Tuesday, April 30, 2013

The slippery slope of fear

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LeDoux makes some useful comments on confusion one encounters in studies of fear, especially involving the amygdala, a clip: ‘Fear’ is used...
2 comments:
Monday, April 29, 2013

Lessons learned from a Chaos and Comlexity seminar.

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For ~ 15 years I have participated in the weekly Chaos and Complexity seminar at the Univ. of Wisconsin organized by physics professor Clint...
Friday, April 26, 2013

Teleological reasoning about nature: intentional design or relational perspectives?

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Ojalehto et al. offer an interesting analysis of assumptions about our reasoning about natural phenomena. Some slightly edited clips from ...
1 comment:
Thursday, April 25, 2013

Brain activity correlating with future antisocial activity.

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From Aharoni et al. : Identification of factors that predict recurrent antisocial behavior is integral to the social sciences, criminal j...
Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Body posture modulates action perception.

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From Zimmermann et al : Recent studies have highlighted cognitive and neural similarities between planning and perceiving actions. Given th...
Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Where our brains compute musical reward.

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Yet another fascinating chunk from Zatorre and collaborators : We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate neural processes...
Monday, April 22, 2013

Quiet - the world of introverts.

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I recently visited my year old grandson in Austin, TX., who turns out to be my opposite on Jerome Kagan's scale of temperamental introv...
1 comment:
Friday, April 19, 2013

Free Will, continued - Prior unconscious brain activity predicts choices for abstract intentions!

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I've been running a thread on free will and neuroscience in this blog, recently noting comments by Nahmias : ...As long as people unders...
4 comments:
Thursday, April 18, 2013

Showing where moral intent is determined in our brains.

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Interesting work from Koster-Hale et al: Intentional harms are typically judged to be morally worse than accidental harms. Distinguishing be...
Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Brain training games don't actually make you smarter.

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Wow...after having done several posts uncritically passing on studies by Jaeggi and others claiming that games to improve working memory, su...
1 comment:
Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Older brains - just as much nerve firing, but scrambled connections?

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A group of colleagues at Imperial College London and Tsinghua University in Beijing have fitted glass windows on the skulls of old and youn...
2 comments:
Monday, April 15, 2013

A review - Mindfulness meditation and our brain's default versus attentional networks.

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I've been doing some homework on potential topics to work up into a lecture, one of them being brain correlates of various meditative, a...
1 comment:
Friday, April 12, 2013

Why old folks more easy lose their way,

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Wiener et al. make observations that shed light on why older people have more difficulty finding their car in a shopping mall's large p...
Thursday, April 11, 2013

Defining when a visual stimulus become conscious to us.

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Llinás and collaborators do a nice dissection of our conscious versus unconscious visual processing and note the timing (240 milliseconds) ...
Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Your smartphone, your social brain, and your vagus nerve.

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I am always struck, when I go a local Starbucks for my noon coffee or do a happy hour at a local bar, that the great majority of those prese...
1 comment:
Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Mindfulness training improves working memory and cognitive performance while reducing mind wandering.

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Yet another study, by Mrazek et al. , on the salutary effects of mindfulness: Given that the ability to attend to a task without distraction...
Monday, April 08, 2013

Alteration of paralimbic self awareness circuits in behavioral addiction.

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Changeux and collaborators look at the brain correlates of pathological gambling, evaluating whether addictions might occur because of a pr...
Friday, April 05, 2013

Training our emotional brain - improving affective control.

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Schweizer et al. suggest that our ability to keep a cool head in emotionally charged situations can be enhanced by working memory training,...
3 comments:
Thursday, April 04, 2013

Impersonating your younger self makes your body physiologically younger - a rediscovered post.

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For several years I've been trying to find or recall a MindBlog post or an article read, and couldn't come up with it. A blog reader...
3 comments:
Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Do we need an Apollo moon project for the brain?

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I have collected a sampling of the many commentaries on the Brain Activity Map project to which Barack Obama alluded in his State of the Uni...