Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Dysregulation Nation

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Judith Warner does an nice piece in the NYTimes Magazine, in which she notes that problems of self-regulation — of appetite, emotion, impul...

The classical art of memory

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Andrea Becchetti notes a correspondence between modern understanding of memory formation in the hippocampus and techniques in the "Art ...
Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Binge drinking and the adolescent brain.

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Deficits in hippocampus-associated cognitive tasks are observed in alcoholic humans. Taffe et al. show that binge drinking in adolescent ma...

Being hungry or full influences our risk taking.

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Dolan's group does some neat experiments showing that having a full stomach makes us more risk aversive in monetary decisions. We act j...
Monday, June 28, 2010

MRI can decode subjective, but not objective, memories

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In experiments that cast further doubt on claims of lie detection by fMRI measurements, Rissman et al. find that subjective memory states c...
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How we read the minds of others.

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Tamir et al. do some interesting MRI studies that suggest that understanding the mental states of others starts with self perception as an ...
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Friday, June 25, 2010

"The Singularity" - and Singularity University

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I've been meaning to point to this interesting New York Times article , on techno-utopian Singularity University (whose sponsors includ...

Presidential Harrisment

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A clip from an article by Steve Mirsky in the June issue of Scientific American: In early March, Harris Interactive conducted an on-line su...
Thursday, June 24, 2010

Concert pianists as genius models?

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Not likely in my case.... but I will mention an article by Charles Ambrose in the July-August issue of American Scientist, pointed out to m...

Antipsychotic drug shrinks the brain

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It turns out that haloperidol, a commonly-prescribed antipsychotic drug, shrinks the brain within hours of administration, specifically di...
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Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Sense of Wonder

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As we age our brains become so stuffed with our history that we loose the capacity to open to novel experiences, to sense things with the na...

The Devil's grimmace.

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An interesting fragment by Gisela Telis in ScienceNow : When 15th-century Europeans first landed on the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, they...
Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Oxytocin: out-group aggression, social cues, and amygdalar action

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Three recent papers are a reflection of the recent outpouring of work on oxytocin (a peptide hormone containing the 9 amino acids shown in t...
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The Wayward Mind

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Continuing my review of old posts that have popped into my head over the past few days during mulling over this and that, I am reproducing m...
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Monday, June 21, 2010

Followup on acupuncture

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Following the " Acupuncture's secret revealed? " post on 6/17 a reader sent me two interesting links that I want to pass on.  ...
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Is life worth living?

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Philosopher Peter Singer, in his " Should this be the last generation " query, offers philosophical rambling of the sort that driv...
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Are you holding your breath?

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While mulling over how I am feeling or acting during the day,  a recollection of an old MindBlog post occasionally pops into my head....I so...
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Friday, June 18, 2010

Associating a nerve growth factor with positive affect - depression therapy?

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Panksepp has made a number of interesting observations on the neurochemistry of affiliative (bonding) and hedonic behavior in animals (role ...

Is that my Mobile ringing? Rapid brain processing

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Roye et al . show that top-down frontal-parietal attentional mechanisms prime even the earliest stages of our auditory pathways to be especi...
Thursday, June 17, 2010

Acupuncture's secret revealed?

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I've tried acupuncture therapy for myself, and found it to be somewhere between ineffective and mildly annoying. This experience, plus r...
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