Friday, May 30, 2014

The monkey business illusion.

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Many people have by now viewed the famous "Gorilla Video" made by Daniel Simons over fifteen years ago, in which most viewers aske...
Thursday, May 29, 2014

How social equality is represented in the brain.

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Interesting work from Aoki, Adolphs, and collaborators: A distinct aspect of the sense of fairness in humans is that we care not only a...
Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Brain correlates of expertise in musical improvisation

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Pihno et al. show that expertise in musical improvisation is associated with increased connectivity between premotor and prefrontal areas, s...
1 comment:
Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Brain correlates of "the good life" ??

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Lewis et al. offer another example of the class of experiments correlating the volume of a specific brain area with a specific behavior, i...
Monday, May 26, 2014

Stress can protect from Alzheimer's disease

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Yanker and his collaborators have found that levels of a neuro-protective protein called REST (repressor element 1-silencing transcription ...
Friday, May 23, 2014

Fear detection depends on phase of our heartbeats.

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Here's a fascinating piece of work: Cognitions and emotions can be influenced by bodily physiology. Here, we investigated whether the...
Thursday, May 22, 2014

Correlation between prosocial behavior and computer game playing

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Here's what seems to me a a slightly counter-intuitive result. Numerous studies have a noted a correlation between playing violent comp...
1 comment:
Wednesday, May 21, 2014

What drives collective versus individualistic behaviors?

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Talheim et al. offer a strikingly simple explanation for why collective versus individualistic behaviors may arise in a given cultural grou...
Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Morality and perception speed

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Here is an interesting nugget... We are more likely to see a word flashed for a very brief interval if it has moral valence. Words related t...
Monday, May 19, 2014

Sluggish cognitive tempo,  a new diagnosis du jour?

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The drug companies may be finding a new profit center, having maxed out their ability to push pills on the more than 6 million American chi...
Friday, May 16, 2014

Formation of new brain cells can erase old memories

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Over the past ten years it has been established that generation of new nerve cells in the dentate gyrus portion of our brains' hippocamp...
Thursday, May 15, 2014

Nonconscious emotions and first impressions - role for conscious awareness

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I just came across this interesting article from Davidson and collaborators at Wisconsin: Emotions can color people’s attitudes toward unr...
Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Language universals at birth.

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Fascinating observations from Gómez et al. showing that human babies are born with linguistic biases concerning syllable structure: The...
Tuesday, May 13, 2014

GABA predicts time perception.

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Individuals can vary widely in their ability to detect sub-second visual stimuli, and most cognitive training and exercise regimes have exer...
Monday, May 12, 2014

More on the rejuvenating power of young blood...

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Since my "fountain of youth" post in 2011 there has been a burst of research showing that factors in the blood of younger animals...
Friday, May 09, 2014

Brain activity display in the spirit of P.T. Barnum

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Carl Zimmer points to some amazing brain graphics, notably one from Gazzaley's lab . You should use the gear symbol to slow down the g...
Thursday, May 08, 2014

We transfer reward in a bottom-up search task to a top-down search task.

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Lee and Shomstein make the interesting observation that a reward-based contingency learned in a bottom-up search task can be transferred to...
Wednesday, May 07, 2014

Gene expression changes in expert meditators?

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Interesting data from an international collaboration . (Although, it seems the more useful design would have been to do a double blind exper...
3 comments:
Tuesday, May 06, 2014

The smell of sickness.

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Olsson et al. demonstrate the existence of a olfactory signal of illness, a aversive body odor that can signal other humans to keep their d...
Monday, May 05, 2014

Out of body, out of mind.

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Bergouignan et al. do a neat experiment in which they test how well study participants remember a presentation when they experience being i...
2 comments: