Wednesday, April 30, 2014

A blood test for Alzheimers disease?

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Mapstone et al. have identified a set of 10 lipids whose levels predict, with an accuracy of over 90%, whether or not an older individual w...
Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Wave of the future - trusting machines that talk to us.

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We're reading that in 10 years we might be able to buy autonomous cars that do the driving for us. Waytz et al. do an interesting stud...
Monday, April 28, 2014

Brain abnormalities caused by marijuana use.

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Numerous studies have shown that cannabis use is associated with impairments of cognitive functions, including learning and memory, attentio...
4 comments:
Friday, April 25, 2014

Brain activity underlying subjective awareness

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Hill and He devise and interesting paradigm to distinguish brain activities directly contributing to conscious perception from brain activi...
Thursday, April 24, 2014

Blocking facial muscle movement compromizes detecting and having emotions

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Rychlowska et al. show that blocking facial mimicry makes true and false smiles look the same: Recent research suggests that facial mimicr...
Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Is it a Stradivarius?

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I've published several posts on studies showing that panels of expert wine tasters can not distinguish cheap from expensive wines if the...
Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Top Brain, Bottom Brain - a user's manual from Kosslyn and Miller

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I thought I would point to a recent book authored by Kosslyn and Miller:  “ Top Brain - Bottom Brain: Surprising Insights into How You Think...
Monday, April 21, 2014

Judging a man by the width of his face.

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Valentine et al. make interesting observations in a speed-dating context. The effect of higher facial width-to-height ratio on short-term ...
Thursday, April 17, 2014

Over the hill at 24

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Great....the continuous stream of papers documenting cognitive aging in adults and seniors, many noted in MindBlog, has how lowered the bar ...

Training emotions - a brief video from The Brain Club

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I received an email recently from " The Brain Club " pointing me to the series of brief video presentations they are developing ov...

Attributing awareness to oneself and others.

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Kelley et al. make some fascinating observations. I pass on their statement of the significance of the work and their abstract: Significa...
Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Poor people judge more harshly.

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From Pitesa and Thau : In the research presented here, we tested the idea that a lack of material resources (e.g., low income) causes peop...
Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Memory reactivation in aging versus young brains.

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Given my status as a senior aging person I always note the passing article that chronicles yet another way in which the equipment upstairs i...
Monday, April 14, 2014

Enhancing or lowering performance monitoring activity of our brains.

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Wow, here is a fascinating observation. Small electrical currents applied to our medial frontal cortex can either enhance or abolish our bra...
1 comment:
Friday, April 11, 2014

Caloric restriction and longevity.

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I thought I would pass on this recent open access Nature article by the Univ. of Wisconsin group studying the effects of caloric restrictio...
1 comment:
Thursday, April 10, 2014

Is consciousness in control? Does it matter?

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I want to pass on a clip from SelfAwarePatterns that is as succinct a summary as I have seen (better than the one in my " I-Illusion...
Wednesday, April 09, 2014

An interesting pain suppression tactic.

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Romano and Maravita report that magnifying the visual size of one׳s own hand modulates pain anticipation and perception, reducing experiene...
Tuesday, April 08, 2014

Practice and sleep form different aspects of skill.

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Because I am a pianist I find this work by Song and Cohen totally fascinating. It conforms to my own experience in learning new note seque...
Monday, April 07, 2014

Using imagination or memory to increase prosocial behavior.

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Gaesser and Schacter test two simple techniques for altering empathy towards the suffering of others, useful perhaps at the scale of indivi...
Friday, April 04, 2014

Exercise protects retinas.

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Gretchen Reynolds points to an article by Lawson et al. showing that the increase in blood levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factors (B...