Monday, November 30, 2020

Emotions do not have distinctive brain and body ‘fingerprints’

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This post, following an introduction in last Friday’s post , is a series of clips and paraphrases from Ch. 1 of Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book...
Friday, November 27, 2020

A unified view of reasons and emotions.

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As indicated in my Nov. 18 post , I have been taking a mini-sabbitical from grinding out daily MindBlog posts to sort out my understanding ...
4 comments:
Monday, November 23, 2020

Your brain is not for thinking.

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Lisa Feldman Barrett,the author whose book has prompted me to take a mini-sabbitical from MindBlog to do a period of study, has an Op-Ed pi...
1 comment:
Wednesday, November 18, 2020

We have been wrong about what emotions are - MindBlog is taking a study mini-sabbitical

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I have been doing a careful reading of Barrett's book " How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain " - hence the decr...
4 comments:
Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Nature's lessons for a more kind society.

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I recently came across this 2009 MindBlog post... relevant to our times. Here is a re-post ( this link to the original post takes you to so...
Monday, November 16, 2020

The complexity model of societal collapse

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Continuing in the thread of the previous MindBlog post describing Turchin's historical model, I want to point to Ben Ehrenreich's pi...
Thursday, November 12, 2020

Our looming civil unrest is predicted by Turchin's historical model.

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I recommend you have a look at Graeme Wood's article on the writing and thoughts of Peter Turchin, who has developed a model based on t...
2 comments:
Wednesday, November 11, 2020

The pandemic exposes human nature: 10 evolutionary insights

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The Nov. 10 issue of PNAS has a open source perspective article authored by an all star cast of prominent thinkers (including Steven Pinker...
Monday, November 09, 2020

Increasing acceptance of psychotropic drugs reflected by US Election results

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Several landmark drug reform measures were passed in the recent election. Four states legalized recreational marijuana, one state decrimina...
Friday, November 06, 2020

Oxytocin can increase or decrease anxiety-related behaviors.

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Duque-Wilckens et al. report experiments in mice showing that oxytocin, usually regarding as reducing anxious behaviors, enables stress-ind...
Thursday, November 05, 2020

Power to the people (on climate change policy)

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Cathleen O'Grady points to a good model for the United States - countries using citizens' assemblies to address longer term problem...
Wednesday, November 04, 2020

Learned hopefulness

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My son Jon pointed me to an irreverent 'Life Advice' column by Mark Manson whose Nov. 2 installment had an interesting piece descri...
Tuesday, November 03, 2020

Healing the partisan partisan divide - is there a vital center?

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A recent NYTimes OpEd by David Brooks notes that Biden has been taking steps towards healing political polarization and divisiveness. Andre...
Monday, November 02, 2020

Being an America First populist correlates with reported lifetime criminal arrests.

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Here is an interesting tidbit from Levi at al. :   Significance Using the 2016 American National Election Study, we develop comprehensive...
Friday, October 30, 2020

MindBlog's 5,000th post - The milliseconds of a choice - Watching your mind when it matters.

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This was going to be a post on oxytocin research...but I looked at the Blogger counter to see that it will be the 5,000th post done since th...
Thursday, October 29, 2020

Why have we become more comfortable and less happy over the past 40 years?

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Arthur Brooks offers another article in his biweekly series on "How to Build a Life," pointing out that we haven't gotten hap...
Wednesday, October 28, 2020

A case for "we" in an "I" country

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James Morone does a review in Science Magazine of "The Upswing" by Robert Putnam with Romney Simon. Some clips: At the turn of ...
Tuesday, October 27, 2020

The end of an expanding epidemic cannot be precisely forecast

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A sobering analysis from Castro et al. :   Significance Susceptible–infected–removed (SIR) models and their extensions are widely used to...
Monday, October 26, 2020

Machine learning detects online influence campaigns.

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Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel in the struggle to determine when malign information or online influence campaigns are being s...
Friday, October 23, 2020

Unethical amnesia

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An interesting study from Galeotti et al. (open source): Significance Using large-scale incentivized online experiments, we tested two po...