Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2628 )

• The Immensity of the Vacated Present.

  The title of this post is a phrase from a recent essay by Vivian Gornick, "The cost of daydreaming," describing an experience that very much resonates with my... Read more

  Posted on 11 May 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Yet Another Self Therapy Electrical Widget.

  I've done a number of posts on transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Entering 'transcranial' in MindBlog's search box takes you to posts on tDCS... Read more

  Posted on 08 May 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Observing Brain Correlates of Social Interactions.

  

  Bilek et al. look at coordinated brain activity during social interactions between two people in a joint attention paradigm, using a hyperscanning procedure in... Read more

  Posted on 07 May 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Early Environment and Stress Systems in Children.

  Most of the detailed work on the long term effects of adverse early life environment on stress response systems has been done with rodent models. McLaughlin et... Read more

  Posted on 07 May 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cognitive Training Enhances Intrinsic Brain Connectivity in Childhood.

  A fascinating open access article from Astle et al., who found changes in brain connectivity in 8-11 year old children who completed 20 sessions of... Read more

  Posted on 06 May 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Ideology Distorts Perception of Social Mobility in the U.S.

  I find it interesting that I share the same misperception of social mobility changes that are noted in this piece of work by Chambers et al.: The ability to mov... Read more

  Posted on 05 May 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Economic Origins of Ultrasociality

  Gowdy and Krall, in a manuscript under review by Behavioral and Brain Sciences, argue that the transition to agriculture in ants, termites, and our humans... Read more

  Posted on 04 May 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Explaining the Increase in Individualism in the U.S. Over the Past 150 Years.

  Grossman and Varnum quantify shifts in eight cultural-level correlates of individualism reflected in the domains of cultural products (individualist and... Read more

  Posted on 01 May 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Most Clever Crow Yet....

  MindBlog has done posts on a raven making a tool, an urban crow with street smarts, and now I pass on a video that a friend alerted me to, showing a crow solvin... Read more

  Posted on 30 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Effortless Awareness: Linking Subjective Experience with Brain Activity During...

  Garrison and collaborators, whose work I have referenced in a previous post and also at the end of my "Upstairs/Downstairs" web lecture, give a further account... Read more

  Posted on 29 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Improving Vision in Older Adults.

  I'm now a Fort Lauderdale, Florida resident (except for 5 months of spring and summer in Madison WI.), and have several friends 85 and older still still... Read more

  Posted on 28 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Emotion is a Component of the Earliest Stages of Perception.

  

  Emotions and perceptions are generally assumed to be separate and parallel realms of the mind. Topolinski et al. show to the contrary that affect is a genuine... Read more

  Posted on 27 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Subliminal Learning Can Nudge Future Control Decisions.

  A dichotomy is proposed by most dual-system approaches to cognition (as, for example, in Kahneman's 2011 book "Thinking, fast and slow") in which processes are... Read more

  Posted on 24 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mind Wandering and Mental Autonomy.

  I'm on my third reading of a dense open access paper by Thomas Metzinger in Frontiers in Psychology titled "The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking a... Read more

  Posted on 23 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Evolution of Gender Effects on Empathy.

  

  Christov-Moore et al. offer a review making the point that differences in the capacity for empathy between males and females have deep evolutionary and... Read more

  Posted on 22 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Observing Leadership Emergence Through Interpersonal Brain Synchronization.

  Interesting work from Jiang et al., who show that show that interpersonal neural synchronization is significantly higher between leaders and followers than... Read more

  Posted on 21 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Glycogen Recovery After Exercise: Junk Food as Good as Sport Supplements

  I note this article because one of its authors, Chuck Dumke, now at the University of Montana, worked in my vision research laboratory at the University of... Read more

  Posted on 20 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Your Friends Know How Long You Will Live.

  An interesting study from Jackson et al. analyzing data from an east coast cohort of 600 people observed in the 1930s through 2013: Although self-rated... Read more

  Posted on 17 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Positive and Negative Emotions - Valence is Not Value

  Having done several recent posts on positive emotions, and given the continuing rise of the "Be Happy" industry with its Be Happy Apps, I thought it... Read more

  Posted on 16 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Happens in Vagus - Compassion, Positive Emotion, Vagal Tone, and Respirator...

  The 10th cranial nerve, the vagus nerve, is distinctive to mammals and supports social engagement and nurturing behaviors as well as feeding, digesting, resting... Read more

  Posted on 15 April 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE