Friday, December 30, 2016

Resetting the clock of aging - at least in mice.

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I pass on a few clips from Nicholas Wade's recent discussion of work done by resear chers at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA. In t...
Thursday, December 29, 2016

Killing old cells to stay young.

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I want to pass on one of Science Magazine's choices for the top ten scientific breakthroughs of the year. Pricey plastic surgery ...
Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Creative versus destructive chaos in Trump-land. Is there a ray of hope?

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I am a member of the professional intelligentsia bubble still feeling post-traumatic stress from the presidential election. I grasp at any ...
Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Artificial intelligence ups its game

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I pass on this description by John Bohannon in Science Magazine of a recent triumph of A.I.: This year, artificial intelligence (AI) pas...
Monday, December 26, 2016

Making the world nicer is a tough slog - two organizations trying.

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The end of 2016 approaches, I am thinking about charitable donations I have made or might make in this angry and uncertain time of huge poli...
Friday, December 23, 2016

Our automated jobless future.

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Elizabeth Kolbert offers an interesting review of ideas in several recent books dealing with our automated future. How long will it be bef...
Thursday, December 22, 2016

A stark graphic - the income gap continues to widen.

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The NYTimes piece by Patricia Cohen and graphic summaries by Ashkenas are worth reading. The top 1% and the bottom 50% have swapped their ...
Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Our Arthropod housemates.

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Now I know more about what is in the haze of particles I see illuminated by the horizontal rays of the rising sun flowing through my Fort La...
Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Reducing future fears by suppressing episodic simulation in the brain.

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Benoit et al. offer some findings relevant to understanding the heightened anxiety many are feeling in the Age of Trump. An edited summary...
Monday, December 19, 2016

Can evolution have a 'higher purpose'?

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I want to point to this essay by Robert Wright, author of "The Moral Animal," who makes the point that arguments that life on ear...
1 comment:
Friday, December 16, 2016

Political tribes, and the psychology of liberals and conservatives.

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I am using this post to pass on to MindBlog readers some background material I just sent out to members of a senior current topics discussio...
Thursday, December 15, 2016

Bad things that happen to annoyingly happy people...

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There is abundant evidence that being or appearing to be happy confers lots of advantages in life, both in personal health, relationships an...
Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Why does time fly when you’re having fun? Dopamine neurons…

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Soares et al. find by observing timing behavior in mice that dopaminergic neurons control temporal judgments on a time scale of seconds. O...
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Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Feeling confident that you know? fMRI correlates of metacognitive accuracy.

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The more confident you are, the less likely you are to be correct! From Molenberghs et al: One important aspect of metacognition is the ab...
Monday, December 12, 2016

Oxytocin, moral judgement, and male social synchony

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I pass on two interesting pieces of work. First, Bernhard et al. show a correlation between different forms of the oxytocin receptor gene ...
Friday, December 09, 2016

Exhaustion is not unique to our overstimulated age.

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Anna Katharina Schaffner, author of the book "Exhaustion: A History (2016), does a precis of its arguments , Is ours the most exhaust...
Thursday, December 08, 2016

The rage against the elites...

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Roger Cohen, always a perceptive commentator, really nails it in his recent Op-Ed Piece "The Rage of 2016". His closing paragra...
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Wednesday, December 07, 2016

We should ask our elders how best to live.

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I want to point to a brief essay by Pillemer in Aeon . His interviews with several thousand people in their 80s and 90s revealed that their ...
Tuesday, December 06, 2016

Protecting and reactivating memories

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I want to point to two recent Science Magazine articles on memory. From the magazine's summaries.. Protecting memories from stress ...
Monday, December 05, 2016

Reversing the effect of booze on the brain.

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Assuming that data on female rats can be extrapolated to humans, a bit of work that makes me feel better about my daily habits of aerobic sw...