Friday, August 29, 2014

The origins of morality.

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Mark Johnson has generated some creative and seminal ideas in his books "The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination...
Thursday, August 28, 2014

The stability of the authoritarian state.

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Science Magazine publishes comment on a fascinating article by King et al. who essentially reverse-engineer censorship in China to show th...
Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Early life anxiety in monkeys and humans correlates with connectivity between prefrontal cortex and amygdala.

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A group of collaborators, mainly at the University of Wisconsin, including Ned Kalin and Richard Davidson, provide new information about th...
Tuesday, August 26, 2014

More on better living through zapping your brain.

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Anna Altman has done an entertaining piece on transcranial direct-current stimulation, or tDCS, which I have mentioned in numerous previous...
1 comment:
Monday, August 25, 2014

Origins of good and evil in human babies.

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Felix Warneken does a review in TICS (Trends in Cognitive Sciences) of Paul Bloom new book "Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil,...
Friday, August 22, 2014

OhMyGawd...now MRI measurement are going to tell us how happy we are??

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Dolan and collaborators come up with yet another clever use of MRI measurements. (If you enter "Dolan" in the mindblog search box...
Thursday, August 21, 2014

The source of consciousness.

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Paller and Suzuki do a compact review on efforts to define the source of consciousness, arguing against the mysterian position that conscio...
Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Is our microbiome manipulating us to look out for itself?

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Links between our gut and our brain, especially via the vagus nerve, can regulate stress disorders such as depression and anxiety. Growing e...
Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Brain and behavioral correlates of compassion training.

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Davidson and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin have ...investigated whether short-term compassion training would enhance altruis...
Monday, August 18, 2014

Spooky and awesome technology

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Recent issues of Science Magazine have amazing reports of technology advances: a brain-like spiking-neuron integrated circuit on a 5.4 bill...
Friday, August 15, 2014

More on brain games and training - and reversing cognitive decline in aging.

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Yesterday I got into playing again with a subscription to the online brain training games developed by Michael Merzenich and his colleagues...
Thursday, August 14, 2014

How chronic pain saps our motivations and desires - the mechanism.

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Fields gives a nice summary of work by Schwartz et al. , who find a detailed synaptic mechanism for how chronic pain saps our motivations a...
Wednesday, August 13, 2014

The habenula (?) does a tally of our negative outcomes.

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Impress your friends that you know the name of a brain region that they haven't heard of before! Lawson et al. , in yet another publicat...
1 comment:
Tuesday, August 12, 2014

In learning, too much of a good thing can be bad.

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Many contemporary elementary school classrooms have walls that are covered with varied and interesting displays that are not relevant to ong...
Monday, August 11, 2014

Varieties of introspection.

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I disagree with David Brooks’ opinions much of the time, but I’m impressed with what a polymath he is. His Op-Ed piece on healthy versus u...
Friday, August 08, 2014

An opinion due to social conformity lasts only a few days.

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Huang et al. do a study on 22 South China Normal University students in which they evaluated the attractiveness of a series of neutral face...
Thursday, August 07, 2014

Motivation not improved by multiple motives.

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Wrzesniewski et al. do an interesting study of 11,320 West Point cadets over a period of ten years. Although people often assume that m...
Wednesday, August 06, 2014

How much do our genes influence our political beliefs?

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One of MindBlog’s subject threads has been noting articles that examine the correlation between our genetic constitution and our political b...
Tuesday, August 05, 2014

Anger as the most easily spread emotion.

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Teddy Wayne does an essay on how anger is the emotion that spreads the most easily over social media. Some clips: A 2013 study, from Beih...
Monday, August 04, 2014

Brain noise? Insomnia? Try A.S.M.R.

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Fairyington does an interesting piece on a phenomenon called autonomous sensory meridian response (A.S.M.R.), which is felt as a mild calmi...