Friday, November 28, 2014

Brain's inflammatory response may contribute to brain disorders.

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This post is just a pointer to a press release from the Society for Neuroscience meetings in Washington, DC. It outlines several studies on...
1 comment:
Thursday, November 27, 2014

In older people, moderate alcohol intake improves memory.

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Articles like this work from Downer et al. make me worry less about the possible deleterious effects of the happy hour cocktail that is par...
2 comments:
Wednesday, November 26, 2014

How to dampen that urge to buy.

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A brief post appropriate to the season: Seeing DeSteno's recent OpEd piece in the NYTimes make me think this is a relevant time to poin...
Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Can brain science be dangerous?

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Mindblog has done a number of posts on long terms brain and behavioral effects of early adverse environments. This OpEd piece by Anna North ...

How our prefrontal cortex explores and exploits options.

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Hare describes work by Donoso et al : Inferring the best response from a large range of possible actions frequently involves difficult c...
Monday, November 24, 2014

Art in a whiskey glass, the physics explained.

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Here's a random bit that provides a tonic for the day. Ernie Button, a photographer in Phoenix, started taking pictures of the interest...

Wealth is especially bad for the wealthy.

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Michael Lewis reviews Darrell West's new book " Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust " in The New Republic. The revie...
Friday, November 21, 2014

Genes that turned wildcats into kitty cats.

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Reaction of my Abyssinian cat, Melvin, to finding that his genome had been sequenced. David Grimm summarizes work by Montague et al....
Thursday, November 20, 2014

Cooperating with the future - how to sustain resources.

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From Hauser et al. , an experiment showing that if resource extraction decision are made by vote rather than individually, the resource can ...
Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Humor and Health

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I want to point to this item by Jennifer Gibson that reminds me how useful it might be for me to "lighten up" just a little bit, ...
Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Chemicals that delay or reverse effects of aging.

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I scan for articles on aging in my wanderings through journals and pass on the following two, on chemical compounds that delay or reverse th...
Monday, November 17, 2014

Big data in Neuroscience

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I want to pass on an interesting graphic from a piece by Sejnowski, Churchland, and Movshon that introduces a "Focus on big data"...
1 comment:
Sunday, November 16, 2014

The internet and the mind

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This is a brief post to point to Jacob Silverman's quick reviews of four books that consider how enhanced connectivity might be alterin...
Saturday, November 15, 2014

MDMA (ecstasy) enhances emotional empathy and prosocial behavior

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Maybe a hit of NDMA, the party drug ecstasy (not to be confused with the methamphetamine of crystal meth, which is another derivative of the...
Friday, November 14, 2014

Trajectories of aging.

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This post points to another of the articles in the Science special issue on aging. Lindenberger summarizes key features of human cogniti...
Thursday, November 13, 2014

Are we really conscious?

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I've done a post on Graziano's 'attention schema' theory of conscious, and thought I would pass on some clips from his rece...
9 comments:
Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Antidepressant and nerve growth stimulating effects of exercise - a mechanism.

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Yau et al. find that a hormone secreted by fat cells during exercise alleviates depression-like behaviors in mice and boosts new nerve cell...
Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Aging: sit less and shape up your attitude

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I'm continuing to clean out my queue of aging articles that have been languishing as potential posts... Reynolds points to two studie...
2 comments:
Monday, November 10, 2014

Mind wandering that makes effort more efficient.

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MindBlog has done numerous posts on our brains' default mode and executive control networks, with the idea usually being that activating...
Sunday, November 09, 2014

What is literature good for?

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I pass on this fetching clutch of points on the usefulness of reading literature (rather than brief tweets, and blog posts like this) from A...