Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• The Social (and Medical) Pathology of Correlating Inner Worth with Wealth.

  A recent piece by Wilkinson and Pickett in the NYTimes deserves notice. They comment on how wealth inequality is not only divisive and socially corrosive, but... Read more

  Posted on 14 February 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Pupil Dilation Reflects Decision Related Choice.

  Pupil size is known to be increased by effortful decisions. The current supposition is that decision-related pupil dilation tracks the activity of... Read more

  Posted on 13 February 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Reaction Time and Longevity.

  Hagger-Johnson et al. note a correlation between reaction times (doing a button press as quickly as possible after a light flashes on a computer screen) and... Read more

  Posted on 12 February 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Genetic Predisposition of Our Behavioral Responses.

  Gregory sets the context for a recent article by Skuze et al. on how genes for our oxytocin receptors can influence our social recognition skills: ... Read more

  Posted on 11 February 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Different Cultures, Different Computation Systems

  Bender and Beller report that a mixed number system superimposing three binary steps onto a decimal structure was invented long before Leibniz’s description of... Read more

  Posted on 10 February 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Electroconvulsive Therapy Works in Mood Disorders.

  Dukart et al. make the interesting observation that the controversial procedure of electroconvulsive therapy causes changes in gray matter volume in the brain... Read more

  Posted on 07 February 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Constancy of Our Social Signatures.

  Robin Dunbar and collaborators have done an interesting examination of the persistence of how many close contacts we maintain (family and close friends) over... Read more

  Posted on 06 February 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Does Music Make You Smarter?

  Since I have done a number of posts on long term changes in the brains of adults who have had extensive music training, I thought I should point at an article b... Read more

  Posted on 05 February 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• When Psychotherapy Works - What Are the Brain Changes?

  The journal Brain and Behavioral Science circulates forthcoming articles for peer commentary before their final publication in the journal. I thought I would... Read more

  Posted on 04 February 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Making Our Brains Younger

  

  I thought I would pass on this link to a brief (15 min) talk I gave to the Feb. 2, 2014, meeting of the Fort Lauderdale Prime Timers group. It discusses brain... Read more

  Posted on 03 February 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog's Most Read Posts.

  

  I'm doing a review of older MindBlog posts to see what categories collect themselves as potential talks or web-lectures of the sort you see in the left column. Read more

  Posted on 03 February 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 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