Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• The Temporal Organization of Perception.

  Ronconi et al. do interesting work suggesting that whether we perceive two visual stimuli as being separate events or a single event depends on a precise... Read more

  Posted on 04 January 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Facebook Admits Its Sociopathic Side. Are Social Media the Drug Epidemic of Our...

  An article by Farhad Manjoo notes that Facebook itself has pointed to work by Shakya and Christakis showing that overall the use of Facebook is negatively... Read more

  Posted on 03 January 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Early Stress Exposure Influences Adult Decision Making.

  From Birn et al.: Individuals who have experienced chronic and high levels of stress during their childhoods are at increased risk for a wide range of behaviora... Read more

  Posted on 02 January 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Pax Technica - the New Web of World Government

  Some clips from an Op-Ed piece by Roger Cohen: ...the puzzle remains. A year of Trump and the world has not veered off a precipice. Read more

  Posted on 01 January 2018 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• When Intuition Overrides Reason.

  Gilbert Chin points to work by Walco and Risen showing that a third to a half of us will elect to rely on gut feelings even after having demonstrated an accurat... Read more

  Posted on 29 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• On Gratitude...

  I want to pass on this bit from an essay by Philip Garrity in the New York Times Philosophy Forum "The Stone". On recovering from the vibrancy and trauma of... Read more

  Posted on 28 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mind the Hype - Mindfulness and Meditation

  Smith et al. point to and summarize an article by Van Dam et al. I pass on the Van Dam et al. abstract: During the past two decades, mindfulness meditation has... Read more

  Posted on 27 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The 11 Separate Nations of the United States

  

  I just became aware, through an article by Matthew Speiser in The Independent, of the interesting work of Oolin Woodard that suggests that 11 distinct cultures... Read more

  Posted on 26 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Autopilots and Metastates of Our Brains.

  I pass on summaries from two recent contributions to understanding automatic information processing in our brains. First from Vatansever et al. Read more

  Posted on 25 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Detailed Demographics from Google Street Views.

  Interesting....neighborhood-level estimates of the racial, economic and political characteristics of 200 U.S. cities using Google Street View images of... Read more

  Posted on 22 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Wealth Inequality as a Law of Nature.

  

  Here is the abstract from Scheffer et al., a bit of work that casts an interesting light on the current Republican tax legislation that significantly accelerate... Read more

  Posted on 20 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Skill Networks and Human Capital.

  Anderson does an interesting analysis showing that workers who can combine different skills synergistically earn more than other skilled workers. Read more

  Posted on 19 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Positive Stimuli Blur Time.

  From Roberts et al.: Anecdotal reports that time “flies by” or “slows down” during emotional events are supported by evidence that the motivational relevance... Read more

  Posted on 18 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Teaching A.I. to Explain Itself

  An awkward feature of the artificial intelligence, or machine learning, algorithms that teach themselves to translate languages, analyze X-ray images and... Read more

  Posted on 15 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Debussy La Plus Que Lente - a First Musical Offering from Austin Texas.

  

  This is a personal post, a musical offering of the sort I have done on MindBlog in previous years. The Steinway B that I have used since 2002 recently moved wit... Read more

  Posted on 14 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Digital Mass Persuasion Via Psychological Targeting.

  Sigh...we're heading full-tilt towards a plutocracy which will manipulate the masses via technologies of the sort described by Matz et al. Read more

  Posted on 13 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Trauma is Passed Over Generations.

  Bakalar points to work by Santavirta et al. showing that the daughters of women exposed to childhood trauma are at increased risk for psychiatric disorders. Read more

  Posted on 12 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How is American (and World) Governance Evolving?

  So... what is the United State to become? From the recent outpouring of Op-Ed pieces you can take your choice: Autocracy, Plutocracy, Oligarchy, Kleptocracy...... Read more

  Posted on 11 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Dogs Can Smell Our Happiness and Fear.

  From D'Aniello et al: We report a study examining interspecies emotion transfer via body odors (chemosignals). Do human body odors (chemosignals) produced... Read more

  Posted on 08 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Evil is Tech?

  The title of this post is from an Op-Ed piece by David Brooks. Some clips: There are three main critiques of big tech. The first is that it is destroying the... Read more

  Posted on 07 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE