Tuesday, March 31, 2015

The Singularity—an Urban Legend?

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Clips from an interesting essay by Daniel Dennett: The Singularity—the fateful moment when AI surpasses its creators in intelligence and t...
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Monday, March 30, 2015

Quiet

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From my long queue of potential MindBlog post items, I pull up Judith Warner’s 2012 review of Susan Cain’s Book “Quiet”, which argues for t...
Friday, March 27, 2015

Altering the oxytocin receptor gene enhances perception of anger and fear.

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Puglia et al. find that the epigenetic modification of methylating the DNA of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) decreases the control of am...
Thursday, March 26, 2015

Information overload is filter failure.

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I pass on the following brief lucid piece by Jay Rosen.You might also have a look at Peder Zane's " In the Age of Information, Spe...
Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Expert listening to music alters gene transcription...So?

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I can't resist comment on a piece generated by PsyBlog, "Classical Music's Surprising Effect on Genes Vital to Memory and Lear...
Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Thought for the day: America devolving into a plutocracy...

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A clip from Tom Engelhardt writing in Salon: ...let me be as clear as I can be about something that seems murky indeed: this period doe...

Transcranial direct current stimulation increases propensity to mind-wander

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Alelrod et al. show that stimulation of the frontal lobe areas involved in our attentional network increase mind wandering associated with ...
Monday, March 23, 2015

Impulse control with weak currents applied to the head - a new therapy?

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Spieser et al. apply a very small current (1 milliamp) using the electrodes shown in the figure to slightly hyperpolarize, or make less exc...
Friday, March 20, 2015

Losing the music - Aging affects the perception of musical harmony

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An open access article from Bones and Plack: When two musical notes with simple frequency ratios are played simultaneously, the resulting...
Thursday, March 19, 2015

Thomas Metzinger on (the absence of) our conscious agency.

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The edge.org question for 2014 was “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” I want to pass on a few clips from Metzinger’s lucid bri...
Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Hunger promotes acquisition of nonfood objects

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Here is a fascinating nugget of information from Xu et al. : Hunger motivates people to consume food, for which finding and acquiring food i...
Tuesday, March 17, 2015

What can music ensembles tell us about social cognition and interaction?

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D'Ausilio et al. note that most studies of how cognition and brain organization is shaped by social factors have used subjects in defin...
Monday, March 16, 2015

The happiness gap between conservatives and liberals debunked

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Given the number of MindBlog posts that have passed on research supporting the standard orthodoxy that conservatives are happier than libera...
Friday, March 13, 2015

Emotional foundations of cognitive control.

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Cognitive control (self control, self regulation) allows us to restrain from temptations of the present to focus on more long term goals. Em...
Thursday, March 12, 2015

Observing brain correlates of self affirmation and its healthy consequences

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From the introduction of Falk et. al. : ...according to the World Health Organization, “60% to 85% of people in the world—from both deve...
Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Spontaneous emergence of shared social conventions.

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Centola and Baronchelli have recruited subjects from the world wide web to play a live game. They demonstate that myopic players interactin...
Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Predictions and the brain: how musical sounds become rewarding

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I want to point to the review article  in Trends in Cognitive Science by Salimpoor, Zatorre, and collaborators  that outlines brain mechanis...
Monday, March 09, 2015

Hugging can make you less likely to catch a virus cold.

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Daily social stress is known to correlate with susceptibility to cold virus infection. Cohen et al. ask whether social support and the act...
Friday, March 06, 2015

Human language reveals a universal positivity bias

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Dodds et al. have constructed 24 corpora (collections of writing) spread across 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian P...
Thursday, March 05, 2015

Chickens count from the left, just like us!

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Rugani et. al. show ( Brugger's summary ) that ...3-day old chicks associate small numerosities with the left side, and large ones wi...