Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Questioning the Universality of a Facial Emotional Expression.

  

  Crivelli et al. question the universality of at least one facial expression that has been thought to be the same across all cultures. Read more

  Posted on 31 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Lifespan Adversity and Later Adulthood Telomere Length.

  From Puterman et al. (Note...telomeres are protective caps of tandem repeats of nucleotides at the end of DNA strands, whose shortening is involved in cellular... Read more

  Posted on 28 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• More Evidence on Exercise Delaying Later Life Dementia

  Suo et al. examine changes in brain anatomy that occur during exercise, the only known antidote to later life dementia. They compare brain changes after 6 month... Read more

  Posted on 27 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Men Are More Friendly After Conflict Than Women.

  Interesting stuff from Benenson and Wrangham, whose findings suggest the deep evolutionary history of male bonding. Men affiliate more after one-on-one conflict... Read more

  Posted on 26 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Issues Or Identity? Cognitive Foundations of Voter Choice.

  

  This open source article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by Jenki and Huette is worth a look. I pass on the summary and one figure. Voter choice is one of the... Read more

  Posted on 25 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Kind of Exercise is Best for the Brain?

  Reynolds points to work by Nokia et al. asking what kind of exercise is most effective in stimulating the generation of new brain cells in the hippocampus,... Read more

  Posted on 24 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Most Effective Learning?... Sleep Between Two Practice Sessions

  From Mazza et al.: Both repeated practice and sleep improve long-term retention of information. The assumed common mechanism underlying these effects is memory... Read more

  Posted on 21 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• You're Gonna Die....

  

  I live in Fort Lauderdale, an epicenter of life extension companies peddling life extending elixirs. I've tried a few of them, and reported on my experiences... Read more

  Posted on 20 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Testosterone in Men is Associated with Status Enhancing Behaviors.

  Seeing this piece by Dreher et al. makes me wonder what Donald Trump's testosterone levels are.... Significance Although in several species of bird and animal,... Read more

  Posted on 19 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Brain Basis of Numerical Thinking is Different in Congenitally Blind People.

  Kanjlia et al. show that the absence of visual experience modifies the neural basis of numerical thinking. Brain areas recruited for numerical cognition expand... Read more

  Posted on 18 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 3-year Olds Infer Social Norms from Single Actions.

  Work from Schmidt et al. that is in the same vein as the previous MindBlog post: Human social life depends heavily on social norms that prescribe and proscribe... Read more

  Posted on 17 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Most Simple Sensory Decisions Show Confirmation Bias.

  Abrahamyan et al. do some fascinating experiments to show that our existing history of making choices, regardless of whether the choices are good or bad ones, i... Read more

  Posted on 14 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Decline of Self, Intimacy, and Friendships

  David Brooks' searing Op-Ed piece is worth a slow read. Some clips: ...In 1985, 10 percent of Americans said they had no one to fully confide in, but by the... Read more

  Posted on 13 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• When Fairness Matters Less Than We Expect.

  A fascinating piece of work from Cooney, Gilbert, and Wilson, from which I pass on the abstract and discussion: Abstract Do those who allocate resources know ho... Read more

  Posted on 12 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Do "Brain-Training" Programs Work? - the Latest Installment of the Debate

  Daniel Simons (Psychology Dept., Univ. of Illinois) has organized a collaboration that has examined essentially all of the relevant published experiments on... Read more

  Posted on 11 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Some Brain Benefits of Exercise Evaporate After a Short Rest.

  Gretchen Reynolds points to a study by kinesiologists at the Univ. of Maryland that probed what happens when very active and fit people stop exercising for... Read more

  Posted on 10 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Way to Change Adult Behaviors - Debiasing Decisions.

  Hambrick and Burgoyne do a piece on the difference between rationality and intelligence. Starting from Kahneman and Tversky's work in the early 1970's, countles... Read more

  Posted on 07 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog, Hurricane Matthew, and a Personal Note

  

  I have a few MindBlog posts in a queue to be automatically posted by Blogger, but want to mention that there might be a hiatus in posts caused by the fact that... Read more

  Posted on 06 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Way to Change Adolescent Behaviors?

  Bryan et al. present an interesting strategy for the difficult task of changing adolescent behaviors: Significance Behavioral science has rarely offered... Read more

  Posted on 06 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Avalanche of Distrust

  I keep returning to an Op-Ed piece by David Brooks, with the title of this post, in my queue of articles that are candidates for mention. Read more

  Posted on 05 October 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE