Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• The Peripheral Immune System and Stress Susceptibility.

  Using a social stress model in mice, Hoades et al. find preexisting individual differences in the sensitivity of the peripheral immune system that predict and... Read more

  Posted on 03 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Does Exercise Really Make Us Smarter?

  A NYTimes Well piece by Gretchen Reynolds points to an interesting study by Stothart et al., who decided to address a basic deficiency in most studies of the... Read more

  Posted on 02 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Usefulness of Spite.

  Angier reviews a number of studies suggesting that the evolution of human cooperation can be assisted by spite, a certain degree of "altruistic" punishment, whe... Read more

  Posted on 01 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain's Inflammatory Response May Contribute to Brain Disorders.

  This post is just a pointer to a press release from the Society for Neuroscience meetings in Washington, DC. It outlines several studies on the link between... Read more

  Posted on 28 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• In Older People, Moderate Alcohol Intake Improves Memory.

  Articles like this work from Downer et al. make me worry less about the possible deleterious effects of the happy hour cocktail that is part of my daily ritual. Read more

  Posted on 27 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How to Dampen That Urge to Buy.

  A brief post appropriate to the season: Seeing DeSteno's recent OpEd piece in the NYTimes make me think this is a relevant time to point back to my June post... Read more

  Posted on 26 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Our Prefrontal Cortex Explores and Exploits Options.

  

  Hare describes work by Donoso et al: Inferring the best response from a large range of possible actions frequently involves difficult computations that the brai... Read more

  Posted on 25 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Art in a Whiskey Glass, the Physics Explained.

  

  Here's a random bit that provides a tonic for the day. Ernie Button, a photographer in Phoenix, started taking pictures of the interesting patterns he noticed... Read more

  Posted on 24 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Wealth is Especially Bad for the Wealthy.

  Michael Lewis reviews Darrell West's new book "Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust" in The New Republic. The review starts with a marvellous story abou... Read more

  Posted on 24 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Genes That Turned Wildcats into Kitty Cats.

  

  Reaction of my Abyssinian cat, Melvin, to finding that his genome had been sequenced. David Grimm summarizes work by Montague et al. Read more

  Posted on 21 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cooperating with the Future - How to Sustain Resources.

  From Hauser et al., an experiment showing that if resource extraction decision are made by vote rather than individually, the resource can be sustained. Voting... Read more

  Posted on 20 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Humor and Health

  I want to point to this item by Jennifer Gibson that reminds me how useful it might be for me to "lighten up" just a little bit, try to get a daily laugh. Read more

  Posted on 19 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Chemicals That Delay Or Reverse Effects of Aging.

  I scan for articles on aging in my wanderings through journals and pass on the following two, on chemical compounds that delay or reverse the effects of aging:... Read more

  Posted on 18 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Big Data in Neuroscience

  

  I want to pass on an interesting graphic from a piece by Sejnowski, Churchland, and Movshon that introduces a "Focus on big data" series of articles in the... Read more

  Posted on 17 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MDMA (ecstasy) Enhances Emotional Empathy and Prosocial Behavior

  Maybe a hit of NDMA, the party drug ecstasy (not to be confused with the methamphetamine of crystal meth, which is another derivative of the core amphetamine... Read more

  Posted on 15 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Trajectories of Aging.

  

  This post points to another of the articles in the Science special issue on aging. Lindenberger summarizes key features of human cognitive aging from the... Read more

  Posted on 14 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Are We Really Conscious?

  I've done a post on Graziano's 'attention schema' theory of conscious, and thought I would pass on some clips from his recent exposition of the model in a... Read more

  Posted on 13 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Antidepressant and Nerve Growth Stimulating Effects of Exercise - a Mechanism.

  Yau et al. find that a hormone secreted by fat cells during exercise alleviates depression-like behaviors in mice and boosts new nerve cell synthesis in the... Read more

  Posted on 12 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Aging: Sit Less and Shape up Your Attitude

  I'm continuing to clean out my queue of aging articles that have been languishing as potential posts... Reynolds points to two studies. Read more

  Posted on 11 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mind Wandering That Makes Effort More Efficient.

  MindBlog has done numerous posts on our brains' default mode and executive control networks, with the idea usually being that activating the default network or... Read more

  Posted on 10 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE