Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Why Are Some People More Anxious Than Others? Brain Correlates of Trait Anxiety.

  Why does trait anxiety (the stable tendency to attend to, experience, and report negative emotions such as fears, worries, and anxiety across many situations)... Read more

  Posted on 02 May 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is Superintelligence Impossible?

  Andy Clarke does an interesting and concise commentary on a discussion between Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers. I pass on the final two paragraphs of Clark's... Read more

  Posted on 01 May 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Digital Addiction and the Attention Economy.

  Jia Tolentino's "What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away" is a broad essay on our digital addictions that focuses on two recent books: Cal Newport's “Digital... Read more

  Posted on 30 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Bit of Digital Detox - Rehearsing a Mendelssohn Piano Trio

  

  I have been fortunate to find in Austin TX two accomplished string players, violinist Andrea Gore and cellist Karen Foster Cason, who join me in sight reading... Read more

  Posted on 29 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Bringing Dead Brains Back to Life.

  Work by Vrselja et al. on restoring brain function in pigs four hours after death has been extensively covered by the popular press. Read more

  Posted on 26 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Factfulness - Rosling's Instinctual Mental Errors - Destiny, Single...

  

  This is the final installment of several posts for my own benefit - making brief clips from the Rosling "Factfullness" book to encapsulate what he calls our 10... Read more

  Posted on 25 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Factfulness - Rosling's Instinctual Mental Errors - Fear, Size, Generalization

  

  I'm continuing posts for my own benefit - making brief clips from the Rosling "Factfullness" book to encapsulate what he calls our 10 'basic instincts' -... Read more

  Posted on 24 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Factfulness - Rosling's Instinctual Mental Errors - Gap, Negativity, Straight...

  

  I'm doing this and a few subsequent posts for my own benefit - making brief clips from the Rosling "Factfullness" book described in the previous post to... Read more

  Posted on 23 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Factfulness - Hans Rosling - Introduction

  

  I have just had a read through the book “Factfulness” written by Hans Rosling together with his son and daughter, published in early 2018, very much in the... Read more

  Posted on 22 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Return of the Oppressed.

  

  An article written by Peter Turchin in 2013 notes that inequality moves in cycles, from the Roman Empire to our own Gilded Age, and he gives a chilling... Read more

  Posted on 19 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• New Microscopy Technique Sees Thousands of Cells and Their Activity Deep in the...

  

  Weisenberger et al. manage the amazing feat of imaging and recording activity of ~12,000 neurons in the mouse cortex. Here is their abstract and a clip from... Read more

  Posted on 18 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• McMindfulness - How Capitalism Captured the Mindfulness Industry

  A great piece in The Guardian by David Forbes, an extract from his forthcoming book "Mindfulness and its Discontents" from which I further extract a few... Read more

  Posted on 17 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The New York Times Privacy Project

  Many MindBlog readers are probably aware of the NYTimes series of articles on privacy, but I point to it for those who may not be. Read more

  Posted on 16 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Changes in Well-being Measured by Massive Online Choice Experiments.

  Brynjolfsson et al. (open source) suggest moving beyond using gross domestic product (GDP) and productivity as a proxy for well-being to include the welfare... Read more

  Posted on 15 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Tracking Emotions of Unseen Persons by Their Context.

  

  Martinez does a commentary on work by Chen and Whitney (open source) in the same issue of PNAS. Here is a clip from that commentary: Face perception is a... Read more

  Posted on 12 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Studies on Brain Renewal and Enhancement

  I want to point to two recent examples of studies on brain renewal in aging humans and other animals. First, a Stanford group finds that the normal decay in... Read more

  Posted on 11 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Synchronizing Rhythmic Brain Circuits Improves Working Memory in Older Adults.

  Our short term memory depends on theta rhythms (~6-10 Hz) and gamma rhythms (~25-100 Hz) in different parts of our brain being coupled and in synchrony with eac... Read more

  Posted on 10 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Affective Forecasting and Partisanship

  Rai summaries work by Dorison et al.: Increasing political polarization is driven in part by voters selectively seeking views that support their preexisting... Read more

  Posted on 09 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• "Learned Helplessness" from Constant Attention to Your Input Stream (email,...

  I'm trying out a 'new rule' for myself (cf. the Real Time with Bill Maher show on HBO). I frequently wake with some new ideas that I want to develop and write... Read more

  Posted on 08 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Life Prospects of Female Co-twins Are Diminished by Prenatal Testosterone...

  From Bütikofe et al.: During sensitive periods in utero, gonadal steroids help organize biological sex differences in humans and other mammals. Read more

  Posted on 05 April 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE