Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• 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

• Quality of Early Parent Input Predicts Child Vocabulary 3 Years Later

  Here is a fascinating result from Cartmill et al.: Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing... Read more

  Posted on 16 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Obesity Paradox - Fat People May Live Longer!

  

  Virginia Hughes writes about accumulating data on obesity and longevity that many researchers wish would just go away, after all the effort that has been put... Read more

  Posted on 12 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Gospel According to Me...

  I want to pass on a few clips from the stimulating essay by Critchley and Webster in "The Stone" forum of the New York Times: …many citizens in rich Western... Read more

  Posted on 11 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Order Your DIY Brain Stimulation Kit to Improve Your Cognition?

  Nature Magazine has an interesting editorial on dealing with the fact that transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) kits (costing ~ $200) are likely to... Read more

  Posted on 09 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Want to See the Metadata on Yourself (like the NSA Already Has)??

  

  Intrigued by two recent articles by Lapidos and Chen, I've taken myself to the MIT media program called "Immersion". "... it only works with Gmail and you have... Read more

  Posted on 08 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Our Brain Cortex Receives Information About the World

  

  This post is for that subset of MindBlog readers interested in details of brain wiring. Constantinople and Bruno have upset a basic dogma taught to budding... Read more

  Posted on 08 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE