Effects of Brief Mindfulness Interventions on the Interference Induced by Experimental Heat Pain on Cognition in Healthy Individuals.

Pain captures attention and interferes with competing tasks demanding cognitive effort. Brief mindfulness interventions involving both conceptual learning and meditation exercises have been shown to improve attention and reduce pain sensitivity, and could potentially reduce pain interference. This study assesses the effect of a 5-day mindfulness intervention (20 min/day) on the interference produced by thermal pain on working memory performance using a 2-back task.

Trade-off in the sound localization abilities of early blind individuals between the horizontal and vertical planes.

There is substantial evidence that sensory deprivation leads to important cross-modal brain reorganization that is paralleled by enhanced perceptual abilities. However, it remains unclear how widespread these enhancements are, and whether they are intercorrelated or arise at the expense of other perceptual abilities. One specific area where such a trade-off might arise is that of spatial hearing, where blind individuals have been shown to possess superior monaural localization abilities in the horizontal plane, but inferior localization abilities in the vertical plane.

Pain reduces sexual motivation in female but not male mice.

Chronic pain is often associated with sexual dysfunction, suggesting that pain can reduce libido. We find that inflammatory pain reduces sexual motivation, measured via mounting behavior and/or proximity in a paced mating paradigm, in female but not male laboratory mice. Pain was produced by injection of inflammogens zymosan A (0.

The influence of vision on sound localization abilities in both the horizontal and vertical planes.

Numerous recent reports have suggested that individuals deprived of vision are able to develop heightened auditory spatial abilities. However, most such studies have compared the blind to blindfolded sighted individuals, a procedure that might introduce a strong performance bias. Indeed, while blind individuals have had their whole lives to adapt to this condition, sighted individuals might be put at a severe disadvantage when having to localize sounds without visual input.