Friday, March 30, 2012

Feeling the moves - motor empathy with expert performance

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Jola et al. make the interesting observation that experienced viewers of ballet, even without physical training, covertly simulate the move...
Thursday, March 29, 2012

The Righteous Mind

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I want to point to two reviews of Jonathan Haidt's new book , which has the title of this post. It brings exceptional clarity to the de...
4 comments:
Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Everything Is The Way It Is Because It Got That Way

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An interesting summary of some core ideas in developmental psychology by Paul Bloom: This aphorism is attributed to the biologist and cl...
Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Handedness affects the coding of affective information.

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Interesting correlates from Brunyé et al. : The body specificity hypothesis posits that the way in which people interact with the world affe...
Monday, March 26, 2012

Emotion in Eastern and Western Music Mirrors Vocalization

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Further interesting work from Purves and his colleagues: In Western music, the major mode is typically used to convey excited, happy, brigh...
3 comments:
Friday, March 23, 2012

Eyes as location of the self.

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Starmans and Bloom do an interesting nugget of work showing how children and adults see the eyes as the location of the self. In three expe...
1 comment:

The importance of epigenetics in understanding nature/nurture interactions

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I'm vaguely aware of the vast new field of epigenetics, defined in various ways, but all definitions are based in the central concept th...
2 comments:
Thursday, March 22, 2012

Belief in and memory for an event can be independent constructs.

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From Clark et al.: Recent studies have shown that many people spontaneously report vivid memories of events that they do not believe to have...

Beyond mirror neurons - the neuroscience of real social encounters

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A recent draft manuscript by Schilbach et al (PDF) has a nice summary of what a second-person neuroscience would be like, moving beyond spe...
Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Our brains lengthen perceptions of biological motions.

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Wang and Jiang show that the inherent temporal properties of life motion signals spontaneously engage more intricate brain processings comp...
4 comments:
Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Meditation practice increases brain size and gyrification

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Luders and her colleagues ( PDF here ) have examined 44 people — 22 control subjects and 22 who had practiced various forms of meditation, i...
6 comments:
Monday, March 19, 2012

Serotonin and reaction to unfairness.

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How should one deal with line cutters? Or, more generally, what would you do if you faced unfair or wrong behavior? Studies have shown that ...
2 comments:
Friday, March 16, 2012

Elegance of our brain lies in its inelegance.

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I want to pass on this nice brief essay by David Eagleman : For centuries, neuroscience attempted to neatly assign labels to the vario...
1 comment:
Thursday, March 15, 2012

Cognitive enhancement is in our futures.

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I want to point to three articles on brain enhancement that have accumulated in my queue of potential items for posting: Benedict Carey di...
Wednesday, March 14, 2012

The debate over the evolution of altruism.

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Jonah Lehrer does a fascinating article in the March 5 issue of The New Yorker titled "Kind and Kind - a fight about the genetics of al...
2 comments:
Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Why humans made it, and chimps didn’t

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Fascinating work on the comparative cognitive and social behavior of humans and chimpanzees continues to pour out, highlighting behaviors th...
Monday, March 12, 2012

Recurring patterns in music from Bach to Scott Joplin

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More amazing stuff from Daniel Levitan on music...first an except from the introduction to his latest paper in PNAS : Musical behaviors—s...
Friday, March 09, 2012

The rich behaving badly

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No big surprise, I guess, but here is a gem from Piff et al. that shows in a variety of different experimental settings that higher social ...
5 comments:
Thursday, March 08, 2012

Our brain connectivity predicts perceptual task performance.

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An MRI scan may soon be part of the interview process for jobs requiring skill at learning and performing novel tasks... Baldassarre et al. ...
Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Childhood maltreatment reduces brain volume.

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Shortly after putting up this post on maternal nurturing correlating with larger hippocampal volumes, I can across the flip side of the sto...