Scientific Research Reveals a Gigantic Brain Conspiracy

Why do we love beautiful faces? Why are we instinctively drawn towards attractive people? Why do we fall in love? Why do we fall out of love? Why do we find babies cute and adorable and treat them as special, protecting them and enabling them to survive? Why do we need 8 hours of sleep a day? Why do we desire to climb tall mountains at the risk of loosing our limbs and life? Why are we the only animal species that laughs a lot and enjoys sex? Why do react emotionally in certain situations, but act coldly in some other situations?

Continuing scientific research reveals that everything we do, all our likings and dislikings, all our wantings and desirings, all of everything that makes what we are, stems from the composition of the cortexes of our brains.

Now it can be told - 'Its all in the brain'

Our human brain is at the root of a gigantic conspiracy contrived to direct every aspect of our lives into standard, compartmentalized formats to generate an ordered state of human life, enabling us to relate to other people and to make sense of our lives. If not for our brains, we would have been a chaotic mess with each of us shooting off in separate directions unable to find any similarity with our fellow humans, unable to coordinate with each other at any level, doomed to exist in a state of constant conflict, chaos and confusion.

But thanks to our brain, we all behave in more or less similar fashion, enjoy more or less similar things, get attracted to more or less similar type of humans. Scientific research continues to discover different sections of our brain responsible for our specific likes and dislikes. Now new research has discovered the solution to one enduring mystery that the scientific community was unable to crack despite years of research - Why do we like cute babies? No, not because because they are actually cute. On the contrary, babies are nothing more than little lumps of noisy flesh that leak a lot of shit and slobber frequently and abundantly. But, as the latest research proves, its our brain that tricks us into thinking they are cute in order to prod us into producing more babies to keep the cycle of creation going on forever.

This research was led by Morten Kringelbach and Alan Stein from the University of Oxford and was funded by the Wellcome Trust and TrygFonden Charitable Foundation. The authors showed that a region of the human brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex is highly specifically active within a seventh of a second in response to (unfamiliar) infant faces but not to adult faces.

The research team used a neuroimaging method called magnetoencephalography (MEG) at Aston University, UK. This is an advanced neuroscientific tool which offers both excellent temporal (in milliseconds) and spatial (in millimetres) resolution of whole brain activity. Because the researchers were primarily interested in the highly automatized processing of faces, they used an implicit task that required participants to monitor the colour of a small red cross and to press a button as soon as the colour changed. This was interspersed by adult and infant faces that were shown for 300 ms, but which were not important to solve the task.

The authors found a key difference in the early brain activity of normal adults when they viewed infant faces compared to adult faces. In addition to the well documented brain activity in the visual areas of the brain in response to faces, early activity was found in the medial orbitofrontal cortex to infant faces but not adult faces. This wave of activity starts around a seventh of a second after presentation of an infant face. These responses are almost certainly too fast to be consciously controlled and are therefore perhaps instinctive.

The medial orbitofrontal cortex is located in the front of the brain, just over the eyeballs. It is a key region of the emotional brain and appears to be related to the ongoing monitoring of salient reward-related stimuli in the environment. In the context of the experiment, the medial orbitofrontal cortex may provide the necessary emotional tagging of infant faces that predisposes us to treat infant faces as special and plays a key role in establishing a parental bond.

Without the presence of medial orbitofrontal cortex, we wouldn't have been predisposed to like babies. Quite possibly we would have hated babies for their overall weirdness vis-a-vis grown-up adults. We would have noticed that they are unproductive creatures who cry a lot, shit a lot, spit a lot, demand too much attention and are generally a great nuisance, requiring high maintenance but providing little value in exchange. Noticing all that, we would have refrained from producing babies endangering the continuance of human life on earth.

Now it can be a told - We are all here, living the way we are living, doing the things we are doing, because of a gigantic brain conspiracy.

Next few items on scientists research list - Who's the master-brain behind the brain conspiracy? How was the master-brain created? Is there another conspiracy behind the creation of the master-brain? These questions are expected to keep the scientists engaged for next few thousand years.