Thursday, January 31, 2013

How our brains judge risk and effort.

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Burke et al. do a nice piece of work showing that the risk of an option for action is encoded by the anterior insula and the effort require...
Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Moral roots of environmental attitudes.

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From Feinberg and Willer : Americans’ attitudes about the environment are highly polarized, but it is unclear why this is the case. We cond...
Tuesday, January 29, 2013

The Biology of Fear

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I want to point to a good open source review article in Current Biology on the brain correlates of fear, by Ralph Adolphs. You might find t...
Monday, January 28, 2013

You are going to die...

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The "Opinionator" online commentary feature of the New York Times has another engaging contribution in its "Anxiety" se...
Friday, January 25, 2013

Thoughts as material objects - impact on evaluations

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It's hard to get rid of unwanted thoughts. What about just throwing them in the garbage like unwanted objects? In some conditions might ...
4 comments:
Thursday, January 24, 2013

What we should fear...

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Gary Marcus does a review of some answers to the annual question of John Brockman's edge.org , "What *should* we be worried about?...
Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Brain correlates of developing intuition.

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An interesting open access study from Wan et al. : The superior capability of cognitive experts largely depends on automatic, quick inform...
Tuesday, January 22, 2013

How procrastination gets things done...

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John Tierney writes a delightful piece on not getting some things done. He notes several authors' comments on procrastination: The k...
1 comment:
Monday, January 21, 2013

Hedonic adaptation - where did the warm glow go?

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Obtaining something we want follows a very stereotyped course, as noted in Oscar Wilde's famous aphorism: "There are only two trag...
Friday, January 18, 2013

How environments talk to genes.

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The January issue of Nature Neuroscience has some fascinating articles on gene-environment interactions. Vassoler et al. report that in ra...
Thursday, January 17, 2013

Our brains change operating modes during an eyeblink.

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Nakano et al. suggest that an eye blink briefly gives our attentional network a rest, as activity shifts to the default network: It remai...
Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Why mental arithmetic counts.

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Price et al. show that brain activation during single digit arithmetic predicts high school math scores: Do individual differences in the b...
Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Lifelong bilingualism enhances cognitive control in aging.

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This work by Gold et al. makes me wish I had maintained the proficiency in German that I had in my college years: Recent behavioral data h...
Monday, January 14, 2013

A great New Yorker Cover

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I can't resist passing on the cover of the most recent issue of The New Yorker:

Mindfulness neuroscience

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The journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience has released an issue devoted to studies of brain correlates of different kinds of ...
5 comments:
Friday, January 11, 2013

The power of concentration

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I've been meaning to pass on this review by Konnikova on the salutary effects of mindfulness and concentration. It pulls together a num...
Thursday, January 10, 2013

Self affirmation enhances responsiveness to errors.

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Legault et al. note brain responses that correlate with augmented attention and emotional receptivity to performance errors caused by enhan...
1 comment:
Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Music and movement: shared dynamic structure in universal expressions of emotion

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Sievers et al. do a fascinating analysis. They designed an ingenious computer program that used slider bars to adjust a music player or a ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, January 08, 2013

The End of History Illusion.

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The Jan 4 issue of Science has an interested article by Quoidbach et al. on our perception of how much we changed in the past decade and h...
Monday, January 07, 2013

Surprise! Satisfied old folks live longer.

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Contra a popular assumption that feisty, grumpy old farts are likely to live longer than sweet docile passive ones, Judith Graham reviews ...