The baby was crying half the night, the three year-old has decided that his older brother is a punching bag and the older brother has imposed a moratorium on speaking to either parent. This isn’t the plot of a movie; it’s the role of a lifetime. And few people survive parenthood without at least occasionally feeling that the process is turning their brains into mush.

More than with words it seems their brains are shaped by what they see. To the extent that they can discriminate between languages without hearing a word!

Quite similar to adults, it appears.

I’ve noticed a trend in evolutionary psychology to attribute motivations and behaviors in modern humans to our evolutionary prequels. According to some, my wife probably chose me based on my dominant genetic traits and physical symmetry which indicated my potential to breed strong babies. It goes without saying that I smelled good.

The finding that mature rats exposed to classical odor-shock conditioning soon learn to avoid the odor as a way of also avoiding the shock certainly qualifies for the school of the blooming obvious. What is less apparent, and in fact little known, is that rat pups show “paradoxical learning;” pups still confined to the nest show a strong odor preference in this classical training paradigm. This attraction to anything, even pain, occurs regardless of maternal presence.

Mere moments spent searching with the words “chocolate” and “sex” on the internet generates numerous references to the aphrodisiac power of chocolate…or women’s preference for chocolate over sex. The latter might be seen as an aphrodisiacal canard. Does it prove that chocolate is sexy if women prefer it to actually having sex?

Given the tons of information floating around on Oxytocin, it’s no surprise that some questions follow. One fact many people have heard is that Oxytocin is released in large quantities upon orgasm. One logical question that follows is: If I have sex with someone, will I fall in love with that someone? Maybe, maybe not.

Under the category of “Not in a thousand years would I have thought of that study,” Dijkstra and colleagues find that if you assume the body posture you were in when an event occurred you have a better recall of it.

This week’s NYT Science section gives those of us in relationship science plenty to talk about by dedicating the bulk of this week’s Science section to a variety of topics related to relationships. A hodgepodge of factoids about relationships reflects the lack of coherence apparent in relationship science as we try to pull together information from as divergent fields as evolutionary biology and online survey research. However, it also reflects a failure by scientists to present the areas of research in which coherence is emerging.