Monthly Archives: May 2009

Synaesthesia in Frankenstein

May 31, 2009 – 8:00 am

One of the new ideas in synaesthesia research is that affected people perhaps don’t develop mixed senses as their brains develop, they just fail to lose them. It seems most children might start with naturally mixed senses before perception becomes segregated through pruning of the fuzzy neural pathways. I’ve just noted an interesting article in […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Integrating | Comments (4)

Mad honey

May 29, 2009 – 10:00 pm

I’ve just discovered there’s a form of neurotoxic honey, genuinely known as “mad honey“, created by bees taking nectar from the beautiful rhododendron ponticum flower, pictured on the right. The nectar from these plants, prevalent around the Black Sea region of Turkey, occasionally contains grayanotoxins, a class of neurotoxin that interferes with the action potential […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Inside the Brain | Leave a Comment

The demon drink

May 29, 2009 – 12:00 pm

Oh dear. It looks like psychologist Glenn Wilson has fallen off the wagon again. From the man who brought you the ‘email hurts IQ more than cannabis’ PR stunt before repenting, comes the ‘the way you hold your drink reveals personality’ PR stunt. This time it’s to promote a British pub chain and God bless […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Nonsense | Comments (1)

2009-05-29 Spike activity

May 29, 2009 – 8:00 am

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: HBO launches the awesome Alzheimer’s Project online. Video, documentary, facts, stories. Very nicely put together. Teen mental health and mindfulness are the focus of a recent ABC Radio National Health Report. The LA Times has more on the ongoing <a href="Psychiatrists rewriting the mental […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Linkage | Leave a Comment

Valuing the unusual illness debate

May 28, 2009 – 10:00 pm

One of the particular joys of psychiatry is the regular ritual where a small but determined group of researchers try and get their idea for a new diagnosis accepted into the DSM. The most recent outbreak has hit the LA Times where a short article notes the proposal for ‘posttraumatic embitterment disorder’. The idea for […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in News | Comments (3)

Winning the vaccine wars

May 28, 2009 – 8:00 am

PLoS Biology has an excellent article on the social factors behind how recent vaccination scares sparked off and continue, despite them having no scientific basis and having been repeatedly proved incorrect. I’m morbidly fascinated by the autism scares because they are meeting of two very different forms of systems in which to think about knowledge. […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in News | Comments (2)

The phantom from the battle field

May 27, 2009 – 10:00 pm

The Lancet recently published a fantastic article on one of the earliest cases of phantom limb. It was written by American Civil War surgeon Silas Weir Mitchell but not as a study in a medical journal, but as a short story in a popular magazine. The story was titled The Case of George Dedlow in […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Integrating | Leave a Comment

Evolving causal belief

May 27, 2009 – 12:00 pm

There’s an interesting letter in this week’s edition of Nature from biologist Lewis Wolpert making the speculative but interesting claim that the development of causal belief may have been a key turning point in human evolution. Wolpert is responding to a recent Nature essay critiquing the idea that closely related species will have evolved similar […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Integrating | Comments (4)

All smoke and mirror neurons?

May 27, 2009 – 8:00 am

New Scientist has a tantalising snippet reporting on a shortly to be released and potentially important new study challenging the idea of ‘mirror neurons’. Mirror neurons fire both when we perform an action and when we see someone else doing it. The theory is that by simulating action even when watching an act, the neurons […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (10)

Changes to psychiatrists’ diagnostic ‘bible’ hinted at

May 26, 2009 – 12:00 pm

PsychCentral reports on the likely changes to appear in the DSM-V, the new version of the psychiatrist’s diagnostic manual, due out in 2012 and discussed in a recent presentation in last week’s American Psychiatric Association annual conference. The most significant change proposed has to do with the inclusion of dimensional assessments for depression, anxiety, cognitive […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in News | Leave a Comment

Russian roulette in the medical literature

May 26, 2009 – 8:00 am

I’ve just discovered there’s a small medical literature on deaths by Russian roulette, where people put one bullet in a revolver, spin the chamber, put the gun to their head and pull the trigger. A recent article from the The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology has a 10-year case review covering 24 deaths […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Integrating | Comments (2)

Freestyle Lehrer

May 25, 2009 – 10:00 pm

Edge has an excellent interview with science writer Jonah Lehrer who riffs on consciousness, the joy of discovery, the importance of the marshmallows in psychology and how he fell in love with science. It’s interesting because rarely do science writers get the opportunity to give their own opinions on the big questions in neuroscience, despite […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Other People | Comments (1)

Encephalon 71 welcomes new diners

May 25, 2009 – 12:00 pm

The 71st edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just been served in the welcoming surroundings of the stylish Neuroanthropology blog. A couple of my favourites include a podcast interview with neuropsychologist Chris Frith from the Brain Science Podcast blog, and a post on the development of early language from Babel’s Dawn. […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Linkage | Leave a Comment

A hostage to hallucination

May 25, 2009 – 8:00 am

I’ve just found a morbidly fascinating 1984 study on hallucinations in hostages and kidnap victims. The paper is from the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease and contains case studies of people who have been held captive by terrorists, kidnappers, rapists, robbers, enemy troops and, er… UFOs. The reasoning behind including two ‘alien abductees’ was […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Integrating | Leave a Comment

On the information alarmageddon

May 23, 2009 – 8:00 am

New York Magazine has an article arguing that the concerns about digital technology drastically affecting our minds are just hype. I really wanted to like it but it’s just another poorly researched piece on the psychology of digital technology. Research has shown that distraction can improve exactly the sorts of skills that the digital doomsayers […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Integrating | Comments (3)

Can’t put the thought genie back into the bottle

May 22, 2009 – 12:00 pm

PsyBlog has an excellent piece on the counter-intuitive psychology of thought suppression – the deliberate attempt to not think of something that almost invariably backfires. The article is both fascinating from a scientific point-of-view but also important as a personal mental health resource if you’re one of the many people who intuitively think that the […]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Integrating | Leave a Comment
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