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How weird is this?  Depending on whether someone wants to have a romantic relationship with you, or just a friendship, it all has to do with one part of the body rather than another. No, I'm not talking about those parts. According to a new study,  heterosexual men and women look at the head or chest of an opposite-sex person longer and more often when evaluating dating potential, compared with possible friendship.  But both men and women look at legs or feet with greater frequency when they made platonic rather than sexual judgments, newswise.com reports. While -- here comes the boring part -- we've always thought that attraction hinges on a fixed set of characteristics that makes a person desirable, this new study shows that what people look for in a prospective relationship partner depends on their "relational" goals . And here it comes, the big finale.  "The same person who makes a highly desirable friend may not make a good mate,” says  Angela Bah...

Ever thought your brain worked the same way when looking at pictures and text? Not so much.  In the brain, one area sees familiar words as pictures andnother sounds out words, according to newswise.com. Skilled readers can quickly recognize words when they read because the word has been placed in a visual dictionary of sorts which functions separately from an area that processes the sounds of written words, say Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) neuroscientists. The visual dictionary idea rebuts a common theory that our brain needs to “sound out” words each time we see them.  “Beginning readers have to sound out words as they read, which makes reading a very long and laborious process,” says the study’s lead investigator, Laurie Glezer, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow. The research was conducted in the Laboratory for Computational Cognitive Neuroscience at GUMC, led by Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD. I don't know about you but when I read about the ...