Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• The Passing of Governance to Corporate Oligarchies Serving the Top 10%?

  Three recent articles suggest to me a direction for our future. Bret Stephens' article describes the U.S. and Great Britain as rudderless and scarcely able to... Read more

  Posted on 21 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Bacteria in Your Gut Reveal Your True Age.

  Galkin et al. find that the composition of our gut microbiota can approximately reveal our age. Some microbes become more abundant with aging while others... Read more

  Posted on 18 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Upstairs/ Downstairs in Our Brain - Who (or What) is Running Our Show?

  I want to pass on to MindBlog readers the lecture notes and slides from a talk I gave yesterday to "NOVA" - one of five senior learning programs hosted by the... Read more

  Posted on 17 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why 2018 Was the Best Year in Human History.

  Nicholas Kristof provides an antidote to the doom and gloom surrounding national and international politics in his Op-Ed piece, which is essentially an update o... Read more

  Posted on 16 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Different Meditation Practices Differently Buffer from Stress.

  A group at the University of Wisconsin lead by my colleague Richard Davidson looks a the effects of different styles of brief contemplative practices:... Read more

  Posted on 15 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Does Meditation Provide the Only Way to Survive Our Brain-dissolving...

  Both the last chapter of Harari's "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" (abstracted in MindBlog here) and a recent Op-Ed piece by NYTimes tech columnist Farhad... Read more

  Posted on 14 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Illusion of Multitasking Improves Performance.

  From Srna et al.: With technological advancements, the desire, ability, and often necessity to multitask are pervasive. Although multitasking refers to the... Read more

  Posted on 11 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Real World Demonstration of How Tribes Determine Opinions.

  From Satherley et al.: Real-world tests of the impact of partisan cues on voters are scarce because they require assessing how citizens’ attitudes changed towar... Read more

  Posted on 10 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• People Use Less Information Than They Think to Make up Their Minds

  Klein and O'Brien (open access, ) note another of our psychological biases or shortcomings. We perform Manichean good or bad characterizations with much less... Read more

  Posted on 09 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Stimulating Creativity with Alternating Current Transcranial Brain Stimulation

  So... the actual title of the article by Di Bernardi et al. is "Right temporal alpha oscillations as a neural mechanism for inhibiting obvious associations" -... Read more

  Posted on 08 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Return of Paganism

  Continuing in the thread of the previous post, I want to point to a piece by Ross Douthat that suggests the return (or emergence) of a new spirituality that... Read more

  Posted on 07 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons..." Abstracted - Part 5 - Resilience

  This is the fifth installment of clips taken from "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," Harari, Yuval Noah. Kindle Edition, Random House Publishing Group. Part V. Read more

  Posted on 04 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons..." Abstracted - Part 4 - Truth

  This is the fourth installment of clips taken from "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," Harari, Yuval Noah. Kindle Edition, Random House Publishing Group. Part IV. Read more

  Posted on 03 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons..." - Abstracted - Part 3 - Despair and Hope

  This is the third installment of clips taken from "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," Harari, Yuval Noah. Kindle Edition, Random House Publishing Group. Part III. Read more

  Posted on 02 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons..." - Abstracted - Part 2 - The Political Challenge

  This is my second installment of clips taken from "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," Harari, Yuval Noah. Kindle Edition, Random House Publishing Group. Part II. Read more

  Posted on 01 January 2019 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons.." Abstracted - Part 1 - The Technological Challenge

  In this and the next four posts I'm passing on the result of something I do for myself when reading an interesting book - attempt to get the essence of the... Read more

  Posted on 31 December 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Reimagining the Human

  Eileen Crist does a perspective essay in Science Magazine. Some clips: Earth is in the throes of a mass extinction event and climate change upheaval, risking a... Read more

  Posted on 28 December 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Biomarkers for Resilience - Executive Frontal Lobe Activity

  Friedman points to several articles demonstrating brain correlates of resilience to social adversity: -higher connectivity within the brain’s frontoparietal... Read more

  Posted on 27 December 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Blood Proteins Are Different in People Who Exercise.

  There is abundant documentation of the positive effects of exercise: lengthening life spans, reducing disease risks, improving heart health, bolstering immune... Read more

  Posted on 26 December 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Seasonal Offering...

  

  The cellist in a piano trio that I am playing with invited me (as a sight reading pianist who is always on the prowl for string players) to attend a gathering... Read more

  Posted on 25 December 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE