Monday, October 10, 2011

Now They Tell Us

After marriage, a man's testosterone level will drop significantly
In humans, researchers have found that testosterone levels drop significantly after marriage, long before many men become fathers.
A single throw away line in a long article on parenting, nurturing and such. I found this passage much more amusing.
James Swain, a Canadian researcher at Yale University, used functional magnetic-resonance imaging to look at the brain activity of 25 couples after they had a baby. He and his colleagues took brain images of the new moms and dads when they heard the sound of their infant crying, or looked at a picture of their newborn.

They found that the brain activity of new parents is strikingly similar to what is seen in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder when their symptoms have been triggered.
The article seems to spend a lot of time dwelling on a tribe of hunter-gatherers in African, called the Aka (also known as??), where the fathers do all kinds of things the author clearly thinks fathers should do, like drag the kids around and let them suckle when cranky.  Call it the science of wish fulfillment.

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