Monday, December 30, 2019

We’ve just had the best decade (and year) in human history. Seriously

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To provide a faintly upbeat end of the year post, I want to point to a Matt Ridley piece in The Spectator that provides a bit of a tonic fo...
Friday, December 27, 2019

World in decline? New authoritarian age? - the dangers of declinism.

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These are times of high anxiety for both Red and Blue state America. A powerful Op-Ed by Roger Cohe n, in the wake of the British election, ...
Wednesday, December 25, 2019

For the holiday season - the gift of self care

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To acknowledge that today is a special one for a large fraction of humanity, I want to pass on Parker-Pope's description of suggestions ...
Monday, December 23, 2019

Is this what my grandson will be doing in a few years?

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My seven year old grandson Sebastian is a performer, taking piano lessons and reminding me a bit of myself when I was doing the same thing a...
Friday, December 20, 2019

Setting back our epigenic age?

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I would like to point to Josh Mitteldorf's Blog "Aging Matters", in particular " Pulsed Yamanaka Factors Set Back Epigen...
Wednesday, December 18, 2019

MindBlog reviews the HealthyMinds App

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The Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, established by my former University of Wisconsin colleague Richard Davidson, i...
3 comments:

Favorite sentences

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I have to pass on a few of the favorite sentences collected by book critic Dwight Garner from his 2019 list of books - you can get the cita...
Monday, December 16, 2019

Our blood protein profiles change in the fourth, seventh and eighth decades of life

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Lehallier et al. find that ~1,380 of the ~3,000 plasma proteins in blood samples from 4,263 people between the ages of 18 and 95 vary signi...
Friday, December 13, 2019

Our visual system uses recurrence in its representational dynamics

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Fundamental work from Kietzmann et al. shows how recurrence - lateral and top-down feedback from higher to the more primary visual areas of...
Wednesday, December 11, 2019

More insight into metformin's beneficial effects on diabetes, aging, and several diseases.

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A group at McMaster University has shown an effect of the diabetes drug metformin beyond its suppression of liver glucose production that m...
Monday, December 09, 2019

Heritable gaps between chronological age and brain age are increased in common brain disorders.

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Kaufmann et al. have used machine learning on s large dataset to estimate robust estimation of individual biological brain ages on the basi...
Friday, December 06, 2019

Same-Sex behavior in animals - a new view.

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Monk et al. offer a fresh perspective on the "problem" of how same-sex sexual behavior could have evolved. It is a problem only i...
Wednesday, December 04, 2019

Something in the way we move.

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Gretchen Reynolds points to work by Hug et al. suggesting that each of us has a unique muscle activation signature that can be revealed du...
Monday, December 02, 2019

Rival theories of consciousness being tested by large project.

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In the first phase of a $20 million dollar project, six laboratories are going to run experiments with more than 500 participants to test t...
Friday, November 29, 2019

The real cost of texting and tweeting.

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Agnes Callard, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, crystallizes some fascinating points in an NYTimes Op-Ed p...
Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Cognitive and noncognitive predictors of success.

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An interesting bit of work from Duckworth et al. When predicting success, how important are personal attributes other than cognitive abil...
3 comments:
Monday, November 25, 2019

How trance states might have forged human societies

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I want to pass on a series of clips I have made for my own use from an intriguing article by Mark Vernon in Aeon : With anatomically modern...
Friday, November 22, 2019

Evidence for premature aging caused by insufficient sleep.

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I have come to realize in the past year or so that my physical and mental robustness require getting at least seven, and preferably eight, h...
Wednesday, November 20, 2019

A "Department of the Attention Economy"

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Popping up on my daily input stream (in this case the Google News aggregator - which knows more that I do about what I might like to see) is...
Monday, November 18, 2019

Social class is revealed by brief clips of speech.

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Kraus et al. - a collective modern version of Professor Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion - offer a detailed analyt...