Deric's MindBlog

This blog reports new ideas and work on mind, brain, behavior, psychology, and politics - as well as random curious stuff. (Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column.)

Friday, July 29, 2011

MindBlog retrospective: A new description of our inner lives.

This is another of my old posts that emerged from the retrospective scan of this blog that I did recently, another interesting perspective ...

Thursday, July 28, 2011

The utility of being vague.

I'm just getting to glance at the last few issue of Psychological Science, and find this gem, "In Praise of Vagueness" by Mish...

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Inappropriate cravings? Hold a magnet by your head!

Here's an idea for a BioTech startup!...(I'm not serious)...suggested by an article from McClemon et al. titled "Repetitive T...

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Watching Humor in the Brain

Bekinschtein et al. look at what may be the brain correlates of "humor as a cognitive cleanup mechanism" mentioned in my June 17 ...

Monday, July 25, 2011

Confabulation

Here is an entry from Fiery Cushman on the Edge.org question "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?...

Friday, July 22, 2011

The importance of our brains’ resting state activity.

Pizoli et al find, in an open access article describing the clinical case of a young boy with epileptic encephalopathy who underwent succes...

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Pressure to conform - survey of tight and loose cultures.

Gelfand et al. have constructed a metric they term "tightness-looseness" - the extent to which societies impose social norms, an...

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

The Forbidden Fruit Intuition - our inability to cope with what we know about our minds.

I've recently done a scan of old MindBlog posts, and a number of them stand out so strongly for me, that I want to have their ideas repe...

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Clips: Animal Joys - Diet and Weight

There's a fun article in today's NYTimes Science section ("The Joy of a Sun Bath, a Snuggle, a Bite of Pâté") reviewing a ...

Our Umwelt

I found the following bit to be an engaging and refreshing reminder, from David Eagleman : In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll introdu...

Monday, July 18, 2011

Peer pressure influences our memories

Fascinating observations from Edelson et al. , who examine how our accurate initial memories of an event can be be changed by hearing differ...

Friday, July 15, 2011

Stress and the City

The number of the world's people living in cities has increased from 30% to 50% since 1950, and by 2050 is projected to be ~70%. Many ex...

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Effects of blue light on our memory, cognition, and circadian thythm

I ran a vision research laboratory for 30 years, and in the early 1970s found that installing natural spectrum florescent lights (with more...

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Watching contextual memories

Our memories from a particular time and place are linked together (recall Proust's Madeleine cookie) and referred to as contextual memor...

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Dopamine, reward, and beliefs

I want to point to comments made by Charles ( The Dopamine Project ) on the How we form beliefs post below. The Sapolsky video is quite en...

Varies of reward in the brain.

Smith et al. do some interesting tracking of the different circuits that are active in different kinds of reward in the brain. Here is the...

Monday, July 11, 2011

Our brains are hard-wired to make poor choices about harm prevention.

Daniel Gilbert, always an engaging writer, has done a nice piece in Nature " Buried by bad decisions " and I pass on a few clips ...

Friday, July 08, 2011

How we form beliefs

A.C. Grayling offers a review of Michael Shermer's latest book "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspira...

Married, with Infidelities

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article by Mark Oppenheimer in the Sunday NYTimes Magazine. It focuses on the ideas of Dan Savage, who is...

Thursday, July 07, 2011

Emotion hot spots in our brain - modern phrenology

I am guilty, as well as much of the modern press, of using the discredited shortcut of associating specific emotions with specific brain are...

View web version

Powered by Blogger.