Friday, February 28, 2014

A brain basis for musical hallucinations

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Kumar et al. report their findings from an unusual opportunity that presented itself when a retired London schoolteacher, Sylvia, reported ...
1 comment:
Thursday, February 27, 2014

The right temperature for a stroking caress

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We apparently have sensory nerves in our skin that are exquisitely tuned for human hedonic, affiliative contact. From Ackerley et al. : Hum...
Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Passing ADHD from one generation to the next.

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Prenatal and early postnatal exposure of the developing brain to nicotine (PNE) is a major risk factor for inducing attention deficit hyper...
Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Restoring vision to blind mice (and humans with RP or AMD?) with a photoswitch.

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Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and retinitis pigmentosa (RP) affect millions of people around the world and in their advanced stages...
Monday, February 24, 2014

Predicting risky choices from brain activity patterns

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Helfinstein et al. find some predictive neural correlates of avoiding versus taking risks. Even course global patterns of brain activity re...
Friday, February 21, 2014

Senior Coolness

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Swiss researchers Zimmermann and Grebe describe the outcome of analysis of in-depth interviews in German with 65 people aged 77 to 101, whi...
Thursday, February 20, 2014

Mindfulness and corporate America’s bottom line.

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New Republic senior editor Evgeny Morozov writes a piece called “ The Mindfulness Racket ”. (I have been working on a brain/mind web lecture...
Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Meditation and brain imaging of two kinds of love.

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Judson Brewer and collaborators perform fMRI scans of experienced practitioners of loving kindness meditation, which fosters feelings of se...
Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Neural signature of our own-race bias.

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Wiese et al. examine the N170 signal (a component of event related potentials, or ERP recorded from electrodes placed on the head, which ...
Monday, February 17, 2014

Awesome Images

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I want to pass on to MindBlog reader two striking galleries of open access images. The first is Science Magazine's Visualization Challen...
Friday, February 14, 2014

The social (and medical) pathology of correlating inner worth with wealth.

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A recent piece by Wilkinson and Pickett in the NYTimes deserves notice. They comment on how wealth inequality is not only divisive and soci...
Thursday, February 13, 2014

Our pupil dilation reflects decision related choice.

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Pupil size is known to be increased by effortful decisions. The current supposition is that decision-related pupil dilation tracks the activ...
Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Reaction time and longevity.

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Hagger-Johnson et al. note a correlation between reaction times (doing a button press as quickly as possible after a light flashes on a com...
1 comment:
Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Genetic predisposition of our behavioral responses.

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Gregory sets the context for a recent article by Skuze et al. on how genes for our oxytocin receptors can influence our social recognition...
1 comment:
Monday, February 10, 2014

Different cultures, different computation systems

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Bender and Beller report that a mixed number system superimposing three binary steps onto a decimal structure was invented long before Lei...
Friday, February 07, 2014

Why electroconvulsive therapy works in mood disorders.

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Dukart et al. make the interesting observation that the controversial procedure of electroconvulsive therapy causes changes in gray matter ...
2 comments:
Thursday, February 06, 2014

Constancy of our social signatures.

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Robin Dunbar and collaborators have done an interesting examination of the persistence of how many close contacts we maintain (family and c...
1 comment:
Wednesday, February 05, 2014

Does music make you smarter?

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Since I have done a number of posts on long term changes in the brains of adults who have had extensive music training, I thought I should p...
1 comment:
Tuesday, February 04, 2014

When psychotherapy works - what are the brain changes?

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The journal Brain and Behavioral Science circulates forthcoming articles for peer commentary before their final publication in the journal. ...
Monday, February 03, 2014

Making Our Brains Younger

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I thought I would pass on this link to a brief (15 min) talk I gave to the Feb. 2, 2014, meeting of the Fort Lauderdale Prime Timers group....