Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• Brain and Body Imaging of the Emotional Power of Poetry.

  By now a body of work has grown on how peak musical experiences engage the reward systems of our brains, with concomitant changes such as tingling and goosebump... Read more

  Posted on 12 October 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog Has Moved to Austin Texas.

  

  A personal note.  Len and I have just moved back into the family house in Austin Texas where I grew up, through high school. My son and his family recently move... Read more

  Posted on 11 October 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Price Modulates the Effectiveness of Your Pain Medication!

  Fascinating observations from Tinnermann et al. A Science magazine summary, followed by the article abstract: Price modulates early pain processing Patients in... Read more

  Posted on 10 October 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Transcending Tribalism - Crafting a New Vision for America?

  I want to point to, and comment on, two recent pieces by David Brooks. In the first, he argues that “the main enemy is not aliens; it’s division — between rich... Read more

  Posted on 09 October 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog's Book Abstracts.

  I’ve been working on abstracting a book I’ve mentioned recently, Sapolsky’s “Behave - The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst,” hoping to present the basic... Read more

  Posted on 06 October 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Curtailing Proactive Policing Can Reduce Major Crime.

  Weisburd points to work by Sullivan and O’Keeffe, yielding counter-intuitive results, that "took advantage of a natural experiment in New York City that resulte... Read more

  Posted on 05 October 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Circuits That Modulate Sociability.

  

  The social bonding neuropeptide oxytocin can be traced over 500 million years, with analogous peptides found in birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians, and some... Read more

  Posted on 04 October 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• This Year's Ig Nobel Prizes.

  

  If you want a few chuckles, have a look at this link. The prize winning work this year shows that cats can be simultaneously solid and liquid because of their... Read more

  Posted on 02 October 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Does It Matter Whether We Believe in Free Will Or Not?

  From Genschow et al.: Significance The question whether free will exists or not has been a matter of debate in philosophy for centuries. Recently, researchers... Read more

  Posted on 29 September 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Greater Internet Use Does Not Correlate with Faster Growth of Political...

  Continuing a topic from MindBlog's April 20 post...Most writing on the increase in political polarization over the past decades argues that it is facilitated... Read more

  Posted on 28 September 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• “No Problem” Vs “you’re Welcome”

  My daughter pointed me to this piece by Gretchen McCulloch, which gives me some insight into what I have considered the annoying habit of younger people to... Read more

  Posted on 27 September 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Science of Emotion - Now at Least 27 Categories of Emotional States.

  So...I guess we knew emotions are complicated. There has been intense debate on how to describe them in semantic and geometric dimensions such as valence and... Read more

  Posted on 26 September 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Will You Be Above Or Below “the API” in the Emerging Economy?

  An application programming interface (API) is a set of subroutine definitions, protocols, and tools that are building blocks for application software... Read more

  Posted on 25 September 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Color Naming Across Languages Reflects Color Use

  Gibson et al. do a study showing that warm colors are communicated more efficiently than cool colors, and that this cross-linguistic pattern reflects the color... Read more

  Posted on 22 September 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Separate Prefrontal Areas Code Desirability Versus Availability.

  When we make a decision, we calculate its “expected value,” by multiplying the value of something (how much we want or need it) with the probability that we... Read more

  Posted on 21 September 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How We See What We Expect to See.

  Kok et al. show that expectations can induce the preactivation of stimulus templates in our brain that resemble the neural signals actually generated when the... Read more

  Posted on 20 September 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Computer Design Cues Taken from Human Brains

  Metz does an interesting article on the waning of do-it-all chips, central processing units of the sort that are running my MacBook Air as I type this, in... Read more

  Posted on 19 September 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• It’s All About Tribes - Not Ideas, Morals, Or Principles.

  

  Thomas Edsall does another excellent piece on what is happening in our politics. I suggest you read it...here are a few clips: Since the advent of Trump, ... Read more

  Posted on 18 September 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Intractability of Racial Discrimination

  Sobering findings from Quillian et al.: Significance Many scholars have argued that discrimination in American society has decreased over time, while others... Read more

  Posted on 15 September 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Neuroforecasting Crowd Funding Outcomes

  Genevsky et al. find that directly measuring brain activities in the nucleus accumbens of individuals while they decide whether to fund proposed projects... Read more

  Posted on 14 September 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE