Monday, January 31, 2011

Modern conversation.

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As relevant to this morning's previous post, I had to pass on today's Doonesbury cartoon , having noted during my kid's New Year...
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Is our technology replacing our identity?

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After publishing an optimistic book about the internet in 1995 ("Life on the Screen"), MIT social science professor Sherry Turkle ...
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Friday, January 28, 2011

Our social brain - what are smiles for?

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In this past Tuesday's NYTimes science section, Carl Zimmer offers a brief review of some of the many social functions served by our sm...
Thursday, January 27, 2011

Our Guts 'R Us

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It dents my tidy self image just a bit when I read articles like this one from Atarashi et al. (summarized by Barnes and Powrie ). A very i...
Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Some factoids on exercise and health.

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I thought I would list out four interesting chunks from the Wellness Blog at the NY Times: It's well know that exercise can be an ant...
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Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Why loneliness is hazardous to your health

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Greg Miller does an interesting review article in Science Magazine that describes numerous recent studies on the effect of loneliness on ou...
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Monday, January 24, 2011

The chemistry of enjoying music

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Robert Zatorre is an imaginative and productive musician/scientist. His website offers a cornucopia of information on the brain and music....
Friday, January 21, 2011

Age defying or denying? Real life among the old old.

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Studies or ideas about human aging are frequently the subjects of posts in this blog (given that I have a vested interest in the aging of yo...
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Thursday, January 20, 2011

Distortions of mind perception in psychopathology

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A really interesting perspective comes from Daniel Wegner and co-workers in the Psychology Dept. at Harvard. (Wegner's book, "The...

Smart Phone people...

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A bit of humour from the TalkAndroid website (click on image to enlarge and read the captions):
Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Recursive inference of the beliefs of others.

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Yoshida et al. (Dolan's group at Wellcome Center, UC, London) do a fascinating imaging study that identifies areas in the pre-frontal c...
Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Good Dog!

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In this morning's NYTimes Science section there is  an article about a border collie named Chaser who has been taught 1,022 nouns, name...
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Financial reward undermines intrinsic incentives.

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Kurayama et al . measure brain activity during conditions of apparent intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to show striking evidence for a phe...
Monday, January 17, 2011

Living for "The Whoosh"

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Scanning my long list of links that haven't quite made it into a MindBlog post, I note this Op-Ed piece by David Brooks from Dec. 31, i...
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Examples of the relativity of our sensing time...

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Two recent articles give fascinating glimpses of how plastic our sense of time can be. Jiga-Boy et al. show that our perception of temporal...
Friday, January 14, 2011

Modeling the World in the Brain

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Berkes et al. show that spontaneous activity in the visual brain adapts during development to resemble the activity generated by external n...

Further debate on anti-aging molecule resveratrol

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As a drug trial is stopped, the current and former leaders of the pharmaceutical company Sirtris disagree on whether we should be taking re...
Thursday, January 13, 2011

The dark side of oxytocin

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Nicholas Wade does a further discussion of work I mentioned in my June 22 post on several studies on oxytocin (the 'trust' hormone...
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Difficulty of seeing changes in moving objects.

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A nice demonstration by Suchow and Alvarez . Play the movie while looking at the small white speck in the center of the ring. At first, the...
Wednesday, January 12, 2011

How our brains optimize our rewards

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In the absence of other options, we use trial-and-error (reinforcement) learning to discover which of our actions are most likely to yield r...