Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• The Origins of Morality.

  Mark Johnson has generated some creative and seminal ideas in his books "The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason" and, with... Read more

  Posted on 29 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Stability of the Authoritarian State.

  Science Magazine publishes comment on a fascinating article by King et al. who essentially reverse-engineer censorship in China to show that criticisms of the... Read more

  Posted on 28 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Early Life Anxiety in Monkeys and Humans Correlates with Connectivity Between...

  

  A group of collaborators, mainly at the University of Wisconsin, including Ned Kalin and Richard Davidson, provide new information about the evolutionarily... Read more

  Posted on 27 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• More on Better Living Through Zapping Your Brain.

  Anna Altman has done an entertaining piece on transcranial direct-current stimulation, or tDCS, which I have mentioned in numerous previous mindblog posts (ente... Read more

  Posted on 26 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Origins of Good and Evil in Human Babies.

  Felix Warneken does a review in TICS (Trends in Cognitive Sciences) of Paul Bloom new book "Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil," which argues that humans... Read more

  Posted on 25 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• OhMyGawd...now MRI Measurement Are Going to Tell Us How Happy We Are??

  Dolan and collaborators come up with yet another clever use of MRI measurements. (If you enter "Dolan" in the mindblog search box, you will find numerous posts... Read more

  Posted on 22 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Source of Consciousness.

  Paller and Suzuki do a compact review on efforts to define the source of consciousness, arguing against the mysterian position that consciousness is beyond the... Read more

  Posted on 21 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is Our Microbiome Manipulating Us to Look out for Itself?

  Links between our gut and our brain, especially via the vagus nerve, can regulate stress disorders such as depression and anxiety. Read more

  Posted on 20 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain and Behavioral Correlates of Compassion Training.

  Davidson and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin have ...investigated whether short-term compassion training would enhance altruistic behavior toward a... Read more

  Posted on 19 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Spooky and Awesome Technology

  

  Recent issues of Science Magazine have amazing reports of technology advances: a brain-like spiking-neuron integrated circuit on a 5. Read more

  Posted on 18 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• More on Brain Games and Training - and Reversing Cognitive Decline in Aging.

  Yesterday I got into playing again with a subscription to the online brain training games developed by Michael Merzenich and his colleagues that I purchased... Read more

  Posted on 15 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Chronic Pain Saps Our Motivations and Desires - the Mechanism.

  

  Fields gives a nice summary of work by Schwartz et al., who find a detailed synaptic mechanism for how chronic pain saps our motivations and desires. I pass on... Read more

  Posted on 14 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Habenula (?) Does a Tally of Our Negative Outcomes.

  

  Impress your friends that you know the name of a brain region that they haven't heard of before! Lawson et al., in yet another publication that includes... Read more

  Posted on 13 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• In Learning, Too Much of a Good Thing Can Be Bad.

  Many contemporary elementary school classrooms have walls that are covered with varied and interesting displays that are not relevant to ongoing instruction... Read more

  Posted on 12 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Varieties of Introspection.

  I disagree with David Brooks’ opinions much of the time, but I’m impressed with what a polymath he is. His Op-Ed piece on healthy versus unhealthy... Read more

  Posted on 11 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• An Opinion Due to Social Conformity Lasts Only a Few Days.

  Huang et al. do a study on 22 South China Normal University students in which they evaluated the attractiveness of a series of neutral faces with and without... Read more

  Posted on 08 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Motivation Not Improved by Multiple Motives.

  Wrzesniewski et al. do an interesting study of 11,320 West Point cadets over a period of ten years. Although people often assume that multiple motives for... Read more

  Posted on 07 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Much Do Our Genes Influence Our Political Beliefs?

  One of MindBlog’s subject threads has been noting articles that examine the correlation between our genetic constitution and our political behaviors. Read more

  Posted on 06 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Anger as the Most Easily Spread Emotion.

  Teddy Wayne does an essay on how anger is the emotion that spreads the most easily over social media. Some clips: A 2013 study, from Beihang University in... Read more

  Posted on 05 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Noise? Insomnia? Try A.S.M.R.

  Fairyington does an interesting piece on a phenomenon called autonomous sensory meridian response (A.S.M.R.), which is felt as a mild calming tingling... Read more

  Posted on 04 August 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE