Friday, June 30, 2006

Cognitive Biases

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Check out this wikipedia link. It has a thorough list of errors we make in judgement and thinking.
Thursday, June 29, 2006

Prospection

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I’m showing you my reduction of Daniel Gilbert’s 238 pages of “Stumbling on Happiness” to about 8 pages of paraphrase and quotation, present...

Subjectivity

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The Reduced “Stumbling on Happiness” II. Subjectivity (ch. 2, 3) - the science of happiness, what does the word mean, can we ever measure ...

Realism

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The Reduced “Stumbling on Happiness” Part III. Realism (ch 4,5) – a first short coming of imagination is that it works so quickly, quietly,...

Presentism

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The Reduced “Stumbling on Happiness” IV. Presentism (The tendency for current experience to influence one’s view of the past and the fut...

Rationalization

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The Reduced “Stumbling on Happiness” V. Rationalization (act of causing something to be or to seem reasonable) – the third shortcoming of i...

Corrigibility

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The Reduced “Stumbling on Happiness” VI. Corrigibility (capability of being corrected, reformed, or improved.) Chapter 10 Once Bitten Why...
Tuesday, June 27, 2006

In another culture, the future is behind you.

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Time is an abstraction, not an object, so is compared to space by people all over the world, yet in different ways. Past is ‘behind’ us, f...
4 comments:
Monday, June 26, 2006

Our perception of gender from biological movement: It's adaptation suggests brain neurons selective for this task.

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You have probably had the experience of sitting in a railway car and watching a train slowly moving past you for a period. After it has pas...
3 comments:
Saturday, June 24, 2006

Angry Faces. Men detect them better than women do.

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Williams and Mattingley have done an elegant study (Current Biology, vol. 16, pp 402-404, June 2006) that demonstrates that men detect angry...
Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Neuromarketing: a growing menace?

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Check out this article by Mary Carmichael describing how marketers are teaming up with cognitive scientists doing MRI to find the advertisi...
Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Decreasing chronic pain by learning how to decrease activity in the brain areas regulating it.

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The truncated abstract from the article by deCharms et al. in PNAS follows: "If an individual can learn to directly control activation...
Monday, June 19, 2006

Changes in genes and fearful behavior caused by early life stress can be reversed.

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The information in our genes can be permanently altered by 'epigenetic' modifications, such as adding methyl groups to DNA. Infant ...
Thursday, June 15, 2006

Your Amazing Brain

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This site is fun, check it out... Your Amazing Brain. There are a number of clever quick time exercises on aspects of how our brains wor...

Emotional Communication in Humans and other Primates.

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This is the title of a review by Parr et al. (Current Opinion in Neurobiology, vol. 15, pp 716-720, Dec. 2005), whose abstract I include he...
2 comments:
Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Our psychological immune system

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In a previous post I mentioned a review of the book by Daniel Gilbert (Harvard Psychology Department ) "Stumbling on Happiness". ...
4 comments:
Monday, June 12, 2006

The brain during normal awareness, absence Seizures, and the vegetative state

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A review by Laureys in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Volume 9, Issue 12, December 2005, Pages 556-559) notes the brain correlates of the dif...
1 comment:
Thursday, June 08, 2006

Left Brain and Right Brain in the regulation of our subjective feelings.

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There is increasing evidence that an the insula areas of our left and right cerebral cortices process higher order re-representations of hom...
2 comments:
Tuesday, June 06, 2006

We need our orbitofrontal cortex to make intelligent choices. Its individual cells code for value.

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Credit: Ann Thomson, Nature Neuroscience Damage to the part of our frontal lobes just above our eyes, the orbitofrontal cortex, can damage ...
1 comment:
Monday, June 05, 2006

Apes plan ahead for the future! - yet another 'unique human trait' bites the dust.

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Chimpanzees in a primate center in Leipzig, Germany, learned to use an object as a tool to obtain grapes from an apparatus in a test room ...