Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Are things getting better or worse?

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In a recent New Yorker article Joshua Rothman discusses debate over assessing the state of the world, with major emphasis on Pinker book ...
Monday, July 30, 2018

Piano training enhances speech perception.

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Fascinating work from an international collaboration of Desimone at M.I.T., Nan at Beijing Normal Univ., and others: Significance Musi...
Friday, July 27, 2018

Mechanism of white matter changes induced by meditation?

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Posner and collaborators, who previously have shown changes in brain white matter induced by meditation, suggest a possible mechanism , usi...
Thursday, July 26, 2018

The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation

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I completely missed this review article by Posner and colleagues when it appeared, and am grateful for Bäumli's mention of it in her re...
1 comment:
Wednesday, July 25, 2018

When persistence doesn't pay - the sunk cost bias.

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Sweis et al. show that sensitivity to time invested in pursuit of a reward occurs similarly in mice, rats, and humans. All three display a ...
Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Declining mental health among disadvantaged Americans.

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Cherlin summarizes work by Goldman et al. that demonstrates "a troubling portrait of declining psychological health among non-Hispani...
Monday, July 23, 2018

Therapy for NYTAD - read about citrus micro-jets!

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What is NYTAD? My just made up acronym for “New York Times Anxiety Disorder” - what I have to resist during my daily glance through the en...
Friday, July 20, 2018

Crows make mental templates.

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Weintraub points to further studies from the University of Aukland School of Psychology on the extraordinary New Caledonian crows that hav...
Thursday, July 19, 2018

Perceptual and judgement creep.

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Fascinating work by Gilbert and colleagues : Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that peo...
Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Authentic lies.

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Hahl et al. suggest how a blatantly lying demagogue (guess who?) can be perceived as authentic: We develop and test a theory to address a ...
Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Social media and the emergence of violence during protests.

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The social media, and especially Twitter, are now integral to modern political behavior, with events online both reflecting and influencing ...
Monday, July 16, 2018

What is consciousness, and could machines have it?

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I want to point to a lucid article by Dehaene, Lau, and Koulder that gives the most clear review I have seen of our current state of knowle...
Friday, July 13, 2018

Playing with proteins in virtual reality.

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Much of my mental effort while I was doing laboratory research on the mechanisms of visual transduction (changing light into a nerve signal ...
Thursday, July 12, 2018

Increasing despair among poor Americans.

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A survey by Goldman et al. of more than 4,600 American adults conducted in 1995-1996 and in 2011-2014 suggests that among individuals of lo...
Wednesday, July 11, 2018

A fundamental advance in brain imaging techniques.

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I want to pass on the abstract, along with a bit of text and two figures, from an article by Coalson, Van Essen, and Glasser that argues fo...
Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Mindfulness training increases strength of right insula connections.

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Sharp et al.(open source) suggest that: The endeavor to understand how mindfulness works will likely be advanced by using recently devel...
Monday, July 09, 2018

Mortality rates level off at extreme age

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Interesting work from Barbi et al. showing that human death rates increase exponentially up to about age 80, then decelerate, and plateau a...
1 comment:
Friday, July 06, 2018

Brain imaging predicts who will be a good musical performer.

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Fascinating observations from Zatorre's group : Significance In sophisticated auditory–motor learning such as musical instrument le...
Thursday, July 05, 2018

Why are religious people trusted more?

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A prevailing view is that religious behavior facilitate trust, primarily toward coreligionists, and particularly when it is diagnostic of be...
Wednesday, July 04, 2018

Seven creepy Facebook patents

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I'll follow yesterday's post with yet another post on creepy high tech patents, this time from Facebook, showing their ongoing inten...