Friday, January 30, 2015

Parallel brain systems regulate our pain.

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Our subjective sensory experiences are regulated by defined brain areas subh visual cortex, auditory cortex,somatosensory cortex, etc., but...
Thursday, January 29, 2015

Power and your voice.

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Margaret Thatcher did it, and so can you. She went through voice training that permitted her to exude a more authoritative powerful persona....
Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Musical training accelerates cortical thickness maturation.

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Hudziak et al. have examined a database of MRI scans of 232 youths ranging from 6 to 18 years of age, obtained over a period of years. Thei...
Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Judging and adapting to norm violations engage different brain regions.

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Gu et al. find that our insula is critical for learning to adapt when reality deviates from norm expectations, and the ventromedial prefron...
Monday, January 26, 2015

Subjective status shapes political preferences.

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Brown-Iannuzzi et al. suggest that people's subjective perception of their socioeconomic status (SES) has a large influence on whether ...
Friday, January 23, 2015

We can see in the infrared!

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The major part of my professional life was spent doing research on how the rod cells in our retinas change light into a nerve signal. (I jus...
Thursday, January 22, 2015

Steven Pinker's "Sense of Style"

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I've just read through Steven Pinker's new book "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Cen...
Wednesday, January 21, 2015

The signature of consciousness in resting-state brain activity.

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I've done a number of posts on attentional or salience versus default mode long-range connectivity networks in our brains (for a review ...
Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Body movements shape brain representation of musical rhythms.

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Entraining our movement to music is a universal human behavior. The enhancement of social cohesion by group movements in synchrony with the ...
Monday, January 19, 2015

An Example of Publication Bias - Cognitive Advantage in Bilingualism

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MindBlog has done several posts on experiments that reinforce what has become the conventional wisdom regarding bilingualism: that it enhanc...
Friday, January 16, 2015

Watching brain oscillations drive perception.

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Are the electrical oscillations observed in EEG recordings as we perceive images simply correlations, reflecting brain processes driving our...
Thursday, January 15, 2015

Perceived control promotes persistence and influences brain response to setbacks

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From Bhanji et al : Highlights •We report two distinct neural mechanisms for persistence through adversity  •Perceiving control over ...
Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Another magic anti-aging compound?

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Riluzole is a drug used to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also studied for use in mood and anxiety disorders, depression and obsessiv...
Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Human children conform to peers' behavior, but apes do not.

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Haun and collaborators make the interesting observation that two year old human children will change a learned problem solving strategy on ...
1 comment:
Monday, January 12, 2015

Personality and Ideology

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I've done a number of posts (for example, here ) pointing to work suggesting that differences in basic partially inherited neurocognitiv...
Friday, January 09, 2015

Subliminal Strengthening

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Levy et al. make the interesting observation that presenting subliminal positive age stereotypes to older people has a greater effect than ...
Thursday, January 08, 2015

Personality and immune system reactivity.

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Vedhara et al. have examined the expression of inflammatory genes in 121 people who also took personality tests that rated the generally id...
Wednesday, January 07, 2015

The unforeseen costs of extraordinary experiences.

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Daniel Gilbert and his collaborators at Harvard have come up with yet another fascinating nugget on our human behaviors: People seek ext...
Tuesday, January 06, 2015

Invunerablism

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Todd May does a brief essay (coining the world “invulnerabilism”) that is yet another interesting take on an issue central to all our live...
2 comments:
Monday, January 05, 2015

Is there a reason for everything? - Teleological reasoning about life events

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Banerjee and Bloom   explore the view that the tendency to develop teleological beliefs about life events is a byproduct of certain universa...
3 comments: