Friday, April 29, 2011

Yet another distortion of democracy.

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An interesting study from Davis et al. , on the effects of instantaneous polling while an election debate is proceeding: A recent innovatio...
Thursday, April 28, 2011

Religion and brain atrophy...

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I guess I might as well continue the religion theme of yesterday's post with this piece from Owen et al. , on religious factors and hipp...
2 comments:
Wednesday, April 27, 2011

How to decrease belief in intelligent design

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Tracy et al. make the encouraging observation that teaching existential meaning in naturalism can decrease belief in intelligent design. Th...
Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Liberal and Conservative brains

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Greg Miller does a commentary on Kanai et al.'s study of correlations between political orientation and brain structure. The Kanai et ...
Monday, April 25, 2011

Multitasking compromises short term memory in seniors.

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Sigh... A careful noting "by Clapp et al. of the "deficient ability to dynamically switch between functional brain networks"...
Friday, April 22, 2011

Neuromarketing - not ready for prime time...

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I don't usually react to emails suggesting that mindblog consider mentioning what turn out to be commercial sites, but I thought the p...
Thursday, April 21, 2011

Juvenile training improves adult skills - at a cost.

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Sarro and Sanes ask whether there are long-term effects of early sensory training that can only be assessed after maturation. The experimen...
1 comment:
Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Pain reduction by mindfulness meditation - brain correlates

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Zeidan et al. offer these interesting results on possible consequences of a form of mindfulness meditation called Shamatha, or focused atte...
1 comment:
Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Self control makes us angry

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In several different places I have come across this interesting article by Gal and Liu. Exerting self control is usually assoicated with p...
Monday, April 18, 2011

Dialing numbers on your cellphone can elicit concepts

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Observations by Topolinski note an interesting consequence of our cell phone habits: When people perform actions, effects associated with ...
1 comment:
Friday, April 15, 2011

Outsourcing self regulation

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It seems reasonable that thinking about supportive partners should be motivationally bolstering - leading us to work harder. Fitzsimonds and...
1 comment:
Thursday, April 14, 2011

A long, diligent life...

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Lagergren reviews Friedman and Martin's recent book on the 8-decade long longevity study started in 1921 at Stanford University by Lew...
1 comment:
Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Disorder promotes discrimination and stereotyping

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Stapel and Lindenberg find that environmental signs of disorder, such as uncollected trash at a train station or cars parked askew on a sid...
1 comment:
Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Hurt the flesh, cleanse the soul....

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Here are some summary, slightly edited, clips from an interesting study by Bastian et al. (performed on the usual batch of college undergra...
Monday, April 11, 2011

Improving your cognitive toolkit - VII

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Continuation of my sampling of a few of the answers to the annual question at edge.org, "What scientific concept would improve everybod...
2 comments:
Friday, April 08, 2011

Music and language - differing brain activations

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Rogalsky et al. obtain data that fills out in much more detail a description of which brain activations overlap and which differ during the...
1 comment:
Thursday, April 07, 2011

Elephants know when they need a helping trunk.

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From de Waal and collaborators , evidence for convergent evolution of cooperation: Elephants are widely assumed to be among the most cognit...
Wednesday, April 06, 2011

The brains of experts - due to predispositions and/or training?

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Here is how Golestant et al. frame their interesting study on the brains of expert Phoneticians - who typically spend one to four years of ...
1 comment:
Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Competitions for memory, it's stabilization, and a memory enhancer

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Kuhl et al. find that the competition in the brain between old memories and new ones that are associated with the same thing (for example, ...
Monday, April 04, 2011

Increasing the viewed size of a painful body part reduces the pain

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Here's an interesting and useful bit from Mancini et al. : Pain is a complex subjective experience that is shaped by numerous contextua...