Friday, July 30, 2010

Resilience in the face of adversity - brain correlates

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Interesting work from Dolan's group on how we modulate expected aversive outcomes: The value assigned to aversive events is susceptibl...

Reciprocity engages our brain's reward system.

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Interesting stuff from Phan et al : Brain reward circuitry, including ventral striatum and orbitofrontal cortex, has been independently im...
Thursday, July 29, 2010

Twitter-mood

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Here is a cute study that attempts to gauge  our mood (more accurately, the 7% of American who use Twitter) throughout the day.  Play throu...
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Altruism as good business - shoppers who care

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Gneezy et al. add an interesting twist to studies of how we buy things. Companies loose money in attempts to enhance sales with pay-what-yo...
1 comment:
Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Monetary favors bias judgement in unrelated domains

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Work from Read Montague's group at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, that explains how corporate sponsorship (of athletic o...

Our bias towards negative interpretation of ambiguous faces

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Neta and Whalen make some interesting observations (on the usual cadre of undergraduate psychology students usually involved in such studie...
Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Nuturing robots

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A recent article by Benedict Carey suggests we may be heading towards a future in which instructional and emotional needs of those not able...
3 comments:

Perceptual training enhances working memory in older adults.

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Berry et al. demonstrate that training the visual discrimination of older adults enhances working memory, a cross-domain brain enhancement....
Monday, July 26, 2010

Sex promotes generation of new brain cells.

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Stress usually adversely affects hippocampal structure and function in adult rats, inhibits cell division, and produces anxiety-like behavio...
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MRI evidence on how hypnosis works.

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I just came across a paper by Cojan et al. on brain activity under hypnosis. While undergoing functional MRI, participants were instructed ...
9 comments:
Friday, July 23, 2010

Directly controlling 'fear' cells in the brain.

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LeDoux and collaborators have done the clever experiment (in rats) of introducing an optically activated molecular label into cells in the ...
1 comment:

Fool the brain to enhance performance with a carbohydrate rinse

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Kolata reports on exercise physiologists stumbling on an unexpected feature: simply rinsing the mouth with a carbohydrate solution stimulat...
Thursday, July 22, 2010

Our dread of idleness

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Being a hyper-purposeful person myself, I've always been attracted to the opposite pole represented by The Idler ,  both the original bo...
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Mindblog on the road

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I'm in Ft. Lauderdale today through next Tuesday, attending the 85th birthday party/piano concert David Goldberger, the fellow I did a f...
Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Acetaminophen (tylenol) reduces physical and social pain.

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DeWall et al. show that an anti-pain medication that acts on the brain's pain pathways, reduces both physical and social pain: Pain, w...

A growing isolated brain can organize itself.

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How much of the development of our brain's cortex depends on it being able to talk with other parts of the brain and body? Apparently, n...
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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Dopamine, Time, and Our Impulsivity

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Yet another fascinating piece of work from the group around Ray Dolan at the London Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging. They show that...
3 comments:

Motivating only half our bodies.

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Schmidt et al. do a simple experiment to show that motivation need not be a person-level concept, our left and right hemispheres can be sep...
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Monday, July 19, 2010

The mind is the body - tumor suppression by enriched environment

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An amazing article by Cao et al. brings home the intimate attachment between mental well-being and health - in mice (and by implication, fo...
3 comments:

How superstition improves performance

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Interesting stuff from Damish et al. They demonstrate a causal effect of an activated good-luck-associated superstition on subsequent perfo...
2 comments: