Friday, November 30, 2018

Being a Beast Machine: The Somatic Basis of Selfhood

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Seth and Tsakiris offer a review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, with the title of this post, that immediately caught my eye. I'm work...
Thursday, November 29, 2018

A molecular basis for the placebo effect.

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Several popular articles point to work I wish I had been more aware off. Gary Greenberg in the NYTimes , and Cari Romm in The Atlantic , p...
Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Factoids about an ideal gas.

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I pass on this neat slide from a lecture by physics professor Clint Sprott ("Ergodicity in Chaotic Oscillators") given to the Nov....
Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Impacts of outdoor artificial light on plant and animal species.

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Gaston does a perspective article describing how the nighttime lighting up of our planet is profoundly disturbing the activities of many an...
Monday, November 26, 2018

Dietary fat: From foe to friend?

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The title of the post is the title of one of the articles in a special section of the Nov. 16 issue of Science devoted to Diet and Health. ...
Friday, November 23, 2018

Social learning circuits in the brain.

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Allsop et al. at MIT, observe brain circuits that let an animal learn from the experience of others:  Highlights •Neurons in cortex a...
Thursday, November 22, 2018

Conversation with your angry uncle over Thanksgiving - a chat bot.

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I have to pass on this gem from this morning's NYTimes. Karin Tamerius, founder of "Smart Politics" offers a chat bot to hel...

Top-down and Bottom-up causation in the emergence of complexity.

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I want to pass on just the first section of a commentary by George F.R. Ellis on a paper by Aharonov et al. , whose evidence and analysis s...
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Wednesday, November 21, 2018

REM sleep in naps and memory consolidation in typical and Down syndrome children.

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From Spano et al.: Sleep is recognized as a physiological state associated with learning, with studies showing that knowledge acquisition i...
Tuesday, November 20, 2018

The ecstasy of speed - or leisure?

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The Google Blogger platform by Deric's MindBlog emails me comments on posts to approve (or delete, or mark as spam). The almost daily co...
Monday, November 19, 2018

Practicing gratitude, kindness, and compassion - can our i-devices help?

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My Apple Watch occasionally, and unexpectedly, prompts me to stop and breathe (does it not like the pulse that it is measuring?). Noticing...
Friday, November 16, 2018

Self driving cars will have to decide who should live and who should die.

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Johnson points to a collaboration by Awad et al. that explored the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. They designed an experimen...
Thursday, November 15, 2018

Biomarkers of inflamation are lower in people with more positive emotions

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Fron Ong et al. : There is growing evidence that inflammatory responses may help to explain how emotions get “under the skin” to influence ...
Wednesday, November 14, 2018

New longevity vitamins?

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Well known senior biochemist Bruce Ames (b. 1928) suggests an array of compounds should be added to the list of essential vitamins that main...
Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Are we getting too hysterical about the dangers of artificial intelligence?

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It is certainly true that A.I. might take away the current jobs of people like lawyers and radiologists who scan data looking for patterns, ...
Monday, November 12, 2018

Even a 10 minute walk can boost your brain

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From Suwabe et al. : Significance Our previous work has shown that mild physical exercise can promote better memory in rodents. Here, w...
Friday, November 09, 2018

Facebook language predicts depression in medical records.

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Eichstaedt et al. , suggest that analysis of language used by consenting individuals in their social media accounts could provide a depressi...
Thursday, November 08, 2018

Advancing front of old-age human survival

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Zuo et al. examine the probabilities of death at ages past 65 years for males and females in developed countries; that is, they consider in...
Wednesday, November 07, 2018

The human herd and its digital overlords.

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We've been seeing articles about the downside of young children and teenagers using digital social platforms, and the family conflicts r...
Tuesday, November 06, 2018

Might tribal conflict fatigue lead to a contagion of civility and kindness ?

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A majority of both republicans and democrats express dismay over the current state of our civil discourse. Continuously stoked arousal of o...