• Admissions Requirements for Psychology Schools

    Updated: 2023-04-30 19:32:05
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  • Are we living in a simulated world?

    Updated: 2023-04-28 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , April 28, 2023 Are we living in a simulated world This post is the sixth installment of my passing on to both MindBlog readers and my future self my idiosyncratic selection of clips of text from O’Gieblyn’s book God , Human , Animal , Machine’ that I have found particularly interesting . Here are fragments of Chapter 8 from the fourth section of her book , nbsp titled Paradox . Bostrom , a prominent transhumanist , believes that humanity is in the process of becoming posthuman as we merge our bodies with technology . We are becoming superintelligence ourselves . His simulation hypothesis begins by imagining a future , many generations from

  • Networks and Emergentism

    Updated: 2023-04-24 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , April 24, 2023 Networks and Emergentism This post is the fourth installment of my passing on to both MindBlog readers and my future self my idiosyncratic selection of clips of text from O’Gieblyn’s book God , Human , Animal , Machine’ that I have found particularly interesting . Chapters 5 and 6 form the third section of her book , nbsp titled Network . From Chapter : 5 When it comes to biological systems like forests and swarms , emergent behavior that appears to be unified and intelligent can exist without a centralized control system like a brain . But the theory has also been applied to the brain itself , as a way to account for human

  • Flipping Classes and Fun With Play-Doh

    Updated: 2023-04-21 17:05:50
    My friends in the Facebook group “Teaching Resources for Biological Psychology and Neuroscience” have shared so many exciting resources, but my favorite was the Play-Doh neuron project. Because I’ve been teaching remotely for three (!!!) years now, I never had a chance to do this. Yes, I could have asked […]

  • The Illusion of the Self as Humans become Gods.

    Updated: 2023-04-19 05:00:00
    : . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , April 19, 2023 The Illusion of the Self as Humans become Gods . This post continues my passing on to both MindBlog readers and my future self my idiosyncratic selection of clips of text from O’Gieblyn’s book God , Human , Animal , Machine’ that I have found particularly interesting . nbsp This post deals with Chapter 2 from the first section of the book , Image . I’m discontinuing the experiment of including Chat GPT 4 condensations of the excerpts . Here are the : clips It turns out that computers are particularly adept at the tasks that we humans find most difficult : crunching equations , solving logical propositions , and other

  • Autism Prevalence: Reflections from a Mom

    Updated: 2023-04-14 16:55:07
    When Karla was little, I found that I had to educate my pediatricians about autism. They said they’d read about it in medical school, but it was so rare that they never expected to see a case. Services in the public school were non-existent, and given my responsibilities with a […]

  • Breath - Some basic facts and instructions

    Updated: 2023-04-14 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , April 14, 2023 Breath Some basic facts and instructions I’ve enjoyed reading through James Nestor’s book Breath The new science of a lost , art and I tried out some of the exercises he points to , such as Tummo , which increases breathing to deliver a brief shock therapy to the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems that regulate breathing , thus temporarily resetting to a more appropriate balance between the two . nbsp He describes numerous useful breathing therapies that have been discovered , forgotten , and then rediscovered over the past 3000 years by different cultural and religious traditions , and in the past 300 years by more

  • Our heartbeat shapes our perception of time (and a comparison of how ChatGPT and Google Bard condense an account of work showing this)...

    Updated: 2023-04-07 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , April 07, 2023 Our heartbeat shapes our perception of time and a comparison of how ChatGPT and Google Bard condense an account of work showing this Ellen Barry has done a review of work by Sadeghi et al as well as others , on how heart-brain interactions influence our perception of time . I asked ChatGPT to do a 200 word summary of her article of 795 words . It generated 237 words below to which I made a small addition . I feels like I'm using the language generating mental equivalent of a physical prosthesis . That is followed by Google Bard's response , very impressive . Microsoft's Bing was unable to deal with the task . A recent study

  • The fundamentals of empathy

    Updated: 2023-04-05 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , April 05, 2023 The fundamentals of empathy Akinrinade et al . show that the neuropeptide oxytocin is responsible for emotional fear contagion , and involves the same regions of the brain in zebrafish and in mammals , suggesting this most basal form of empathy could have evolved many , many millions of years ago . Emotional contagion is the most ancestral form of empathy . We tested to what extent the proximate mechanisms of emotional contagion are evolutionarily conserved by assessing the role of oxytocin , known to regulate empathic behaviors in mammals , in social fear contagion in zebrafish . Using oxytocin and oxytocin receptor

  • Can we fight cancer in ourselves with thoughts?

    Updated: 2023-04-03 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , April 03, 2023 Can we fight cancer in ourselves with thoughts David Linden , a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins Medical Schoo , has done an interesting piece on his own experience with a tumor in his heart , written 23 months after being told to expect to live 6 to 18 months after radiation and chemotherapy . The remnant tumor has become stable , and no metastases have developed . And so , at the age of 61, I find myself in the weird and liminal state of having a terminal illness but feeling fine and having no immediate threat to my health . Since my diagnosis , I have received a lot of unsolicited medical advice . Much of this

  • Aspartame and Anxiety

    Updated: 2023-03-31 18:47:32
    My younger self was known to consume rather alarming amounts of diet soda. A busy schedule of family and work was easier to manage if my caffeine intake was high. I would drink quite a bit of coffee in the morning, then switch to diet soda later in the day. […]

  • Humans are more than AI machines - OpenAI's chatGPT edits a MindBlog preliminary draft

    Updated: 2023-03-31 05:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , March 31, 2023 Humans are more than AI machines OpenAI's chatGPT edits a MindBlog preliminary draft I am feeling majorly freaked out now . I asked ChatGPT to improve one of the draft paragraphs that I mentioned in this past Tuesday's . post My request to ChatGPT Please make improvements to the following draft of a blog post : nbsp We humans are AI machines . As with the nerve networks of GPT-4, our developing neuronal connections in the embryo are reinforced by learning correlations that link , sensory and motor capabilities . What we have that is missing in the silicon and metal nerve nets of large language models is a developmental

  • The Fifth Edition of Discovering Behavioral Neuroscience Is Available Now!

    Updated: 2023-03-29 20:32:03
    I’m very excited to announce that my fifth edition is officially in print (and available electronically). In fact, I received a notification that my author’s copies from Cengage will be arriving via UPS tomorrow. There’s nothing quite like holding your book for the first time! I hope you like the […]

  • MindBlog's seduction by AI

    Updated: 2023-03-28 21:29:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Tuesday , March 28, 2023 MindBlog's seduction by AI I decided to drink the kool aid , go down the rabbit hole , of learning more about AI , and have ceased regular MindBlog posts . As I have been reading numerous articles and a few books I have curbed my urge to rapidly summarize , abstract , and post their main ideas . This has been in the hope that a more integrative summary that feels faintly original might perhaps rise from the mists of my unconscious during a waking period at night . A few paragraphs that feel like they might be of that sort are in draft form . nbsp I'm going to break my reticence with this post , however , to share with

  • Is the hype over A.I. justified? Does it really change everything?

    Updated: 2023-03-17 05:00:00
    : . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , March 17, 2023 Is the hype over A.I . justified Does it really change everything I know , I know We’re all tired of the hysteria resulting from the sudden appearance of ChatGPT-like programs that feel to us as though they are intelligent and are already shaping much of our lives . Still , I’m inclined to agree with Sundar Pichai , the chief executive of Google , who said in 2018 that the invention of AI is more profound than the discovery of fire and electricity . New York Times writer Ezra Klein also thinks that things will never be the same Below are a few clips from his piece , and I focus on a section describing the thoughts of Meghan

  • Blood-derived signals as potent drivers of both age-related brain dysfunction and brain rejuvenation.

    Updated: 2023-03-13 05:00:00
    : . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , March 13, 2023 Blood-derived signals as potent drivers of both age-related brain dysfunction and brain rejuvenation . An open source review from Bieri et . al has some nice graphics and tables summarizing the varieties of pro-aging and rejuvenating interventions . nbsp Here is their abstract . Aging induces molecular , cellular and functional changes in the adult brain that drive cognitive decline and increase vulnerability to dementia-related neurodegenerative diseases . Leveraging systemic and lifestyle interventions , such as heterochronic parabiosis , administration of young blood’ , exercise and caloric restriction , has challenged

  • An arthritis drug mimicks the anti-aging benefits of youthful blood transfusions

    Updated: 2023-03-10 06:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , March 10, 2023 An arthritis drug mimicks the anti-aging benefits of youthful blood transfusions Some edited clips from the New Atlas description of research by Passegué and collaborators on rejuvenating the stem cells located in the blood marrow that produce blood cells : An aging blood system , because it’s a vector for a lot of proteins , cytokines , and cells , has a lot of bad consequences for the organism . A 70-year-old with a 40-year-old blood system could have a longer healthspan , if not a longer lifespan . 8221 The bone marrow niche in which stem cells exist deteriorates over time and becomes overwhelmed by inflammation , which

  • MindBlog as a portal to Open AI's ChatGPT? A few stumbles on the way...

    Updated: 2023-03-06 06:00:00
    : . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , March 06, 2023 MindBlog as a portal to Open AI's ChatGPT A few stumbles on the way . After my initial foray into playing with OpenAI's ChatGPT last December I decided to return for another chat today , and was initially blown away by the results . After the exchange shown in the following screen shot , I put a link in the right column of MindBlog look under Dynamic Views of MindBlog that makes it a portal to the ChatBot . After doing this I clicked on the link and discovered it is bullshit . chatgps.com does not go to OpenAI but to a site that wants to sell that domain name for 20K So I changed the URL to actually go to Open AI . nbsp The

  • Empathy lost and regained in a mouse model of dementia

    Updated: 2023-03-03 06:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , March 03, 2023 Empathy lost and regained in a mouse model of dementia A PNAS Journal Club article by Carolyn Beans points to work by Yao and colleagues that shows that a loss of empathy that is especially problematic for those experiencing frontotemporal dementia FTD . a rare condition that often develops earlier in life than other types of dementia can be linked to slowed activity in a particular brain region of a mouse model of FTD . When Yao and colleagues experimentally increased brain activity , empathy returned . Here is the technical abstract of Yao and : collaborators Highlights Mice display dmPFC-dependent emotional contagion and

  • Possible mechanism of psychedelic therapeutic effects

    Updated: 2023-02-27 06:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , February 27, 2023 Possible mechanism of psychedelic therapeutic effects From the latest issue of Science Magazine : The mechanism underlying psychedelic action Psychedelic compounds promote cortical structural and functional neuroplasticity through the activation of serotonin 2A receptors . However , the mechanisms by which receptor activation leads to changes in neuronal growth are still poorly defined . Vargas et . al found that activation of intracellular serotonin 2A receptors is responsible for the plasticity-promoting and antidepressant-like properties of psychedelic compounds , but serotonin may not be the natural ligand for those

  • MindBlog picks some of its favorite posts on defining what a self is…

    Updated: 2023-02-24 06:00:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , February 24, 2023 MindBlog picks some of its favorite posts on defining what a self is The following links are from a recent scan of what pops up if I click on items in Selected MindBlog Categories’ in the right column of this page to remind myself of some of the results of my personal reflections on the topics indicated . The chronological list starts with the most recent posts . Enlightenment , Habituation , and Renewal Or , Mindfulness as the opiate of the thinking classes The non-duality industry as a panacea for the anxieties of our times I am not my problem Self , purpose , and tribal mentality as Darwinian adaptations or Why why

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