Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Why is Melody in the High Notes and Rhythm in the Base?

  Hove et al. examine to what extent musical convention might be shaped by evolutionarily-shaped human physiology. Across cultures, polyphonic music most often... Read more

  Posted on 23 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Blue is Warmer Than Red?

  Red colors are arousing, blue colors calming, so at first the results of Ho et al. seem counter-intuitive. A red object at the same temperature as a blue... Read more

  Posted on 22 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Ecstasy (MDMA) and LSD as Therapeutic Drugs

  Kupferschmidt offers two pieces in Science magazine on using two currently banned classes of drugs for therapeutic purposes: the party drug ecstacy... Read more

  Posted on 21 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Feeling the Social Touch Being Observed in Others.

  Interesting work by Bolognini et al. on our mirroring of the emotions of others : Touch has an emotional and communicative meaning, and it plays a crucial role... Read more

  Posted on 18 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Activity Can Reveal Whom Someone is Thinking About.

  A collaboration between five different research centers shows that in predicting or imagining the behavior of others based on their personality the brain relys... Read more

  Posted on 17 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Response of Large Scale Brain Networks to Acute Stress.

  

  I pass on this interesting summary and graphic by Hermans et al. Exposure to acute stress prompts a reallocation of resources to a salience network, promoting... Read more

  Posted on 16 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Increased Self Control Without Increased Willpower

  Here is a fascinating bit of work from Magen et. al., who show that a simple cognitive reframing of the classic immediate or delayed gratification test makes... Read more

  Posted on 15 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cooperating with the Future

  You should have a look at this nice Nature Video that very simply illustrates work by Hauser et al. dealing with how we might design policies aimed at preservin... Read more

  Posted on 14 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Does Phase of the Moon Influence Our Sleep? Three Contradictory Studies.

  This is an update on a previous MindBlog posting. Vyazovskiy and Foster review three recent studies that give contradictory results on how or whether the phase... Read more

  Posted on 11 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Untutored Mind Does Not Like to Be Alone with Itself.

  Our mammalian brains evolved to physically engage the world in the interest of our survival and passing on genes. Humans are distinctive among animals in being... Read more

  Posted on 10 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Caring for the Future

  In a fascinating behavioral economics experiment Hauser et al examine willingness of people in a group to sacrifice personal gains for future generations, and... Read more

  Posted on 09 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Information Integration Without Awareness.

  I want to point to an excellent review by Christof Koch and colleagues. It contains some useful summary graphics. •Empirical data suggest that... Read more

  Posted on 08 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Couch Potato? You Should Be Taking Omega-3!

  I pass on the abstract from Leckie et al. (DHA refers to docosahexaenoic acid, an omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid that is highly concentrated in the brain,... Read more

  Posted on 07 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Moral Judgements Depend on What Language We’re Speaking.

  Costa et al. use the famous trolley problem to offer another example of the incredible power of the tribal or "us versus them" nature of our psychology. Read more

  Posted on 04 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Consciousness is Constructed Through a Discrete Set of Activity Spaces.

  This fascinating work by Hudson et al. shows that as the brain recovers consciousness from a perturbation such as anesthesia, it does not follows a steady and... Read more

  Posted on 03 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Parenting Rewires Men's Brains.

  From Abraham et al., interesting material on a global "parental caregiving" neural network in our brains: Although contemporary socio-cultural changes... Read more

  Posted on 02 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks

  I have frequently noticed that simply reading the barrage of negative news in the daily New York Times about the myriad things in our world that aren't working... Read more

  Posted on 01 July 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mind Reading Has to Be Taught.

  A review by Heyes and Frith notes how our learning to read minds is like learning to read print, except that it occurs much earlier in our development. Read more

  Posted on 30 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Stress Chemistry Predicts Age-related Cognitive Decline.

  Anderson et al. show, in studies on rats, that elevated hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activity impairs not only hippocampal function during aging but may... Read more

  Posted on 27 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Megascience Efforts and the Brain.

  

  Grillner offers a commentary on the current megascience efforts (costing gazillions of dollars) to develop infrastructure for tools, modeling, or... Read more

  Posted on 26 June 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE