The Curious Engineer

Deric's MindBlog

2014–2018

1,359 posts

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2018 254

December 2018

  1. Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons.." abstracted - Part 1 - The Technological Challenge
  2. Reimagining the human
  3. Brain biomarkers for resilience - executive frontal lobe activity
  4. Blood proteins are different in people who exercise.
  5. A Seasonal Offering...
  6. "Meaningful Life" science - a tonic for our times?
  7. Brain correlates of successful cognitive aging.
  8. Corruption of online social systems by Bots
  9. More on slowing down aging.
  10. Can we really inherit trauma?
  11. Bad news on human nature - a listicle
  12. Septuagenarians with the bodies of 25-year-olds
  13. Stop talking about 'male' and 'female' brains.
  14. Testing theories of sex differences and autism with big data.
  15. Watching memories change the brain - a challenge to the traditional view
  16. The coding of perception in language is not universal.
  17. The neuroscience of hugs.
  18. Limited prosocial effects of meditation.
  19. How stress changes our brains' blood flow.
  20. More on the sociopathy of social media.
  21. Our brains are prediction machines. Friston's free-energy principle

November 2018

  1. Being a Beast Machine: The Somatic Basis of Selfhood
  2. A molecular basis for the placebo effect.
  3. Factoids about an ideal gas.
  4. Impacts of outdoor artificial light on plant and animal species.
  5. Dietary fat: From foe to friend?
  6. Social learning circuits in the brain.
  7. Conversation with your angry uncle over Thanksgiving - a chat bot.
  8. Top-down and Bottom-up causation in the emergence of complexity.
  9. REM sleep in naps and memory consolidation in typical and Down syndrome children.
  10. The ecstasy of speed - or leisure?
  11. Practicing gratitude, kindness, and compassion - can our i-devices help?
  12. Self driving cars will have to decide who should live and who should die.
  13. Biomarkers of inflamation are lower in people with more positive emotions
  14. New longevity vitamins?
  15. Are we getting too hysterical about the dangers of artificial intelligence?
  16. Even a 10 minute walk can boost your brain
  17. Facebook language predicts depression in medical records.
  18. Advancing front of old-age human survival
  19. The human herd and its digital overlords.
  20. Might tribal conflict fatigue lead to a contagion of civility and kindness ?
  21. Core mechanisms undermining liberal democracy.
  22. A review of body effects of mindfulness meditation
  23. Are you holding your breath?

October 2018

  1. The evolution of overconfidence
  2. Self-care and finding personal peace in today's socio-political climate.
  3. DNA variants linked to same sex behavior.
  4. Diffusion in networks and the virtue of burstiness
  5. Musicians' enhanced auditory perception depends on the instrument they play.
  6. Seeing something that is not there - our brain retroactively constructs our reality.
  7. An average person can recognize 5,000 faces.
  8. What is the last question?
  9. It's better to be born rich than gifted.
  10. Trump Anxiety Disorder
  11. Feeling unsafe in a safe world - the unsafety theory of stress
  12. Health of fathers influences the well-being of their progeny.
  13. Too much or too little sleep correlates with cognitive deficits.
  14. A new algorithm for predicting disease risk.
  15. Digital media and developing minds
  16. Where is free will in our brains?
  17. Sans Forgetica
  18. In praise of mediocrity
  19. Militarized police forces do not enhance safety or reduce crime, but do diminish police reputation.
  20. The number of neurons in the amygdala normally increases during development, but not in autism.
  21. Income inequality drives female sexualization.
  22. Daily fasting can improve health span and life span
  23. Constancy of the architecture of shame across cultures is due to biological, not cultural, evolution.

September 2018

  1. Anti-aging molecule produced during fasting.
  2. Is Democracy Dying? - Irrelevance of most humans in a technocratic future...
  3. The Flow Genome Project - modern snake oil? con?
  4. The war for our attention - an existential threat.
  5. Infants distinguish between leaders and bullies
  6. Giving Ecstasy to Octopuses
  7. Building molecular machines.
  8. Mapping our subjective feelings.
  9. Details of how a fear response is unlearned.
  10. Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization.
  11. How exercise slows Alzheimer’s disease.
  12. Robots R Us

August 2018

  1. MindBlog is on vacation Aug. 31 - Sept. 22
  2. Collective intelligence is improved by intermittent breaks in interaction.
  3. Robots exert peer pressure on children, but not adults.
  4. Reversing age related decay of brain plasticity with prozac
  5. On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit
  6. The architecture of pride is a cultural universal.
  7. Our divided brains
  8. Brain tracking of musical beat is enhanced by low frequency sounds.
  9. The false idols of wellness.
  10. Mesolimbic reward circuitry influences valuation of knowledge versus ignorance.
  11. Meditation quiets the ego? ….maybe just the opposite.
  12. The neuroscience of pessimism.
  13. More evidence against the transferable benefits of online brain training on cognitive function
  14. Rediscovering ancient greek music.
  15. Controlling drones with a body-machine interface.
  16. No gender differences in early math cognition.
  17. A ecosystem of podcast bros who want to optimize your life.
  18. Our weaponized social media
  19. How pupil mimicry promotes trust.
  20. Brain regions involved in compensating for lost body parts.
  21. Residential isolation of disadvantaged groups is not mitigated by extensive urban mobility.
  22. Chimps can psych out humans
  23. Enhanced brain activity associated with highly superior memory.

July 2018

  1. Are things getting better or worse?
  2. Piano training enhances speech perception.
  3. Mechanism of white matter changes induced by meditation?
  4. The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation
  5. When persistence doesn't pay - the sunk cost bias.
  6. Declining mental health among disadvantaged Americans.
  7. Therapy for NYTAD - read about citrus micro-jets!
  8. Crows make mental templates.
  9. Perceptual and judgement creep.
  10. Authentic lies.
  11. Social media and the emergence of violence during protests.
  12. What is consciousness, and could machines have it?
  13. Playing with proteins in virtual reality.
  14. Increasing despair among poor Americans.
  15. A fundamental advance in brain imaging techniques.
  16. Mindfulness training increases strength of right insula connections.
  17. Mortality rates level off at extreme age
  18. Brain imaging predicts who will be a good musical performer.
  19. Why are religious people trusted more?
  20. Seven creepy Facebook patents
  21. A patent for emotional robots?
  22. An optimistic outlook creates a rosy past.

June 2018

  1. Stress and autoimmune disease
  2. Social media and democracy
  3. The Philosophy we need: Personalism
  4. Mindfulness can lower your motivation.
  5. Deep origins of consciousness
  6. Brain EEG activity can predict who antidepressants will work on
  7. Old Italian violins imitate the human voice.
  8. Families and politics - curtailed conversations
  9. Tipping points in changing social conventions.
  10. The misunderstood sixth mass extinction
  11. Comparing human prefrontal cortex to that of other primates
  12. Evolutionary cognition - bees demonstrate an understanding of zero
  13. Jaron Lanier on why you should delete your social media accounts.
  14. What makes a man attractive?
  15. Socioeconomic status moderates age-related differences in brain organization throughout adulthood.
  16. Move into your virtual body avatar with just your hands and feet
  17. Social contagion of ethnic hostility.
  18. Placebo treatment facilitates social trust.
  19. The End of Humanism - Homo Deus
  20. More on the sociopathy of social media
  21. How much should A.I. frighten us?

May 2018

  1. A.I. needs to learn like a human child.
  2. Intelligent brains have more sparse and efficient nerve connections.
  3. The light and dark sides of friendship.
  4. Good things about a party drug (Ketamine).
  5. Why we itch more with aging.
  6. The microbiome regulates amygdala-dependent fear recall.
  7. Research on subjective well-being.
  8. Cognitive underpinnings of nationalistic ideology.
  9. Brain changes from adolescence to adulthood
  10. Has artificial intelligence become alchemy?
  11. Status threat explains 2016 presidential vote
  12. The effort paradox - Effort is both costly and valued
  13. Transparency is the mother of 'fake news'
  14. Industrial revolutions are political and social wrecking balls.
  15. How not to mind if someone is lying...
  16. More on the vagaries of expertise
  17. The illusion of skill acquisition.
  18. Protein synthesis in brain tissue is much higher than previously thought.
  19. Electrical brain stimulation enhances visual memory performance
  20. A morning cortisol pulse is crucial for normal cognitive and emotional responses.
  21. Sitting is bad for your brain...
  22. Brain signals predict who we will like in the future.
  23. You're as old as you feel...

April 2018

  1. A workshop on music and the brain.
  2. Risk tolerance is predicted by amygdala-prefrontal cortex connectivity
  3. Propagation of economic inequality through reciprocity and reputation.
  4. Seeing what you feel - unconscious affect drives perception
  5. Why exercise alone may not cause weight loss.
  6. How our "I" is like a virtual reality headset.
  7. Andy Clark on extended mind, A.I., and predictive processing
  8. Baby Boomers reaching the end of their To-Do list
  9. Basal forebrain and default mode network regulation.
  10. Scared by the news? Take the long view.
  11. Cracking the code relating speech prosody to social judgements.
  12. Locus Coeruleus integrity and memory in aging adults
  13. A.I. quantifies 100 years of gender and ethnic stereotypes.
  14. The contract with authoritarianism
  15. A small molecule for stroke therapy
  16. Why senior adults get lost more frequently than younger adults.
  17. We choose what we want to hear.
  18. Reprogramming fear responses outside of conscious awareness.
  19. If resources are scarce infants choose ingroup support over fairness.
  20. Is loneliness a health epidemic?
  21. Predicting the effectiveness of cognitive therapy with functional MRI

March 2018

  1. Young muscles and immune systems in aging cyclists.
  2. How is tech dividing us?
  3. Logic in babies.
  4. Different kinds of smiles elicit different physiological responses
  5. YouTube's A.I. finds that radicalization gets more ad revenue.
  6. The reputation age.
  7. Think you’re not a competitor? Think again.
  8. Brain coupling during holding hands correlates with pain reduction
  9. Being what we think we are.
  10. Rationalizing undesired change as soon as it takes effect.
  11. Dying for the group - a theory of extreme self-sacrifice
  12. We project our own spatial bias onto others.
  13. A Slow Thought Manifesto
  14. On social media lies spread faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth.
  15. Critical comment on Pinker's "Enlightenment Now"
  16. Pinker on humanism and human flourishing.
  17. Pinker on reason, and our presumed post-truth era
  18. The Future of Progress - return to the Middle Ages, or continuing upward curve?
  19. Pinker on progress
  20. Progressophobia
  21. Two very different worlds to live in.
  22. Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" - a must read book

February 2018

  1. Culture of Empathy
  2. Computerized Gaydar - a threat to privacy and safety of gay people
  3. Amygdala structure and defense of the social system.
  4. Our microbiome challenges our concept of self.
  5. When our eyes move, our eardrums move.
  6. Human cooperation in dynamic networks.
  7. Welcome to the post text future (of the new authoritarian state?)
  8. Ancient origins of walking on land - the walking skate.
  9. Computers no better than humans at predicting who should go to jail.
  10. Afraid of A.I.? Be very afraid of quantum computing....
  11. A Valentine's Day musical offering - Respighi's Intermezzo Serenata
  12. Mind treats on the web.
  13. “The rich are different from you and me..” - the psychology of inequality
  14. Our body tissues crosstalk during exercise.
  15. A Thursday musical offering... Charles Meyer - Valse Melancolique
  16. Brain correlates of our ability to think creatively
  17. MindBlog's 12th anniversary. Blogs as relics or rebirths?
  18. The blogging golden age
  19. Mental autonomy - developing a ‘culture of consciousness’.
  20. How to goose your memory.

January 2018

  1. Commentary on devolution of advanced societies towards tribalism.
  2. Corporate social responsibility to counter the sociopathy of capitalism?
  3. How our bones regulate our weight.
  4. Taming modern Frankensteins
  5. Preferences for moral vs. immoral traits in others are conditional
  6. Self protection from social media feedback.
  7. The ‘social genomes’ of friends are correlated.
  8. How much can we change our aging?
  9. Improving ourselves to death
  10. Explanation of fraternal birth order effect on sexual orientation.
  11. Benefits of talking to yourself.
  12. Old brains come uncoupled in sleep.
  13. How to detect that someone is sick.
  14. A Two-System Framework for understanding fear and anxiety.
  15. Demonstrating reciprocity on a global scale.
  16. Forget about major life extension - Aging is a fundamental feature of multicellular life
  17. Exercise alters the microbiome, enhancing immune function.
  18. Memories are stored by the extracellular matrix surrounding brain cells.
  19. The narcissism epidemic is dead?
  20. The temporal organization of perception.
  21. Facebook admits its sociopathic side. Are social media the drug epidemic of our times?
  22. How early stress exposure influences adult decision making.
  23. Pax Technica - the new web of world government

2017 264

December 2017

  1. When intuition overrides reason.
  2. On gratitude...
  3. Mind the Hype - Mindfulness and Meditation
  4. The 11 separate nations of the United States
  5. Autopilots and metastates of our brains.
  6. Detailed demographics from Google Street Views.
  7. Some morning Rachmaninoff - Fantasy Piece, in E, Op. 3. No. 3
  8. Wealth inequality as a law of nature.
  9. Skill networks and human capital.
  10. Positive stimuli blur time.
  11. Teaching A.I. to explain itself
  12. Debussy La plus que lente - a first musical offering from Austin Texas.
  13. Digital mass persuasion via psychological targeting.
  14. Trauma is passed over generations.
  15. How is American (and World) governance evolving?
  16. Dogs can smell our happiness and fear.
  17. How Evil is Tech?
  18. Trust and cooperation across societies.
  19. The emotional political base supporting the consolidation of the U.S. plutocracy.
  20. A mind reading machine?
  21. Bringing big science to psychology

November 2017

  1. Speed of processing training results in lower risk of dementia
  2. Behavior modification empires.
  3. People who seek solitude are more creative.
  4. How to turn conservatives into liberals.
  5. Common cause of jihad and the Alt-Right
  6. How gratitude changes you and your brain.
  7. A debate on the pros and cons of aging and death.
  8. Building artificial intelligence that can build artificial intelligence
  9. Buddhism is more Western than you think.
  10. The emotional intelligence of one- to four-year-olds
  11. America is facing an epistemic crisis
  12. Improving brain function by shocking it.
  13. How linguistic metaphor scaffolds reasoning
  14. Arousal versus relaxation in meditative practices.
  15. Self as object: Trends in Self Research
  16. For your brain's sake, keep moving.
  17. Where our brains perceive social interactions.
  18. Modern flimflam men? - The Flow Genome Project
  19. Focus on present predicts enhanced life satisfaction but not happiness
  20. Cognitive reflection in men impaired by single testosterone dose
  21. The split brain revisited - a new perspective
  22. Gut reasons to brush your teeth.

October 2017

  1. Smiles of reward, affiliation, and dominance.
  2. Rethinking our conceptions of mental life.
  3. “Let’s Get Togetherism.”
  4. How Fiction Becomes Fact on Social Media.
  5. Do intelligent robots need emotion?
  6. Different kinds of mindfulness correlate with different benefits.
  7. The “sense of self” in Biblical times.
  8. The coming dark age…or a new integration?
  9. Coordination of brain waves between humans facing territorial threats.
  10. Like apes and small children, ravens plan ahead.
  11. The Premortem
  12. A sobering political graphic
  13. Does acupuncture work by re-mapping the brain?
  14. A 'Gaydar' machine?
  15. Brain and body imaging of the emotional power of poetry.
  16. MindBlog has moved to Austin Texas.
  17. Price modulates the effectiveness of your pain medication!
  18. Transcending tribalism - crafting a new vision for America?
  19. MindBlog's book abstracts.
  20. Curtailing proactive policing can reduce major crime.
  21. Brain circuits that modulate sociability.
  22. You want younger or older?
  23. This year's Ig Nobel prizes.

September 2017

  1. Does it matter whether we believe in free will or not?
  2. Greater internet use does not correlate with faster growth of political polarization.
  3. “No problem” vs “you’re welcome”
  4. The science of emotion - now at least 27 categories of emotional states.
  5. Will you be above or below “the API” in the emerging economy?
  6. Color naming across languages reflects color use
  7. Separate prefrontal areas code desirability versus availability.
  8. How we see what we expect to see.
  9. Computer design cues taken from human brains
  10. It’s all about tribes - not ideas, morals, or principles.
  11. The intractability of racial discrimination
  12. Neuroforecasting crowd funding outcomes
  13. Do Americans care about rising inequality?
  14. How to regulate Artificial Intelligence
  15. How “ought” exceeds but implies “can”
  16. Debate over a scientific wellness study.
  17. Oxytocin reduces xenophobic outgroup rejection.
  18. Evaluation of brain training programs.
  19. American Nirvana
  20. Washing away your sins in the brain.
  21. Mindfulness management of stress and inflammation

August 2017

  1. How to make time slow down.
  2. An essay on the real problem of consciousness.
  3. A magic bullet to restore our brain's plasticity?
  4. Are people really unconcerned about rising economic inequality?
  5. Mammalian empathy: neural basis and behavioral manifestations
  6. Forget about our brains, even the most simple nerve networks defy understanding.
  7. Different flavors of artificial intelligence - and, can we pull the plug?
  8. Race based biases in deception judgements.
  9. Beyond anger.
  10. Hold your nose to prevent obesity?
  11. Our broken economy, in one simple chart
  12. Neural correlates of the positive effects of gratitude.
  13. Exposure to and recall of violence reduce short-term memory and cognitive control
  14. Leisure just as enjoyable before as after work is done.
  15. Perception of being overweight predicts future health and well-being
  16. In group favoritism shown by 17 month old infants.
  17. Redistribution is supported by compassion, envy, and self interest, but not sense of fairness.
  18. Smiles for love, sympathy, and war.
  19. Why it's a bad idea to tell students that words are violence
  20. A positive mood from listening to music broadens our auditory attention.
  21. Default mode network and the wandering mind.
  22. The real threat of artificial intelligence
  23. Buying time promotes happiness.

July 2017

  1. Cognitive reappraisal in frontal cortex underlies placebo analgesia.
  2. Different languages use different systems of nerve cells.
  3. The world’s laziest countries.
  4. The brain circuits of a winner.
  5. When is stress good for you?
  6. Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks.
  7. Rejuvenating brain plasticity
  8. A.I. algorithms analyze the mood of the masses.
  9. Trust is heritable, whereas distrust is not
  10. A new ‘alternative’ culture?
  11. Nature experience reduces our brain rumination.
  12. Politics and the English Language - George Orwell
  13. Can utopianism be rescued?
  14. When the appeal of a dominant leader is greater than a prestige leader.
  15. Damaging in utero effects of low socioeconomic status.
  16. Our nutrition modulates our cognition.
  17. Working memory isn’t just in the frontal lobes.
  18. Cognitive control as a double-edged sword.
  19. Describing aging - metastability in senescence
  20. The human fetus engages face like stimuli.
  21. Neural measures reveal lower social conformity among non-religious individuals.

June 2017

  1. Maybe Trump’s behavior is explained by a simple Machine Learning (A.I.) algorithm.
  2. Mechanism of adult brain changes caused by early life stress.
  3. Positive trends over time in personality traits as well as in intelligence.
  4. It's complicated....more on Sapolsky's new book.
  5. Why it is impossible to tune a piano.
  6. Sorting out complex thoughts and messy emotions
  7. Dogs can know what you know.
  8. Metabolic and physical decline that occurs during aging promoted by a DNA repair enzyme.
  9. A conclusion from one of my lectures.
  10. Some outstanding books on the biology of our behaviors.
  11. Watching our brains construct linguistic phrases
  12. Brain-to-Brain symmetry tracks classroom interactions.
  13. Our mental models predict emotion transitions.
  14. A chemical link between early life stress and adult schizophrenia
  15. You're less likely to check facts in a social media crowd than when alone.
  16. Cracking the brain's code for facial identity.
  17. Trust and the poverty trap.
  18. The heart trumps the head : Desirability bias in political belief revision.
  19. Opioids regulate oxytocin enhancement of social attention.
  20. Visual category selectivity is innate.
  21. Preferences for group dominance underlie social inequality and violence across societies
  22. The wisdom of crowds for visual search.

May 2017

  1. Listener evaluations of new and old Italian violins
  2. Solitary discourse yields deeper understanding than solitary description.
  3. Detecting both facial and olfactory cues of sickness in others
  4. Optimal incentives for collective intelligence
  5. Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth
  6. A moralistic bias in our default representation of what is possible.
  7. Osteoarthritis attenuated by removing senescent cells.
  8. The Science of Consciousness
  9. Our brains have an innate knowledge of tools.
  10. The invisibility cloak illusion - You're too focused on what you're focused on.
  11. Increasing honesty in humans with noninvasive brain stimulation
  12. The fading American dream in a nutshell...
  13. Our spatial memory is driven by perceived animacy of simple shapes.
  14. Semantics and the science of fear - the amygdala doesn't 'cause' fear.
  15. What we perceive depends on how much it costs us.
  16. Has Trump stolen philosophy’s critical tools?
  17. Details of our brain's upstairs-downstairs emotion regulation.
  18. Brain correlates of third person perspective improving interactions with criticism.
  19. Histone variants promote vulnerability to depressive behaviors
  20. Watching the brain think about friends.
  21. From learning to instinct
  22. The Nature Fix
  23. Brain stimulation enhances memory.

April 2017

  1. Brain-heart dialogue shows how racism hijacks perception
  2. Underestimating the value of being in another person's shoes.
  3. MindBlog is moving to Austin. Texas
  4. Reading what the mind thinks from how the eye sees.
  5. Brooks on "The crisis of Western Civilization"
  6. A.I. better at predicting heart attacks, learns implicit racial and gender bias.
  7. Study suggests social media are not contributing to political polarization.
  8. How to feel good - and how feeling good can be bad for you.
  9. Scratching is contagious.
  10. Is "The Stack" the way to understand everything?
  11. Anterior temporal lobe and the representation of knowledge about people
  12. Lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s presidency.
  13. How exercise calms anxiety.
  14. The calming effect of breathing.
  15. Brain correlates of information virality
  16. Three sources of cancer - the importance of “bad luck”
  17. How "you" makes meaning.
  18. Religiosity and social support
  19. Wiser than than the crowd.
  20. Several takes on extending our lives.

March 2017

  1. Preverbal foundations of human fairness
  2. The best exercise for aging muscles
  3. Brain systems specialized for knowing our place in the pecking order
  4. Termite castles, human minds, and Daniel Dennett.
  5. Ownership of an artificial limb induced by electrical brain stimulation
  6. Predicting the knowledge–recklessness distinction in the human brain
  7. Warping reality in the era of Trump - some interesting essays
  8. Is the body the missing link for truly intelligent machines?
  9. What is really going on in the White House?
  10. Emergence of communities and diversity in social networks
  11. Materialism alone can't explain consciousness? A flawed argument.
  12. Half of the conclusions in psychology and cognitive neuroscience papers are wrong.
  13. Well-being increased by imagining time as scarce.
  14. Impeachara
  15. Minding the details of mind wandering.
  16. Humans can do echolocation
  17. Exercise slows the aging of heart cells.
  18. Meditating mice!
  19. A higher-order theory of emotional consciousness
  20. We look like our names.
  21. The Trump vortex - social media as a cancer
  22. Crony beliefs
  23. Evolutionary psychology explains why facts don't change people's minds.
  24. Opposite Effects of Recent History on Perception and Decision
  25. Theory of cortical function

February 2017

  1. Universality of the cognitive architecture of pride.
  2. Monday morning Schubert
  3. Vitamin B3 (Niacin) protects from glaucoma
  4. Scientific curiosity counters politically motivated reasoning.
  5. Will the “Anthropocene Era” concept slow or accelerate human impact on our planet?
  6. Decision-making: Judges' decisions not so legal
  7. Musical evolution in the lab exhibits rhythmic universals
  8. OhMyGawd....
  9. The purpose of sleep? To forget.
  10. Hacking the brain to overcome fear
  11. Gender stereotypes emerge early.
  12. How our brains make meaning, with the help of a little LSD
  13. An emotional experience can enhance future memory formation.
  14. Kind words in language - changes over time
  15. Mysterianism
  16. Feel good fractals.
  17. Why our supermarket tomatoes are sturdy and flavorless.
  18. MindBlog’s 11th anniversary…some statistics.
  19. Artificial intelligence: Machines that reason
  20. The origins of happiness
  21. Are human-specific plastic cortical synaptic connections what makes us human?

January 2017

  1. An individual's ultimate economic burden can be forecast in childhood
  2. The uniformity illusion.
  3. Regression to the mean - Why we would all be better off if we ignored Trump’s tweets
  4. Smartphone reprogramming of our brains?
  5. Gender and the conflation of equality and sameness
  6. Knowing how confidently we know
  7. How our evolutionary psychology elected Donald Trump.
  8. The deepening of our cultural echo chambers.
  9. The immensity of the vacated present.
  10. A fitness downside to statin drugs?
  11. Research on consequences of low socioeconomic status becoming a small industry.
  12. Positivity in older adults is more related to cognitive decline than to emotion regulation.
  13. Seeing faces of young black boys facilitates identification of threatening stimuli.
  14. The milliseconds of a choice - Watching your mind when it matters.
  15. People who move more are happier.
  16. From Power to Inaction.
  17. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Psychology.
  18. Dual streams of speech processing.
  19. The effect of status on stress depends on the stability of the hierarchy.
  20. What is different about the brains of “superagers”?
  21. How to market the reality of climate change more effectively.
  22. I used to be a human being - how technology almost killed me.

2016 271

December 2016

  1. Resetting the clock of aging - at least in mice.
  2. Killing old cells to stay young.
  3. Creative versus destructive chaos in Trump-land. Is there a ray of hope?
  4. Artificial intelligence ups its game
  5. Making the world nicer is a tough slog - two organizations trying.
  6. Our automated jobless future.
  7. A stark graphic - the income gap continues to widen.
  8. Our Arthropod housemates.
  9. Reducing future fears by suppressing episodic simulation in the brain.
  10. Can evolution have a 'higher purpose'?
  11. Political tribes, and the psychology of liberals and conservatives.
  12. Bad things that happen to annoyingly happy people...
  13. Why does time fly when you’re having fun? Dopamine neurons…
  14. Feeling confident that you know? fMRI correlates of metacognitive accuracy.
  15. Oxytocin, moral judgement, and male social synchony
  16. Exhaustion is not unique to our overstimulated age.
  17. The rage against the elites...
  18. We should ask our elders how best to live.
  19. Protecting and reactivating memories
  20. Reversing the effect of booze on the brain.
  21. The brain adapts to dishonesty.
  22. Genetic variants linked to education predict longevity

November 2016

  1. Genetic correlates of social deprivation and household income
  2. More exercise, less depression.
  3. Networks of conforming or nonconforming individuals always reach a satisfactory state
  4. Online social interaction associated with reduced mortality risk.
  5. Stock trading - gut feelings help with risky decisions.
  6. The teenage brain and the pleasure of “likes”
  7. Social media's globe-shaking power.
  8. Sex differences in brain regulation of aggression
  9. Are your emotions 'Black and White' or 'Shades of Gray'? - Brain correlates.
  10. Thoughts about Dying in America.
  11. Our working memory modulates our conscious access to suppressed threatening information.
  12. View a flickering stimulus before you try to read fine print…
  13. Why do people in big cities move faster?
  14. Social class and attentiveness to others.
  15. Explaining gender differences in anxiety.
  16. The presidential election has spawned an effusion of interesting essays - a sampling
  17. Political ideology and pathogen avoidance across 30 nations
  18. How to get beyond our tribal politics.
  19. Facebook use associated with a longer life?
  20. Social motion, social bonds, and exercise.
  21. Wikipedia - a possible antidote for the pathologies of the internet?
  22. Paradoxical thinking intervention can moderate attitudes in violent times

October 2016

  1. I can't resist passing this on..... Trump Sandwich
  2. Questioning the universality of a facial emotional expression.
  3. Lifespan adversity and later adulthood telomere length.
  4. More evidence on exercise delaying later life dementia
  5. Men are more friendly after conflict than women.
  6. Issues or Identity? Cognitive foundations of voter choice.
  7. What kind of exercise is best for the brain?
  8. Most effective learning?... sleep between two practice sessions
  9. You're gonna die....
  10. Testosterone in men is associated with status enhancing behaviors.
  11. The brain basis of numerical thinking is different in congenitally blind people.
  12. 3-year olds infer social norms from single actions.
  13. Our most simple sensory decisions show confirmation bias.
  14. The decline of self, intimacy, and friendships
  15. When fairness matters less than we expect.
  16. Do "Brain-Training" programs work? - the latest installment of the debate
  17. Some brain benefits of exercise evaporate after a short rest.
  18. A way to change adult behaviors - debiasing decisions.
  19. MindBlog, hurricane Matthew, and a personal note
  20. A way to change adolescent behaviors?
  21. Avalanche of Distrust
  22. Decoding spontaneous emotional states in our brains.
  23. Science in the age of selfies

September 2016

  1. More great news: Our brains are polluted with environmental magnetite.
  2. Recollecting details improves future performance
  3. Insight into intergroup conflict - defense trumps aggression
  4. Election Stress Disorder
  5. A hedonism hub in the human brain.
  6. Dreams and revelations.
  7. Treating trans-generational stress with probiotics...
  8. Biofeedback to chill out your amygdala’s hyper-reactivity?
  9. Scientific studies show....
  10. Defining brain areas involved in music perception.
  11. Predicting false memories with fMRI
  12. Self-regulation via neural simulation
  13. A psychological mechanism to explain why childhood adversity diminishes adult health?
  14. The ecstasy of speed - or leisure?
  15. Mind and Body - A neural substrate of psychosomatic illness
  16. Want to predict a group’s social standing? Get a hormonal profile.
  17. Reason is not required for a life of meaning.
  18. Brain network characteristics of highly intelligent people.
  19. Feeling Good? Do something unpleasant.
  20. Do your friends really like you?
  21. Growing Older, Getting Happier
  22. Everything we eat both cures and causes cancer.

August 2016

  1. Climate disasters act as threat multipliers in ethnic conflicts.
  2. Our self and our temporo-parietal junction
  3. Psychological disruptions of our online lives.
  4. A bit of nostalgia - Powers of 10
  5. Alerting or Somnogenic light - pick your color
  6. Oxytocin - a molecular substrate for forming optimistic beliefs about the future
  7. Slow motion increases perceived intent.
  8. Lifespan changes in brain and cognition - early life sets the stage.
  9. Neural link between affective understanding and interpersonal attraction
  10. Statistics versus judgement.
  11. How China is changing your internet.
  12. The long lives of fairy tales.
  13. Brain changes during hypnosis
  14. Why do people infer “ought” from “is”?
  15. How our brain and visceral monitoring encode the ‘self’
  16. Leave the kids alone! A cognitive case for un-parenting
  17. Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness.
  18. A brain area crucial to coping with stress.
  19. To remember something better, wait, then exercise.
  20. Distinguishing brain correlations from causes.
  21. Competition does not improve quality of work.
  22. Turn-taking skills unique to humans?
  23. Zapping your brain at home.

July 2016

  1. Worldwide internet access from light based wireless communication
  2. Abstract thinking in newborn ducklings!
  3. Brain scans are prone to false positives.
  4. A must see Rube Goldberg machine
  5. The intractability of implicit beliefs
  6. Our sociability correlates with epigenetic oxytocin gene modifications.
  7. Cultural differences in music perception
  8. Oxytocin both bonds and divides the sexes.
  9. Placebo effects in brain training
  10. Consciousness is the brain messing with itself.
  11. Insurance makes sellers of services dishonest.
  12. Who blames the victim?
  13. Social support, stress, and the aging brain
  14. Is Donald Trump's frontostriatal connectivity weakened?
  15. A non-linguistic brain network for mathematics.
  16. Turning out the vote.
  17. Endogenous opioids are not involved in meditation based pain relief
  18. The secrets to a long and happy life.
  19. Why we become more cautious with age.
  20. A simple model for why moderate beliefs rarely prevail.
  21. The Myth of Cosmopolitanism
  22. How exercise enhances brain renewal and growth.

June 2016

  1. Cognitive fatigue increases impulsivity.
  2. The brain makes maps of abstract realms.
  3. Training our brains without our awareness.
  4. Much ado about grit.
  5. Why do Greek statues have such small penises?
  6. Think less, think better.
  7. Smartphone Era Politics
  8. Confronting the prejudiced brain
  9. Predicting whether you are going to vote.
  10. Yes, there have been aliens.
  11. The mistrust of science
  12. Our (Bare) Shelves, Our Selves
  13. Vision reconstructs causal history from static shapes.
  14. A postdictive illusion of choice.
  15. Reducing stress induced inflammatory disease with bacteria.
  16. Unethical amnesia
  17. The attention economy
  18. A redefinition of health and well-being for older adults
  19. Why do we feel awe?
  20. Is humanity getting better?
  21. Telephone metadata does reveal personal details.
  22. A science of consciousness carnival in Tucson.

May 2016

  1. Sentiments on cynicism and hope.
  2. Exercise and intermittent fasting improve brain plasticity and health
  3. Are electric vehicles really better for the planet?
  4. Culture shapes the evolution of cognition.
  5. A model for aggression and violence around the world.
  6. The Dalai Lama’s Atlas of emotions
  7. When philosophy lost its way.
  8. This is how fascism comes to America
  9. Brain modules that process human consensus decision-making
  10. Aerobic fitness: one minute of all out effort = 45 min. of moderate effort
  11. America in decline?
  12. Downsides of diversity.
  13. Two ways to be satisfied.
  14. John Oliver on "Scientific Studies show...."
  15. Diversity makes you brighter.
  16. What art unveils
  17. Our brain activity at rest predicts our performance on tasks.
  18. The key to political persuasion
  19. Our perception of our body shape is very malleable - making your finger feel shorter.
  20. What happens if we all live to 100?
  21. Semantic maps in our brains - and some interactive graphics
  22. Video games for Neuro-Cognitive Optimization
  23. Embodied Prediction - perception and mind turned upside down

April 2016

  1. The privileged fifth.
  2. Sleep deprivation, brain structure, and learning
  3. Grandiose narcissism and the U.S. presidency
  4. Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?
  5. Essential role of default mode network in higher cognitive processing.
  6. How to attract others.
  7. Impulsivity, sensation seeking, and substance use correlate with reduced brain cortical thickness.
  8. Metaphorical conflict shapes social perception when spatial and ideological collide.
  9. Political polarization and prejudice.
  10. How to change prejudice...for real this time
  11. Brain correlates of how the risk taking of others influences our own risk taking
  12. Aging brains - more physical activity, more gray matter, less Alzheimers.
  13. Distraction in the digital era….what about since 1710?
  14. The evolutionary origins of smiles, laughter, and tears.
  15. Another list - "Keys to happiness"
  16. A succinct list of some of our common psychological errors.
  17. Muscle mass and nerve control enhanced in octogenarian athletes.
  18. Why sad music can make us feel good.
  19. The Social Gene
  20. Pterostilbene anti-aging supplement - undesirable side effects
  21. Are we all sexists and racists?

March 2016

  1. Another social science, Economics, looks at itself.
  2. Overkill in techno-aids for 'Mens Sana in Corpore Sano'
  3. Storing long term emotional memories.
  4. Screenagers - brain executive function immediately diminished by television
  5. Our progression towards a nation of rich and poor
  6. Suppressing memory of trauma causes forgetting of other memories.
  7. Vasopressin increases human risky cooperative behavior
  8. Pictures of green spaces make you happier.
  9. Rachmaninoff Morceaux de fantasie Op. 3, No. 4, Polichinelle
  10. Anxiety suppresses prefrontal cortex decision ability.
  11. Impatience, aging, and leukocyte telomere length.
  12. Political Substance Abuse: Donald Trump in Florida
  13. Seasonality in human cognitive brain responses
  14. Rachmaninoff Morceaux de fantasie Op. 3 No. 1 Elegie
  15. Our brains remember the good stuff.
  16. Brain games and driving safely.
  17. Wearing a bike helmet increases risk taking.
  18. Brahms Waltzes Op. 39, Nos. 1,13,14
  19. Stephen Wolfram on A.I. and the future of civilization
  20. Repeated social defeat causes neuroinflammation and memory impairment.
  21. Punishment of others: decreased by status in the West, increased in the East
  22. More on clever crows - they learn shell games.
  23. Chopin Trois Eccossaises
  24. New nerve cells in the brain generated best by sustained aerobic exercise
  25. This is too good not to pass on.....
  26. If all the world's a stage, do we have a true self?
  27. "Well-being" as a practiced skill
  28. Getting rid of old cells extends lifespan of mice and ameliorates age-related diseases.

February 2016

  1. A brain circuit for loneliness.
  2. Winning a competition predicts dishonest behavior.
  3. Abnormal cortical folding correlates with trait anxiety.
  4. Moralistic gods enhance sociality.
  5. Creative cognition and brain network dynamics.
  6. A mindfulness meditation intervention enhances connectivity of brain executive and default modes and lowers inflammation markers.
  7. Forming Beliefs: Why Valence Matters.
  8. A neural crossroads of psychiatric illnesses as a target for therapeutic brain stimulation
  9. Finally...a brain area specialized for music has been found.
  10. A 50 year misunderstanding of how we decide to initiate action - our intuition is valid
  11. Our eye movements are coupled to our heartbeats.
  12. What makes political leaders influential?
  13. Linking sustained attention to brain connectivity.
  14. Everybody's a critic. And that's how it should be.
  15. Fantasies of the Future
  16. Our digital presence.
  17. Consciousness as the product of carefully balanced chaos.
  18. Inequality and facing the future.
  19. The neuroscience of poverty.
  20. The burden of obesity revisited.
  21. The 8 second attention span.

January 2016

  1. Fourth Industrial Revolution?? Maybe not.....
  2. Predicting the Future: The Fourth Industrial Revolution
  3. The ascendant candidacy of Donald J. Trump
  4. Social relationships and biomarkers of longevity across our life span.
  5. The evolution of dance
  6. On teaching old dogs new tricks.
  7. Several perspectives on the valuation of outgroups.
  8. Paying attention to your body can increase resilience to stress
  9. Biochemical individuality obsoletes many dietary recommendations and the glycemic index.
  10. Posthumanism - the quantification craze and the death of beauty
  11. Homosexuality as a discrete class.
  12. Another installment on anti-aging chemistry - pterostilbene
  13. How to be bad together - Punishing pro-social behavior.
  14. Purity, Disgust and Donald Trump
  15. Our strongest prejudice - partisan hostility
  16. How learning shapes the empathic brain.
  17. Virtual reality going mainstream will enhance our understanding of consciousness.
  18. How our brains change during the day.
  19. Nature's warning system.
  20. Higher inequality correlates with less generous rich people.
  21. A positive tonic: Human Progress Quantified
  22. Boosting our brain plasticity.

2015 286

December 2015

  1. Negative evaluation of counterstereotypical people by conservatives maintains their sense of certainty
  2. Dorsal and Ventral Right Brain Pathways for Prosody
  3. Brain mitochondria function links anxiety with social subordination.
  4. Socioeconomic status, inflammatory reactivity, and social support.
  5. The need for affiliation - communities of kindness
  6. Empathy is a choice, and can be trained.
  7. Male and female brains do not constitute two distinct categories.
  8. Good news for the grumpy.
  9. Loneliness hurts.
  10. A special issue of Science Magazine on aging.
  11. Exercise helps your brain rewire.
  12. Why doesn't economic growth lead to more happiness?
  13. Modest exercise gives maximum health benefits.
  14. Coffee consumption correlates with lower risk of dying.
  15. Exercise enhances frontal brain lateralization characteristic of younger brains.
  16. Mindfulness meditation and pain reduction.
  17. Gender bias in the attribution of creativity
  18. Lower leg power predicts cognitive aging.
  19. Racial bias and time perception.
  20. Cultural specificity of human fairness.
  21. The evolution of music from emotional signals
  22. Increased false-memory susceptibility after mindfulness meditation
  23. Religiousness decreases children’s altruistic behaviors.

November 2015

  1. The effects of birth order on personality.
  2. A picture show; and, Alzheimer's and the innate immune system
  3. Online political communication: more than an echo chamber?
  4. Choosing to be grateful.
  5. Musical expertise modulates the brain’s entrainment to music.
  6. Our bodies can sabotage our healthy behaviors..
  7. Wielding power increases testosterone in women.
  8. Flip-Flops in medical advice.
  9. Divided we fall - putting social progress on par with prosperity
  10. A personal note, the Steinway B now in Fort Lauderdale - some Chopin
  11. Neuropolitics - reading the electorate's mind.
  12. The Brain with David Eagleman
  13. More evolution cartoons
  14. Good and bad stress in the Brain - The inverted U
  15. Shift happens
  16. How to live what we don't believe.
  17. Amazing…. Robots learn coordinated behavior from scratch.
  18. Trusting robots, but not androids
  19. The unknowns of cognitive enhancement
  20. Can we really change our aging?
  21. Critical period for visual pathway formation? - another dogma bites the dust.
  22. A biomarker for early detection of dementia
  23. Lifting weights and the brain.
  24. Brain Pickings on 'the most important things'
  25. A lab experiment: visibility of wealth increases wealth inequality

October 2015

  1. More exercise correlates with younger body cells.
  2. Low-power people are more trusting in social exchange.
  3. How much sleep do we really need?
  4. Chilling down our religiousity and intolerance with some magnets?
  5. The hippocampus is essential for recall but not for recognition.
  6. Brain activity associated with predicting rewards to others.
  7. Drugs or therapy for depression?
  8. Hoopla over a bit of rat brain…a complete brain simulation?
  9. Meditation madness
  10. A brain switch that can make the familiar seem new?
  11. Sir Reginald's Marvellous Organ
  12. Great apes can look ahead in time
  13. Rhodopsin curing blindness?
  14. Can epigenetics explain homosexuality?
  15. Musical expertise changes the brain's functional connectivity during audiovisual integration
  16. Runner's high? Thank your internal marijuana...
  17. A Gee Whiz! moment. Activating neurons with ultrasound.
  18. 1/f brain noise increases with aging.
  19. Methionine, an amino acid, enhances recovery from cocaine addiction.
  20. Memory aging and brain maintenance
  21. The wealthy are different from you and me...
  22. Watching sleep deprivation cause a decline in prefrontal control of emotion.
  23. Ig Nobel Prizes for 2015
  24. Brain system for mental orientation in space, time, and person.

September 2015

  1. More exercise correlates with younger body cells.
  2. Does exercise change your brain?
  3. Can dietary supplements fight cognitive decline?
  4. Humanity as a Competitive Advantage
  5. Is "gaydar" a myth?
  6. Consolidating motor skills in our sleep.
  7. More bad things about sleep debt.
  8. Our nervous systems are lazy.
  9. The social mysteries of the superior temporal sulcus
  10. A final musical/social at Twin Valley - some Rachmaninoff
  11. Hormones and clothing choices.
  12. Heritable risk of developing anxiety correlates with brain metabolism, not structure.
  13. Inventing new words - iconic sounds are used.
  14. Brain correlates of learning character traits versus rewards.
  15. Thinking too much - Self generated thought as the engine of neuroticism.
  16. Savoring happy memories - value representations in the striatum
  17. Convergent evolution of numerosity detection in bird and primate brains.
  18. A classification of cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice.
  19. Brain imaging can predict six-year outcomes in children’s numerical abilities.
  20. Bioethics - Doing more harm than good?
  21. Oxytocin - more sophisticated views of its functions
  22. Birth of the moralizing gods.
  23. The benefits of reading to children.

August 2015

  1. Self-policing by psychologists - many prominent experiments fail replication tests
  2. A beta-blocker facilitates fear extinction.
  3. The collaborative roots of corruption.
  4. What emotions are and aren’t.
  5. Stress can cause bad food choices and compromise long term goals.
  6. Disadvantage, self control, and health
  7. Biased internet search engines might influence election outcomes
  8. Introverts prefer mountains.
  9. Unequal, but happy
  10. People who eat spicy food live longer.
  11. Tracking ongoing cognition with fMRI of functional connectivity states.
  12. Anti-aging therapies? Start by quantifying aging in young adults for early intervention.
  13. Exercise for the aging brain - how much is necessary?
  14. What is fair? It depends on your culture.
  15. Knowing the internal states of ourselves and of others.
  16. Overclaiming - the illusion of knowledge
  17. Habitual exercise correlates with lower distractibility.
  18. The benefits of pupil orientation.
  19. Are Chatbots destined to become our most sympathetic listeners?
  20. Benefits of High School Music training.
  21. Synchronizing brain theta oscillations strengthens our adaptive behavior control.
  22. Another awesome brain video
  23. New stuff on exercise, brain, and body.
  24. Brain correlates of the impatience of adolescents.

July 2015

  1. Unlearning social biases during sleep
  2. The danger of artificial intelligence is artificial stupidity.
  3. Placebo analgesia reduces empathy for pain.
  4. Dopamine and subjective well-being
  5. Brain markers of individual differences in human prosociality.
  6. Top-down alpha band oscillations optimize visual perception.
  7. Universal features of human music.
  8. A small bonbon for techie MindBlog readers.
  9. Screams and the communication soundscape
  10. Ohmygawd - a social app that aims for fleeting authenticity?
  11. How experiencing nature influences our brains.
  12. Happy or anxious?
  13. Sense8 - Sympathetic Sci-Fi
  14. How did kindness come to be our forbidden pleasure?
  15. Four books from Edge.org's summer reading list.
  16. Participants in the senior olympics have fitness age 25 years younger than their chronological age.
  17. Cleaning up the queue - interesting ideas.
  18. Genetic risk factors for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia predict creativity.
  19. Evolving ourselves
  20. The embodied cognition of your love life.
  21. Kinda Neat! - a Soft Jumping Robot
  22. Why don't the poor rise up?
  23. Political ideology, self control, and belief in free will.
  24. Caffeine as an antidote to depression caused by stress.
  25. Groups are better lie detectors than individuals.
  26. The science of 'Inside-Out"'
  27. The Higher Life - A mindfulness guru for the tech set.
  28. The smell of happiness.
  29. Cat videos are good for your health.
  30. Anti-ageing pill pushed as a bona fide drug.

June 2015

  1. The power of positivity.
  2. Inside Out
  3. Neuroanatomical correlates of the income-achievement gap.
  4. Facebook internal research shows its algorithms enhance political polarization.
  5. Acetaminophen - over the counter relief from both pain and emotions...
  6. How is creativity helped by being just a little bit crazy?
  7. A new class of anti-aging drugs that selectively kill senescent cells.
  8. Ocytocin reverses amphetamine-induced deficits in social bonding.
  9. A bit of amphetamine turns older brains into younger brains.
  10. Brain areas that place us in the past, present and future.
  11. Constructing rich false memories of committing crime.
  12. Brain markers of psychopathy.
  13. Sign language as a window on universals in linguistic representation of events.
  14. Oxytocin makes formidable men more likeable.
  15. Serotonin deficiency correlates with stress vulnerability.
  16. The urge to instruct.
  17. The "Good Life"
  18. Why do we experience awe?
  19. Lack of exercise disrupts body’s rhythms.
  20. It’s not a stream of consciousness, its a rhythm.
  21. Humans need not apply.
  22. How we fashion meaning and purpose.
  23. Sleep stabilizes, but does not enhance, motor performance training.

May 2015

  1. Cultural differences, emotional expressivity, and smiles
  2. How biased are our brains?
  3. After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain
  4. Neural basis of anxiety reduction by placebo.
  5. How alarm amplifies through social networks.
  6. Modulating movement intention and the extended present with tDCS.
  7. Brain correlates of loving kindness meditation.
  8. Essentialism
  9. What to do with brain markers that predict future behaviors?
  10. More comment on anti-aging regimes
  11. Grasp posture of our hands biases our visual processing.
  12. The sound of climate change.
  13. Literary (like musical and athletic) expertise shifts brain activity to the caudate nucleus.
  14. Human Purpose
  15. Trust and the Insula
  16. The immensity of the vacated present.
  17. Yet another self therapy electrical widget.
  18. Observing brain correlates of social interactions.
  19. Early environment and stress systems in children.
  20. Cognitive training enhances intrinsic brain connectivity in childhood.
  21. Ideology distorts perception of social mobility in the U.S.
  22. Economic origins of ultrasociality
  23. Explaining the increase in individualism in the U.S. over the past 150 years.

April 2015

  1. The most clever crow yet....
  2. Effortless awareness: Linking subjective experience with brain activity during focused meditation with real-time fMRI
  3. Improving vision in older adults.
  4. Emotion is a component of the earliest stages of perception.
  5. Subliminal learning can nudge future control decisions.
  6. Mind wandering and mental autonomy.
  7. The evolution of gender effects on empathy.
  8. Observing leadership emergence through interpersonal brain synchronization.
  9. Glycogen recovery after exercise: junk food as good as sport supplements
  10. Your friends know how long you will live.
  11. Positive and negative emotions - valence is not value
  12. What happens in Vagus - compassion, positive emotion, vagal tone, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia,
  13. The science of mind wandering.
  14. Manipulating moral decisions by exploiting eye gaze.
  15. The Apple Watch will be making us more sociable and human??
  16. A drug for compassion?
  17. A natural compound for chilling out?
  18. Physical activity's 'modest' effects on cognitive vitality
  19. The transparent avatar in your brain.
  20. Awareness breaks down brain’s network modularity.
  21. Origins of Narcissism in Children
  22. Cognitive abilities across the lifespan.

March 2015

  1. The Singularity—an Urban Legend?
  2. Quiet
  3. Altering the oxytocin receptor gene enhances perception of anger and fear.
  4. Information overload is filter failure.
  5. Expert listening to music alters gene transcription...So?
  6. Thought for the day: America devolving into a plutocracy...
  7. Transcranial direct current stimulation increases propensity to mind-wander
  8. Impulse control with weak currents applied to the head - a new therapy?
  9. Losing the music - Aging affects the perception of musical harmony
  10. Thomas Metzinger on (the absence of) our conscious agency.
  11. Hunger promotes acquisition of nonfood objects
  12. What can music ensembles tell us about social cognition and interaction?
  13. The happiness gap between conservatives and liberals debunked
  14. Emotional foundations of cognitive control.
  15. Observing brain correlates of self affirmation and its healthy consequences
  16. Spontaneous emergence of shared social conventions.
  17. Predictions and the brain: how musical sounds become rewarding
  18. Hugging can make you less likely to catch a virus cold.
  19. Human language reveals a universal positivity bias
  20. Chickens count from the left, just like us!
  21. The high from nicotine depends on whether you think it is there.
  22. Immune cells drive resilience to stress.
  23. MindStuff: A Guide for the Curious User

February 2015

  1. The neurochemistry of music.
  2. Twitter predicts mortality from heart disease!
  3. Metacognitive mechanisms underlying lucid dreaming.
  4. The neuroscience of motivated cognition.
  5. MindBlog's 9th anniversary
  6. What is different about the brains of "SuperAgers"
  7. Training the mind not to wander with brain feedback.
  8. An informative genetic grammatical impairment - the biological basis of language
  9. Psilocybin as a key to consciousness.
  10. A sense of the unfolding digital age.
  11. Music training offsets decline in speech recognition on aging.
  12. MindBlog experiments with a brain enhancer.
  13. How musical sound becomes rewarding - predictions and the brain
  14. Changing bodies changes minds.
  15. MindBlog's other lives - a piano concert
  16. Watching large scale brain network interactions in cognitive control.
  17. Causal emergence in our brains
  18. Expensive drugs work better than cheap ones.
  19. Computers judge personality more accurately than humans.
  20. Doubting global warming?
  21. A landmark for our human brains.
  22. Another study on exercise keeping us young - and other fitness trends
  23. Communicating by having our brains in synchrony.
  24. Low social status enhances prosocial orientation.

January 2015

  1. Parallel brain systems regulate our pain.
  2. Power and your voice.
  3. Musical training accelerates cortical thickness maturation.
  4. Judging and adapting to norm violations engage different brain regions.
  5. Subjective status shapes political preferences.
  6. We can see in the infrared!
  7. Steven Pinker's "Sense of Style"
  8. The signature of consciousness in resting-state brain activity.
  9. Body movements shape brain representation of musical rhythms.
  10. An Example of Publication Bias - Cognitive Advantage in Bilingualism
  11. Watching brain oscillations drive perception.
  12. Perceived control promotes persistence and influences brain response to setbacks
  13. Another magic anti-aging compound?
  14. Human children conform to peers' behavior, but apes do not.
  15. Personality and Ideology
  16. Subliminal Strengthening
  17. Personality and immune system reactivity.
  18. The unforeseen costs of extraordinary experiences.
  19. Invunerablism
  20. Is there a reason for everything? - Teleological reasoning about life events
  21. Biological explanations for psychopathology decrease clinician empathy.
  22. Cerebral coherence between communicators.

2014 284

December 2014

  1. Neurobiology and the Humanities
  2. Origins of human altruism.
  3. Exercise and intermittent fasting improve brain plasticity and health
  4. Several articles on aging brains.
  5. Exercise changes our muscle DNA
  6. A bit of science fiction...a brain implant that allows mind-controlled gene expression.
  7. Impact of literacy on visual processing
  8. Cross-species evidence that adaptive training diminishes distractibility in Aging.
  9. How to bridge the respective bubbles of our ideological tribes?
  10. Critique of the Nature paper on dishonest bankers,
  11. Several nuggets on the individual vs. the collective.
  12. The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions
  13. The new surveillance state and our robotic future.
  14. Why elders smile, and wisdom in social signals.
  15. Physics, Emergence, and the Connectome - From the connectome to brain function
  16. Psilocybin changes brain connectivity.
  17. We search for meaning at the start of each chronological decade.
  18. Banking - a culture of dishonesty
  19. The ecology of religious beliefs
  20. E.O. Wilson and "The Meaning of Human Existence"
  21. Varieties of poverty - money, time, and bandwidth
  22. My iPad is masturbating!
  23. The peripheral immune system and stress susceptibility.
  24. Does exercise really make us smarter?
  25. The usefulness of spite.

November 2014

  1. Brain's inflammatory response may contribute to brain disorders.
  2. In older people, moderate alcohol intake improves memory.
  3. How to dampen that urge to buy.
  4. Can brain science be dangerous?
  5. How our prefrontal cortex explores and exploits options.
  6. Art in a whiskey glass, the physics explained.
  7. Wealth is especially bad for the wealthy.
  8. Genes that turned wildcats into kitty cats.
  9. Cooperating with the future - how to sustain resources.
  10. Humor and Health
  11. Chemicals that delay or reverse effects of aging.
  12. Big data in Neuroscience
  13. The internet and the mind
  14. MDMA (ecstasy) enhances emotional empathy and prosocial behavior
  15. Trajectories of aging.
  16. Are we really conscious?
  17. Antidepressant and nerve growth stimulating effects of exercise - a mechanism.
  18. Aging: sit less and shape up your attitude
  19. Mind wandering that makes effort more efficient.
  20. What is literature good for?
  21. Why do we like sad music?
  22. Positive thinking can sabotage desired outcomes.
  23. A mechanism underlying intractable political conflicts.
  24. Aging - predictors of cognitive abilities.
  25. Liberals and conservatives have different smell preferences.
  26. Memory reactivation during rest supports upcoming learning of related content.
  27. A mechanism underlying our current political paralysis

October 2014

  1. Neural and cognitive characteristics of extraordinary altruists.
  2. Anti-aging interventions: from elixirs to fasting.
  3. Update on ‘fitness age’ calculators…
  4. Brain resting state network stimulation for psychiatric and neurological diseases
  5. The amygdala as the hub of three brain networks supporting our social life.
  6. Breath counting as an objective behavioral measure of mindfulness.
  7. The power of play - Portal2 better than brain training software?
  8. Let a Hundred McMansions Bloom
  9. How to chill on aggression...get blood glucose levels up.
  10. Happiness and well-being sources.
  11. Speaking out in a group correlates with gender.
  12. Scientific evidence does not support anti-aging claims of the brain game industry.
  13. Humans and robots.
  14. Pianists’ brains are different from everyone else...
  15. Vitamin D prevents cognitive decline
  16. How culture shapes spatial conceptions of time - Is your past in front of, or behind you?
  17. Why are we fooled by the ventriloquist?
  18. Our microbial aura - in the house and in the garden
  19. Boredom = Stress.... and misbehavior
  20. Improvement of performance by transcranial stimulation depends on existing degree of expertise.
  21. Our sleep cycle started 700 million years ago in a worm?
  22. Inflammatory signaling is bad for the aging brain.
  23. Why our childhood takes so long - the metabolic costs of brain development
  24. Is it love or lust? Look at eye gaze.
  25. Having 'no self' as self transcendence, or spirituality.
  26. An update of dericbownds.net
  27. A few Self-Help Nostrums.
  28. Fish as brain food - it’s not just the omega-3
  29. Status and the brain.

September 2014

  1. The good order - creativity needs routine
  2. Hearing and imagination shape what we see.
  3. The Human Dynamic Clamp
  4. Rules of implicit evaluation by race, religion, and age.
  5. Morality in real life versus the lab.
  6. Neuroanatomy predicts individual risk attitudes.
  7. Synchrony between observers' brains during action observation.
  8. Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes
  9. Music shapes how we think - whether we see the forrest or the trees.
  10. Parasites practicing mind control.
  11. Associative memory enhanced by brain stimulation.
  12. Norm enforcement is biased from its emergence.
  13. Early music training improves neural encoding of speech in children and arrests auditory decline in older adults.
  14. Study on relationship between genomics and well being receives a critical trashing.
  15. A new compound that ameliorates cognitive dysfunction.
  16. Upstairs/Downstairs in our Brain – What’s running our show?
  17. MindBlog's other half - a Sunday afternoon recital at Twin Valley
  18. Reboot, reset, your brain - take a break - a walk, or better, a vacation.
  19. MDMA (Ecstasy) as an affiliative social drug
  20. Does one novelty lead to another?
  21. Genetic influence on our valuation of free choice
  22. Morality - how theists and non theists differ
  23. Intergenerational transmission of emotional trauma.
  24. How could language have evolved?

August 2014

  1. The origins of morality.
  2. The stability of the authoritarian state.
  3. Early life anxiety in monkeys and humans correlates with connectivity between prefrontal cortex and amygdala.
  4. More on better living through zapping your brain.
  5. Origins of good and evil in human babies.
  6. OhMyGawd...now MRI measurement are going to tell us how happy we are??
  7. The source of consciousness.
  8. Is our microbiome manipulating us to look out for itself?
  9. Brain and behavioral correlates of compassion training.
  10. Spooky and awesome technology
  11. More on brain games and training - and reversing cognitive decline in aging.
  12. How chronic pain saps our motivations and desires - the mechanism.
  13. The habenula (?) does a tally of our negative outcomes.
  14. In learning, too much of a good thing can be bad.
  15. Varieties of introspection.
  16. An opinion due to social conformity lasts only a few days.
  17. Motivation not improved by multiple motives.
  18. How much do our genes influence our political beliefs?
  19. Anger as the most easily spread emotion.
  20. Brain noise? Insomnia? Try A.S.M.R.
  21. MindBlog gets married.
  22. Faith and ideology trump reason...

July 2014

  1. Brain activity that reflects positive and negative emotion.
  2. Brain correlates of behaviors in market bubbles.
  3. A intriguing take on consciousness as a perceptual construct.
  4. Video game puzzle that improves executive function.
  5. Life purpose, longevity, and Alzheimers disease.
  6. How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
  7. Why is melody in the high notes and rhythm in the base?
  8. Blue is warmer than red?
  9. Ecstasy (MDMA) and LSD as therapeutic drugs
  10. Feeling the social touch being observed in others.
  11. Brain activity can reveal whom someone is thinking about.
  12. Response of large scale brain networks to acute stress.
  13. Increased self control without increased willpower
  14. Cooperating with the future
  15. Does phase of the moon influence our sleep? Three contradictory studies.
  16. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.
  17. Caring for the future
  18. Information integration without awareness.
  19. Couch potato? You should be taking omega-3!
  20. Moral judgements depend on what language we’re speaking.
  21. Consciousness is constructed through a discrete set of activity spaces.
  22. Parenting rewires men's brains.

June 2014

  1. Emotional contagion through social networks
  2. Mind reading has to be taught.
  3. Stress chemistry predicts age-related cognitive decline.
  4. Megascience efforts and the brain.
  5. Executive control training reduces rumination.
  6. Distinguishing the 50 united states with a tightness-looseness measure.
  7. Early music training enhances cognitive capacities in adults.
  8. Monday music - Debussy Nocturne
  9. On the precipice - a "Majority-Minority" America.
  10. Dopamine receptor genes and independent versus interdependent social orientation.
  11. Speed reading apps blow away comprehension.
  12. Watching the physical correlate of memory improvement during sleep.
  13. When being a control-freak doesn't help....
  14. Another Poulenc offering: Improvisation No. 13
  15. Brain initiative meets physics….Opps!
  16. Gratitude reduces economic impatience.
  17. Childhood bullying predicts adult inflammation.
  18. Tonics for a long life?
  19. Rapidity of human brain and muscle evolution - the downside of smarts?
  20. A Monday musical offering - Poulenc Improvisation No. 7
  21. First direct evidence for human sex pheromones.
  22. Social attention and our ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
  23. Blue Mind - looking at water improves your health and calm
  24. Crowdsourcing our brain’s wiring.
  25. The science of inequality.

May 2014

  1. The monkey business illusion.
  2. How social equality is represented in the brain.
  3. Brain correlates of expertise in musical improvisation
  4. Brain correlates of "the good life" ??
  5. Stress can protect from Alzheimer's disease
  6. Fear detection depends on phase of our heartbeats.
  7. Correlation between prosocial behavior and computer game playing
  8. What drives collective versus individualistic behaviors?
  9. Morality and perception speed
  10. Sluggish cognitive tempo, a new diagnosis du jour?
  11. Formation of new brain cells can erase old memories
  12. Nonconscious emotions and first impressions - role for conscious awareness
  13. Language universals at birth.
  14. GABA predicts time perception.
  15. More on the rejuvenating power of young blood...
  16. Brain activity display in the spirit of P.T. Barnum
  17. We transfer reward in a bottom-up search task to a top-down search task.
  18. Gene expression changes in expert meditators?
  19. The smell of sickness.
  20. Out of body, out of mind.
  21. Oxytocin promotes group-serving dishonesty
  22. Aesop's crow - evidence of causal understanding

April 2014

  1. A blood test for Alzheimers disease?
  2. Wave of the future - trusting machines that talk to us.
  3. Brain abnormalities caused by marijuana use.
  4. Brain activity underlying subjective awareness
  5. Blocking facial muscle movement compromizes detecting and having emotions
  6. Is it a Stradivarius?
  7. Top Brain, Bottom Brain - a user's manual from Kosslyn and Miller
  8. Judging a man by the width of his face.
  9. Over the hill at 24
  10. Training emotions - a brief video from The Brain Club
  11. Attributing awareness to oneself and others.
  12. Poor people judge more harshly.
  13. Memory reactivation in aging versus young brains.
  14. Enhancing or lowering performance monitoring activity of our brains.
  15. Caloric restriction and longevity.
  16. Is consciousness in control? Does it matter?
  17. An interesting pain suppression tactic.
  18. Practice and sleep form different aspects of skill.
  19. Using imagination or memory to increase prosocial behavior.
  20. Exercise protects retinas.
  21. Another demonstration of the gender gap.
  22. Can body language be read more reliably by computers than by humans?
  23. Evolved music specific brain reward systems.

March 2014

  1. Mechanism of muscle decay on aging, and its reversal.
  2. Our lives are a concept, not a reality.
  3. Restoring mitochondrial dysfunction associated with aging.
  4. Out of Sight, Out of Mind
  5. Clash of 'grand theories' of consciousness??
  6. Shaping memory accuracy by TCDS
  7. Do brain workouts work?
  8. A debate on what faces can tell us.
  9. Magical thinking in auction biding.
  10. Control over memory retrieval is predicted by heart rate variability.
  11. Some homilies on wisdom - older and wiser.
  12. Fat hurts, and exercise helps, the brain.
  13. Several perspectives on rich versus poor.
  14. A technique for enhancing error awareness in older age.
  15. Time, Money, and Morality
  16. Default mode network: the seat of literary creativity?
  17. Optimism correlates with poor results
  18. Dangerous behaviors and the corporate consumption complex.
  19. More on building brains with video games
  20. Want to remember something? Have some coffee!
  21. Cognitive aging - a dark side to environmental support?

February 2014

  1. A brain basis for musical hallucinations
  2. The right temperature for a stroking caress
  3. Passing ADHD from one generation to the next.
  4. Restoring vision to blind mice (and humans with RP or AMD?) with a photoswitch.
  5. Predicting risky choices from brain activity patterns
  6. Senior Coolness
  7. Mindfulness and corporate America’s bottom line.
  8. Meditation and brain imaging of two kinds of love.
  9. Neural signature of our own-race bias.
  10. Awesome Images
  11. The social (and medical) pathology of correlating inner worth with wealth.
  12. Our pupil dilation reflects decision related choice.
  13. Reaction time and longevity.
  14. Genetic predisposition of our behavioral responses.
  15. Different cultures, different computation systems
  16. Why electroconvulsive therapy works in mood disorders.
  17. Constancy of our social signatures.
  18. Does music make you smarter?
  19. When psychotherapy works - what are the brain changes?
  20. Making Our Brains Younger
  21. MindBlog's most read posts.

January 2014

  1. The myth of cognitive decline with aging? Yes and No....
  2. Most published scientific results are false.
  3. Mindfulness has so totally gone mainstream…..
  4. Enriched environments enhance adult brain plasticity.
  5. How inactivity changes the brain
  6. The liberal illusion of uniqueness
  7. The Kerfuffle over whether men and women's brains are different.
  8. Bodily maps of emotions.
  9. The morning morality effect.
  10. The milliseconds of a choice - Watching your mind when it matters.
  11. Beauty at the ballot box.
  12. Signals from inside and outside our bodies in self consciousness
  13. A reason for the power of prayer.
  14. Left spatial neglect goes with neglecting the “Left Side” of time.
  15. How the brains of virtuosic pianists are different...
  16. The social life of our genes - the devastating effects of social isolation
  17. Social Darwinism isn't dead - the rich really do think they are different...
  18. Watching our brain remembering something.
  19. The "being happy" stress-out.
  20. Oxytocin enhances brain function in children with autism.
  21. A neural prosthesis can restore sensory-motor function after brain damage.
  22. My aversion to "selfies" and the demographics of social media.
  23. Cognitive Control - what you see depends on how you look.

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