Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2685 )

• Monday Morning Schubert

  

  On Sunday Feb. 19 I gave a recital dedicated to the memory of David Goldberger, who I had performed with in several four hands recitals several years ago. Read more

  Posted on 27 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Vitamin B3 (Niacin) Protects from Glaucoma

  A number of anti-aging elixirs contain vitamin B3, or niacin, which is a precursor of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+), a key molecule in mitochondrial... Read more

  Posted on 24 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Scientific Curiosity Counters Politically Motivated Reasoning.

  Jasny points to work by Kahan et al. (open source) showing that science curiosity (of the sort shown by MindBlog readers!) promotes open-minded engagement with... Read more

  Posted on 23 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Will the “Anthropocene Era” Concept Slow Or Accelerate Human Impact on Our...

  Wesley Yang does a nice piece in the NYTimes Magazine, which notes that the concept of an anthropocene era, as a new stage of the geological time scale leaving... Read more

  Posted on 22 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Decision-making: Judges' Decisions Not So Legal

  An article by Spamann and Klöhn in The Journal of Legal Studies presenting an experiment with real judges showing that justice is less blind and less... Read more

  Posted on 21 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Musical Evolution in the Lab Exhibits Rhythmic Universals

  Ravignani et al. have managed to grow the rhythmic universals of human music in the laboratory, suggesting that they arise from human cognitive and biological... Read more

  Posted on 20 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Purpose of Sleep? To Forget.

  

  In two recent Science papers de Vivo et al. and Diering et al. probe the nightlife of the synapses that control the signalling between cells in our brain. Read more

  Posted on 17 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Hacking the Brain to Overcome Fear

  Schiller does a brief review of work by Koizumi et al., which points to a method for reducing defensive responses without consciously confronting the threatenin... Read more

  Posted on 16 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Gender Stereotypes Emerge Early.

  Bian et al. (open source) find that children at age five do not consider boys and girls different with respect to being 'really, really smart' - the childhood... Read more

  Posted on 15 February 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 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