Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2563 )

• Aspects of Our Musical Experience.

  I want to pass on three recent articles I found interesting. The first is a piece by Kawakami in the New York Times on why we like sad music, sumarizing his... Read more

  Posted on 27 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Theory of Mind and the Mind of the Market

  The financial community has been in a striking tizzy over the fact that the Federal Reserve didn't do what they were predicting, i.e. start to dial back on thei... Read more

  Posted on 26 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Joystick Years - Computer Games and Grey Matter Volume

  Sian Lewis summarizes work by Kühn and Gallinat: A new study has used voxel-based morphometry of MRI scans of adult video-game players to investigate whether... Read more

  Posted on 25 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Compassion - Bridging Practice and Science

  Science magazine has an article by Kupferschmidt pointing to the work of Tania Singer, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain... Read more

  Posted on 24 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Virtues of Coffee and Coffee Shops.

  I've been meaning to pass on these two articles that help me justify my addiction to breakfast and noon (but not dinner) coffee. Read more

  Posted on 23 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Old Farts Perform More Consistenly on Cognitive Tasks Than Younger Adults.

  Schmiedek et al. do a demonstration of something we more or less already knew... People often attribute poor performance to having bad days. Read more

  Posted on 20 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Poulenc Novelette No. 2 - a Bit on the Wild Side

  Poulenc's first two novelettes, the one in C major that I posted yesterday, and today's second novelette in B-flat minor, were composed in 1927 and 1928, and... Read more

  Posted on 19 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Cognitive Benefits of Movement Reduction.

  This piece by Warburton et al. shows another example of how musical, artistic, or athletic performance can be enhanced by subtle mimicking of the final... Read more

  Posted on 19 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Political Extremism is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding.

  Fernback et. al. start their interesting article with some nice quotes: Bertrand Russell “The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no... Read more

  Posted on 17 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Pinch of L-dopa Enhances Learning to Suppress Excessive Fear Responses.

  Haaker et al. make an interesting observation: Traumatic events can engender persistent excessive fear responses to trauma reminders that may return even after... Read more

  Posted on 16 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Numerosity is Represented in Our Parietal Cortex.

  

  Our primary sensory cortices are arranged topographically, and Harvey et al. have now tested the speculation that numerosity is also organized topographically b... Read more

  Posted on 13 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Scientific Explanation of Our Subjective Experience.....

  Being a card carrying materialist, I've always felt that our mental life could be explained in physical terms. Although I consider myself a twinkie when it come... Read more

  Posted on 12 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Language Can Boost Unseen Objects into Visual Awareness.

  

  From Lupyan et al: Linguistic labels (e.g., “chair”) seem to activate visual properties of the objects to which they refer. Here we investigated whether... Read more

  Posted on 11 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Drug That Alters Dopamine Receptors and Risk-taking Behaviors

  Interesting observations from Norbury et al. on a drug that activates or enhances action of some dopamine receptors and also increases the probability of... Read more

  Posted on 10 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Nighttime Light Impairs Our Emotional Responses.

  I have done a number of posts (enter melanopsin in the search box to find them) on a second visual system, involving the visual pigment melanopsin in our retina... Read more

  Posted on 09 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Better Safe Than sorry?...Anxiety and Our Body’s Safety Margin.

  Sambo and Iannetti find interesting correlations between our anxiety and our interpersonal space boundaries: The defensive peripersonal space represents a... Read more

  Posted on 06 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Dopamine, Rewards, and the Brain

  

  The neurotransmitter dopamine is one we all seem to have heard about, claimed to be central to love, gambling, reward, addiction, etc. A recent article by Howe... Read more

  Posted on 05 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Interesting…thinking About Science Enhances Moral Behavior.

  There have been a number of high profile cases of dishonesty in reporting scientific results over the past ten years, but these errors in the conduct of the... Read more

  Posted on 04 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Social Pathologies Generated by Connectivity and Internet Echo-chambers.

  I have to pass on two zinger's from today's paper, a nice piece by Bruni, written during a Shanghai stay, on the ease of keeping your personal world cocoon... Read more

  Posted on 03 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Second Language Training Reorganizes Right Hemisphere Areas.

  Hosoda et al. do a clear demonstration of how first and second languages mainly recruit different part of the brain. Training in a second language correlates... Read more

  Posted on 03 September 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE