Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• DNA Variants Linked to Same Sex Behavior.

  Michael Price and Jocelyn Kaiser report from the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in San Diego: How genes influence sexual orientation... Read more

  Posted on 29 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Diffusion in Networks and the Virtue of Burstiness

  From Akbarpour and Jackson: Significance The contagion of disease and the diffusion of information depend on personal contact. Read more

  Posted on 26 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Musicians' Enhanced Auditory Perception Depends on the Instrument They Play.

  Professionally trained musicians show enhanced auditory perception of music. Krishnan et al. show that this expertise is modulated by the instrument played by... Read more

  Posted on 25 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Seeing Something That is Not There - Our Brain Retroactively Constructs Our...

  

  Two new illusions found by Stiles et al. (open source) report two new multimodal illusions in which sound influences visual perception. Read more

  Posted on 24 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• An Average Person Can Recognize 5,000 Faces.

  

  Jenkins et al. recruited 25 undergraduate or postgraduate students at the University of Glasgow and the University of Aberdeen (15 female, 10 male; mean age... Read more

  Posted on 23 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What is the Last Question?

  After 20 years, the Edge.org annual question exercise seems to have run out of steam. John Brockman, author of "The Third Culture" and the guru who has led the... Read more

  Posted on 22 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• It's Better to Be Born Rich Than Gifted.

  Andrew Van Dam points to work by Papageorge and Thom use genome based measurements to demonstrate that even though genetic endowments are distributed almost... Read more

  Posted on 19 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Trump Anxiety Disorder

  John Harris (chief editor of POLITICO) and Sarah Zimmerman offer an article "Trump May Not Be Crazy, But the Rest of Us Are Getting There Fast." A few clips: ... Read more

  Posted on 18 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Feeling Unsafe in a Safe World - the Unsafety Theory of Stress

  Brosschot et al. make the point that our body's stress response is chronically turned on, unless it is actively inhibited by our upstairs prefrontal perception... Read more

  Posted on 17 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Health of Fathers Influences the Well-being of Their Progeny.

  Watkins et al. show in mice that a low protein diet during the period of spermatogenesis leads to offspring with disturbed metabolic health: Significance... Read more

  Posted on 16 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Too Much Or Too Little Sleep Correlates with Cognitive Deficits.

  Wild et al. collected sleep and cognitive performance data from ~10,000 people to find that less than 7 or more than 8 hours of sleep a night diminishes... Read more

  Posted on 15 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A New Algorithm for Predicting Disease Risk.

  I pass on the text of this piece from Gina Kolata, and then the abstract of the article by Khera et al. she is referencing: By surveying changes in DNA at 6. Read more

  Posted on 12 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Digital Media and Developing Minds

  I want to point to the Oct. 2 issue of PNAS, which free online access to a Sackler Colloquium on Digital Media and Developing Minds. Read more

  Posted on 11 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Where is Free Will in Our Brains?

  Really fascinating work from Darby et al. identifying the brain areas that make us feel like we have free will, the perception that we are in control of, and... Read more

  Posted on 10 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Sans Forgetica

  

  A fascinating piece from Taylor Telford in The Washington Post describes a new font devised by psychology and design researchers at RMIT Univ. in Melbourne...... Read more

  Posted on 09 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• In Praise of Mediocrity

  Tim Wu does an engaging essay on how the pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure. I’m a little surprised by how many people tel... Read more

  Posted on 08 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Militarized Police Forces Do Not Enhance Safety Or Reduce Crime, but Do...

  From Jonathan Mummolo: Significance National debates over heavy-handed police tactics, including so-called “militarized” policing, are often framed as a... Read more

  Posted on 05 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Number of Neurons in the Amygdala Normally Increases During Development,...

  Avino et al. point out one possible underlying cause of the characteristic difficulty that people with autism spectrum disorder have in understanding the... Read more

  Posted on 04 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Income Inequality Drives Female Sexualization.

  Blake et al. do a fascinating analysis that suggests that rising economic inequality promotes status competition among women, by means of the posting of "sexy... Read more

  Posted on 03 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Daily Fasting Can Improve Health Span and Life Span

  

  Mitchell et al. show (in mice) that caloric restriction (a 30% reduction in daily intake) or single-meal feeding (resulting in fasting during each day but no... Read more

  Posted on 02 October 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE