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An entrée of Cognitive Science with an occasional side of whatever the hell else I want to talk about.
Cognitive stuff from a cognitive person. If you've got any requests, drop me an email. If it takes me a while to get to it, drop me another one.
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April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
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Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
We already know that mirror neurons are responsible for social interaction (except when they're not), meaning, art, religion, sports, dinosaurs, sun spots, Marxism, post-it notes, freeze-dried fruit, Harleys, and and Firefox 3.0, so it's not at all surprising that we're...
Posted by Chris at 2:47 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Blogs and the mainstream media have been filled with neuroscience news lately. First we learned that sarcasm happens in the brain, and then that sexual orientation is in the brain too. There was even an attempt (sarcastic, I hope) to...
Posted by Chris at 5:32 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Then listen to this set of lectures from the 2007 Advanced Neuroimaging Summer School at UCLA....
Posted by Chris at 1:41 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Last month, a paper was published in Nature, in which Kay et al(1) were able to guess which of their stimuli a person was seeing by looking at their fMRI scans. The model looked something like this (from Kay et...
Posted by Chris at 5:40 PM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
You know, just the other day, on this very blog, I swore I would never read another (cognitive) imaging paper again, but between then and now, I've read 5 of 6, so apparently my oath didn't take. It's sort of...
Posted by Chris at 4:03 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
That's it! I'm never reading another imaging paper again, ever. OK, I might read one or two, and I might even post about them, but for now I'm telling myself, for my own sanity, that I'm never, ever, under any...
Posted by Chris at 9:43 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Reading an article in the LA Times today, I learned something exciting: political differences in thought happen in the brain. At least that's what a new study published in Nature Neuroscience(1) purports to show, though I hear that the next...
Posted by Chris at 8:58 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Apparently so. Recent research has shown that pleasant smells can increase pain tolerance, and a recent paper by Prescott and Wilkie(1) suggests that it is specifically sweet smells that do so. I'll just skip to the experiment, and spare you...
Posted by Chris at 9:05 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
All of you are probably familiar with color opponency, but just in case, I'll give you a quick refresher. I'll even start with the history. In the 19th century, there were two competing theories of color vision. The first was...
Posted by Chris at 4:12 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Psychology
About a year ago, there was an article in Seed Magazine titled "Seduced by the Flickering Lights of the Brain," in which Paul Bloom argued that people are too easily seduced by neuroscience, believing that it made for good science,...
Posted by Chris at 9:05 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
