Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• 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

• 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