Let's Hope

[spangletigress]

So I know the typical belief that what separates humans from other organisms is our intelligence and creative abilities. Without us, there would be no pursuit of philosophy or science, no understanding of abstract mathematics, etc. However, there are stories in our culture that suggest that what makes humans really special (though not necessarily

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[spangletigress]

No, I read an article last year in SciAm Mind about the phenomenon of human tears. The researchers noticed something odd: human tears of sadness have higher hormone concentrations than human tears of eyeflushing, and higher hormone concentrations than non-human tears of eyeflushing. However, while the difference in hormone levels they measured was significant, it cannot possibly account for getting the hormones out of the body (as the body's attempt to get rid of the emotion... not that hormones are responsible for emotions, because if you shoot people up with large amounts of "emotion-related" hormones/neurotransmitters, they don't feel the emotion usually associated with it but just exhibit the physiological responses, but, yeah)....

Heehee, I ramble on this topic; it's my ultimate career goal: to unearth the biochemistry of emotion and hopefully show that emotions aren't just "all in your head" or "made up" or "pretend", that there's a physical mechanism which acts upon the body and the brain... which will hopefully contribute to increased empathy, societal responsibility, and care for those with emotion dysregulation disorders (depression, antisocial personality, bipolar, etc), those who are just ridiculously sensitive (like me), those who commit crimes in anger/revenge, etc.....