Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• First Direct Evidence for Human Sex Pheromones.

  Here is a clever experiment by Zhou et al., who digitally morph the gender of moving point light displays of walking from male to female while subjects are... Read more

  Posted on 06 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Social Attention and Our Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex.

  

  Ralph Adolphs points to an interesting article by Wolf et al. showing that bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage impairs visual attention to the eye... Read more

  Posted on 05 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Blue Mind - Looking at Water Improves Your Health and Calm

  I just spend three days this past weekend in a guesthouse cabin in Door County, Wisconsin - three days of seeing mainly gorgeous green forests and the blue... Read more

  Posted on 04 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Crowdsourcing Our Brain’s Wiring.

  You too can be be a neuroscientist! I have to join in the general chorus of press pointing to the efforts of Sebastian Seung, now moving from MIT to Princeton... Read more

  Posted on 03 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Science of Inequality.

  The May 23 issue of Science Magazine has a large section devoted the origins and analysis of economic inequality. And, the general gist of virtually all the... Read more

  Posted on 02 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Monkey Business Illusion.

  Many people have by now viewed the famous "Gorilla Video" made by Daniel Simons over fifteen years ago, in which most viewers asked to count how many times... Read more

  Posted on 30 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Social Equality is Represented in the Brain.

  Interesting work from Aoki, Adolphs, and collaborators: A distinct aspect of the sense of fairness in humans is that we care not only about equality in... Read more

  Posted on 29 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Correlates of Expertise in Musical Improvisation

  Pihno et al. show that expertise in musical improvisation is associated with increased connectivity between premotor and prefrontal areas, suggesting that the... Read more

  Posted on 28 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Correlates of "the Good Life" ??

  Lewis et al. offer another example of the class of experiments correlating the volume of a specific brain area with a specific behavior, in this case... Read more

  Posted on 27 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Stress Can Protect from Alzheimer's Disease

  Yanker and his collaborators have found that levels of a neuro-protective protein called REST (repressor element 1-silencing transcription factor) are... Read more

  Posted on 26 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Fear Detection Depends on Phase of Our Heartbeats.

  Here's a fascinating piece of work: Cognitions and emotions can be influenced by bodily physiology. Here, we investigated whether the processing of brief fear... Read more

  Posted on 23 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Correlation Between Prosocial Behavior and Computer Game Playing

  

  Here's what seems to me a a slightly counter-intuitive result. Numerous studies have a noted a correlation between playing violent computer games and less... Read more

  Posted on 22 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Drives Collective Versus Individualistic Behaviors?

  Talheim et al. offer a strikingly simple explanation for why collective versus individualistic behaviors may arise in a given cultural group. Read more

  Posted on 21 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Morality and Perception Speed

  Here is an interesting nugget... We are more likely to see a word flashed for a very brief interval if it has moral valence. Words related to morality can be... Read more

  Posted on 20 May 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 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