Thursday, July 31, 2014

Brain activity that reflects positive and negative emotion.

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Knutson et al. at Stanford note a correlation between self reported positive and negative arousal and fMRI measurement of brain activity in...
Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Brain correlates of behaviors in market bubbles.

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Interesting...from Smith et al. a visualization of the part of our brains that seem to be saying "go for it" during a market bubb...
Tuesday, July 29, 2014

A intriguing take on consciousness as a perceptual construct.

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A recent review by Aaron Schurger in Science Magazine pointed me to Michael Graziano's 2013 book " Consciousness and the Social Br...
Monday, July 28, 2014

Video game puzzle that improves executive function.

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Maybe you don't have to pay brainhq.com or luminosity.com a monthly fee for brain exercises to improve your brain's executive functi...
1 comment:
Friday, July 25, 2014

Life purpose, longevity, and Alzheimers disease.

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From Hill and Turiano : Having a purpose in life has been cited consistently as an indicator of healthy aging for several reasons, includ...
Thursday, July 24, 2014

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

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The standard answer, which I've used to end several of my lectures, is "practice, practice, practice." Macnamara et al. sugge...
1 comment:
Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Why is melody in the high notes and rhythm in the base?

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Hove et al. examine to what extent musical convention might be shaped by evolutionarily-shaped human physiology. Across cultures, polypho...
Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Blue is warmer than red?

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Red colors are arousing, blue colors calming, so at first the results of Ho et al. seem counter-intuitive. A red object at the same tempera...
Monday, July 21, 2014

Ecstasy (MDMA) and LSD as therapeutic drugs

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Kupferschmidt offers two pieces in Science magazine on using two currently banned classes of drugs for therapeutic purposes: the party drug ...
Friday, July 18, 2014

Feeling the social touch being observed in others.

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Interesting work by Bolognini et al. on our mirroring of the emotions of others : Touch has an emotional and communicative meaning, and i...
Thursday, July 17, 2014

Brain activity can reveal whom someone is thinking about.

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A collaboration between five different research centers shows that in predicting or imagining the behavior of others based on their persona...
Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Response of large scale brain networks to acute stress.

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I pass on this interesting summary and graphic by Hermans et al. Exposure to acute stress prompts a reallocation of resources to a salien...
1 comment:
Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Increased self control without increased willpower

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Here is a fascinating bit of work from Magen et. al. , who show that a simple cognitive reframing of the classic immediate or delayed gratif...
Monday, July 14, 2014

Cooperating with the future

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You should have a look at this nice Nature Video that very simply illustrates work by Hauser et al. dealing with how we might design polic...
Friday, July 11, 2014

Does phase of the moon influence our sleep? Three contradictory studies.

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This is an update on a previous MindBlog posting . Vyazovskiy and Foster review three recent studies that give contradictory results on how...
Thursday, July 10, 2014

The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.

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Our mammalian brains evolved to physically engage the world in the interest of our survival and passing on genes. Humans are distinctive am...
Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Caring for the future

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In a fascinating behavioral economics experiment Hauser et al examine willingness of people in a group to sacrifice personal gains for futu...
Tuesday, July 08, 2014

Information integration without awareness.

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I want to point to an excellent review by Christof Koch and colleagues. It contains some useful summary graphics. •Empirical data suggest ...
3 comments:
Monday, July 07, 2014

Couch potato? You should be taking omega-3!

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I pass on the abstract from Leckie et al. (DHA refers to docosahexaenoic acid, an omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid that is highly concent...
Friday, July 04, 2014

Moral judgements depend on what language we’re speaking.

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Costa et al. use the famous trolley problem to offer another example of the incredible power of the tribal or "us versus them" na...