trying to think clearly

laboratoryequipment:

Skull Resonance Influences Musical Preference

Why is it that some songs get your toes tapping and others leave you cold? Part of the answer may lie in the unique shape of your skull.

In addition to the obvious social and cultural influences on musical preference, there are also a myriad of little physical quirks of the body that affect the way we hear and process sound, particularly music. A new study presented at the 165th Acoustical Society of America Meeting in Montreal adds another quirk to the list: skull resonance. It turns out that the unique shape and resonance of a person’s skull could have a subtle impact on the way that she hears different keys of music, and how much she likes it.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/06/skull-resonance-influences-musical-preference

kateoplis:

I’ll Have What She’s Having

‘What Do Women Want?’

“When it comes to the study of female sexuality, scientists have tended to see what they expect, or want, to see, and there are fewer established facts than you would think. “Despite all the powers of contemporary science,” Bergner writes, “the seemingly straightforward anatomical question, is there a G spot? remains unanswered.” …

Female ejaculation has a similar history of discovery, denial, incredulous rediscovery, lingering unknowns. Now, researchers who work with animals argue that female anatomy in fact might be specifically adapted to sex with multiple partners — not just over a lifetime, but in the course of a single sexual episode. The different pace at which men and women build to climax might have the purpose of facilitating sex with multiple men in short succession, which would increase the odds of getting pregnant. Paraphrasing a theory put forward by the primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Bergner writes that the characteristics of female orgasm “could well be thoroughly relevant among our ancestors. Its delay, its need of protracted sensation … was evolution’s method of making sure that females are libertines, that they move efficiently from one round of sex to the next and frequently from one partner to the next, that they transfer the turn-on of one encounter to the stimulation of the next, building toward climax.”

If this is true, then female orgasm has played a crucial role in successful human reproduction — even though it is not necessary to conception itself.

So where does that leave us? Should we join swingers’ clubs? Have threesomes? Cheat with the piano tuner?

Only at our own risk. Bergner acknowledges that people agree to monogamy not because it’s the sexiest possible arrangement but because it seems the best way to have things like emotional stability and trust and therefore long-term companionship, which appears to be something both human males and females want — even if they also want to sleep around. One could imagine a more drawn-out examination of whether monogamy is indeed the best foundation for long-term relationships, given that both men and women (studies now show) sometimes find the strictures stifling to sexual happiness. In reading this book, I was reminded of the columnist Dan Savage’s long-running contention that heterosexual couples would have more stable relationships if they had a less rigid devotion to the ideal of monogamy. But Bergner doesn’t linger on the puzzles of long-term couplehood. The human tendency to become intensely attached to particular sex partners doesn’t figure in here. Instead, the book’s disparate parts are held together by Bergner’s general insistence on the very existence and force of female lust. Bergner proceeds as if the value of being called “animal,” of being considered highly libidinous, were self-evident — as if such charges had never been used against women. The fact that scientific and medical study of women’s reproductive systems has over the last three centuries been a fun house of ethically questionable experiments and misogynistic pronouncements doesn’t weigh as heavily on this book as you might expect. It is with apparently innocent enthusiasm that Bergner describes scenes of women masturbating while hooked up to M.R.I. scanners and having their vaginal blood flow measured by machines.”

Read on.

jadaliyya:

Sultan of Sultans by Khalil Bendib

(Source: pestilentiae, via kateoplis)