Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 3 hours ago
Surely this must be the greatest headline for a BBC News story ever: Banjo Used in Brain Surgery. Although the banjo wasn't in the hands of the surgeons it was still an essential part of the operation. It was played by legendary Blue Grass musician Eddie Adcock who was having surgery install a deep brain stimulation device to treat an essential tremor that had been affecting his playing. The BBC News...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 1 hour ago
Seed Magazine has got video of a great talk by Henry Markham, the director of the Blue Brain Project which is developing the world's largest simulation of networks of individual neurons in an attempt to understand the large scale dynamics of the brain. Their ambition is to be able to run a simulation on the scale of the whole human brain within a decade. If you want a good summary of where the ambitious...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 10/10/2008
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: Pfizer have been caught manipulating studies. Again. This time for the drug Neurontin. The New York Times has the full story. Neurophilosophy discusses a new way of understanding the neurobiology of hallucinations . An excellent Carl Zimmer article on the genetics of intelligence is available from Scientific American . Neurotopia examines a case...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 10/10/2008
I'm off to Bogotá to attend the annual conference of the Association of Colombian Psychiatry, so apologies if updates are a little erratic, but I shall try and report back with the highlights here. I've been kindly invited to take part in a symposium on psychosis where I'll look forward to getting a distinctly Colombian perspective on my interest in the neuropsychology of delusions.
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 10/10/2008
Web Therapy is an incredibly funny and wonderfully made web series about a psychologist who does chaotic three-minute therapy sessions via webcam. It stars Lisa Kudrow, who plays the over-involved Fiona Wallace who can't quite keep her personal issues out of the sessions. It's a really simple premise but is a very well observed satire on therapy and has some sublimely funny moments as Wallace tries...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 09/10/2008
I've just found a wonderful article on how the Jivaro-Shuar, an indigenous people from the upper Amazon basin, shrink human heads after killing their enemies in battle. It's from the medical journal Neurosurgery but it's most fascinating for what it reveals about the complex customs and social relations that surround the practice. The actual head shrinking is the end point in a raid on an enemies...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 09/10/2008
The New York Times has a fascinating piece on some new software that automatically tweaks pictures of human faces to make them more attractive by reducing the concept of facial beauty to simple vector-based algorithms. The image on the right is a 'before and after' picture of the software at work, and the researchers have a page for the project with many more examples and the full-text of the academic...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 09/10/2008
I just came across these two beautiful images in a paper by neuroscientist Marek Kubicki and colleagues on diffusion tensor imaging studies in schizophrenia. DTI is a technique that using MRI scans to track how water moves throughout the brain. As water tends to move in one particular direction when its trapped inside nerve fibres, a technique called MRI tractography can be used to map out all the...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 08/10/2008
Today's Nature has a fascinating one page article on the Turin anatomy museums that have the archives of the controversial founder of criminal psychology, Cesare Lombroso , who thought that deviant behaviour was imprinted in the face and brain from birth. Lombroso had the theory that criminals were biologically defective, and that these defects - and hence criminality - could be found by measuring...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 08/10/2008
If mental illness doesn't exist, how come the dark forces of heavy metal know so much about it? Almost the whole range of psychopathology can be found on the cover of heavy metal albums. You never need buy a psychiatry textbook again. Are you listening Thomaz Szasz? Are you?
PsyBlog (Free subscription) | 08/10/2008
New memory study records the activation of human brain cells deep inside the living brain. The mystery of what happens in our brains when we remember something is fascinating not only from a scientific perspective but also because the experience of recall can be so, well, memorable. Thinking backwards we become sensory time travellers; recalling sights, sounds, events, emotions - all in the blink of...
PsyBlog (Free subscription) | 08/10/2008
Sponsored post : Diet pills are big business nowadays and in recent years a plant called Hoodia gordonii has been hyped as the latest and greatest dietary supplement that will help you lose weight. Hoodia is a spiny plant that grows in South Africa and Namibia which came to attention for its potential appetite suppressant properties. The active ingredient in Hoodia is thought to be a molecule dubbed...
MindBlog (Free subscription) | 08/10/2008
Benedict Carey has a great article in last Tuesday's NYTimes science section on the evolved psychology of retaliation and forgiveness we share with a large number of other social animal species, particularly with reference to the current public anger at the financial community: The fury is based in instincts that have had a protective and often stabilizing effect on communities throughout human history....
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 07/10/2008
The Boston Globe has an interesting piece on differing decision-making styles and how cognitive science is increasingly recognise the role of emotion in making choices. It's shoehorned into a slightly dubious Obama vs McCain premise, but it covers the important relationship between more conscious reflective forms of problem analysis, and more intuitive forms of approach. Some of the most interesting...
Scholars and Rogues (Free subscription) | 07/10/2008
Any S&R readers interested in participating in some interesting voting behavior research? A research team from the Psychology Department at New York University, headed by Professor Yaacov Trope and supported by the National Science Foundation, is investigating the cognitive causes of voting behavior, political preferences, and candidate evaluations throughout the course of the 2008 U.S. Presidential...
The last article published by a user on Psychology :
vokradio | 21/09/2008
vokradio.com; The purpose of the following article is to help graduate and undergraduate level students in the fields of psychology, social sciences, and/or film be able to have a model of how to look at a movie from the perspective of their fields of study and write a paper utilizing their knowledge. In the following papers movies are analyzed, interpreted, discussed, and ultimately criticized a way
