Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• The Institutional Stance - an Evolved Intuitive Theory?

  I have just been sent an article by BBS (Brain and Behavioral Sciences) that is soliciting commentaries on an article by Jara-Ettinger and Dunham titled "The... Read more

  Posted on 31 December 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Our Brains Are Doing as We Experience Musical Pleasure.

  I've been playing more Schubert lately, drawn by his genius for inserting melodic sections within his piano works (sonatas, impromptus, fantasies, etc.) that... Read more

  Posted on 29 December 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Are Humans For? - AI Forces a Question We’ve Been Dodging

  . AI Is Already Fusing With Us — The Only Question Is How The argument about whether AI will enhance or diminish our our humanity usually starts in the wrong... Read more

  Posted on 26 December 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Modernity Machine

  

  I want to pass on to readers this Venkatesh Rao substack essay that summarizes what his book club has learned in the past year: The Modernity Machine... Read more

  Posted on 24 December 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Human Machines and AI Machines

  The story of life is the story of machines that learned how to copy themselves and persist through time. Over billions of years these replicating systems evolve... Read more

  Posted on 22 December 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Time, Space, Memory and Brain–body Rhythms

  Buzsáki at NYU Medical School offers interesting perspectives on the two 'types' of time that are considered in cognitive science and neuroscience: physica... Read more

  Posted on 18 December 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Changes in Human Brain Organization at Age ~83 (as Well as Ages ~9, 32, and 66)

  This open source paper by Mousley et al. caught my eye because at 83 years of age I am at one of the article's 'turning points' in brain organization. Read more

  Posted on 16 December 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Bigger AI Models Are Failing Faster - The Future Evolution of AI is into the 4D...

  I want to pass on this interesting Venkatest Rao piece (which he calls a "Sloptraptions" because it is written with AI assistance) The current debate over... Read more

  Posted on 12 December 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Focused Attention Mindfulness Meditation Changes Our Cerebrospinal Fluid Dynamics

  From Keating et al. Significance Mindfulness meditation is widely recognized for its self-reported mental and physical health benefits, yet its effects on core... Read more

  Posted on 10 December 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving

  I'm enjoying reading through an interesting article by Bai et al. that will appear in Behavioral and Brain Science and is now soliciting commentary. Here is... Read more

  Posted on 09 December 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• From Today's Wall Street Journal: How the Top 0.1% Can Live.

  Information that might be useful for people living in poverty in the Liberty City, Overtown, and Little Haiti neighborhoods of Miami who wonder where they shoul... Read more

  Posted on 17 November 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Dangerous Ideas.......

  Deric's MindBlog is almost 20 years old. Its first post appeared on Feb. 8, 2006. The assertions and ideas described in that original post are as fresh and... Read more

  Posted on 12 November 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Welcome to the Polycene

  On reading articles like Tom Friedman’s recent piece in the NYTimes, I realize what a cozy small world this contented retired professor lives in, becoming ever... Read more

  Posted on 10 November 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Inequality and Hierarchy Are Features of All Natural Systems

  DeDeo and Hobson do a commentary on a model developed by Kawakatsu et al. (open source) that explains the emergence of hierarchy in networked endorsement... Read more

  Posted on 04 November 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is AI Pushing Us Back to a Pre-Gutenberg Culture? - A Rethink of Creativity in...

  Here I pass on a link to both video and a transcript of a striking Alex Dobrenko interview with Venkatesh Rao that I have just read, and here is ChatGPT’s... Read more

  Posted on 31 October 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Claude Goes to Therapy

  One of the things my father used to say was: "I look to see what everyone else is doing and do something different". I am feeling that way about AI at the same... Read more

  Posted on 29 October 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Age of De-Skilling

  I want to pass on some selected clips from a marvelous articles by Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Atlantic titled "The Age of De-Skilling - Will AI stretch our... Read more

  Posted on 27 October 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is the Current AI Frenzy a Bubble Certain to Crash? - a Check in with...

  I am a disagreeable bot. Can you get me to agree with you?The billions of dollars in debt being taken on by OpenAI , Anthropic, and other AI companies is... Read more

  Posted on 22 October 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Illusion of Judgment in LLMs

  An important open source article from Loru et al:SignificanceLarge Language Models (LLMs) are used in evaluative tasks across domains. Read more

  Posted on 21 October 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The 2025 Ig Nobel Prizewinners in Full

  A clip from the Chris Simms Nature Magazine articleLITERATUREThe late physician William Bean, for persistently recording and analysing the rate of growth of... Read more

  Posted on 10 October 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE