Twitter affects brain chemistry the same as love

Why is Twitter so addictive and appealing? It seems the answer may be more scientific than one would have guessed. An experiment by an industrious blogger has found that sending a tweet increases oxytocin and decreases stress hormone levels in the brain. This is similar to the reaction a person has when being in love.

I would love to see this investigated on a larger scale. Is this guy an anomoly, or is this a common experience for tweeters? How does reading other tweets affect us? Are the effects magnified when someone replies to us? Are the thousands of tweets I’ve sent in the last year considered drug abuse?

Hop to it, NIH! Fund this essential research.

Should birth control pills be available over the counter?

There’s an interesting Op-Ed over at the New York Times suggesting that it’s about time the birth control pill be available as over the counter medication. Since a prescription is the status quo, it never even dawned on me that changing that was an option. This would certainly help women who don’t have access to a doctor or had other complications arise (forgetting your pills before a vacation, etc). And in a country plagued by teen pregnancy, it would certainly help sexually active teens who don’t have methods of getting a prescription, whether they be for monetary or parental reasons.

But on top of the social aspect, Kelly Blanchard makes many good points on why we should make this change based on the science behind the pill:

The pill meets F.D.A. criteria for over-the-counter medications. Women don’t need a doctor to tell them whether they need the pill — they know when they are sexually active and want to avoid pregnancy. Pill instructions are easy to follow: Take one each day. There’s no chance of becoming addicted. Taking too many will make you nauseated, but won’t endanger your life, in contrast to some over-the-counter drugs, like analgesics. (There are even side benefits to taking the pill, like reduced risks of ovarian and uterine cancer.)

It’s true that the pill could be dangerous for women with certain conditions. Women who are 35 or older and smoke, and those with high blood pressure, are at greater risk of a heart attack or stroke if they take oral contraceptives that combine estrogen and progestin. But these are not complicated conditions to identify; women already have to tell their doctor about their health problems when they get a prescription, and research shows that women can screen themselves for contraindications almost as well as providers do.

What do you think? Is it time for birth control pills to be available over the counter? Do we have these regulations in place just because it deals with women’s sexuality, or are their valid medical concerns that Blanchard failed to mention?

I am such a REBEL, YEAAAAHHH!

I get crazy email sometimes, but this person seemed to have my best interests at heart. How about I share it with you guys, and see what you all think?

My name is Eric [redacted] and I have read much on what you have had to say on various subjects.

Religion
prochoice/prolife
Gay rights

You have a rebelious nature. You are about the same age as my children, and I see a lot of immaturity in you.
You enjoy attacking people to much.
You demand your right to be heard and then are rude to those who disagree with you.

All of the various subjects that you believe so strongly in are all tied together under one real subject. Your desire to buck the system.

Most people do believe in God…. you do not and you consider anyone who does an uneducated backwards fool.

You believe in Gay rights….. Yet HIV/AIDS has shown that nature itself has cursed this life style.

You would fight for the right of a serial killer to be saved from the electric chair and later that day fight for a woman to have the right to kill an innocent unborn child.

I would ask a feminist this: If women are intelligent why is abortion even needed? Today we have so many different forms of birth control abortion should no longer even be needed.

Could it simply be that women are not using birth control and then saying they do not want children? If you want men to take the responsibility can a woman not say ” not until you put that condom on”>??????

Maybe what your belief system is really all about is being able to do whatever you want anytime you want with anyone you want and their being no consequences to any of your actions….

We use to call people that thought like that children….. maybe it’s time to grow up

My new email address is: [redacted]

I wish you good luck

You know, I feel it’s only fair to respond to people with the level of respect that their thoughtful arguments have earned. Which is why, Eric, I feel compelled to say this:

Lolololololololol.

Hey, if there’s anything maturity has taught me, it’s to not waste my time responding to the insane judgemental ramblings of random internet strangers. Each sentence he wrote could get it’s own novel-length rebuttal, but what does it matter if it’s flying in one ear and out the other? The only reason I’m posting this is that I think it’s unfair to keep all this merriment to myself. Or so you could facepalm at the stupidity and develop your own counterarguments. Whatever floats your boat.

Though I do have to point out one thing: If I really wanted to rebel against my parents, I would have become a fundamentalist Christian Republican Sarah-Palin loving housewife. I think just typing that made my dad feel a disturbance in the Force.

Sexual strategies predict religiosity and attitude toward drug use

A new study from the University of Pennsylvania has indicated that your sexual attitudes help cause not only your attitude toward drugs, but your religiosity. It was previously commonly believed that religiosity and/or political beliefs were the primary causative agents, but it appears to be the other way around. Here’s an excerpt from the paper explaining this in more detail:

Moreover, the relationship between sex and drugs tended to mediate items that, from the perspective of canonical views in political science, might have been thought to be driving views on drugs. For instance, while it is true, as one might have expected, that people who are more religious and those who are more politically conservative tend to oppose recreational drugs, in both our samples, the predictive power of these religious and ideological items was reduced nearly to zero by controlling for items tracking attitudes toward sexual promiscuity.

These reductions are difficult to reconcile with a model in which abstract political views are the underlying causal variables driving attitudes toward drugs. They are, however, consistent with the model we propose, in which individuals’ sexual strategies drive views on recreational drugs.

It is also plausible given our results that abstract commitments drive sexual attitudes and sexual attitudes drive drug attitudes. In both models, sexual attitudes directly influence drug attitudes, with the difference being that our model views sexual strategy as a major causal influence in determining abstract commitments, while the other model takes the opposite causal position, viewing items like religiosity and ideology as major influences in determining sexual attitudes. We note that recent work with regard to religiosity shows substantial evidence that the causal arrow runs at least in significant part from sexual lifestyles and attitudes to religious commitments (McCullough et al. 2005; Weeden et al. 2008; Li et al.
2009).

The authors rightfully note that sexual attitudes don’t account for all variance, but they do account for a significant amount. This is obviously a complex issue, so I would like to see more research, but it’s still interesting. If it is true, I think it has profound implications for religion. There’s a difference between “Divine mandate says we must be monogamous, therefore I am” and “I’m monogamous, so I feel comfortable in a belief system that affirms my opinion.” Moral judgments sort of fall flat when they’re based on arbitrary personal opinion. Although, this concept isn’t too shocking to atheists.

Of course, if there’s one hole in this study, it’s all the religious fundamentalists who keep popping up in the news for their inability to keep their pants on. You think they would all be sex-crazed liberals.

(Via Carnal Nation)

Here, have some links!

In a couple hours I’ll be on a plane to Portland! I’ve set up some posts to go up during my absence, and I may blog at the conference if I get burnt out on evolution (unlikely, I know). Until then, here are some interesting stories I’ve seen recently to keep you busy.

Writer’s block

Sorry for the dearth of blog posts lately. I’ve had horrible writer’s block, mainly because it’s the summer. I get most of my inspiration from classes or crazy campus antics – finishing research and playing video games isn’t as exciting. Just to give you an example of my current activities, I spent the last two days at my parents’ house watching them watch golf. Yeah, thrilling.

I’m also going to be out of town soon. On Wednesday I’m leaving for the Evolution 2010 conference in Portland, Oregon. I’ll be there for a week presenting my research along with a bunch of my lab mates and professor. This is a huge conference, with almost 2,000 scientists attending, and I had a blast last year. But unfortunately for you, it also means I’ll have limited to no internet access.

So, help me out. Ask me questions either in the comments, by email (blaghagblog(at)gmail(dot)com), or anonymously through formspring.me! That way I can keep you entertained while I’m gone.

Haircuts, irrationality, and girliness

I chopped off 10 inches of hair today.
I swear it looks better than that photo. My camera is literally falling apart (the duct tape is failing), so taking a good picture was difficult.

Anyway, I’m relieved to have it cut. Starting when I was about 11, I’ve gone through a cycle of cutting my hair chin length, letting it grow out to a length I can donate, and then cutting it short again. I used to donate to Locks of Love, but decided not to anymore due to growing criticism of their practices. This particular pony tail will be donated to Pantene Beautiful Lengths, whose mission is to “make real hair wigs for women who have lost their hair due to cancer treatments.” This is especially important to me since my mom is a breast cancer survivor, and I know how much having a wig helped her self esteem when she needed it the most.

Though if you’re a friend or follow me on twitter, you know I’ve been hemming and hawing about this haircut for a while. The hour leading up to my appointment I flip flopped every thirty seconds between just getting a trim and chopping it off. Haircuts are just one of those things I’m irrational about. I know every time I do get it cut I love it and feel so much better – the loss of weight, shorter showers, cuter ‘do – but it unnerves me up until the cut.

Part of it is because I used to hate my hair: Up until college it was a frizzy, untameable mess. One of the reasons I loved Hermione so much as a kid was because I identified with her bushy hair – which is (one reason) why I can’t stand Perfect Shimmering Locks movie Hermione. The first time I donated my hair I joked that I felt bad for whoever got a wig of it. I didn’t have much hair-esteem.

On top of that, my mother forced me to have bangs as a child, which I absolutely loathed. Because my hair is thick and naturally wavy, my bangs had a mind of their own. Every morning my mom would attempt to tame them with a curling iron, but after a couple hours of school they were sticking out the wrong way again. I spent 7th grade running away from my mother whenever she brandished a pair of scissors, rebelling against that awful haircut and growing my bangs out. I don’t care how nice modern styles may look with bangs – I refuse to go through that again.

With bangs gone and the discovery of specialized anti-frizz shampoo and this thing called conditioner, my hair was instantly better. But hair is still a symbol of insecurity for me. I’ve always felt like I was left out of Girl Initiation – that my crucial feminine gene had been deleted or something. Girls, and now Women, all seem to know these standard secrets that I don’t. It’s not that I feel like I must have a certain type of hair or makeup or clothes; it’s that I feel unskilled because even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know how to make my hair nice or put on make up or pick out cute outfits. I want that ability to be there.

I’m an overachiever – I don’t like being bad at something. But I have a hard time picking up anything feminine. I do well in school because I learn very well in a traditional classroom environment. When it comes to fashion or style, no one ever sat me down explaining things. The most womanly wisdom my mom ever imparted on me was “One day, you’re going to start bleeding down there” and then showed a very terrified and confused Younger Jen where the pads were.

Now, even if I knew how to put on makeup, I would still probably go makeup-less 99% of the time. It would just be nice if I had the skill so for the 1% of the time where I’m going to a wedding or a club, I can make myself look a little spiffier. But until then, girlish stuff like this gives me horrible anxiety. I recently had a nightmare that I was on America’s Next Top Model and my challenge was to put on makeup in under 2 minutes. After drawing on my face like a four year old who just broke into Mommy’s makeup drawer, Tyra felt so bad that she let me try again. The sad thing is, this isn’t too far off from reality (minus the whole me making it on ANTM without becoming a size zero).

And I feel the same way about hair. It was almost my senior year of high school when a very stereotypically girly teammate on my golf team let me know what conditioner was. And while looking up haircuts for today, I still realized how hopelessly out of the loop I am. I thought blow drying your hair was just to make it dry faster, not for any sort of styling. I have no idea what different types of brushes are, let alone do. I didn’t realize people used curling irons or straighteners for regular hairdos. The stylist put “product” in my hair, and I have no idea what that is or how I could replicate my look.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m happy with how I look. I don’t feel the need to conform or look a specific way. It’s just frustrating to know there’s a whole body of knowledge that I am completely ignorant about. I felt the same anxiety while learning advanced calculus or magnetism. Hell, I’m much better at advanced calculus and magnetism than I am at feminine things. If I ever have children, I sort of hope I have sons just because I’m terrified of failing my daughters. I don’t want to instill them with the same anxiety I’ve been battling my whole life.

“Touchdown Jesus” to be resurrected

He won’t be coming back in three days, but the gaudy statue will be rebuilt, says Solid Rock Church. It’s bad enough they wasted $500,000 to build the thing to begin with – now they’re going to drop even more money to put it back up. I hope they’re insured; at least then they’ll be getting back money they already spent.The idea of spending over a million dollars on a ugly Jesus statue seems decidedly un-Christian to me. Couldn’t that money be better spent, you know, helping the poor or feeding the hungry? Just a thought.

But of course, that’s not the point of this sculpture. This is just another example of arrogance – of religious people who think their particular fairy tale is so awesome that they want to show it off. Not all religious people are like this: If everyone actually kept religion a personal issue like so many claim to do, we’d have a lot less problems in the world. But whenever someone feels the need to put up a 62-foot Jesus on the side of the highway, that’s just so they can show off.

I also find it amusing that religious people often attribute natural disasters to God’s will, but when it hurts them instead of homosexuals or pro-choicers, it was simply bad luck. Ah, isn’t cherry-picking your religious beliefs to make them conform to your political ones so nice? Hurricane Katrina? Totally God saying he hates gays. Lightning striking your giant idol that’s making Christians look bad? Totally explained by physics. Of course, at least one of my commenters from last night was being consistent:

wow.. so many different views.. but I keep thinking, that once again God has sent Jesus to protect us. I live only a few miles from Solid Rock Church. There are also all kinds of hotels, and hospitals surrounding the area. Jesus took the beating so his people wouldn’t have to…. once again. Praise God.

Yep, because God couldn’t send that lightning bolt to hit a tree. Now the church will have to waste even more money putting up their giant idol, instead of helping their congregation or community. Man, God is kind of a dick.