Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Why You Are Probably An NPC (Non Playing Character)

  I want to pass on this outstanding piece of writing from Gurwinder on Substack, in which he describes five different robotic human character types that include... Read more

  Posted on 29 August 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• AI is a Mass-Delusion Event - and - Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress

  I want to recommend two articles whose titles are this post's title, the first by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic and the second by Kyla Scanlon in her Substack... Read more

  Posted on 27 August 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Gaze Patterns Can Serve as a Sensitive Marker of Cognitive Decline

  From Wynn et al.: AbstractEye movements are closely linked to encoding and retrieval processes, with changes in viewing behavior reflecting age- and... Read more

  Posted on 25 August 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Predictability and the Pleasure of Music

  Mas-Herrero et al. do an interesting study on how predictive processes shape individual musical preferences .SignificanceUsing a novel decision-making task, we... Read more

  Posted on 22 August 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Brain-computer Interface That Reads Inner Thoughts.

  Inampudi does a description of work by Kunz et al., who isolated signals from a brain implant so people with movement disorders could voice thoughts without... Read more

  Posted on 20 August 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Polarization May Be Inherent in Social Media

  Science news reports on a fascinating recent study suggesting that just the basic functions of social media—posting, reposting, and following—inevitably... Read more

  Posted on 18 August 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Does AI Hinder Democratization?

  Here is the abstract from the open source article of Chu et al in PNAS: This paper examines the relationship between democratization and the development of AI... Read more

  Posted on 21 May 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• AI is Not Your Friend.

  I want to pass on clips from Mike Caulfield's piece in The Atlantic on how "opinionated" chatbots destroy AI's potential, and how this can be fixed: Recently,... Read more

  Posted on 19 May 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• On Replacing the American Establishment - the Ideological Battle for the Soul...

  I want to pass on the first few paragraphs from Chaffin and Elinson's piece in the May 10 Wall Street Journal, which give a juicy summary of warring camps in... Read more

  Posted on 16 May 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Human Consciousness is a 'Controlled Hallucination' and AI Can Never...

  I want to suggest that readers have a look at an engaging popular article by Darren Orf that summarizes the ideas of Anil Seth. Read more

  Posted on 14 May 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Ketamine Breaks Through Anhedonia - Reigniting Desire

  When chronic depression has not been relieved by behavioral therapies such as meditation or cognitive therapy ketamine is sometimes found to provide relief. Read more

  Posted on 12 May 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Vocabulary, Semantics, and Syntax of Prosody

  Matalon et al. (open source) offer a fascinating study illustrating the linguistic structuring of prosody -the communication of meaning through the tone and... Read more

  Posted on 08 May 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• This Totally Nails It - That Thing in Your Head Called Language Has Got a Mind o...

  

  From Elan Barenholtz's Substack. He is an Assoc. Prof. of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. So, now that we’ve caught language in a jar,... Read more

  Posted on 26 April 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mastering Diverse Control Tasks Through World Models

  Hafner et al. offer an amazing open source article that presents an algorithm s mimicking the way in which our brains actually solves problems. Read more

  Posted on 07 April 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• An Example of AI Representing Concepts Outside the Current Sphere of Human...

  An open source article from the latest PNAS from Schut et al.:Significance As AI systems become more capable, they may internally represent concepts outside... Read more

  Posted on 01 April 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Belief in Belief, Like Religion, is a Cross-cultural Human Universal

  Fascinating open source research reported by Gervais et al. (Open source):Significance Religion is a cross-cultural human universal, and religions may have... Read more

  Posted on 01 April 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Deric and DeepSeek R1 on the Enteroceptive Self in a Small World - Taking...

  This post on an exchange with DeepSeek R1 is a followup on my previous post describing the Chat GPT 4o response to some of my idea fragments - further convincin... Read more

  Posted on 27 March 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Parents Convey a Male Default in Child-directed Speech

  Interesting open source article describing experiments by Leshin et al. (Our current MAGA overlords would like to ban such perspectives. Read more

  Posted on 19 March 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Reflections on The Predictive Self.

  I pass on another interaction with ChatGPT 4o that has amazed me, Below is my prompt, followed by its response. (Anthropic Claude. Read more

  Posted on 14 March 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Critical Fragility in Sociotechnical Systems

  Here is the abstract and part of the introduction (giving examples of system breakdowns) of a fascinating and approachable analysis by Moran et al. Motivated... Read more

  Posted on 12 March 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE