Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• MindBlog is Moving to Austin. Texas

  

  A personal note...the picture is of a crane moving my Steinway B out of our second floor condo in Fort Lauderdale. It's been a good run. Read more

  Posted on 26 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Reading What the Mind Thinks from How the Eye Sees.

  Expressive eye widening (as in fear) and eye narrowing (as in disgust) are associated with opposing optical consequences and serve opposing perceptual functions. Read more

  Posted on 25 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brooks on "The Crisis of Western Civilization"

  A brief screed by David Brooks, worth a read, notes the decline of a progressive Western civilization narrative that “that people, at least in Europe and North... Read more

  Posted on 24 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A.I. Better at Predicting Heart Attacks, Learns Implicit Racial and Gender Bias.

  Lohr notes a study that suggest we need to develop and "A.I. index" analogous to the Consumer Price Index, to track the pace and spread of artificial... Read more

  Posted on 21 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Study Suggests Social Media Are Not Contributing to Political Polarization.

  Bromwich does an interesting piece on increasing political polarization in the US. The number of the 435 house districts in the country competitive for both... Read more

  Posted on 20 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How to Feel Good - and How Feeling Good Can Be Bad for You.

  In case you feel like another click,  I pass on these two self-helpy feel-good or happiness bits, in the common list form ... First, a bit from Scelfo noting a... Read more

  Posted on 19 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Scratching is Contagious.

  The precis from Science Magazine, followed by the abstract: Observing someone else scratching themselves can make you want to do so. This contagious itching... Read more

  Posted on 18 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is "The Stack" the Way to Understand Everything?

  When the Apple II computer arrived in 1977, I eagerly took its BASIC language tutorials and began writing simple programs to work with my laboratory’s data. Read more

  Posted on 17 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Anterior Temporal Lobe and the Representation of Knowledge About People

  Anzellotti frames work by Wang et al.: Patients with semantic dementia (SD), a neurodegenerative disease affecting the anterior temporal lobes (ATL), present... Read more

  Posted on 14 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Lying is a Feature, Not a Bug, of Trump’s Presidency.

  PolitiFact rates half of Trump’s disputed public statements to be completely false. Adam Smith points out that Trump is telling… “blue” lies—a psychologist’s... Read more

  Posted on 13 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Exercise Calms Anxiety.

  Another mouse story, as in the previous post, hopefully applicable to us humans. Gretchen Reynolds points to work of Gould and colleagues at Princeton showing... Read more

  Posted on 12 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Calming Effect of Breathing.

  Sheikhbahaei1 and Smith do a Perspective article in Science on the work of Yackle et al. in the same issue. The first bit of their perspective, followed by the... Read more

  Posted on 11 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Correlates of Information Virality

  Scholz et al. show that activity in brain areas associated with value, self and social cognition correlates with internet sharing of articles, reflecting how... Read more

  Posted on 10 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Three Sources of Cancer - the Importance of “bad Luck”

  Tomasetti and Vogelstein raised a storm by claiming several years ago that 65% of the risk of certain cancers is not due to inheritance or environmental factors... Read more

  Posted on 07 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How "you" Makes Meaning.

  Orvell et al. do some experiments on our use of the generic “you” rather than the first-person pronoun “I.” “You” is one of the most common words in the... Read more

  Posted on 06 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Religiosity and Social Support

  I found this article by Eleanor Power to be an interesting read. Here is her abstract:. In recent years, scientists based in a variety of disciplines have... Read more

  Posted on 05 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Wiser Than Than the Crowd.

  In a summary in Nature Human Behavior, Kousta points to work by Prelec et al. The summary: The notion that the average judgment of a large group is more accurat... Read more

  Posted on 04 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Several Takes on Extending Our Lives.

  In spite of the fact that I am unsympathetic to efforts to extend our lifespan, I want to pass on several recent articles on the effort. Read more

  Posted on 03 April 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Preverbal Foundations of Human Fairness

  I want to point to two articles in the second issue of Nature Human Behavior. One is a review by McAuliffe et al.: New behavioural and neuroscientific evidence... Read more

  Posted on 31 March 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Best Exercise for Aging Muscles

  I want to pass on the message from this Gretchen Reynolds article, that points to work by Robinson et al.. Their experiments were... .... Read more

  Posted on 30 March 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE