Friday, August 30, 2013

The Innovation of Loneliness

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This is a wonderful succinct video that has gone viral, and I would encourage MindBlog readers to have a look at it. I can't imagine a...
2 comments:

"Life Enhancement"

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A colleague sends me material he finds on longevity, life enhancement, etc. and I thought I would pass on two links on trendy compounds du ...
Thursday, August 29, 2013

Meditation factoids - enhancement of “good” genes expression, smoking reduction

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Herbert Benson (of "relaxation response" fame) and collaborators have offered a study suggesting that meditation or relaxation dow...
2 comments:
Wednesday, August 28, 2013

More on the Neuro-Utopians

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A recent article by Benjamin Fong. " Bursting the neuro-utopian bubble " was so widely reported that I have delayed mention of it....
Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Song of our warming planet

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A colleague in the chaos seminar group here at the Univ. of Wisconsin sent around this video translating global warming data into a musical ...
1 comment:

The Beethoven mouse - a key to auditory transduction

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I have to pass on this great montage cover and its legend from the journal Neuron. The article referenced described a gene mutation that lea...
Monday, August 26, 2013

Early experience shapes the amygdala’s sensitivity to race.

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Here is a fascinating finding. Not surprising, I suppose, but Telzer et al. show that orphan human infants raised with exposure to only sa...
Thursday, August 22, 2013

Looking at the Posit Science brain renewal training program.

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I recently did a post pointing to Patricia Marx's article on brain exercises meant to counter aging. The authors went through the trai...
Wednesday, August 21, 2013

How the brain shifts between purpose and habit.

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Gremel et al. do a nice explication of the brain's upstairs/downstairs story, illustrating with direct electrical recordings how the m...
Tuesday, August 20, 2013

A brain correlate of near death hallucinations and visions?

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Borjigin et al. make some fascinating observations on brain activity that occurs during the moments of cardiac arrest when brain glucose l...
Monday, August 19, 2013

War of science and the humanities redux: Ross Douthat on The Scientism of Steven Pinker

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I enjoyed a very well written article by Steven Pinker in the New Republic titled "Science is not your enemy", which argued that ...
Friday, August 16, 2013

Factoids on exercise and learning - the kind of exercise is important

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In my scans of journals' tables of contents for potential MindBlog posts I keep an eye out for articles on exercise, probably the most l...
1 comment:
Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Do you have a tidy or messy desk?

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Vohs et al. have done an interesting experiment that suggests that physical order enhances healthy choices, generosity, and conventionality...
Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Imperceptible current applied to our scalp enhances general intelligence.

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Here is yet another of the increasing number of articles examining the effects of very weak electrical stimulation of our frontal scalp with...
Monday, August 12, 2013

Evidence that the Lunar cycle influences human sleep.

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I have kept a log for many years that has convinced me that I have roughly monthly oscillations in motivation and libido, but I've not c...
Friday, August 09, 2013

Personal control enhances treatment effectiveness.

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An interesting fragment, relating to the powerful vs helplessness theme of a recent post , subjects faced with alternative pain control dru...
Thursday, August 08, 2013

Think your radiologist gets it right? The invisible gorilla strikes again.

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A well known video shows the famous experiment of missing a gorilla walking through a basketball game when you have been instructed to count...
Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Degree of Musical Expertise Modulates Higher Order Brain Functioning

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A piece like this one by Oechslin et al. gives me some hope that my piano playing and sight reading compensate for my aversion to spending ...
Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Be young in perception and behavior! Put yourself in a virtual child’s body!

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Banakou et al. show that if we use some simple tricks to project ourselves into a 4-year old's body, we overestimate object sizes and m...
Monday, August 05, 2013

The bad kind of stress - perceived helplessness

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Velasquez-Manoff does a nice discussion of a topic that has been recurrent in MindBlog, understanding the kind of stress that is really bad...