Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• 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

• Chimps Play Fair in the Ultimatum Game.

  These interesting observations by Proctor, de Waal et al. using a new experimental design that resolves conflicting data in studies by other authors suggest tha... Read more

  Posted on 15 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How We Listen to Music...

  Adam Gopnik has a very nice essay in The New Yorker on the mysteries of sound and the quest for 3-D recording. I was struck by his description of how the way... Read more

  Posted on 14 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Internal Threats to Our Bodies Trigger Different Fear System from External...

  A large volume of work has documented the amygdala's role in fear, and now Feinstein et al. present a surprising finding that carbon dioxide inhalation evokes... Read more

  Posted on 13 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Wisconsin Public Radio Series on Consciousness

  I've been wanting to point to an engaging series of interviews on consciousness presented by Wisconsin Public Radio either for listening, or in transcript form. Read more

  Posted on 12 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• We Can Retroactively Edit Our Conscious Experience.

  Have you ever had the experience of tuning out someone who was droning on in a conversation or lecture that was boring you, then when suddenly being challenged... Read more

  Posted on 11 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Deric Bownds' MindBlog - 7th Anniversary

  

  I just realized that today, 7 years ago on Feb. 8, 2006, was my first posting on this blog, which I started after reading a New York Times article on the... Read more

  Posted on 08 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Cocktail Party Effect is Enhanced by Vision.

  Golumbic et al. show that watching someone we are trying to hear and understand in a crowded noisy setting sharpens up the auditory processing in our brains tha... Read more

  Posted on 07 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Aging, Sleep, and Memory.

  Events during a day that we think important to remember are held in short term memory storage by an active hippocampus. Then, during deep, non-REM, slow brain... Read more

  Posted on 06 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Racial Essentialism Reduces Domain-general Creativity.

  Interesting observations from a group at Tel Aviv University: Individuals who believe that racial groups have fixed underlying essences use stereotypes more tha... Read more

  Posted on 05 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Early Musical Training - Sensitive Period in Brain White Matter Plasticity

  MindBlog has noted a number of studies that document beneficial effects of early music training on adult brain function. Now Steele and collaborators make... Read more

  Posted on 04 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Promise and Perils of Oxytocin.

  

  Greg Miller summarizes some consequences of recent work showing that oxytocin promotes trust and cooperation, and makes people more attuned to social cues. It... Read more

  Posted on 01 February 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Our Brains Judge Risk and Effort.

  Burke et al. do a nice piece of work showing that the risk of an option for action is encoded by the anterior insula and the effort required for that action is... Read more

  Posted on 31 January 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes.

  From Feinberg and Willer: Americans’ attitudes about the environment are highly polarized, but it is unclear why this is the case. We conducted five studies to... Read more

  Posted on 30 January 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Biology of Fear

  I want to point to a good open source review article in Current Biology on the brain correlates of fear, by Ralph Adolphs. You might find the summary graphics... Read more

  Posted on 29 January 2013 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE