Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• 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

• Morality in Real Life Versus the Lab.

  The majority of studies on morality have used artificial controlled laboratory settings where study participants respond to presented moral issues (such as the... Read more

  Posted on 24 September 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Neuroanatomy Predicts Individual Risk Attitudes.

  Gilaie-Dotan et al. show that the volume of a region in the right posterior parietal cortex is relatively larger in individuals with higher risk tolerance... Read more

  Posted on 23 September 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Synchrony Between Observers' Brains During Action Observation.

  Nummenmaa et al. (free access article, check out the nice graphics) have examined how we can understand what another person might be thinking or feeling just... Read more

  Posted on 22 September 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Female Hurricanes Are Deadlier Than Male Hurricanes

  The fact that I am driving away from Madison Wisconsin tomorrow, to my cold weather nest in Fort Lauderdale Florida, made me recall this interesting bit on... Read more

  Posted on 19 September 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Music Shapes How We Think - Whether We See the Forrest Or the Trees.

  Hansen and Melzner do a fascinating piece on how musical cues that vary in distance and abstractness versus proximity and concreteness influence us. Read more

  Posted on 19 September 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Parasites Practicing Mind Control.

  Zimmer points to a further installment in the fascinating story of Toxoplasma gondii parasites, who can infect any mammal or bird, but can reproduce only... Read more

  Posted on 18 September 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Associative Memory Enhanced by Brain Stimulation.

  Wang et al. do a proof that the hippocampus facilitates associative memory formation in humans by interacting with distributed brain regions. Read more

  Posted on 17 September 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE