Mind Blog
Most of my recent effort has been devoted to "Deric Bownds' MindBlog, which reports new ideas and work on mind,
brain, and behavior, as well as random curious stuff.
Mind Lectures & Writings
 Here you
will find a taste of the kind of material I've been working with
in the past few years. “Are you holding your breath?” - Structures of arousal and calm - , a talk given at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Chaos Seminar Series, May 8, 2012. Making Minds - Evolving and Constructing the "I", a talk given in the Evolution Seminar Series at the Univ. of Wisconsin on April 28, 2011. Who wants to know? - The Nature of our Subjective "I", a lecture given at a Cognitive Neuroscience meeting in Istanbul in May, 2010. For background, you might start with an earlier talk, such as "The
I Illusion" lecture/essay - (Podcast version here), which contains a number
of simple demonstrations of how our minds work. Two further essays are offered in both web and podcast format: The Beast Within (Web; Podcast) and MindStuff: A guide for the curious user (Web, Podcast). If you want
to glance at only a few paragraphs, try Mindstuff
- Bonbons for the curious user. There are
several other brief essays you might find interesting.
In the early 1990's I developed an interdisciplinary
course at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, titled The
Biology of Mind. Lecture notes from that course were transformed into a
book aimed both at my course students and also the educated general
public.
Biology of Mind
This gives you a full web version of that book, with complete
references not included in the hard copy version, which can be obtained from either Amazon or John
Wiley & Sons. You can download the book, with illustrations, for your ebook reader from MobileReads.com. To contact me, please email mdbownds@wisc.edu.
Music & About
Me
Here you can learn more about me and my personal life and the
first 35 years of my professional life, which was devoted to
studying vision. I prepared this graphic social and scientific history of the Bownds Laboratory for a laboratory reunion over the last weekend of May 2012, on the occasion of my 70th birthday. Pictures of the reunion can be found here and of a Social/Musical held at my Twin Valley home here. This personal biography was written in the summer of 2012. I gave a talk on May 14, 2013 to the McPherson Eye Research Institute seminar at the University of Wisconsin, describing the contributions of my laboratory (from 1968 to 1998) to understanding how light changes into a nerve signal in our eyes. (The talk is posted here.)
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