Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Cannabis use during pregnancy correlates with cortisol, anxiety, aggression, and hyperactivity in young children.

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Sobering results from Rompala et al. :  Significance Cannabis use is becoming more prevalent, including during developmentally sensitive p...
Monday, November 29, 2021

An artificial neural network that responds to written words like our brain's word form area

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Interesting work from Dehaene and collaborators :   Significance Learning to read results in the formation of a specialized region in the...
Friday, November 26, 2021

Online spread of false information depends on cascade size

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Juul and Ugander do an analysis of factors that influence the spread of false news, finding a central role for cascade size and suggesting ...
Thursday, November 25, 2021

Caution around the fountain of youth.

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Lee et al. do a review " Antiaging diets: Separating fact from fiction " in Science Magazine. The link takes you to their summary...
Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Volatile hexadecanal emitted by babies could make men more docile and women more aggressive

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Interesting observations from Mishor et al. : In terrestrial mammals, body volatiles can effectively trigger or block conspecific aggressio...
Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Socrates, Diderot, and Wolpert on Writing and Printing

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I have to pass on these quotes sent by one my Chaos and Complexity Seminar colleagues at the University of Wisconsin: Socrates on writing,...
Monday, November 22, 2021

Fluid intelligence and the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system

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Tsukahara and Engle suggest that the cognitive mechanisms of fluid intelligence map onto the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system. I pass ...
Friday, November 19, 2021

Drifting nerve assemblies can maintain persistent memories

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A prevailing model has been that a memory in our brains is stored in a specific set of nerve connections, that, like a book in a library, st...
Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Our brainstems respond to fake therapies and fake side effects.

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Here is the abstract from a Journal of Neuroscience paper by Crawford et al. titled "Brainstem mechanisms of pain modulation: a withi...

Snippets of Bach

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To give MindBlog readers a bit of a break from brain and mind posts, I want to point out that the New York Times has a great series of artic...
Monday, November 15, 2021

Coevolution of tool use and language - shared syntactic processes and basal ganglia substrates

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Thibault et al. show that tool use and language share syntactic processes. Functional magnetic resonance imaging reveals that tool use and ...
1 comment:
Friday, November 12, 2021

Freedom From Illusion

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A friend who attended the lecture I gave last Sunday ( A New Vision of how our Minds Work ), and mentioned in a Monday post , sent me an art...
2 comments:
Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Computational evidence that predictive processing shapes language comprehension mechanisms in the brain.

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Having just posted a lecture on predictive processing that I gave two days ago, I come across this fascinating work from Schrimpf et al. : ...
1 comment:
Monday, November 08, 2021

A MindBlog lecture - A New Vision of how our Minds Work

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Yesterday I gave a short talk to the Austin Rainbow Forum discussion group that I started up with several other members of the Austin Prime ...
4 comments:

It’s Quitting Season

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I want to pass on two articles with the similar themes of people taking stock of their lives and deciding to stop making themselves unhappy....
Friday, November 05, 2021

Variability, not stereotypical expressions, in facial portraying of emotional states.

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Barrett and collaborators use a novel method to offer more evidence against reliable mapping between certain emotional states and facial mu...
Wednesday, November 03, 2021

People mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own

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Fascinating experiments from Adrian Ward:     Significance In the current digital age, people are constantly connected to online informati...
1 comment:
Monday, November 01, 2021

What the mind is - similarities and differences in concepts of mental life in five cultures

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From Weisman et al. , who do a fascinating study of cognitive structures 'from the bottom up', allowing data to give rise to ontolog...
Friday, October 29, 2021

People listening to the same story synchronize their heart rates.

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Several studies have shown that people paying attention to the same videos or listening to the same stories show similar brain activity, as ...
Wednesday, October 27, 2021

What are our brains doing when they are (supposedly) doing nothing?

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Pezullo et al. address the question of this post's title in an article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences : " The secret life of pred...