Friday, June 29, 2018

Stress and autoimmune disease

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I am now in my 77th year, and not all that pleased that my inflammatory, immune, and stress systems are becoming more excitable, more likely...
Thursday, June 28, 2018

Social media and democracy

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This post passes on links to articles on social media discussed recently in the Univ. of Wisconsin Chaos and Complex Systems seminar that I ...
Wednesday, June 27, 2018

The Philosophy we need: Personalism

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To his credit, David Brooks keeps searching for moral visions that might be an antidote to our current social and political malaise. A recen...
Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Mindfulness can lower your motivation.

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Vohs and Hafenbrack do an NYTimes opinion piece to advertise their forthcoming paper on effects of meditation. Given my personal experienc...
1 comment:
Monday, June 25, 2018

Deep origins of consciousness

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I want to recommend an engaging book by Peter Godfrey-Smith that I have read recently, "Other Minds: The Octopus, theSea, and the Deep...
1 comment:
Friday, June 22, 2018

Brain EEG activity can predict who antidepressants will work on

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Pizzagalli et al. have used electroencephalography (EEG) to look at the activation level of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in ...
Thursday, June 21, 2018

Old Italian violins imitate the human voice.

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A fascinating study from Tai et al. (open source): Significance Amati and Stradivari violins are highly appreciated by musicians and c...
Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Families and politics - curtailed conversations

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Chen and Rohla find that Thanksgiving dinners in which the hosts and guests lived in oppositely voting precincts were up to 50 minutes shor...
Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Tipping points in changing social conventions.

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How can we explain the rapid rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany or the rapid acceptance of gay marriage in the United States? Centola et al....
Monday, June 18, 2018

The misunderstood sixth mass extinction

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Paul Ehrlich, 50 years after the publication of "The Population Bomb," together with Gerardo Ceballos, has written a concise rebu...
Friday, June 15, 2018

Comparing human prefrontal cortex to that of other primates

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From Donahue et al. : Significance A longstanding controversy in neuroscience pertains to differences in human prefrontal cortex (PFC) ...
Thursday, June 14, 2018

Evolutionary cognition - bees demonstrate an understanding of zero

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Howard et al. demonstrate an astounding evolutionary convergence by showing that insects have developed the concept of zero, a capability o...
Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Jaron Lanier on why you should delete your social media accounts.

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I have read through Jared Lanier's " Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. " His critiques are impo...
Tuesday, June 12, 2018

What makes a man attractive?

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In many species female mate preference is influenced by signs indicating the health and robustness of the potential male partner. Rehm poin...
Monday, June 11, 2018

Socioeconomic status moderates age-related differences in brain organization throughout adulthood.

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Work by Chan et al.  (open source article) suggests that higher socioeconomic status (SES) may be a protective factor against age-related br...
Friday, June 08, 2018

Move into your virtual body avatar with just your hands and feet

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Steph Yin points to work by Kitazaki's group at Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan, who try... ...to figure out the minim...
Thursday, June 07, 2018

Social contagion of ethnic hostility.

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From Bauer et al. : Significance We provide experimental evidence on peer effects and show that behavior that harms members of a differ...
Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Placebo treatment facilitates social trust.

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Nasal sprays containing oxytocin have been shown to facilitate pro-social behaviors. Xan et al. have now shown that this effect can be obta...
Tuesday, June 05, 2018

The End of Humanism - Homo Deus

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I want to pass on a useful precis of two books by Yuval Harari prepared by my colleague Terry Allard for a meeting of the Chaos and Complex...
Monday, June 04, 2018

More on the sociopathy of social media

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I want to pass on to MindBlog readers some material from Michael Kaplan, who recently pointed me to his YouTube channel OneHandClap , and in...