Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Five Myths About Consciousness

  In a perspective piece for the Washington Post Christof Koch (chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute of Brain Science) does a brief and concise... Read more

  Posted on 14 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• It’s Not Just How the Game is Played, It’s Whether You Win Or Lose

  An open source article from Molina et al.: Growing disparities of income and wealth have prompted extensive survey research to measure the effects on public... Read more

  Posted on 12 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Ingroup Vigilance in Collectivistic Cultures

  Fascinating work from Liu et al., who provide a more nuanced view of how people in more collectivist cultures are more suspicious of possible unethical... Read more

  Posted on 09 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Feeling Pleasure from Music - Brain Correlates of Why People Differ

  From Martínez-Molina et al.: SIGNIFICANCE Music is one of the most important sources of pleasure for many people, but at the same time there are important... Read more

  Posted on 07 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Can an Uprising of Decency Win the Next Presidential Election?

  

  I want to point to this massively cogent piece by David Brooks, and also pass on a video done by the democratic presidential candidate he mentions, Marianne... Read more

  Posted on 05 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Can We Do When Facts Don't Matter?

  Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters are those whose lives are most diminished and compromised by his actions. They do not let facts cloud their beliefs. Read more

  Posted on 02 August 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Politics Are in Our DNA - Why Societies Evolved to Have Both Conservatives and...

  Sebastian Junger points out an evolutionary rationale for the presence of both liberals and conservatives within a group - that over our evolutionary history... Read more

  Posted on 31 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Re-skilling the Brain.

  For the first time, Oby et al (open source, nice graphics) observe the new neural activity patterns that cause a new learned behavior. Significance Consider a... Read more

  Posted on 29 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Deindividuation of Outgroup Faces Occurs at the Earliest Stages of Visual...

  From Hughes et al: A hallmark of intergroup biases is the tendency to individuate members of one’s own group but process members of other groups categorically. Read more

  Posted on 26 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Facial Muscles in Dogs Evolved for Interactions with Humans.

  From Kaminski et al. (check out the videos in the article): Domestication shaped wolves into dogs and transformed both their behavior and their anatomy. Read more

  Posted on 24 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Around the Globe, Financial Temptation Increases Civic Honesty.

  Shalvi does a commentary on work by Cohn et al. Here is the Cohn et al. abstract: Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development but is... Read more

  Posted on 22 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• It’s Never simple...The Tidy Textbook Story About the Primary Visual Cortex is...

  When I was a postdoc in the Harvard Neurobiology department in the mid-1960’s I used to have afternoon tea with the Hubel and Weisel group. Read more

  Posted on 19 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• An Anti-aging Pill with Some Credibility....

  An AARP article points to studies on the new drug RTB101, which boosts immune function in older people and lowers risk for respiratory diseases. Read more

  Posted on 17 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Correlating Our Our Physical and Mental Experiences of Stress Linked to...

  Davidson and colleagues at the Univ. of Wisconsin show that individual differences in the ability to associate subjective stress and heart rate are related to... Read more

  Posted on 15 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Problem With ‘Sharenting’

  An article in the NYTimes 'Privacy Project' by Kamenetz resonates with my own experience of very mixed reactions to viewing some of what I consider the most... Read more

  Posted on 12 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Looking for a Dose of Optimism?

  I want to point to a recent NYTimes Op-Ed piece by David Brooks that is a bit more upbeat than his frequent hand wringing over the dissolution of old verities. Read more

  Posted on 10 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Subgroups of Gay Men Correspond to Different Biodevelopmental Pathways

  Swift-Gallant et al. consider three established biomarkers of sexual orientation and suggest they reflect distinct biodevelopmental pathways influencing same-se... Read more

  Posted on 08 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Social Media - No Effect on Adolescent Life Satisfaction?

  Orben et al. (open source article) provide a study whose results contest a common opinion, reinforced by several previous studies, that adolescents who use... Read more

  Posted on 05 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Think Twice About Metformin as an Anti-aging Drug.

  Gretchen Reynolds points to work suggesting that use of metformin (the most commonly used Type 2 diabetes drug) as an anti-aging agent by healthy active people... Read more

  Posted on 03 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Your Professional Decline.

  Arthur Brooks, former president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank and New York Times Op-Ed writer, does an essay in the Atlantic in... Read more

  Posted on 01 July 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE