Being Human

This website was helpful for me in looking at the difference between Manic (bipolar) and depression:

Two different conditions

Major depressive disorder—what people commonly call “depression”—and bipolar disorder do have some symptoms in common. However, they are two different conditions that require different treatments.

In general, major depressive disorder involves overwhelming feelings of sadness, worthlessness and hopelessness. Bipolar disorder involves episodes of depression but also episodes of mania—symptoms of which can include excessive energy, extreme irritability or “out of control” behavior. (People with depression do not experience manic episodes.)

Depressive symptoms vs manic symptoms

I found this article interesting. Cocaine use while pregnant slows cognitive and speech development as well as affects birth weight and head circumference.

Here is the link:

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1337370

Here is an interesting article that found that we find features of the face to be attractive if they are what we consider the "norm." Apparently, because they are easy for our brain to process because we have seen those kinds of features often, our brain finds them attractive, simply because they are familiar.

 Here is the link:

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/seeing/index.html

This is a new one for me. I have never heard of the hair pulling disorder....

Here is the cite.

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2006/10/the_genetics_of_hair.html

I just wanted to say thanks for showing the movie on evolution. I found it really interesting. It helped me understand how something can gradually develop and improve over time to the needs of the environment. I learned about evolution before, but it has been a while, so the brush up was appreciated. Thanks!

I can't help but continue to ponder about Saturday's debates that we watched. I found the second debate by the women (sorry, can't remember her name) very interesting. Especially interesting was the comment about how parents treat their children differently, i.e. boys and girls are treated differently. This fact also tied into some of the reading this week about a woman's role in a man's life cycle. I believe that the parents do treat their children differently, although not necessarily on purpose. It seems from birth the girls are the pretty, sensitive, fragile beings that we must protect. They are taken in under their mother's wing. On the other hand, it seems that although boys to are nurtured by their mother, they are taken in under their father's wing and shown "the way to be a man," and "how to be tough." I found the perceptions of parents regarding their children in the studies profound. Just the simple fact that parents of boys reported their boys as being talented in math more than the parents of girls was pretty eye opening. Parents' perceptions influence their children's actions. That is why I think gender stereotypes live on, because to some extent they are true....and this is because it is a learned behavior....such as the girls helping mom in the kitchen and the boys out in the garage helping dad.