Category Archives: Neuroscience and Psychology

Mice Run for Fun, Not Just Work, Research Shows

Exercise is naturally fun and playful. That’s the result of this interesting study. Build a running wheel in the wild and mice will come to play. Mice Run for Fun, Not Just Work, Research Shows – NYTimes.com.

Posted in Brain Hacking, Diet and Exercise, Neuroscience and Psychology, Performance, Play | Leave a comment

Fight procrastination: breathe

A short tip for fighting procrastination: just breathe. Inhale and count “one.” Exhale and count “two.” Continue to ten. This gets to the fact that so much of procrastination is an effort to escape from anxiety or bad feelings surrounding … Continue reading

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Three Strategies to Get and Stay Inspired

This is a good set of rules for performing any activity: act, start small, work with others. These are three very important principles because, as the author says, inspiration doesn’t strike very often and not very reliably. The first is … Continue reading

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Improving performance: Know why

There is a story about the actor Sir Laurence Olivier that speaks to improving performance. Olivier, one of the greatest stage performers of all time, had invited a friend to watch him on an evening that turned out to be … Continue reading

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Performance tips from Sesame Street: you have to put down the ducky

Sesame Street: Ernie Puts Down The Duckie – YouTube. Often when we have a goal we hold ourselves back from achieving it because pushing for change is scary. We may strive for a goal half-heartedly because we don’t want to … Continue reading

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Ambition and “Fire in the Belly”

The term “fire in the belly” is an old term for someone who has a huge amount of drive and ambition. In general, people think of “fire in the belly” as meaning a kind of inner force, a kind of … Continue reading

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‘Memories’ pass between generations

Yet another example of how little we know about the workings of the body and mind. In a way, much of this is not new–we have known that epigenetic changes can be passed on (like the metabolic changes prompted by … Continue reading

Posted in How Life Begins, Neuroscience and Psychology, Science and Medicine | Leave a comment

Ian Parker: The Search for a Blockbuster Insomnia Drug : The New Yorker

A nice article on the efforts to get approval for a new type of sleep drug, based on the orexin receptor that was linked to narcolepsy at Stanford. Ian Parker: The Search for a Blockbuster Insomnia Drug : The New … Continue reading

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Five Surprising Ways Oxytocin Shapes Your Social Life

Oxytocin is not exactly what it is supposed to be. It has the reputation of being the “love hormone” or the “cuddle drug.” But it’s more like the “clique” hormone–everyone inside the social group is wonderful, but woe to outsiders. … Continue reading

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A scientific strategy for learning

This is a nice comprehensive blog entry about memorizing things through Spaced repetition. There is a lot of neuroscience that shows that neural circuits “learn” (attain permanent state changes) based on repeated firing of the right circuits. And they learn optimally … Continue reading

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