This is your brain on Pink Floyd

Salon.com has a review of the new book, Mind Wide Open, by Steven Johnson (Salon requires subscription, but see also amazon’s reviews). There’s also a lengthy excerpt, including this passage:

Panksepp's studies make a convincing case that the shiver of pleasure we experience while listening to our favorite music is the release of endogenous opioids, the same molecules implicated in social bonding, parental love, the "runner's high" -- and, of course, in narcotic drugs like heroin and morphine. Panksepp has found that animals appear to have chill responses to music as well. In one widely cited study, he played dozens of records to chickens attached to equipment designed to record their shivers of pleasure. (The chickens turned out to have the strongest positive response to the late-era Pink Floyd record "The Final Cut.")

I would really like to have seen that.

The book sounds like something even a non-scientist such as myself would find fascinating. In the past couple of years, I’ve had the opportunity to work on several training and communications projects in the biotech and pharmaceuticals fields, far outside the high-tech area I started in. The workings of the human body seem way more interesting than those of a computer – and so much more complex. In fact, that’s what’s kept me from going back to school to get educated in the sciences so that I could specialize in medical or science writing: starting from square one, it looks too overwhelming. Also, I think I’m a generalist at heart; I like learning new things and working in a variety of areas and not necessarily getting too deep into them. I’ve joked that I could get by at a cocktail party talking about almost anything for about 2 minutes before I’d max out my knowledge.

Anyway, Mind Wide Open is now added to my wish list. After I get through that big pile of unread books I already have, my weekly New Yorkers, my daily newspapers, my blogroll, etc. I'm going to write my own book, Mind Completely Cluttered.

2:19:20 PM      trackback [] 

Hershey chocolate spa

Eating chocolate not enough for you? Perhaps you’d like to be stewed in it? This morning’s Globe has a feature on the chocolate spa at the Hotel Hershey in Hershey, PA. The “signature chocolate services” include:

fondue wrap (60 minutes, $100); chocolate mud hydrotherapy (25 minutes, $55), a jet bath of moor mud and essence of cocoa; and a chocolate bean polish (30 minutes, $60), an exfoliation by cocoa bean husks… Other scrub options are a strawberry parfait and a peppermint salt scrub. When the latter is mixed with the wrap, you've got a York Peppermint Pattie.

12:58:27 PM      trackback []