Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Feeling Grateful - a Shortcut to Virtuous Behavior.

  Psychologist David DeSteno, in an Aeon essay, summarizes his experiments suggesting that moving towards a more virtuous life might accomplished by simply... Read more

  Posted on 28 October 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Five Myths About Aging.

  I want to pass on a few clips from this piece by William Mair, who researches the biology of aging at Harvard: MYTH NO. 1 Biological aging can't be slowed. The... Read more

  Posted on 25 October 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Metamorphosis of the Western Soul

  I want to point to an article by Will Storr "The Metamorphosis of the Western Soul" that has been languishing for over a year in my list of references that migh... Read more

  Posted on 23 October 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Shape of Your Heart is Determined by Whether You Run Or Sit.

  Shave et al. show that endurance runners and farmers have larger, elongated left ventricles with thin walls (traits that help pump large volumes of blood for a... Read more

  Posted on 21 October 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Default Mode Network Represents Esthetic Appeal.

  Vessel et al. note another role for the default mode network of our brain: Significance Despite being highly subjective, aesthetic experiences are powerful... Read more

  Posted on 18 October 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cross-national Negativity Bias in Reacting to News

  There seems to be a world-wide anxiety industry of media that find maximum profits in presenting mostly negative news - in a way similar to the drug companies... Read more

  Posted on 16 October 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• An Update on the Science of ‘free Will’

  I want to point to an excellent article by Gholilpour in the Atlantic Magazine that describes a reinterpretation of experiments by Libet taken to suggest that... Read more

  Posted on 14 October 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• More Critique of Work Linking Loving Kindness Meditation and Cellular Again

  In my Sept. 23 post, "Loving kindness meditation slows cellular aging?", I gave a few of the reasons that the article triggered my bullshit detector. A email... Read more

  Posted on 11 October 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Psilocybin + Mindfulness Meditation Change Brain Connectivity - Lasting...

  Dolan points to work by Smigielski et al.: Both psychedelics and meditation exert profound modulatory effects on consciousness, perception and cognition, but... Read more

  Posted on 09 October 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mindfulness Doesn't Reduce Impulsive Behavior.

  Korponay, Davidson and colleagues present results of a study that were contrary to their expectation that the practice of mindfulness meditation would... Read more

  Posted on 07 October 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Gender and Race Stereotypes - What's in a Name...

  Eaton et al. give us more data on the application of gender and race stereotypes in academia: The current study examines how intersecting stereotypes about... Read more

  Posted on 04 October 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

  I want to point the subset of MindBlog readers interested in brain-behavior correlations to the journal “Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience,”... Read more

  Posted on 02 October 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• People of Color - Getting Quantitative About Police-involved Deaths

  From Edwards et al.: Significance Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000... Read more

  Posted on 30 September 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 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