Tag Archives: brain

Found while foraging (December 31, 2012)

31 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by in Foraging

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I was hoping to spend lots of time writing during the winter holidays, but instead I’ve been enjoying the opportunity to spend time with my family.  I’ve got a few promising posts in the works for early in the new year, but until then here’s another collection of odds and ends from around the web to keep you going.  As always, feel free to add more links in the comments.  I hope you’ve all enjoyed the winter/summer solstice and associated holidays.
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The basis of our overly optimistic beliefs

20 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Humans

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Optimism (Photo credit:verydemotivational.com)The human brain seems to be wired for forward-looking optimism.  In 2007, Tali Sharot and a team of scientists at University College London showed that people who were asked to imagine positive and negative future events consistently felt like the positive events are closer in time; the positive future events also felt closer than events in the past, whether positive or negative.  More recently, Dr. Sharot has turned her attention to the “good news/bad news effect”, our tendency to update our beliefs to reflect good news more than bad news.  Over the last few years, she and her team have identified the part of the brain responsible for this behaviour and even shown how to disrupt it.
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Natural selection: selection mechanisms, sex, and the brain

08 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by in Evolution, Natural Selection

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This is second part in my series on natural selection.  In the first part, I discussed different modes of selection; in this post, I’ll explain an important mechanism of natural selection which probably doesn’t get enough attention in basic biology courses.  The idea, called sexual selection, dates back to Darwin, who dedicated over half of one of his books (The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex) to the subject.  Sexual selection is based on the struggle to reproduce rather than the struggle to survive; this already gives us a hint that the term “fitness” has a different meaning in evolutionary biology than it does in common speech, which is a subject I’ll get to in a later part of this series.

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