Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• 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

• Beauty at the Ballot Box.

  From White et al.: Why does beauty win out at the ballot box? Some researchers have posited that it occurs because people ascribe generally positive... Read more

  Posted on 20 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Signals from Inside and Outside Our Bodies in Self Consciousness

  

  Olaf Blanke (whose work on projecting ourselves outside our bodiesI've mentioned previously) and collaborators extend their studies on body perception and self... Read more

  Posted on 17 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Reason for the Power of Prayer.

  Friesea and Wänke find one source of the power of prayer that is not supernatural: it enhances self control by buffering self-control depletion, that is,... Read more

  Posted on 16 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How the Brains of Virtuosic Pianists Are Different...

  Because I'm a performing classical pianist (in fact, giving a concert on Feb. 9 in Fort Lauderdale, my snowbird roost from mid-October to mid_April), I always... Read more

  Posted on 14 January 2014 CULTURE, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Social Life of Our Genes - the Devastating Effects of Social Isolation

  

  David Dobbs has done a broad and accessible review of how completely the expression of the genes regulating behavior are controlled by the social milieu,... Read more

  Posted on 13 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Social Darwinism Isn't Dead - the Rich Really Do Think Their Different...

  An engaging piece by Matthew Hutson in Slate points to work by Kraus and Keltner. Some clips: ...In 2012 the top 0.01 percent of households earned an average... Read more

  Posted on 10 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Watching Our Brain Remembering Something.

  

  This is kind of neat! Staresinaa et al. observe a part of our brain working at remembering something while we go on about our further activities unrelated to... Read more

  Posted on 09 January 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE