Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2679 )

• Cleaning Our Brains During Deep Sleep

  I monitor my sleep both with the Oura Ring and the Apple watch, and have observed that my mental clarity and feeling rested on waking positively correlates... Read more

  Posted on 10 June 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• AI Construed as a Brilliant friend...Claude's New Constitution

  Colin Lewis, AI Research Scientist and Developer, has written a Substack essay on Anthropic Claude's New Constitution which deserves your careful reading. Read more

  Posted on 08 June 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The World is Unraveling: A 3-Step Guide to Staying Sane & Useful

  MindBlog has now put out a series of AI assisted posts on the disintegration of the world we have known and the infusion of LLMs into our possible futures. Read more

  Posted on 29 May 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness

  

  I pass on the following edited clips from ChatGPT and Claude condensations of a conversation between Nate Hagens and Iain McGilchrist. Read more

  Posted on 27 May 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Getting Gooier: How AI Is Reshaping Human Nature

  This post is the result of my back and forth interaction with Claude Sonnet 4.6 that has yielded the following summary of Venkatesh Rao's recent essay,... Read more

  Posted on 25 May 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Agentic AI and the Next Intelligence Explosion

  This post is the second of two recursive returns to engage the ideas of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, which were the subject MindBlog posts on 3/13/26 and 3/16/26. Read more

  Posted on 21 May 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• AI Is Not an Alien Intruder — It Is the Latest in a Four-Billion-Year...

  This post is the first of two recursive returns to engage the ideas of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, which were the subject MindBlog posts on 3/13/26 and 3/16/26.... Read more

  Posted on 19 May 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Tech Mirage: Why the U.S.-China AI Race Is Failing Us All

  I asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek to summarize Yi-Ling Liu's recent New York Times essay, in the form of a MindBlog post, and pass on Gemini's... Read more

  Posted on 17 May 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 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