Wednesday, September 30, 2020

All of us are racists in our early infancy.

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Listening to a Sam Harris 'Making Sense' podcast interview of prolific black author John McWhorter - who describes 'The New Re...
Tuesday, September 29, 2020

What to Do When the Future Feels Hopeless

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In one of his biweekly 'How to bluild a life' essays Arthur Brooks offers advice on antidotes to feeling of helplessness in the fa...
Monday, September 28, 2020

Kitty see, kitty do: cat imitates human

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I am immediately going to start trying this with my abyssinians! Cats have been notoriously hard to study, and this study reinforces, for e...
Friday, September 25, 2020

Perceptions of family social status correlate with health and life chances

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A fascinating British twin study from Rivenbark et al : Children from lower-income households are at increased risk for poor health, educ...
Thursday, September 24, 2020

Genes and environments, development and time

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 A special section of the Sept. 22 issue of PNAS offers a series of free online artices on biological embedding across timescales.  Here is...
Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Inflammaging - Another reason seniors don't want to catch COVID-19

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I imagine myself to have a very robust immune system because I very seldom catch a flu or cold, take Vitamins C and D, exercise, am not over...
Tuesday, September 22, 2020

The 2020 Ig Nobel Prizes - research on knives made of feces.

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A piece in Science Magazine gives the highlights of this year's Ig Noble prize s published in the Annals of Improbable Research . If t...
Monday, September 21, 2020

Brain circuits signaling the absence of emotion in body language

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Sokolov et al. show that modulation of the reciprocal effective connectivity between the amygdala and insula during processing of neutral a...
Friday, September 18, 2020

Another Big History - why the West is WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic)

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Alas, I usually end up reading reviews of books rather than the books themselves. Here I want to pass on clips from Shulevitz's review i...
Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’ commitment to democracy

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Bartels does a survey (open source) that provides numbers and graphs on what is obvious from current news sources - the frailty of public c...
Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Disagreeable people are not more likely than agreeable people to obtain power in an organization.

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An interesting study from Anderson et al. : Does being disagreeable—that is, behaving in aggressive, selfish, and manipulative ways—help pe...
Monday, September 14, 2020

"Us" versus "Them" in 17 month old infants.

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Jin and Baillargeon make observations that suggest an early origin of the 'us and them' perspective being taken to extremes in our ...
Thursday, September 10, 2020

Cognitive control increases honesty in cheaters but cheating in those who are honest

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Abe discusses work of Speer et al. that probes: ..a long-standing paradox concerning the cognitive nature of honesty: Is it a matter of...
Wednesday, September 09, 2020

Origins of human music - two perspectives

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Because I wrote an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (coauthored with Vadim Arshavsky), that was published in 2010, I receive the j...
Tuesday, September 08, 2020

The science of inequality.

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Economic inequality is a continuing focus of political debate, and I think a re-post of a brief MindBlog item from 6/2/2014 is relevant: ...
Monday, September 07, 2020

Predicting results of our presidential election.

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I want to pass on an email from retired historian Lou Wangberg, a friend from my Fort Lauderdale period who leads a history discussion group...
Friday, September 04, 2020

Democracy in the Balance - Special Issue of Science Magazine

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The Sept.4 issue of Science Magazine has a special section of open source perspectives and reviews. A few of the titles: Racial authoritar...
Thursday, September 03, 2020

The illusion of objectivity enhances political polarization.

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From Schwalbe et al. (open source):   Significance Political polarization increasingly threatens democratic institutions. The belief ...
Wednesday, September 02, 2020

Mechanisms of our current political polarization.

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I want to point to three sources that provide complimentary perspectives on the origins and maintenance of the extreme Red versus Blue divid...
Tuesday, September 01, 2020

The active grandparent hypothesis - an evolutionary explanation of why and how exercise delays senescence and death.

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I recommend that you read an interesting article by Daniel Lieberman in the current issue of Harvard Magazine. Here are a few clips: The...