Mind Hacks

A brief article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 2001 reported the case of a young man who suffered delusions that he was a player inside a computer game. The game isn’t mentioned by name, but it seems to be Grand Theft Auto. The authors of the case study point [...]

The New York Times reports on a new study that examined how doctors disclose information about themselves during patient consultations. The study found that disclosures are usually for the benefit of the doctor and rarely help the patient. The study recorded 113 doctor-patient interactions and analysed the conversation for themes, timing, effect and number of [...]

Childhood stress can interfere with the development of the teeth to the extent that a traumatic experience leaves a recognisable line in the tooth enamel that remains as a record of past traumas. I discovered this when reading about a study published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences [pdf] that used [...]

Science has just published a study of almost a quarter-of-million people providing strong evidence that oldest children have slightly higher IQs, and, most interestingly, the evidence suggests that this isn’t a biological effect – it’s likely to do with family environment and upbringing. In fact, first-born children are known to have a number of psychological [...]