Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2563 )

• A Review - Mindfulness Meditation and Our Brain's Default Versus Attentional...

  I've been doing some homework on potential topics to work up into a lecture, one of them being brain correlates of various meditative, attentional, or default... Read more

  Posted on 15 April 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Old Folks More Easy Lose Their Way,

  Wiener et al. make observations that shed light on why older people have more difficulty finding their car in a shopping mall's large parking lot if they exit... Read more

  Posted on 12 April 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Defining When a Visual Stimulus Become Conscious to Us.

  Llinás and collaborators do a nice dissection of our conscious versus unconscious visual processing and note the timing (240 milliseconds) of a brain signa... Read more

  Posted on 11 April 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Your Smartphone, Your Social Brain, and Your Vagus Nerve.

  I am always struck, when I go a local Starbucks for my noon coffee or do a happy hour at a local bar, that the great majority of those present are staring... Read more

  Posted on 10 April 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory and Cognitive Performance While...

  Yet another study, by Mrazek et al., on the salutary effects of mindfulness: Given that the ability to attend to a task without distraction underlies performanc... Read more

  Posted on 09 April 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Alteration of Paralimbic Self Awareness Circuits in Behavioral Addiction.

  

  Changeux and collaborators look at the brain correlates of pathological gambling, evaluating whether addictions might occur because of a predisposition linked t... Read more

  Posted on 08 April 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Training Our Emotional Brain - Improving Affective Control.

  Schweizer et al. suggest that our ability to keep a cool head in emotionally charged situations can be enhanced by working memory training, because both... Read more

  Posted on 05 April 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Impersonating Your Younger Self Makes Your Body Physiologically Younger - a...

  For several years I've been trying to find or recall a MindBlog post or an article read, and couldn't come up with it. A blog reader sent an email recalling... Read more

  Posted on 04 April 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Do We Need an Apollo Moon Project for the Brain?

  I have collected a sampling of the many commentaries on the Brain Activity Map project to which Barack Obama alluded in his State of the Union address which is... Read more

  Posted on 03 April 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Next Generation of Antidepressants?

  Russo and Charney do a brief write up on recent work of Nasca et al., who find that a common dietary supplement, L-acetylcarnitine, is a potential rapidly actin... Read more

  Posted on 02 April 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Are Philosophers Good For?

  Perhaps an appropriate post for April 1st...If you are looking for a good headache, take yourself to Gary Gutting's rehashing of the "can consciousness be... Read more

  Posted on 01 April 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Activity Associated with the "Cocktail Party Effect."

  Zion et al. do interesting experiments, with an array of sub-dural electrodes implanted in surgical epilepsy patients, to show what is happening as we attend... Read more

  Posted on 29 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Perils of Perfectionism, and the World We Are Losing.

  I want to mention one of the many items in my queue of articles for potential posts that I have neglected so far. Vgeny Morozov does a precis of his new book “T... Read more

  Posted on 28 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Ambivalence and Body Movement

  Schneider et al. make interesting observations about circulation correlations between our thoughts and body movements. We sway more from side to when we feel... Read more

  Posted on 27 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• If You Use Google Reader to Follow Deric's MindBlog, Please Read On....

  This blog has ~2,500 RSS subscribers. As I write this, 2,240 subscribers are obtaining the feed via Feedfetcher, which is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds whe... Read more

  Posted on 26 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Are There Trendy Parts of the Brain?

  

  Behrens et al. do an interesting analysis, asking: Are there really trendy parts of the brain? Or does each scientist falsely believe their own research area... Read more

  Posted on 25 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Cornucopia of Mind Blog Sites.

  

  Scientific American has announced that its daughter magazine Scientific American Mind has set up a Blogs site that lists a number of psychology, neuroscience,... Read more

  Posted on 22 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Brain Basis of Our Superiority Illusion.

  

  One of the most robustly documented findings of psychology is the "optimism" bias, which leads us to put rose-colored glasses on past, future, and our own... Read more

  Posted on 21 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Would Tarzan Believe in God?

  Some clips from Konika Banerjee and Paul Bloom: Would someone raised without exposure to religious views nonetheless come to believe in the existence of God,... Read more

  Posted on 20 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Negativity Bias and Political Ideology

  I've just received a reviewer's copy of an upcoming article in Brain and Behavioral Science in the vein of several MindBlog posts mentioning work on the brains... Read more

  Posted on 19 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE