Deric Bownds
These articles, from Deric's MindBlog at http://mindblog.dericbownds.net report new ideas and work on mind, brain, and behavior - as well as random curious stuff.
MY BLOGS
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Deric Bownds' MindBlog
http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/
This blog reports new ideas and work on mind, brain, and behavior - as well as random curious stuff.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 2496 )
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How Our Brains Make Meaning, with the Help of a Little LSD
Interesting work from Preller et al: Highlights •LSD-induced effects are blocked by the 5-HT2A receptor antagonist ketanserin •LSD increased the... Read more
Posted on 14 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
An Emotional Experience Can Enhance Future Memory Formation.
Tambini et al. show that neural effects of an emotional experience can persist, and bias how new and unrelated information is encoded and stored by our brains:... Read more
Posted on 13 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Kind Words in Language - Changes Over Time
John Carson does a nice precis of Iliev et al.: It is debated whether linguistic positivity bias (LPB) — the cross-cultural tendency to use more positive words... Read more
Posted on 10 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Mysterianism
Here is Nicholas Carr's statement of an argument that has always appealed to me, a concept that should be more widely know. Roughly: "I don't expect my cat to... Read more
Posted on 09 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Feel Good Fractals.
I want to point to this excerpt from Florence Williams' new book, "The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative," that appears on... Read more
Posted on 08 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Why Our Supermarket Tomatoes Are Sturdy and Flavorless.
Having dinked with tomato breeding and genetic manipulations to make our supermarket tomatoes sturdy, colorful, and tasteless, now geneticists have tried to... Read more
Posted on 07 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
MindBlog’s 11th Anniversary…some Statistics.
Today is MindBlog’s 11 anniversary. I let the 10th anniversary pass without noticing, so I want to briefly comment this year. Google analytics tells me that... Read more
Posted on 06 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Artificial Intelligence: Machines That Reason
Stavroula Kousta does a precis of work reported by Graves et al. of the Google DeepMind project: Complex reasoning is a hallmark of natural intelligence, as is... Read more
Posted on 03 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Origins of Happiness
A MindBlog reader pointed me to this presentation, at this year's Davos World Economic Forum, on the subject of what government actions (in a European context)... Read more
Posted on 02 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Are Human-specific Plastic Cortical Synaptic Connections What Makes Us Human?
I want to pass on an excellent primer (open source) on the plasticity of a specific synapse between pyramidal neurons and fast-spiking interneurons of the... Read more
Posted on 01 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
An Individual's Ultimate Economic Burden Can Be Forecast in Childhood
Important work from Caspi et al., who show that 20% of the population accounts for close to 80% of economic burden. This group can be predicted with high... Read more
Posted on 31 January 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Uniformity Illusion.
Otten et al. investigate a visual illusion in which the accurate and detailed vision in the center of our visual field, accomplished by the fovea, influences ou... Read more
Posted on 30 January 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Regression to the Mean - Why We Would All Be Better off If We Ignored Trump’s...
O’Donnell’s answer to the annual edge.org question "What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?": My candidate is an old, simple, and powerfu... Read more
Posted on 27 January 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Smartphone Reprogramming of Our Brains?
Nicolelis makes some good points as he adds to the genre of literature that predicts a diminution of our brain power caused by dependence on the latest... Read more
Posted on 26 January 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Gender and the Conflation of Equality and Sameness
I want to pass on some clips from a sane brief essay by Helena Cronin, author of "The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today. Read more
Posted on 25 January 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Knowing How Confidently We Know
Here is a fascinating piece of work from Miyamoto et al. showing that parallel stream of information in the brain regulate the confidence that a memory is... Read more
Posted on 24 January 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
How Our Evolutionary Psychology Elected Donald Trump.
While I feel that in principle our world might be best governed by a multinational meritocratic elite (of the sort that just met in Davos Switzerland) I can’t... Read more
Posted on 23 January 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Deepening of Our Cultural Echo Chambers.
Farhad Manjoo does a nice piece in the Tech and Society section of the NY Times, pointing out how much has changed since the 1970s, when TV programs like “All i... Read more
Posted on 20 January 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
A Fitness Downside to Statin Drugs?
Before passing on this article by Gretchen Reynolds and the work of Chung et al. that it points to, I'll start with a personal account of why it immediately... Read more
Posted on 18 January 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Research on Consequences of Low Socioeconomic Status Becoming a Small Industry.
It is becoming hard to keep up with research on biological and behavioral consequences of low socioeconomic status - one of MindBlog's subject threads since... Read more
Posted on 17 January 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE