Thursday, October 31, 2013

Scary music for Halloween - Dance Macabre

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You should have a look at the 13 scariest pieces of classical music for Halloween, assembled by Limelight Magazine . It is hard for me to s...
Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Finding a protein linking exercise to brain health

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Yet another candidate for a life enhancing drug? ...perhaps a protein that mimics the effect of the protein FNDC5, which is produced by musc...
1 comment:
Tuesday, October 29, 2013

"Only Disconnect" - The pathology of digital of connectivity

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Alas, it seems increasingly clear that to follow E.M. Forster’s dictum “Only Connect” (i.e. with humans in person, what our emotional brain...
Monday, October 28, 2013

Perspective taking can turn competitors unethical

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An interesting bit from Pierce et al. : Perspective taking is often the glue that binds people together. However, we propose that in compet...
Thursday, October 24, 2013

Oxytocin, gentle human touch, and social impression.

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Another bit of information from Leknes and collaborators , expanding on their work mentioned in a recent post : Interpersonal touch is fre...
Wednesday, October 23, 2013

A genetic predisposition to note the negative.

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Another interesting example of viewing the world through gene-colored glasses... Todd et al. note an interesting behavioral correlation in...
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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Silver Lining of a mind in the clouds

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This post continues a MindBlog thread on the consequences of our minds being task-focused versus wandering. A seminal paper was Killingswort...
Monday, October 21, 2013

Face recognition area of the brain also notes race and sex.

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Hundreds of papers have been written on the fusiform face area (FFA) of our brains, which Contreras et al. now show immediately collects i...
Friday, October 18, 2013

Out of the group, out of control?

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From Otten and Jonas : The effects of social exclusion are far-reaching, both on an emotional and behavioral level. The present study inves...
Thursday, October 17, 2013

Trashing Malcolm Gladwell

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It is with some glee that I have been reading the many negative reviews of Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book (David and Goliath..), in...
Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Constructive aspects of mind wandering

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I've generally been noting research that documents some negative aspects of mind wandering, for example " A wandering mind is an un...
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Tuesday, October 15, 2013

The changing psychology of culture from 1800 through 2000.

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Greenfield makes use of the Google Books Ngram Viewer to observe a large shift from collectivist to individualist values during this period...
Monday, October 14, 2013

Distinctive brain correlates of brief compassion meditation.

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This article by Hassenkamp provides a very useful integrative review of, and links to, several articles on brain correlates of mindfulness,...
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Sunday, October 13, 2013

Is music the key to success?

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I'm passing this on immediately after reading it. While I have done numerous posts on how music training influences brain development, ...
Friday, October 11, 2013

Oxytocin dilates our pupils and enhances emotion detection

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Interesting work from Leknes et al. : Sensing others’ emotions through subtle facial expressions is a highly important social skill. We in...
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Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Our sense of fairness changes with weak electric stimulation of our prefrontal cortex.

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Fascinating work from Ruff et al : All known human societies have maintained social order by enforcing compliance with social norms. The b...
Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Psychedelic drugs cause cortical desynchronization

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From Muthukumaraswamy et al. , small wonder that it doesn't all hang together during the psychedelic experience: Psychedelic drugs pr...
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Monday, October 07, 2013

Poulenc Improvisation No. 15

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This piece is a homage to Edith Piaf.  The last of a series of Poulenc recordings I have done this year.  
1 comment:

Better memory with less default mode activity

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I've done a number of posts on our default mode versus attentional networks (a review is here , for example). Here is the summary and ab...
Friday, October 04, 2013

Evilicious humans, hard-wired for war?

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"Evilicious" is the title of a new book self published by Marc Hauser, the Harvard Psychologist forced to resign his position afte...