Thursday, May 31, 2012

Quantitative analysis of language evolution.

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Modern computation techniques and the mass digitization of books have made possible the systematic analysis of one of humankind's most i...
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Social jetlag and obesity.

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Roenneberg et al. do an epidemiological study, showing that, beyond sleep duration, the difference between natural circadian sleep rhythm a...
1 comment:
Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Social interactions prime us for motor empathy or resonance.

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Hogeveen and Obhi1 find that recent experience tunes our mirroring systems to particular agent types. A bit from their introduction, follow...
Monday, May 28, 2012

Serotonin modulates reward value in our decision making.

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Seymour et al. find further behavioral and neural evidence that serotonin modulates (is necessary for) distinct behavioral and anatomical c...
2 comments:
Friday, May 25, 2012

The neurogenetics of nice.

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Interesting observations from Poulin et al ...They note that all prosocial acts require people to contend with concerns about potential expl...
Thursday, May 24, 2012

Higher maternal cortisol correlates with later affective problems.

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Sobering data from Buss et al : Stress-related variation in the intrauterine milieu may impact brain development and emergent function, wi...
2 comments:
Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Seeing where our brains think about our thinking

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More fascinating work from Ray Dolan's group at the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging at University College, London: Neuroscienc...
Tuesday, May 22, 2012

My amygdala made me do it...

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James Atlas writes an engaging piece on a topic that has been the subject of many MindBlog posts: how our supposedly rational 'upstairs...
3 comments:
Monday, May 21, 2012

Further cognitive advantages of bilinguals.

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Interesting work from Krizman et al. : Bilingualism profoundly affects the brain, yielding functional and structural changes in cortical reg...
Friday, May 18, 2012

Reunion of Bownds' Vision Laboratory

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Before I started the thread of reading and writing that led to this MindBlog, I spent 35 years doing laboratory experiments on how the rods ...
Thursday, May 17, 2012

Emotion reversed in the brains of left handers.

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Fascinating observations from Brookshire and Casasanto : According to decades of research on affective motivation in the human brain, approa...
2 comments:
Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Compounds that increase muscle endurance also enhance cognition

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Recent experiments from Kobilo et al. build on several studies that have shown that exercise enhances cognition (in both humans and mice). ...
Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Universality of facial expressions of emotion challenged.

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This  work by Jack et al (open access to full article) comes as quite a challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy on the universality of human ...
4 comments:
Monday, May 14, 2012

Linking social environment to gene expression.

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Tung et al. report work on rhesus macaque monkeys - consonant with more limited human studies - showing that dominance rank causes a plast...
2 comments:
Friday, May 11, 2012

Egalitarian behavior and the insula.

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Fascinating work from Dawes et al. : Individuals are willing to sacrifice their own resources to promote equality in groups. These costly ...
Thursday, May 10, 2012

Choosing whether you are anxious or chilled out - a toolkit.

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This is a followup on my May 2 post , which provided a link to a lecture that I now have given (this past Tuesday) to the Chaos and Complex...
2 comments:
Wednesday, May 09, 2012

12 month old human infants recognize stable social dominance relations.

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Interesting work from Mascaro and Csibra . They presented several dominance scenarios with block figures to infants, and then examined mean ...
Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Further work on when two heads are better or worse than one.

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Studies that compare the accuracy of individual and group decision yield somewhat inconsistent results. The key to benefiting from other min...
Monday, May 07, 2012

Brain correlates of whether we help someone suffering.

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I thought I would pass on this interesting paper that is being discussed by an emotion seminar group here on the Univ. of Wisc. campus.  Hei...
Friday, May 04, 2012

Metaphors are the tip of the mind's iceberg.

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An essay by Benjamin Bergen does a nice summary of the importance of ideas in Lakoff and Johnson's 1980 book, "Metaphors We Live B...