Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• World in Decline? New Authoritarian Age? - the Dangers of Declinism.

  These are times of high anxiety for both Red and Blue state America. A powerful Op-Ed by Roger Cohen, in the wake of the British election, sees a coming Trump... Read more

  Posted on 27 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• For the Holiday Season - the Gift of Self Care

  To acknowledge that today is a special one for a large fraction of humanity, I want to pass on Parker-Pope's description of suggestions by Korean Buddhist... Read more

  Posted on 25 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is This What My Grandson Will Be Doing in a Few Years?

  

  My seven year old grandson Sebastian is a performer, taking piano lessons and reminding me a bit of myself when I was doing the same thing at his age. Read more

  Posted on 23 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Setting Back Our Epigenic Age?

  I would like to point to Josh Mitteldorf's Blog "Aging Matters", in particular "Pulsed Yamanaka Factors Set Back Epigenic Age. Read more

  Posted on 20 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog Reviews the HealthyMinds App

  

  The Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, established by my former University of Wisconsin colleague Richard Davidson, is trying to export th... Read more

  Posted on 18 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Favorite Sentences

  I have to pass on a few of the favorite sentences collected by book critic Dwight Garner from his 2019 list of books - you can get the citations from the... Read more

  Posted on 18 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Blood Protein Profiles Change in the Fourth, Seventh and Eighth Decades of...

  Lehallier et al. find that ~1,380 of the ~3,000 plasma proteins in blood samples from 4,263 people between the ages of 18 and 95 vary significantly with age,... Read more

  Posted on 16 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Visual System Uses Recurrence in Its Representational Dynamics

  Fundamental work from Kietzmann et al. shows how recurrence - lateral and top-down feedback from higher to the more primary visual areas of the brain that... Read more

  Posted on 13 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• More Insight into Metformin's Beneficial Effects on Diabetes, Aging, and...

  

  A group at McMaster University has shown an effect of the diabetes drug metformin beyond its suppression of liver glucose production that might partially explai... Read more

  Posted on 11 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Heritable Gaps Between Chronological Age and Brain Age Are Increased in Common...

  Kaufmann et al. have used machine learning on s large dataset to estimate robust estimation of individual biological brain ages on the basis of structural... Read more

  Posted on 09 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Same-Sex Behavior in Animals - a New View.

  Monk et al. offer a fresh perspective on the "problem" of how same-sex sexual behavior could have evolved. It is a problem only if different-sex sexual... Read more

  Posted on 06 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Something in the Way We Move.

  Gretchen Reynolds points to work by Hug et al. suggesting that each of us has a unique muscle activation signature that can be revealed during walking and... Read more

  Posted on 04 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Rival Theories of Consciousness Being Tested by Large Project.

  In the first phase of a $20 million dollar project, six laboratories are going to run experiments with more than 500 participants to test two of the primary... Read more

  Posted on 02 December 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Real Cost of Texting and Tweeting.

  Agnes Callard, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, crystallizes some fascinating points in an NYTimes Op-Ed piece. She wonders wh... Read more

  Posted on 29 November 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cognitive and Noncognitive Predictors of Success.

  An interesting bit of work from Duckworth et al. When predicting success, how important are personal attributes other than cognitive ability? Read more

  Posted on 27 November 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Trance States Might Have Forged Human Societies

  I want to pass on a series of clips I have made for my own use from an intriguing article by Mark Vernon in Aeon: With anatomically modern humans comes culture... Read more

  Posted on 25 November 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Evidence for Premature Aging Caused by Insufficient Sleep.

  I have come to realize in the past year or so that my physical and mental robustness require getting at least seven, and preferably eight, hours of sleep every... Read more

  Posted on 22 November 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A "Department of the Attention Economy"

  Popping up on my daily input stream (in this case the Google News aggregator - which knows more that I do about what I might like to see) is a CNN business... Read more

  Posted on 20 November 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Social Class is Revealed by Brief Clips of Speech.

  Kraus et al. - a collective modern version of Professor Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion - offer a detailed analytic update on how social... Read more

  Posted on 18 November 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Explaining the Puzzle of Human Diversity in the Christian World

  Fascinating work by Schulz et al. is reviewed by both Gelfand and also Zauzmer. Schultz et al. show how the specific practices of Medieval Christianity can in... Read more

  Posted on 15 November 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE