Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Autism Attenuates the Perception of the Mind-body Divide

  A fascinating piece of work from Berent et al.: Significance Across cultures, people consider the mind as ethereal, distinct from the body. Read more

  Posted on 12 December 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Modern Human Brains Are Different from Those of Other Hominids and Chimps.

  Work pointed to in the previous post continues to add to the list of behaviors once presumed to be unique to humans that have now been found in other animals... Read more

  Posted on 09 December 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT Answers Some Questions from MindBlog

  Given a recent posting in which I played with the DALL-E 2 A.I. system that generates images when you tell it what you want to see, I was motivated by a... Read more

  Posted on 07 December 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Collection of Animal Stories

  I've accumulated several items on animal behaviors in my list of potential post subjects, and have decided to simply pass them on to allow animal curious... Read more

  Posted on 05 December 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Z-Library Kerfuffle and the Whack-a-mole Problem

  

  Several months ago a friend told me about the Z-Library that he was using to download recently published fiction to evaluate candidates for book club reading. H... Read more

  Posted on 02 December 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Intuitive Physics Learning in a Deep-learning A.I. Model

  A fascunating open source article from Piloto et al. in Nature Human Behaviour that addresses a major shortcoming of current artifician intelligence systems:... Read more

  Posted on 30 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Computational Society

  The most recent issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences presents a forum in its 25th Anniversary Series: Looking Forward. Several of the contribution are open... Read more

  Posted on 28 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Non-duality Industry as a Panacea for the Anxieties of Our Times?

  One of MindBlog's subject threads is meditation, and some recent posts have dealt with characterizing non-dual awareness (to find these, look in the right colum... Read more

  Posted on 25 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Huberman Lab Cornucopia

  A friend mentioned enjoying a podcast on meditation from hubermanlab.com, so I listened to it, and decided to look a bit further into who Andrew Huberman is... Read more

  Posted on 23 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog in Crypto-Land Part II - Is the Crypto Industry Headed for Oblivion?

  In late spring of this year, I was seduced by my son's having made a six hundred-fold return on an investment by virtue of being one of the first cohort to stic... Read more

  Posted on 21 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Focusing on Individual-level Solutions Has Led Behavioral Public Policy...

  MindBlog has been staying out of politics lately, but I think it worthwhile to pass on the abstract of a forthcoming article in Behavioral and Brain Science by... Read more

  Posted on 18 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Neurophysiology of Consciousness - Neural Correlates of Qualia

  This is a post for consciousness mavens.Tucker, Luu, and Johnson have offered a neurophyiological model of consciousness, Neurophysiological mechanisms of... Read more

  Posted on 16 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Poisoned by Twitter - Trump, Musk and Kanye

  Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist whose writing is always worth reading, has done a succinct must-read kind of piece in the NYTimes. Read more

  Posted on 14 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Sleep Preferentially Consolidates Negative Aspects of Human Emotional Memory

  The Nov. 1, 2022 issue of PNAS has a special feature on Sleep, Brain, and Cognition. A large body of research suggests that sleep benefits memory, and I want... Read more

  Posted on 11 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Neurobiology of Long COVID

  A number of my friends have reported, having caught break thru Covid even after 3-5 vaccinations, and are having symptoms of long Covid such as brain fog,... Read more

  Posted on 09 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Sadder but Wiser? Maybe Not.

  It looks like another universally accepted result of psychological research may be wrong - that depressed people have a more accurate reading of their ability t... Read more

  Posted on 07 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Senescent Cells Targeted by Anti-aging Therapies May Not Be All Bad

  Michael Irving does a brief article in New Atlas that points to work by Reyes et al. showing that some senescent od the sort that accumulate with aging not... Read more

  Posted on 04 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Well Being Increases with Diversity of Social Connections.

  From Collins et al.: Significance The link between social connection and well-being is well-documented: Happier people tend to spend more time with others, and... Read more

  Posted on 02 November 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Molecular Markers of Eventual Chronic Diseases of Aging Are Higher in Young...

  Sobering work from Shanahan et al.: Significance The analysis of gene expression in peripheral whole blood of US young adults in their late 30s revealed... Read more

  Posted on 31 October 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Observing the Activity of Our Prosocial Brains

  Interesting work from Lockwood et al., open source with nice graphics: Highlights • Prosocial behaviors frequently involve exerting effort • Human... Read more

  Posted on 28 October 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE