New feature here on BrainEthics. In the spirit of the great Mind Hacks‘ “Spike Activity” posts, in the future, every Monday we are going to list interesting new papers that we can’t find the time to write more elaborate posts about. So, without further ado, here’s the first batch of papers:
Vaughan Bell is not only one of the authors of Mind Hacks. In his spare time he moonlights as a psychiatrist and writes research papers as well. In the forthcoming issue of Trends in Cognitive Science he has a review of theories explaining delusion as a break-down of belief formation. [Link to paper.]
The April issue of Nature Neuroscience contains another interesting paper from the Logothetis Lab on the relation between the BOLD signal and neural activity. This study shows that negative BOLD responses originate in neuronal activity decreases. [Link to paper.]
The evolutionary roots of social cooperation is a hot topic these days. In a paper in the April 7 issue of Science Özgür Gürerk and his colleagues show experimentally that societies build on sanctioning fares better than sanction-free societies. [Link to paper.]
Robert Plomin and colleagues are discussing the notion of a set of “generalist genes” in two new papers. Generalist genes are a set of genes that affect most cognitive abilities and disabilities. One paper can be found in April version of Current Opinion in Neurobiology. [Link to paper.] The other can be found in Trends in Cognitive Science. [Link to paper.]
More highlights from the literature next Monday!
– Martin
[…] (This is a follow-up on Martins and my brief review) […]