Tuesday, June 30, 2015

The power of positivity.

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Ramirez et al. make the fascinating observation that depressive-like stress responses in mice can be acutely suppressed through artificial ...
Monday, June 29, 2015

Inside Out

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I can't resist passing on a few selected clips from Anthony Lane's review of the new Pixar Movie, "Inside Out." Pixar wr...
Friday, June 26, 2015

Neuroanatomical correlates of the income-achievement gap.

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The difference in academic achievement between students from higher- and lower-income backgrounds is substantial and growing. A group of col...
Thursday, June 25, 2015

Facebook internal research shows its algorithms enhance political polarization.

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From the commentary by Lazer : Bakshy et al. examine... whether Facebook's curation of news feeds prevents the intersection of conflic...
Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Acetaminophen - over the counter relief from both pain and emotions...

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I've sometimes wondered why I feel a bit flat (anhedonic) after taking acetaminophen (Tylenol). Durso et al. show that it blunts sensit...
Tuesday, June 23, 2015

How is creativity helped by being just a little bit crazy?

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Park et al. examine individuals with schizotypal personality disorder, which is characterized by need for social isolation, anxiety in soci...
Monday, June 22, 2015

A new class of anti-aging drugs that selectively kill senescent cells.

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From   Brian Ray in the Editor's Choice section of the June 5 issue of Science, another approach to life-extension drugs (and, to possi...
Friday, June 19, 2015

Ocytocin reverses amphetamine-induced deficits in social bonding.

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As a followup to yesterday's post on a positive effects of amphetamine on the cognition of aging adults, I thought it would be interesti...
Thursday, June 18, 2015

A bit of amphetamine turns older brains into younger brains.

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Fascinating. Garrett et al. show that raising dopamine levels with amphetamine (sold as the prescription drug Adderall, for ADHD), increa...
3 comments:
Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Brain areas that place us in the past, present and future.

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Here is an interesting bit of work from Kurczek et al. showing that thinking about the past and future requires activation of the hippocam...

Constructing rich false memories of committing crime.

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Yet another study, from Shaw and Porter , demonstrating how flawed our memory systems can be. This sort of experiment explains in part the c...
Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Brain markers of psychopathy.

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Philippi et al. analyze 142 adult male prison inmates, and offer a detailed analysis showing that psychopathy can be correlated with altere...
Monday, June 15, 2015

Sign language as a window on universals in linguistic representation of events.

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From Strickland et al. , I've learned a new word - telicity: According to a theoretical tradition dating back to Aristotle, verbs can b...
1 comment:
Friday, June 12, 2015

Oxytocin makes formidable men more likeable.

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An interesting tidbit from Chen et al. : Physical size and strength are associated with dominance and threat. The current study tested (i) ...
Thursday, June 11, 2015

Serotonin deficiency correlates with stress vulnerability.

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From Sachs et al. , a statement of significance, followed by a more detailed abstract: Significance The biological factors that determine ...
Wednesday, June 10, 2015

The urge to instruct.

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I thought I would pass on this humorous piece by Peter Funt on his review of YouTube videos on how to break in a new baseball glove. After ...
Tuesday, June 09, 2015

The "Good Life"

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The previous post noting recent work by Dacher Keltner and collaborators prompted me to have another look at the website of " The Great...
Monday, June 08, 2015

Why do we experience awe?

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Awe, like reverence, is a pro-social emotion that subordinates individual self interest to a larger whole. Dacher Keltner and Paul Piff, in ...
Friday, June 05, 2015

Lack of exercise disrupts body’s rhythms.

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Natural daily rhythms in spontaneous movement patterns in both humans and mice show scale invariance, i.e., movement patterns repeat over ti...
Thursday, June 04, 2015

It’s not a stream of consciousness, its a rhythm.

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In the NYTimes Gray Matter series Gregory Hickok gives an exegesis on the implications of his Psychological Science paper "The Rhythm...