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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Sluggish Cognitive Tempo, a New Diagnosis Du Jour?
The drug companies may be finding a new profit center, having maxed out their ability to push pills on the more than 6 million American children who have... Read more
Posted on 19 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Formation of New Brain Cells Can Erase Old Memories
Over the past ten years it has been established that generation of new nerve cells in the dentate gyrus portion of our brains' hippocampus is required for... Read more
Posted on 16 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Nonconscious Emotions and First Impressions - Role for Conscious Awareness
I just came across this interesting article from Davidson and collaborators at Wisconsin: Emotions can color people’s attitudes toward unrelated objects in the... Read more
Posted on 15 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Language Universals at Birth.
Fascinating observations from Gómez et al. showing that human babies are born with linguistic biases concerning syllable structure: The evolution of human... Read more
Posted on 14 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
GABA Predicts Time Perception.
Individuals can vary widely in their ability to detect sub-second visual stimuli, and most cognitive training and exercise regimes have exercises designed to... Read more
Posted on 13 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
More on the Rejuvenating Power of Young Blood...
Since my "fountain of youth" post in 2011 there has been a burst of research showing that factors in the blood of younger animals can actually reverse the... Read more
Posted on 12 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Brain Activity Display in the Spirit of P.T. Barnum
Carl Zimmer points to some amazing brain graphics, notably one from Gazzaley's lab. You should use the gear symbol to slow down the graphic, and set the... Read more
Posted on 09 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
We Transfer Reward in a Bottom-up Search Task to a Top-down Search Task.
Lee and Shomstein make the interesting observation that a reward-based contingency learned in a bottom-up search task can be transferred to a subsequent top-dow... Read more
Posted on 08 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Rapid Epigenetic Changes in Expert Meditators.
Fascinating data from an international collaboration: Background A growing body of research shows that mindfulness meditation can alter neural, behavioral and... Read more
Posted on 07 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Smell of Sickness.
Olsson et al. demonstrate the existence of a olfactory signal of illness, a aversive body odor that can signal other humans to keep their distance from a... Read more
Posted on 06 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Out of Body, out of Mind.
Bergouignan et al. do a neat experiment in which they test how well study participants remember a presentation when they experience being in their own bodies... Read more
Posted on 05 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Oxytocin Promotes Group-serving Dishonesty
Like Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, the oxytocin story gets curiouser and curiouser.... this from Shalvi and De Dreu: To protect and promote the well-being of... Read more
Posted on 02 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Aesop's Crow - Evidence of Causal Understanding
Jelbert et al. show even further smarts in the New Caledonian Crow I've mentioned in several previous posts. Understanding causal regularities in the world is... Read more
Posted on 01 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
A Blood Test for Alzheimers Disease?
Mapstone et al. have identified a set of 10 lipids whose levels predict, with an accuracy of over 90%, whether or not an older individual will develop mild... Read more
Posted on 30 April 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Brain Abnormalities Caused by Marijuana Use.
Numerous studies have shown that cannabis use is associated with impairments of cognitive functions, including learning and memory, attention, and... Read more
Posted on 28 April 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Brain Activity Underlying Subjective Awareness
Hill and He devise and interesting paradigm to distinguish brain activities directly contributing to conscious perception from brain activities that precede or... Read more
Posted on 25 April 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Blocking Facial Muscle Movement Compromizes Detecting and Having Emotions
Rychlowska et al. show that blocking facial mimicry makes true and false smiles look the same: Recent research suggests that facial mimicry underlies accurate... Read more
Posted on 24 April 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Is It a Stradivarius?
I've published several posts on studies showing that panels of expert wine tasters can not distinguish cheap from expensive wines if their labels are covered,... Read more
Posted on 23 April 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Top Brain, Bottom Brain - a User's Manual from Kosslyn and Miller
I thought I would point to a recent book authored by Kosslyn and Miller: “Top Brain - Bottom Brain: Surprising Insights into How You Think. Read more
Posted on 22 April 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Judging a Man by the Width of His Face.
Valentine et al. make interesting observations in a speed-dating context. The effect of higher facial width-to-height ratio on short-term but not long-term... Read more
Posted on 21 April 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE