Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Empathy Lost and Regained in a Mouse Model of Dementia

  A PNAS Journal Club article by Carolyn Beans points to work by Yao and colleagues that shows that a loss of empathy that is especially problematic for those... Read more

  Posted on 03 March 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Artificial Intelligence and Personhood

  MindBlog hesitates to add to the feeding frenzy of articles about LLMs (large language models) such as Open AI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing’s “Sydney,” but I... Read more

  Posted on 01 March 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Possible Mechanism of Psychedelic Therapeutic Effects

  From the latest issue of Science Magazine: The mechanism underlying psychedelic action Psychedelic compounds promote cortical structural and functional... Read more

  Posted on 27 February 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog Picks Some of Its Favorite Posts on Defining What a Self Is…

  The following links are from a recent scan of what pops up if I click on items in ‘Selected MindBlog Categories’ in the right column of this page - to remind... Read more

  Posted on 24 February 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Fish Passes the Mirror Self Recognition Test!

  Our human abilities continue to found in more evolutionarily distant species. From Kohda et al.: Some animals have the remarkable capacity for mirror... Read more

  Posted on 22 February 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Fundamentally Rethinking What a Mind is and How a Brain Works.

  

  The February Issue of Trends in Cognitive Science has an open source Opinions article from Lisa Feldman Barrett and collaborators that suggests that new researc... Read more

  Posted on 20 February 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Touch Sensitive Nerve Cells That Make Mice (and Probably Us) Horny.

  From Elias et al. (open source) in the journal Cell: Highlights • Activation of Mrgprb4-lineage touch neurons induces lordosis-like posture •... Read more

  Posted on 17 February 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A.I. as a Path Towards Mass Lunacy

  MindBlog wants to be part of the passing on of this elegantly stated clip from an article by novelist, literary critic, and essayist Walter Kirn: What chatbots... Read more

  Posted on 15 February 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• An fMRI Marker of Drug and Food Craving

  Koban et al. identify an fMRI-based neural signature of craving that is common to both food and drugs, predicts self-reported craving, distinguishes drug users... Read more

  Posted on 13 February 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Multigenerational Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net.

  In an open source article in the January issue of the American Economic Review East et al. show that early life exposure to Medicaid enhances the next... Read more

  Posted on 10 February 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Shifting from Foraging to Farming, Beginning ~12,000 Years Ago, Changed...

  A special Feature section in the Jan. 17 issue of PNAS offers a series of perspectives on the past 12,000 years of human behavior, adaptation, and evolution tha... Read more

  Posted on 08 February 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Openness to Spiritual Experiences...with Caution

  After a Protestant Christian upbringing (I was a teenage organist in an Austin Lutheran Church, and took a course from theologian Paul Tillich at Harvard), my... Read more

  Posted on 06 February 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cryptocurrency Isn't Going Away - Any More That Gold Is...

  ...as long as cryptocurrency maintains a core of true believers in the block chain concept for guaranteeing trustworthiness. All currencies are useful as... Read more

  Posted on 03 February 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 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