Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Universality of the cognitive architecture of pride.

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An international collaboration of evolutionary psychologists suggests that a universal cognitive architecture underlies the emotion of prid...
Monday, February 27, 2017

Monday morning Schubert

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On Sunday Feb. 19 I gave a recital dedicated to the memory of David Goldberger, who I had performed with in several four hands recitals seve...
2 comments:
Friday, February 24, 2017

Vitamin B3 (Niacin) protects from glaucoma

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A number of anti-aging elixirs contain vitamin B3, or niacin, which is a precursor of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+), a key molecu...
Thursday, February 23, 2017

Scientific curiosity counters politically motivated reasoning.

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Jasny points to work by Kahan et al.  (open source) showing that science curiosity (of the sort shown by MindBlog readers!) promotes open-m...
Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Will the “Anthropocene Era” concept slow or accelerate human impact on our planet?

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Wesley Yang does a nice piece in the NYTimes Magazine, which notes that the concept of an anthropocene era, as a new stage of the geologica...
Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Decision-making: Judges' decisions not so legal

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An article by Spamann and Klöhn in The Journal of Legal Studies presenting an experiment with real judges showing that justice is less blin...
Monday, February 20, 2017

Musical evolution in the lab exhibits rhythmic universals

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Ravignani et al.  have managed to grow the rhythmic universals of human music in the laboratory, suggesting that they arise from human cogni...
Saturday, February 18, 2017

OhMyGawd....

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I have to pass on this graphic sent by a friend, perhaps a reaction to Trump's recent press conference.
Friday, February 17, 2017

The purpose of sleep? To forget.

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In two recent Science papers de Vivo et al. and Diering et al. probe the nightlife of the synapses that control the signalling between cel...
Thursday, February 16, 2017

Hacking the brain to overcome fear

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Schiller does a brief review of work by Koizumi et al. , which points to a method for reducing defensive responses without consciously conf...
Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Gender stereotypes emerge early.

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Bian et al. (open source) find that children at age five do not consider boys and girls different with respect to being 'really, really...
Tuesday, February 14, 2017

How our brains make meaning, with the help of a little LSD

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Interesting work from Preller et al : Highlights •LSD-induced effects are blocked by the 5-HT2A receptor antagonist ketanserin  •LSD ...
Monday, February 13, 2017

An emotional experience can enhance future memory formation.

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Tambini et al. show that neural effects of an emotional experience can persist, and bias how new and unrelated information is encoded and s...
Friday, February 10, 2017

Kind words in language - changes over time

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John Carson does a nice precis of Iliev et al. : It is debated whether linguistic positivity bias (LPB) — the cross-cultural tendency to u...
Thursday, February 09, 2017

Mysterianism

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Here is Nicholas Carr's statement of an argument that has always appealed to me, a concept that should be more widely know. Roughly: ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Feel good fractals.

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I want to point to this excerpt from Florence Williams' new book, "The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and Mor...
Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Why our supermarket tomatoes are sturdy and flavorless.

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Having dinked with tomato breeding and genetic manipulations to make our supermarket tomatoes sturdy, colorful, and tasteless, now geneticis...
Monday, February 06, 2017

MindBlog’s 11th anniversary…some statistics.

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Today is MindBlog’s 11 anniversary. I let the 10th anniversary pass without noticing, so I want to briefly comment this year. Google analyt...
9 comments:
Friday, February 03, 2017

Artificial intelligence: Machines that reason

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Stavroula Kousta does a precis of work reported by Graves et al. of the Google DeepMind project: Complex reasoning is a hallmark of natur...
Thursday, February 02, 2017

The origins of happiness

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A MindBlog reader pointed me to this presentation , at this year's Davos World Economic Forum, on the subject of what government actions...