Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Red and Blue Voters Live in Different Economies

  

  Wow... if you want some graphics that powerfully describe our current political malaise, check out Edsall's Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes. Read more

  Posted on 27 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mindfulness Training and Attentional Control of Mind-wandering

  Several studies have suggested that mindfulness training can strengthen the connections between the networks in our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex [DLPFC]... Read more

  Posted on 25 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Loving Kindness Meditation Slows Cellular Aging?

  

  I like to be generous, loving, kind and nice, but a recent PsyPost article on the slowing of cellular aging by loving-kindness meditation triggered my bullshit... Read more

  Posted on 23 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Gender Neutral Pronouns Reduce Bias in Favor of Traditional Gender Roles

  An interesting study by Tavits and Pérez on Sweden's 2015 incorporation into the Swedish Academy Glossary (which sets norms for Sweden's language) of the... Read more

  Posted on 20 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Power of "cute"

  I want to point MindBlog readers to an article by Simon May at aeon.co that encapsulates the contents of his new book "The Power of Cute" (2019), and to a Trend... Read more

  Posted on 18 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Psychological Adaptation to the Apocalypse - Meditate, Or Just Be Happy?

  In this post, not exactly an upper, I point first to two in-your-face articles on how we ought to be afraid, very afraid, about humanity's future technological... Read more

  Posted on 16 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Twitter is Making Us Dumber.

  Stanley-Becker points to some research providing hardly surprising evidence that communicating about complex issues using 280 character chunks of text dumbs dow... Read more

  Posted on 13 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Can We Reverse Our Biological Age? The Usual Media Hysteria...

  I must have see at least 10 of my media inputs hyping a small study by Fahy et al. (9 white men, and lacking controls) pointed to by Abbott suggesting that the... Read more

  Posted on 11 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Training to Reduce Cognitive Biases.

  Sellier et al. show that students assigned to solve a business case exercise are less likely to choose an inferior confirmatory solution when they have... Read more

  Posted on 09 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Personal and Professional Conduct Relate to One Another.

  From Griffin et al.: Significance The relative importance of personal traits compared with context for predicting behavior is a long-standing issue in... Read more

  Posted on 06 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Training Wisdom - the Illeist (third Person) Method.

  I think my most sane moments are those when I experience myself as watching, in third-person mode, rather than “being” Deric, the immersed actor. Read more

  Posted on 04 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Infants Expect Leaders to Right Wrongs

  From Stavans and Baillargeon: Anthropological and psychological research on direct third-party punishment suggests that adults expect the leaders of social... Read more

  Posted on 02 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Loss of Control in Aging Cells.

  Wow...experiments like those of Pereda et al. make me feel rather fatalistic and resigned to the aging process, notwithstanding all numerous pie in the sky... Read more

  Posted on 30 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Interindividual Variability - Rather Than Universality - in Facial-emotion...

  Brooks et al. do experiments suggesting that the representational structure of emotion expressions in visual face-processing regions may be shaped by... Read more

  Posted on 28 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• From "Love Your Enemies" - Arthur Brooks on Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory

  

  I have read through Arthur Brooks' new book, "Love your Enemies," which addresses the many facets of our current political polarization, with the goal of... Read more

  Posted on 26 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What We See is Biased by Ongoing Neural Activity.

  

  Rassi et al. (open source) show that ongoing neural activity in our brain, as in the fusiform face area, can influence what we perceive in an ambiguous sensory... Read more

  Posted on 23 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• More Diversity in Flow-land.

  

  I will pass on part of an email from Mr. Todd Denen occasioned by my 8/16/19 post, in which he assures me, that unlike the Flow Genome Project and Flow... Read more

  Posted on 21 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What We See is Influenced by What We Can Do About It

  Djebbara et al. do experiments that resolve an ancient debate on the relationship between cognition, movement, and environment, showing that potential actions... Read more

  Posted on 19 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Schism in Flow-land? Flow Genome Project Vs. Flow Research Collective

  In Nov. 2017 I did a scathing review of the "Stealing Fire" book by Jamie Wheal and Steven Kotler - in support of expensive workshops offered by their "Flow... Read more

  Posted on 16 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Weight Training Changes the Brain.

  Gretchen Reynolds points to work by Kelty et al. showing that weight training in rats can ameliorate mild cognitive impairment in rats induced by a injecting a... Read more

  Posted on 16 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE