Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• A Fundamental Advance in Brain Imaging Techniques.

  

  I want to pass on the abstract, along with a bit of text and two figures, from an article by Coalson, Van Essen, and Glasser that argues for a fundamental chang... Read more

  Posted on 11 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mindfulness Training Increases Strength of Right Insula Connections.

  

  Sharp et al.(open source) suggest that: The endeavor to understand how mindfulness works will likely be advanced by using recently developed tools and theory... Read more

  Posted on 10 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mortality Rates Level off at Extreme Age

  Interesting work from Barbi et al. showing that human death rates increase exponentially up to about age 80, then decelerate, and plateau after age 105. Read more

  Posted on 09 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Imaging Predicts Who Will Be a Good Musical Performer.

  Fascinating observations from Zatorre's group: Significance In sophisticated auditory–motor learning such as musical instrument learning, little is understood... Read more

  Posted on 06 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Are Religious People Trusted More?

  A prevailing view is that religious behavior facilitate trust, primarily toward coreligionists, and particularly when it is diagnostic of belief in moralizing... Read more

  Posted on 05 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Seven Creepy Facebook Patents

  I'll follow yesterday's post with yet another post on creepy high tech patents, this time from Facebook, showing their ongoing intention to invade our privacy a... Read more

  Posted on 04 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Patent for Emotional Robots?

  I recently received an interesting email from Deepak Gupta, who is with a patent research services company, who, having seen my post on robots and emotion,... Read more

  Posted on 03 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• An Optimistic Outlook Creates a Rosy Past.

  From Devitt and Schacter in the Harvard Psychology department, a study recruiting the usual gaggle of psychology undergraduate students as subjects: People... Read more

  Posted on 02 July 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Stress and Autoimmune Disease

  I am now in my 77th year, and not all that pleased that my inflammatory, immune, and stress systems are becoming more excitable, more likely to be activated by... Read more

  Posted on 29 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Social Media and Democracy

  This post passes on links to articles on social media discussed recently in the Univ. of Wisconsin Chaos and Complex Systems seminar that I attend. Read more

  Posted on 28 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Philosophy We Need: Personalism

  To his credit, David Brooks keeps searching for moral visions that might be an antidote to our current social and political malaise. A recent Op-Ed piece is on... Read more

  Posted on 27 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mindfulness Can Lower Your Motivation.

  Vohs and Hafenbrack do an NYTimes opinion piece to advertise their forthcoming paper on effects of meditation. Given my personal experience with 'mindfulness'... Read more

  Posted on 26 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Deep Origins of Consciousness

  I want to recommend an engaging book by Peter Godfrey-Smith that I have read recently, "Other Minds: The Octopus, theSea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Read more

  Posted on 25 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain EEG Activity Can Predict Who Antidepressants Will Work on

  Pizzagalli et al. have used electroencephalography (EEG) to look at the activation level of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in depressed patients. Read more

  Posted on 22 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Old Italian Violins Imitate the Human Voice.

  A fascinating study from Tai et al. (open source): Significance Amati and Stradivari violins are highly appreciated by musicians and collectors, but the... Read more

  Posted on 21 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Families and Politics - Curtailed Conversations

  Chen and Rohla find that Thanksgiving dinners in which the hosts and guests lived in oppositely voting precincts were up to 50 minutes shorter than... Read more

  Posted on 20 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Tipping Points in Changing Social Conventions.

  How can we explain the rapid rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany or the rapid acceptance of gay marriage in the United States? Centola et al. Read more

  Posted on 19 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Misunderstood Sixth Mass Extinction

  Paul Ehrlich, 50 years after the publication of "The Population Bomb," together with Gerardo Ceballos, has written a concise rebuttal of scientists (and the... Read more

  Posted on 18 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Comparing Human Prefrontal Cortex to That of Other Primates

  From Donahue et al.: Significance A longstanding controversy in neuroscience pertains to differences in human prefrontal cortex (PFC) compared with other primat... Read more

  Posted on 15 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Evolutionary Cognition - Bees Demonstrate an Understanding of Zero

  Howard et al. demonstrate an astounding evolutionary convergence by showing that insects have developed the concept of zero, a capability once thought to be a... Read more

  Posted on 14 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE