While you’re waiting, here’s a fantastic gallery of solar images. My favorites: numbers 15 and 16.

The emotional ‘brain’, on this view, is distributed throughout our middles, with a particular concentration in what we call the ‘solar plexus’.

I was reminded of all this when I saw this article the other day.

For our other mentions of Mr. Gurdjieff in these pages, have a look here, and for related posts try our ‘Inner Work‘ category.

And here’s a related video.

Scientists at UCLA gave a group of rats the “human equivalent” of 15 to 20 beers during a two-hour binge. We’ll call this group the Rat Blackout Brigade. These rats not only passed out cold, but also lost the reflex mechanism that allows them to flip over when placed on their backs.

Another group of rats got tanked up with the same amount of alcohol, except this group was also given a shot of DHM. While the DHM rats eventually passed out as well, it took them longer to become intoxicated and their stupor lasted only 15 minutes. These rats also regained their reflexes quickly. In other words, the study concluded that DHM counteracts intoxication and alcohol withdrawal symptoms. And most significantly, DHM was found to reduce voluntary alcohol consumption. (After a two-week bender, the rats did not become dependent).

Hovenia dulcis has been used as a folk remedy for centuries to treat a wide range of alcohol-induced ailments, including liver injuries. In fact, the Raisin Tree was recorded in the world’s first pharmacopoeia, Tang Ben Cao. It is said that during the Song Dynasty the poet Su Dongpo, who had a propensity for excessive alcohol consumption, used zhi ju zi, or Raisin Tree extract, to help him hold his liquor.

I don’t know. As far as I can tell, this h. dulcis stuff interferes with all the effects of alcohol, both the ones you don’t want and the ones you do. I know a simpler way of accomplishing that, and it’s cheap, too: don’t drink. (I give that a whirl every once in a great while, and as it happens it’s how I’m spending this January — mainly because I enjoy being able, now and then, to flip myself over when placed on my back.) I suppose this raisin-seed elixir would be good for someone who just wants a nice glass of wine with dinner, say, for purely aesthetic reasons, but I think it’s safe to say that most people consuming alcohol have a motivation that goes beyond finding the perfect pairing for their aumônière d’oeuf poché Périgueux.

On the other hand, if someone were to come up with a medicament that reliably eliminates the existential crisis commonly known as “the morning after”, without interfering with one’s customary enjoyment of the evening before — well now, that would be something worth investing in.

Men, Women Really Do Have Big Personality Differences

– that any human being, plucked from anywhere on Earth at any time between the invention of language and the 1960s or so, and not in a persistent vegetative state, could have told you.

I’m “on the wagon” this month; after an outstandingly well-lubricated holiday season I thought a dry January would have a salubrious and restorative effect. Items like this make it very much more difficult.

Can anyone really imagine anymore that the galaxy isn’t teeming with Earth-like, watery worlds? Can we really imagine that we are alone?

This often draws the objection, however, that females have distinctly smaller brains than males, but do not show lower average intelligence within their population groups than males. So if this difference doesn’t account for differences in intelligence within groups, why should mean brain volume be responsible for IQ differences between groups?

The answer is coming into view. It appears, as many have suspected, that the difference in brain size between males and females is due to the presence of extra machinery in the male brain for processing spatial-relationship data — a feature that is independent of general intelligence.

Charles Murray comments here.

Even though it is repeatedly stressed by everyone that the research behind all of this concerns itself only with statistical aggregates, and has absolutely nothing to say about the intelligence of any individual person, the subject is obviously Kryptonite for public figures, and discussion of it has been ruinous for more than a few. (Just ask James Watson, for example.) The widely read blogger Andrew Sullivan has now rather bravely taken up the topic in a series of posts; the latest of them is here. (HT: Dennis Mangan.)

Given what a lethally electrified topic this is, it’s fair to ask: even if this is all true, why bring it up? In a conversation I had a while back with a friend in Wellfleet who was a professor of sociology at Harvard, she actually went so far as to insist, when pressed, that this sort of research simply should not be conducted, as nothing good can come of it anyway. Here’s Mr. Sullivan’s response to that (my emphasis):

Two points: research is not about helping people; it’s about finding out stuff. And I have long opposed the political chilling of free inquiry into any area of legitimate curiosity or research. I’m not going to stop now. Secondly, I agree that there would be very little, if any, use for this data in our society, apart from the existence of affirmative action. But when public policy holds that all racial difference in, say, college degrees, are due to racism, a truth claim has already been made. So the p.c. egalitarians have made this a public and social issue by a statement of fact they subsequently do not want to see debated or challenged using the data. That’s an illiberal position, in my view.

I remain gob-smacked by the resilience of IQ differences between broad racial groups, controlling for much other data. Maybe if we understood what was going on – which particular and subtle combination of genetics, culture and generation makes this the result – we could help increase equality of opportunity. Maybe racial categories themselves have become so fluid and opaque the whole area is now moot. Maybe we should accept that differences in outcomes among racial groups have some element of irreducibility to them. Maybe the answer is to abolish racial affirmative action and replace it by class-based forms. Maybe the answer is to abolish affirmative action altogether (my preferred outcome). But all these questions depend on a thriving research culture which has been chilled by politics. That’s what saddens me.

Leaving aside Mr. Sullivan’s more general sentiment about stifling free inquiry, his highlighted point is exactly right: the reason we ought to be able to engage in this particular research, and to discuss its results without opprobrium, is that others have already used truth claims about the distribution of intelligence as the basis of a great deal of public policy, while at the same time declaring it off-limits for debate. But if we can come to accept, for example, that the prevalence of Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians in elite intellectual occupations, and the low representation of other groups in those areas, merely reflect actual differences in the distribution of innate intelligence rather than malevolent racism, perhaps we can finally stop making futile and polarizing gestures at terrible expense, stop falsely demonizing statistically more-successful groups as vile oppressors, and eventually learn to treat people as we should have been doing all along: as individuals.

Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.

… It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.

No, it doesn’t. Neither does pretending it isn’t so, or insisting it isn’t so, or making public policy based on the assumption that it isn’t so.

Here’s a related statistical fact, of no less significance: the qualities under examination here have been repeatedly demonstrated to be highly heritable (another commonsense datum that would once have been obvious to all, but nowadays only to professional psychometricians, black-hearted curmudgeons, and breeders of livestock).

Taken together, what are we to make of these results? Gee, I really can’t say. And you’d better not, either.

Boys do better on tests of technical aptitude (for example, mechanical aptitude tests) than girls. The same is true for adults. A new study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, describes a theory explaining how the difference comes about: the root cause is that boys are just more interested in technical things, like taking apart a bike, than girls are.

More on this startling result here.

Have a look.

Here.

“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.

A neutrino walks into a bar.

Older Musicians Experience Less Age-Related Decline in Hearing Abilities Than Non-Musicians

ScienceDaily (Sep. 13, 2011) — A study led by Canadian researchers has found the first evidence that lifelong musicians experience less age-related hearing problems than non-musicians.

While hearing studies have already shown that trained musicians have highly developed auditory abilities compared to non-musicians, this is the first study to examine hearing abilities in musicians and non-musicians across the age spectrum — from 18 to 91 years of age.

The study was led by Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and is published online Sept. 13 in the journal Psychology and Aging, ahead of print publication.

Investigators wanted to determine if lifelong musicianship protects against normal hearing decline in later years, specifically for central auditory processing associated with understanding speech. Hearing problems are prevalent in the elderly, who often report having difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background noise. Scientists describe this as the “cocktail party problem.” Part of this difficulty is due to an age-related decrease in the ability to detect and discriminate acoustic information from the environment.

“What we found was that being a musician may contribute to better hearing in old age by delaying some of the age-related changes in central auditory processing. This advantage widened considerably for musicians as they got older when compared to similar-aged non-musicians,” said lead investigator Benjamin Rich Zendel at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute. Zendel is completing his Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Toronto and conducted the study with senior cognitive scientist and assistant director of the Rotman Research Institute, Dr. Claude Alain.

The article doesn’t mention recording engineers, but I’m sure the effect is just as strong for them, if not stronger. Over the years people have often said to me what good hearing I must have to have had a long career as an engineer; I’ve always told them that one doesn’t need exceptional hearing (in fact I had both of my eardrums punctured as a child, to relieve a stubborn middle-ear infection), but must rather be trained to listen. And it seems that training makes a big difference as one’s auditory organs become less sensitive in later years.

Progress has been made. Here’s an article that will explain where we’ve got to so far.

P.S. Don’t miss the bit about the fuzzy beast with seven sexes.

According to Scientific American, a meta-analysis of seven studies of the effects of salt consumption finds little or no health benefit from reduced-sodium diets.

Would you mind calling off the mutaween?