Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• A Reality-challenged America of Echo Chambers and Cults

  Following the recent drama of a mob motivated by a fraudulent theory briefly taking over America's capitol building I want to pass on a number of interesting... Read more

  Posted on 08 January 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Are We the Cows of the Future?

  One of the questions posed by Yuval Harari in his writing on our possible futures is "What are we to do with all these humans who are, except for a small... Read more

  Posted on 07 January 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cuttlefish Can Pass the Marshmellow Test.

  Cephalopod mullusks like octopuses or cuttlefishes show remarkable intelligence. My most engaged and soothing viewing experience during the pandemis has been... Read more

  Posted on 06 January 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Brains of Friends Have Similar Brain Functional Connectivities.

  From Hyhon et al.: Significance In what ways are we similar to our friends? Here, we characterized the social network of residents of a remote village, a... Read more

  Posted on 05 January 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Changing Geography of Social Mobility in the United States

  From Connor and Storper: New evidence shows that intergenerational social mobility—the rate at which children born into poverty climb the income ladder—varies... Read more

  Posted on 04 January 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Commentaries on Our Times

  I have accumulated a number of articles on our current political and social issues that I think offer interesting perspectives. Read more

  Posted on 01 January 2021 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Matriliny Reverses Gender Disparities in Inflammation and Hypertension.

  Fascinating obeervations from Reynolds et al.: Significance Greater autonomy afforded to women in matrilineal societies has been hypothesized to benefit... Read more

  Posted on 31 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Generic "you" Enhances Connection Between People and Ideas

  An interesting piece from Orvell et al.: Creating resonance between people and ideas is a central goal of communication. Historically, attempts to understand th... Read more

  Posted on 30 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Sixteen Facial Expressions Occur in Similar Contexts Worldwide .

  I want to pass on this article by Cowen et al., which was the subject of a comment made on my December 2 post "Emotions are constructed, and are not universal. Read more

  Posted on 29 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Hallucinogens at a Prehistoric Rock Art Site.

  Interesting work from Robinson et al. on stoned stone-age artists! Significance Proponents of the altered states of consciousness (ASC) model have argued that... Read more

  Posted on 28 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Musical Offering for This Day.

  

  I'm grateful to a number of MindBlog viewers for their positive feedback on the recent series of posts on Barrett's book on emotions, and I thought I would... Read more

  Posted on 25 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Plasticity of Well-being and the Cultivation of Human Flourishing

  I pass on the abstract of an open source article in PNAS contributed by my former colleague Richard Davidson and his colleages at the University of Wisconsin... Read more

  Posted on 24 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Barrett's Grand Finale... From Brain to Mind: The New Frontier

  Following our last installment on the emotions of animals, this post arrives at Barrett's final take home messages in Chapter 13 of "How Emotions are Made: The... Read more

  Posted on 23 December 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 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