Monday, March 31, 2014

Mechanism of muscle decay on aging, and its reversal.

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Humans in their 70's and 80's experience a loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength (sarcopenia) that correlates with an increase i...
Friday, March 28, 2014

Our lives are a concept, not a reality.

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It is useful to occasionally be reminded of our essential strangeness, something I attempted in my " I-Illusion " web/lecture some...
1 comment:
Thursday, March 27, 2014

Restoring mitochondrial dysfunction associated with aging.

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The aging of our bodies is by definition cellular aging, and it is hard to keep track with all the theories on why cells age. One of the m...
1 comment:
Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

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It has been a common supposition that suppressing conscious recall of unpleasant or traumatic memories doesn't prevent their stealthly e...
2 comments:
Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Clash of 'grand theories' of consciousness??

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In what strikes me in the most unlikely venue, The Huffington Post , new age guru (also savvy businessman and marketer) Deepak Chopra offers...
7 comments:
Monday, March 24, 2014

Shaping memory accuracy by TCDS

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Here is yet another example, from Zwissler et al. , of how different brain processes, in this case memory, can be tweaked by trans-cranial ...
Friday, March 21, 2014

Do brain workouts work?

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I've done numerous posts on brain training websites, and have ended up enjoying returning to the one started up by Michael Merzenich, Po...
1 comment:
Thursday, March 20, 2014

A debate on what faces can tell us.

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Security agencies are developing facial emotion profiling software for use at checkpoints, while Apple and Google are working on using your ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Magical thinking in auction biding.

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Newman and Bloom do another demonstration of how common magical thinking is in our society by analyzing the influence of physical contact o...
Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Control over memory retrieval is predicted by heart rate variability.

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Here is a fascinating observation from Gillie et al. , who find that a physiological marker, heart rate variability, correlates with a perso...
2 comments:
Monday, March 17, 2014

Some homilies on wisdom - older and wiser.

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Because at ~72 years of age I am becoming more aware of how much time I have left rather than how long I have lived, I enjoyed a recent art...
Friday, March 14, 2014

Fat hurts, and exercise helps, the brain.

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Gretchen Reynolds points to work by Erion et al. . showing that in obese mice inflammatory cytokines released by fat tissue enter the bra...
Thursday, March 13, 2014

Several perspectives on rich versus poor.

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The latest issue of Psychological Science has several articles reflecting different perspectives on rich and poor people: An analysis not...
Wednesday, March 12, 2014

A technique for enhancing error awareness in older age.

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Harty et al. note yet another salutary effect of transcranial direct current stimulation. A small voltage applied across the right dorsolat...
Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Time, Money, and Morality

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Gino and Mogilner note "It seems that a day does not go by without some unethical behavior by a politician, movie star, professional a...
1 comment:
Monday, March 10, 2014

Default mode network: the seat of literary creativity?

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Wise et al. offer an article with the title of this post in Trends in Cognitive Sciences that comments on the brain areas that consistently...
Friday, March 07, 2014

Optimism correlates with poor results

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Richtel points to work by Sevincer et al. that makes the counter-intuitive observation that optimistic language in newspaper articles and ...
Thursday, March 06, 2014

Dangerous behaviors and the corporate consumption complex.

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Mark Bittman points to Nicholas Freudenberg's new book ,  a right-on exposition and summary of ...“the corporate consumption comple...
Wednesday, March 05, 2014

More on building brains with video games

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Nick Bilton does a brief piece on how trying to win various kinds of video games enhances subsequent performance on real world attention an...
Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Want to remember something? Have some coffee!

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Here is the brief abstract from Borota et al. , followed by a graphic summary of the results offered by Favila and Kuhl : It is currentl...