Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Pianists’ Brains Are Different from Everyone Else...

  Because I'm a pianist who started lessons at age 6 and now usually give two concerts a year, I'm always fascinated by articles like this one from a music site... Read more

  Posted on 21 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Vitamin D Prevents Cognitive Decline

  ...in aging rats, to be sure. Work like the following piece from my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin reinforces my determination to continue my... Read more

  Posted on 20 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Culture Shapes Spatial Conceptions of Time - Is Your Past in Front Of, Or...

  A interesting perspective from Fuente et al. on spatial conceptions of time. Some clips from their article: Across many of the world’s languages, the future is... Read more

  Posted on 17 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Are We Fooled by the Ventriloquist?

  As we watch the movement's of a dummy's mouth while it is sitting in a ventriloguist's lap, we perceive the speech as coming from the dummy's mouth, rather... Read more

  Posted on 16 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Microbial Aura - in the House and in the Garden

  I've always been fascinated by the fact that in "our" bodies most of the cells are not our own, they are microbial symbionts. I pass on here two more takes on... Read more

  Posted on 15 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Boredom = Stress.... and Misbehavior

  From Merrifield and Danckert, a crisp piece of work (using the usual covey of college undergraduate as subjects) demonstrating that boredom increases stress... Read more

  Posted on 14 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Improvement of Performance by Transcranial Stimulation Depends on Existing Degre...

  Furuya et al. make the interesting observation that the fine motor hand performance of musically untrained people is improved by transcranial direction current... Read more

  Posted on 13 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Sleep Cycle Started 700 Million Years Ago in a Worm?

  Zimmer points to a nice piece of work by Tosches et al. suggesting that the melatonin rhythm that regulates our sleep may have arisen ~700 million years ago in ... Read more

  Posted on 10 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Inflammatory Signaling is Bad for the Aging Brain.

  Baruch et al. do some interesting work suggesting that preventing antiviral-like responses may protect aging brain function. They find that the choroid plexus o... Read more

  Posted on 09 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Our Childhood Takes So Long - the Metabolic Costs of Brain Development

  Kuzawa et al. do a nice job of explaining how the energy requirements of our brain growth slow down our body growth in childhood: The metabolic costs of brain... Read more

  Posted on 08 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is It Love Or Lust? Look at Eye Gaze.

  Bolmont et al. ask: When you are on a date with a person you barely know, how do you evaluate that person’s goals and intentions regarding a long-term... Read more

  Posted on 07 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Having 'no Self' as Self Transcendence, Or Spirituality.

  

  I've finally read another item in my queue of potential posts, an interview by Gary Gutting of Sam Harris, whose most recent book is titled "Waking Up: A Guide... Read more

  Posted on 06 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• An Update of Dericbownds.net

  I wanted to mention some recent changes to my main website, dericbownds.net, which first started during my transition from a career of laboratory research on... Read more

  Posted on 05 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Few Self-Help Nostrums.

  I thought I would pass on a few random self-help pieces from the NY Times that caught my eye and have accumulated in my queue of potential posts. Read more

  Posted on 03 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Fish as Brain Food - It’s Not Just the Omega-3

  An interesting study from Raji et al., examines data from 260 cognitively normal people with an average age of 78, and finds baked or broiled fish (but not frie... Read more

  Posted on 02 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Status and the Brain.

  

  I want to pass on this summary by Utevsky and Platt of the article by Noonan et al. (both are PLOS open source) on brain neural circuits that covary with an... Read more

  Posted on 01 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Good Order - Creativity Needs Routine

  I really liked David Brooks' recent OpEd piece in the NYTimes. It is one of many published comments praising Obama's recent speech at the United Nations on the... Read more

  Posted on 30 September 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Hearing and Imagination Shape What We See.

  Vetter et al. have done the interesting experiment of blindfolding people and then scanning their brains while they listened to birds singing, traffic noise,... Read more

  Posted on 29 September 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Human Dynamic Clamp

  In my distant past when I was doing cellular neurophysiology we used a technique called the "voltage clamp", in which the electrophysiology equipment measuring ... Read more

  Posted on 26 September 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Rules of Implicit Evaluation by Race, Religion, and Age.

  Axt and collaborators look at a very large sample (N > 200,000) of people of varying race, religion, and age and find, that after ranking their own race,... Read more

  Posted on 25 September 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE