Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Eye Widening in Fear - Sensory and Social Benefits

  An interesting bit from Lee et al. Their abstract: Facial expressions may have originated from a primitive sensory regulatory function that was then co-opted an... Read more

  Posted on 05 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Inflammation Links Ageing to the Brain.

  

  Gabuzda et al. do a nice review of work by Zhang et al., that suggests that manipulation of hypothalamus regulation, and especially levels of the hormone GnRH... Read more

  Posted on 04 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Spiritual Home for Atheists.

  For many of us secular humanists, agnostics, or atheists, life after our alienation from conventional religious congregations that offer prayers to an... Read more

  Posted on 03 July 2013 SPIRITUALITY

• Enhanced Emotion Regulation Persists After Meditation Training.

  Desbordes and collaborators have looked at the effects of training in both mindful attention meditation and compassion meditation in two groups of subject with... Read more

  Posted on 01 July 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Are You Married? Did You Meet On-line Or Off-line?

  Interesting bit from Cacioppo et al. Marital discord is costly to children, families, and communities. The advent of the Internet, social networking, and on-lin... Read more

  Posted on 26 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Science Backlash, Throwing out the Baby with the Bathwater.

  A recent NYTimes Op-Ed piece by David Brooks' ("Beyond the Brain") references the recent book "“Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience. Read more

  Posted on 25 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Paternal Stress Changes Stress Axis in Offspring

  A study from Bale and colleagues shows that stress on preadolescent and adult male mice induces an epigenetic mark in their sperm that reprogramms their... Read more

  Posted on 24 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Neuroimaging Our Self Esteem - Be Happy!

  

  There are more papers coming out on brain correlates of whatever aspect of our behaviors you care to name than anyone could possibly keep up with. Read more

  Posted on 19 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Young Blood Makes Younger Hearts (and Brains) - Also, Aging Resistant Brains

  

  I've previously mentioned work showing that providing young blood to an older brain can be beneficial, and now want to note work by Loffredo et al. Read more

  Posted on 18 June 2013 BIOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Heart Rate Variability, ANS Aging - a New Device from "Phyode" - Therapeutic...

  I want to put in this post a comment by reader "Andre" on my June 11 post ("Changes as an autonomic nervous system ages 11 years - The "Wild Divine" is a bit... Read more

  Posted on 17 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Carrying Human (and Mouse) Babies Reduces Their Crying and Heart Rate.

  Esposito et al. present some really nice observations. They demonstrate for the first time that the infant calming response to maternal carrying is a coordinate... Read more

  Posted on 17 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Memory Can Be Selectively Rewritten During Its Reconsolidation.

  Chan and LaPaglia make an interesting observation in humans that had previously only been reported in animal studies. We can mess with an existing declarative... Read more

  Posted on 14 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Private Behaviors from Public Records...

  The exposure of the PRISM surveillance system by Edward Snowden gave me a sort of "So what else is new?" reaction... I thought we knew this unfortunate stuff wa... Read more

  Posted on 13 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Changes as an Autonomic Nervous System Ages 11 Years - The "Wild Divine" is a Bi...

  

  Just after I retired from being a Univ. of Wisconsin department chair in 2001 I bought a set of finger sensors that fit on one's three middle fingers to report... Read more

  Posted on 11 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Preventing Alzheimer’s Associated Brain Cell Atrophy with B Vitamin Treatment.

  

  I pass this on because it seems like a very striking result. Douaud et al. find that high-dose B-vitamin treatment (folic acid 0.8 mg, vitamin B6 20 mg,... Read more

  Posted on 10 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Visions of Our High-tech Future: Julian Assange, Jaron Lanier, Et Al. on...

  The book by Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, "The New Digital Age" is a rosy scenario of our high-tech future that many have found a bit creepy and... Read more

  Posted on 09 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• We Can Learn New Information During Sleep.

  Arzi et al. have devised a nice demonstration of how we can learn new information during our sleep. They paired pleasant and unpleasant odors with different... Read more

  Posted on 07 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Childhood Self-control Predicts Health, Wealth, and Public Safety

  

  An international collaboration between researchers at universities in the US, UK, Canada, and New Zealand has generated this study, which speaks for itself... Read more

  Posted on 06 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Chemistry of Protecting Our Brains by Fasting.

  Actually, I'm making a big assumption in the post title... namely that the results obtained by Gräff et al. in mice would extrapolate to similar finding in the... Read more

  Posted on 05 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Long-term Improvement of Brain Function and Cognition with Brain Stimulation...

  

  A group of collaborators from the University of Oxford and Innsbruck Medical University have published an observation that simple transcranial random noise... Read more

  Posted on 03 June 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE