Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• 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

• 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