Wednesday, October 31, 2007

A Consciousness Debate

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Christof Koch and Susan Greenfield offer a written version of their Oxford University Debate in the summer of 2006 in the Oct. 2007 issue o...
3 comments:

A new consiousness and philosophy of mind bibliography

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David Chalmers and David Bourget are offering a more extensive online service, outlined in this message from ASSC (Assoc. for Sci.Stud. Cons...
Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Sleep deprivation diminishes recall of neutral and positive, but not of negative, events.

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We remember emotional events, particularly negative ones, better than neutral events. Sterpenich et al. show that while consolidation of ne...
1 comment:

Biology and Health Inequality

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PLoS Biology has ventured beyond its usual fare to publish several articles focusing on poverty, human development, and the environment. Th...
Monday, October 29, 2007

Silent Minds

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I want to point you to an excellent article by Jerome Groopman, with the title of this post, that appeared in a recent New Yorker Magazine....
1 comment:

Evolution - with feeling....

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A recent issue of American Scientist has a review by Robert Pennock of two books that attempt to show that a mechanistic Darwinian view of ...
Friday, October 26, 2007

The Outsourced Brain

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I can't resist passing on this clever NY Times Op-Ed piece by David Brooks - on the subject of the dissolution of our individual intell...

Different takes on the social brain.

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Gobbini et al. show that different types of mentalizing engage different brain regions. The abstract and a summary figure: We compared two...

Brain changes after rehabilitation of congenital prosopagnosia

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Another article on faces... Degutis et al. show MRI changes correlating with a recovery of enhanced amplitude of the N170 ERP (electroencep...
2 comments:
Thursday, October 25, 2007

The male chill-out after sex: role for brain oxytocin

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Here is an intriguing account from Waldherr and Neumann : Sexual activity and mating are accompanied by a high level of arousal, whereas ane...

It's in the Eyes!

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Another curious bit on our brain's specialization for recognizing faces, noting the central role of the eyes. The abstract and a figu...
Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Our visual system is tuned to animals.

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New et al. argue that the human attention system evolved category-specific selection criteria to monitor animals (including humans) in the ...

Brain location of verbal information storage varies between people

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A group at Wisconsin has made the interesting observation that group averaged analyses of the sort frequently reported in brain imaging stu...

Reverie

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I'm incredulous that over 38,000 people have viewed a recording of Debussy's Reverie that I put on YouTube, and 79 people have mad...
Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Origin of language from cortical motor systems - evidence from fMRI imaging

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Meister and Iacoboni offer some interesting observations supporting the idea that language evolved as an exaptation from motor cortical sys...

How potential reward biases our attention

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Our eyes dart about (make saccades) rapidly as we view a visual scene - without these small rapid movements we are blind. Milsteen and Dori...
Monday, October 22, 2007

Language Evolution: An invisible hand.

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A slightly edited "Editor's Summary" from the Oct. 11 Nature: As a language evolves, grammatical rules emerge and exceptions d...
2 comments:

Emotional enhancement of memory and learning - a molecular mechanism.

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Hu et al. have performed an interesting study of how the rush of noradrenaline during an emotional experience might enhance our ability to ...
Saturday, October 20, 2007

A Wisconsin fall...

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My partner and I went driving and walking in the Wisconsin countryside yesterday afternoon - here is an apple orchard, and the ice age trail.

The well-tempered web

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I wanted to pass on this link to an engaging article by New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, on his experience with classical music culture o...