Monday, October 31, 2011

Very brief meditation training produces brain changes associated with positive emotions.

›
It is known that the ratio of left frontal to right frontal lobe activation is relatively higher in individuals with higher positive affec...
1 comment:
Friday, October 28, 2011

Adolescent brain changes while viewing media violence

›
Strenziok et al. (open access) note a habituation and desensitization of adolescent emotional network brain responses to TV violence, which...
Thursday, October 27, 2011

A Fauré Nocturne - new born chicks would like it....

›
I'm finding some of the Gabriel Fauré Noctures very pleasant. Here is Nocturne no. 3, op. 33. And, the abstract following the video is r...
Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Our "divided brain" - an animated tutorial.

›
A loyal mindblog reader has pointed me to an animated lecture, by psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist, that is quite fun to watch. It s...
1 comment:
Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Women's memory enhanced by lower male voice pitch.

›
Women are attracted to low male voices, and a prevailing idea is that this is relevant to mate selection. Kevin Allen and colleagues now sh...
Monday, October 24, 2011

Human genes still evolve rapidly

›
A Harvard group has found evolution in response to natural selection in a contemporary human population, showing a dramatic decrease in age...
Friday, October 21, 2011

The brain's fountain of youth

›
Williams points to an article that suggests that Dracula may have gotten it right. Young blood can restore an aging body. Giving young bl...
Thursday, October 20, 2011

"Neurotrash"

›
In The Chronicle of Higher Education Marc Parry notes the crusade of Raymond Tallis to throw out the "Neurotrash." This is the go...
1 comment:

Brief neuroscience video-tutorials

›
I recently received an email from Aki Nikolaidis, a neuroscience graduate student at the University of Illinois, asking me to have a look so...
Wednesday, October 19, 2011

The science of irrationality.

›
As a followup to yesterday's post on how common sense, ideology and intuition lead us astray in our attempts to fix social problems - wh...
4 comments:
Tuesday, October 18, 2011

The science of psychological change

›
In the Oct 14 issue of Science Magazine Geoffrey L. Cohen reviews Timothy Wilson's new book "Redirect: The Surprising New Science...
Monday, October 17, 2011

Dissolution of the social contract

›
I've been meaning to point to a very cogent essay by Marmor and Mashaw on why conditions for recovery from the great depression of the ...
4 comments:
Friday, October 14, 2011

Differences in reality monitoring correlate with prefrontal cortex variations

›
Here is an intriguing bit of work from Buda et al. : Much recent interest has centered on understanding the relationship between brain stru...
1 comment:
Thursday, October 13, 2011

Merging emotional information from voice and faces in the brain.

›
Klasen et al. find the ventral posterior cingulate to be a central structure for supramodal representation of complex emotional information...
Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Measuring Zeitgeist from the Tweet stream.

›
Golder and Macy have analyzed more than 509 million Twitter posts by 2.4 million users over a 2-year period in order to study collective mo...
Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Fatherhood decreases testosterone.

›
Gettler et al. find that, in a community-based sample from the Philippines, men with higher testosterone level are more likely to marry tha...
Monday, October 10, 2011

Mimicry can foster both rapport and threat.

›
Liu does experiments that illustrate two aspects of mimicry. Mimicry can bond people by fostering rapport and liking, but appears to have t...
Friday, October 07, 2011

The Jekyll and Hyde of emotional intelligence

›
Côté et al. make some observations about emotional smarts: Does emotional intelligence promote behavior that strictly benefits the greate...
Thursday, October 06, 2011

How our brain links to our immune system via vagus nerve

›
A large number of studies show that our psychological state can influence our immune system. Social isolation and stress weaken our immune ...
Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Be Happy! ... regulate your own amygdala

›
Not really....the conditions used in the experiments by Zotev et al.et al. - having a handy fMRI machine nearby - are not exactly accessibl...