Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2562 )

• How to Dress to Say It is Wrong to Be Gay!

  

  I had to pass this on..... FABULOUS! The Pope Emeritus, wearing a fabulous vintage chiffon-lined Dior gold lame gownover a silk Vera Wang empire waist tulle... Read more

  Posted on 17 March 2013 HUMOR, LIFESTYLE

• Does Cannabis Use Cause Lower IQ?

  Rogeberg offers a critique of a recent suggestion by Meyer et. al. of a neurotoxic effect of cannabis on developing brains that permanently lowers IQ, based on... Read more

  Posted on 15 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Observing Regulatory Connections Correlating with Emotion Control During...

  Interesting work from Gee et al. showing some brain changes that correlate with the inhibition of emotional reactivity that occurs during human adolescence:... Read more

  Posted on 14 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Do Alligators Get Errections?

  I couldn't resist passing on this Discoblog pointer to Kelly's article. Most birds, reptiles, and mammals have penises that become erect by filling with fluid,... Read more

  Posted on 13 March 2013 SCIENCE

• Anti-aging Drugs - Clarification on Resveratrol and SIRT1 Activators

  

  Resveratrol, the natural compound in red wine, and other small molecules are allosteric activators of SIRT1, an enzyme with roles in many biological processes... Read more

  Posted on 12 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Mental Cost of Cognitive Enhancement.

  There has been quite a bit of interest lately in the prospect of enhancing various brain operations by the use of trans-cranial electrical stimulation (TES). Read more

  Posted on 11 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Can the Catholic Church Evolve?

  Maureen Dowd discusses gay author Colin Toibin’s “The Testament of Mary,” a one-woman show with Fiona Shaw previewing later this month on Broadway, and I pass o... Read more

  Posted on 07 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Neural Mechanisms of Stress Vulnerability and Resilience.

  Two interesting papers in the Journal of Neuroscience deal with what is happening to nerve cells in mouse brains as they either do or don't recover from... Read more

  Posted on 06 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• In Praise of the Unexamined, Unlived Life?

  I was sufficiently interested by two reviews of a new book by British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (“Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life”), one in the... Read more

  Posted on 05 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is the Insula Necessary for Our Feelings? If Not, Where Are They?

  I have been fairly uncritical in passing on simplifications like “The insula is the sensory cortex for our internal visceral feelings” and so was grateful to... Read more

  Posted on 04 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Watching Our Auditory Brain, Like a Radio, Switch Hearing Frequency Channels.

  From Da Costa et al.: Cocktail parties, busy streets, and other noisy environments pose a difficult challenge to the auditory system: how to focus attention on... Read more

  Posted on 01 March 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Amygdala Damage Can Make Us More Generous

  

  From van Honk et al.: Contemporary economic models hold that instrumental and impulsive behaviors underlie human social decision making. Read more

  Posted on 28 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Our Viscera Influence Our Brain and Behavior

  I want to pass on this fascinating and useful open source review by Critchley and Harrison in the journal Neuron. Having just had the flu, I found their... Read more

  Posted on 27 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Ambient Light Might Influence Our Mood.

  The visual pigment melanopsin in the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) of our inner retinas (two cells layers away from our rods and... Read more

  Posted on 26 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Lament of the Historian…

  My colleague William Cronon at the University of Wisconsin was President of the American Historical Association for 2012, and I want to pass on a clip from the... Read more

  Posted on 25 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• In an Uncertain World, Fairness Finishes First.

  I usually get hopelessly lost in accounts of variations of the ultimatum game used to model human behavior and its evolutionary rationale or origins. This... Read more

  Posted on 22 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Big Brains Decrease Fertility.

  More intelligent mammals, such as humans, whales, and dolphins, have decreased fertility. One ideas has been that the energetic cost of increased brain power ha... Read more

  Posted on 21 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Mindfulness Meditation Works in the Brain - a Model

  Kerr et al make some interesting speculations. Their article contains some useful summary graphics. Using a common set of mindfulness exercises, mindfulness... Read more

  Posted on 20 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Interdependent Behavior Facilitated by Independent Behavior?

  Hamedani et al. , who end up suggesting that it may be necessary to invoke independent behaviors in order to successfully motivate interdependence, start their... Read more

  Posted on 19 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Red Brain, Blue Brain

  Darren Schreiber and collaborators add yet another article to what is a growing literature on the differing sensitivities to threat of liberals and... Read more

  Posted on 18 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE