Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• The Emotions of Animals - and Our Human Mental Inference Fallacy

  This post continues Barrett's discussion of the implications of our new understanding of how emotions work, passing on some of her discussion of animal... Read more

  Posted on 21 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Emotion and the Law

  This post continues Barrett's discussion of the implications of our new understanding of how emotions work, passing on just a few chunks from Chapter 11 "Emotio... Read more

  Posted on 18 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Implications of the New Understanding of How Our Emotions Really Work - Emotiona...

  The previous post in this series, 'A New View of Human Nature,' covering Chapter 8 of Barrett's book brought to a close her account of our brains operate by... Read more

  Posted on 16 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A New View of Human Nature

  This post continues on from the abstracting of Chapter 7 ‘Emotions as Social Reality’ with Chapter 8 ‘A New View of Human Nature’ from Barrett’s book on... Read more

  Posted on 14 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Emotions as Social Reality

  This post is the next installment of my reduction of Barrett’s book, continuing on to Chapter 7 (Emotions as Social Reality) from the summary of chapter 6 (How... Read more

  Posted on 11 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How the Brain Makes Emotions

  This post continues on from the summary of chapter 5 (Concepts, Goals, and Words) in Barrett’s book "How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain" to... Read more

  Posted on 09 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Concepts, Goals, and Words

  I now proceed on from a previous post on ‘The Origin of Feeling’ , chapter 4 of Barrett’s book on emotions, to an idiosyncratic selection of edited chunks from... Read more

  Posted on 07 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Origin of Feeling

  This post continues my cooking down, rewriting, paraphrasing, and excerpting of Barrett’s book on emotions with Chapter 4, “The Origin of Feeling. Read more

  Posted on 04 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Emotions Are Constructed, and Are Not Universal.

  This post continues with clips, paraphrase, and editing of Barrett’s book "How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain" - material from chapter 2, and... Read more

  Posted on 02 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Emotions Do Not Have Distinctive Brain and Body ‘fingerprints’

  This post, following an introduction in last Friday’s post, is a series of clips and paraphrases from Ch. 1 of Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book “How Emotions are... Read more

  Posted on 30 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Unified View of Reasons and Emotions.

  As indicated in my Nov. 18 post, I have been taking a mini-sabbitical from grinding out daily MindBlog posts to sort out my understanding of what emotions are. Read more

  Posted on 27 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Your Brain is Not for Thinking.

  Lisa Feldman Barrett,the author whose book has prompted me to take a mini-sabbitical from MindBlog to do a period of study, has an Op-Ed piece in today's NYTime... Read more

  Posted on 23 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• We Have Been Wrong About What Emotions Are - MindBlog is Taking a Study...

  I have been doing a careful reading of Barrett's book "How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain" - hence the decreased frequency of MindBlog posts. Read more

  Posted on 18 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Nature's Lessons for a More Kind Society.

  I recently came across this 2009 MindBlog post... relevant to our times. Here is a re-post (this link to the original post takes you to some comments. Read more

  Posted on 17 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Complexity Model of Societal Collapse

  Continuing in the thread of the previous MindBlog post describing Turchin's historical model, I want to point to Ben Ehrenreich's piece that also describes... Read more

  Posted on 16 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Looming Civil Unrest is Predicted by Turchin's Historical Model.

  I recommend you have a look at Graeme Wood's article on the writing and thoughts of Peter Turchin, who has developed a model based on the past 10,000 years of... Read more

  Posted on 12 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Pandemic Exposes Human Nature: 10 Evolutionary Insights

  The Nov. 10 issue of PNAS has a open source perspective article authored by an all star cast of prominent thinkers (including Steven Pinker, Same Harris, Paul... Read more

  Posted on 11 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Increasing Acceptance of Psychotropic Drugs Reflected by US Election Results

  Several landmark drug reform measures were passed in the recent election. Four states legalized recreational marijuana, one state decriminalizing natural... Read more

  Posted on 09 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Oxytocin Can Increase Or Decrease Anxiety-related Behaviors.

  Duque-Wilckens et al. report experiments in mice showing that oxytocin, usually regarding as reducing anxious behaviors, enables stress-induced social anxiety... Read more

  Posted on 06 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Power to the People (on Climate Change Policy)

  Cathleen O'Grady points to a good model for the United States - countries using citizens' assemblies to address longer term problems that politicians - focused... Read more

  Posted on 05 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE