Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• 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

• Where Our Brains Perceive Social Interactions.

  From Isik et al.: Significance Humans spend a large percentage of their time perceiving the appearance, actions, and intentions of others, and extensive previou... Read more

  Posted on 08 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Modern Flimflam Men? - The Flow Genome Project

  Cleaning up my queue of articles on which a MindBlog post might be based, I came across this piece by Casey Schwartz titled “How to Hack your Brain (for... Read more

  Posted on 07 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Focus on Present Predicts Enhanced Life Satisfaction but Not Happiness

  Another study by Felsman et al., in the vein of the work described in MindBlog's Oct. 25 post. That study claimed a correlation between present-moment... Read more

  Posted on 06 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cognitive Reflection in Men Impaired by Single Testosterone Dose

  An interesting bit from Nave et al.: In nonhumans, the sex steroid testosterone regulates reproductive behaviors such as fighting between males and mating. Read more

  Posted on 03 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Split Brain Revisited - a New Perspective

  I pass on the suggestion by Pinto et al. that classical experiments on subjects whose corpus callosum communicating between the two hemispheres has been severed... Read more

  Posted on 02 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Gut Reasons to Brush Your Teeth.

  Cao does a summary and discussion of work by Atarashi et al. : Numerous microorganisms, including bacteria, colonize the intestine where they play important... Read more

  Posted on 01 November 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Smiles of Reward, Affiliation, and Dominance.

  From Martin et al.: Abstract The human smile is highly variable in both its form and the social contexts in which it is displayed. Read more

  Posted on 31 October 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE