Instead, our wiring constantly, subliminally urges us: “Want. More. Now.” Western civilization wisely reined in this urge for thousands of years with an array of cultural conventions, from Aristotle’s Golden Mean (neither too much, nor too little) to the Edwardian table-saying: “I have reached an elegant sufficiency and anything additional would be superfluous.”
Consumer culture ditched all that, though, constructing instead an ever more sophisticated system for pinging our primitive desire circuits into overdrive. It got us to the point where we created everything we need as a basis for contentment. Now it’s rushing us past the tipping point, beyond which getting more makes life worse rather than better. And it’s making our brains respond more weirdly than ever.
- Enough is enough: learn to want less, The Sunday Times, January 12, 2008.
3. Are women - but not men - hard-wired to be fat-phobes? Female brains react in a negative way when they view photos of overweight individuals, even when they’re of a normal weight themselves, according to a study from Brigham Young University.
“Even though they claim they don’t care about body issues... [women’s] brains are showing that it really bugs them to think about the prospect of being overweight,” study researcher Mark Allen, a neuroscientist, told Fox News.
For the study of 10 normal-weight women and 9 normal-weight men between age 18 and 30, both groups viewed images of people of their own gender with various body shapes. As the subjects viewed each image and their brains were scanned using functional MRI, they were told to “imagine someone is saying ‘your body looks like hers/his.’ ”
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