Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Memory fading? Try some dopamine...

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From Chowdhury et al. in the Journal of Neuroscience: Activation of the hippocampus is required to encode memories for new events (or ep...
Monday, October 22, 2012

A revolution in understanding our genetics, personality, and disease.

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A revolution is taking place. It challenges the basic genetic orthodoxy of the past century, changing what all of us thought we knew. This i...
Friday, October 19, 2012

Learning new information during sleep.

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Arzi et al. do an ingenious experiment to show that we can do associative learning during our sleep. We can associate a sound with a pleasa...
Thursday, October 18, 2012

The Neurochemistry of Storytelling.

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Having in the previous post just made an ill-tempered dump on one kind of popularization, I decide to be inconsistent and now pass on this n...
1 comment:
Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Brain Showbiz...

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Put me down as a curmudgeonly old fart, but I'm not getting a 'gee whiz' response to a recent promotional email asking for publi...
Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Conscious awareness not required for our placebo or nocebo responses.

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Interesting observations from Jensen et al . They first condition a placebo (beneficial) or nocebo (adverse) reponse to a thermal pain stimu...
1 comment:
Monday, October 15, 2012

Clever crows! Now shown to reason about hidden causes.

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Behavioral studies on New Caledonian crows, especially over the past twenty years, continue to yield amazing results. (A video I first poste...
3 comments:
Friday, October 12, 2012

Kids as little scientists - early academics can be misguided

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A review article by Gopnik offers an interesting perspective: New theoretical ideas and empirical research show that very young children’s ...
Thursday, October 11, 2012

Opps! Sex does decrease human male lifespan.

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Animal studies have suggested that castration increases lifespan in males, and now Korean researchers have examined genealogy records and l...
Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Followup on evolutionary psychology as ' just so stories'

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A comment on my Sept. 28 post has passed on a number of excellent response to the book review I was noting in that post. I was remiss (laz...
3 comments:
Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Young children and adults: intrinsically motivated to see others helped

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This interesting piece from Tomasello and collaborators : Young children help other people, but it is not clear why. In the current study, ...
Monday, October 08, 2012

MRI of reading Jane Austen

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Another totally annoying example of science by press release sans any reference to an original research article offers a glimpse at what lo...
1 comment:
Friday, October 05, 2012

Rethinking sleep - brief wakeful resting boosts new memories over the long term.

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Two recent articles point out that the prevailing notion that an eight hour chunk of sleep is required for optimum health and function is a ...
1 comment:
Thursday, October 04, 2012

Regulators of prosocial and empathetic behavior.

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Two pieces in the September issue of Psychological Science deal with empathetic or prosocial behavior. Grant and Dutton make observations ...
Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Idle Minds - why are our brains so active when doing ‘nothing’?

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Kerri Smith does a review on the resting or default activity of our brains, what is happening when we are not focused on anything in partic...
Tuesday, October 02, 2012

Interpersonal closeness and brain social reward processing

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I'm passing on a graphic from Vrticka's comments on recent work by Farei et al. , who have observed brain activation patterns assoc...
1 comment:
Monday, October 01, 2012

Want to be unhappy? Trying to be happy will do it!

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I'm finding the "Anxiety" topic in the Opinionator series at the NYTimes to be a real treat. This entry by British expatriate...
Friday, September 28, 2012

Just so stories about the evolution of our minds.

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I want to point to a very nicely done review in The New Yorker by Anthony Gottlieb, who notes a number of recent books dealing with evolut...
4 comments:
Thursday, September 27, 2012

Voting patterns: “I” value competence but “we” value social competence

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(Chen et al. ask whether judgments of candidates' social competence—defined as the capacity for effective functioning in social interac...
Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Combat stress causes long term changes in brain connectivity.

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Sobering results from Wingen et al. : Prolonged stress can have long-lasting effects on cognition. Animal models suggest that deficits in ...