Hot MedFax

You've had a hard day at work and now it's couch potato time.  You turn on the TV and there's that commercial for that car you've been eyeing for some time. You're really into the show but wait, here comes that commercial again.  And you know what?  The more you focus on it, the more you want it, at least, according to a new study, as reported by newswise.com. The relationship between desire and attention was long thought to only work in one direction: When a person desires something, they focus their attention on it.  Now, new research reveals this relationship works the other way, too: increasing a person’s focus on a desirable object makes them want the object even more—a finding with important implications for marketers and clinicians seeking to influence behavior. “People will block out distraction and narrow their attention on something they want,” says Anne Kotynski, author of the study and a PhD student in psychological sciences at Case Western Re...

Who thinks about their brains when falling in love?  But a new study has found the actual part of the brain that makes decisions about whether we want to spend the rest of our lives with someone. According to newswise.com, t he finding, made in an examination of a 48-year-old man who suffered a stroke, provides the first causal clinical evidence that an area of the brain called the anterior insula “plays an instrumental role in love,” said UChicago neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo, lead author of the study. " In this study, the patient made decisions normally about lust but showed slower reaction times when making decisions about love, in contrast to neurologically typical participants matched on age, gender and ethnicity," the Web site reports. “This distinction has been interpreted to mean that desire is a relatively concrete representation of sensory experiences, while love is a more abstract representation of those experiences,” said Cacioppo, a research associate...