Doctors Lau and Chan from the University of Hong Kong have made a wonderful site to teach you critical thinking, logic, scientific reasoning, and other such skills. That page is a good resource and offers good tools and methods. Critical thinking, logic and reasoning have a place in all aspects of life, whether they be [...]
A short meta-article this time. I noticed that there is now a last.fm page for mindmodifications.com. You can check it out here. I think it’s a bit funny as last.fm is a site for various types of music, and the mindmodifications.com tracks consist of very simple colored noise files suitable for Ganzfeld experiments. Anyway, currently [...]
BBC has an interesting article about how people who are synaesthetes can visualize flow of time. These so-called time-space synaesthetes have superior recall when it comes to remembering when certain events took place. Could it be that they have a “built-in” visualization-association system which helps in remembering without much effort? Think of something like an [...]
IEEE Spectrum Online points to interesting research lead by William J. Tyler. The research group used low-power, low-frequency (440 kHz to 670 kHz) ultrasound to stimulate areas within the brain. This technique, called “ultrasonic neuromodulation“, works by toggling the sodium channels of a neuron, possibly triggering the release of neurotransmitters – in other words, making [...]
Here is an interesting Nature journal article about cognitive-enhancing drugs and their current legal status. The authors argue that even though there are risks involved, the overall benefits for the individuals and the society are greater, and thus use of cognition-enhancing drugs (for example Ritalin, Modafinil, Adderall, Aricept) should be allowed for use by healthy [...]
The site ended up at MetaFilter, and the resulting traffic influx killed the poor web server. But now the server is up again – hello to all MetaFilter people, hope you enjoy your visit(s)! The MetaFilter article pointed to a Mindhacks post about a very interesting research paper at Cortex volume 44. Unfortunately direct linking [...]
I got mail from Emotiv pointing out that the Discovery Channel recently ran a feature about building a mind-controlled car, using the Emotiv EPOC gadget for brain-computer interface. If you are in the USA, have a look. I would appreciate if you could post some comments, as I was unable to view the video – [...]
The placebo effect, in a nutshell, is demonstrated like this: instead of giving a patient real medicine, he is given ineffective medicine (e.g. sugar pills) but the patient is nevertheless cured. This is because the patient thinks he is receiving real medicine and “knows” that it should work – thus, although really given ineffective medicine, [...]
An interesting article about research which was done to help people with dyslexia. The brain can learn to permanently adapt to enhance the learning capabilities, as long as enough training and instruction are given (and the training carefully followed, of course). Check out “Remedial instruction rewires dyslexic brains, provides lasting results”. Quote: “Focused instruction can [...]
An article about enhancing cognition (with the aid of chemicals) in the Economist.
