Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Listening to Our Bodies Can Make Us More Resilient to Stress

  Jane Brody points to work from Haas et al. suggesting that resilience is more about body awareness than rational thinking. In their experiments subjects who... Read more

  Posted on 04 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• AI-synthesized Faces Are Indistinguishable from Real Faces and More Trustworthy

  A sobering open source aricle from Nightingale and Farid than suggests the impossibility of sorting our the real from the fake. Read more

  Posted on 02 March 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Seven Habits That Lead to Happiness in Old Age

  I want to point to this self-help article by Arthur Brooks in The Atlantic, part of his 'How to Build a Life' series. It's bottom line, derived from data in... Read more

  Posted on 28 February 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Reconsidering Evidence of Moral Contagion in Online Social Networks

  Burton et al. raise some cautions about recent studies seeming to show that inclusion of emotional terms in social media text messages increases message... Read more

  Posted on 25 February 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Predictions Help Neurons, and the Brain, Learn

  From the PNAS Journal Club, a review of a publication by Luczak et. al. that suggest that neurons might be able to predict their own future activity, and learn... Read more

  Posted on 23 February 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Consciousness is Supported by Near-critical Slow Cortical Electrodynamics

  An open source offering from Toker et al. that has a nice summary graphic.: Significance What changes in the brain when we lose consciousness? Read more

  Posted on 21 February 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Illusory Faces Are More Likely to Be Perceived as Male Than Female

  Interesting observations from Wardle et al.: Despite our fluency in reading human faces, sometimes we mistakenly perceive illusory faces in objects, a phenomeno... Read more

  Posted on 18 February 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Brains Store Concepts as Sensory-motor and Affective Information

  Fascinating work from Fernandino et al., who show that concept representations are not independent of sensory-motor experience: Significance The ability to... Read more

  Posted on 16 February 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How to Want Less

  I've just enjoyed reading through an article by Arthur Brooks, "How to want less" in The Atlantic, which is adapted from his new book "From Strength to Strength... Read more

  Posted on 14 February 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Special Issue of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience on tDCS

  I want to point to this special open source issue of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Paulo Boggio provides an interesting historical introduction,... Read more

  Posted on 11 February 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Expression Unleashed: The Evolutionary & Cognitive Foundations of Human...

  I'm passing on the abstract of a dense but interesting article by Christophe Heintz and Thom Scott-Phillips that will be published in Behavioral and Brain... Read more

  Posted on 09 February 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog is 16 Years Old... It's First Post: "Dangerous Ideas"

  I repeat MindBlog's first post... of ideas that are now considered more commonplace than dangerous. Edge.org soldiers on, but its 'annual question' addressed... Read more

  Posted on 07 February 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Attention and Executive Functions - Improvements and Declines with Ageing.

  From Verissimo et al.: Many but not all cognitive abilities decline during ageing. Some even improve due to lifelong experience. Read more

  Posted on 04 February 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Fast People Respond to Each Other is a Metric of Social Connection.

  From Templeton et al.: Significance Social connection is critical for our mental and physical health yet assessing and measuring connection has been challenging. Read more

  Posted on 02 February 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Threatening Language is Contagious - Tracking America’s Collective Response to...

  From Choi et al.: Significance People are constantly exposed to threatening language in mass communication channels, yet we lack tools to identify language abou... Read more

  Posted on 31 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Stories We Imagine While Listening to Music Depends on Our Culture.

  Margulis et al. (text from their introduction) ....compared quantitative measures of narrativity (the likelihood that an excerpt of music triggers a story in... Read more

  Posted on 28 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Brains Have Multiple Representations of the Same Body Part.

  Here is a neat finding. Remember your elementary biology textbook picture of the homunculi in our somatosensory and motor cortices? Read more

  Posted on 26 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Using Big Data to Track Major Shifts in Human Cognition

  I want to pass on the first few paragraphs of a fascinating commentary by Simon DeDao on an article by Scheffer et al. that was the subject of MindBlog's... Read more

  Posted on 25 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What is Working for You and What is Not?

  This post passes on to MindBlog readers the discussion topic for a Feb 6 2:00 p.m. (CST) Zoom meeting of The Austin Rainbow Forum, which I coordinate along... Read more

  Posted on 21 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Can Monitoring Brain Waves Boost Mental Health?

  David Dodge does an interesting article asking whether neurofeedback has delivered the mental health revolution it has been promising for decades. Read more

  Posted on 21 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE