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 ( 2494 )
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A Brain Correlate of Near Death Hallucinations and Visions?
Borjigin et al. make some fascinating observations on brain activity that occurs during the moments of cardiac arrest when brain glucose levels have dropped... Read more
Posted on 20 August 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
War of Science and the Humanities Redux: Ross Douthat on The Scientism of...
I enjoyed a very well written article by Steven Pinker in the New Republic titled "Science is not your enemy", which argued that an increasing melding of scienc... Read more
Posted on 19 August 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Factoids on Exercise and Learning - the Kind of Exercise is Important
In my scans of journals' tables of contents for potential MindBlog posts I keep an eye out for articles on exercise, probably the most life enhancing activity... Read more
Posted on 16 August 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Do You Have a Tidy Or Messy Desk?
Vohs et al. have done an interesting experiment that suggests that physical order enhances healthy choices, generosity, and conventionality, while disorder... Read more
Posted on 14 August 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Imperceptible Current Applied to Our Scalp Enhances General Intelligence.
Here is yet another of the increasing number of articles examining the effects of very weak electrical stimulation of our frontal scalp with surface electrodes. Read more
Posted on 13 August 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Evidence That the Lunar Cycle Influences Human Sleep.
I have kept a log for many years that has convinced me that I have roughly monthly oscillations in motivation and libido, but I've not come across convincing... Read more
Posted on 12 August 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Personal Control Enhances Treatment Effectiveness.
An interesting fragment, relating to the powerful vs helplessness theme of a recent post, subjects faced with alternative pain control drugs (both actually... Read more
Posted on 09 August 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Think Your Radiologist Gets It Right? The Invisible Gorilla Strikes Again.
A well known video shows the famous experiment of missing a gorilla walking through a basketball game when you have been instructed to count the number of... Read more
Posted on 08 August 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Degree of Musical Expertise Modulates Higher Order Brain Functioning
A piece like this one by Oechslin et al. gives me some hope that my piano playing and sight reading compensate for my aversion to spending any significant amoun... Read more
Posted on 07 August 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Be Young in Perception and Behavior! Put Yourself in a Virtual Child’s Body!
Banakou et al. show that if we use some simple tricks to project ourselves into a 4-year old's body, we overestimate object sizes and more readily associate... Read more
Posted on 06 August 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Bad Kind of Stress - Perceived Helplessness
Velasquez-Manoff does a nice discussion of a topic that has been recurrent in MindBlog, understanding the kind of stress that is really bad for us. Read more
Posted on 05 August 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Different Kinds of Happiness - Different Immune System Consequences.
Happiness is usually classified into two main flavors: hedonic and eudaimonic. Hedonic refers mainly to self gratification and eudaimonic to a sense of meaning... Read more
Posted on 02 August 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Workouts at the Brain Gym.
Patricia Marx writes an engaging article in The New Yorker, "Mentally Fit," that describes her foray into various regimes for building cognitive and emotional... Read more
Posted on 31 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Markers of Our Aging
I thought I would point to this interesting piece in the New York Times about the search for some simple objective assay of our biological age, as distinct... Read more
Posted on 29 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Unconscious Activation of Our Brains' Inhibitory Controls.
Hepler and Albarracin have done the interesting experiment of exposing participants in an experiment to subliminally presented inaction (calm) and action... Read more
Posted on 26 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Why Does Time Speed up for Older People?
I've come across two recent articles recently on how our experience of time is our own invention - "mind time" - that can be faster or slower than clock or... Read more
Posted on 25 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
A Mechanism of Why Novelty Seeking Individuals Are More Vulnerable to Social...
Duclot and Kabbaj offer an interesting result that suggests at least part of the reason for why individuals more likely to seek novelty (whether humans or... Read more
Posted on 23 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Positive Feedback Loop Between Social Connections, Positive Emotions, and Vagal...
Kok et al. suggest that positive emotions, positive social connections, and physical health reinforce one another in a positive feedback loop.They use cardiac... Read more
Posted on 22 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
An Ancestral Logic of Politics?
Another evolutionary psychology speculation: If individual dispositions about modern political conflicts are partly generated by evolved mechanisms designed... Read more
Posted on 19 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
How Exercise Calms Anxiety.
In my scans of journals' tables of contents I missed this interesting piece by Schoenfeld et al., which is pointed to by a summary in the New York Times "Well"... Read more
Posted on 17 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE