Friday, October 29, 2010

de Waal on the Biology of Morality

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A colleague pointed out this thoughtful piece on morals without God written by primatologist Frans de Waal. The debate is less about the t...
4 comments:
Thursday, October 28, 2010

How rummination can both help and hinder.

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Altamirano et al. do a simple study that shows that depressive rumminators (like myself?) are more stable in maintaining goals, but sacrifi...
1 comment:
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

MindBlog is on the road.

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Tuesday evening... little do they realize  (my two Abyssinian cats, Marvin and Melvin) that they will be on the road at 7 a.m. tomorrow morn...
1 comment:

Why that nearby cell phone conversation bothers you...

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While I am reading my morning newspaper in a restaurant at breakfast, nothing ticks me off more than a nearby cell phone conversation, but I...
3 comments:
Tuesday, October 26, 2010

The quest for simplicity.

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A new Apple product has been announced recently, a new MacBook Air that is the offspring of the union of a Mac computer and an iPad. In ad...
1 comment:
Monday, October 25, 2010

A Brahms Rhapsody for monday morning...

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I thought I would pass on this slightly truncated version of the Brahms Rhapsody Op. 79, No. 1 that I played for the Carnaval Music group in...

How to make yourself more powerful...

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Carney et al suggest that just a few minutes of moving your body muscles into a more open expansive posture can change your behavior and bo...
1 comment:
Friday, October 22, 2010

Brain correlates of whether we decide to help others.

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Hein et al. find that empathy-related brain responses in the anterior insula predict costly helping of others, that distinct neural respons...
Thursday, October 21, 2010

Magic numbers

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Anything Daniel Gilbert writes is worth reading, and in that spirit I pass on this Op-Ed bon-bon that asks why a full course of antibiotics...

A dog's dish - half empty or half full?

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We know that humans vary in their underlying temperament (negative versus positive mood), with ~50% of the variation due to genetic factors....
Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Earlier retirement, earlier memory decline.

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In yet another example of "use it or loose it," Rohwedder and Willis show that the earlier people retire, the more quickly their ...

Do cell phones cause cancer?

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My random browsing of the October issue of Scientific American brought me to this nice summary graphic offered by physicist Bernard Leikind...
2 comments:
Tuesday, October 19, 2010

What makes groups of people smart?

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Woolley and collaborators have studied people working in small groups, investigating why some groups appear to be smarter than others. A gi...
3 comments:

Lecture slides from the "theory of everything" talk.

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A comment on the "Theory of Everything" talk referenced by last Friday's post inquired if the whole lecture content was avail...
Monday, October 18, 2010

Followup on MindBlog's Istanbul lecture on our subjective "I"

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A previous post has pointed to a web text version of the piano recital and lecture I gave at "Cognitive VII", an international...

Serotonin regulates our moral judgements

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Crockett et al. have done some fascinating experiments demonstrating that increased serotonin makes individuals less likely to endorse mora...
5 comments:
Friday, October 15, 2010

A New Theory of Everything?

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My Zoology Department colleague Jim Pawley (now retired, as I am) gave a talk to the Chaos and Complex Systems Seminar here at the Universi...
5 comments:

The science of us...

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I pass on this clip from the Oct. 8 issue of Science Magazine, struck by the verse that brings home the fact that most of the cells in our b...
Thursday, October 14, 2010

Exercise improves executive function in our aging brains

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A group of collaborators has looked at functional connectivity measured by fMRI in ~65 year old adults before and after their separation fo...
Wednesday, October 13, 2010

A presumed cognitive divide between monkeys and ourselves disappears

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In trying to understand the sequential evolutionary steps that led to our human style self awareness, much has been made of the fact that mo...