Thursday, January 03, 2008

A science debate for presidential candidates?

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A note for this day of the Iowa presidential primary...I have signed on with many others at Science Debate 2008 to urge the candidates to d...

Liberals are smarter than conservatives...?

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A British study by Deary et al. titled "Bright Children become Enlightened Adults" (Psychological Science, Volume 19 pp. 1-6, Ja...
Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Alarms and Anxiety in 2008 - guaranteed

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John Tierney does a very nice piece in the Jan 1 NY Times Science section describing how activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scienti...

Nature versus Nurture in Ventral Visual Cortex

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Polk et al. do functional magnetic resonance imaging of monozygotic and dizygotic twins to show that genetics play a significant role in de...
Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Experimental Philosophy - moving out of the armchair?

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The Dec. 9 New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article by Kwame Appiah that I have been meaning to mention, on the new philosophical ...

Accelerated Human Evolution in past 40,000 years.

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An interesting article by Nicholas Wade from the Dec. 11 NY Times: Researchers analyzing variation in the human genome have concluded that ...
Monday, December 31, 2007

MindBlog freezes and thaws again

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A holiday trip back to Madison Wisconsin, view from front door and back door of house on Twin Valley Road - just before the third time I ha...

Repressed Memory - A recent cultural invention?

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Literary references to depression, hallucinations, anxiety, and dementia can be found throughout history. A fascinating article in Harvard...
1 comment:
Friday, December 28, 2007

Cognitive Recovery in Socially Deprived Young Children

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With elaborate consideration of the ethical issues involved (commented on by Millum and Emanuel ), Nelson et al. have compared the cognitiv...

Motion perception and production - similar neural coding

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Another example of how our brain's representations of motion are tuned to biological actions. Here is the abstract of the open access a...
Thursday, December 27, 2007

Monkeys and college students: similar in non-verbal math

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This work from Cantlon and Brannon suggests that humans and nonhuman primates share a cognitive system for nonverbal arithmetic, suggesting ...
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Human genetic variation - breakthrough of the year

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We differ from each other in the number and order of our genes, and in their composition. A few edited clips from E. Pennisi's summary ...
Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Learning from errors - genetic differences between humans

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From Holden's brief summary of the work: "Once burned, twice shy" works for most people. But some people are slow to learn fr...

Another difference in the brains of musicians...

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Being a performing musician myself (cf. the YouTube video below), I'm always fascinated by work of the sort recently done by Chen et al...
Monday, December 24, 2007

J. S. Bach - Christmas Oratorio - Schlafe, mein Liebster

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John Eliot Gardiner leads the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, with Bernarda Fink in "Schlafe, mein Liebster," f...

Neural correlates of trust

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Krueger et al. offer an MRI study of brain changes that occur during a reciprocal trust game. They: .used hyperfunctional magnetic resonan...

Laws of Nature as resting on faith...

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Dennis Overbye does a brief piece in the Dec. 18 NY Times that derives from the small firestorm of commentary ignited by a previous OpEd pi...
Friday, December 21, 2007

Children attributing causality - extension to religious and political imitation.

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Blog reader Rick Thomas makes a brief comment on the previous post on children attributing causality (a comment I wish I had made), that is ...
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The hidden structure of over-imitation

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Human children, unlike chimpanzees, will copy unnecessary or arbitrary parts of an action sequence they observe in adults, Lyons et al. term...
1 comment:

Vegansexuality

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Jeff Stryker gives us more from the fringe (Dec. 9 NY Times Magazine): Forget homo-, bi- or even metro-: the latest prefix in sexuality is v...