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POPSAwesome research/ Homework resource I only found this the other day and mostly I'm clipping it for my own uses; however, it's a great resource and I thought I'd share. The site itself has pretty cool info too. 'Hope you guys like the clip.
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POPSComplex decision? Don't sleep on it Since its publication two years ago by a Dutch research team in the journal Science, the earlier finding had been used to encourage decision-makers to make "snap" decisions (for example, in the best-selling book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell) or to leave complex choices to the powers of unconscious thought ("Sleep on it", Dijksterhuis et al., Science, 2006). But in the new study, to be published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, scientists ran four experiments in which participants were presented with complex decisions and asked to choose the best option immediately ("blink"), after a period of conscious deliberation ("think"), or after a period of distraction ("sleep on it"), which is claimed to encourage "unconscious thought processes". In all experiments, there was some evidence that conscious deliberation can lead to better choices and little evidence for superiority of choices made "unconsciously".
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POPSSCIENTISTS SHOW HALLUCINOGEN CREATES UNIVERSAL “MYSTICAL” EXPERIENCE in the 1950s, showed signs of therapeutic potential or value in research into the nature of consciousness and sensory perception. “Human consciousness…is a function of the ebb and flow of neural impulses in various regions of the brain-the very substrate that drugs such as psilocybin act upon,” Schuster says. “Understanding what mediates these effects is clearly within the realm of neuroscience and deserves investigation.” “A vast gap exists between what we know of these drugs-mostly from descriptive anthropology-and what we believe we can understand using modern clinical pharmacology techniques,” says study leader Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor with Hopkins’ departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Biology. “That gap is large because, as a reaction to the excesses of the 1960s, human research with hallucinogens has been basically frozen in time these last forty years.”
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POPSWho's Minding the Mind? New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it. In describing my own research or cognitive science in general to people, the most difficult obstacle I would eventually encounter was the stubborn human belief that there was a independent entity — a free will — in charge of everything important that goes on in their brain. While science has been steadily dismantling this understandable misconception for decades, recent studies on subconscious social priming like these would have helped me demonstrate my point. To be fair, it's more than a little disconcerting to realize what a messy mix of competing, semi-independent, multi-layered neural modules are responsible for producing our daily behavior.
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POPSFirstborn Children Are the Cleverest Be sure to read the rest of the article; it is quite fascinating. It's also interesting to note that one of the related articles listed on the side is titled "Smarter People Are No Better Off"!
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POPSPotential Alzheimer's, Parkinson's Cure Found In Century-old Drug Also impressed is one of Dr. Atamna's co-authors, Bruce Ames, PhD, a senior scientist at Children's and world-renowned expert in nutrition and aging. "What we potentially have is a wonder drug." said Dr. Ames. "To find that such a common and inexpensive drug can be used to increase and prolong the quality of life by treating such serious diseases is truly exciting." Dr. Atamna's research is the first to show that low concentrations of the drug have the ability to slow cellular aging in cultured cells in the laboratory and in live mice. He believes methylene blue has the potential to become another commonplace low-cost treatment like aspirin, prescribed as a blood thinner for people with heart disorders.
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POPSPolygamy is the key to a long life Men, by contrast, can reproduce well into their 60s and even 70s and 80s, and most researchers assumed this explained their longevity. But Lummaa and colleague Andy Russell wondered whether other factors explained the long lifespan of men, such as a grandfather effect. If female survival is the main explanation for male longevity, then monogamous and polygamous men would live for about the same length of time. Instead, it seems that fathering more kids with more wives leads to increased male longevity. Men, then, live long because they're fertile well into their grey years. The explanation could be both social and genetic. Men who continue fathering kids into their 60s and 70s could take better care for their bodies because they have mouths to feed. But evolutionary forces acting over thousands of years could also select for longer-lived men in polygamous cultures.
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POPSGenetics Show How Prehistoric Cultures Migrated & Shared Knowledge The researchers tracked genetic variation on the Y chromosome, the sex chromosome passed from father to son that encodes maleness, using a technique now widely used that was developed in the early 1990s by Underhill and colleagues in the lab of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, professor emeritus of genetics. The method has given scientists a powerful window into ancient human migrations and prehistoric cultural shifts. The technique has also been adopted by some commercial genealogy services that offer Y-chromosome testing to the public.
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POPSQuality of Sleep = Memory storage the Belgian study shows that getting a good night’s sleep the night after learning a new fact has a direct impact on the transfer process between the hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex.
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