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Overinterpreting Computational Models of Decision-Making
Bell (1985)Can a set of equations predict and quantify complex emotions resulting from financial decisions made in an uncertain environment? An influential paper by David E. Bell considered the...
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Hoarders and Collectors
Andy Warhol's collection of dental models Pop artist Andy Warhol excelled in turning the everyday and the mundane into art. During the last 13 years of his life, Warhol put thousands of collected...
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Did dreams evolve to transcend overfitting?
A fascinating new paper proposes that dreams evolved to help the brain generalize, which improves its performance on day to day tasks. Incorporating a concept from deep learning, Erik Hoel...
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The rs-FC fMRI Law of Attraction (i.e., Resting-State Functional...
Feeling starved for affection after 15 months of pandemic-mandated social distancing? Ready to look for a suitable romantic partner by attending an in-person speed dating event? Just recline inside...
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Why would nasally-transferred coronavirus only affect the left side of the...
WE GET QUESTIONS!Q– “I survived a mild case of COVID. Should I be worried about the volume of gray matter in olfactory-related structures in the left hemisphere of my brain?”A– Most of what you've read...
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Reading Aloud without a Mask, Olfactory Bulbs, Omega Variant
Here's the latest alarming COVID news to distract you from fires and hurricanes. {I'm very sorry if you are experiencing either of these disasters personally. Donations ideas: El Dorado Community...
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A Curious Case of Auditory-Gustatory Synesthesia... in someone who can't smell
A fascinating case study from 1907 describes the self-reported sensory “taste” experiences evoked by hearing specific words, names, or sounds (Pierce, 1907). The subject was a young woman about to...
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Xylological Delusions of Being a Tree
The mythology surrounding reverse inter-metamorphosis, a delusional syndrome that involves transformation into a beast, has frightened and fascinated for hundreds of years. A special instance of...
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Is Precision Psychiatry Realistic?
Fig. 1 (Fernandes et al., 2017). Domains related to ‘precision psychiatry’.“The right drug for the right patient” was a catch phrase in the early years of the personalized medicine movement (2000),...
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Your Own Personal DBS
The second calendar year of COVID surges to a close, and hospital personnel continue their frenetic pace of caring for the infected (most of whom are defiantly unvaccinated). For the rest of us,...
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Vortioxetine for Post-COVID Brain Fog
If you're relatively young and healthy, is a mild case of COVID-19 really “mild”, like a cold or the flu? Are you still at risk for long COVID— a persistent state of fatigue, anxiety, insomnia,...
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The Ongoing Debate about Hippocampal Neurogenesis in Adult Humans is over.
modified from Franjic et al. (2022). Cross-species comparison shows transcriptomic signatures of neurogenesis in the hippocampus of adult mouse, pig, and monkey — but not human.Does the adult brain...
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Machine Yearning - Sad Robots and Prolonged Grief
Crying Robot, by Mr.A What is 'machine yearning'?Intense longing exhibited by cartoon robots? Or a clever pun that describes a network analysis of prolonged grief symptoms? (Malgaroli et al., 2022). My...
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Nostalgia and Its Analgesia
“Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a...
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THIS device may not nudge your brain into deep sleep
The Washington Post used this picture of a saline-filled 280-channel Geodesic Head Web1 to illustrate a new wearable device that aims to enhance slow wave sleep (SWS). The device delivers low-level...
View ArticleABCT Apologizes for Past Support of Gay Conversion Therapy
It's 2022, and the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) has just issued a belated apology because two of their past Presidents published papers on “aversion therapies” for...
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Extracting reliable neurobiological biomarkers for complex subjective...
"The self is the psychological counterpart of the default mode functionality of the brain." (Scalabrini et al., 2021). The self studying how "The Self" is represented and constructed by the brain is...
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The Human Protein Atlas (Neuropeptide Edition)
The more you study the brain, the more unknowable it becomes. The level of complexity is baffling, and this is true whether the brain belongs to a human or a crab.1 The latest uptick in human brain...
View Article"And then a Plank in Reason, broke,"
“I am dead.” In terms of possible delusions in living human beings, Le délire des négations—the nihilistic delusion that one is dead —evokes the most harrowing existence imaginable. The French...
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Frankenstein's Hand
Just in time for Halloween, I had a hideous surgery to repair a fractured elbow. This entailed receiving a nerve block that made my hand feel like a dead appendage, which was quite spooky indeed....
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Neuroscience Trend Forecasters
As 2022 draws to a close, the SNL Trend Forecasters have agreed to divulge their predictions for the most — and the least — exciting research fads for the New Year.The Neurocritic: How do you guys...
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I'm thinking about moving this blog...
...to another platform. Hi, it's been a while. I haven't written anything this year. My last post was December 31, 2022.The main reason is that I've had to deal with more loss and grief in my life....
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Why are "Love Languages" so popular, when they're completely inaccurate?
I joined an online dating site a few months ago.1 Besides being asked about my sun, moon, and rising signs (?), I was puzzled by the following question.2My love language? I'm supposed to choose only...
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The Miraculous Guru with an h-index of 62
Guruji Mahendra Kumar Trivedi is an “Enlightened and miraculous being” with a Google Scholar page, an h-index1 of 62, and 12,031 citations of his work. Most of these are self-citations from a tangled...
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Backed by Science? Building a lucrative spiritual empire based on potentially...
image from Google ScholarMahendra Kumar Trivedi is the founder of Trivedi Global, Inc., a provider of health and wellness products and services. His Google Scholar profile lists 795 publications with...
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