Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The good order - creativity needs routine

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I really liked David Brooks' recent OpEd piece in the NYTimes. It is one of many published comments praising Obama's recent speech ...
Monday, September 29, 2014

Hearing and imagination shape what we see.

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Vetter et al. have done the interesting experiment of blindfolding people and then scanning their brains while they listened to birds singi...
Friday, September 26, 2014

The Human Dynamic Clamp

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In my distant past when I was doing cellular neurophysiology we used a technique called the "voltage clamp", in which the electrop...
Thursday, September 25, 2014

Rules of implicit evaluation by race, religion, and age.

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Axt and collaborators look at a very large sample (N > 200,000) of people of varying race, religion, and age and find, that after rankin...
Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Morality in real life versus the lab.

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The majority of studies on morality have used artificial controlled laboratory settings where study participants respond to presented moral ...
Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Neuroanatomy predicts individual risk attitudes.

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Gilaie-Dotan et al. show that the volume of a region in the right posterior parietal cortex is relatively larger in individuals with higher...
Monday, September 22, 2014

Synchrony between observers' brains during action observation.

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Nummenmaa et al. (free access article, check out the nice graphics) have examined how we can understand what another person might be thinki...
Friday, September 19, 2014

Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes

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The fact that I am driving away from Madison Wisconsin tomorrow, to my cold weather nest in Fort Lauderdale Florida, made me recall this int...
1 comment:

Music shapes how we think - whether we see the forrest or the trees.

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Hansen and Melzner do a fascinating piece on how musical cues that vary in distance and abstractness versus proximity and concreteness infl...
Thursday, September 18, 2014

Parasites practicing mind control.

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Zimmer points to a further installment in the fascinating story of Toxoplasma gondii parasites, who can infect any mammal or bird, but can...
Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Associative memory enhanced by brain stimulation.

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Wang et al. do a proof that the hippocampus facilitates associative memory formation in humans by interacting with distributed brain region...
Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Norm enforcement is biased from its emergence.

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Interesting work from Jordan et al. on the appearance of in-group bias in punishing selfish behaviors in insiders versus outsiders: When ...
Monday, September 15, 2014

Early music training improves neural encoding of speech in children and arrests auditory decline in older adults.

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Fascinating work from Kraus et al. : Musicians are often reported to have enhanced neurophysiological functions, especially in the auditory...
Friday, September 12, 2014

Study on relationship between genomics and well being receives a critical trashing.

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I recently did a post passing on (as usual, uncritically) what looked like a neat correlation between genomics and human well-being. Brown ...
Thursday, September 11, 2014

A new compound that ameliorates cognitive dysfunction.

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Alzheimer's disease is thought ultimately to be caused by the accumulation of the excess proteins found in plaques and tangles in the br...
Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Upstairs/Downstairs in our Brain – What’s running our show?

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Although I mentioned this in Tuesday's post, I wanted to more explicitly point MindBlog readers to this web version of a talk I gave a...
1 comment:
Tuesday, September 09, 2014

MindBlog's other half - a Sunday afternoon recital at Twin Valley

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This past Sunday afternoon my partner Len and I hosted a musical/social event for 50 friends at our Twin Valley home in Middleton Wisconsin....

Reboot, reset, your brain - take a break - a walk, or better, a vacation.

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I've done a number of posts on the attentional and default modes of our brain (in fact, I'm doing on a talk on this topic today at ...
Monday, September 08, 2014

MDMA (Ecstasy) as an affiliative social drug

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Wardle et al. probe an interesting bit of social neurochemistry: 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, ‘ecstasy’) is used recreationall...
Friday, September 05, 2014

Does one novelty lead to another?

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Barbar Jazney summarizes interesting work by Tria et al. : Life would be boring if things were always the same. Tria and colleagues explo...