Feynman On Visual Cognition
November 7, 2010
This particular interview was part of what inspired me to study how our brain conceives space by processing the waves which enter our eyes, and then infer what’s going on around us. I love Richard Feynman. He’s a hero of mine. I absolutely loved his Lectures On Physics, which are his undergraduate level lectures he delivered at Cal-Tech in the 1960s. I’m completely fascinated with the mess of waves we’re immersed in. As he points out, our eyes and bodies are instruments almost like radios, which are attuned to vibrations of this oscillating “field”. Our sensory organs are tapped into various frequency ranges, but there’s all these other waves which exist as well, we just don’t perceive them.
The big thing in the world of Physics today is String Theory. Here’s one of the theory’s founders, Dr. Kaku, explaining how the fundamental particles of our reality are really tiny little vibrating energy strings. I don’t know anything about String Theory. Besides all my neuroscience research, and other physics studies, hopefully within the next five or so years I’ll be able to study String Theory. It’ll be a while for me though.
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Consciousness and Egocentric Disorientation
November 7, 2010
You know, the world is strange – beyond strange. Near every conception I’ve held toward life since I was a little kid has turned out to be wrong when subjected to close inspection. Take the most common thing in the world – getting up out of your chair and walking around. Sounds so simple doesn’t it? We do it everyday. We get up and go to our jobs, navigate the hallways, make it to our office, and do our work. But the more neuroscience I study, the more I realize how mistaken we are when we look in the mirror. We’re not what we think we are.
I’ve spent all day today reading a textbook of mine called Neurological Foundations Of Cognitive Neuroscience. (All quotations found within this post will be from this text). Basically, it’s a compilation of research papers related to what happens when various areas of the brain are damaged. It turns out that your brain is responsible for near every capability you have. This is one of those things everyone knows, but doesn’t know. They know their brain is involved in their life, but they don’t realize that it’s pretty much everything that they are. Your brain consists of all these modules and if you suffer from say a stroke, and the brain cells of those modules die, you lose abilities to do all sorts of things – things you rarely (if ever) even think about.
My primary area of research these days is related to object recognition and spatial perception/cognition. I’m interested in how we perceive objects (such as a table, a desk, a book, whatever), link them together in spatial environments, and tie them together in sequences which we experience as time and our memories. Well I spent all day today studying a variety of disorders, and I’ll take a little time tonight discussing what are called topological disorientations. This has to do with things which go wrong when we’re “way-finding”, which is how we perceive the world, arrange it into space, and then navigate it, starting at point A, and moving toward our destination point B. Let’s talk about how various forms of brain damage in select areas can leave you incapable of doing this everyday task.
If you develop a serious lesion in any of the numbered areas, you’re going to face serious difficulties getting around. First, let’s introduce each area, and then discuss what happens when that area is damaged. Area (1) is the posterior parietal cortex, and it’s associated with what’s called egocentric disorientation. Area (2) is the posterior cingulate gyrus, and it’s associated with heading disorientation. Area (3) is the lingual gyrus, and it’s associated with a disorder called landmark agnosia. Last but not least, Area (4) is the parahippocampus, and it’s associated with aneterograde disorientation. Note: These sites illustrated are in the right hemisphere since the great majority of cases of topological disorientation follow damage to right-sided cortical structures.
Here’s a chart of each disorder.
Let’s examine some patients who have developed lesions in these areas.
Lesion In Area (1) – Egocentric Disorientation
A patient reported by Levine and colleagues (Levine, Warach, & Farah, 1985) presented with severe spatial disorientation following development of intracerebral hemorrhages. He would become lost in his own house and was unable to travel outside without a companion because he was completely unable to judge which direction he needed to travel. The patient demonstrated a right homonymous hemianopia, but had intact visual acuity and no evidence of prosopagnosia, object agnosia, or achromatopsia. His disabilities were most strikingly spatial. He had difficulty fixating on individual items within an array, demonstrated right-left confusion for both external space and his own limbs, and could not judge relative distance. He became grossly disoriented in previously familiar places; was unable to learn his way around even simple environments; and provided bizarre descriptions of routes. A computed tomography (CT) scan revealed bilateral posterior parietal lesions extending into the posterior occipital lobe on the left.
To save you some time, I’ll break down the medical terminology for you.
Homonymous hemianopia is a form of partial blindness resulting in a shared loss of vision in the same visual field of both eyes. Here’s a picture illustrating right homonymous hemianopia in this patient.
Prosopagnosia is a disorder where you can’t recognize people’s faces. We actually have a built in brain function specifically designed to look at a person’s face and associate it with an identity. If you lose that function, it’s pretty interesting. Patients with prosopagnosia can’t watch television because they’re unable to identify which character is which, so they can’t follow the plot.
I find prosopagnosia fascinating. In most all of us, we have a “hardware accelerated” facial recognition system. It happens without us thinking about. People with this disorder have to think about each individual aspect of a person’s face. They see an eye, another eye, a nose, a mouth, a mustache, a beard, but none of it ties together. They have to memorize identifying facial features in order to recognize someone, and they have to consciously think about it.
Agnosia is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss. For example, you still see, but you can’t tell what you’re looking at.
One of these days I’ll write a post into how our brain does object recognition, which is so interesting. Ever since I was like 16 years old I’ve wanted to know how the brain stores, processes, and recognizes objects.
Achromatopsia primarily has to do with color vision. If you have this disorder, you see things in blacks, whites, and grays. Also, everything is blurry in well lit rooms.
Let’s continue with our case study.
[His] most striking abnormalities were visual and spatial. . . . He could not reach accurately for visual objects, even those he had identified, whether they were presented in central or peripheral visual fields. When shown two objects, he made frequent errors in stating which was nearer or farther, above or below, or to the right or left. . . .
He could not find his way about. At 4 months after the hemorrhages, he frequently got lost in his own house and never went out without a companion. . . . Spatial imagery was severely impaired. He could not say how to get from his house to the corner grocery store, a trip he had made several times a week for more than 5 years. In contrast, he could describe the store and its proprietor. His descriptions of the route were frequently bizarre: “I live a block away. I walk direct to the front door.” When asked which direction he would turn on walking out of his front door, he said, “It’s on the right or left, either way.” . . . When, seated in his room, he was blindfolded and asked to point to various objects named by the examiner, he responded [very poorly]. (Levine, Warach, & Farah, 1985, p. 1013)
These brain areas I’ve shown you in the image above are responsible for your conception of space. When you lose them, you can’t even think in terms of spatial relationships. People with properly functioning brains effortlessly walk around and think it’s so simple that a “soul” must be controlling the body, and we must have this “free will” which controls our bodily movements. We may have some sort of free will, but it doesn’t control the body in some simple way. Your brain is responsible for these things, and it functions a lot like a computer.
It’s amazing to me how this patient can’t even remember space. “It’s on the right or left, either way.” He can’t tell whether an object is distant or far. He can’t distinguish his left arm from his right. If you guys haven’t watched the lectures I posted on here the other day, you need to check them out. Dr. Murray was showing how contextual cues are processed giving rise to spatial and size conceptions. Area (1) is doing this. In healthy individuals, the brain takes the information from the eyes and processes it in such a way as to tell you about objects and their spatial relationships. This patient’s parsing system is half functioning. He can parse out objects and tell you, “Oh, that’s a coffee mug”, but doesn’t know “where” it is. You can ask him to reach out and grab it and he’ll be grasping all over the place. It must be frustrating living in that damaged brain. To see objects, but not be able to relate them in space is incomprehensible to me.
The details of all of this intrigues me because you have to realize that this system is a product of natural selection. It evolved for low speeds and medium sized objects. It tells you that time flows in sequence, that these objects exist independently from one another, and that they have to be in this or that location. It tells you that a particle existing in two locations at once is “paradoxical”. It’s a very sophisticated illusion. The brain has evolved so well that it all just syncs together, and you think that time is flowing, that reality has to behave in such and such a fashion, that you control this body, that “you” have arms and legs, and so on. But no! That’s wrong. Your idea of “you” is a subjective feeling created by the body itself. “You” are something entirely different. “You” is a word created by the language system, linked to a possessive feeling which exists in your body because it is a self-replicating machine, concerned with holding on to its form so it can reproduce. But the actual consciousness, which is what you and I really are, works through the outer cortical areas of the brain. The rest of the body was made through evolution and is mechanical. The real us is some sort of undefinable “consciousness”. Call it a soul or a spirit if you like. I have to link it to a word to write it down, but it can’t be described because words can only describe physical stuff which our body can perceive.
When I talk of this “consciousness”, it’s the thing that feels, tastes, sees, and hears. The brain activity produces experiences in consciousness. If we were together and I put my hand on your shoulder, you would feel my hand and I’d feel your shoulder. Those subjective feelings are consciousness. It’s linked to this physical matter, probably due to some complex vibrational pattern. But I strongly feel we’re immortal spirits of some sort. I don’t mean “Jason” is a spirit. This “spirit” I’m talking about doesn’t have an identity resembling the things human brains think about. If we had a different body, we’d live a totally different experience. It’s not some spiritual clone of this human existence. It’s something entirely different. It can sense vibrations of physical matter as we know it, and probably influence select vibrational patterns. It’s just my guess based on my own neuroscience studies. I assume its existence because I don’t see how free will can exist without it. Outside of free will though, I don’t see a reason to assume its existence.
With all this talk of “consciousness”, I’m sure some of you are thinking, “Where’s your proof for all this Jason? I believe I am my physical body. You can’t tell me otherwise.” Well, ok, I’ll now bring out the proof. The possessive feelings which people falsely identify themselves with are illusions created by the body itself for its own survival. Let’s talk about neglect. Here’s a case study from a real patient who developed this brain lesion.
What happened?
Neglect is more common and more severe with right than with left brain damage. I will refer mostly to left-sided neglect following right brain damage, although similar deficits are seen sometimes following left brain damage.
A 65-year-old woman presented to the hospital because of left-sided weakness. She was lethargic for 2 days after admission. She tended to lie in bed at an angle, oriented to her right, and ignored the left side of her body. When her left hand was held in front of her eyes, she suggested that the limb belonged to the examiner. As her level of arousal improved, she continued to orient to her right, even when approached and spoken to from her left. She ate only the food on the right side of her hospital tray. Food sometimes collected in the left side of her mouth.
Her speech was mildly dysarthric. She answered questions correctly, but in a flat tone. Although her conversation was superficially appropriate, she seemed unconcerned about her condition or even about being in the hospital. When asked why she was hospitalized, she reported feeling weak generally, but denied any specific problems. When referring to her general weakness, she would look at and lift her right arm. Over several days, after hearing from her physicians that she had had a stroke and having repeatedly been asked by her physical therapist to move her left side, she acknowledged her left-sided weakness. However, her insight into the practical restrictions imposed by her weakness was limited. Her therapists noted that she was pleasant and engaging for short periods, but not particularly motivated during therapy sessions and fatigued easily.
Three months after her initial stroke, obvious signs of left neglect abated. Her left-sided weakness also improved. She had slightly diminished somatosensory sensation on the left, but after about 6 months she also experienced uncomfortable sensations both on the skin and “inside” her left arm. The patient continued to fatigue easily and remained at home much of the time. Her magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan showed an ischemic stroke in the posterior division of the right middle cerebral artery (figure 1.1). Her lesion involved the posterior inferior parietal lobule, Brodmann areas (BA) 39 and 40 and the posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus, BA 22.
A little later, the textbook further describes how patients deny their own limbs. Sometimes they even grow to hate their limbs.
Personal neglect refers to neglect of contralesional parts of one’s own body. Observing whether patients groom themselves contralesionally provides a rough indication of personal neglect. Patients who ignore the left side of their body might not use a comb or makeup, or might not shave the left side of their face (Beschin & Robertson, 1997). To assess personal neglect, patients are asked about their left arm after this limb is brought into their view. Patients with left personal neglect do not acknowledge ownership of the limb. When asked to touch their left arm with their right and, these patients fail to reach over and touch their left side (Bisiach, Perani, Vallar, & Berti, 1986).
A phenomenon called anosognosia for hemiplegia can also be thought of as a disorder of personal awareness. In this condition, patients are aware of their contralesional limb, but are not aware of its paralysis (Bisiach, 1993). Anosognosia for hemiplegia is not an all-or-none phenomenon, and patients may have partial awareness of their contralesional weakness (Chatterjee & Mennemeier, 1996). Misoplegia is a rare disorder in which patients are aware of their own limb, but develop an intense dislike for it (Critchley, 1974).
As you can see, without that brain module telling you, “Care about this body part. This is your body part” “you” cease to care about it. People are capable of neglecting any part of their body. They”ll shave one half of their face but not the other! They see the other half of their face but don’t attribute it to themselves. It’s no different than their toothbrush. Bizarre indeed! Brain damage pulls up the curtain and shows us that it was all a grand illusion. The “body” you see in the mirror every day isn’t you and never was you. It’s just a mechanical machine that the real you can currently interact with.
If free will exists, consciousness is responsible for it, but that’s not to say it’s simple. It’s very complicated, if it exists at all. The brain is computing, calculating, and going about its business, and for the most part, I think we’re just dragged along for the ride. We seem to be able to nudge it here and there, but it’s primarily an automated biological robot.
Unfortunately, it’s 1:30 AM and I’ve just barely scratched the surface of today’s research alone. *Sigh*. I don’t typically write about my research because there’s so much! I’d have to write a book. I haven’t finished talking about egocentric disorientation. I realize that this post is getting really long, so I’ll probably continue this later with a part II.
For a final end note, I want to say there’s more to this reality than what our senses are telling us. The light which our eyes perceive and process into space is only a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. Waves of all sorts are passing through our bodies as we speak, but we don’t sense them. Neutrinos make their way through the universe and nobody notices. The matter which we feel with our hands is only a minor constituent of the universe which we know about from physics studies. The vast majority of our universe is dark matter and dark energy. We live our entire days in an illusion which is generated by a sliver of the matter and energy that’s out there. As vast as the perceptible universe is, it’s a tiny fraction of what we know about – and we’ve probably just touched the surface as to what’s out there.
Tomorrow, if I have time, I’ll write about heading disorientations, landmark agnosia, and anterograde disorientations. I got sidetracked talking about consciousness. I’ll try to stay more focused next time, and direct the post on spatial cognition (which was my original intent for this post too, but oh well).
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In Remembrance of Carl Sagan
November 6, 2010
This coming Tuesday would have been Carl Sagan’s 76th birthday. Physicists and scientists all over the world have declared it Carl Sagan Day.
RIP - Carl Sagan - Astrophysicist (Nov 9, 1934 – Dec 20, 1996)
In remembrance, I’m going to post a clip of him reading from his book Pale Blue Dot. Enjoy.
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Visual Cognition And Your Brain
November 2, 2010
Besides physics, my other primary area of research is related to visual cognition. Have you guys ever seen the Honda robot Asimo? I’m sure you’ll recognize it from the picture below.
Asimo is the most advanced robot in existence. I found an awesome lecture on Youtube by one of the scientists involved in Asimo’s creation. He’s talking about its visual system and how it works. It’s absolutely incredible. If you want to know what the subject of “visual cognition” is all about, jump to 20 minutes within this video and you’ll actually watch Asmio’s systems in action. You get to see out of its camera eyes and watch it process the raw information, track objects, and comprehend the environment.
This is an artificial robot doing the same things your brain does for you automatically. The most simplistic, everyday tasks you perform are actually mind boggling in complexity. The thing is, your brain processes all the information for you without you having to think about it, leaving you with a false sense of simplicity.
I’ve also found some interesting lectures on the same material online. In this next lecture by Dr. Scott Murray, you’ll find out that your visual system heavily processes the raw sensory information from your eyes long before it becomes conscious to you. This is actually rather cutting edge research because his information related to V1 is different than what my neuroscience textbooks tell me, and they’re only a few years old.
It’s amazing to learn how your brain judges the “size” of an object. Our brains also perform some rather strange feats as they process the color information they receive. By the time you see something, you brain has already greatly filtered and processed the information, fusing it together with the context around it. You’re only conscious of the end result, which is why this is very fascinating to me. Understanding all those intermediary steps is a passion of mine.
You’ll be amazed as Dr. Murray moves colored squares in and out of pictures. He’ll hold the square outside of a picture and say, “What color is this?” You’ll say, “It’s gray”. Then when he places it in the picture, it’ll turn blue right before your eyes. Is the square gray? Blue? I don’t know.
As you take a stroll through your backyard, you’d be blown away if you knew all the things your brain processes for you. Say you see a tree several yards away from you. You walk toward it, then away from it, then move around it and view it from an angle, and so on and so forth. Throughout all of those complex changes in sensory impressions, your brain has computed and inferred that there is a tree, and that between your movements, what you’re viewing is the same tree. It’s judged its location relative to other objects. Even when changes take place, such as the limbs bending, and the leaves falling from the sky, it still knows it’s the same tree. It logs memories of these experiences. It just does and sorts all of this information for you. It’s only when you have to design a robot to do all these things that you start to appreciate how complex you are.
I study the brain because it tells us who we really are. I believe the space we’re living within is way more complicated than what our brains are telling us. The space our brains work with is a product of natural selection, and is a rough approximation. Quantum mechanics and relativity point toward a deeper picture. I think to understand some of the more subtle mysteries, it’ll take a deep understanding of everything the brain does.
Physics is plagued by overly simplistic concepts such as “observers” and “objects”. There’s models like the “many-worlds” interpretation, and that each decision splits the universe. But what are these “decisions” they’re talking about? If you study neuroscience and the brain, you see that such conceptions are way too simple compared to what’s really going on.
Our brains are almost hard wired to decode the sensory information in a certain way, and using that system we set constrictions on our level of understanding. As Richard Dawkins is always saying, we’ve evolved to move at slow speeds and deal with medium sized objects. Once you start dealing with the universe at the large scale, such as cosmology, or the small scale (quantum physics), the “virtual reality” which our brains are decoding and immersing us within based on sensory impressions is inaccurate and has to be abandoned.
People talk about “free will” like it’s some ultimately simple thing. It’s not. Philosophers such as John Locke have felt we have control of our bodily movements. This simplicity is assumed by many physicists when they talk about our actions influencing and modifying various quantum mechanical experiments. But decisions are not so simple. Take this next lecture for instance. When you look into your visual system closely, you find out that you actually have two visual cognition systems. One is related to conscious awareness of what you’re seeing, whereas the other one plans bodily movements based on visual information. There are patients with brain damage who live with just one or the other, and it’s pretty strange.
When you do something as simple as picking up a pen off your desk, the calculations and computations your brain performs are almost unbelievable. Multiple brain systems go into operation and trillions of neurons are firing off. And if you think some simplistic “you” is in control of that, all it takes is a little brain damage to set you back in your proper place.
I’ll let Professor Goodale explain it. He does a wonderful job.
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The Reality Of College Students’ Sex Lives
October 29, 2010
Not too terribly long ago, while waiting for class to start, some students were talking about their “crazy” weekend, and basically led on like every weekend consists of a huge drunken orgy. The teacher rolled her eyes, and the guys started laughing.
As I listened, I thought to myself, “I’d like to know what percentage of students take part in such events. I’d also be curious to know the degree of their participation.” I speculated that that students weren’t near as comfortable in those situations as they let on, but I really didn’t know. I also guessed that men would like that sort of thing more than women, but that was just mere speculation, which I was basing primarily on evolutionary psychology. I didn’t have any hard facts to back my assertion.
So I decided that I’d research it out. It turns out that the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology has published several detailed papers on the sex lives of college students. The studies are more detailed than I could have imagined. Some are on kissing, others are on factors contributing to sexual attraction, and others are on views toward commitment. But the study that really caught my attention was Hooking up: Gender Differences, Evolution, and Pluralistic Ignorance (2010). It’s exactly what I wanted to know. This particular study comprised a random sample of 507 students, who basically responded by filling out a detailed survey about their sex lives, how often they took part in various sexual encounters, and how comfortable they were in various sexual situations.
Participants were asked questions related to,
(1) How comfortable are you with engaging in the following activities during a hook-up?
(2) Think of the average person of the same sex as you. How comfortable do you think this person of the same sex is with engaging in the following activities during a hook-up?
(3) Think of the average person of the opposite sex as you. How comfortable do you think this person of the opposite sex is with engaging in the following activities during a hook-up?The five behaviors that participants rated for each question were: sexual touching above the waist, sexual touching below the waist, oral sex (giving), oral sex (receiving), and intercourse. Participants also indicated which of these behaviors they had actually engaged in during a hook-up.
And what sorts of results did they find? Well, they found what I pretty much expected.
Abstract: “Hooking-up” – engaging in no-strings-attached sexual behaviors with uncommitted partners – has become a norm on college campuses, and raises the potential for disease, unintended pregnancy, and physical and psychological trauma. The primacy of sex in the evolutionary process suggests that predictions derived from evolutionary theory may be a useful first step toward understanding these contemporary behaviors. This study assessed the hook-up behaviors and attitudes of 507 college students. As predicted by behavioral-evolutionary theory: men were more comfortable than women with all types of sexual behaviors; women correctly attributed higher comfort levels to men, but overestimated men’s actual comfort levels; and men correctly attributed lower comfort levels to women, but still overestimated women’s actual comfort levels. Both genders attributed higher comfort levels to same-gendered others, reinforcing a pluralistic ignorance effect that might contribute to the high frequency of hook-up behaviors in spite of the low comfort levels reported and suggesting that hooking up may be a modern form of intrasexual competition between females for potential mates.
And what is pluralistic ignorance exactly?
Pluralistic ignorance (PI) has been demonstrated to play a role in hook-up behavior. PI is characterized by individuals behaving in accordance with (generally false) beliefs attributed to the group, regardless of their own beliefs (Fields and Schuman, 1976; Miller and McFarland, 1987). Lambert, Kahn, and Apple (2003) found that young adults routinely believe that others are more comfortable with various sexual behaviors than they, themselves, are. This leads them to behave as if they were more comfortable than they actually are, and engage in behaviors with which they are not actually comfortable.
And can we be more detailed as to who we’re dealing with in this study?
Participants included 507 undergraduate students at a mid-sized public university. The sample was 55% female (n = 277) and 45% male (n = 227). The mean age of participants was 19.7 years (SD = 1.7). Participants included 42% first-year/freshmen (n = 214), 28% second-year/sophomores (n = 140), 16% third-year/juniors (n = 82), and 14% fourth-year/seniors (n = 71).
So, what percentage of students are involved in these hookup relationships, and how far do they go?
And just how comfortable were they doing this?
It looks like men are down for just about anything. Women seem ok with being touched, but are uncomfortable with anything more.
Steven Pinker, in his book How The Mind Works (1997), talked about these same issues.
The first question of strategy is how many partners to want. Remember that when the minimum investment in offspring is greater for females, a male can have more offspring if he mates with many females, but a female does not have more offspring if she mates with many males—one per conception is enough. Suppose a foraging man with one wife can expect two to five children with her. A premarital or extramarital liaison that conceives a child would increase his reproductive output by twenty to fifty percent. Of course, if the child starves or is killed because the father isn’t around, the father is genetically no better off. The optimal liaison, then, is with a married woman whose husband would bring up the child. In foraging societies, fertile women are almost always married, so sex with a woman is usually sex with a married woman. Even if she is not, more fatherless children live than die, so a liaison with an unmarried partner can increase reproduction, too. None of this math applies to women. A part of the male mind, then, should want a variety of sexual partners for the sheer sake of having a variety of sexual partners.
Do you think that the only difference between men and women is that men like women and women like men? Any bartender or grandmother you ask would say that men are more likely to have a wandering eye, but perhaps that is just an old-fashioned stereotype. The psychologist David Buss has looked for the stereotype in the people most likely to refute it—men and women in elite liberal American universities a generation after the feminist revolution, in the heyday of politically correct sensibilities. The methods are refreshingly direct.
Confidential questionnaires asked a series of questions. How strongly are you seeking a spouse? The answers were on average identical for men and women. How strongly are you seeking a one-night stand? The women said, Not very strongly; the men said, Pretty strongly. How many sexual partners would you like to have in the next month? In the next two years? In your lifetime? Women said that in the next month eight-tenths of a sexual partner would be just about right. They wanted one in the next two years, and four or five over their lifetimes. Men wanted two sex partners within the month, eight in the next two years, and eighteen over their lifetimes. Would you consider having sex with a desirable partner that you had known for five years? For two years? For a month? For a week? Women said “probably yes” for a man they had known for a year or more, “neutral” for one they had known for six months, and “definitely not” for someone they had known a week or less. Men said “probably yes” as long as they had known the woman for a week. How short a time would a man have to know a woman before he would definitely not have sex with her? Buss never found out; his scale did not go down past “one hour.” When Buss presented these findings at a university and explained them in terms of parental investment and sexual selection, a young woman raised her hand and said, “Professor Buss, I have a simpler explanation of your data.” Yes, he said, what is it? “Men are slime.”
Are men really slime, or are they just trying to look like slime? Perhaps in questionnaires men try to exaggerate their studliness but women want to avoid looking easy. The psychologists R. D. Clark and Elaine Hatfield hired attractive men and women to approach strangers of the opposite sex on a college campus and say to them, “I have been noticing you around campus. I find you very attractive,” and then ask one of three questions: (a) “Would you go out with me tonight?” (b) “Would you come over to my apartment tonight?” (c) “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” Half the women consented to a date. Half the men consented to a date. Six percent of the women consented to go to the stooge’s apartment. Sixty-nine percent of the men consented to go to the stooge’s apartment. None of the women consented to sex. Seventy-five percent of the men consented to sex. Of the remaining twenty-five percent, many were apologetic, asking for a rain check or explaining that they couldn’t because their fiancee was in town. The results have been replicated in several states. When the studies were conducted, contraception was widely available and safe-sex practices were heavily publicized, so the results cannot be dismissed simply because women might be more cautious about pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
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