Monday, April 30, 2012

Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief.

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From Gervais and Norenzayan's introduction to their paper : According to dual-process theories of human thinking, there are two disti...
Friday, April 27, 2012

We don't project our visceral states onto dissimilar others.

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Interesting observations from O’Brien and Ellsworth on limits to the empathy of our embodied cognition: What people feel shapes their perce...
Thursday, April 26, 2012

Facial theory of politics

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I wanted to pass on this piece by Leonard Mlodinow to continue the thread started in previous posts (also, click on 'faces' in th...
Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Better brains through exercise

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Reynolds points to some fascinating work by Justin Rhodes that upends previous assumptions about the importance of a rich environment lead...
2 comments:
Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Walking on air.

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I thought I would pass on this nifty video. Calming, but at the same time sobering to see how people are down there.

Physical exertion can impair recall and recognition.

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Some interesting observations from Hope et al. : Understanding memory performance under different operational conditions is critical in many...
Monday, April 23, 2012

Increases in stress and amygdala volume reversed by mindfulness meditation.

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Davidson and McEwen offer a nice review of stress induced changes in the amygdala and hippocampus, and also describe experiments showing th...
2 comments:
Friday, April 20, 2012

Both mental and physical effort rise from deep sub-cortical structures.

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Schmidt et al. show that a common motivational system within the basala ganglia underlies performance of both mental and physical efforts. ...
Thursday, April 19, 2012

Young blood enhances repair of old brains.

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In a Neuroscience perspective in Science Redmond and Chan summarize work of Ruckh et al. showing that factors present in the blood of youn...
1 comment:
Wednesday, April 18, 2012

John Cleese on creativity

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For the second time, I've come across some engaging comments by the British actor John Cleese, and I though I would pass them on. Cle...
Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Swarm Intelligence - The Simpleton Ant and the Intelligent Ants

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Another posting from my scan of responses to the edge.org annual question "What is your favorite deep elegant or beautiful explanatio...
Monday, April 16, 2012

Two different ways of making choices in two brain areas.

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Kolling et al. note brain correlates of two different ways of making decisions. They use fMRI of humans to examine neural correlates of fo...
Friday, April 13, 2012

More on why exercise is so good for us...

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Many studies show that egular physical activity confers enormous fitness benefits. Exercise training enhances muscular endurance and strengt...
2 comments:
Thursday, April 12, 2012

Seeing the whole reduces access to its parts.

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The content of our conscious experience is automatically dictated by higher level stages of visual processing, which are associated with the...
Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Clothes can invade our body and brain...

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Adam and Galinsky offer an interesting variant of studies on embodied cognition, a topic that MindBlog has frequently visited (35 postings,...
Tuesday, April 10, 2012

When two heads are worse than one - the cost of collaboration

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An interesting bit in Psychological Science from Minson and Mueller, who demonstrate that joint decision making exacerbates rejection of ou...
2 comments:
Monday, April 09, 2012

Why Curry, Wine And Coffee Cure Most Ails

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A nice brief essay from Murali Doriaswamy: What makes an explanation beautiful? Many elegant explanations in science are those that have be...
Friday, April 06, 2012

How curriculum reform can decrease learning.

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In the Editor's choice section of Science Magazine, McCartney reviews an interesting article in the Physics Education Journal : Since 19...
Thursday, April 05, 2012

Our brain structure changes after two hours of learning.

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Sagi and colleagues have provided the first evidence that rapid structural plasticity can be detected in humans after just 2 hr of playing ...
3 comments:
Wednesday, April 04, 2012

The happiest countries? I'm confused.

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Having just done a post on March 2 on an article in the Economist reporting most happiness in poor and middle income countries (most Europe...
4 comments: