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Gene for memory and IQ gives students low grades - life - 23 September 2009 - New Scientist
During the test, the cognitive benefits of the Met-158 mutation could have been masked by increased stress also associated with the variation.
Will We Eventually Upload Our Minds? | h+ Magazine
h+: What is your vision for the future of cognitive enhancement and neurotechnology in the next 20 years?
BK: Ultimately, we want to be free of the limitations of the human brain. There are just too many inherent difficulties in its kludgy design — pro
Rowing as a group increases pain thresholds : Not Exactly Rocket Science
Group activities, such as rowing in an 'eight', increases the pain thresholds of the individual athletes, compared to rowing alone. These raised thresholds are probably the result of endorphins, natural pain-killing chemicals that our brains release when
Mind Hacks: Splintered sexuality as a window on the brain
Curiously though, the article implies that, in sex research, brain imaging is the way forward while case studies of brain damaged patients are a thing of the past, when this couldn't be further from the truth.
We have learnt far more about the link bet
Mind Hacks: Stunning brain scans of 500-year-old mummies
[eerie] The Llullaillaco mummies are the spectacularly preserved bodies of three sacrificial children from a 500-year-old Inca civilisation found at more than 6,500m above sea level in the Peruvian Andes. I've just found a study that brain scanned the mum
Anticancer Compound Found In Common Plant: American Mayapple
Podophyllotoxin is found in Indian mayapple (Podophyllum emodii Wall.), American mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum L.), and other species. Podophyllotoxin and its derivatives are used in several commercially available pharmaceutical products such as the anti
Depression's Evolutionary Roots: Scientific American
what could be so useful about depression? Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also
Are the Brains of Reckless Teens More Mature Than Those of Their Prudent Peers?: Scientific American
Psychologists have long believed that the brain's judgment-control systems develop more slowly than emotion-governing systems, not maturing until people are in their mid-20s. Hence, teens end up taking far more risks than adults do. Evidence supporting th
More Obesity Blues: Obese People Are At Greater Risk For Developing Alzheimer's, Study Finds
obese people had 8 percent less brain tissue than people with normal weight, while overweight people had 4 percent less tissue. According to Thompson, who is also a member of UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, this is the first time anyone has establishe
ScienceDirect - Neurotoxicology and Teratology : White matter integrity in adolescents with histories of marijuana use and binge drinking
Binge-drinking adolescents who smoke marijuana have less neuropathology than those who don't
The Brain: The Dark Matter of the Human Brain | Memory, Emotions, & Decisions | DISCOVER Magazine
[this is very good]
Meet the forgotten 90 percent of your brain: glial cells, which outnumber your neurons ten to one. And no one really knows what they do.
Basics - Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop - NYTimes.com
Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist who studies stress at Stanford University School of Medicine, said, “This is a great model for understanding why we end up in a rut, and then dig ourselves deeper and deeper into that rut.”
The truth is, Dr. Sapolsky sai
Chinese Acupuncture Affects Brain's Ability To Regulate Pain, UM Study Shows
These findings could spur a new direction in the field of acupuncture research following recent controversy over large studies showing that sham acupuncture is as effective as real acupuncture in reducing chronic pain.
"Interestingly both acupuncture a
Einstein's Brain and the Magic Flute | h+ Magazine
Are psychosis and creativity the same thing? While the neuregulin 1 gene suggests an association between psychosis and creativity, Jeremy Hall remains skeptical, "There's always been this slightly romantic idea that madness and genius are the flipside to
MIT researchers: The mind's eye scans like a spotlight - MIT News Office
Picower Institute postdoctoral associate and co-author Timothy J. Buschman found that the spotlight of the mind's eye shifted focus at 25 times a second and that this process of switching was regulated by brain waves.
Artist's vision: Decode color perception - The Boston Globe
At the moment, Conway, who still spends half his time making art at his Cambridge studio, is fixated on color. Many artists go through such phases - Picasso's famous "blue period" was followed by his "rose period" - but Conway is going deeper. He's lookin
Personal Values Color Understanding Of Sentences Within Milliseconds
Moral-ethical and political beliefs colour the way people read opinion questions. This ‘colouring’ process takes place well before people become aware of their answers to such questions.
Less Wrong: Why You're Stuck in a Narrative
Essentially, the narrative fallacy is our tendency to turn everything we see into a story - a linear chain of cause and effect, with a beginning and an end. Obviously the real world isn't like this - events are complex and interrelated, direct causation i
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Cognitively, it's much cheaper to interpret a group of things as a story - a pattern - than to remember each one of them seperately. Simplifying, summarizing, clustering, and chaining ideas together - reducing complex data to a few key factors, lets us get away with, say having an extremely small working memory, or a relatively slow neuron firing speed. Compression of some sort is needed for our brains to function - it'd be impossible to analyze the terabytes of data we receive every second from our senses otherwise. As such, we naturally reduce everything to the simplest pattern possible, and then process the pattern.
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lower level biases. For instance, the availability heuristic causes us to make predictions and inferences based on what most quickly comes to mind - what's most easily remembered. Hindsight bias causes us to interpret past events as obviously and inevitably causing future ones. Consistency bias causes us to reinterpret past events and behaviors to be consistent with new information. Confirmation bias causes us to only look for data to support the conclusions we've already arrived at. There's also our tendency to engage in rationalization, and create post-hoc explanations for our behavior. They all have the effect of of molding, shaping, and simplifying events into a kind of linear narrative, ignoring any contradiction, complexity, and general messiness.
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Culture Wars | Mind, brain and self in the age of Facebook
Are our brains being restructured? Probably they are, but is this a relevant question? Before the invention of writing, bards and poets of the oral tradition had to learn huge poems the size of the Iliad – no-one does this any more, so you could say that
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a leading neuroscientist, addressed a House of Lords committee on the subject and raised important questions and concerns.
Why are people using these sites? What are the dangers to children’s brains? She drew out five areas of risk for their lordships to consider: Human brains are very plastic and children’s brains particularly so – these sites may pose a threat to their development; the persistent use of this technology may change who we all are fundamentally; children may lose the ability to read other people’s emotions and the capacity to make real friends; screen culture may be related to the rates of autism and ADHD; and that screen culture may also make all of us shallower.
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children do not have the chances to go out and make friends in the ways they once did. Children use different methods of achieving different things and this technology is a part of it. Watching TV for long periods has been displaced among children by use of other screen-based activities. Will we all be lonely and disembodied? Social networking is part of people’s attempt to build what is called social capital. It is part of the strategies people have to maintain relationships with others and could be said to produce more social contact, not less. If you have friends already and want to keep in better touch with them, then Facebook et al are a good idea. If you are already lonely then spending your time on Facebook is not such a good idea.
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How Chronic Stress Leads To Bad Choices - By Restructuring The Brain
help to explain why so many times stress-related diseases are associated with addictive or compulsive behaviour. But also, in a stress-dominated society like ours, to understand how constant stress can directly affect our choices can help to develop mecha
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help to explain why so many times stress-related diseases are associated with addictive or compulsive behaviour. But also, in a stress-dominated society like ours, to understand how constant stress can directly affect our choices can help to develop mechanism to deal with it, a particularly important issue, for example, for army personnel in war zones
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