Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• The Conscious Turing Machine - a Blueprint for Conscious Machines.

  I want to point to a paper in the current PNAS by Blum and Blum, "A theory of consciousness from a theoretical computer science perspective: Insights from the... Read more

  Posted on 10 June 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Stories Move the Heart - Literally

  Continuing my thread of heart activity realted posts (here, and here), I'll mention that I've enjoyed reading this open access PNAS Science and Culture article... Read more

  Posted on 08 June 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• I Am Not My Problem

  An explanation of the strange title of this post: Sometimes a new idea spontaneously appears from nowhere as I am waking in the morning. Read more

  Posted on 06 June 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Beginnings

  The title of this post is the title of one of the mini-essays in a piece on my website, written 20 years ago, called "MINDSTUFF: BONBONS FOR THE CURIOUS USER. Read more

  Posted on 03 June 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Heart Rate Variability as a Marker of Stress and Health - Measurements with the...

  This post is a follow-up to the previous post on brain-heart interplay in emotional arousal, and points to Thayer et al.'s meta-analysis of heart rate... Read more

  Posted on 01 June 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain-Heart Interplay in Emotional Arousal - Resolving a Hundred Year Old Debate

  Candia-Rivera et al. do a fascinating piece of work that answers some long-standing issues in the century old debate on the role of the autonomic nervous... Read more

  Posted on 30 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Experiential Appreciation as a Pathway to Meaning in Life

  I have resumed cruising journals' tables of contents after a lapse due to shifting my attention elsewhere, and just came across this interesting open source... Read more

  Posted on 27 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why is a Moving Hand Less Sensitive to Touch Than a Stationary Hand?

  Fuehrer et al. do a nice piece showing how our brains' predictive processing can alter our sensory experience: Significance Tactile sensations on a moving hand... Read more

  Posted on 25 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mozart and Brahms Piano Trios at an 80th Birthday House Concert

  

  This post falls in the 'random curious stuff' category mentioned under MindBlog's title. On May 15, one day before my 80th birthday, my piano trio offered a... Read more

  Posted on 21 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Harmonics of the Social Brain

  Interesting work from Mague et al. on the brain-wide network in mice that encodes rewarding social experience: Highlights • Machine learning model... Read more

  Posted on 19 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Stress Might Help Reduce Dementia and Alzheimer’s.

  The post today (my 80th birthday) points to experimental results relevant to my interest in not losing my marbles anytime soon. Read more

  Posted on 16 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Tabula Sapiens Consortium - Mapping Cell Types in the Human Body

  It is hard to keep up with the mind boggling advances that pop up in almost every issue of Science Magazine. In a perspective article Liu and Zhang describe... Read more

  Posted on 13 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Increases and Decreases in Affective Polarization Over the Past 40 Years in...

  An interesting study from Boxell et al. shows that across 12 advanced democracies, affective polarization, the degree to which people feel more negatively towar... Read more

  Posted on 11 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Prosocial Effect of Touching - the Midas Touch Effect.

  Schaefer et al. (open source) examine the neural underpinnings of how light touching enhances prosocial behavior. Their abstract: Giving and receiving touch... Read more

  Posted on 09 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Graziano's Conceptual Framework for Consciousness

  I would like to pass on this link to Graziano's latest (open source) explication of his theory of consciousness, continuing a MindBlog thread that started with ... Read more

  Posted on 09 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Questioning Common Claims About Human Brain Evolution

  From DeCasien et al.: Highlights New research has questioned or contradicted multiple long-standing claims about human brain evolution. Read more

  Posted on 05 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Older Adults Store Too Much Information.

  From Amer et al.: Highlights Healthy aging is accompanied by declines in control of attention. These reductions in the control of attention, result in older... Read more

  Posted on 03 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Human Fear Paradox: Affective Origins of Cooperative Care

  On the same morning last week that I read a NYTimes essay by Thomas Edsall "The Politics of Fear Show No Sign of Abating" I received an email from the journal... Read more

  Posted on 02 May 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Cultural Evolution of Love in Literary History

  An interesting article from Baumard et al. in Nature Human Behaviour: Since the late nineteenth century, cultural historians have noted that the importance of... Read more

  Posted on 28 April 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Are We Seeing the Beginning of World War III?

  Below, I am passing on some links to background reading for this Sunday's Austin Rainbow Forum (email [email protected] for information), whose discussion... Read more

  Posted on 26 April 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE