Friday, April 30, 2010

Evaluating effects of genes and environment on early reading.

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Work from Taylor et al. studying mono- and dizygotic twins in kindergarten through 5th grade suggests, not suprisingly, that that better t...
Thursday, April 29, 2010

When do human groups form states?

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Spencer suggests that human states evolve (without contact with any preexisting states) when the area controlled by a group becomes larger ...
Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Do brain training programs work?

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ScienceNow reports an interesting tussle over the effectiveness of brain training programs. BBC producers contacted Adrian Owen at the MRC ...
1 comment:
Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Old age improves reasoning about social conflicts

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Interesting observation from Grossmann et al. : It is well documented that aging is associated with cognitive declines in many domains. Yet...
1 comment:
Monday, April 26, 2010

Internet enhancing, not diminishing, the public square.

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Some interesting points from David Brooks, noting a study by Gentzkow and Shapiro which counters the prevailing assumption that the interne...

How pain impairs cognition

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Ji et al. use an animal model of arthritis pain to show that pain-related cognitive deficits result from amygdala-driven impairment of medi...
Friday, April 23, 2010

Oxytocin enhances social learning as well as empathy.

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From Hurlemann et al. : Oxytocin (OT) is becoming increasingly established as a prosocial neuropeptide in humans with therapeutic potential...
Thursday, April 22, 2010

The brain's default mode, our ego, and Freud

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Carhart-Harris and Friston offer an open access article exploring the notion that Freudian constructs may have neurobiological substrates. ...
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The best illusion of the year contest

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The top ten candidates for the 2010 best Illusion of the Year context have been chosen. The site show the illusions from previous years...
Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Doing two things at once splits the brain.

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...and we are not very good at managing more than two things at once. Here is the fascinating abstract from Charron and Koechlin : The ant...

Opera singers' brains - and the brain's organization of music knowledge

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Numerous studies have shown brain changes that correlate with athletic and musical instrument training. Kleber et al. now extend such work ...
Tuesday, April 20, 2010

PharmVille

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An article by Virginia Heffernan in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine points to the interesting Psych-Babble website hosted by psychiatry profes...
1 comment:

Enhanced facial threat detection in elite warriors

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Ross et al show that Navy SEALS, compared with a male control group, show more focused neural and performance tuning: greater neural proces...
Monday, April 19, 2010

MindBlog's spring home

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This picture (click to enlarge) of early spring at my 1860 stone schoolhouse residence in Middleton Wisconsin shows why I recently returned...

Two routes to slowing aging...

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Fontana et al. offer a nice article in the April 16 issue of Science Magazine, a review of experiments indicating that caloric restriction ...
1 comment:
Friday, April 16, 2010

More detail on money and happiness

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Yet another study, this one by Boyce et al. (open access) , confirming that money doesn't buy happiness, people gain "utility"...
Thursday, April 15, 2010

Like humans - Leaders, Followers and Schmoozers among animals

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Natalie Angier does an interesting article describing work showing that the array of personality types noted within human groups, mostly li...
Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Self control without a self...

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The fact that humans are better at self control (delayed gratification) than animals is often attributed to their having a sense of self tha...
3 comments:
Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Lessening moral judgements by a magenetic zap to the brain.

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MRI measurements have shown that the the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) - an area just above the right ear - receives more blood than...
1 comment:
Monday, April 12, 2010

We separate identity and emotion of a stimulus in under 100 msec.

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Liu and Ioannides record the small rapid magnetic signals caused by brain activity (using magnetoencephalography, or MEG) to study whether ...