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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When Being a Control-freak Doesn't Help....
Bocanegra and Hommel note limits to the usefulness of cognitive control, showing, in particular, how overcontrol (induced by task instructions) can prevent the... Read more
Posted on 16 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Brain Initiative Meets physics….Opps!
Scientists leading the much-heralded Obama Brain Initiative initially providing $100 million (now NIH is seeking 4.5 billion for their part of the project) to... Read more
Posted on 13 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Gratitude Reduces Economic Impatience.
Whenever I come across yet another self-help laundry list of useful tricks for feeling better, and try a few, I repeatedly find that briefly following... Read more
Posted on 12 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Childhood Bullying Predicts Adult Inflammation.
How is this for a chilling finding? Childhood bullying leaves bullies with lower, and victims with higher, levels of chronic inflammation than those uninvolved... Read more
Posted on 11 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Tonics for a Long Life?
I've recently come across two articles relevant to life extension (work done with mice and worms, to be sure, but a human who reads these papers might well be... Read more
Posted on 10 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Rapidity of Human Brain and Muscle Evolution - the Downside of Smarts?
Roberts does a summary of fascinating work by Bozak et al. He sets the context: Somewhat narcissistically, one of the spectacular changes in phenotype that we... Read more
Posted on 09 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
First Direct Evidence for Human Sex Pheromones.
Here is a clever experiment by Zhou et al., who digitally morph the gender of moving point light displays of walking from male to female while subjects are... Read more
Posted on 06 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Social Attention and Our Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex.
Ralph Adolphs points to an interesting article by Wolf et al. showing that bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage impairs visual attention to the eye... Read more
Posted on 05 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Blue Mind - Looking at Water Improves Your Health and Calm
I just spend three days this past weekend in a guesthouse cabin in Door County, Wisconsin - three days of seeing mainly gorgeous green forests and the blue... Read more
Posted on 04 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Crowdsourcing Our Brain’s Wiring.
You too can be be a neuroscientist! I have to join in the general chorus of press pointing to the efforts of Sebastian Seung, now moving from MIT to Princeton... Read more
Posted on 03 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Science of Inequality.
The May 23 issue of Science Magazine has a large section devoted the origins and analysis of economic inequality. And, the general gist of virtually all the... Read more
Posted on 02 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Monkey Business Illusion.
Many people have by now viewed the famous "Gorilla Video" made by Daniel Simons over fifteen years ago, in which most viewers asked to count how many times... Read more
Posted on 30 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
How Social Equality is Represented in the Brain.
Interesting work from Aoki, Adolphs, and collaborators: A distinct aspect of the sense of fairness in humans is that we care not only about equality in... Read more
Posted on 29 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Brain Correlates of Expertise in Musical Improvisation
Pihno et al. show that expertise in musical improvisation is associated with increased connectivity between premotor and prefrontal areas, suggesting that the... Read more
Posted on 28 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Brain Correlates of "the Good Life" ??
Lewis et al. offer another example of the class of experiments correlating the volume of a specific brain area with a specific behavior, in this case... Read more
Posted on 27 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Stress Can Protect from Alzheimer's Disease
Yanker and his collaborators have found that levels of a neuro-protective protein called REST (repressor element 1-silencing transcription factor) are... Read more
Posted on 26 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Fear Detection Depends on Phase of Our Heartbeats.
Here's a fascinating piece of work: Cognitions and emotions can be influenced by bodily physiology. Here, we investigated whether the processing of brief fear... Read more
Posted on 23 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Correlation Between Prosocial Behavior and Computer Game Playing
Here's what seems to me a a slightly counter-intuitive result. Numerous studies have a noted a correlation between playing violent computer games and less... Read more
Posted on 22 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
What Drives Collective Versus Individualistic Behaviors?
Talheim et al. offer a strikingly simple explanation for why collective versus individualistic behaviors may arise in a given cultural group. Read more
Posted on 21 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Morality and Perception Speed
Here is an interesting nugget... We are more likely to see a word flashed for a very brief interval if it has moral valence. Words related to morality can be... Read more
Posted on 20 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE