Friday, December 31, 2010

The wolfpack effect.

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An interesting piece of work from Gao et al. showing how the perception of animacy influences our interactive behavior. Imagine a pack of...

A contrarian view of energy prospects.

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John Tierney describes a wager he made in 2005 with Matthew Simmons, who bet $5,000 that the price of oil, then about $65 a barrel, would m...
1 comment:
Thursday, December 30, 2010

New brain circuits form online during rapid learning

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Shtyrov et. al. show that after just 14 minutes of learning exposure to a new word, presentations of this word cause increased responses in...
2 comments:

Paying the price for a longer life.

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A brief article by Bakalar notes a study by Crimmins et al. ...people live longer not because they are less likely to get sick, but becau...
Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Placebo pills work without deception

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Kaptchuk et al. show that placebos administered without deception may be an effective treatment for irritable bowel syndrome. From Bakalar...

English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently.

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I pass on this abstract from Boroditsky et al. , and a few clips from the article: Time is a fundamental domain of experience. In this pape...
Tuesday, December 28, 2010

You've got to have (150) friends...

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The post title is the title of a brief essay by Robin Dunbar , who is best known for his work documenting, for a large number of animal spec...
1 comment:

The science of cities.

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I've been meaning to point out an interesting article by Jonah Lehrer that focuses on the work of 70-year old physicist Geoffrey West, ...
Monday, December 27, 2010

Listening to your heart

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Dunn et al. try to evaluate how sensing feedback from the body influences thought and feeling. Some edited clips of background, and their r...

Deric's MindBlog for smartphones

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I use Google's Blogger to publish MindBlog, and they have just added a nice new tweak. We realize that more and more users are accessin...
Friday, December 24, 2010

The dark side of inflammation

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Couzin-Frankel does an interesting piece in the News section of the Dec. 17 issue of Science, consonant with my opinion that inflammatory p...
1 comment:

Google's body browser

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I've been enjoying playing a bit with Google's new 3-D body browser that lets you proceed through body layers (muscles,organs, bone...
Thursday, December 23, 2010

Why diets fail.

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Pankevich et al. offer observations that might explain why weight lost during an effective diet is usually regained - dieting makes the bra...

Sigh....

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Coming upon cheerful news like the following makes me want to dig a hole, get in it, and pull it in after myself.... 40 Percent Of America...
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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Regulation of distress better with thicker prefrontal cortex.

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Ventral prefrontal cortex activity correlates with suppression of amygdala reactivity to emotionally challenging stimuli, presumably reflect...
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Out of our brains - extended mind continues

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As a followup to my Nov. 3 post on critiques of Andy Clark's extended mind ideas (which drew 20 comments) I wanted to pass on this furt...
Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Reducing depression with light stimulation of medial prefrontal cortex

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In mice, to be sure.....Brain imaging and direct brain stimulation have implicated the prefrontal cortex in clinical depression in humans an...

Time, space, and number - evolved brain computations

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Dehaene and Brannon introduce a special (and open access) issue of Trends in Cognitive Science on Time, space, and number. What do the r...
Monday, December 20, 2010

Culturomics

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This is a bit mind-blowing. Here is the New York Times article , here is the Science summary by Bohannon, and here is the abstract and th...
2 comments:

"Me-We" - Obama and the passions

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A great essay by Mark Lilla (Humanities Professor at Columbia University) in the NYTimes Sunday magazine. The conclusion: ...the shape of...