Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Eat less, live longer, now shown for monkeys as well as mice and worms

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Mason writes an interesting review in the New York Times 10/31/06 science section focusing on experiments at the University of Wisconsin Pri...
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Relationship between genetic variations in serotonin transporter, brain activity, and depression.

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The effect of life stress on depression is moderated by a repeat length variation in the transcriptional control region of the serotonin tra...
1 comment:
Monday, October 30, 2006

How Google can nudge the keywords of political debate

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There's a great piece "Own your own words" in the Oct. 30 Sunday New York Times Book Review Magazine written by Steven Johnso...

Hereditary family signature of facial expression

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Facial expressions of emotions are universal, but individual differences create a facial expression "signature" for each person. ...
Friday, October 27, 2006

Mirroring Minds (A talk I gave at Univ. Wisc. on 10/24)

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An eclectic group of people gathers on Tuesday noon every week at the "Chaos and Complexity" seminar organized by Clint Sprott of...
Thursday, October 26, 2006

The God Delusion

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This is the title of a new book by Richard Dawkins, reviewed by Jim Holt in the Oct 22 New York Times. Abstracting from that review: ...
3 comments:
Wednesday, October 25, 2006

"Special K" not just a party drug

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The club drug K may be useful for something besides the psychedelic high of going "down the K-hole." A brief review by Check in ...
Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Plasticity of gender difference in math performance

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My Sept. 11 post mentioned studies of how construals can influence performance. Another example comes now from Dar-Nimrod and Heine , w...
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Monday, October 23, 2006

Imaging the brain during the motivated reasoning of political bias

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Westen et al. report studies using functional neuroimaging to study the neural responses of 30 committed partisans during the U.S. Preside...
Friday, October 20, 2006

Human fronto–mesolimbic networks guide decisions about charitable donation

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Humans often sacrifice material benefits to endorse or to oppose societal causes based on moral beliefs. Charitable donation behavior, whi...
Thursday, October 19, 2006

Early exposure to novelty enhances social, cognitive, and neuroendocrine development

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An interesting article in the latest PNAS from the University of New Mexico and McEwen's laboratory at Rockefeller.... I can't say ...
Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Your Brain on Humor...an fMRI study

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A popular psychological model suggests that humor involves detection and resolution of incongruity. Incongruity is generated when a predicti...
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Monday, October 16, 2006

A genetic change in brain growth factor alters anxiety behavior in mice (and humans?)

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Brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) regulates neuronal survival, differentiation, and synaptic plasticity. There has been speculation...
Friday, October 13, 2006

A neural network that shares a common genetic origin with human intelligence.

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Pol et al. have explored the genetic influence on focal gray matter (GM, nerve cell bodies) and white matter (WM, myelin covered axon tract...
Thursday, October 12, 2006

An Elephant "Speaks"......

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I wanted to pass on this curious bit from the Oct. 6 issue of Science Magazine: A couple of years ago, an elephant trainer at South Korea...
Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Biology of emotional linkages and merging of physiologies

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Daniel Goleman offers a brief essay in the science section of the Oct. 10 New York Times on the biology of healing and emotional linkages b...
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Tuesday, October 10, 2006

A striking difference in brain function in autism: Failure to deactivate.

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Kennedy et al report interesting functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data on normal compared with autistic brains. From their art...
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Monday, October 09, 2006

The power of positive (and negative) thinking about aging

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I wanted to pass on the graphic below, from the Thursday, Oct. 5 New York Times, taken from an article on robustness versus frailty in agin...
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Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Clever experiment: distinction of self and other in mirroring motor neurons.

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Extravagant claims have been made about systems of neurons that are active both during execution of a motion or emotion and observing other...

Language, embodiment, and the cognitive niche

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This is the title of an essay by Andy Clark in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Vol 10, no. 8., pp. 370-374, 2006). It discusses an alternativ...