Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• 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

• Brain Systems Specialized for Knowing Our Place in the Pecking Order

  From Kurnaran et al.: Highlights •Social hierarchy learning is accounted for by a Bayesian inference scheme •Amygdala and hippocampus support... Read more

  Posted on 29 March 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Termite Castles, Human Minds, and Daniel Dennett.

  After reading through Rothman’s New Yorker article on Daniel Dennett, I downloaded Dennett’s latest book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” to check out his... Read more

  Posted on 28 March 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Ownership of an Artificial Limb Induced by Electrical Brain Stimulation

  From Collins et al.: Significance Creating a prosthetic device that feels like one’s own limb is a major challenge in applied neuroscience. Read more

  Posted on 27 March 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Predicting the Knowledge–recklessness Distinction in the Human Brain

  Important work from Vilares et al. - in an open source paper in which fMRI results are shown in a series of figures - showing that brain imaging can determine,... Read more

  Posted on 24 March 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Warping Reality in the Era of Trump - Some Interesting Essays

  I try to not pay attention, feel worn down by the continual bombardment of alternative realities presented by today's media, but have read and enjoyed the... Read more

  Posted on 23 March 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is the Body the Missing Link for Truly Intelligent Machines?

  Medlock comments on efforts to achieve human-like artificial intelligence (AI) while bypassing the messy flesh that characterizes organic life. A clip from the... Read more

  Posted on 22 March 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What is Really Going on in the White House?

  A good friend sent me this speculation, and I asked him if I could pass it on. He said yes, as long as he remained anonymous.... Ivanka Trump now has an office... Read more

  Posted on 21 March 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE