Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Downsides of Diversity.

  I want to thank the anonymous commentator on the " Diversity makes you brighter" post, who sent links to interesting articles by Jonas and by Dinesena and... Read more

  Posted on 16 May 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Two Ways to Be Satisfied.

  Anna North points to an article by Helzer and Jayawickreme that examines two different control strategies for obtaining short and long term life satisfaction,... Read more

  Posted on 13 May 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Diversity Makes You Brighter.

  Providing some data relevant to debates over affirmative action, Levine et al. show that ethnic diversity can increase intelligent behaviors. Misfits between... Read more

  Posted on 12 May 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Key to Political Persuasion

  I pass on clips from this interesting piece, that has been languishing in my queue of potential posts for some time, in which Willer and Feinberg give a more... Read more

  Posted on 09 May 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Perception of Our Body Shape is Very Malleable - Making Your Finger Feel...

  

  Here is a neat trick. It works! (I tried it). Ekroll et al. show that illusory visual completion of an object's invisible backside can make you finger feel... Read more

  Posted on 06 May 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Happens If We All Live to 100?

  I want to mention an interesting article by Easterbrook that has been languishing in my queue of potential posts for more than a year. It notes numerous... Read more

  Posted on 05 May 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Semantic Maps in Our Brains - and Some Interactive Graphics

  

  Huth et al. have performed functional MRI on subjects listening to hours of narrative stories to find semantic domains that seem to be consistent across... Read more

  Posted on 04 May 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Video Games for Neuro-Cognitive Optimization

  

  Continuing the MindBlog thread on brain games (cf. here), I pass on the introduction to a brief review by Mishra, Anguera, and Gazzaley on designing the next... Read more

  Posted on 03 May 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Embodied Prediction - Perception and Mind Turned Upside Down

  Andy Clark does a fascinating discussion and analysis of predictive processing, which turns the traditional picture of perception on its head. The embodied... Read more

  Posted on 02 May 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Privileged Fifth.

  I tweeted this well researched OpEd piece by Thomas Edsall the first time I read it, and after my third reading, want to urge you to read it. I pass on two ... Read more

  Posted on 29 April 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Sleep Deprivation, Brain Structure, and Learning

  Saletin et al. find that individual differences in the anatomy of the human hippocampus explain many of the differences in learning impairment after sleep... Read more

  Posted on 28 April 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Grandiose Narcissism and the U.S. Presidency

  Many of us are scratching our heads about what a Trump presidency might be like, particularly in regard to his outstanding personality trait: grandiose... Read more

  Posted on 27 April 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Essential Role of Default Mode Network in Higher Cognitive Processing.

  

  The respective roles of attentional and default mode networks in our brains has been the subject of numerous MindBlog posts (enter 'default mode' in the search... Read more

  Posted on 25 April 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Metaphorical Conflict Shapes Social Perception When Spatial and Ideological...

  Kleiman et al. do some intriguing experiments. I give you their abstract first, which doesn't actually say how they did the experiments, and then give you some... Read more

  Posted on 20 April 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Political Polarization and Prejudice.

  Yesterday's post dealt with softening prejudicial attitudes towards transgender people. This is relevant to prejudice rising from the right versus left politica... Read more

  Posted on 19 April 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How to Change Prejudice...for Real This Time

  John Bohannon summarizes the interesting story of two researchers, who after finding that a study on reversing homophobia was based on fake data, went ahead to... Read more

  Posted on 18 April 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Correlates of How the Risk Taking of Others Influences Our Own Risk Taking

  From Suzuki et al., another upstairs/downstairs story. Risk is represented in the caudate nucleus (downstairs), the risk activity of others is represented in th... Read more

  Posted on 15 April 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Evolutionary Origins of Smiles, Laughter, and Tears.

  Graziano suggests that our smile originated in the defensive reaction of monkeys to other monkeys moving into their personal space. He then proceeds to make... Read more

  Posted on 12 April 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Another List - "Keys to Happiness"

  The New York Times has done a simple list of pointers to basic articles and research on well being. I'm passing on a few of the items from a condensed version... Read more

  Posted on 11 April 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Succinct List of Some of Our Common Psychological Errors.

  I want to point to Belsky's article on why we think we are better decision makers under uncertainty than we really are. He summarizes several common... Read more

  Posted on 08 April 2016 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE