Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2661 )

• Acetaminophen - Over the Counter Relief from Both Pain and Emotions...

  I've sometimes wondered why I feel a bit flat (anhedonic) after taking acetaminophen (Tylenol). Durso et al. show that it blunts sensitivity to both negative an... Read more

  Posted on 24 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How is Creativity Helped by Being Just a Little Bit Crazy?

  Park et al. examine individuals with schizotypal personality disorder, which is characterized by need for social isolation, anxiety in social situations, odd... Read more

  Posted on 23 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A New Class of Anti-aging Drugs That Selectively Kill Senescent Cells.

  From Brian Ray in the Editor's Choice section of the June 5 issue of Science, another approach to life-extension drugs (and, to possibly curb your enthusiasm... Read more

  Posted on 22 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Ocytocin Reverses Amphetamine-induced Deficits in Social Bonding.

  As a followup to yesterday's post on a positive effects of amphetamine on the cognition of aging adults, I thought it would be interesting to point out a dark... Read more

  Posted on 19 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Bit of Amphetamine Turns Older Brains into Younger Brains.

  

  Fascinating. Garrett et al. show that raising dopamine levels with amphetamine (sold as the prescription drug Adderall, for ADHD), increases the brain wave... Read more

  Posted on 18 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Areas That Place Us in the Past, Present and Future.

  Here is an interesting bit of work from Kurczek et al. showing that thinking about the past and future requires activation of the hippocampus in the medial... Read more

  Posted on 17 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime.

  Yet another study, from Shaw and Porter, demonstrating how flawed our memory systems can be. This sort of experiment explains in part the continuing parade of... Read more

  Posted on 17 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Markers of Psychopathy.

  Philippi et al. analyze 142 adult male prison inmates, and offer a detailed analysis showing that psychopathy can be correlated with altered connectivity in... Read more

  Posted on 16 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Sign Language as a Window on Universals in Linguistic Representation of Events.

  From Strickland et al., I've learned a new word - telicity: According to a theoretical tradition dating back to Aristotle, verbs can be classified into two broa... Read more

  Posted on 15 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Oxytocin Makes Formidable Men More Likeable.

  An interesting tidbit from Chen et al.: Physical size and strength are associated with dominance and threat. The current study tested (i) whether men’s... Read more

  Posted on 12 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Serotonin Deficiency Correlates with Stress Vulnerability.

  From Sachs et al., a statement of significance, followed by a more detailed abstract: Significance The biological factors that determine whether an individual... Read more

  Posted on 11 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Urge to Instruct.

  I thought I would pass on this humorous piece by Peter Funt on his review of YouTube videos on how to break in a new baseball glove. Read more

  Posted on 10 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The "Good Life"

  The previous post noting recent work by Dacher Keltner and collaborators prompted me to have another look at the website of "The Greater Good Science Center"... Read more

  Posted on 09 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Do We Experience Awe?

  Awe, like reverence, is a pro-social emotion that subordinates individual self interest to a larger whole. Dacher Keltner and Paul Piff, in their NYTimes piece... Read more

  Posted on 08 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Lack of Exercise Disrupts Body’s Rhythms.

  Natural daily rhythms in spontaneous movement patterns in both humans and mice show scale invariance, i.e., movement patterns repeat over time scales of... Read more

  Posted on 05 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• It’s Not a Stream of Consciousness, Its a Rhythm.

  In the NYTimes Gray Matter series Gregory Hickok gives an exegesis on the implications of his Psychological Science paper "The Rhythm of Perception. Read more

  Posted on 04 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Humans Need Not Apply.

  Check out this chilling video on the increasing obsolescence of humans, which was referenced in a recent meeting of the Chaos and Complexity Seminar group I... Read more

  Posted on 03 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How We Fashion Meaning and Purpose.

  This is a brief post about some material I thought I might get to cohere, maybe something along the lines of purpose as an evolved means of generating order,... Read more

  Posted on 02 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Sleep Stabilizes, but Does Not Enhance, Motor Performance Training.

  From Nettersheim et al., a result challenging the prominent model that sleep enhances the performance of a newly learned skill (which is my experience in... Read more

  Posted on 01 June 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cultural Differences, Emotional Expressivity, and Smiles

  Rychlowska et al. analyze cultural display rules from 32 countries to reveal that the extent to which a country’s present-day population descends from numerous... Read more

  Posted on 29 May 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE