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Channel: Emotions and the Brain – The Brain from Top to Bottom Blog – Intermediate Level
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Embodied Cognition and Emotions

Expressions such as “receiving a warm welcome” and “giving someone the cold shoulder” seem to be rooted deep in our bodily experience, or at least, that is the conclusion increasingly suggested by...

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Optogenetics: Neurons Controlled by Light

Among the many new techniques developed in the neurosciences in recent years, few have caused as much of a stir as optogenetics. This strange marriage between the sciences of optics and genetics...

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Dusting Off the Triune Brain and the Limbic System

In neuroscience, as in other fields, some concepts are so convenient that it no longer even occurs to us to question them. But no scientific knowledge can be taken for granted forever, so it makes...

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When Fear Makes Us React Conservatively

Paul Nail and his colleagues at the University of Central Arkansas conducted a series of three experiments that showed how a psychologically threatening situation can make someone whose thinking is...

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Humans Have No Monopoly on Empathy

One rat springs another rat from prison, then shares some chocolate with him. Sounds like a Saturday-morning cartoon, but that’s what actually happened in a laboratory experiment showing that real...

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“Centres” of Cognitive Functions in the Brain: A Misleading Concept

The media nowadays often publish reports that scientists using brain-imaging technology have just discovered the brain’s “centre” for anger, jealousy, generosity, or some other specific emotion or...

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We May Be Able To Have Feelings Without an Insula

The insula is a brain structure that lies deep inside the cerebral cortex and so is less accessible for examination. That is why so little was known about the insula for so long, until neurobiologists...

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Functions of the amygdala : more diverse than previously thought

Science in general, and neuroscience in particular, are constantly evolving. So even though our knowledge of a given brain structure may not have undergone a scientific revolution or a paradigm shift...

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Humans Are the Product of Dynamic Processes on Multiple Time Scales

Today I want to talk about dynamic processes that occur on some very different time scales in the human nervous system. To do so, I will describe four examples very briefly, referring to the two...

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The Brain and Body Are Really One, Especially When It Comes to Emotions

In April 2017, while preparing a lecture for a course on embodied cognition that I teach in French at UPop Montréal, I had to refresh my memory about the major communication pathways between the brain...

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Conceptual evolution in some explanations in neuroscience

This website and this blog have been around long enough now (over 15 years and nearly 7 years, respectively) to have witnessed the ongoing evolution and refinement of certain concepts in the...

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Political Allegiance and Brain Biology

How hard it is to get someone to shift their allegiance from one political party to another is something that many of us know from personal experience, but it has also been demonstrated experimentally....

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Are Nationalist Sentiments Inversely Proportional to Cognitive Flexibility?

Many studies have shown how certain emotional characteristics can have higher-level cognitive effects. including an impact on people’s political choices. For example, studies have shown that being more...

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Being rich makes you less empathetic (even when it’s just Monopoly money)

Today I’m going to talk about the work of social psychologist Paul Piff, whose research interests revolve around social hierarchies, economic inequality, altruism and co-operation. I learned about Piff...

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Two very different approaches to identify functional connections between...

Two recent studies have shown yet again that many more different parts of the brain are often involved in a given mental phenomenon than was once believed. In the brain, nothing is really isolated, and...

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