[Paleopsych] why do we need to SEE sex and violence?
HowlBloom at aol.com
HowlBloom at aol.com
Sat Aug 13 05:08:59 UTC 2005
Judging from the following item, our perceptual system seems preprogrammed
to stop, pause, and rivet on sights that promise sex or threaten violence.
Makes sense. Sex makes sure that when we die our genes go marching on.
Avoiding violence makes sure our body and mind live to see another day. Gawking
at violence from a distance hopefully helps us learn how to avoid it—or
overcome it-- in the future.
Now the question is this. Is this fixation on violence and sex a product
of Western Culture. Or is it universal in humans? If it’s universal in
humans, does it also show up in lab rats, pigeons, and anolis lizards? In other
words, does it go back to a common ancestor of birds, mammals, and lizards?
At what age does this phenomenon appear in humans? When are babies able to
perceive sex and violence? When do these two become emotionally potent to
kids? Howard
Retrieved August 13, 2005, from the World Wide Web
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7845 NewScientist.com Erotic images can turn you blind *
18:09 12 August 2005 * NewScientist.com news service * Gaia Vince
Researchers have finally found evidence for what good Catholic boys have known all
along – erotic images make you go blind. The effect is temporary and lasts just
a moment, but the research has added to road-safety campaigners’ calls to ban
sexy billboard-advertising near busy roads, in the hope of preventing
accidents. The new study by US psychologists found that people shown erotic or
gory images frequently fail to process images they see immediately afterwards.
And the researchers say some personality types appear to be affected more
than others by the phenomenon, known as “emotion-induced blindness”. David
Zald, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Marvin Chun and
colleagues from Yale University in Connecticut, showed hundreds of images
to volunteers and asked them to pick a specific image from the rapid sequence.
Most of the images were landscape or architectural scenes, but the
psychologists included a few emotionally charged images, portraying violent or
sexually provocative scenes. The closer these emotionally charged images occurred
prior to the target image, the more frequently people failed to spot the
target image, the researchers found. “We observed that people failed to detect
visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images,
whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images,”
Zald says. Primitive brain “We think there is essentially a bottleneck for
information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it
can jam up the bottleneck so subsequent information can’t get through,” Zald
explains. “It appears to happen involuntarily. The stimulus captures
attention and once allocated to that particular stimulus, no other stimuli can get
through” for several tenths of a second. He believes that a primitive part
of the brain, known as the amygdala, may play a part. That region is involved
in evaluating sensory input according to its emotional relevance and has an
autonomic role, influencing heart rate and sweating. “It is possible that
emotionally-charged stimuli produce preferential rapid routing of the impulse
that bypasses the slower cortical route via the amygdala," Zald told New
Scientist. "Patients with amygdala lesions pick out the target image without
reacting to violent images, although they show normal blindness reactions when
sexual images are introduced, which suggests another mechanism may also be
involved.” Harm avoiders The researchers think emotion-induced blindness could lead
to drivers simply not seeing another car or pedestrian if they have just
witnessed an emotionally charged scene, such as an accident or sexually explicit
billboard. The effect could exacerbate the more obvious problem of drivers
simply being distracted by large, arresting images. "It's the responsibility
of drivers to ensure that when they are behind the wheel they keep their eyes
on the job in hand," says a spokeswoman from Brake, a UK road safety
organisation. And some people are more vulnerable than others. The study assessed
participants using a personality questionnaire, rating them according to
their level of “harm avoidance”. Those scoring highly were more fearful,
careful and cautious; those scoring low were more carefree and more comfortable in
difficult or dangerous situations. The researchers found that those with low
harm avoidance scores were better able to stay focused on a target image than
those with high harm avoidance scores. “People who are more harm avoidant
may not be detecting negative stimuli more than other people, but they have a
greater difficulty suppressing that information,” Zald suggests. The Brake
spokeswoman says companies should think about the consequences of placing
emotionally charged billboards at dangerous road junctions: “We should be
concerned if drivers are experiencing split-second breaks in concentration, which
could result in an accident or death on the roads.” Journal reference:
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (August 2005 issue) Related Articles * Early
blindness frees brain-power for hearing *
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524845.200 * 29 January 2005 * Porn panic over eroto-toxins *
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424750.800 * 27 November 2004 * Women's
better emotional recall explained *
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2576 * 22 July 2002 Weblinks * David Zald, Vanderbilt University *
http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/zalddh/zaldhomepage.htm * Marvin Chun, Yale
University * http://www.yale.edu/psychology/FacInfo/Chun.html * Brake, UK
road safety organisation * http://www.brake.org.uk/ * Psychonomic Bulletin
and Review * http://www.psychonomic.org/PBR/ Close this window Printed on Sat
Aug 13 05:53:57 BST 2005
----------
Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of
History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the
21st Century
Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University;
Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
www.howardbloom.net
www.bigbangtango.net
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic
of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The
Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American
Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society,
Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International
Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for
Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see:
www.paleopsych.org
for two chapters from
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History,
see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big
Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/paleopsych/attachments/20050813/8e22d769/attachment.html>
More information about the paleopsych
mailing list