Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• 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

• Learned Hopefulness

  My son Jon pointed me to an irreverent 'Life Advice' column by Mark Manson whose Nov. 2 installment had an interesting piece describing Marin Seligman's updatin... Read more

  Posted on 04 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Healing the Partisan Partisan Divide - is There a Vital Center?

  

  A recent NYTimes OpEd by David Brooks notes that Biden has been taking steps towards healing political polarization and divisiveness. Andrew Sullivan echoes thi... Read more

  Posted on 03 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Being an America First Populist Correlates with Reported Lifetime Criminal...

  Here is an interesting tidbit from Levi at al.: Significance Using the 2016 American National Election Study, we develop comprehensive measures of the current... Read more

  Posted on 02 November 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog's 5,000th Post - The Milliseconds of a Choice - Watching Your Mind...

  This was going to be a post on oxytocin research...but I looked at the Blogger counter to see that it will be the 5,000th post done since the start of MindBlog... Read more

  Posted on 30 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Have We Become More Comfortable and Less Happy Over the Past 40 Years?

  Arthur Brooks offers another article in his biweekly series on "How to Build a Life," pointing out that we haven't gotten happier as our society has become... Read more

  Posted on 29 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Case for "we" in an "I" Country

  James Morone does a review in Science Magazine of "The Upswing" by Robert Putnam with Romney Simon. Some clips: At the turn of the 20th century, the United... Read more

  Posted on 28 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The End of an Expanding Epidemic Cannot Be Precisely Forecast

  A sobering analysis from Castro et al.: Significance Susceptible–infected–removed (SIR) models and their extensions are widely used to describe the dynamics of... Read more

  Posted on 27 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE