Friday, November 27, 2009

The religious wars

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In a NYTimes OpEd piece appropriate to yesterday's Thanksgiving rituals Kristof notes a new crop of books on religion that that he fee...

Openness versus conservatism - its cultural evolution

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Acerbi et al. ask what might make different groups of people more liberal or conservative (or open minded versus having inflexible views),...
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Deconstructing the Placebo

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I want to point you to this great post at Neuroskeptic . Here is its ending text: "The placebo effect" has become a vague catch-al...
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Thursday, November 26, 2009

Watching our brains judge gain versus pain

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Yet another lucidly presented bit of work from a collaboration involving Dolan's group at University College London: The maxim "n...

Curing musicians' dystonia.

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Here is another bit on music or musicians. (I seem to be doing a fair number of postings in this area, maybe because I'm back into more ...
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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

More on the trust and empathy hormone...

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Natalie Angier does a summary of some recent studies on oxytocin, several of which I've already mentioned in MindBlog posts (enter oxyt...

Origins of empathetic yawning?

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Interesting observations by Palagi et al : Yawn contagion in humans has been proposed to be related to our capacity for empathy. It is prese...
Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Sounds during sleep aid memory

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Rudoy et al. ( PDF here ) find that if, while asleep, people hear sounds that had earlier been associated with objects at specific spatial l...

The Music Instinct

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Steven Mithen (author of The Singing Neanderthals ) does a summary of his ideas on the evolutionary basis of musicality in this open access ...
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Musicians are not as bothered by background noise.

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From Parbery-Clark et al. : Musicians have lifelong experience parsing melodies from background harmonies, which can be considered a process...
Monday, November 23, 2009

Imagination and bad governance

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I liked this column by Thomas Friedman. Some clips: ...I’m not ready to cede the 21st century to China just yet...there are still two real...

Neural predictors of attitude changes.

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Some work from van Veen et al. on attitude changes induced by cognitive dissonance: When our actions conflict with our prior attitudes, we ...

Why sex matters - more on brain differences between men and women

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Luders et al. examine brain differences not dependent on size in gray matter distributions between men and women. They find a number of reg...
Friday, November 20, 2009

The weirdest people in the world?

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Many broad claims about human behavior are based on experiments done samples drawn from western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democra...
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Cyclic variations in our vigilance

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I had been unaware that our vigilance during a sustained attention task varies in a systematic way. Aue et al. have examined suggested rhy...
Thursday, November 19, 2009

Low fat makes you happier?

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Here is a curious fragment... Brinkworth et al. studied 106 obese people put on either a low fat or low carbohydrate diet for a year, doi...
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The sooner you can sleep, the better you learn.

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Van Der Werf et al. investigate whether motor skill enhancement through prior observation requires sleep to follow the observation to conso...
Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Neurogenetics of remembering emotions past

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It turns out that genetic makeup would determine how vididly Proust's narrator, on biting into a madeleine cake dipped in tea, would e...
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Evolution of "the God gene"

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Articles on a particular topic seem to come out in clusters. Shortly after doing yesterday's post on the origin of religions I see this...
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Cognitive science and the origin of religions

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Elizabeth Culotta writes the 11th essay in Science's series in honor of the Year of Darwin, which explores the human propensity to beli...
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