Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Can We Really Change Our Aging?

  I thought I would point MindBlog readers to a brief talk I gave, "Can we really change our aging?," at the Nov. 1, 2015 meeting of the Fort Lauderdale Prime... Read more

  Posted on 09 November 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Critical Period for Visual Pathway Formation? - Another Dogma Bites the Dust.

  India, which may have the largest number of blind children in the world, with estimates ranging from 360,000 to nearly 1.2 million, is providing a vast... Read more

  Posted on 06 November 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Biomarker for Early Detection of Dementia

  Kunz et al. show that in an at-risk group for developing Alzheimer's different brain signals are detected many decades before onset of the disease. Individuals... Read more

  Posted on 05 November 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Lifting Weights and the Brain.

  

  Reynolds points to a study suggesting that light weight training slows down the shrinkage and tattering of our brain's white matter (nerve tracts) that... Read more

  Posted on 04 November 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Pickings on 'the Most Important Things'

  I enjoy the weekly email sent out by Maria Popova's Brain Pickings website. I find it a bit overwhelming (and high on the estrogens), and so sample only a few o... Read more

  Posted on 03 November 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Lab Experiment: Visibility of Wealth Increases Wealth Inequality

  Nishi et al. do a fascinating laboratory experiment conducted online showing that when people can see wealth inequality in their social network, this propels... Read more

  Posted on 02 November 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• More Exercise Correlates with Younger Body Cells.

  Reynolds points to work by Loprinzi et al. showing physicaly active people have longer telomeres at the end of their chromosomes' DNA strands than sedentary... Read more

  Posted on 30 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Much Sleep Do We Really Need?

  A study by Yetish et al. casts fascinating light on the widespread idea that a large fraction of us in modern industrial societies are sleep-deprived, going to... Read more

  Posted on 28 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Chilling Down Our Religiousity and Intolerance with Some Magnets?

  A group of collaborators has used transcranial magnetic stimulation to dial down activity in the area of the posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC)that evaluate... Read more

  Posted on 27 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Drugs Or Therapy for Depression?

  I want to pass on a few clips from a piece by Friedman, summarizing work by Mayberg and collaborators at Emory University, who looked for brain activity that... Read more

  Posted on 22 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Hoopla Over a Bit of Rat Brain…a Complete Brain Simulation?

  A vastly expensive and heavily marketed international collaborative "Blue Brain Project (BBP)" has now reported its first digital reconstruction of a slice of... Read more

  Posted on 21 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Meditation Madness

  Adam Grant does a NYTimes Op-Ed piece that mirrors some of my own sentiments about the current meditation craze. There would seem to be almost nothing that... Read more

  Posted on 20 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Brain Switch That Can Make the Familiar Seem New?

  We all face the issue how to refresh and renew our energy and perspective after our brains have adapted, habituated, or densensitized to an ongoing interest or... Read more

  Posted on 19 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Great Apes Can Look Ahead in Time

  Yet another supposed distinction between human and animal minds has bit the dust. The prevailing dogma (expressed in my talk " The Beast Within") has been that... Read more

  Posted on 16 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Rhodopsin Curing Blindness?

  

  In a previous life (1962-1998) my laboratory studied how the rhodopsin visual pigment in our eyes changes light into a nerve signal. Thus it excites me when I... Read more

  Posted on 15 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Musical Expertise Changes the Brain's Functional Connectivity During...

  

  Music notation reading encapsulates auditory, visual, and motor information in a highly organized manner and therefore provides a useful model for studying... Read more

  Posted on 13 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Gee Whiz! Moment. Activating Neurons with Ultrasound.

  Optogenetics, making nerve cells sensitive to light by a genetic manipulation, has the limitation that light doesn't penetrate living tissue very well, and so... Read more

  Posted on 09 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Methionine, an Amino Acid, Enhances Recovery from Cocaine Addiction.

  Wright et al. use a mouse model to show that the common amino acid methionine - which can serve as a methyl group donor for the DNA methylation that regulates... Read more

  Posted on 07 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Memory Aging and Brain Maintenance

  An open access article by Nyberg et al. notes The association of intact memory functioning in old age with maintenance and preservation of a functionally young... Read more

  Posted on 06 October 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Does Exercise Change Your Brain?

  After yesterday's post suggesting no effects of common dietary supplements on cognitive changes with aging, I thought I would note work regarding exercise and... Read more

  Posted on 30 September 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE