Thursday, November 30, 2006

Predictive Codes for Forthcoming Perception in the Frontal Cortex

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Incoming sensory information is often ambiguous, and the brain has to make decisions during perception. "Predictive coding" propos...
3 comments:
Wednesday, November 29, 2006

For Some People, Intimacy Is Toxic.... The Virtues of Solitude

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I've been wanting to mention a brief essay in the Nov. 21 New York Times by psychotherapist Richard Friedman that describes a patient wh...
Tuesday, November 28, 2006

The latest on Resveratrol enhancing health and longevity

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Pretty soon we'll all be chowing down on grape skin extracts. I actually tried this stuff several years ago and thought it increased my ...
Monday, November 27, 2006

How we make our visual world appear to be constant.

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At the same time that our brains command a body movement, they also generate an expection of the sensory outcome of that movement that is ch...
Thursday, November 23, 2006

Making pain worse - basis of the Nocebo effect

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In the nocebo effect - the opposite of the placebo effect - expectations of symptom worsening play a crucial role. Most of our knowledge a...
Wednesday, November 22, 2006

The Case Against Faith .. and what's the alternative

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I've mentioned Sam Harris in previous posts. He is the author of two New York Times best sellers: "Letter to a Christian Nation...
Tuesday, November 21, 2006

An inherited primate baseline for spatial cognition.

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Haun et al report some interesting experiments that suggest that human infants inherit many of the same cognitive preferences and biases a...
Monday, November 20, 2006

Enhancing Cognition after Stress with Gene Therapy

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This is the title of an article from Sapolsky's laboratory. Sapolsky is an amazing off the wall guy. His book "Why Zebras Don...
Friday, November 17, 2006

Memory enhancement during your sleep...just wear an electric head strap?

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I'm wondering how long it is going to be before we start seeings advertisements for "effortless memory enhancement" devices in...
Thursday, November 16, 2006

Is there a biology of intelligence?

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Because I once had an article in Behavioral and Brain Science , I receive email on final drafts of forthcoming articles for review. The p...
Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Gender and sexual orientation regulate the effect of invisible images.

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As we are contantly bombarded with vast amounts of information, selective attention mechanisms help us quickly attend to what is important w...
Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Mind over Matter: how depression causes bone loss through nerve activation.

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The chronic activation of the arousal part of our autonomic nervous system (the sympathetic nervous system) that can occur during stress has...
Monday, November 13, 2006

Imaging the brain during "speaking in tongues"

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The charismatic practice of speaking with the full conviction that God is talking through you has ancient roots in many religious traditions...
Friday, November 10, 2006

Putting humans and their climate in perspective

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I always find it theraputic to renew my awareness of the fact that humans as we know them occupy only an eyeblink in the timeline of complex...
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Thursday, November 09, 2006

Deric and MindBlog are moving south for the winter...

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From Madison, WI to Fort Lauderdale, FL. The pictures below show why… Five years after retiring as a department chair at the Univ. of Wisc...
Wednesday, November 08, 2006

The Brain Making Choices: The Lesser of Two Evils or the Better of Two Goods....

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The relevance of this topic to yesterday's election was mentioned in the post just below. Blair et al. have now used functional magneti...
Tuesday, November 07, 2006

The psychology of framing in this election - are we deciding whom to accept or whom to reject?

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Barry Schartz (a psychology professor at Swarthmore, and author of “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.”) has a nice OpEd piece in to...

The evolution of morals - a nudge of clarity

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Relevant to my recent post , This letter to the editor in the science section of the NYTimes from my Univ. of Wisconsin colleague Larry Shap...

Where your brain sizes up your competition...

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Goodman reports on a study led by Caroline Zink, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health, that found that several ...
Monday, November 06, 2006

No effect of DHEA or Testosterone in Elderly

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Nicholas Bakalar reviews a study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine involving 87 men, average age 79, and 57 women, average ...