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 ( 2497 )
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The Myth of Cognitive Decline with Aging? Yes and No....
Offering something of an antidote to the drumbeat of articles measuring cognitive declines on again, Ramscar et al. (open source) suggest that changing... Read more
Posted on 31 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Most Published Scientific Results Are False.
I would highly recommend reading this article by George Johnson, which points in particular to the work of John P. A. Ioannidis, a kind of meta-scientist who... Read more
Posted on 30 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Enriched Environments Enhance Adult Brain Plasticity.
I learned much of my neuroscience at tea time in Hubel and Wiesel's laboratory at Harvard Medical School during my post-doc days in the 1960's, as we discussed... Read more
Posted on 29 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
How Inactivity Changes the Brain
Here is yet another sobering note for couch potatoes. Lack of exercise (in rats) causes undesirable remodeling of the brain. Gretchen Reynolds points to work... Read more
Posted on 28 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Liberal Illusion of Uniqueness
Bill Clinton is reported to have complained that getting Democrats to agree on a course of action was like herding cats, while the Republicans didn’t seem to... Read more
Posted on 27 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Kerfuffle Over Whether Men and Women's Brains Are Different.
Nothing kicks up a firestorm in the Neuroscience blogosphere like talk of sex differences in brain architecture. Within days of PNAS's early December 2013... Read more
Posted on 24 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Bodily Maps of Emotions.
Nummenmaa and collaborators, from several universities in Finland, propose that our emotions are represented in our somatosensory system as culturally... Read more
Posted on 23 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Morning Morality Effect.
Here is an interesting tidbit from Kouchaki1 and Smith: Are people more moral in the morning than in the afternoon? We propose that the normal, unremarkable... Read more
Posted on 22 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Milliseconds of a Choice - Watching Your Mind When It Matters.
This is actually a post about mindfulness, in reaction to Dan Hurley's article describing how contemporary applications of the ancient tradition of mindfulness... Read more
Posted on 21 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Beauty at the Ballot Box.
From White et al.: Why does beauty win out at the ballot box? Some researchers have posited that it occurs because people ascribe generally positive... Read more
Posted on 20 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Signals from Inside and Outside Our Bodies in Self Consciousness
Olaf Blanke (whose work on projecting ourselves outside our bodiesI've mentioned previously) and collaborators extend their studies on body perception and self... Read more
Posted on 17 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
A Reason for the Power of Prayer.
Friesea and Wänke find one source of the power of prayer that is not supernatural: it enhances self control by buffering self-control depletion, that is,... Read more
Posted on 16 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
How the Brains of Virtuosic Pianists Are Different...
Because I'm a performing classical pianist (in fact, giving a concert on Feb. 9 in Fort Lauderdale, my snowbird roost from mid-October to mid_April), I always... Read more
Posted on 14 January 2014 CULTURE, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Social Life of Our Genes - the Devastating Effects of Social Isolation
David Dobbs has done a broad and accessible review of how completely the expression of the genes regulating behavior are controlled by the social milieu,... Read more
Posted on 13 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Social Darwinism Isn't Dead - the Rich Really Do Think Their Different...
An engaging piece by Matthew Hutson in Slate points to work by Kraus and Keltner. Some clips: ...In 2012 the top 0.01 percent of households earned an average... Read more
Posted on 10 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Watching Our Brain Remembering Something.
This is kind of neat! Staresinaa et al. observe a part of our brain working at remembering something while we go on about our further activities unrelated to... Read more
Posted on 09 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The "being Happy" Stress-out.
Oliver Burkeman (the author of “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking”) does an engaging article on how deliberate effort on the... Read more
Posted on 08 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Oxytocin Enhances Brain Function in Children with Autism.
Fascinating observations from Gordon et al, who find that that intranasal administration of oxytocin enhances activity in the brain for socially meaningful... Read more
Posted on 07 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
A Neural Prosthesis Can Restore Sensory-motor Function After Brain Damage.
Guggenmos et al. use a brain–machine–brain interfaces (BMBIs) to reconnect two active brain regions whose connections had severed by damage to the brain area... Read more
Posted on 06 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
My Aversion to "selfies" and the Demographics of Social Media.
The actor James Franco has done an interesting brief essay on the meaning of "selfies", photos of himself reporting what he is doing relayed via Instagram. Read more
Posted on 03 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE