Wednesday, October 31, 2012

I R’ Us - a waking mashup

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When I am going through the daily transition from the last bit of REM sleep to having an awake self I frequently find articles I have recent...
2 comments:
Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Mouse song: features similar to human and bird song.

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A MindBlog reader has pointed out to me an interesting article by Arriaga et al. that notes that mice courtship ultrasonic sound has some a...
Monday, October 29, 2012

Brain correlates of switching consciousness on and off again

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Kock points in Scientific American Mind to work by Långsjö et al. (open access), who image the neural core of consciousness. They performe...
2 comments:
Saturday, October 27, 2012

A new study on implicit attitudes and voting..

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Following my post on implicit attitudes and voting I have received an email from a group of collaborators doing further studies on the same...
Friday, October 26, 2012

Gender bias is alive and well in academic science.

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Handelsman and collaborators do a rather clear study on how the academy works, showing that science faculties favor male students: Despite...
Thursday, October 25, 2012

Resilience to stress replacing happiness as fashionable research topic

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Nature has published a special supplement on Stress and Relilience, a topic also of major emphasis in Richard Davidson's new book . I t...
Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Mechanism of unconscious internal bias in our choices

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What's actually happening when we make choices that do not seem to be justifiable on purely economic or logical grounds? Wimmer and Sho...
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: