Wednesday, November 01, 2017

Gut reasons to brush your teeth.

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Cao does a summary and discussion of work by Atarashi et al. : Numerous microorganisms, including bacteria, colonize the intestine where...
Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Smiles of reward, affiliation, and dominance.

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From Martin et al. : Abstract The human smile is highly variable in both its form and the social contexts in which it is displayed. A s...
Monday, October 30, 2017

Rethinking our conceptions of mental life.

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Interesting ideas from Weisman et al. : Significance How do ordinary people make sense of mental life? Pioneering work on the dimension...
Friday, October 27, 2017

“Let’s Get Togetherism.”

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I have to pass on the ending paragraphs of Brooks NYTimes OpEd piece today, titled "The week Trump won." He compares our situatio...

How Fiction Becomes Fact on Social Media.

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Benedict Carey does a fascinating article on how misinformation is spread on social media. Here are a few clips with his major points: Fo...
Thursday, October 26, 2017

Do intelligent robots need emotion?

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It is becoming increasingly clear that the parts of our brains processing emotions are not tidily separated from those dealing with reason, ...
Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Different kinds of mindfulness correlate with different benefits.

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Jazaieri points to work by Blanke et al. that probed how different aspects of mindfulness influence our emotional well-being. Three kinds ...
1 comment:
Tuesday, October 24, 2017

The “sense of self” in Biblical times.

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Sigal Samuel does an article on the ideas of James Kugel in his final book “ The Great Shift - Encountering Good in the Biblical Era” ...
3 comments:
Monday, October 23, 2017

The coming dark age…or a new integration?

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I would like to offer Mindblog’s rambling thoughts on possible futures, if, as in some estimates , the relentless march of the machines of ...
Friday, October 20, 2017

Coordination of brain waves between humans facing territorial threats.

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Here is an interesting piece from Mu et al. , first their abstract, and then a chunk of their introduction which gives rationale and backgro...
Thursday, October 19, 2017

Like apes and small children, ravens plan ahead.

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The notion that animal cognition outside of the primate lineage is locked into the present has to be tossed. It appears that cognitive evol...
Wednesday, October 18, 2017

The Premortem

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Richard Thaler, the father of behavioral economics, just received the 2017 Nobel Prize in economics. I thought I would pass on this brief pi...
Tuesday, October 17, 2017

A sobering political graphic

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The graphic (click to enlarge) is from Thomas Edsall's thoughtful and well-researched piece (as usual) on our current political situati...
Monday, October 16, 2017

Does acupuncture work by re-mapping the brain?

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I want to pass on a chunk of a sane article offered by Vitaly Napadow in Aeon . Napadow is director of the Center for Integrative Pain Neur...
Friday, October 13, 2017

A 'Gaydar' machine?

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Heather Murphy describes the kerfuffle that has ensued after Stanford researchers published a preprint of their work that will soon appear...
Thursday, October 12, 2017

Brain and body imaging of the emotional power of poetry.

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By now a body of work has grown on how peak musical experiences engage the reward systems of our brains, with concomitant changes such as ti...
Wednesday, October 11, 2017

MindBlog has moved to Austin Texas.

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A personal note.  Len and I have just moved back into the family house in Austin Texas where I grew up, through high school. My son and his ...
Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Price modulates the effectiveness of your pain medication!

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Fascinating observations from Tinnermann et al. A Science magazine summary, followed by the article abstract: Price modulates early pain ...
Monday, October 09, 2017

Transcending tribalism - crafting a new vision for America?

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I want to point to, and comment on, two recent pieces by David Brooks. In the first , he argues that “the main enemy is not aliens; it’s div...
Friday, October 06, 2017

MindBlog's book abstracts.

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I’ve been working on abstracting a book I’ve mentioned recently , Sapolsky’s “Behave - The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst,” hoping ...