Deric Bownds
These articles, from Deric's MindBlog at http://mindblog.dericbownds.net report new ideas and work on mind, brain, and behavior - as well as random curious stuff.
MY BLOGS
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Deric Bownds' MindBlog
http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/
This blog reports new ideas and work on mind, brain, and behavior - as well as random curious stuff.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 2494 )
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Piano Training Enhances Speech Perception.
Fascinating work from an international collaboration of Desimone at M.I.T., Nan at Beijing Normal Univ., and others: Significance Musical training is... Read more
Posted on 30 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Mechanism of White Matter Changes Induced by Meditation?
Posner and collaborators, who previously have shown changes in brain white matter induced by meditation, suggest a possible mechanism, using a mouse model.... Read more
Posted on 27 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation
I completely missed this review article by Posner and colleagues when it appeared, and am grateful for Bäumli's mention of it in her recent brief essay, which... Read more
Posted on 26 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
When Persistence Doesn't Pay - the Sunk Cost Bias.
Sweis et al. show that sensitivity to time invested in pursuit of a reward occurs similarly in mice, rats, and humans. All three display a resistance to giving... Read more
Posted on 25 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Declining Mental Health Among Disadvantaged Americans.
Cherlin summarizes work by Goldman et al. that demonstrates "a troubling portrait of declining psychological health among non-Hispanic whites in mid- and... Read more
Posted on 24 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Therapy for NYTAD - Read About Citrus Micro-jets!
What is NYTAD? My just made up acronym for “New York Times Anxiety Disorder” - what I have to resist during my daily glance through the endless list of NYT and... Read more
Posted on 23 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Crows Make Mental Templates.
Weintraub points to further studies from the University of Aukland School of Psychology on the extraordinary New Caledonian crows that have been shown to learn... Read more
Posted on 20 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Perceptual and Judgement Creep.
Fascinating work by Gilbert and colleagues: Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to... Read more
Posted on 19 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Authentic Lies.
Hahl et al. suggest how a blatantly lying demagogue (guess who?) can be perceived as authentic: We develop and test a theory to address a puzzling pattern that... Read more
Posted on 18 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Social Media and the Emergence of Violence During Protests.
The social media, and especially Twitter, are now integral to modern political behavior, with events online both reflecting and influencing actions offline.... Read more
Posted on 17 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
What is Consciousness, and Could Machines Have It?
I want to point to a lucid article by Dehaene, Lau, and Koulder that gives the most clear review I have seen of our current state of knowledge on the nature of... Read more
Posted on 16 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Playing with Proteins in Virtual Reality.
Much of my mental effort while I was doing laboratory research on the mechanisms of visual transduction (changing light into a nerve signal in our retinal rod... Read more
Posted on 13 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Increasing Despair Among Poor Americans.
A survey by Goldman et al. of more than 4,600 American adults conducted in 1995-1996 and in 2011-2014 suggests that among individuals of low socioeconomic... Read more
Posted on 12 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
A Fundamental Advance in Brain Imaging Techniques.
I want to pass on the abstract, along with a bit of text and two figures, from an article by Coalson, Van Essen, and Glasser that argues for a fundamental chang... Read more
Posted on 11 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Mindfulness Training Increases Strength of Right Insula Connections.
Sharp et al.(open source) suggest that: The endeavor to understand how mindfulness works will likely be advanced by using recently developed tools and theory... Read more
Posted on 10 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Mortality Rates Level off at Extreme Age
Interesting work from Barbi et al. showing that human death rates increase exponentially up to about age 80, then decelerate, and plateau after age 105. Read more
Posted on 09 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Brain Imaging Predicts Who Will Be a Good Musical Performer.
Fascinating observations from Zatorre's group: Significance In sophisticated auditory–motor learning such as musical instrument learning, little is understood... Read more
Posted on 06 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Why Are Religious People Trusted More?
A prevailing view is that religious behavior facilitate trust, primarily toward coreligionists, and particularly when it is diagnostic of belief in moralizing... Read more
Posted on 05 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Seven Creepy Facebook Patents
I'll follow yesterday's post with yet another post on creepy high tech patents, this time from Facebook, showing their ongoing intention to invade our privacy a... Read more
Posted on 04 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
A Patent for Emotional Robots?
I recently received an interesting email from Deepak Gupta, who is with a patent research services company, who, having seen my post on robots and emotion,... Read more
Posted on 03 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE