Thursday, February 28, 2013

Amygdala damage can make us more generous

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From van Honk et al. : Contemporary economic models hold that instrumental and impulsive behaviors underlie human social decision making....
Wednesday, February 27, 2013

How our viscera influence our brain and behavior

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I want to pass on this fascinating and useful open source review by Critchley and Harrison in the journal Neuron. Having just had the flu, ...
1 comment:
Tuesday, February 26, 2013

How ambient light might influence our mood.

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The visual pigment melanopsin in the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) of our inner retinas (two cells layers awa...
Monday, February 25, 2013

The lament of the historian…

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My colleague William Cronon at the University of Wisconsin was President of the American Historical Association for 2012,  and I want to pas...
Friday, February 22, 2013

In an uncertain world, fairness finishes first.

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I usually get hopelessly lost in accounts of variations of the ultimatum game used to model human behavior and its evolutionary rationale or...
Thursday, February 21, 2013

Big brains decrease fertility.

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More intelligent mammals, such as humans, whales, and dolphins, have decreased fertility. One ideas has been that the energetic cost of incr...
Wednesday, February 20, 2013

How mindfulness meditation works in the brain - a model

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Kerr et al make some interesting speculations. Their article contains some useful summary graphics. Using a common set of mindfulness exer...
Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Interdependent behavior facilitated by independent behavior?

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Hamedani et al. , who end up suggesting that it may be necessary to invoke independent behaviors in order to successfully motivate interdepe...
Monday, February 18, 2013

Red Brain, Blue Brain

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Darren Schreiber and collaborators add yet another article to what is a growing literature on the differing sensitivities to threat of libe...
Friday, February 15, 2013

Chimps play fair in the ultimatum game.

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These interesting observations by Proctor, de Waal et al. using a new experimental design that resolves conflicting data in studies by othe...
Thursday, February 14, 2013

How we listen to music...

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Adam Gopnik has a very nice essay in The New Yorker on the mysteries of sound and the quest for 3-D recording. I was struck by his descrip...
2 comments:
Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Internal threats to our bodies trigger different fear system from external threats.

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A large volume of work has documented the amygdala's role in fear, and now Feinstein et al. present a surprising finding that carbon dio...
Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Wisconsin Public Radio series on consciousness

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I've been wanting to point to an engaging series of interviews on consciousness presented by Wisconsin Public Radio either for listening...
Monday, February 11, 2013

We can retroactively edit our conscious experience.

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Have you ever had the experience of tuning out someone who was droning on in a conversation or lecture that was boring you, then when sudden...
1 comment:
Friday, February 08, 2013

Deric Bownds' MindBlog - 7th Anniversary

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I just realized that today, 7 years ago on Feb. 8, 2006, was my first posting on this blog, which I started after reading a New York Times a...
4 comments:
Thursday, February 07, 2013

The cocktail party effect is enhanced by vision.

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Golumbic et al. show that watching someone we are trying to hear and understand in a crowded noisy setting sharpens up the auditory processi...
Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Aging, sleep, and memory.

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Events during a day that we think important to remember are held in short term memory storage by an active hippocampus. Then, during deep, ...
Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Racial essentialism correlates with less domain-general creativity.

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Interesting observations from a group at Tel Aviv University : Individuals who believe that racial groups have fixed underlying essences u...
Monday, February 04, 2013

"Chasing Ice" - watching a glacier calving

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 I have to pass on this amazing video shared by Wisconsin colleague John Young, showing one of the breakdowns of a glacier that has retreate...

Early musical training - sensitive period in brain white matter plasticity

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MindBlog has noted a number of studies that document beneficial effects of early music training on adult brain function. Now Steele and coll...