Seeking - How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting.
posted by nickyskye on Sep 6, 2009 - 40 comments

Addiction: thousands of studies have been done claiming that it is a disease, often using rats in isolated cages with a bar-press system of delivery, showing they will repeatedly get high even if it means starving to death. Bruce Alexander was a skeptic, questioning the ecological validity of all such results: "They were said to prove that these kinds of dope are irresistible, and that’s it, that’s the end of the addiction story right there," and after delivering one particularly fruitless seminar in 1976, he decided to build Rat Park to conduct his own studies... [more inside]
posted by tybeet on Feb 12, 2009 - 47 comments

A New State of Mind. "New research is linking dopamine to complex social phenomena and changing neuroscience in the process."
posted by homunculus on Aug 12, 2008 - 25 comments

Alexyss Tylor was right! Semen is a powerful drug. (Fairly SFW, text-only link.)
posted by Brittanie on Jul 18, 2007 - 58 comments

Chile Pepper's Lonely Endorphins Club Cinema: I, II, III

Can all this be explained by Dr. Paul Rozin's Benign Masochism / Constrained Risk theory? I, for one, am not buying it, but any way you slice it, hot cock sauce is here to stay.
posted by NaturalScinema on Feb 23, 2007 - 35 comments

New research finds that the human brain registers the avoidance of an anticipated punishment in pretty much the same way as it registers a reward. (See this link for a less technical discussion of the research.) Do these findings suggest that the use of punishment as a deterrent to undesirable behavior in effect actually motivates the undesirable behavior (as opposed to the use of negative reinforcement, or in other words, the withholding of reward)? Do punishment-oriented models of socialization/behaviorial conditioning actually encourage cheating, by in effect selecting for better cheaters?
posted by saulgoodman on Jul 12, 2006 - 28 comments