Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Our Nutrition Modulates Our Cognition.

  A fascinating study from Strang et al.: Food intake is essential for maintaining homeostasis, which is necessary for survival in all species. Read more

  Posted on 10 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Working Memory Isn’t Just in the Frontal Lobes.

  An inportant open access paper from Johnson et al.: The ability to represent and select information in working memory provides the neurobiological infrastructur... Read more

  Posted on 07 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cognitive Control as a Double-edged Sword.

  Amer et al. offer an implicit critique of the attention and resources dedicated to brain-training programs that aim to modify the cognitive performance of... Read more

  Posted on 06 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Describing Aging - Metastability in Senescence

  Naik et al. suggest a whole brain computational modeling approach to understand how our brains maintain a high level of cognitive ability even as their... Read more

  Posted on 05 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Human Fetus Engages Face Like Stimuli.

  Reid et al. are able to show that we prefer face-like stimuli even in utero: Highlights •The third trimester human fetus looks toward three dots configure... Read more

  Posted on 04 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Neural Measures Reveal Lower Social Conformity Among Non-religious Individuals.

  An interesting bit from Thiruchselvam et al.: Even in predominantly religious societies, there are substantial individual differences in religious commitment.... Read more

  Posted on 03 July 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Maybe Trump’s Behavior is Explained by a Simple Machine Learning (A.I.)...

  Burton offers an intriguing explanation for our inability to predict Donald Trump’s next move suggesting: ...that Trump doesn’t operate within conventional huma... Read more

  Posted on 30 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mechanism of Adult Brain Changes Caused by Early Life Stress.

  Peña et al., working with mice, demonstrate a mechanisms by which early life stress encodes lifelong susceptibility to stress by changing a reward region o... Read more

  Posted on 29 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Positive Trends Over Time in Personality Traits as Well as in Intelligence.

  Jokela et al. add an interesting dimension to numerous studies that have shown a steady increase in people's intelligence over the past 100 years, concluding... Read more

  Posted on 28 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• It's Complicated....more on Sapolsky's New Book.

  In a recent MindBlog post I urged you to read Robert Sapolsky’s new book, "Behave - The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Read more

  Posted on 27 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why It is Impossible to Tune a Piano.

  

  Here is a 'random curious stuff' item, per the MindBlog description above.  I want to pass on this great explanation of why physics requires that piano notes... Read more

  Posted on 26 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Sorting out Complex Thoughts and Messy Emotions

  Here is a nice perky piece from Stephen Matheson, editor of Cell Reports, on the genetics of behavior, which I pass along in its entirety (references are in... Read more

  Posted on 23 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Dogs Can Know What You Know.

  Catela et al. offer evidence in dogs for theory of mind ability (recognizing that others have a different perspective, shown for humans, apes, and corvids). Read more

  Posted on 22 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Metabolic and Physical Decline That Occurs During Aging Promoted by a DNA...

  Damage to our DNA accumulates during our aging, and Park et al. show a link between this damage and the loss of metabolic function associated with physical... Read more

  Posted on 21 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Conclusion from One of My Lectures.

  While mulling over possible topics I might develop for a next lecture, I have looked back over previous efforts on dericbownds.net and found several bits of tex... Read more

  Posted on 20 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Some Outstanding Books on the Biology of Our Behaviors.

  If you are wanting to find a humorous, fascinating, engaging, authoritative account of why we humans behave the way we do, you should immediately buy a copy of... Read more

  Posted on 19 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Watching Our Brains Construct Linguistic Phrases

  From Nelson et al.: Significance According to most linguists, the syntactic structure of sentences involves a tree-like hierarchy of nested phrases, as in the... Read more

  Posted on 16 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain-to-Brain Symmetry Tracks Classroom Interactions.

  From Dikker et al.: Highlights •We report a real-world group EEG study, in a school, during normal class activities •EEG was recorded from 12... Read more

  Posted on 15 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Mental Models Predict Emotion Transitions.

  Thornton and Tamir (open source) demonstrate that we use mental models to allow us to predict, during a currently perceived emotion in another person, the next... Read more

  Posted on 14 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Chemical Link Between Early Life Stress and Adult Schizophrenia

  A massive collaboration finds that schizophrenia-like symptoms induced by early life stress in mice correlates with expression of a DNA altering enzyme. Read more

  Posted on 13 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE