Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Workouts at the brain gym.

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Patricia Marx writes an engaging article in The New Yorker, "Mentally Fit," that describes her foray into various regimes for bu...
Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Loneliness promotes inflammation in our bodies

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Jaremka et al provide further data on how our social status reaches down to the most intimate details of our personal chemistry, with their...
Monday, July 29, 2013

Markers of our aging

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I thought I would point to this interesting piece in the New York Times about the search for some simple objective assay of our biological ...
Friday, July 26, 2013

Unconscious activation of our brains' inhibitory controls.

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Hepler and Albarracin have done the interesting experiment of exposing participants in an experiment to subliminally presented inaction (ca...
Thursday, July 25, 2013

Why does time speed up for older people?

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I've come across two recent articles recently on how our experience of time is our own invention - "mind time" - that can be ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, July 23, 2013

A mechanism of why novelty seeking individuals are more vulnerable to social defeat stress.

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Duclot and Kabbaj offer an interesting result that suggests at least part of the reason for why individuals more likely to seek novelty (wh...
3 comments:
Monday, July 22, 2013

Positive feedback loop between social connections, positive emotions, and vagal tone.

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Kok et al. suggest that positive emotions, positive social connections, and physical health reinforce one another in a positive feedback lo...
Sunday, July 21, 2013

Sebastian - The Maestro

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Deric and 16 month old grandson Sebastian improvising.
Friday, July 19, 2013

An ancestral logic of politics?

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Another evolutionary psychology speculation: If individual dispositions about modern political conflicts are partly generated by evolved me...
1 comment:
Thursday, July 18, 2013

Pathways through which loneliness affects health.

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From Jaremka et al. , some technical data on how stress correlates with activation of inflammatory chemistry in our bodies - chemistry star...
Wednesday, July 17, 2013

How exercise calms anxiety.

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In my scans of journals' tables of contents I missed this interesting piece by Schoenfeld et al. , which is pointed to by a summary in ...
Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later

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Here is a fascinating result from Cartmill et al. : Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major...
Monday, July 15, 2013

A defense of evolutionary psychology.

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For those of you who follow the debate over the legitimacy of the evolutionary psychology perspective, I recommend a look at this contributi...
Friday, July 12, 2013

The obesity paradox - fat people may live longer!

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Virginia Hughes writes about accumulating data on obesity and longevity that many researchers wish would just go away, after all the effort...
3 comments:
Thursday, July 11, 2013

The gospel according to me...

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I want to pass on a few clips from the stimulating essay by Critchley and Webster in "The Stone" forum of the New York Times: ...
Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Order your DIY brain stimulation kit to improve your cognition?

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Nature Magazine has an interesting editorial on dealing with the fact that transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) kits (costing ~ $...
1 comment:
Monday, July 08, 2013

Want to see the metadata on yourself (like the NSA already has)??

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Intrigued by two recent articles by Lapidos and Chen , I've taken myself to the MIT media program called " Immersion ". ...

How our brain cortex receives information about the world

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This post is for that subset of MindBlog readers interested in details of brain wiring. Constantinople and Bruno have upset a basic dogma t...
Friday, July 05, 2013

Eye widening in fear - sensory and social benefits

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An interesting bit from Lee et al. Their abstract: Facial expressions may have originated from a primitive sensory regulatory function th...
Thursday, July 04, 2013

Inflammation links ageing to the brain.

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Gabuzda et al. do a nice review of work by Zhang et al. , that suggests that manipulation of hypothalamus regulation, and especially levels...