Thursday, June 30, 2011

Consciousness - correlation is not a cause

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Here are excerpts from Susan Blackmore's contribution to the Edge.org question "What scientific concept would improve everybody...
5 comments:
Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Internet use restructures the brain

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An interesting study out of China by Yuan et al. does fMRI studies of the brains of Chinese college-age students self-diagnosed with "...
Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Ventromedial prefrontal cortex and judgement bias.

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More from Reed Montague and colleagues in an open access article that further probes the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in judg...
Monday, June 27, 2011

How our attention can be highjacked.

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Here are some interesting observations by Anderson et al. on how our attention can be highjacked by stimuli irrelevant to the task at hand,...
Friday, June 24, 2011

Debate on mechanisms for change..continued

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My recent post pointing to David Brooks comments on the health care debate drew a number of spirited responses, and I though I would contin...

Does cognitive training work?

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From Jaeggi et al., this open access article on their most recent cognitive training studies: Does cognitive training work? There are nume...
Thursday, June 23, 2011

Why ketamine ( 'special K') makes you happy

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I've mentioned in a previous post that the club drug K may be useful for something besides the psychedelic high of going "down the...
3 comments:
Wednesday, June 22, 2011

The visual impact of gossip

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Here is an interesting bit from Anderson et al. Apparently hearing negative gossip about someone apparently activates top down brain filte...
Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Innate Euclidean geometry.

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This report from Izard et al. is kind of neat: Kant argued that Euclidean geometry is synthesized on the basis of an a priori intuition of...
1 comment:
Monday, June 20, 2011

The amygdala - not command central for our fear reactions?

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Most of us have accepted for years, starting from LeDoux's early work, that there is an automatic unconscious 'downstairs' rapi...
5 comments:

Article of the future...

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I'm on the editorial board of one of the Elsevier journals, and so get occasional emails on things they are cooking up. Towards the end...
Friday, June 17, 2011

Why we laugh

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In the June 10 issue of Science Walter Sinnott-Armstrong reviews what looks like a fascinating and fun book : "Inside Jokes Using Humo...
2 comments:
Thursday, June 16, 2011

Techie nirvana - Google's human android

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I've gone for the cloud. On receiving an invitation (which I requested) from Google to try their beta version of Google Music ( music.go...
1 comment:

Liszt - Années de pèlerinage - Vallee d'Obermann

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This is the fourth piece played in a house concert for friends at my home on Twin Valley Road in Middleton WI, on May 22, 2011. This recordi...

The Empathetic Brain

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Christian Keyser, who does research on mirror neurons at The Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, sent me an email yesterday pointing ou...
Wednesday, June 15, 2011

The quest for validation.

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Out of the virtual diarrhea of commentary on Anthony Weiner's weiner, the commentary by Ross Douthat struck a chord with me, and so I m...
1 comment:
Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Shame and honor drive cooperation

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In Biological Letters, an interesting and simple result from Jacquet et. al. : Can the threat of being shamed or the prospect of being hono...
3 comments:
Monday, June 13, 2011

Debate on optimal mechanisms for political and social change

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David Brooks has done what seems to me a balanced piece on the fundamental philosophical issues underlying the current debate on reform of ...
5 comments:
Friday, June 10, 2011

Searching for the True Self

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Joshua Knobe writes a piece for The Stone, a forum for contemporary philosopers in The New York Times Opinionator. The issue posed is: .....
8 comments:
Thursday, June 09, 2011

A devolution of modern nation states?

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I've been reading Fukayama's new book on the origins of political order and the evolution, first in England, of government with the ...