Thursday, April 28, 2022

The cultural evolution of love in literary history

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An interesting article from Baumard et al. in Nature Human Behaviour: Since the late nineteenth century, cultural historians have noted th...
Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Are we seeing the beginning of World War III?

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Below, I am passing on some links to background reading for this Sunday's Austin Rainbow Forum (email forumaustin@gmail.com for informat...
Thursday, April 21, 2022

Insight from Jonathan Haidt - "After Babel"

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This article by Jonathan Haidt in the May 2022 print edition of The Atlantic is a long, frightening, and rewarding read. It lays out the me...
Monday, April 18, 2022

How the gut talks to the brain.

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Gabanyi et al. show that bacterial cell wall molecules that travel to the brain could trigger a host of behaviors. Here is the abstract of...
Friday, April 15, 2022

A magisterial summary of the new world disorder by David Brooks

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A few clips that attempt to summarize a David Brooks essay that does a beautiful job of putting all the pieces together: I can remember a ...
Wednesday, April 13, 2022

The Dance of Sleep

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Sleep and wakefulness are characterized by unique intrinsic activity patterns and are usually thought to be two distinct global states, with...
Monday, April 11, 2022

The road to our larger brains

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Bertrand et al. address the question of how and why mammals evolved large brain sizes relative to their body mass by characterizing the tim...
1 comment:
Friday, April 08, 2022

Humans don’t have culture because we’re smart, we’re smart because we have culture.

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The title of this post is a sentence taken from the final paragraph of Henrich's Perspective article in Science on the work of Thompson...
Wednesday, April 06, 2022

The Science of Consciousness - Tucson 2022

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For junkies of consciousness and altered states thereof, as in anesthesia or psychedelic-induced states, a browsing of the abstracts submitt...
2 comments:
Monday, April 04, 2022

Magic mind therapy….. Moving your body.

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Gretchen Reynolds interviews Jennifer Heisz about the contents of her new book " Move the Body, Heal the Mind ," which details t...
Friday, April 01, 2022

Losing sleep with age.

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Jacobson and Hoyer summarize experiments of Li et al. : Humans spend approximately one-third of their lives asleep, but this is not distri...
Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Re-energizing the aged brain

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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...