Friday, September 30, 2011

There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences.

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Mobbs and Watt argue that neuroscience can explain seeing bright lights, meeting the dead, or being convinced you are one of them, suggesti...
7 comments:

Longevity gene debate.

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A collaboration between German, French, and British laboratories is challenging the basic observations on extending life span in nematodes ...
Thursday, September 29, 2011

Yoghurt lowers stress in the brain.

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Here is a totally fascinating study done at the University College Cork indicating that the presence of probiotic bacteria in the gut can r...
2 comments:
Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Infidelity yields better offspring

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Here is a study of birds (dark-eyed juncos) who form a social pair with one partner but produce more than one-quarter of their offspring fro...
Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Atul Gawande on improving skilled performance by coaching

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Anything Gawande writes is worth reading. I have previously noted his essays on aging and medical practice . In his most recent New Yorker ...

The Buddha's Biology

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I had started to occasionally re-post an old post that really struck me during my scan of this blog since its beginning in 2006, and now rep...
4 comments:
Monday, September 26, 2011

Delayed gratification - 40 years later.

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Casey et al. (open access) do a followup of the famous "marshmallow experiments" that showed young children who are better at del...
Friday, September 23, 2011

Nurture affects gender differences in spatial abilities

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Here is a fascinating bit from Hoffman et al. : Women remain significantly underrepresented in the science, engineering, and technology wor...
Thursday, September 22, 2011

Testosterone modulates brain talk in social emotional behavior.

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People with higher testosterone levels show more approach-related behavior during short social exchanges, and recent work has shown that thi...
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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Evolutionary rationale for positive illusions.

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Johnson and Fowler offer a fascinating explanation for why 70% of us (and 90% of college professors) feel we are above average in physical ...
1 comment:
Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Rewriting self-fulfilling prophecies about social rejection

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Stinson et al. provide yet another example of how even a very modest intervention to alter self-image can have long lasting effects: Chron...
2 comments:
Monday, September 19, 2011

Musical expertise boosts language perception

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Perhaps the thousands of hours I have put in on piano practice have made it easier for me to write? A few clips from the introduction of Fra...
1 comment:
Friday, September 16, 2011

Neural correlates of pain reduction through meditation

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Salomons and Kucyi present a nice review of experiments examining meditation and pain reduction ( PDF here ). ...A cognitive mechanism tha...
1 comment:
Thursday, September 15, 2011

Why laughing feels so good...

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Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary psychologist at Oxford who has correlated social group size with brain size in evolution, and also argued for...
Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Priming for self-esteem improves performance.

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Yet another interesting collaboration involving Ray Dolan from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging. Social cues have subtle effects...
2 comments:
Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Brain changes following cognitive behavioral therapy for psychosis.

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I've always been impressed by work of the sort done by Schwartz and others that shows cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), when effectiv...
3 comments:
Monday, September 12, 2011

Talk about a nasty trick..plus, beta males win

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Robert Sapolsky, whose work on stress I've talked about in a number of posts, is a polymath who maintains a number of quirky interests, ...
2 comments:
Friday, September 09, 2011

Civil conflict correlates with climate change.

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A sobering analysis from Hsiang et al. : It has been proposed that changes in global climate have been responsible for episodes of widespre...
Thursday, September 08, 2011

Free Will: Neuroscience vs. Philosophy

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Kerri Smith offers ( PDF here ) an update on the perennial debate between neuroscientists and philosophers over free will, it covers finding...
2 comments:
Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Behavioral and Brain Science Freebies...

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Yet another post in which I pass on some of the goodies that are constantly flowing through my literature scans, rather than losing them as ...