and females and also may have a distinct evolutionary origin and physiological purpose.
Certain chemicals may build-up when the body is under great stress. Studies have shown that proteins released in emotional tears are the same hormones associated with high stress. For instance, prolactin (protein associated with breastmilk production) and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) are both associated with emotional tears and also stress within the body.
Women tend to have higher prolactin levels, nearly double, than that of men and this may be why women cry a bit more easily when under stress. ACTH, often associated with the "sweating bullets" you see on a guy who has forgotten his anniversary or is pushing a deadline, is stress associated and released in emotional tears. Research shows that suppressing emotional tears may contribute to conditions such as hypertension and heart disease.
The most mysterious and enigmatic part of crying comes from the most recognized use of tears in today's society; communication. At a funeral or during a sad event, cultural norm shows expressing sadness in tears is comforting and common. This seems to be an emotional response that covers many cultures. The same way adults use crying to show an emotional bond, babies and young children use crying (with associated tears) as a symbol of communication to show pain, hunger or perhaps hurt. The evolutionary and physiological aspect of the communication of crying, in humans and perhaps some animals, still has many points of consideration to explore.
Fun Fact: Why Do Onions Make You Cry?
We all know that onions make us tear up. The next time you are around someone who is cutting up an onion, impress them with your scientific knowledge.
Onions contain amino acid sulfoxides, which are a type of organic molecule. When you cut into the onion skin, allinases, a class of enzymes, mix with the sulfoxides to make sulfenic acid. Once exposed to oxygen in the air, the sulfenic acid arranges into the strong chemicals syn-propanethial-S-oxide and thiosulfinates, which cause tears and cause the strong smell of cut onion, respectively. It's not the scent of the onion that makes you cry, but rather the syn-propanethial-S-oxide irritating the eye that makes you release reflex tears and cry. Since the chemical makes you cry it's also called a lachrymator.
Sources 1 2 3
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This SpikedHumor article continues from Part 1 of Cool Brain Phenomena: Spiked's Week in Science.
Make sure to read and watch the video in Part 1 first or this part won't make sense.
Was It Really Blindness?
That's a very good question and the answer may be yes, no, or yes and no. There are other possibilities to explain this phenomenon, though from research inattentional blindness is readily explored.
The brain constantly processes and responds to stimuli. The question presented by the idea of inattentional blindness is do we miss -significantly- unexpected events, that is potential visual stimuli, when engaged in tasks? In application to the video, this means that you didn't recall the big dancing gorilla, much like the observers in the film, simply because you did not see it.
Inattentional Amnesia and Agnosia
However, what if you actually did see it? That is surely a possibility. In that case, it could indicate that our brains may experience a sort of memory lapse, that is inattentional amnesia. You may have very well seen the gorilla on the first time around, and even made a quick note of "Wow, a dancing gorilla!", and continued on your focused task of counting the passes.
By the time you were queried to what you saw in the video (the expected stimuli of a ball being caught N times), you may have totally forgotten about the gorilla. That is, you experienced amnesia.
Another possibility lies within being an agnostic of sorts. Who knows what that implies?
If you said, "I'm not certain", you are either witty or really just agnostic.
Inattentional agnosia in the event of focused attention and unexpected events, presents itself in a situation where your brain may experience an unknown "thing" but fail to categorize it, leaving it as an ignored enigma, or to say, unknown. That is, you were either partially or fully unable to recognize the gorilla using your typical visual center.
So though you may have actually seen the unexpected event, and it was somewhat observed and therefore processed, it may not register to the brain as being significant and thus not readily recalled or reported.
Implications and Things to Ponder
In all, this leaves us with more questions about the nature of the brain, the way we process events, our limits and even questions about the nature of our evolution.
An interesting study would be to have a group of people, a control, simply observe the overall scene without being told what to expect, including gorilla, while having their brain stimulation monitored. When the unexpected stimulus appeared, would their brains show similar patterns to those who were encouraged to focus on a narrow task?
This also brings another interesting question, or more an implication. Is narrowed focus and discard of seemingly irrelevant "data" a beneficial feature of our evolutionary heritage? Being in a world with increased stimuli, and a brain that is highly equipped to observe and plan based on stimuli, without being able to "tune out" so to speak there exists a possibility that the brain could overload -or not be able to readily focus on tasks- granted the inability to actively lose focus when needed (if through inattentional blindness, agnosia, or amnesia or other explanations).
Is the human tendency to naturally limit attention and discard unexpected stimuli when focused an evolutionary advantage, as opposed to cerebral limitation? One other interesting study would be to see how people with genetic conditions, such as ADD, would perform given the task set in the video. Would their results differ?
Whatever the answers to these questions may be, it is a definite that the human brain is a complex marvel.
So what do you make of all of this and how did you do in the initial experiment?!?
Sources
(listed as abstracts)
Cognition. 2007 Apr 11
The attentional cost of inattentional blindness.
Brain Fun Facts
Conscious Cogn. 2006 Sep;15(3):620-7. Epub 2006 Feb 17.
The effects of eye movements, age, and expertise on inattentional blindness
Pyschol Review 2005 Jan;112(1):217-42.
What you see is what you set: sustained inattentional blindness and the capture of awareness.
Perception. 1999;28(9):1059-74
Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. (outdated, used to reference video)
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Drop everything you are doing right now and get ready for a bit of science. Ready?
First, you need to watch the following video. See how well you can do with the experiment. You'll have to watch very intently, as it's a bit tougher than it looks.
So that the experimental video doesn't pop up on the front page, however, first I'm going to list some cool and random facts about the brain and such. After this little "Cool Brain Facts" section to take up space, we can start with the actual experiment and article.
Cool Brain Facts
Here are some interesting bits of trivia about the brain.
- On average, the adult human brain weighs about three pounds (1,300-1,400 g). An elephant brain weights over four times more, at around 6,000 grams.
- We have around 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) neurons packed within our brains.
- After loss of blood supply to your brain for brain for over ten seconds, you will likely experience unconsciousness.
- During pregnancy neurons divide at 250,000 neurons/minute.
- The longest a person has stayed awake is is between 449 hours and 264 hours, held by Mrs. Maureen Weston, Robert McDonald, and Randy Gardner, respectively. The first two apparently achieved their records while sitting awake in rocking chairs.(Thanks for correction scottdrocks)
Alright, that should be enough. Now on to the actual article... :)
As mentioned before, first watch this video and participate in the experiment.
Ok, how did you do?
Yeah, I felt the same way at first. If you need to take a quick break and clear your head following that experiment, take a gander at the "If Bill Maher and Ann Coulter Made It" picture made by Adamness in your
Spiked forums. If you want to find out about the science behind this cool little experiment, read on! (Note: This article has been broken into two parts due to length.)
Human Awareness
The human brain is simply amazing; a complex command center capable of many things, from issuing coordination to abstraction.
Like every thing in nature, however, the brain does have its limits.
One of those limits, as demonstrated in this example, involves the potential for diminished attention when focusing on new tasks.
If you were truly intent on counting the number of passes made by people in the white shirts, and became narrowly focused, your brain perhaps made you subject to a state of awareness coined by Irvin Rock and Arien Mack as INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS.
In this video, for those who missed the big visual event, there are several explanations as to what could have happened.
You'll note, that the unexpected object in the video was fully and blatantly visible. If you don't believe it, and as you likely have already done by this point, re-watch the video and only look for the object you may have missed the first time around.
Now if you missed the unexpected event, that does not mean anything is wrong with your brain. In fact, that means you were intently focused and paying attention to a primary task. Your failure to notice the unexpected event likely had nothing to do with the nature of the huge honkin' gorilla, but more with the fact that your overall attention was limited in scope due to full engagement of a particular task. That is, your brain may have been selectively excluding sensory data.
(Continues in Part 2!)
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Life expectancy is increasing in the developed world. But Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey believes it will soon extend dramatically to 1,000. Here, he explains why.
Ageing is a physical phenomenon happening to our bodies, so at some point in the future, as medicine becomes more and more powerful, we will inevitably be able to address ageing just as effectively as we address many diseases today.
I claim that we are close to that point because of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project to prevent and cure ageing.
It is not just an idea: it's a very detailed plan to repair all the types of molecular and cellular damage that happen to us over time.
And each method to do this is either already working in a preliminary form (in clinical trials) or is based on technologies that already exist and just need to be combined.
This means that all parts of the project should be fully working in mice within just 10 years and we might take only another 10 years to get them all working in humans.
When we get these therapies, we will no longer all get frail and decrepit and dependent as we get older, and eventually succumb to the innumerable ghastly progressive diseases of old age.
We will still die, of course - from crossing the road carelessly, being bitten by snakes, catching a new flu variant etcetera - but not in the drawn-out way in which most of us die at present.
So, will this happen in time for some people alive today? Probably. Since these therapies repair accumulated damage, they are applicable to people in middle age or older who have a fair amount of that damage.
I think the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.
It is very complicated, because ageing is. There are seven major types of molecular and cellular damage that eventually become bad for us - including cells being lost without replacement and mutations in our chromosomes.
Each of these things is potentially fixable by technology that either already exists or is in active development.
Aubrey de Grey leads the SENS project at Cambridge University and also runs the Methuselah Mouse prize for extending age in mice.
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