Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2671 )

• Activating the Evolved Healing Mechanisms of the Placebo Response Requires...

  I want to point to an article on the placebo effect published at theconversation.com, and recommend that you read it. I asked the four LLM's I frequently consul... Read more

  Posted on 29 April 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• When Execution Gets Cheap, What Remains Scarce? - The Last Biological Moat.

  I have enjoyed reading a recent essay by Aneesh Sathe, which I recommend you read in full. I will pass on here the equally amazing job that Claude Sonnet 4. Read more

  Posted on 27 April 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Refusal to Dehumanize - Rewilding Creativity

  .. I find it impossible to keep up with the prolific output stream of Indy Johar on Substack, but two recent posts (The Refusal to Dehumanize and Rewilding... Read more

  Posted on 24 April 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Physiology of Agency in the Age of AI

  There is a question lurking beneath the current wave of enthusiasm about artificial intelligence that I think deserves more serious attention than it has... Read more

  Posted on 22 April 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What a Self Is.

  Reading Michael Pollan’s account of his meeting with Anil Seth in his recent book "A World Appears" has prompted me to write down for my own use what I take a... Read more

  Posted on 20 April 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• From Animal to Humans - Multimodality as a Safeguard of Honesty in...

  I pass on the abstracts of an article by Hex et al to appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the manuscript by emailing... Read more

  Posted on 17 April 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Executive Function: Universal Capacity Or Schooled Skill?

  A recent PNAS article by Kroupin and colleagues challenges one of the most widely assumed constructs in cognitive science: that “executive function” (EF)... Read more

  Posted on 15 April 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Default Mode Network as a Bidirectional Interface Between World and Mind

  I want to pass on the abstract of a PNAS contribution from Zhang et al. titled "Sender–receiver subdivisions of the default mode network in perceptual and... Read more

  Posted on 13 April 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• AI, Agency, and the Quiet Hollowing of Mind

  Reading through the article "A Rational Optimist View Of Preventing Agency Decay" is a rich experience. For readers with less patience, here is a ChatGPT summar... Read more

  Posted on 09 April 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Memes Before Machines: The Real Cognitive Risk of the AI Age

  I strongly urge you to read a New York Times opinion piece by Willy Staley titled "Forget the A.I. Apocalypse. Memes Have Already Nuked Our Culture." (unlocked... Read more

  Posted on 07 April 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• AI Use Can Compromise Our Serendipity, Creativity, Autonomy, and Sense of Agency.

  I have been reading numerous articles on pitfalls of using AI, and want to point to two in particular that I highly recommend for a slow and careful read. Read more

  Posted on 31 March 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• One Terminal Chats with Another to Start Vibe Coding a New Dericbownds.net

  Writing MindBlog posts is on temporary hiatus because I have recently followed Claude's instructions to set up my Mac mini M3 to use Claude code, getting my... Read more

  Posted on 23 March 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Polyvagal Theory is Dead - and HRV Isn't a Simple Indicator of Arousal

  I was recently struck by Baxter's Substack post (its title copied to be the title of this MindBlog post), which noted work critical of Porges' Polyvagal theory... Read more

  Posted on 18 March 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Nature of Intelligence and Selves.

  I want to pass on the result of my extracting what I felt to be crucial chunks of text from Chapters 5 through 9 of Agüera y Arcas’s "What is Intelligence" whic... Read more

  Posted on 16 March 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Seismic Shift in Our Understanding of Intelligence

  I've just spent the last three days reading large chunks of the remarkable book "What is Intelligence" by Agüera y Arcas. It is best accessed at... Read more

  Posted on 13 March 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• AI Makes Workloads Worse, Not Better

  An article in today's Wall Street Journal by Ray Smith conforms so completely to my own work experience over the past week (I'm currently feeling fatigued from... Read more

  Posted on 12 March 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Will Deric’s Mind Blog Be Firing Deric Soon? Is AI is Doing His Job Better?

  The short answer to both questions is yes and no. I am finding that ChatGPT 5.2 ($20/month version) will scan the TOCs (tables of contents) of journals such as... Read more

  Posted on 05 March 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A MindBlog-ready ChatGPT Synthesis

  This post continues from the previous one to show ChatGPT's response to my prompt "Let's go with the empathy / orexin paper for your producing a MindBlog-ready... Read more

  Posted on 05 March 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Empathy as a Brain Rhythm: Orexin, Theta Oscillations, and Prosocial Behavior

  (The following is the final installment of a series of three posts on using ChatGPT to assist in the generation of MindBlog posts. I think this final product... Read more

  Posted on 05 March 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Geometries of Change and the Value of Being Human

  I pass on and also archive for myself the following three ChatGPT 5.2 summaries of three recent Johar essays:Summary of The Geometries of Change by Indy Johar... Read more

  Posted on 23 February 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE