Reversal of cocaine addiction by environmental enrichment (2)
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noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) (3)
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Effortless Incitement (5)
5 days, 17 hours
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Addiction is one of those topics where there's a lot of morally hysterical yelling that generates plenty of heat but no illumination. It's also an area where we're making rapid and interesting scientific progress. One battle that was -- to my mind -- won a long time ago involved getting addiction taken seriously as in key respects a behaviour like any other. That doesn't mean addictive behaviour isn't odd in some respects, but rather that ...
17 Research Studies from 2008 (1)
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Dr Justin Marley (2)
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The Amazing World of Psychiatry: A Psychiatry Blog (2)
6 days, 2 hours
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Here are 17 research studies from 2008 that I found interesting. (1) Happiness in Social Networks In the BMJ, a study involving three generations of subjects in the Framingham Heart Study, looked at social networks using detailed information on the subjects. The researchers showed evidence that happiness in a person is associated with happiness in members of [...]
Are Faces Special? (2)
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, Neuroskeptic (3)
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Research Blogging - All Topics - English (27)
6 days, 23 hours
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There's been a glut of face-based science lately. There was the first American face transplant (the second if you count the ill-fated Travolta/Cage one...) Then an Atlanta group allegedly found that chimpanzees have a part of the brain specialized for recognizing the faces of their fellow chimps.As I'll explain, this would be extremely important if true. This research is just the latest chapter in a long and contentious debate going back many years - a ...
TAWOP Featured Blog List 2008 (1)
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'Twas a night of experiments... (1)
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Neurotopia (version 2.0) (4)
1 week, 5 days
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'Twas the night of experiments, and all through the lab All attention focused on the shape on the slab. All electrodes were strung outside to the air In hopes that some lightning soon would be there. The lab techs in their lab coats, and myself in mine Settled down with some coffee to wait for a sign. Despite all the caffeine, I got a mite sleepy, 'Til the feel of the air made my skin ...
How life became big in two giant steps (1)
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Not Exactly Rocket Science (2)
1 week, 6 days
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Since the first living things appeared on the planet, the biggest among them have become increasingly bigger. Over 3.6 billion years of evolution, life's maximum size has shot up by 16 orders of magnitude - about 10 quadrillion times - from single cells to the massive sequoias of today (below right). And no matter what people say, size does matter. The largest of creatures, from the blue whale to the sauropod dinosaurs, are powerful captors ...
Beyond Proportional Analogy (2)
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Peter Turney (0)
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Apperceptual (0)
2 weeks
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For some time now, I’ve been experimenting with algorithms for solving proportional analogies. A proportional analogy has the form A:B::C:D, meaning “A is to B as C is to D“. For example, quart:volume::mile:distance means “quart is to volume as mile is to distance”. Multiple-choice proportional analogy problems were part of the SAT college entrance test until 2005, and they are still part of the GRE and MAT tests. It seems that proportional analogies capture an ...
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Sandeep said:
a good post on LRA - something like factor analysis - and which can be quite useful in analogical reasoning and metaphor comprehension.
Disowning pain with binoculars [Neurophilosophy] (4)
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Mo none@example.com (16)
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ScienceBlogs : Combined Feed (98)
2 weeks
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My second article for the Scientific American Mind Matters website is online now. This one is about the recent study which demonstrated that distorting the body image alters pain perception - specifically, it was found that using inverted binoculars to make the hand look smaller than it actually was led to a reduction in the pain and swelling induced by movement in patients with chronic pain. It is not clear why this happens, but the ...
This is your honeybee. And this is your honeybee on drugs. [A Blog Around (2)
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Coturnix none@example.com (26)
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ScienceBlogs Channel : Brain & Behavior (70)
2 weeks, 1 day
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A well-written press release on a very well done and exciting study: Honey bees on cocaine dance more, changing ideas about the insect brain: In a study published in 2007, Robinson and his colleagues reported that treatment with octopamine caused foraging honey bees to dance more often. This indicated that octopamine played a role in honey bee dance behavior. It also suggested a framework for understanding the evolution of altruistic behavior, Robinson said. "The idea ...
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Sandeep said:
Are human cocaine users too more altruistic?
Seek and ye shall find: How unpredictability relates to exploration (1)
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2 weeks, 1 day
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Unpredictability as a result of trade off between exploration/ exploitation. seems to be a nice conjecture.
The Thinking Meat Project (3) permalink
Every year John Brockman of Edge.org poses a question to a diverse group of thinkers and publishes their responses. This year’s question relates to the fact that some technologies or discoveries have changed our lives drastically in the past, and asks people to think about what big development they expect to see in their lifetime [...]Shared by Michael Meadon (51) Sandeep (23)Contribute comment
