visceral

****, that is scary and horrible. I would rather be dead...

Wow! Interesting. I wonder how far their brains can recreate other people's sensations? Would they, for example, feel the sensation of touching a surface with complex patterns if they saw someone else do it... I'd like to know more...I'm gonna do a few searches.

I know it's more than merely neurological. I would just like to know where it comes from. Ostensibly, it's an instinct in most people. I'd like to know if there is something in common neurologically between people who don't want them.

Is it a circuit in the brain? Is it the effect of a high estrogen level? Could you do a brain scan on a group of women who had children or wanted them in the future, then one of women who had chosen not to have children, and pinpoint something that the first group had and the second one didn't?

My BMI is 18.9. I recommend eating frequent small meals instead of less frequent large ones. Oh, and ingest a LOT of caffeine. :D

You can learn exercises to elongate your spine. Try the Alexander technique.

Suspected Aspergian girl here. 39. About as revelatory as telling me I have black hair.

In a more removed and mechanistic context, it is, but when I said empathy, I meant the intuitive ability most people have to detect others' emotions without having to be told what someone is feeling. ASD people lack the ability to detect others' emotions, but they don't tend to lack critical thinking. It's more that they cannot instinctively sense how someone is feeling, by unconsciously noticing nuances of facial expression, tone of voice, etc.

I'm one of those. I am a raging danger junkie.

Agreed. I actually have a lot of the effects of ADD/ADHD, but I know I don't actually have either of those, I'm just still not yet mature. Modern life is way too narrow-minded. Anyone outside a certain norm seems to get diagnosed with a disorder.

I know the idea that a high systemic/low empathic mind is a male one while the high empathic/low systemic end of the continuum is female domain, is a huge oversimplification, I just called it that so people would get the idea... Is there such a disorder? Could there be such a thing as 'system blindness', where though someone would be extremely empathic and do very well at sensing people's emotions, they would have low to no ability to use reductive or systemic thinking? Is this even a legitimate concept? Are "systemic" and "empathic" really opposites? One theory is that the condition exists, but it isn't a problem because it's not maladaptive: Taken from Simon Baron Cohen's The Essential Difference

Why do the zones of the cortex have to differentiate? I assumed they can't produce hormones properly unless they don't, but I seem to remember they're not differentiated at birth...?

Either very underweight or what Sam said, wasting disease.

That makes my ****ing blood boil. So he had a lot of money with him? How does that make him a criminal? He could have just taken it out of the ****ing bank...

Don't they have massive amounts of wiring in one area which results in them having certain abilities, and not enough in other areas? Something like that...

Animals cannot help this as they don't have the ability for conscious thought to rise above it. Humans like I described on the other hand, choose to behave like that.

Not quite, before conception you simply don't exist. After death you have a body but it doesn't have any functions.

Let's agree to disagree Mokele, I like you.

Don't know much about it, but I'll make an assumption. It could be that cells get less efficient at dividing properly as they get older.

No, people who terrorize everyone in the area because they can are unworthy of life.

How do you tell the difference between evolved traits and 'programmed' ones? I'm thinking specifically of differences between the sexes here. For example I've read various things in 'science' books like The Female Brain (Louann Brizendine) like how women evolved to cry more easily, or that they find it much harder to keep their emotions to themselves. How does anyone know these things are due to evolution? As a society we give females the right to cry but not males. We give females the right to be vulnerable, but not males. Girls and boys are treated differently while still wearing their amniotic membrane. Girls are mostly treated as just potential nurturers/encouraged to develop and interest in looking pretty. Boys are encouraged to develop visual-spatial skills ( as in using toy cars, building things, and the like.). http://www.springerlink.com/content/p88566041u435g96 http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/15/garden/parent-child.html?pagewanted=1 So how exactly do you determine what is environmental and what is written in their DNA?

Yes some humans are worth less. If it were, say, 100 of those chav guys who do nothing except hang around intimidating everyone and sexually harassing women, sure, I'd kill them instead of the mice. If it were 100 war criminals or 100 drug dealers, I'd kill them instead of the mice. Again, under what circumstances? If both were in danger and I could only save the humans, I would probably do that, because humans are my kind. If the 100 humans had a disease and I could choose to kill the mice to find a cure for said disease, no, I wouldn't.

In what situation? A choice between experimenting on them to cure human diseases? Or just a strict one-or-the-other choice between mouse or human? Which 100 humans am I killing?

Yes. Sentient, as in conscious, something that can think or feel.

Sure, I would kill only 10. What I take issue with is the assumption that the few who die should be animals. They owe us nothing. So what if mice have a small brain and don't do much outside of basic behaviours? They're still sentient beings. If a race existed who were massively superior to normal humans, would it be ok for them to experiment in humans because we are 'lower'?