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Editor's Selections: Golf, Spatial IQ, Embodied Cognition, and Brain Trauma

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Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week.

  • Practicing golf changes the brain! Well, pretty much everything you do changes the brain - but a new paper specifically about golf is covered nicely by William Yates at Brain Posts.

  • A new study in PNAS about spatial intelligence in two groups of people in Northern India has been getting a lot of media and blogospheric attention. The main finding, according to the paper, is that any gender difference in spatial intelligence can be linked to culture and environment. Neuroskeptic, however, is skeptical: Men, Women, and Spatial Intelligence.

  • We've all heard about embodied cognition. But Sam McNerney, of the blog Why We Reason, asks "what do cognitive scientists really mean when they say that brains are embodied?" The Embodiment of Time, Tenderness, and Weight.

  • Can brain trauma cause cognitive enhancement? A fascinating question, originally asked by a Quora user, is answered by Bradley Voytek of Oscillatory Thoughts.

That's it for this week... Check back next week for more great psychology and neuroscience blogging!

Jason G. Goldman is a science journalist based in Los Angeles. He has written about animal behavior, wildlife biology, conservation, and ecology for Scientific American, Los Angeles magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC, Conservation magazine, and elsewhere. He contributes to Scientific American's "60-Second Science" podcast, and is co-editor of Science Blogging: The Essential Guide (Yale University Press). He enjoys sharing his wildlife knowledge on television and on the radio, and often speaks to the public about wildlife and science communication.

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