Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Our Thrifty Brains.

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Andy Clark has done a piece that is really worth reading in the Stone, a New York Times forum for contemporary philosophers. (And, check ou...
1 comment:
Monday, January 30, 2012

A simple way to attentuate emotional arousal?

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I just came across these interesting observations of Herwig et al. . They show that simply using self referential reflection (i.e., using m...
Friday, January 27, 2012

You think, therefore I am.

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I pass on this contribution from Rose and Markus as their answer to this year's annual question from Edge.org (What is your favorite de...
Thursday, January 26, 2012

Cellular 'self eating' accounts for some beneficial effects of exercise.

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Population studies suggest that exercise protects against diabetes, cancer, and age related diseases such as Alzheimer's. Work by Congc...
Wednesday, January 25, 2012

The psychology of perceived wealth.

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Studies have shown that not every dollar contributes equally to perceived wealth, people’s standing relative to those around them often pred...
Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Bounded rationality.

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I thought I would pass on clips from Mahzarin Banaji's response to the Edge.org annual question "What is your favorite deep, elega...
Monday, January 23, 2012

The age of anxiety

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Daniel Smith does an interesting piece asking whether it is appropriate to consider our current times an "age of anxiety." Some c...
4 comments:
Friday, January 20, 2012

On Solitude.

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Reading a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece by Susan Cain (" The Rise of the New Groupthink ") transported me back over 20 years t...
1 comment:
Thursday, January 19, 2012

Chill-out architecture - The use of tree metaphors

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I gravitate towards forests and trees (typing right now at a desk that looks out at a large tree canopy on the opposite riverbank) because t...
1 comment:
Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Living large - how the powerful overestimate.

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From Duguid and Goncalo , their abstract, slightly edited: In three experiments, we tested the prediction that individuals’ experience of p...
Tuesday, January 17, 2012

My pushing back against our diffusion into “the cloud”

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My son visits over the new year's holiday every year, which gives me the chance to have a "techie" conference with him to see ...
Monday, January 16, 2012

Remembering a rosy future.

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Here is a fascinating tidbit from Dan Schacter's laboratory. When we imagine events in the future, our subsequent recall of negative si...
2 comments:
Friday, January 13, 2012

Our bias against creativity

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In principle we are all for creativity, but, when faced with the prospect of actually altering our behavior or opinions we falter. Mueller e...
2 comments:
Thursday, January 12, 2012

IQ scores are malleable.

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Brinch and Galloway do a rather clean demonstration that contests the common notion that education has little effect on IQ. Here is the abs...
Wednesday, January 11, 2012

BioDigitalHuman - You've got to check out this site!

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I've just spent the last two hours marveling at the incredibly elegant 3-D human anatomy website developed by BioDigital Systems (point...
2 comments:
Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Classic versus modern violins: beauty in the eye of the beholder?

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It is a truism among musicians that no modern violin can, or ever will, approach the perfection of the instruments crafted by Renaissance vi...
Monday, January 09, 2012

Are the Humanities becoming the “Animal Sciences”

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A theme of my "Biology of Mind" course at the University of Wisconsin and the book of that title that I generated from my lecture ...
Friday, January 06, 2012

Structural changes in adult brains caused by acquiring knowledge

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A number of reports have appeared over the past 20 years suggesting that the hippocampus region of the brain involved in place memory is lar...
Thursday, January 05, 2012

Can ignorance promote democracy?

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It is easy to despair over the continuing decay in the intelligence and rationality of American voters, and worry about their susceptibility...
Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Dynamics of improvising together.

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In a previous life (when I was a 30-something) I frequently participated in dance improvisation sessions sponsored by either the Univ. of Wi...