Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Seven nuggets on how we confuse ourselves about our brains and our world.

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In a series of posts starting on Nov. 27, 2020 I attempted to abstract and condense the ideas in Lisa Feldman Barrett’s 2017 book “How Emot...
1 comment:
Monday, June 28, 2021

In our brains everything changes

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Sometimes learning the hard neuroscience of how our brains work leaves me feeling a bit queasy. The first time this happened was when I lear...
Friday, June 25, 2021

Lack of mathematical education impacts brain development and future attainment

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From Zacharopoulos et al. :    Significance Our knowledge of the effect of a specific lack of education on the brain and cognitive devel...
Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Decision-making ability, psychopathology, and brain connectivity

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An open access review offered by Dolan and his colleagues continues the story of correlating our human competencies with our brain structur...
Monday, June 21, 2021

Giving help to others may increase your life span.

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An interesting analysis from Chen et al. :  Significance Social support is a key contributor to mortality risk, with effects comparable in...
Friday, June 18, 2021

Our 'Self' extends vastly beyond our brain.

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I want to pass on two interesting articles that review how the self we usually take to be largely inside our heads (somewhere behind the eye...
1 comment:
Thursday, June 17, 2021

A.I. should be afraid of us.

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Alan Burdick does a nice summary of some recent work on interactions between humans and artificial intelligence algorithms designed to appe...
Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Your blood proteins can tell you the best kind of exercise for your body

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Since I am heading into my 80th year, and realizing that any further years must be regarded as a gift from nature, I'm attentive to anyt...
Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Equality and Equity in the Life Sciences

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After yesterday's heavy post describing 'Four Americas.' - with the last listed being 'Justice America' - rising out of ...
Monday, June 14, 2021

Four Americas

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I want to recommend that MindBlog readers have a look at George Packer's essay in the Atlantic presenting a condensed version of argume...
Friday, June 11, 2021

Social Media isn't the problem...We are.

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Mark Manson is one really smart guy. I have to pass on a precis of a nicely structured item pointed to in his weekly newsletter : He begin...
1 comment:
Thursday, June 10, 2021

Storytelling increases oxytocin and positive emotions, decreases cortisol and pain, in hospitalized kids

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From Brockington et al. : Storytelling is a distinctive human characteristic that may have played a fundamental role in humans’ ability to ...
Wednesday, June 09, 2021

Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability

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Behavioral and Brain Sciences has accepted an article from Uchiyama et al. , whose abstract I copy below, and invites the submission of comm...
Tuesday, June 08, 2021

We’ve been great at extending our lives, but not at ending them.

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Steven Pinker does a review of Steven Johnson's recent book " Extra Life - A Short History of Living Longer ," whose subject ...
Monday, June 07, 2021

Making the hard problem of consciousness easier

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Yet another morsel of text for consciousness mavens. Melloni et al. (open source) describe efforts to narrow down on which of several curren...
Friday, June 04, 2021

Inequality is a law of nature

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DeDeo and Hobson do a commentary on a model developed by Kawakatsu et al. (open source) that explains the emergence of hierarchy in networ...
Thursday, June 03, 2021

Optogenetics used to induce pair bonding and restore vision.

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I want to note two striking technical advances that make use of the light activated protein rhodopsin that I spent 36 years of my laboratory...
1 comment:
Wednesday, June 02, 2021

I’m Not Scared to Reenter Society. I’m Just Not Sure I Want To.

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I have to pass on a few clips from Tim Kreider's piece in the Atlantic : ...after a year in isolation, I, at least, have gotten acclima...
Tuesday, June 01, 2021

Watching brain regions that help us anticipate what's going to happen next.

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A primary function of the brain is to adaptively use past experience to generate expectations aboutevents that are likely to occur in the fu...
Monday, May 31, 2021

Will our American democracy collapse?

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An apocalyptic opinion piece by Krugman induces me to ruminations of the sort I’ve been inflicting on MindBlog readers in recent posts (see...