Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Insight from Jonathan Haidt - "After Babel"

  This article by Jonathan Haidt in the May 2022 print edition of The Atlantic is a long, frightening, and rewarding read. It lays out the mechanisms by which... Read more

  Posted on 21 April 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How the Gut Talks to the Brain.

  Gabanyi et al. show that bacterial cell wall molecules that travel to the brain could trigger a host of behaviors. Here is the abstract of a Perspectives essay... Read more

  Posted on 18 April 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Magisterial Summary of the New World Disorder by David Brooks

  A few clips that attempt to summarize a David Brooks essay that does a beautiful job of putting all the pieces together: I can remember a time — about a... Read more

  Posted on 15 April 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Dance of Sleep

  Sleep and wakefulness are characterized by unique intrinsic activity patterns and are usually thought to be two distinct global states, with the preoptic area o... Read more

  Posted on 13 April 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Road to Our Larger Brains

  Bertrand et al. address the question of how and why mammals evolved large brain sizes relative to their body mass by characterizing the timing and pattern of... Read more

  Posted on 11 April 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Humans Don’t Have Culture Because We’re Smart, We’re Smart Because We Have...

  The title of this post is a sentence taken from the final paragraph of Henrich's Perspective article in Science on the work of Thompson et al. which notes that... Read more

  Posted on 08 April 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Science of Consciousness - Tucson 2022

  For junkies of consciousness and altered states thereof, as in anesthesia or psychedelic-induced states, a browsing of the abstracts submitted for The Science o... Read more

  Posted on 06 April 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Magic Mind Therapy….. Moving Your Body.

  Gretchen Reynolds interviews Jennifer Heisz about the contents of her new book "Move the Body, Heal the Mind," which details the latest science about exercise... Read more

  Posted on 04 April 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Losing Sleep with Age.

  Jacobson and Hoyer summarize experiments of Li et al.: Humans spend approximately one-third of their lives asleep, but this is not distributed equally across... Read more

  Posted on 01 April 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Re-energizing the Aged Brain

  Alderton does a brief summary of work by Brakedal et al.: Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) is an important cofactor in numerous metabolic reactions. Read more

  Posted on 30 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Abnormal Hemispheric Interactions of Autism Spectrum Disorder Present in 1st Yea...

  From Rolison et al.: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by atypical connectivity lateralization of functional networks. Read more

  Posted on 28 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Trust is Needed to Run the World, and Crypto Can Make Trusting Easier

  I want to pass on a few clips from a recent screed by Mark Manson in his usual explitive-rich style. I regret that he doesn't make clear the central point that... Read more

  Posted on 25 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• New Work from Norman-Haignere Et Al. Describes a Populati...

  New work from Norman-Haignere et al. describes a population of cells in our auditory cortex, located between the music and speech-selective areas, that is... Read more

  Posted on 23 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mellow Mice - Why Deep Breathing Can Keep Us Calm

  How we are breathing is usally a good indicator of whether we are calm or aroused. When we become anxious or aroused, usually the best thing we can do is stop... Read more

  Posted on 21 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Difference in Knowledge Production by Global North and South

  Torres et al. do an interesting analysis: Significance Contemporary social sciences aim to be diverse and inclusive, but traces of the historical dominance of... Read more

  Posted on 18 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Exercise Supports the Brain

  From Leiter et al. "Selenium mediates exercise-induced adult neurogenesis and reverses learning deficits induced by hippocampal injury and aging": Highlights... Read more

  Posted on 16 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Addicted to Dreaming.

  Dopamine (DA) is usually associated with pleasure and addiction. Now Hasegawa et al. show that release of DA in the basolateral amygdala (BLA), a brain structur... Read more

  Posted on 14 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Manly Art of Self-promotion

  Exley and Kessler suggest that gender wage gaps may have roots in men being more self-promoting than women: We run a series of experiments involving over 4,000... Read more

  Posted on 11 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Genes for Loving Nature.

  From Chang et al.: Nature experiences have been linked to mental and physical health. Despite the importance of understanding what determines individual... Read more

  Posted on 09 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Feeling of Loss in the Abstraction of All Those Beautiful Things into Streams...

  I pass on a single paragraph from A.O.Scott's recent essay "Shelf Life: Our Collections and the Passage of Time" and suggest you read the whole piece, an... Read more

  Posted on 07 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE