So you may have noticed the posts grinding to a halt over the past several weeks. Alas, I've been spending far too much time with cardboard boxes instead of my computer. I found out mid-August that the woman who owns the house we were renting had decided to sell it, so we had to scramble to find a new place to live and then pack up all our stuff.
SCIENCE OF HOARDING
Moving is always a pain the ass, but the fact that I'm a bit of a pack rat makes it even more challenging. And while I'm nowhere near being labeled a Hoarder, I've been known to keep a few too many nostalgic items that perhaps would be better left behind. As I was surveying the large pile of boxes now exiled to the garage at our new place for storage, it got me to thinking about why people hang onto things. Which led me to the following about the science of hoarding.
In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study done by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grantee David Tolin, Ph.D, and his colleagues at Hartford Hospital, Hartford, CT, parts of a decision-making brain circuit in patients with hoarding disorder over-activated when deciding whether to keep or throw away their own possessions, but had no such reaction when throwing away items belonging to others. From the NIMH press release:
In this case, the implicated brain areas are hubs of a salience network that weighs the emotional significance of things and regulates emotional responses and states. Hoarding patients’ severity of symptoms, self-ratings of indecisiveness, and feeling of things being “not just right” were correlated with the degree of aberrant activity in these hubs. The results add to evidence of impaired decision-making in hoarding disorder and may help to disentangle its brain workings from those of OCD and depression.
EYE CANDY: BLOW IT UP
Moving causes a lot of stress, so sometimes you just need to take a break and blow off some steam. Old Spice's "Explosion" is not scientific - it just made me laugh.
MOVING THE SHUTTLE
We got a pretty big truck to move our stuff (did I mention I like to keep things?), but it was nothing compared to the rig that got the Space Shuttle Endeavour through the streets of Los Angeles on October 12th-13th as it traveled from LAX to its new permanent home at the California Science Center. Brandon Fibbs got some fantastic pics of the shuttle which you can see here in his photostream on Flickr, and here's a pretty amazing time lapse of the Shuttle's journey.
The Los Angeles Times. Video by Bryan Chan.
While the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, the future permanent home for Endeavour, is being built, the shuttle will be on display in the Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Endeavour Display Pavilion, opening on October 30, 2012.
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