Let's Hope

[spangletigress]

So I know the typical belief that what separates humans from other organisms is our intelligence and creative abilities. Without us, there would be no pursuit of philosophy or science, no understanding of abstract mathematics, etc. However, there are stories in our culture that suggest that what makes humans really special (though not necessarily

Comments

[golden_wanderer]

Are there other 'animals' that cry? I believe I read an article about rats that said they laugh, but I don't know about crying. (And by cry I mean cry in sadness, not just because something is in your eye.)

[spangletigress]

No, I read an article last year in SciAm Mind about the phenomenon of human tears. The researchers noticed something odd: human tears of sadness have higher hormone concentrations than human tears of eyeflushing, and higher hormone concentrations than non-human tears of eyeflushing. However, while the difference in hormone levels they measured was significant, it cannot possibly account for getting the hormones out of the body (as the body's attempt to get rid of the emotion... not that hormones are responsible for emotions, because if you shoot people up with large amounts of "emotion-related" hormones/neurotransmitters, they don't feel the emotion usually associated with it but just exhibit the physiological responses, but, yeah