Monday, January 31, 2022

Threatening language is contagious - Tracking America’s collective response to threats with a linguistic tool

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From Choi et al. :   Significance People are constantly exposed to threatening language in mass communication channels, yet we lack tools...
Friday, January 28, 2022

The stories we imagine while listening to music depends on our culture.

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Margulis et al. (text from their introduction) ....compared quantitative measures of narrativity (the likelihood that an excerpt of music ...
Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Our brains have multiple representations of the same body part.

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Here is a neat finding. Remember your elementary biology textbook picture of the homunculi in our somatosensory and motor cortices? The smal...
Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Using big data to track major shifts in human cognition

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I want to pass on the first few paragraphs of a fascinating commentary by Simon DeDao on an article by Scheffer et al. that was the subject...
Friday, January 21, 2022

What is working for you and what is not?

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This post passes on to MindBlog readers the discussion topic for a Feb 6 2:00 p.m. (CST) Zoom meeting of The Austin Rainbow Forum, which I ...

Can monitoring brain waves boost mental health?

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David Dodge does an interesting article asking whether neurofeedback has delivered the mental health revolution it has been promising for ...
Wednesday, January 19, 2022

C.E.O.s are our heroes, at least according to them.

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An interesting article by Peter Goodman , explains how corporations that claim to be serving the larger common good pay zero taxes. I sugges...
Monday, January 17, 2022

Different circuits in the brain for reward seeking and novelty seeking.

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Work by Ogasawara et al. is noted by Peter Stern . Novelty seeking is a key feature of intelligent behavior and adaptive cognition. Howev...
Friday, January 14, 2022

Unlocking adults’ implicit statistical learning by cognitive depletion

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Smalle et al. make the fascinating observation that inhibition of our adult cognitive control system by non-invasive brain stimulation can ...
Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Children universally across societies enforce conventional norms but in culturally variable ways

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From Kanngiesser et al. in PNAS: Humans, as compared with other animals, create and follow conventional norms that determine how we greet ...
Monday, January 10, 2022

Transcranial stimulation of alpha oscillations up-regulates the default mode network

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Interesting work from Clancy et al. on the brain's default mode network that carries out our self referential rumination: Significance...
Friday, January 07, 2022

Twitter amplifies the political right more than the political left

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You should read this open source editorial in PNAS by Susan Fiske "Twitter Manipulates your feed: Ethical considerations," a comm...
Wednesday, January 05, 2022

Higher performance and fronto-parietal brain activity following active versus passive learning

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From a brief open source PNAS report by Stillesjö et al. that has a nice graphic of the fMRI data supporting their observations: We here d...
Monday, January 03, 2022

The Power of Us

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A recent New York Times essay by Jon Mooallem, " Is life better when we're together ?" is worth a read, and references work of...
Friday, December 31, 2021

The rise and fall of rationality in language

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Fascinating language analysis from Scheffer et al. that illustrates over the past decades a marked shift in public interest from the collec...
Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Senolytic therapies for healthy longevity

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An article on increasing longevity by getting rid of senescent cells (cells that have stopped dividing and generate products that accelerat...
2 comments:
Monday, December 27, 2021

MindBlog gets an extreme comment on Covid

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I've debated on whether it would be better to ignore (and not amplify by passing on) an extreme comment of a sort MindBlog almost never...
3 comments:
Saturday, December 25, 2021

A musical offering.

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For this day that was central in my Protestant Christian Texas childhood: a performance by the Netherlands Bach Society of the Gloria in Exc...
1 comment:
Wednesday, December 22, 2021

What Happened to American Conservatism?

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I want to strongly recommed that you read David Brooks' article on conservatism in the January/February 2022 issue of The Atlantic. I r...
Monday, December 20, 2021

The Point is to Stop - a farewell to self help coaching

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I want to pass on some points, paraphrase, and central clips from what is essentially a swan song offered by Mark Manson in his latest news...