Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• 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

• C.E.O.s Are Our Heroes, at Least According to Them.

  An interesting article by Peter Goodman, explains how corporations that claim to be serving the larger common good pay zero taxes. Read more

  Posted on 19 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Different Circuits in the Brain for Reward Seeking and Novelty Seeking.

  Work by Ogasawara et al. is noted by Peter Stern. Novelty seeking is a key feature of intelligent behavior and adaptive cognition. Read more

  Posted on 17 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Unlocking Adults’ Implicit Statistical Learning by Cognitive Depletion

  Smalle et al. make the fascinating observation that inhibition of our adult cognitive control system by non-invasive brain stimulation can unleash some of our... Read more

  Posted on 14 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Children Universally Across Societies Enforce Conventional Norms but in...

  From Kanngiesser et al. in PNAS: Humans, as compared with other animals, create and follow conventional norms that determine how we greet each other, dress, or... Read more

  Posted on 12 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Transcranial Stimulation of Alpha Oscillations Up-regulates the Default Mode...

  Interesting work from Clancy et al. on the brain's default mode network that carries out our self referential rumination: Significance In the brain’s... Read more

  Posted on 10 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Twitter Amplifies the Political Right More Than the Political Left

  You should read this open source editorial in PNAS by Susan Fiske "Twitter Manipulates your feed: Ethical considerations," a commentary on the article by... Read more

  Posted on 07 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Higher Performance and Fronto-parietal Brain Activity Following Active Versus...

  From a brief open source PNAS report by Stillesjö et al. that has a nice graphic of the fMRI data supporting their observations: We here demonstrate common... Read more

  Posted on 05 January 2022 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE