Monday, July 30, 2012

Beyond the blink - the art of delay

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I pass on two interesting and related pieces on the limits of rapid spontaneous intuition judgements and actions, contra Malcolm Gladwell . ...
Friday, July 27, 2012

Aphorisms and the Commodification of Wisdom

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I pass on this nice bit from Brain Pickings on some Susan Sontag writing. One chunk: Aphorisms are rogue ideas. Aphorism is aris...
Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Compassion towards one person generalizes to others.

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DeSteno does a NYTimes OpEd piece to point to his papers in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychyology ( PDF here ) and the journal Emo...
1 comment:
Monday, July 23, 2012

Half a heartbeat can chill out our response to threat.

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Whether we are breathing in or breathing out can have a pronounced effect on our threat detection threshold. Meditation regimes and stress p...
2 comments:
Thursday, July 19, 2012

Why are conservatives happier?

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The New York Times has had a nice chunk of commentary on explanations for why many studies show people of conservative political persuasion ...
3 comments:
Tuesday, July 17, 2012

MindBlog summer vacation schedule

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I've decided to chill for a bit, relax from the daily postings, take a summer break. (Maybe this is influenced by the amazing heat wave ...
4 comments:
Monday, July 16, 2012

Monday music offering. Faure Barcarolle No. 4

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Here is the second of the two Faure Baracolles I did at a May 27 recital and recorded on July 5.
Friday, July 13, 2012

Religion replenishes self-control.

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In four experiments Rounding et al. activate god-related concepts in participants without their conscious awareness, using an implicit-pr...
4 comments:
Thursday, July 12, 2012

Scary?..Google X making a digital human brain?

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I have a major love/hate affair with google. This MindBlog uses google's blogger service, and so utterly depends on it, all my email add...
Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Thinking in a foreign language reduces decision biases.

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From Keyser et al. : Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that pe...
3 comments:
Tuesday, July 10, 2012

'Crazy busy' and internet distractions...

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I wanted to pass on two recent NYTimes pieces: Tim Kreider makes the point that the 'busy' trap that many people drive themselves i...
Monday, July 09, 2012

A Faure Barcarolle

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I pass on this recording I made a few days ago of the Faure Barcarolle (Gondolier's song) No. 2. It is a piece I did at a May 27 musica...
Friday, July 06, 2012

Metarepresentations explain human uniqueness.

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I pass along this essay by Hugo Mercier : Humans alone fluently understand the mental states of others. Humans alone rely on an open-en...
2 comments:
Thursday, July 05, 2012

Mechanisms of white matter changes induced by meditation.

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Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a noninvasive MRI-based technique that can delineate white matter fibers in vivo, measure white matter’s s...
1 comment:
Wednesday, July 04, 2012

Hierarchy increases group effectiveness.

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From Ronay et al. : Two experiments examined the psychological and biological antecedents of hierarchical differentiation and the resulting ...
Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Connectivity of prefrontal cortex predicts cognitive control and intelligence

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From Cole et al. : Control of thought and behavior is fundamental to human intelligence. Evidence suggests a frontoparietal brain network ...
Monday, July 02, 2012

Hygiene can hurt.

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I pass on this summary from the Editor's choice section of Science, follwed by the abstract of the work mentioned. It describes further...
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: