Friday, July 31, 2015

Unlearning social biases during sleep

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Feld and Born note that tenacious implicit prejudices of race or gender drive discrimination seen in the rise of nationalistic groups, exce...
Thursday, July 30, 2015

The danger of artificial intelligence is artificial stupidity.

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Here are some clips from an interesting Op-Ed piece by Quentin Hardy on artificial intelligence. (And, by the way, a recent issue of Scienc...
Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Placebo analgesia reduces empathy for pain.

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Fascinating observations from Rütgen et al. . They show that experimental modulation of a first-hand emotion experience also modulates empat...
Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Dopamine and subjective well-being

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Dolan and collaborators note influences of dopamine on emotion and decision making that are distinct from its known role in learning.: The...
Monday, July 27, 2015

Brain markers of individual differences in human prosociality.

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Sul et al. make the fascinating observation that self-regarding and other-regarding regions of the medial prefrontal cortex show greater se...
Friday, July 24, 2015

Top-down alpha band oscillations optimize visual perception.

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Interesting work from Samaha et al. : Significance In contrast to canonical, stimulus-driven models of perception, recent proposals ar...
Thursday, July 23, 2015

Universal features of human music.

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I have read through a fascinating paper by Savage et al. that makes a convincing case for statistical universals in the structure and funct...
3 comments:
Wednesday, July 22, 2015

A small bonbon for techie MindBlog readers.

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Passed on to me by a friend... still vaporware, but cute.

Screams and the communication soundscape

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A fascinating piece from Amal noting that human screams occupy a privileged niche in the communication soundscape. Highlights •We provid...
Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Ohmygawd - a social app that aims for fleeting authenticity?

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I prodded my troglodyte brain to actually read this article about yet another social networking app, Beme, and came away fascinated. More c...

How experiencing nature influences our brains.

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Bratman et al. , in their PNAS article with the title "Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation,...
Monday, July 20, 2015

Happy or anxious?

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I want to point to two interesting recent pieces: Luhrmann notes that the Western, and particularly American, definition of anxiety or de...

Sense8 - Sympathetic Sci-Fi

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I started watching the NetFlix original Sci-Fi drama series "Sense8" two weeks ago, and was completely hooked, watching one episod...
Sunday, July 19, 2015

How did kindness come to be our forbidden pleasure?

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This post is a tertiary product: a review of a review of a book. In this case I want to note Maria Popova’s piece on the book by Adam Phil...
Friday, July 17, 2015

Four books from Edge.org's summer reading list.

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I pass on links to four books that I'm very tempted to buy and read: Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking - Richard E. Nisbett A Be...

Participants in the senior olympics have fitness age 25 years younger than their chronological age.

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I have previously mentioned the fitness age calculator developed by reserarchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in T...
Thursday, July 16, 2015

Cleaning up the queue - interesting ideas.

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As I scan the table of contents for various journals, mining for material that might become a MindBlog post, I accumulate a long list of lin...
Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Genetic risk factors for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia predict creativity.

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As a follow up to my June 30 post on creativity and neurosis, I wanted to point to the following account by Power et al. (Numerous epidemi...
Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Evolving ourselves

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I pass on a few clips from Xue’s review of “Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation Are Changing Life on Earth” ...
Monday, July 13, 2015

The embodied cognition of your love life.

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MindBlog has done a number of posts on how physical changes in our bodies can influence social cognition (Holding a warm versus an iced cup ...