Monday, July 31, 2017

Cognitive reappraisal in frontal cortex underlies placebo analgesia.

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Interesting work from van der Meulen et al. : Placebo analgesia (PA) depends crucially on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is assumed to ...
Friday, July 28, 2017

Different languages use different systems of nerve cells.

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From Xu et al. : A large body of previous neuroimaging studies suggests that multiple languages are processed and organized in a single ne...
Thursday, July 27, 2017

The world’s laziest countries.

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From Althoff et al. : To be able to curb the global pandemic of physical inactivity and the associated 5.3 million deaths per year, we nee...
Wednesday, July 26, 2017

The brain circuits of a winner.

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Social dominance in mice depends on winning social contests. Zhou et al. manipulate synapses connecting the thalamus and dorsomedial prefro...
Tuesday, July 25, 2017

When is stress good for you?

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I want to point to an interesting essay by Bruce McEwen, a well known Rockefeller Univ. researcher who has studied mechanisms of stress for...
Monday, July 24, 2017

Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks.

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From Brady et al. : Political debate concerning moralized issues is increasingly common in online social networks. However, moral psycholog...
Friday, July 21, 2017

Rejuvenating brain plasticity

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Blundon et al. have demonstrated that several pharmacological interventions that disrupt A 1 -adenosine receptor signalling can restore the...
Thursday, July 20, 2017

A.I. algorithms analyze the mood of the masses.

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I pass on this brief article by Matthew Hutson: With billions of users and hundreds of billions of tweets and posts every year, social med...
Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Trust is heritable, whereas distrust is not

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From Reimann et al. : Why do people distrust others in social exchange? To what degree, if at all, is distrust subject to genetic influenc...
Tuesday, July 18, 2017

A new ‘alternative’ culture?

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Reading Herrman’s recent NYTimes Magazine article was an eye-opener for me. On reading the second of the two paragraphs below, I asked go...
Monday, July 17, 2017

Nature experience reduces our brain rumination.

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From Bratman et al. : Significance More than 50% of people now live in urban areas. By 2050 this proportion will be 70%. Urbanization i...
2 comments:
Friday, July 14, 2017

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell

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The 1946 essay by George Orwell with the title of this post was recently discussed by the Chaos and Complex Systems seminar group that I at...
Thursday, July 13, 2017

Can utopianism be rescued?

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I’ve been wanting to do a post on utopias for some time, notes on the subject have drifted to the bottom of my queue of potential posts.  ...
Wednesday, July 12, 2017

When the appeal of a dominant leader is greater than a prestige leader.

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From Kakkara and Sivanathan : Significance We examine why dominant/authoritarian leaders attract support despite the presence of other ...
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Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Damaging in utero effects of low socioeconomic status.

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Gilman et al. make another addition to the list of how low socioeconomic status can damage our biological development, showing maternal imm...
Monday, July 10, 2017

Our nutrition modulates our cognition.

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A fascinating study from Strang et al. : Food intake is essential for maintaining homeostasis, which is necessary for survival in all spec...
Friday, July 07, 2017

Working memory isn’t just in the frontal lobes.

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An inportant open access paper from Johnson et al. : The ability to represent and select information in working memory provides the neurobi...
Thursday, July 06, 2017

Cognitive control as a double-edged sword.

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Amer et al. offer an implicit critique of the attention and resources dedicated to brain-training programs that aim to modify the cognitive...
Wednesday, July 05, 2017

Describing aging - metastability in senescence

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Naik et al. suggest a whole brain computational modeling approach to understand how our brains maintain a high level of cognitive ability e...
Tuesday, July 04, 2017

The human fetus engages face like stimuli.

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Reid et al. are able to show that we prefer face-like stimuli even in utero: Highlights •The third trimester human fetus looks toward ...