Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Listener evaluations of new and old Italian violins

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From Fritz et al. : Old Italian violins are routinely credited with playing qualities supposedly unobtainable in new instruments. These q...
Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Solitary discourse yields deeper understanding than solitary description.

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Zavals and Kuhn show that imagining a discourse between advocates of two political candidates yields a richer representation than solitary ...
Monday, May 29, 2017

Detecting both facial and olfactory cues of sickness in others

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From Regenbogen et al. : Significance In the perpetual race between evolving organisms and pathogens, the human immune system has evolv...
Friday, May 26, 2017

Optimal incentives for collective intelligence

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Mann and Helbing devise a game-theoretic model of collective prediction showing that an antidote to groupthink and conformity is to reward ...
Thursday, May 25, 2017

Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth

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A review from McGann noting work that shows no anatomical basis for supposing human olfaction to be inferior to animals, although variation...
Wednesday, May 24, 2017

A moralistic bias in our default representation of what is possible.

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From Phillips and Cushman : Significance As humans, we think not only about what is, but also what could be. These representations of a...
1 comment:
Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Osteoarthritis attenuated by removing senescent cells.

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Jeon et al. use a model of anterior cruciate ligament surgery to show that senescent cells assemble in the traumatized knee joint and trigg...
Monday, May 22, 2017

The Science of Consciousness

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In 1994 I went to the first of what has become an annual gathering, sponsored by the Center for Consciousness Studies of the University of ...
2 comments:
Friday, May 19, 2017

Our brains have an innate knowledge of tools.

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From Striem-Amit et al. : Significance To what extent is brain organization driven by innate genetic constraints, and how dependent is ...
Thursday, May 18, 2017

The invisibility cloak illusion - You're too focused on what you're focused on.

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Boothy does a summary of her work with Clark and Bargh . Some slightly edited clips: That coffee stain on your shirt, those mismatched ea...
Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Increasing honesty in humans with noninvasive brain stimulation

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Maréchal et al. show that a bit of electricity applied to your right prefrontal cortex makes you half as likely to be dishonest.  Hmmm........
Tuesday, May 16, 2017

The fading American dream in a nutshell...

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From Chetty et al. : We estimated rates of “absolute income mobility”—the fraction of children who earn more than their parents—by combinin...
Monday, May 15, 2017

Our spatial memory is driven by perceived animacy of simple shapes.

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Chin points to work of van Buren and Scholl who use “wolfpack” animations of dart shapes whose points track the movement of a disc (the pr...
Friday, May 12, 2017

Semantics and the science of fear - the amygdala doesn't 'cause' fear.

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Here are some core clips from an article in which Joseph Ledoux updates an idea he proposed several decades ago: …that objectively measur...
Thursday, May 11, 2017

What we perceive depends on how much it costs us.

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Interesting work from Hagura et al. showing that our perceptual decisions are biased by the action costs that are associated with our subs...
1 comment:
Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Has Trump stolen philosophy’s critical tools?

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Casey Williams does an intriguing piece in the NYTimes “The Stone” section on topics in philosophy. I’m sure he is not crediting Trump wit...
Tuesday, May 09, 2017

Details of our brain's upstairs-downstairs emotion regulation.

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Morawetz et al. (open source) offer a study probing how our brain's prefrontal upstairs modulates the up-regulation or down-regulation ...
Monday, May 08, 2017

Brain correlates of third person perspective improving interactions with criticism.

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Interesting work (open source) from Leitner et al. : Previous research suggests that people show increased self-referential processing whe...
Friday, May 05, 2017

Histone variants promote vulnerability to depressive behaviors

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Lepack et al. find that a particular histone protein variant in the nucleus accumbens contributes to stress susceptibility in mice (histone...
Thursday, May 04, 2017

Watching the brain think about friends.

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Work from Wlodarski and Dunbar (open source) produces imaging data suggesting that maintaining friendships may be more cognitively exacting...