Monday, December 31, 2012

A usefull trick: Shifting attention to reduce emotional reactivity.

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Thiruchselvam et al. do a simple demonstration of how our introspective attention can regulate our emotions after an unpleasant for fearful...
Monday, December 24, 2012

Happy Holidays - a personal note - and MindBlog taking a break

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My partner Len and I have traveled from our Fort Lauderdale snowbird retreat to Austin Texas to join  my ex-wife Marilyn Young, son Jonathan...

Training parts of your brain for perceptual enhancement.

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Geraint Rees and collaborators have done some fascinating work showing that training the spontaneous activity of just a part of our visual ...
Friday, December 21, 2012

For guys who want to attract women?

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Perhaps there is a human equivalent of the non-volatile protein pheromone darcin, that Roberts et al. show to stimulate spatial preference ...
Thursday, December 20, 2012

Unconscious reading and arithmetic.

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Here is a fascinating bit from Sklar et al. : The modal view in the cognitive and neural sciences holds that consciousness is necessary fo...
1 comment:
Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Grin and bear it.

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Kraft and Pressman make a nice observation on linking muscle movement to emotion, showing how manipulating the muscles involved in a smile ...
Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Brain plasticity induced by musical training.

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As a lifelong pianist, I have always regarded with awe pianists like Horowitz and Rubenstein who have continued to perform into into their a...
2 comments:
Monday, December 17, 2012

The herding hormone

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Yet another addition, from Stallen et al. , to the long list of studies on oxytocin and our social behaviors (enter oxytocin in the search b...
Friday, December 14, 2012

Brain imaging of the positive bias we place on social feedback.

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Continuing the social brain thread started by yesterday's post, I pass on this piece by Korn et al. showing brain correlates of the rose...
Thursday, December 13, 2012

Enhancing social ability with brain stimulation.

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Social information is thought to be processed by a specific set of neural circuits often referred to as the ‘social brain’ The figure show...
1 comment:
Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Thanks for not sharing, and tuning out...

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I almost did a post last week on Roger Cohen's NYTimes ' thank you for not sharing ' piece , and now he has done a followup on t...
Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Living without irony?

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I've been wanting to pass on this marvelous essay by Christy Wampole, which bemoans the ironic sensibility that pervades our culture, a...
2 comments:
Monday, December 10, 2012

Hindsight bias.

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Regarding the recent presidential election, do you feel that you knew the outcome in your gut all along? Not only felt it coming, but are su...
Friday, December 07, 2012

We use body cues, not facial expression, to discriminate intense positive and negative emotions.

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Interesting work from Aviezer et al : The distinction between positive and negative emotions is fundamental in emotion models. Intriguingly,...
Thursday, December 06, 2012

MindBlog is trying a new brain fitness app

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It has been a few years since I have reviewed brain fitness exercises of the sort claimed to enhance working memory and general intelligenc...
5 comments:
Wednesday, December 05, 2012

New Love, a short shelf life...

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Lyubomirsky previews her forthcoming book “The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, ...
Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Honesty requires time (and lack of justifications)

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Here is a nice little piece from Eldar and Bereby-Meyer : Recent research suggests that refraining from cheating in tempting situations req...
Monday, December 03, 2012

Brain regions that predict and regulate risk-taking.

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Two recent pieces of work raise the prospect of being able to predict and even regulate a person's risk-taking behavior, by first observ...
3 comments:
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: