Friday, April 30, 2021

Excess mortality rates since 2000 in the US compared with Europe.

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Interesting, from Preston and Vierboom. Just the numbers, no commentary on the causes (mainly opioid crisis?). We use three indexes to i...
Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Embracing diversity can disadvantage minorities

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From Starck et al. :   Significance There are numerous reasons why institutions of higher education may choose to embrace diversity. A co...
Monday, April 26, 2021

Sensitivity to geometric shape: A putative signature of human singularity

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From Sablé-Meyer et al. : Among primates, humans are special in their ability to create and manipulate highly elaborate structures of langu...
Friday, April 23, 2021

What coffee does to body and mind

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I am completely dependent on coffee, starting every morning with this stimulant and continuing small sips until a lunchtime cappuccino termi...
1 comment:
Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Ancient Greece's Army of Lovers

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This post is under MindBlog's "random and curious stuff" category. A piece by Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker: Comprisin...
Monday, April 19, 2021

Gamma-frequency oscillations link different brain regions during learning.

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Fernández-Ruiz et al. demonstrate that specific, projected gamma-frequency oscillation patterns dynamically engage functionally related cel...
Friday, April 16, 2021

Vision: What’s so special about words?

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Readers are sensitive to the statistics of written language. New work by Vidal et al. suggests that this sensitivity may be driven by the s...
Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Useful Delusions

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I want to pass on to MindBlog readers some background information on the recent book " Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the S...
Monday, April 12, 2021

Why does passion matter more in individualistic cultures?

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Tsai does an interesting commentary   (open source) on work noted in MindBlog's recent post on an article by Li et al.  Some clips: O...
Friday, April 09, 2021

The Psychology of Fake News

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Pennycook and Rand do a fascinating open source article in Trends in Cognitive Science on the psychology of fake news.  Their highlights an...
Wednesday, April 07, 2021

How dopamine leads to hallucinations

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Hallucinations (perceptual experiences without external stimuli) seen in conditions such as schizophrenia are thought to result from givi...
Monday, April 05, 2021

A Dendrite-Focused Framework for Understanding the Actions of Ketamine and Psychedelics

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I pass on the highlioght points from an interesting review (open source, with a useful graphic) of how the similar therapeutic effects of k...
Thursday, April 01, 2021

False memories can be reversed without damage to true memories.

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  Oeberst et al.   demonstrate the effectiveness of source sensitization, which involves alerting participants that their memories could com...
1 comment:
Tuesday, March 30, 2021

The case against reality

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Over the past year I've dipped into and out of Donald Hoffman's ideas several times, looking back at Geffer's article in Granta...
1 comment:
Friday, March 26, 2021

Plasticity during our development of mapping time on to space.

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A previous mindblog post has pointed to work showing how culture shapes our spatial conceptions of time. Starr and Srinivasan now address ...
Thursday, March 25, 2021

Measuring happiness in small steps.

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I find this Brook's self help essay - that I came across while browsing the news during this morning's coffee - to be a nice brie...
Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Brain mechanism by which testosterone reduces generosity

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 Interesting work from Jianxin Ou et al.: Significance Testosterone is associated with aggressive behavior in both animals and humans. H...
Tuesday, March 23, 2021

Four distinct patterns of aging - what is your 'ageotype'?

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An interesting piece from Lanese describs work showing how aging unfolds at different rates in different tissues: The research team behi...
Monday, March 22, 2021

Points on having a self and free will.

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 A recent podcast by Sam Harris summarizing his ideas on the question of whether we have free will motivates me to do a further summary her...
Friday, March 19, 2021

Passion matters but not equally everywhere.

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From Li et al. :   Significance In three large-scale datasets representing adolescents from 59 societies across the globe, we find eviden...