Bag of Worms Yet Words

121. When Male Mice Cry It Turns Female Mice On

"Crying isn't sexy—unless you're a male mouse. Researchers have found that a previously-identified pheromone in male mouse tears, known as ESP1, makes female mice arch their back, lift their hind region, and stay put when the males approach them to mate. (Female mice not in the mood tend to run away.) Scientists have found mouse pheromones in urine before; pheromones in tears may have evolved because tear fluid lingers in the fur, and female mice often groom the faces of other mice, the team will report tomorrow in Nature. Women don't have the receptor for this pheromone, however, so hold back on those tears for now, guys."

ScienceShot: "Tears Put Female Mice In The Mood."

The article should probably say, scientists have not yet discovered a receptor for the ESP1 pheromone in the human female, rather than that there is no receptor. Frankly, I think a similar phenomenon exists in humans. (See post 104.) Why would evolution discard such a useful trait? And, gosh, isn't this what sensitive metrosexuality is all about? The sensitive metrosexual guy slips in and scores with the girl while the Neandertal is thumping his chest at the frat house.

120. Ovulation Hormones Increase Women's Perception Of Faces

June 29, 2010. New Scientist.

"THE size of a woman's brain changes throughout her menstrual cycle, with some areas growing by as much as 2 per cent in the run-up to ovulation, when women are at their most fertile.

"So say Belinda Pletzer and colleagues at the University of Salzburg, Austria, who took MRI scans of the brains of women during their monthly cycles.

"In women not taking the pill, the team found an increase in the volume of grey matter in the right parahippocampal and fusiform gyri, areas of the brain involved in spatial location and facial recognition (Brain Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.brainres.2010.06.019).

"This boosts women's abilities to recognise faces, bodies and landscapes, says Pletzer, adding that this may help them to locate a high-quality mating partner.

"The team found that the effect is short-lived, however. After ovulation, rising levels of progesterone cause the gyri to shrink back.

"The team also found that women on the pill had a bigger hippocampus and cerebellum, associated with memory and movement, compared to controls. "The pill may exaggerate typical female behaviours such as superior language skills and memory," says Pletzer."

119. Voice Pitch Determines Whether Sentence Will Be Declarative or Interrogative

An MIT linguist has discovered that a shift in voice pitch identifies whether a sentence will be a statement or a question. Babies learn whether a stream of words is to be declarative or interrogative from the pitch order.

118. Women Can Judge A Man's Upper Body Strength By His Voice Alone

In a scientific experiment, women judged men's upper body strength by listening to recordings of their voices. There was no correlation (200 male subjects from three countries) between men's upper body strength and the timbre or pitch of their voices. The women made the evaluations nearly as snap judgments, without thought.

Such ability to intuit men's upper body strength from voice must be genetically hardwired in women. The ability probably evolved in lower primates and was passed along, perhaps enhanced, up the evolutionary tree to humans. It provides evidence of the ability of genetics to encode environmental stimulus. By analogy, to encode values.

117. Rats Have Inborn Navigational Brain Neurology

Scientists at Norwegian University in Trondheim have determined that rats have at birth three kinds of neurons that establish navigation for the new born animals:

direction neurons

place neurons

grid neurons

When the animal moves, direction neuron fires. Place neurons fire at a location. Grid neurons fire at regular intervals as the animal moves, establishing something like a spatial grid.

The article, cited above, compares this finding to Kant's theory of innate knowledge of space; but it is quite different. The rat's navigational knowledge is created by activity in the world. It is existential, in comparison to transcendental.

Presumbly humans have the same equipment, at least.

We can see a congruity between these navigational neurons and the primordial values I hypothesize as the basis of valuated geography, that is, a landscape.