Thursday, April 30, 2009

Features of Einstein's brain.

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Clips from Michael Balter's recent report : The first anatomical study of Einstein's brain was published in 1999, by a team led by ...

Juicing up your brain

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"Every era has its defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for our efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture....
Wednesday, April 29, 2009

The emerging bottom-up world order?

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Two interesting articles on the kind of world order (or disorder) that is likely to emerge in the 21st century. David Brooks notes that: We...
3 comments:

Born to be Good

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I have just thoroughly enjoyed a reading of Dacher Keltner's book "Born to be Good." Keltner, a former student of Paul Ekman...

The quest for compassion

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Greg Miller writes ( PDF here ) on the establishment of a new institute at Stanford University for the scientific study of compassion.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Enlightenment therapy?

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I found myself disappointed by what at first appeared to be a promising article in this past Sunday’s NY Times magazine: “ Enlightenment T...

Econophysics - a model that explains the crash

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I thought I would pass on this report by Cho , slightly edited, on a model that shows leverage to be the root of the current financial turmo...
2 comments:
Monday, April 27, 2009

Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory

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Sobering observations from Evans and Schaumberg presented in an open access article in PNAS: The income–achievement gap is a formidable soc...

Failure to find effect of estrogen or testosterone on economic behavior.

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Zethraeus et al. (open access) obtain a result that is contrary to expectations generated by previous studies: Existing correlative evidence...
3 comments:
Saturday, April 25, 2009

The sapient paradox

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Merlin Donald has written a series of fascinating books on the emergence of modern humans, one of which I used extensively as a reference in...

Risk and reward processing in different prefrontal areas

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More information from Bechara and collaborators on how decisions are parceled out within the prefrontal cortex: Making a risky decision is ...
Friday, April 24, 2009

Can evolution explain how minds work?

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Some clips from an essay in Nature Magazine by Bolhuis and Wynne: ....biologists have tended to assume that species with shared ancestry wi...

Cortical thinning in people with familial risk for major depression

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From Peterson et al : The brain disturbances that place a person at risk for developing depression are unknown. We imaged the brains of 131 ...
Thursday, April 23, 2009

The Green Brain

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I would recommend reading Jon Gertner's article " Why isn't the Brain Green? " (In the same issue of the New York Times M...
1 comment:

Music and the brain - rhythm and pleasure

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Two PNAS articles I have been meaning to mention deal with an apparently innate sense of rhythm in infants, and how pleasing music activate...
Wednesday, April 22, 2009

A bird that follows human eye movements.

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Interesting observations from von Bayern and Emery . They offered food to hand-raised jackdaws. The birds took longer to nab a proffered ni...
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Chimps exchange meat for sex

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Evolutionary origin of the upscale date at Ruths' Chris Steakhouse meant to impress your girlfriend? From Gomes and Boesch : Humans and ...
1 comment:
Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Link between brain anatomy, personality, and the placebo analgesic response

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As a companion to today's first post, on motivation, a note that Schweinhardt et al. provide some interesting correlations between pers...

The shoplifting "high"

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I pass on this tidbit from the random samples section of science magazine: For compulsive shoplifters, covertly pinching a lipstick or a b...
Monday, April 20, 2009

The power of positive thinking.

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Following up on experiments I mentioned in a previous post in 2006 , Cohen et al. provide an example of how recursive positive feedback cyc...