Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Politics are in our DNA - why societies evolved to have both conservatives and liberals.

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Sebastian Junger points out an evolutionary rationale for the presence of both liberals and conservatives within a group - that over our ev...
Monday, July 29, 2019

Re-skilling the brain.

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For the first time,  Oby et al  (open source, nice graphics) observe the new neural activity patterns that cause a new learned behavior. S...
Friday, July 26, 2019

Deindividuation of outgroup faces occurs at the earliest stages of visual perception.

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From Hughes et al : A hallmark of intergroup biases is the tendency to individuate members of one’s own group but process members of other ...
Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Facial muscles in dogs evolved for interactions with humans.

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From Kaminski et al. (check out the videos in the article): Domestication shaped wolves into dogs and transformed both their behavior and ...
1 comment:
Monday, July 22, 2019

Around the globe, financial temptation increases civic honesty.

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Shalvi does a commentary on work by Cohn et al. Here is the Cohn et al. abstract: Civic honesty is essential to social capital and econom...
Friday, July 19, 2019

It’s never simple...The tidy textbook story about the primary visual cortex is wrong.

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When I was a postdoc in the Harvard Neurobiology department in the mid-1960’s I used to have afternoon tea with the Hubel and Weisel group....
Wednesday, July 17, 2019

An anti-aging pill with some credibility....

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An AARP article points to studies on the new drug RTB101, which boosts immune function in older people and lowers risk for respiratory dise...
1 comment:
Monday, July 15, 2019

Correlating our our physical and mental experiences of stress linked to psychological and physical well-being

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Davidson and colleagues at the Univ. of Wisconsin show that individual differences in the ability to associate subjective stress and heart r...
Friday, July 12, 2019

The Problem With ‘Sharenting’

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An article in the NYTimes 'Privacy Project' by Kamenetz resonates with my own experience of very mixed reactions to viewing some of...
Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Looking for a dose of optimism?

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I want to point to a recent NYTimes Op-Ed piece by David Brooks that is a bit more upbeat than his frequent hand wringing over the dissolut...
Monday, July 08, 2019

Subgroups of gay men correspond to different biodevelopmental pathways

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Swift-Gallant et al. consider three established biomarkers of sexual orientation and suggest they reflect distinct biodevelopmental pathway...
Friday, July 05, 2019

Social Media - no effect on adolescent life satisfaction?

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Orben et al. (open source article) provide a study whose results contest a common opinion, reinforced by several previous studies, that ado...
Wednesday, July 03, 2019

Think twice about metformin as an anti-aging drug.

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Gretchen Reynolds points to work suggesting that use of metformin (the most commonly used Type 2 diabetes drug) as an anti-aging agent by h...
Monday, July 01, 2019

Your professional decline.

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Arthur Brooks, former president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank and New York Times Op-Ed writer, does an essay ...
Friday, June 28, 2019

Perception as controlled hallucination - predictive processing and the nature of conscious experience

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I've now read several times through a fascinating Edge.org conversation with philosopher Andy Clark. I suggest you read the piece, and ...
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Wednesday, June 26, 2019

Implicit racial bias is preserved by historical roots of social environments.

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Payne et al. note that geographic differences in implicit racial bias correlate with the number of slaves in those areas in 1860. Signifi...
Monday, June 24, 2019

Over 50-fold difference between individuals in circadian melatonin sensitivity to evening light.

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Phillips et al. probe how our high sensitivity to artificial light after dusk perturbs the circadian rhythm of our sleep hormone melatonin:...
Friday, June 21, 2019

Mechanism of exercise and antioxidant stimulation of memory and new nerve cell growth

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On reading this article by Yook et al. I promptly ordered a bottle of 10 mg astaxanthin capsules to add to my normal array of supplements (...
Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Enhancing longevity by removing deteriorated body cells.

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Here I pass on both the introductory summary and concluding paragraph of van Deursen's review of efforts to enhance longevity by removi...
Monday, June 17, 2019

Why can we read only one word at a time?

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Fascinating work from White et al. : Significance Because your brain has limited processing capacity, you cannot comprehend the text on...
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