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...
View ArticleOptogenetics: 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...
View ArticleDusting 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...
View ArticleWhen 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...
View ArticleHumans 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...
View Article“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...
View ArticleWe 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...
View ArticleFunctions 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...
View ArticleHumans 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleConceptual 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...
View ArticlePolitical 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....
View ArticleAre 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...
View ArticleBeing 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...
View ArticleTwo 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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