Friday, February 29, 2008

A primer on executive function in the prefrontal cortex

›
Gilbert and Burgess offer a brief review of our prefrontal brain cortex structures that enable our flexible responses to situations with al...
6 comments:
Thursday, February 28, 2008

Kahneman on happiness.

›
An interesting shift in opinion on what we thought we knew about measuring happiness from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman : Ten years ago th...
2 comments:
Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Your pupils reveal shifts in your perception

›
Here is an interesting nugget from Christof Koch's laboratory at Cal Tech. When we look at an ambiguous image such as the Necker Cube ...

Study increases learning less than testing...

›
Karpicke and Roediger question the common assumption that learning increases as people study and encode material, while measuring that lear...
1 comment:
Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Bright light and good moods...

›
We are more agreeable when the light is brighter: here is the abstract, and one figure, from "Exposure to bright light is associated ...

Life expectancy increases

›
Taken from an article by Kirkwood on a systems biology approach to longevity... The graph shows the life expectancy in the then longest-liv...
Monday, February 25, 2008

Love speed dating

›
You may do better in relying on your impression after only 4 minutes of interaction with a potential partner than if you think about it a lo...
2 comments:

Watching an anesthetic block emotional memory

›
Here is an intriguing observation by Alkiri et al. We usually recall emotional pictures or events better than neutral ones. They found that...
Friday, February 22, 2008

Languages shape the nuts and bolts of our perception.

›
The debate over whether language nudges the way we actually see the world is being resolved, and what has been the prevailing dogma - that b...
2 comments:
Thursday, February 21, 2008

Watching waves of activity sweep across the brain

›
This is sensory physiology in the age of YouTube. Peterson and colleagues have used a voltage sensitive dye technique to watch the wave of ...

Consciousness papers for January

›
Most downloaded in January 2008 from the ASSC archives : 1. Koriat, A. (2006) Metacognition and Consciousness. In: Cambridge handbook of con...
Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Your amygdala and your blood pressure

›
I was intrigued by this article, because it shows what I suppose must be going on in my brain as I notice my blood pressure increasing when ...
2 comments:

Oliver Sachs on Migraines

›
An interesting article on Migraines by Oliver Sachs in the Op-Extra section of The New York Times, focusing on the geometric hallucination...
3 comments:
Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Video game addiction, and taking play seriously.

›
Video games trigger reward and addiction centers of the brain, just like cocaine. Hoeft et. al. at Stanford have compared the activation of...
2 comments:

Killer Instincts.

›
Dan Jones writes a news feature in Nature on neuroscientific and evolutionary perspectives on homicide, mainly carried out by men. Here ar...

Human and Animal Math

›
Michael Beran writes a brief review of the evolutionary and developmental foundations of mathematics. Humans and other higher animals are b...
Monday, February 18, 2008

The view from my window....

›
The title line for this posting is stolen from Andrew Sullivan's blog - This is the view looking out of the window by the piano in my W...

Persuasion, bonding, and social mimicry

›
Benedict Cary mentions some interesting studies on social mimicry, persuasion, and affiliative behavior in an article from the NY Times sci...

Need something to worry about? Climate tipping points...

›
This graphic is from an open access article in PNAS by Lenton et al. on tipping elements in the earth's climate system. You probably ...
Friday, February 15, 2008

High-Functioning Autism: a neural phenotype in the cingulate cortex

›
A review by Chris and Uta Frith discusses and important paper in Neuron from Montague's group in Houston, who: ...have measured brain ...