Friday, November 30, 2012

Where our brains predict romantic attraction at a glance.

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From Cooper et al : Humans frequently make real-world decisions based on rapid evaluations of minimal information; for example, should we ...
1 comment:
Thursday, November 29, 2012

Cognitive and Emotional plasticity increased by Mindfulness training

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Here is a fascinating study from Allen et al : Mindfulness meditation is a set of attention-based, regulatory, and self-inquiry training reg...
1 comment:
Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Face to face dialog is different.

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Jiang et al do a neat bit of work showing how modern hi-tech dialog devices fail to engage the evolved brain and body synchronization that ...
Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Body-Mind dualism - effects on health.

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Forstmann et al do an interesting bit of work whose results make a lot of sense: Beliefs in mind-body dualism—that is, perceiving one’s mi...
2 comments:
Monday, November 26, 2012

Oxytocin nudges men to monogamy?

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Scheele et al. show that oxytocin nasal spray causes married, but not single, men to keep a greater distance from attractive woman during a...
4 comments:
Friday, November 23, 2012

Musical protolanguage hypothesis - support from congenital amusia.

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Fascinating work from Thompson et al. (open access), suggesting that sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody derives from our capacity to ...
Thursday, November 22, 2012

Inspired by distraction.

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Baird et al. do a simple experiment demonstrating how mind wandering can facilitate creative incubation, that the basement stuff that is di...
Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Unpredictable love.

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There's a nice pieces in the "Gray Matter" series in the New York Times by Richard Friedman that argues that it is our evolve...
Tuesday, November 20, 2012

The force of affective norms - the stranger effect

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Szczurek et al. make a more distanced and structured description of an experience we all have had - being put on guard in a chat with anoth...
Monday, November 19, 2012

How a simple innate bias might guide visual learning

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For years computer programmers have been trying to design algorithms that even remotely approach the ability of young infants in their firs...
Friday, November 16, 2012

Carbs and self control.

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From Molden et al. suggest the increase in self control that some studies have correlated with carbohydrate consumption is caused not by a ...
10 comments:
Thursday, November 15, 2012

Self awarenss and our "spider jar"

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Margit Hesthammer writes a lovely piece for the opinionator section of the NYTimes that has me thinking "I wish I had written that....
1 comment:
Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Giving time gives you time.

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In the same vein as Monday's post, Mogilner et al. note another activity that expands our subjective sense of time: Results of four exp...
Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Mental time travel and our brain's default network.

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Here is some interesting material from Østby et al. on the brain basis of the quality of our remembering the past or imagining the future: ...
Monday, November 12, 2012

Awe is good for you…

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What could most of us could do to chill out and expand our subjective sense of time? Feel a sense of awe more often! Rudd et. al. do a s...
Friday, November 09, 2012

Decreased amygdala neuroplasticity linked to early-life anxious temperament.

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Some interesting work from the research groups of my University of Wisconsin colleagues Ned Kalin and Richard Davidson that suggests that a...
Thursday, November 08, 2012

Biology of social adversity.

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PNAS has done a special issue on the biology of adversity. I mention only a few of the articles here: Ziol-Guest et al. show that low in...
Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Empathy represses analytic thought, and vice versa.

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Jack et al. have performed a study ( online in accepted articles in the journal Neuroimage) observing brain activity in subjects while the...
Tuesday, November 06, 2012

Physiological benefits of leadership - Importance of a sense of control

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An edited paste-up from Sapolsky's brief review pointing to work of Sherman et al. showing that leaders feeling a sense of control hav...
2 comments:
Monday, November 05, 2012

Oxytocin facilitates protective responses to aversive social stimuli in men..

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More in the thread from last Friday's post, in this case on how our brain biases responses to positive and negative social stimuli. In s...