Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Doing good (or evil) increases physical strength

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Kurt Gray offers some interesting observations on the embodyment of moral typecasting: Moral transformation is the hypothesis that doing g...
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Making decisions: Optimally interacting minds

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Bahrami et al. find conditions under which two heads are - and are not - better than one. Science Magazine gives a nice summary: When two ...
Monday, August 30, 2010

Religion and spatial cognition

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The latest Science Magazine 'Editor's choice' points to an interesting bit of work. It is well known that East Asians see visua...
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More trusting people are better lie detectors

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Carter and Weber make the interesting counter-intuitive observation that being a pollyanna does not make one more gullible (cf. with my Aug...
1 comment:
Friday, August 27, 2010

Upstairs-Downstairs pathways regulating our cravings.

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Kober et al. provide yet another "upstairs/downstairs" story of how it takes increased activity in our frontal cortex to override...

Delusions of Gender.

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Katherine Bouton reviews what looks like a very interesting book by cognitive neuroscientist Cordelia Fine which has the title of this post...
1 comment:
Thursday, August 26, 2010

Metacognitive deficits in public political discourse

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Some interesting chunks from a recent David Brooks column in the NYTimes, on what he takes to be the underlying problem facing this country...

Inflammatory and neural responses to social rejection.

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Slavich et al. measure changes in both brain activity and inflammatory chemical activity in response to social rejection: Although stress-...
Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The psychology of possibility.

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An interesting article in the Harvard Magazine describes the life work of Ellen Langer, her demonstrations that our social self image (old ...

Delaying age-related damange to nerves and muscle

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Both exercise and drastic dieting have been shown to have anti-ageing effects in the brain. Studies on mice now suggest that such lifestyle...
Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Predicting inherited risk for anxiety

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Ned Kalin and his colleagues here at the University of Wisconsin have made the interesting observation that increased brain activity in the...

Oxytocin makes people trusting, but not gullible.

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Mikolajczak et al. demonstrate that oxytocin (OT) is not the magical “trust elixir” described in the news, on the Internet, or even by some...
Monday, August 23, 2010

Coping with stress stimulates new brain cell growth.

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Interesting stuff from Lyons et al. , experiments on monkeys which look like they would extrapolate to us humans: Coping with intermittent ...

Solving protein folding - humans outperform computers

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I remember from my graduate student days in the 1960's attending biochemistry lectures in which the professors expressed confidence that...
Friday, August 20, 2010

A Brahms Capriccio as a TGIF offering...

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I've been lazy about playing and recording lately, and so have decided to spend a bit more time with my piano. This Brahms Capriccio has...

Watching our brains perceive the intentions of others.

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Two interesting papers on  people playing economic or cooperation games during MRI imaging that reveals activations flitting about different...
Thursday, August 19, 2010

My hero questioned...

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In this field of studying human and animal minds, I've long been in awe of the intelligence and originality of Mark Hauser. (If you ente...

Paradigm change in the practice of science?

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John Markoff writes an interesting article on how fundamentally critical discourse in mathematics and physics is being transformed by the w...
Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Stereotypes can prevent perceptual learning.

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Some interesting observations from Rydell et al , who find that simply reminding women about the negative stereotype about women's math ...

Exercise moderates anger

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Tara Parker-Pope does a summary of several studies on psychological effects of exercise, which numerous studies have shown to make people (...