Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Psychiatry needs its Higgs boson moment says and article in New Scientist which describes some interesting but disconnected findings suggesting it ‘aint going to get it soon.
Wall Street Journal has an overenthusiastic article on how advances in genetics and neuroscience are ‘revolutionizing’ our understanding of violent behavior. Not quite but not a bad read in parts.
The new series of BBC Radio 4 wonderful series of key studies in psychology, Mind Changers, has just started. Streamed only because the BBC think radio simulations are cute.
Reuters reports that fire kills dozens in Russian psychiatric hospital tragedy.
Author and psychologist Charles Fernyhough discusses how neuroscience is dealt with in literary fiction in a piece for The Guardian.
Nature profiles one of the few people doing gun violence research in the US – the wonderfully named emergency room doctor Garen Wintemute.
The Man With Uncrossed Eyes. Fascinating case study covered by Neuroskeptic.
Wired reports that scientists have built a baseball-playing robot with 100,000-neuron fake brain. To the bunkers!
“Let’s study Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s brain” – The now seemingly compulsory article that argues for some sort of pointless scientific investigation after some horrible tragedy appears in the Boston Globe. See also: Let’s study the Newtown shooter’s DNA.
Wired report from a recent conference on the medical potential of psychedelic drugs.
Adam Phillips, one of the most thoughtful and interesting of the new psychoanalyst writers, is profiled by Newsweek.
Mind Hacks 
Hello Vaughan,
This is probably not the best place for me to say this. But while the discipline of psychology has been quite successful in identifying and quantifying mental disorders since its inception. It seems to have signally failed to do very much to cure or even to ameliorate many of the effects of mental disorders. Quite the reverse in fact from my layman’s point of view there seems to be a lot more mental disorders than there used to be when I was younger. In other areas of medicine study, clinical research, practice etc. etc. have improved treatment survival rates etc. But in psychology this success seems not to have happened.
Reblogged this on Neptune and the Oak.