Friday, November 28, 2008

What happy people don't do.

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Rabin notes the work of John Robinson, who finds that: Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns...

Slow Blogging....

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From an article by Sharon Otterman: The practice is inspired by the slow food movement, which says that fast food is destroying local tradi...
Thursday, November 27, 2008

The Wall Street Bonus degrades rather than enhancing performance.

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Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke, reports interesting work showing that people perform better on tasks requiring cog...
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Contempt and disgust - sexual differences in brain responses

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Aleman and Swart use fMRI measurements to note (slightly edited clip from the abstract) that: Men display stronger brain activation than wo...
Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Reading the drug side-effects label can make you sick.

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An interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on the nocebo effect, which I have mentioned before , the opposite of the placebo effec...

Another herbal miracle drug fails to pan out....

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The largest clinical trial to date finds no effect of ginkgo biloba on slowing memory loss or dementia in Alzheimer's.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Reversal of fear in the human brain

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Schiller et al. do work on learned fear responses and their reversal: Fear learning is a rapid and persistent process that promotes defense...

How we learn to value others

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Behrens et al. use a combination of computational and neuroimaging techniques to address a key question in social neuroscience: how we lear...
Monday, November 24, 2008

Potential flaws in unconscious bias tests

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An interesting article by John Tierney notes controversy over the way researchers have been using split-second reactions on a computer test...

Cultural specificity in amygdala response to fear faces

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From Chiao et al. : The human amygdala robustly activates to fear faces. Heightened response to fear faces is thought to reflect the amygda...
Friday, November 21, 2008

The innovative brain

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Lawrence et al. present preliminary neurocognitive data from matched groups of entrepreneurs and managerial controls that suggests that ent...

Alexithymia

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I just learned a new word: Alexithymia, the inability to express feelings with words, or more generally deficiency in understanding, proces...
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Thursday, November 20, 2008

Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor - a new version

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I just have to pass this on (from Andrews Sullivan's blog):
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Towards a Moral Neuropolitics

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Gary Olson writes an article on the neuroscience of empathy and mirror neuron systems, arguing that the morality that leads to progressive ...

Making your tennis racquet part of your brain's body representation

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Interesting work from Fourkas et al. in Cerebral Cortex: Specific physical or mental practice may induce short- and long-term neuroplastic ...
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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Why do intelligent people live longer?

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Ian Deary offers an interesting essay in Nature. Here are some clips: Scores from cognitive-ability tests (intelligence tests or IQ tests)...
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Religion and visual attention

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Colzato et al. report a quirky study in PLoS ONE : "Losing the Big Picture: How Religion May Control Visual Attention" Despite the...
Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The way we age

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I find myself returning again and again to a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande, "The Way We Age Now." ( PDF here ). It was the ...

Massive reorganization of visual cortex at the level of dendritic spines..

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Keck et al. do elegant experiments to directly observe spine replacement in individual apical dendritic tufts of layer-5 pyramidal neurons,...
Monday, November 17, 2008

A novel theory of mental disorders

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Benedict Carey writes a useful article on a radical new theory for explaining the psychotic spectrum: ...that an evolutionary tug of war be...