Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Critique of the Nature Paper on Dishonest Bankers,

  I wanted to pass on to MindBlog readers this item analyzing the paper noted in my recent post "Banking - a culture of dishonesty", Statistician Salil Mehta... Read more

  Posted on 18 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Several Nuggets on the Individual Vs. the Collective.

  Following yesterday's post on the evolution of prosocial religions, I pass on a random set of links to articles also relevant to the individual and the... Read more

  Posted on 18 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions

  Having been an author in an issue of "Behavioral and Brain Biology" published by Cambridge University Press, I receive notice of forthcoming articles inviting... Read more

  Posted on 17 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The New Surveillance State and Our Robotic Future.

  Isreal et al. examine one of the many uses to which individual credit scores are being put - to determine our cardiovascular risk (useful information for... Read more

  Posted on 16 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Elders Smile, and Wisdom in Social Signals.

  Two articles relevant to becoming a senior person: From Rijsbergen et al. (open access), a piece of work that reminds me of the book recently read by my book... Read more

  Posted on 15 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Physics, Emergence, and the Connectome - From the Connectome to Brain Function

  A special issue of Neuron on connectomics has a special open source section of articles with different views of the problems we face in relating details of brai... Read more

  Posted on 12 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Psilocybin Changes Brain Connectivity.

  

  Petri et al. show that "the brain's functional patterns undergoes a dramatic change post-psilocybin, characterized by the appearance of many transient structure... Read more

  Posted on 11 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• We Search for Meaning at the Start of Each Chronological Decade.

  Recent soulful introspection by my husband, who moves from age 59 to 60 in late December, motivates me to point to this study by Alter and Hershfield, who... Read more

  Posted on 10 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Banking - a Culture of Dishonesty

  Kelland points to work by Cohn et al., who have studied bank workers and other professionals in experiments in which they won more money if they cheated. Read more

  Posted on 09 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Ecology of Religious Beliefs

  Botero et al. do a fascinating survey of 583 societies to show that religions with moralizing high gods that promote cooperation between humans are more... Read more

  Posted on 08 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• E.O. Wilson and "The Meaning of Human Existence"

  I've just read through E.O. Wilson's new and admirably brief and terse book (~200 pages) that gives a distillation of his previous writings on our human... Read more

  Posted on 05 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Varieties of Poverty - Money, Time, and Bandwidth

  We usually think of money when the word poverty is employed. But, just like getting caught in a high interest loan cycle, we can get in trouble by borrowing... Read more

  Posted on 04 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• My iPad is Masturbating!

  As I have read the New York Times or Kindle Apps on my iPad over the past few weeks, the tablet has seemed to take on a mind of its own, opening articles or... Read more

  Posted on 03 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 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