Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• The Visible Gorilla.

  

  A staple of my lectures in the 1990s was showing the ‘invisible gorilla’ video, in which viewers were asked to count the number of times that students with whit... Read more

  Posted on 31 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Unnarratability -The Tower of Babel Redux - Where Have All the Common...

  I pass on some clips from Venkatesh Rao's recent Ribbonfarm Studio posting.. Perspectives like his make me feel that one's most effective self preservation... Read more

  Posted on 28 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A MindBlog Paragraph on Non-dual Awareness Massaged by Bard and ChatGPT-4

  This popst is using MindBlog to archive a further example example of the sort shown in Monday’s post ...of GPT bots editing a paragraph I wrote, this one being... Read more

  Posted on 26 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Evolution of Transhuman Forms - a MindBlog Paragraph Edited by GPT...

  In this post I am documenting the final result of passing a paragraph I wrote on future human evolution through a number of different GPT (generative pre-traine... Read more

  Posted on 24 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Proxy Failure is an Inherent Risk in Goal-Oriented Systems

  I will pass on the title and abstract of another article to appear in Behavioral and Brain Science for which reviewers comments are being solicited. MindBlog... Read more

  Posted on 20 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog's Reading List.

  I've decided to pass on links to articles I have found worthwhile reading , realizing that I am not going to have time to frame their ideas into longer posts... Read more

  Posted on 17 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• ‘Adversarial’ Search for Neural Basis of Consciousness Yields First Results

  Finkel does a summary of the first round of results of an 'adversarial colloboration' funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation in which ... Read more

  Posted on 14 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence

  I would recommend having a read through Evgeny Morozov's piece in the NYTimes as an antidote to Marc Adreessen's optimistic vision of AI that was the subject... Read more

  Posted on 12 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Inheritance of Social Status - Stability in England from 1600 to 2022.

  From historical records Clarks demonstrates (open source) strong persistence of social status across family trees over 400 years, in spite of large increases... Read more

  Posted on 10 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Meta-analysis Questions the Cognitive Benefits of Physical Activity.

  I give up. If anything was supposed to have been proven I would have thought it would be that exercise has a beneficial effect on brain health and cognition. No... Read more

  Posted on 07 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Music Training Slows Cognitive Aging

  A team of Chinese collaborators has reported experiments in the Oxford academic journal Cerebral Cortex titled "Functional gradients in prefrontal regions and... Read more

  Posted on 05 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Babies Know from Zero to 1 Year - Core Systems of Knowledge

  The journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences has sent out to reviewers the précis of a book, "What Babies Know" by Elizabeth S. Spelke, Harvard Psychology Dept. Th... Read more

  Posted on 03 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Managing the Risks of AI in Pragmatic Ways.

  I want to pass on the final paragraphs of a recent commentary by Venkatesh Rao on the tragedy of the Titan submersible, which was a consequence of Stockton Rush... Read more

  Posted on 30 June 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mechanisms That Link Psychological Stress to the Exacerbation of Gut...

  Schneider et al. describe one mechanism by which psychological stress deteriorates our health - the enteric nervous system relays psychological stress to... Read more

  Posted on 28 June 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Vagus Nerve, Heart Rate Variability, and Subjective Wellbeing - a MindBlog...

  

  In this post I pass on to MindBlog readers a NYTimes article by Christina Caron that has been republished several time by the newspaper. It is a sane account... Read more

  Posted on 26 June 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why AI Will Save The World

  

  I want to pass on the following text of a Marc Adreeessen substack post. This is because my usual extracting of small clips of text to give a sense of the... Read more

  Posted on 23 June 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Turing, Von Neumann, and the Computational Architecture of Biological Machines

  I pass on the abstract of a PNAS perspective article by Hashim M. Al-Hashimi (motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me). Read more

  Posted on 21 June 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Psychological Illusion of "The Good Old Days"

  Mastroianni and Gilbert (open access) do a nice study illustrating that the the universal perception of our ongoing moral decline is a psychological illusion... Read more

  Posted on 20 June 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Do We Define Spirituality and What It’s Role is in Our Daily Lives?

  This post is primarily directed to Austin TX people who will be attending the Sunday 2 p.m. July 2 meeting of the Austin Rainbow Forum that is now in its 5th... Read more

  Posted on 10 June 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A New Place for Consciousness in Our Understanding of the Universe

  I want to point MindBlog readers to an article by Thomas Lewton that I enjoyed reading. It describes how theorists are trying to make sense of mysteries like... Read more

  Posted on 09 June 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE