Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Climate disasters act as threat multipliers in ethnic conflicts.

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Schleussner et al. offer a proof of a common assumption about the effects of climate disasters: that they drive people further apart rather...
Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Our self and our temporo-parietal junction

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Eddy does a review of the Temporo-parietal junction area of our brain that appears to be central to our sense of self and other: Highligh...
Monday, August 29, 2016

Psychological disruptions of our online lives.

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I want to pass on clips from a review by Steiner-Adair in the Washington Post, describing Mary Aiken's book " The Cyber Effect ,...
Friday, August 26, 2016

A bit of nostalgia - Powers of 10

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I just stumbled across a charming relic from my counter culture days in the 1970's, when I was watching whales and monarch butterflies a...
4 comments:
Thursday, August 25, 2016

Alerting or Somnogenic light - pick your color

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Bourgin and Hubbard summarize work by Pilorz et al. Light exerts profound effects on our physiology and behaviour, setting our biolo...
Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Oxytocin - a molecular substrate for forming optimistic beliefs about the future

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Ma et al. demonstrate a molecular basis for why people tend to incorporate desirable, but not undesirable, feedback into their beliefs: S...
2 comments:
Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Slow motion increases perceived intent.

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The abstract from interesting work of Caruso et al. To determine the appropriate punishment for a harmful action, people must often make...
Monday, August 22, 2016

Lifespan changes in brain and cognition - early life sets the stage.

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Walhovd et al. present a fascinating study on the origins of lifespan changes in brain and cognition, defining an extensive cortical region...
Friday, August 19, 2016

Neural link between affective understanding and interpersonal attraction

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From Anders et al. : Being able to comprehend another person’s intentions and emotions is essential for successful social interaction. Howe...
Thursday, August 18, 2016

Statistics versus judgement.

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This interesting website , pointed out to me by a friend, offers to send a daily gem of information to you, usually an excerpt from a publi...
Wednesday, August 17, 2016

How China is changing your internet.

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Here is a fascinating piece done by the NYTimes on the parallel universe of the internet in China.  
Tuesday, August 16, 2016

The long lives of fairy tales.

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I pass on some clips from a review by Pagel of work by Da Silva and Tehrani suggesting that some common fairy tales can be traced back 7,0...
Monday, August 15, 2016

Brain changes during hypnosis

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Jiang et al. do the most detailed analysis to date of brain changes that are distinctive to people undergoing hypnosis: Hypnosis has prov...
Friday, August 12, 2016

Why do people infer “ought” from “is”?

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Tworek and Cimpian offer an interesting perspective, doing experiments illustrating how we ascribe intrinsic value to what is customary. I ...
Thursday, August 11, 2016

How our brain and visceral monitoring encode the ‘self’

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Babo-Rebelo et al. show that two seemingly distinct roles of the default brain network (DN), in self-related cognition on the one hand, an...
Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Leave the kids alone! A cognitive case for un-parenting

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I want to pass on some clips from the text of a recent review by Glausiusz of Alison Gopnik's book on child-rearing "The Gardener ...
Tuesday, August 09, 2016

Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness.

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Jordan et al. devise an economic game experiment whose results help to explain a range of puzzling behaviors, such as extreme altruism, the...
Monday, August 08, 2016

A brain area crucial to coping with stress.

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Sinha et al. show that “neuroflexibility” in a specific region of our ventromedial prefrontal cortex enhances resilience to stress - an inc...
Friday, August 05, 2016

To remember something better, wait, then exercise.

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Another nice bit on what exercise can do for you.  The abstract from van Dongen et al. : Highlights •Performing aerobic exercise 4 hr a...
Thursday, August 04, 2016

Distinguishing brain correlations from causes.

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Many researchers, even though they know better, fall into the trap of assuming that correlations are causes (i.e., if brain activity X occur...