Monthly Archives: May 2009

The hunting of the SNARC

May 5, 2009 – 12:00 pm

Cognitive Daily has an excellent article on the fascinating SNARC effect, where we react quicker to numbers with the hand that most approximates their position in space as if they were written out in front of us. In other words, people react faster with their left hand for small numbers, and faster with their right [...]

By vaughanbell | Posted in News | Comments (2)

Mad pride of place

May 5, 2009 – 8:00 am

Newsweek has a good article on the ‘Mad Pride’ movement in the US, a British import where those diagnosed with mental illness reject the medical view of their experiences and decide to live with ‘extreme mental states’ both good and bad. It makes a good complement to last year’s New York Times article on ‘mad [...]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Togetherness | Comments (1)

Help, I’m a prisoner in a brain fiction factory

May 4, 2009 – 8:00 am

The Sunday Times has one of the most gullible neuroscience articles I’ve read in a very long time. While most mainstream press articles are happy to make a hash of one study at a time, this manages to misinterpret virtually every headline-grabbing neuroscience experiment from the last couple of years. The article claims that neuroscience [...]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Nonsense | Comments (3)

Art and mental illness at the birth of modern psychiatry

May 2, 2009 – 8:00 am

If you’re in London before the end of June, make sure you drop into the Wellcome Collection museum which has two fantastic free exhibitions on the art and history of mental illness. If you can’t make it, the exhibition website is excellent and has video and images from the shows. The first exhibition, Madness and [...]

By vaughanbell | Posted in News | Leave a Comment

Tell me about your mother superior

May 1, 2009 – 10:00 pm

I found this fascinating aside in a 1969 article on ‘Psychiatric Illness in the Clergy’ about a group of monks who underwent psychoanalysis, causing two thirds of them to realise they were “called to married life”. The Pope immediately banned psychoanalysis from the priesthood as a result: [Bovet] suggests that many clergy would benefit from [...]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Integrating | Comments (8)

Between a rock and a kind face

May 1, 2009 – 12:00 pm

Newsweek has an article on human good and evil that trots out the usual Milgram-fuelled moral pondering before morphing into a fascinating piece on the psychology of compassion. The most interesting part is where it discusses which psychological traits predict compassionate behaviour: A specific cluster of emotional traits seem to go along with compassion. People [...]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Togetherness | Comments (1)

2009-05-01 Spike activity

May 1, 2009 – 8:00 am

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: Wired has a great piece on illusionist Teller and how stage magic could help cognitive science. Some fascinating research on the use of video to give insight to brain injured patients unaware of their own paralysis is covered by BPS Research Digest. The Journal [...]

By vaughanbell | Posted in Linkage | Leave a Comment
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