Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Re-energizing the aged brain

›
Alderton does a brief summary of work by Brakedal et al. : Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) is an important cofactor in numerous me...
Monday, March 28, 2022

Abnormal hemispheric interactions of Autism Spectrum Disorder present in 1st year of life.

›
From Rolison et al. : Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by atypical connectivity lateralization of functional networks. Howev...
Friday, March 25, 2022

Trust is needed to run the world, and crypto can make trusting easier

›
I want to pass on a few clips from a recent screed by Mark Manson in his usual explitive-rich style. I regret that he doesn't make clea...
Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Neurons in the brain that respond mainly to singing

›
New work from Norman-Haignere et al. describes a population of cells in our auditory cortex, located between the music and speech-selective...
Monday, March 21, 2022

Mellow Mice - Why deep breathing can keep us calm

›
How we are breathing is usally a good indicator of whether we are calm or aroused. When we become anxious or aroused, usually the best thing...
Friday, March 18, 2022

Difference in knowledge production by global north and south

›
Torres et al. do an interesting analysis: Significance Contemporary social sciences aim to be diverse and inclusive, but traces of the hi...
Wednesday, March 16, 2022

How exercise supports the brain

›
From Leiter et al. "Selenium mediates exercise-induced adult neurogenesis and reverses learning deficits induced by hippocampal injury...
Monday, March 14, 2022

Addicted to dreaming.

›
Dopamine (DA) is usually associated with pleasure and addiction. Now Hasegawa et al. show that release of DA in the basolateral amygdala (B...
Friday, March 11, 2022

The manly art of self-promotion

›
Exley and Kessler suggest that gender wage gaps may have roots in men being more self-promoting than women: We run a series of experiments...
Wednesday, March 09, 2022

Genes for loving nature.

›
From Chang et al .: Nature experiences have been linked to mental and physical health. Despite the importance of understanding what determi...
Monday, March 07, 2022

The Life Cycle of Outrage

›
 I have to pass on this great piece by Mark Manson on the life cycle of a 'significant event'.  

A feeling of loss in the abstraction of all those beautiful things into streams and algorithms...

›
I pass on a single paragraph from A.O.Scott's recent essay "Shelf Life: Our Collections and the Passage of Time" and suggest ...
Friday, March 04, 2022

Listening to our bodies can make us more resilient to stress

›
Jane Brody points to work from Haas et al. suggesting that resilience is more about body awareness than rational thinking. In their experi...
Wednesday, March 02, 2022

AI-synthesized faces are indistinguishable from real faces and more trustworthy

›
A sobering open source aricle from Nightingale and Farid than suggests the impossibility of sorting our the real from the fake. Synthesized...
Monday, February 28, 2022

Seven Habits That Lead to Happiness in Old Age

›
I want to point to this self-help article by Arthur Brooks in The Atlantic, part of his 'How to Build a Life' series. It's bott...
Friday, February 25, 2022

Reconsidering evidence of moral contagion in online social networks

›
Burton et al. raise some cautions about recent studies seeming to show that inclusion of emotional terms in social media text messages incr...
Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Predictions help neurons, and the brain, learn

›
From the PNAS Journal Club , a review of a publication by Luczak et. al. that suggest that neurons might be able to predict their own futur...
Monday, February 21, 2022

Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics

›
An open source offering from Toker et al. that has a nice summary graphic.:   Significance What changes in the brain when we lose consci...
Friday, February 18, 2022

Illusory faces are more likely to be perceived as male than female

›
Interesting observations from Wardle et al. : Despite our fluency in reading human faces, sometimes we mistakenly perceive illusory faces ...
Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Our brains store concepts as sensory-motor and affective information

›
Fascinating work from Fernandino et al ., who show that concept representations are not independent of sensory-motor experience:  Significan...