GrrlScientist reports on her Punctuated Equilibriumblog over at the Guardian that a cat burglar has been stalking a San Mateo, California neighborhood. In this case the thief is 6-year-old Dusty, a mixed-breed housecat. Dusty prowls the neighborhood at night and grabs gloves, shoes, toys and other items from his neighbors' yards and carries them home to share with his family. His record is 11 items in a single night, and he seems to favor drying swimsuits.
Local station ABC 7 caught him in the act with their night vision camera. Watch their report:
Apparently Dusty's neighbors are understanding about his behavior, as they know where to go to find their missing items.
Dusty isn't the only feline thief roaming our cities and suburbs. Apparently this sort of "misdirected predation" behavior is not uncommon in urban cats. The UK cat site Moggies.co.uk has a whole collection of cat thief stories - and those are just the ones who both got caught and had stories written about them.
Personally, if I had a cat I'd much prefer a "gift" of the neighbor's flip flops than a half-dead mouse.
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly express'd;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. ~ Sonnet 147, William Shakespeare
Romantic love begins as an individual comes to regard another as special, even unique. The over then intensely focuses his or her attention on this preferred individual, aggrandizing the beloved's better traits and overlooking or minimizing his or her flaws. Lovers experience extreme energy, hyper activity, sleeplessness, impulsivity, euphoria, and mood swings. They are goal-oriented and strongly motivated to win the beloved. Adversity heightens their passion [ . . . ] They reorder their daily priorities to remain in contact with their sweetheart , and experience separation anxiety when apart. And most feel powerful empathy for their amour; many report they would die for their beloved.
In fact, love can affect your brain like an addiction. When love is reciprocated it's a constructive addiction, while rejection of love is a destructive addiction. It's powerful effects have shaped and been shaped by evolution, and - Fisher argues - have even helped drive the development of human culture.
Fisher HE et al. "Reward, Addiction and Emotion Regulation Systems Associated With Rejection in Love" J. Neurophysiol 104: 51-60 (2010) (free pdf)
Fisher H "The Drive to Love: The Neural Mechanism for Mate Selection" in The New Psychology of Love, 2nd Edition. RJ Sternberg and K Weis (Eds.) New Haven: Yale University Press (2006) (free pdf)
Fisher HE et al. "Romantic love: a mammalian brain system for mate choice" Phil Trans R Soc B 360: 2173-2186. (2006) (free pdf)
Jessa Gamble is an award-winning science writer based in Yellowknife, Canada, just a few hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. Because of Yellowknife's high latitude, the length of daylight varies widely during the year - from 5 hours in December to 20 hours in June.
The cultural adaptation of traditional subarctic cultures to that dramatic seasonal variation in day length is how she begins her discussion of natural human sleep cycles in her brief TED talk:
As Gamble notes, before artificial light became common in people's homes, most people did not sleep in an unbroken eight hour block. Instead they went to bed at dusk, slept four hours or so, had a couple hours of wakefulness (used for meditation, sex, study or work), and then returned to sleep until dawn.
As a night owl, I find it hard to imagine going to bed when the sun goes down. Even if I wanted to change my sleeping habits, unless my husband and friends also changed their schedules along with mine, I would find it socially isolating to hit the sack at 8pm. And that doesn't even take into account the difficulty of finding a truly dark place to sleep so early in the evening. Living in a suburb laced with street lights, it doesn't ever get completely dark outside.
I doubt I'm alone in thinking that "natural" sleep patterns aren't easily compatible with modern life. What Gamble suggests is that we should consider the cost of that attitude to our mental well being.
Gamble's book about the daily rhythms of life in different cultures - The Siesta and the Midnight Sun - will be published by Viking Canada in March 2011.
