Blogging on the Brain: May 13-20, 2006
Some recent brain blogging in review:
Chocolate is Cold Comfort: An interesting post from Mind Hacks about how chocolate may actually depress mood rather than elevate it. Should be interesting to see how this plays with the public, given there's a pretty entrenched popular opinion to the contrary...
The Genius covers an excellent talk by David Eagleman that we both saw this week. You're definitely familiar with visual illusions, but what about time illusions? If not, check out this summary...
The Microeconomics of Anticipation: Neurocritic reviews a popular news item this week, the "neurobiological substrates of dread."
What is "g"? Some thoughts: A very interesting post (and discussion!) about the nature of general intelligence, and to what extent we can think of it as being a cross-species construct as well.
Cognitive Flexibility: Eide Neurolearning covers a brand new and very interesting paper by Badre and Wagner in PNAS, called "computational and neurobiological mechanisms underlying cognitive flexibility."
Chances Are: A brief review of what looks like an excellent new book on the role of probability and statistics in our everyday lives... I know that the mere mention of the word "statistics" probably turns off many potential readers, but until you've read detailed information about statistics from a source _other_ than a textbook, you don't know what you're missing.
A really cool visual illusion found by the Neurophile.
A nice post from Thinking Meat on how dolphins actually create names for one another! As far as I know, this kind of behavior has not been previously observed in the wild.
Neuroweapons: A-Bomb of the Future? (Brain Waves)
For the more biologically inclined, a great review of the role of calcium in LTP & LTD over at Retrospectacle.
Chocolate is Cold Comfort: An interesting post from Mind Hacks about how chocolate may actually depress mood rather than elevate it. Should be interesting to see how this plays with the public, given there's a pretty entrenched popular opinion to the contrary...
The Genius covers an excellent talk by David Eagleman that we both saw this week. You're definitely familiar with visual illusions, but what about time illusions? If not, check out this summary...
The Microeconomics of Anticipation: Neurocritic reviews a popular news item this week, the "neurobiological substrates of dread."
What is "g"? Some thoughts: A very interesting post (and discussion!) about the nature of general intelligence, and to what extent we can think of it as being a cross-species construct as well.
Cognitive Flexibility: Eide Neurolearning covers a brand new and very interesting paper by Badre and Wagner in PNAS, called "computational and neurobiological mechanisms underlying cognitive flexibility."
Chances Are: A brief review of what looks like an excellent new book on the role of probability and statistics in our everyday lives... I know that the mere mention of the word "statistics" probably turns off many potential readers, but until you've read detailed information about statistics from a source _other_ than a textbook, you don't know what you're missing.
A really cool visual illusion found by the Neurophile.
A nice post from Thinking Meat on how dolphins actually create names for one another! As far as I know, this kind of behavior has not been previously observed in the wild.
Neuroweapons: A-Bomb of the Future? (Brain Waves)
For the more biologically inclined, a great review of the role of calcium in LTP & LTD over at Retrospectacle.
posted by Chris Chatham at 10:52:00 AM. Now go to the current Developing Intelligence blog!
2 Comments:
Thanks for the link. FYI, the dolphin story at Thinking Meat was a project I used to work on. (Mote Marine in Sarasota, FL). I went to undergrad at New College, in the same city. Most of our work was on manatees (mine was at least), vision and hearing. Interesting coincidence.
That's pretty neat. We used to joke about marine biologists, but now I have no idea why; seems like a pretty awesome job.
I can only imagine that it's easier than working with three-year olds, which is one of my current projects. It's nearly impossible to get them - particularly the boys - to pay attention, stop picking their noses, etc.
I've heard that there's an island populated just by scientists and macaques. You can go there and experiment on macaques that were reared in the wild. I've gotta find the name of this place, because it sounds like a legend; yet the info comes from a trusted source, so who knows.
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