Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2685 )

• 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

• Machine Learning Detects Online Influence Campaigns.

  Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel in the struggle to determine when malign information or online influence campaigns are being spread on social medi... Read more

  Posted on 26 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Unethical Amnesia

  An interesting study from Galeotti et al. (open source):Significance Using large-scale incentivized online experiments, we tested two possible origins of... Read more

  Posted on 23 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Compassion Research

  I want to point to a recent "Making Sense" podcast titled "The power of compassion" in which Sam Harris interviews James R. Doty, a Stanford neurosurgeon who... Read more

  Posted on 22 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Baroque Music - Calming Sounds for Our Times

  The New York Times offers another installment in its series that asks prominent artists to choose the five minutes or so they would play to make their friends... Read more

  Posted on 21 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Correlation Between Increased COVID-19 Cases and Support for Political Leaders.

  Yam et al. (open source) offer an interesting analysis. (I do hope that the help to incumbent governments offered by COVID-19 they note for many countries and... Read more

  Posted on 20 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Another Description of How Science Works.

  Joshua Rothman does a review of a new book by Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University,"The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern... Read more

  Posted on 19 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Want to Feel Better? Make a Fake Smile by Holding a Pencil in Your Teeth.

  Neat work by Marmolejo-Ramos et al in Experimental Psychology, Research subjects who forced their facial muscles to replicate the movement of a smile by... Read more

  Posted on 16 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Physics of Virus Transmission by Speaking Droplets

  Some clarity from Netz and Eaton (open source) on a scientifically contentious politicized issue: To make the physics of person-to-person virus transmission fro... Read more

  Posted on 15 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog Starts Another Anti-aging Self Experiment.

  I've done a bit more reading on alpha-ketoglutarate, a natural component of the Krebs biochemical cycle that generates body energy and whose levels normally... Read more

  Posted on 14 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Can Podcasts Make Us Happy?

  Alexandra Schwartz offers some comments on two positive psychology podcasts that take a quantitative view of the quest to be happy. I suggest you read the... Read more

  Posted on 13 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Looming Societal Bereavement.

  Some ramblings prompted by reading Andrew Sullivan't Weekly Dish piece "Dreaming of a Landslide" : As eager as I am to see Trump lose the presidential... Read more

  Posted on 12 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Partisan Polarization About Voting by Mail During the Pandemic

  From Lockhart et al., surveys illustrating another depressing feature of our times.... Are voters as polarized as political leaders when it comes to their... Read more

  Posted on 09 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Mystery of American Pain - a Warning for the Future

  Case et al. (open source) make the fascinating observation that today's elderly report less pain than those in midlife and predict that tomorrow's elderly will... Read more

  Posted on 08 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Age Related Cognitive Decline and the Gut Microbiome

  Haridy summarizes experiments by D'Amato et al. showing that fecal transplants from old mice to young mice result in the younger animals displaying learning... Read more

  Posted on 07 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Bodybuilding Supplement Promotes Healthy Aging and Extends Life Span

  ...at least in mice. I pass on clips from this piece by by Jocelyn Kaiser: A dietary supplement bodybuilders use to bulk up may have a more sweeping health... Read more

  Posted on 06 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Facing Major Changes That Are a Predictable and Integral Part of Life.

  I pass on clips from another of Arthur Brooks' biweekly articles on "How to Build a Life." Its discussion of major life changes begins with the obvious major... Read more

  Posted on 05 October 2020 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE