Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2705 )

• Casino Culture Meets the Predictive Brain

  Max Read has a recent sharp piece in the New York Times Magazine, "Gambling Is the Culture," that I want to pass on, along with some thoughts it set off in me. Read more

  Posted on 12 October 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Artificial Symbiotic Intelligence - a Future of Agents, AGI and the Orchestratio...

  I pass on this view of our future by Benjamin Bratton, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, and James Manyika in its entirety. It deserves a careful reading, and I'm not... Read more

  Posted on 09 October 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• It's a Bitter, Bitter Lesson

  

  I can't resist passing this on, from Ethan Mollick's Substack "One Useful Thing':...I thought that getting agents to work effectively as a group would take... Read more

  Posted on 06 October 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Aging as a Continuation of Development

  A framework for a more positive view of the aging brain is offered by Fernandez et al., in an article in the "Perspectives on Psychological Science" journal. Read more

  Posted on 05 October 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Who Broke the World? Who Are the villains?...Where Do We Not Want to Be?

  I want to point to one of Nate Hagens' "Great Simplification" essays I found interesting. Hagens lays out eight distinct "lenses" through which people assign... Read more

  Posted on 02 October 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• "Responsibilism" - Collectivism Isn't Warmth, It's Obligation

  For decades, cross-cultural psychological surveys have puzzled researchers by failing to detect the East-West collectivism gap that field experts consistently... Read more

  Posted on 30 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Depth and Quality of Deep Sleep Correlates with Resilience to Stress.

  I'm finding that as I grow older my resilience and recovery from stressful situations depends crucially on the depth and quality of my deep sleep (as measured b... Read more

  Posted on 28 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Cortex Helps Organize Its Own Disappearnce from Waking Consciousness

  A study using mice by Ratliff et al. identifies a sparse population of sleep-active, long-range inhibitory neurons within mouse neocortex whose manipulation... Read more

  Posted on 25 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Slow Breathing Modulates Brain Function and Risk Behavior

  Some interesting observations reported in Neuron by Huang et al.:Highlights• Prolonged exhalation increases risky decisions by increasing reward... Read more

  Posted on 23 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Deeper Meditation is Associated with More Reproducible Sensory Responses

  Nah et al. do experiments suggesting that meditation depth enhances the functional signal-to-noise ratio of the brain. The study is attempting to turn the... Read more

  Posted on 21 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Agentic Self: The Brain Learns Whether Action Matters Before Deciding What t...

  A study by Liu et al. (open access article with interesting graphics) decomposes our “agency” into at least two computations: estimating whether one is in... Read more

  Posted on 18 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Deluge of Articles on What Consciousness Is...

  This post violates sentiments I recently expressed about not using AI to generate text in MindBlog posts. After reading through or skimming four interesting... Read more

  Posted on 16 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Humanity Has the Debate About AI Consciousness Backwards

  I pass on this brief piece by Blaise Agüera y Arcas that appeared in The Economist:We don’t care for others because they’re conscious. We believe they’re... Read more

  Posted on 14 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Categorization is ‘baked’ into the Brain

  I've been meaning to point out this Nature Reviews Neuroscience Perspectives article by Barrett and Miller (the same Miller referenced in the previous post). I... Read more

  Posted on 11 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog's AI Playground - a New Piano Piece: Nocturne in a Minor Key

  A recent NYTimes article on plagarism lawsuits brought by several singer-song writers against the Suno AI music generator made me wonder whether it might... Read more

  Posted on 09 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Analog Cognition and Consciousness

  Miller et al. suggest that brain synapses store representations while large-scale rhythmic electric fields dynamically select, route and combine them. Read more

  Posted on 09 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Moral Weight of Human - AI Interactions

  I am passing on a document prepared for a meeting of the Chaos and Complex Systems discussion group at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Read more

  Posted on 07 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Theory of Cuteness as Developmental Investment

  I pass on the abstract of an upcoming article by Alexis Garsmeur and Nicolas Baumard in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of... Read more

  Posted on 04 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Transcranial Focused Ultrasound for Identifying the Neural Substrate of Consciou...

  From Freeman et al. at MIT, a pie in the sky advertisement for a potential tool that has regulatory hurdles to clear. Great news if things work out for this... Read more

  Posted on 02 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Nikolai Sheiko Prelude Op. 9

  

  As I mentioned in my July 27 post, I've been obtaining PDFs of music scores written by contemporary Russian piano composers who further develop the styles of... Read more

  Posted on 01 September 2026 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE