Monday, February 29, 2016

A brain circuit for loneliness.

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Tye and colleagues find a neural circuit at the base of mouse brains that drives loneliness-like behaviors and drives the animals to seek c...
Friday, February 26, 2016

Winning a competition predicts dishonest behavior.

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Interesting observations from Schurr and Ritov : Significance Competition is prevalent. People often resort to unethical means to win ...
Thursday, February 25, 2016

Abnormal cortical folding correlates with trait anxiety.

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From Miskovich et al. at the Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee : Dispositional anxiety is a stable personality trait that is a key risk fac...
Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Moralistic gods enhance sociality.

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Purzycki et al. combine laboratory experiments, cross-cultural fieldwork, and analysis of the historical record to propose that belief in j...
Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Creative cognition and brain network dynamics.

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Beaty et al. do a review that notes trends in recent neuroimaging studies suggesting that creative cognition involves increased cooperation...
Monday, February 22, 2016

A mindfulness meditation intervention enhances connectivity of brain executive and default modes and lowers inflammation markers.

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Creswell et al. recruited 35 stressed-out adult job-seekers, getting half to participate in an intensive three-day mindfulness meditation r...
Friday, February 19, 2016

Forming Beliefs: Why Valence Matters.

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Sharot and Garrett do a review article that puts their work on how we see through rose colored glasses, mentioned in a previous MindBlog po...
Thursday, February 18, 2016

A neural crossroads of psychiatric illnesses as a target for therapeutic brain stimulation

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I want pass on this open source article by Downar et al. which contains some useful graphics for illustrating their point about a central r...
Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Finally...a brain area specialized for music has been found.

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Norman-Haignere, Kanwisher, and McDermott have devised a new method to computationally dissect scans from functional magnetic resonance ima...
Tuesday, February 16, 2016

A 50 year misunderstanding of how we decide to initiate action - our intuition is valid

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A commonly accepted assumption (that underlies all of the essays at dericbownds.net and many mindblog posts) is that a line of experiments s...
3 comments:
Monday, February 15, 2016

Our eye movements are coupled to our heartbeats.

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A fascinating finding by Ohl et al. that the darting about of our eyes (saccades) during visual search is coupled to our heart rate (the R-...
Friday, February 12, 2016

What makes political leaders influential?

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Brinke et al. examine whether politicians who ascend to influence have been driven by Aristotelian or Machiavellian values (i.e., virtue ve...
Thursday, February 11, 2016

Linking sustained attention to brain connectivity.

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Rosenberg et al. find that strengths of a specific set of brain connections - even when estimated from resting state data collected when su...
Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Everybody's a critic. And that's how it should be.

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An article with the title of this post by NYTimes movie critic A.O. Scott is well worth a read. Here are his noble closing sentiments: .....
Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Fantasies of the Future

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Following up on my Jan. 28 post on Schwab's book "The Fourth Industrial Revolution" I thought I would pass on some speculatio...
Monday, February 08, 2016

Our digital presence.

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Here is an interesting tally : Active users of social media sites compared with the populations of the world's largest countries. if s...
Friday, February 05, 2016

Consciousness as the product of carefully balanced chaos.

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Tagliafuochi and collaborators have provided more evidence that our experience of consciousness and reality might result from a delicate ba...
1 comment:
Thursday, February 04, 2016

Inequality and facing the future.

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A recent piece by Arianna Huffington ( The fourth industrial revolution meets the sleep revolution ) suggests to me one aspect of yet anothe...
Wednesday, February 03, 2016

The neuroscience of poverty.

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This open source review article by Alla Katsnelson is sobering , and worth a read. The major foci in the brain that appear to show dispariti...
Tuesday, February 02, 2016

The burden of obesity revisited.

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A previous mindblog post has noted the obesity paradox, generated by data suggesting that fat people may live longer. Stokes and Preston ,...