Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Jaron Lanier on Why You Should Delete Your Social Media Accounts.

  I have read through Jared Lanier's "Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now." His critiques are important and compelling, and I want to... Read more

  Posted on 13 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Makes a Man Attractive?

  

  In many species female mate preference is influenced by signs indicating the health and robustness of the potential male partner. Rehm points to work by Versluy... Read more

  Posted on 12 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Socioeconomic Status Moderates Age-related Differences in Brain Organization...

  

  Work by Chan et al. (open source article) suggests that higher socioeconomic status (SES) may be a protective factor against age-related brain decline. Read more

  Posted on 11 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Move into Your Virtual Body Avatar with Just Your Hands and Feet

  

  Steph Yin points to work by Kitazaki's group at Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan, who try... ...to figure out the minimal amount of body we need to... Read more

  Posted on 08 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Social Contagion of Ethnic Hostility.

  From Bauer et al.: Significance We provide experimental evidence on peer effects and show that behavior that harms members of a different ethnic group is twice... Read more

  Posted on 07 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Placebo Treatment Facilitates Social Trust.

  Nasal sprays containing oxytocin have been shown to facilitate pro-social behaviors. Xan et al. have now shown that this effect can be obtained using nasal... Read more

  Posted on 06 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The End of Humanism - Homo Deus

  I want to pass on a useful precis of two books by Yuval Harari prepared by my colleague Terry Allard for a meeting of the Chaos and Complexity Seminar at the... Read more

  Posted on 05 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• More on the Sociopathy of Social Media

  

  I want to pass on to MindBlog readers some material from Michael Kaplan, who recently pointed me to his YouTube channel OneHandClap, and in particular his... Read more

  Posted on 04 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Much Should A.I. Frighten Us?

  Continuing the artificial intelligence topic of yesterday's post, I want to pass on the concluding paragraphs of a fascinating New Yorker article by Tad Friend. Read more

  Posted on 01 June 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A.I. Needs to Learn Like a Human Child.

  Matthew Hutson summarizes efforts to nudge machine learning researchers away from the assumption that "computers trained on mountains of data can learn just... Read more

  Posted on 31 May 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Intelligent Brains Have More Sparse and Efficient Nerve Connections.

  From Genç et al.: Previous research has demonstrated that individuals with higher intelligence are more likely to have larger gray matter volume in brain areas... Read more

  Posted on 30 May 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Light and Dark Sides of Friendship.

  I want to point to two brief reviews by Natalie Angier on friendship. She first points to work of Parkinson et al. showing similarities in the brain activities... Read more

  Posted on 29 May 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Good Things About a Party Drug (Ketamine).

  Ketamine, used extensively as an anesthetic during the Vietnam war and also as a party drug, has a rapidly acting antidepressant effect. Read more

  Posted on 28 May 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why We Itch More with Aging.

  Lewis and Grandl offer context and note the significance of work by by Feng et al.: It is well known that aging is accompanied by the death of specific cell... Read more

  Posted on 25 May 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Microbiome Regulates Amygdala-dependent Fear Recall.

  Hoban et al. show interaction between the gut microbes and expression of anxiety and fear regulated by the amygdala. Their technical abstract: The amygdala is... Read more

  Posted on 24 May 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Research on Subjective Well-being.

  Given the drum beat of daily negative news we all face, it is useful to be open to facts about longer term trends showing improvement in different areas of... Read more

  Posted on 23 May 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cognitive Underpinnings of Nationalistic Ideology.

  From Zmigrod et al.: Significance Belief in rigid distinctions between the nationalistic ingroup and outgroup has been a motivating force in citizens’ voting... Read more

  Posted on 22 May 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Changes from Adolescence to Adulthood

  Kundu et al. have used a new fMRI imaging technique to look at shifts in functional brain organization in subjects ranging from 8 to 46 years old, finding that... Read more

  Posted on 21 May 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Has Artificial Intelligence Become Alchemy?

  Mathew Hutson describes Ali Rahimi's critique of current artificial intelligence (AI) learning algorithms at a recent AI meeting: Rahimi charged that machine... Read more

  Posted on 18 May 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Status Threat Explains 2016 Presidential Vote

  Niraj Chokshi points to a PNAS article by Diana Mutz. Mutz's abstract: Significance Support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election was widely attributed to... Read more

  Posted on 17 May 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE