• Admissions Requirements for Psychology Schools

    Updated: 2023-06-30 18:35:47
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  • Managing the risks of AI in pragmatic ways.

    Updated: 2023-06-30 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 , June 30, 2023 Managing the risks of AI in pragmatic ways . I want to pass on the final paragraphs of a recent commentary by Venkatesh Rao on the tragedy of the Titan submersible , which was a consequence of Stockton Rush , the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions , taking a number of design risks to reduce costs and increase profits . The bulk of Rao's piece deals with issues in the design of potentially dangerous new technologies , and the final paragraphs deal with managing the risks of artificial intelligence in pragmatic ways . AI risk , understood as something very similar to ordinary kinds of engineering risk such as the risk of

  • Mechanisms that link psychological stress to the exacerbation of gut inflammation.

    Updated: 2023-06-28 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 Wednesday , June 28, 2023 Mechanisms that link psychological stress to the exacerbation of gut inflammation . Schneider et . al describe one mechanism by which psychological stress deteriorates our health the enteric nervous system relays psychological stress to intestinal inflammation . Here is their abstract : Highlights Psychological stress leads to monocyte-mediated exacerbation of gut inflammation Chronic glucocorticoid signaling drives the effect of stress on IBD Stress induces inflammatory enteric glia that promote monocyte recruitment via CSF1 Stress provokes transcriptional immaturity in enteric neurons and dysmotility Summary Mental

  • The vagus nerve, heart rate variability, and subjective wellbeing - a MindBlog self experiment

    Updated: 2023-06-26 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 , June 26, 2023 The vagus nerve , heart rate variability , and subjective wellbeing a MindBlog self experiment In this post I pass on to MindBlog readers a NYTimes article by Christina Caron that has been republished several time by the newspaper . It is a sane account of what the vagus nerve is and what it does . The vagus is the main nerve of the parasympathetic nervous system . Unlike the sympathetic nervous system , which is associated with arousal of the body and the fight or flight” response , the parasympathetic branch helps us rest , digest and calm down . Numerous experiments have shown that increased activity of the nerve

  • Turing, von Neumann, and the computational architecture of biological machines

    Updated: 2023-06-21 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 , June 21, 2023 Turing , von Neumann , and the computational architecture of biological machines I pass on the abstract of a PNAS perspective article by Hashim M . Al-Hashimi motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me In the mid-1930s , the English mathematician and logician Alan Turing invented an imaginary machine which could emulate the process of manipulating finite symbolic configurations by human computers . His machine launched the field of computer science and provided a foundation for the modern-day programmable computer . A decade later , building on Turing’s machine , the American–Hungarian mathematician John

  • The psychological illusion of "The Good Old Days"

    Updated: 2023-06-20 15:23:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Tuesday , June 20, 2023 The psychological illusion of The Good Old Days Mastroianni and Gilbert open access do a nice study illustrating that the the universal perception of our ongoing moral decline is a psychological illusion to which people all over the world and throughout history have been susceptible . Their abstract : Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining . In a series of studies using both archival and original data n 12,492,983 we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining , that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this

  • How do we define spirituality and what it’s role is in our daily lives?

    Updated: 2023-06-10 15:39:00
    : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Saturday , June 10, 2023 How do we define spirituality and what it’s role is in our daily lives This post is primarily directed to Austin TX people who will be attending the Sunday 2 p.m . July 2 meeting of the Austin Rainbow Forum that is now in its 5th year . We will be discussing the topic of what spirituality means to each of us , and what its role in our lives is . Look below to see how the three major AI chatbots responded to my request for some guidance on how to moderate such a discussion . nbsp Also I'll pass on this youtube video titled What To Remember To Be Happy pointed to by Rainbow Forum discussant David Soileau . nbsp Question to the

  • A new place for consciousness in our understanding of the universe

    Updated: 2023-06-09 05:00:00
    I want to point MindBlog readers to an article by Thomas Lewton that I enjoyed reading. It describes how theorists are trying to make sense of mysteries like quantum mechanics and the passage of time by reformulating physics to include subjective experience as a physical constituent of the world. Lewton cites a number of authors who contributed to a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (Volume 28, Numbers 9-10, 2021)

  • Negativity drives online news consumption

    Updated: 2023-06-07 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 Wednesday , June 07, 2023 Negativity drives online news consumption Why paying attention to the news can come close to being a receipe for clinic depression . An open source article from Robertson et . al Their : abstract Online media is important for society in informing and shaping opinions , hence raising the question of what drives online news consumption . Here we analyse the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories . Specifically , we conducted our analyses using a series of randomized controlled trials N 22,743 Our dataset comprises 105,000 different variations of

  • A simple heuristic for distinguishing lie from truth

    Updated: 2023-06-05 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 Monday , June 05, 2023 A simple heuristic for distinguishing lie from truth Work by Verschuere et . al shows that a simple heuristic of only judging the level of detail in the message consistently allows people to discriminate lies from truths : Decades of research have shown that people are poor at detecting deception . Understandably , people struggle with integrating the many putative cues to deception into an accurate veracity judgement . Heuristics simplify difficult decisions by ignoring most of the information and relying instead only on the most diagnostic cues . Here we conducted nine studies in which people evaluated honest and deceptive

  • Gender inequality is associated with differences between the brains of men and women

    Updated: 2023-06-02 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 , June 02, 2023 Gender inequality is associated with differences between the brains of men and women Sobering but not surprising analysis by Jugman et . al Significance Gender inequality is associated with worse mental health and academic achievement in women . Using a dataset of 7,876 MRI scans from healthy adults living in 29 different countries , we here show that gender inequality is associated with differences between the brains of men and women : cortical thickness of the right hemisphere , especially in limbic regions such as the right caudal anterior cingulate and right medial orbitofrontal , as well as the left lateral occipital ,

  • Some notes on “Constructing Self and World”

    Updated: 2023-05-31 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 Wednesday , May 31, 2023 Some notes on Constructing Self and World” I’ve just listened to one of Sam Harris’ podcasts in his Making Sense” series titled Constructing Self and World . 8221 It is a conversation with Shamil Chandaria , who is a philanthropist , serial entrepreneur , technologist , and academic with multidisciplinary research interests . During the conversation a number of ideas I am familiar with were framed in a very useful way , and I’m wanting to put down and pass on to MindBlog readers my thumbnail summary : nbsp There is a strong similarity between the predictive processing brain model that has been the subject of numerous Mind

  • Using AI to decipher words and sentences from brain scans

    Updated: 2023-05-24 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 Wednesday , May 24, 2023 Using AI to decipher words and sentences from brain scans Things are happening very fast in AI , as this work from Huth and his collaborators shows . Previous work has shown that speeh articulation and other signals can be decoded from invasive intracranial recordings , and they have developed a language decoder that now accomplishs this with non-invasive fMRI . Motivated readers can obtain the detailed description of the work by emailing me . Their abstract : A brain–computer interface that decodes continuous language from non-invasive recordings would have many scientific and practical applications . Currently , however ,

  • An evolutionary psychology perspective on the politics of leadership

    Updated: 2023-05-17 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 Wednesday , May 17, 2023 An evolutionary psychology perspective on the politics of leadership Thomas Edsall does another of his scholarly analyses , this time putting Trump as the wannabe alpha male in a larger evolutionary context . I started this post with a number of clips from Edsall's text , but then decided to have another go at asking ChatGPT 4 to do a summary for me . In response to my request Please condense and summarize the following essay by Thomas Edsall it did a quite credible job , and I'm going to be lazy and pass on what the bot did Thomas Edsall's essay discusses how Donald Trump's alpha-male image conflicts with the barrage of

  • People who talk too much

    Updated: 2023-05-15 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 , May 15, 2023 People who talk too much I host a monthly discussion group in Austin TX , The Austin Rainbow Forum , that meets at 2 pm on the first Sunday of every month to consider interesting topics and ideas . On this past May 7, one of our group members led a discussion of Overtalking in the modern world , which has got us all spouting opinions , giving advice , and getting ourselves in trouble , according to Dan Lyons in his recent book titled STFU : The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World . The central ideas in Lyons’ book are summarized in this Time Magazine article I looked through a reviewers copy of the book

  • Miracle Berries Day in Biopsych!

    Updated: 2023-05-04 21:00:23
    All of the students experienced a strong sensation of sweetness while sucking on lemons, and many asked for a second piece! Then the party became even more interesting when a couple of students decided to see how their Oreos would taste.

  • MindBlog points to books on regulating attention and healthy longevity.

    Updated: 2023-05-03 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 Wednesday , May 03, 2023 MindBlog points to books on regulating attention and healthy longevity . I want to follow up on my post on Nestor’s book on breathing by pointing MindBlog readers to two other self help’ books I have read through recently and found to be both engaging and annoying : Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus and Peter Attia’s . Outlive They are both worth selectively reading through . Like Nestor’s book , they radiate the energy characteristic of male overachievers close to age 50 who have reached a professional peak in their advocacy of causes they have focused on : regulating attention and living for longevity . I got a bit impatient

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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. […]

  • 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 […]

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