Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Neurobiology and the Humanities

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I want to point to this open access article in Neuron by Semir Zeki , a well known visual neuroanatomist who has addressed in particular vis...
2 comments:
Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Origins of human altruism.

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A number of studies in recent years have shown that 1- and 2-year-olds often provide help to novel individuals, and have generally been inte...
Monday, December 29, 2014

Exercise and intermittent fasting improve brain plasticity and health

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I thought it might be useful to point to this brief review by Praag et al. that references several recent pieces of work presented at a rec...
5 comments:
Friday, December 26, 2014

Several articles on aging brains.

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Talking about aging brains is sort of a downer, but it's something I feel like I want to do as I trek onward with open eyes from my curr...
Thursday, December 25, 2014

Exercise changes our muscle DNA

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Following yesterday's post on changing gene expression with brain waves, I'll point to another bit of work on gene changing. Chemica...
Wednesday, December 24, 2014

A bit of science fiction...a brain implant that allows mind-controlled gene expression.

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The experiments by Folcher et al. are done with optogenetic implants in mouse brains that are wirelessly controlled by human brain waves. T...
2 comments:
Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Impact of literacy on visual processing

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From Pegado et al. , a clear demonstration of how learning the act of reading enhances our visual processing: How does learning to read affe...
1 comment:
Monday, December 22, 2014

Cross-species evidence that adaptive training diminishes distractibility in Aging.

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Another fascinating study from Gazzaley's productive research group. A video clip is offered in the abstract. Here are the highlights ...
1 comment:
Friday, December 19, 2014

How to bridge the respective bubbles of our ideological tribes?

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A number of recent mindblog posts have engaged the issue of the individual versus the collective good (for example, here , here , and here )...
Thursday, December 18, 2014

Critique of the Nature paper on dishonest bankers,

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I wanted to pass on to MindBlog readers this item analyzing the paper noted in my recent post " Banking - a culture of dishonesty &quo...

Several nuggets on the individual vs. the collective.

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Following yesterday's post on the evolution of prosocial religions, I pass on a random set of links to articles also relevant to the ind...
Wednesday, December 17, 2014

The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions

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Having been an author in an issue of "Behavioral and Brain Biology" published by Cambridge University Press, I receive notice of f...
Tuesday, December 16, 2014

The new surveillance state and our robotic future.

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Isreal et al. examine one of the many uses to which individual credit scores are being put - to determine our cardiovascular risk (useful i...
1 comment:
Monday, December 15, 2014

Why elders smile, and wisdom in social signals.

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Two articles relevant to becoming a senior person: From Rijsbergen et al. (open access), a piece of work that reminds me of the book rece...
Friday, December 12, 2014

Physics, Emergence, and the Connectome - From the connectome to brain function

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A special issue of Neuron on connectomics has a special open source section of articles with different views of the problems we face in rel...
Thursday, December 11, 2014

Psilocybin changes brain connectivity.

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Petri et al. show that "the brain's functional patterns undergoes a dramatic change post-psilocybin, characterized by the appearan...
2 comments:
Wednesday, December 10, 2014

We search for meaning at the start of each chronological decade.

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Recent soulful introspection by my husband, who moves from age 59 to 60 in late December, motivates me to point to this study by Alter and H...
Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Banking - a culture of dishonesty

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Kelland points to work by Cohn et al. , who have studied bank workers and other professionals in experiments in which they won more money i...
2 comments:
Monday, December 08, 2014

The ecology of religious beliefs

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Botero et al. do a fascinating survey of 583 societies to show that religions with moralizing high gods that promote cooperation between hu...
Friday, December 05, 2014

E.O. Wilson and "The Meaning of Human Existence"

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I've just read through E.O. Wilson's new and admirably brief and terse book (~200 pages) that gives a distillation of his previous ...