In creative pursuits, from the artistic to the scientific, “hot streaks” are characterised by bursts of high-impact works clustered together in close succession. Liu and colleagues analysed the career histories of artists, film directors, and scientists, and developed deep learning and network science methods to build high-dimensional representations of their creative outputs. They found that […]
Creativity and Hot Streaks in Work Read More »
Cognitive control plays an important role in regulating thoughts and behaviours in everyday human life. Controlling the impulse to cheat or not to cheat is no exception. Speer et al. used EEG to find the activity pattern of cognitive control and compare it to the brain activity of participants during a cheating task. They found
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For decades, neurons have been conceptualized as points in larger networks where inputs from other neurons are summed up linearly and yield a simple outcome, such as ‘0’ and ‘1’. However, over the same time, neuroscientists have also become increasingly dissatisfied with this apparently too simplistic description. since the function of neurons is not a
Individual Neurons as Networks Read More »
How do we make decisions about a situation we have not encountered before? New work from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, shows that we can solve abstract problems in the same way that we can find a novel route between two known locations, by using an internal cognitive
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Studies have demonstrated that social support can protect against poor mental health. However, the investigators in this study found that problematic social media use was significantly associated with decreased real-life social support and increased social support on social media. Real-life social support was associated with reduced depression, anxiety, and social isolation, while social support on
Social Media versus In-Person Support against Depression, Anxiety, and Social Isolation Read More »
Investigators have found support for the hypothesis that the anterior insular cortex region in the brain regulates brain network transitions that gate conscious access. https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(21)00414-9
Gates to consciousness in the brain Read More »
Investigators found that prosocial values became more important after completing tasks that made children salient compared to tasks that made adults (or a mundane event) salient or compared to a no-task baseline. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19485506211007605
Children make adults more prosocial and generous Read More »
Stress is a major factor that comes up often when looking at eating patterns. To all who are interested in the link between stress and eating disorders, the following article in the Journal of Neuroscience may be of interest: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2021/04/01/JNEUROSCI.2853-20.2021
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The COVID-19 pandemic has affected families in many ways. As individuals are struggling with anxiety, uncertainty, fears, and changes at work and in social relationships, loneliness, depression and despair have been on the rise. Since families are not closed systems that are shut off from the world and the fears and uncertainties experienced by family
COVID-19 and Family Mental Health Read More »
Algorithms run our world in many ways, from cars to social networks, and even medical recommendation. The researchers in the study below asked whether people would rather trust another person or an algorithm, and the results may be surprising to some, while not to others, but they are relevant to anyone, particularly those with an
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