Friday, June 29, 2012

Life satisfaction and economic growth.

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Richard Easterlin coauthored a seminal study in 1974 that attempted to explain why the happiness score in the United Sates and elsewhere ha...
Thursday, June 28, 2012

Synchronized brain activity across individuals during emotional arousal.

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From Nummenmaa et al.: Sharing others’ emotional states may facilitate understanding their intentions and actions. Here we show that network...
1 comment:
Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Cumulative life stress decreases working memory and prefrontal cortex size.

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Two of my colleagues here at the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson and Seth Pollack, have collaborated with others in a sobering stu...
1 comment:
Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Finding genes that affect brain integrity and intellectual performance

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Chiang et al. have looked at brain images of 472 twins and their non-twin siblings to observe gene network effects on brain microstructure ...
Monday, June 25, 2012

Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking.

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Being a bit curmudgeonly about the whole Happiness industry, and having once been a contrarian guest on a west coast happiness radio program...
1 comment:
Friday, June 22, 2012

How depressives surf the web.

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A brief piece with the title of this post recently appeared in the NYTimes, and is an example of annoying phenomenon: advertising by advanc...
Thursday, June 21, 2012

Highjacked brain fallacy, and free will illusion going mainstream.

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In a series of previous posts on MindBlog I have enjoyed following the continuing back and forth over free will and neuroscience,and my own ...
Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Exercise bad for you?

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My almost religious devotion to exercise has been slightly nudged by this piece by Gina Kolata pointing to a study by Bouchard et al. , who...
2 comments:
Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The burdens of being a biped

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Given my current preoccupation with my failing 70 year old knee joints, I was drawn to a brief piece by Elizabeth Pennisi with the title of...
Monday, June 18, 2012

A musical offering.

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As has been my custom, I post on this blog piano video-recordings that I have recently made, this being the Chopin Nocturne in C# Minor tha...
Friday, June 15, 2012

Skin Pics

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One frequently comes across amazing images in cell biology. This time I felt like passing some on to readers.
1 comment:
Thursday, June 14, 2012

The science of gaydar

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Yet another study suggesting that we have an ability (if not a proficiency) to correctly judge the sexual orientation of others about 60% of...
Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Brain correlates of resting, alert, and meditation states.

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Posner and colleagues do a nice review of neural correlates of establishing, maintaining, and switching brain states.  I thought I would pa...
Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Your great grandparent's experience might have altered your stress response.

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This fascinating nugget from Crews et a. (open access) adds to accumulating evidence on the importance of experience induced modification o...
Monday, June 11, 2012

MindBlog's other lives

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This post is sharing with readers two aspects of Deric's private life.  I studied visual transduction over a 36 year period (1960-1996),...
1 comment:
Friday, June 08, 2012

Different sorts of suspicion - brain correlates

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Bhatt et al. (open access) show brain correlates of the distinction between suspicion based on a person’s general beliefs about people in ...
Thursday, June 07, 2012

Why the liberals lost Wisconsin, and Obama may lose.

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Last Tuesday the liberal bubble of Madison Wisconsin that I live in got reminded of what the rest of the state (and the U.S.) is really like...
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Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Deep brain stimulation, fear extinction, and OCD suppression

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Interesting work from Rodriguez-Romaguera et al. (open access) : Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the ventral capsule/ventral striatum (VC/VS...
Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Embodied metaphors and creative acts

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K.-y. Leung et al. do a series of studies that suggest that embodiment of metaphors for creativity promotes creative problem solving. Given...
Monday, June 04, 2012

The power of network visualization.

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A colleague of mine in the campus Chaos seminar pointed us to this 10 minute talk, which I found very engaging. It is given by Manuel Lima, ...