Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Market Exposure and Human Morality

  In the face of resurgent threats to place religion over the rest of civil society, and specious claims that we can't have a moral society without the (varying)... Read more

  Posted on 01 February 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Sleep Shapes What We Remember and Forget.

  

  I have found monitoring the quality of my sleep to be a fascinating and useful activity. I use both the Oura ring and Apple watch to monitor body temperature,... Read more

  Posted on 30 January 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Evolution of Peace

  I pass on the abstract of an article by Luke Glowacki that has been submitted to the network of Behavioral and Brain Science reviewers who might offer commentar... Read more

  Posted on 25 January 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Different Styles of Thinking.

  An interesting recent article by Joshua Rothman, the ideas editor of newyorker.com, notes several recent books that describe different styles of thinking. Read more

  Posted on 23 January 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Quick MindBlog Riff on What a Self Is....

  Spilling out what I was thinking at breakfast this morning, deciding to fire it off, probably incomprehensible to most readers, perhaps to attempt to clarify... Read more

  Posted on 20 January 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mindful Attention Enhances Brain Network Control and Uncouples Past from the...

  Zhou et al. (open source) do an interesting experiment on mindfulness and brain network control: Significance Practicing mindfulness helps individuals regulate... Read more

  Posted on 18 January 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• COVID-19 and Brain Aging

  Over the Christmas and New Year's holidays I was hit first by a mild Covid infection that lasted only a few days (I've had all 5 vaccinations and immediately... Read more

  Posted on 16 January 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Materialism Meets Transcendence

  I want to pass on the URL to a PBS series by Alan Lightman that I plan to start watching as soon as I can, based on the following description and review in... Read more

  Posted on 13 January 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Awe as a Pathway to Mental and Physical Health

  

  Reading this open source review from Maria Monroy and Dacher Keltner leaves me feeling substantially more mellow! Their abstract, followed by a quote from... Read more

  Posted on 11 January 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• AI After Death: Interactions with AI Representations of the Deceased

  I want to pass on to MindBlog readers the following excellent notes that Terry Allard made to guide a discussion at the Nov. 29, 2022 session of the Chaos ... Read more

  Posted on 09 January 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Observing Many Researchers Using the Same Data and Hypothesis Reveals a Hidden...

  Wow, in an article with title of this post Breznau et al. show that different research teams presented independently with the same data and social science... Read more

  Posted on 06 January 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Deep-learning Model of Prescient Ideas Demonstrates That They Emerge from the...

  The abstract of a fascinating open source article from Vicinanza et al.: Where do prescient ideas—those that initially challenge conventional assumptions but... Read more

  Posted on 04 January 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - Or, Mindfulness as the Opiate of the...

  This New Year’s post is directed to the small number of MindBlog readers who might be sympathetic to some of my private random rants. Perhaps I should keep... Read more

  Posted on 02 January 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Pitfalls of Defining Neural Correlates of Brain Functions

  Rust and Le Doux do a useful brief opinion piece from which I pass on two clips, and recommend you read the whole open source text. ... Read more

  Posted on 30 December 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Rigorous Study Does Not Find That Exercise and Mindfulness Training Improve...

  Wow, here is a study by Lenze et al. - not confirming the results of numerous other less rigorous studies reported in MindBlog posts - that is unable to... Read more

  Posted on 26 December 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Smart Phone Intervention That Enhances Memory in Older Adults.

  Martin et al. offer an open source article that describes a smartphone intervention that enhances real-world memory and promotes differentiation of hippocampal... Read more

  Posted on 23 December 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Neurocomputational Evidence That Conflicting Prosocial Motives Guide Distributiv...

  A fascinating perspective and analysis from Hu et al. who show that three prosocial motives (fairness, harm aversion, and rank reversal aversion) are encoded... Read more

  Posted on 21 December 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Can We Move Beyond Social Media's Current Destruction of Civil Society?

  I strongly recommend that you read Ezra Klein's NYTimes essay on Twitter. He begins by noting that the metaphor of Twitter as a global town square is wrong on... Read more

  Posted on 19 December 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Dawn of Mediocre Computing.

  This post is a followup on MindBlog's 12/07/22 post on OpenAI's ChatGPT essay generating system. It was mentioned in Venkatesh Rao's essay "The Dawn of... Read more

  Posted on 16 December 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Individuals Prefer to Harm Their Own Group Rather Than Help an Opposing Group

  From Gershon and Fridman: Significance Understanding the principles guiding decisions in intergroup conflicts is essential to recognizing the psychological... Read more

  Posted on 14 December 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE