Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Socrates, Diderot, and Wolpert on Writing and Printing

  I have to pass on these quotes sent by one my Chaos and Complexity Seminar colleagues at the University of Wisconsin: Socrates on writing, from Phaedrus,... Read more

  Posted on 23 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Fluid Intelligence and the Locus Coeruleus-norepinephrine System

  

  Tsukahara and Engle suggest that the cognitive mechanisms of fluid intelligence map onto the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system. Read more

  Posted on 22 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Drifting Nerve Assemblies Can Maintain Persistent Memories

  

  A prevailing model has been that a memory in our brains is stored in a specific set of nerve connections, that, like a book in a library, stays where it belongs. Read more

  Posted on 19 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Snippets of Bach

  

  To give MindBlog readers a bit of a break from brain and mind posts, I want to point out that the New York Times has a great series of articles that present... Read more

  Posted on 17 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Brainstems Respond to Fake Therapies and Fake Side Effects.

  Here is the abstract from a Journal of Neuroscience paper by Crawford et al. titled "Brainstem mechanisms of pain modulation: a within-subjects 7T fMRI study... Read more

  Posted on 17 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Coevolution of Tool Use and Language - Shared Syntactic Processes and Basal...

  Thibault et al. show that tool use and language share syntactic processes. Functional magnetic resonance imaging reveals that tool use and syntax in language... Read more

  Posted on 15 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Freedom From Illusion

  A friend who attended the lecture I gave last Sunday (A New Vision of how our Minds Work), and mentioned in a Monday post, sent me an article from The Buddhist... Read more

  Posted on 12 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Computational Evidence That Predictive Processing Shapes Language Comprehension...

  Having just posted a lecture on predictive processing that I gave two days ago, I come across this fascinating work from Schrimpf et al.: Significance Language... Read more

  Posted on 10 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A MindBlog Lecture - A New Vision of How Our Minds Work

  

  Yesterday I gave a short talk to the Austin Rainbow Forum discussion group that I started up with several other members of the Austin Prime Timers in January... Read more

  Posted on 08 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• It’s Quitting Season

  I want to pass on two articles with the similar themes of people taking stock of their lives and deciding to stop making themselves unhappy. Read more

  Posted on 08 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Variability, Not Stereotypical Expressions, in Facial Portraying of Emotional...

  Barrett and collaborators use a novel method to offer more evidence against reliable mapping between certain emotional states and facial muscle movements: It... Read more

  Posted on 05 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• People Mistake the Internet’s Knowledge for Their Own

  Fascinating experiments from Adrian Ward: Significance In the current digital age, people are constantly connected to online information. Read more

  Posted on 03 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What the Mind is - Similarities and Differences in Concepts of Mental Life in...

  From Weisman et al., who do a fascinating study of cognitive structures 'from the bottom up', allowing data to give rise to ontological structures, rather than... Read more

  Posted on 01 November 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• People Listening to the Same Story Synchronize Their Heart Rates.

  Several studies have shown that people paying attention to the same videos or listening to the same stories show similar brain activity, as measured by... Read more

  Posted on 29 October 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Are Our Brains Doing When They Are (supposedly) Doing Nothing?

  Pezullo et al. address the question of this post's title in an article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: "The secret life of predictive brains: what's spontaneou... Read more

  Posted on 27 October 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Scientific Fields Don't Advance If Too Many Papers Are Published.

  Fascinating work from Chu and Evans: Significance The size of scientific fields may impede the rise of new ideas. Examining 1. Read more

  Posted on 25 October 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Metabolism Modulates Network Synchrony in the Aging Brain

  Wow, this work from Weistuch et al. temps me to reconsider my decision to stay away from the various mitochondrial metabolism stimulating supplements I have... Read more

  Posted on 22 October 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Debate Over Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior

  In this post I'm going to pass on the abstract of a PNAS perspective piece by Bak-Coleman et al., a critique by Cheong and Jones and a reply to the critique by... Read more

  Posted on 20 October 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Paws for Thought: Dogs Have a Theory of Mind?

  In a very simple experiment, Schünemann et al. appear to demonstrate that dogs can attribute thoughts and motivations to humans, distinguishing intentional... Read more

  Posted on 18 October 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Dark Side of Eureka: Artificially Induced Aha Moments Make Facts Feel True

  Fascinating observations from Laukkonen et al: Some ideas that we have feel mundane, but others are imbued with a sense of profundity. We propose that Aha! Read more

  Posted on 15 October 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE