Encephalon #50 Edition: Brain & Mind Research

Wel­come to Encephalon 50th edi­tion, where you will find anoth­er superb col­lec­tion of blog posts on all things Brain and Mind. Enjoy these con­tri­bu­tions: Sci­ence & Tech­nol­o­gy Mind Hacks reports that Face­book ate my psy­chi­a­trist. We can learn about the ben­e­fits of social net­work­ing sites like Face­book, bring­ing great per­spec­tive to recent and mis­guid­ed media speculation…

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Mental Health News: NYT, Mind Hacks

A few very inter­est­ing New York Times arti­cles over the last cou­ple of days, plus a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for clin­i­cians and researchers in Latin Amer­i­ca. — Well: When a Brain Sci­en­tist Suf­fers a Stroke “Dr. Tay­lor recounts the details of her stroke and the amaz­ing insights she gained from it in a riv­et­ing 18-minute video…

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Mind Hacks and the Placebo Effect

In the ETech pan­el a few days ago, we dis­cussed some futur­is­tic and some emerg­ing ways in which we can “hack our minds”, most­ly from a tech­nol­o­gy point of view. Nei­ther myself nor the oth­er pan­elists thought of sug­gest­ing the most obvi­ous and inex­pen­sive method, proven in thou­sands of research stud­ies. The secret com­pound?: Belief. Also…

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Brain News: Software, Education, Arts

A few updates and announce­ments: — 1) My apolo­gies for slow blog­ging, due to trav­el. I par­tic­i­pat­ed yes­ter­day in a fun pan­el dis­cus­sion at ETech on Use Your Head- The Future of Mind Hacks. You can read some take-aways (in Ital­ian, so this may be good brain exer­cise) here. — 2) We will release our…

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Placebo effect: why not more of it?

Senia writes a great arti­cle on How You Tell the Sto­ry of Your Life in Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy News Dai­ly. As part of the sto­ry, she men­tions a very fun study on the pow­er of the Place­bo effect. From Seni­a’s post: “In the Feb­ru­ary, 2007 issue of Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Langer and col­league Alia Crum report­ed that they…

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