Friday, May 29, 2015

Cultural differences, emotional expressivity, and smiles

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Rychlowska et al. analyze cultural display rules from 32 countries to reveal that the extent to which a country’s present-day population de...
Thursday, May 28, 2015

How biased are our brains?

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Kristof reviews some recent work on unconscious bias, particularly racial bias. Scholars suggest that in evolutionary times we became har...
Wednesday, May 27, 2015

After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain

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I've been reading through an interesting article by Michael Anderson, a précis of a book accepted for publication and available as a PDF...
1 comment:
Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Neural basis of anxiety reduction by placebo.

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Meyer et al. directly measure neural consequences of expecting a placebo treatment to be effective in relieving anxiety: The beneficial ef...
Monday, May 25, 2015

How alarm amplifies through social networks.

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We've all probably played the parlor game with 10 or more people sitting in a circle, with one whispering a word into the ear of the per...
Friday, May 22, 2015

Modulating movement intention and the extended present with tDCS.

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Douglas et al. do a fascinating bit of work on the 'extended present' in which our brains function, during which our experienced in...
Thursday, May 21, 2015

Brain correlates of loving kindness meditation.

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Garrison and collaborators extend their work on brain correlates of meditation practice, noting again a central role for the posterior cing...
1 comment:
Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Essentialism

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I pass on some clips from Richard Dawkins' brief essay , and suggest you also take a look at Lisa Barrett's comments on essentialis...
2 comments:
Tuesday, May 19, 2015

What to do with brain markers that predict future behaviors?

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An interesting review from Gabrieli et al. suggesting how predicting individual futures with neuromarkers might make a pragmatic contributi...
Monday, May 18, 2015

More comment on anti-aging regimes

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A recent brief review by Jane Brodie points to work showing a small effect of cognitive training programs engaging memory, reasoning, or s...
Friday, May 15, 2015

Grasp posture of our hands biases our visual processing.

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Fascinating observations from Laura Thomas : Observers experience biases in visual processing for objects within easy reach of their hands...

The sound of climate change.

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The sound of climate change from the Amazon to the Arctic from Ensia on Vimeo .
Thursday, May 14, 2015

Literary (like musical and athletic) expertise shifts brain activity to the caudate nucleus.

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Erhard et al. find that creative writing by expert versus amateur writers is associated with more activation in the caudate nucleus, the sa...
Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Human Purpose

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The recent NYTimes David Brooks Op-Ed piece “ What is your purpose? ” has drawn a lot of feedback and comment. He laments the passing the e...
1 comment:
Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Trust and the Insula

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From Belfi et al : Reciprocal trust is a crucial component of cooperative, mutually beneficial social relationships. Previous research usi...
Monday, May 11, 2015

The immensity of the vacated present.

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The title of this post is a phrase from a recent essay by Vivian Gornick, " The cost of daydreaming ," describing an experience th...
2 comments:
Friday, May 08, 2015

Yet another self therapy electrical widget.

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I've done a number of posts on transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Entering 'transcranial' in MindBlog's search ...
Thursday, May 07, 2015

Observing brain correlates of social interactions.

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Bilek et al. look at coordinated brain activity during social interactions between two people in a joint attention paradigm, using a hypers...

Early environment and stress systems in children.

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Most of the detailed work on the long term effects of adverse early life environment on stress response systems has been done with rodent mo...
Wednesday, May 06, 2015

Cognitive training enhances intrinsic brain connectivity in childhood.

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A fascinating open access article from Astle et al. , who found changes in brain connectivity in 8-11 year old children who completed 20 ses...