Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Autistic children insensitive to emotional expressions in others also show decreased activity in their brain's 'mirror neuron' system.

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Systems of mirror neurons in our brains are active during our actions and feelings and also when we observe those actions or feelings in oth...
Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Why don't we choose what makes us happy?

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Hsee and Hastie provide an interesting review of this issue in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Numerous studies prove that people systematic...
Friday, May 26, 2006

Cooperation, Punishment, and the Evolution of Human Institutions

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This is the title of a review by Henrich of studies on how human cooperations and sanctions might have evolved, which specifically cites a ...
Thursday, May 25, 2006

Stressing out or Chilling out changes how our genes are expressed in an immediate and dynamic way.

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Bittman et al. , in "Recreational music-making modulates the stress response and alters individual gene expression," have followe...
Wednesday, May 24, 2006

The brain finds pleasure in novelty.......

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Humans are informavores, and derive pleasure from novel auditory and visual stimulation. Biederman and Vessel note that novel visual images...
Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Religion as a Natural Phenomenon - More on Dennett's Book "Breaking the Spell"

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This book has now received extensive and varying reviews in both popular (New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker) and scientific (Scienc...
Monday, May 22, 2006

The pleasures and pains of information about the future.

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Berns et al show that regions of the brain activated by pain are also activated by the anticipation of pain, and that some experimental sub...
Friday, May 19, 2006

Two ways of knowing the minds of others

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Mitchell's laboratory at Harvard has shed light on two traditionally opposed hypotheses about how we infer the mental states of others. ...
Thursday, May 18, 2006

The good, the bad and the amygdala

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This is the title of a brief review by Ruth Williams in Nature Reviews Neuroscience pointing out an article by Paton et al. that demonstr...
Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Dolphins have discovered "names" of the sort we use.

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It has been known since the 1960s that dolphins develop individually distinctive signature whistles that they use to maintain group cohesion...
Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Men and Women react differently to sniffing a social hormone - aggressively versus friendly

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Thompson et al have found that a peptide influencing social behaviors in numerous species, Arginine vasopressin (AVP), causes different b...
Monday, May 15, 2006

Recursion in vocalization not unique to humans

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Several years ago Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky and Tecumseh Fitch published an influential paper that speculated that recursion, or self embed...
Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Stumbling on Happiness

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This is the title of a new book by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. One quote from the N.Y. Times review by Scott Stossel in the May 7...
2 comments:
Sunday, April 30, 2006

A new brain module for understanding whole words

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While it has been known that rapidly comprehending whole words activates an area called the visual word form area (VWFA), the same area is a...
Tuesday, April 25, 2006

The Paomnnehal Pweor Of The Hmuan Mnid

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I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the l...
3 comments:

Inhibiting Negative Emotions - Opps!, A simple story evaporates

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Numerous studies from Davidson's laboratory and others have shown that deliberately suppressing negative affect correlates with increase...
Monday, April 24, 2006

Brain's Reward Pathway Involved in Mood Disorders

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A recent Science article by Berton et. al. shows that long lasting fearful and withdrawal behaviors that are induced in mice by bullying a...
1 comment:
Friday, April 21, 2006

The Self-Help Scam

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In the May 2006 issue of The Scientific American, Michael Shermer (publisher of Skeptic magazine ) argues that the Self-Help and Actualizat...
Sunday, April 09, 2006

Our inability to cope with what empirical data show us to be true about how our minds work...

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I get frustrated when I try to reconcile what I know from empirical data to be true about my self (see the "I-Illusion" essay on ...
Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Why do I feel an urge to write about how the mind works?

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Here are some sentences trying to put together one motivation for doing this website and this mindblog....and for working up a new web essay...
4 comments: