Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Trust and Cooperation Across Societies.

  Romano et al. (open source) offer, in a study over 17 countries, an example of the kind of research needed to understand and enhance cooperation within and... Read more

  Posted on 06 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Emotional Political Base Supporting the Consolidation of the U.S. Plutocracy.

  I want to pass on the ending paragraphs from a piece by Fareed Zakaria: Is it that the Republican Party is cleverly and successfully hoodwinking its... Read more

  Posted on 05 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Mind Reading Machine?

  Not quite, but Matthew Hutson points to work by Wen et al. using an artificial neural network to categorize fMRI signals from subjects watching different... Read more

  Posted on 04 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Bringing Big Science to Psychology

  Chawla describes a new initiative dubbed the "Psychological Science Accelerator" (PSA) that: ...has so far forged alliances with more than 170 laboratories on... Read more

  Posted on 01 December 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Speed of Processing Training Results in Lower Risk of Dementia

  While brain training exercises in general are not receiving a very good press these days, experiments testing effects of BrainHQ's speed of processing exercise... Read more

  Posted on 30 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Behavior Modification Empires.

  I have to pass on this clip from a Maureen Dowd interview of Jaron Lanier Mr. Lanier believes that Facebook and Google, with their “top-down control schemes,”... Read more

  Posted on 29 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• People Who Seek Solitude Are More Creative.

  Ingraham points to an article by Bowker et al. that makes me feel better about my desire for and comfort with a substantial period of solitude each day. Read more

  Posted on 28 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How to Turn Conservatives into Liberals.

  John Bargh and collaborators have done another interesting piece of work on how implicit biases can influence us. I pass on their abstract and the first part... Read more

  Posted on 27 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Common Cause of Jihad and the Alt-Right

  I pass on some clips from an essay by Scott Atran, who is the director of research in anthropology at the CNRS, École Normale Supérieure, and a senior research... Read more

  Posted on 24 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Gratitude Changes You and Your Brain.

  Thanksgiving day is an appropriate time to point to two articles from the Greater Good Magazine. Wong and Brown describe work on writing gratitude letters... Read more

  Posted on 23 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Debate on the Pros and Cons of Aging and Death.

  I want to pass on the final comments from a debate between Allen Frances (a professor emeritus at Duke University who was the chairman of the DSM-IV task... Read more

  Posted on 22 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Building Artificial Intelligence That Can Build Artificial Intelligence

  This gets scarier and scarier. Clips from an article by Cade Metz: ...perhaps a nightmare for highly skilled computer programmers: artificially intelligent... Read more

  Posted on 21 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Buddhism is More Western Than You Think.

  Robert Wright does a review of Adam Gopnik’s review (in the New Yorker) of Wright’s book “Why Buddhism Is True.” The whole piece is very clearly written and... Read more

  Posted on 20 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Emotional Intelligence of One- to Four-year-olds

  Interesting work from Wu et al. showing young children connect diverse positive emotional vocalizations to their probable causes, showing more sophisticated... Read more

  Posted on 17 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• America is Facing an Epistemic Crisis

  The Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" is certainly taking its toll on all of us who don't hide from the current news. Read more

  Posted on 16 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Improving Brain Function by Shocking It.

  This post points to three recent articles on non-invasive electrical brain stimulation of various types that enhance brain brain function. Krause et al. Read more

  Posted on 15 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Linguistic Metaphor Scaffolds Reasoning

  

  Continuing the line of inquiry pioneered by Lakoff and Johnson's 1980 book, "Metaphors We Live by", Thibodeau et al. provide further examples of how the use of... Read more

  Posted on 14 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Arousal Versus Relaxation in Meditative Practices.

  I am grateful to Robert Ruhloff for his comment on MindBlog's Oct. 25th post on Mindfulness, in which he pointed to a reference whose abstract I would like to... Read more

  Posted on 13 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Self as Object: Trends in Self Research

  The current issue of Trends in Neurosciences has a nice open source article reviewing different aspects of assessing what our 'self' is, considering 'self as... Read more

  Posted on 10 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• For Your Brain's Sake, Keep Moving.

  Gretchen Reynolds points to work by van Praag and collaborators showing that a week of activity rather than inactivity (in adult male rats) increases both the... Read more

  Posted on 09 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE