Mind Hacks

Are we paralysed by risk aversion? Is TV good for children? What do we want from science? These questions and many others will be debated at the second day of the Battle of Ideas Festival tomorrow (Sunday, 29th Oct) at the Royal College of Art, London, held in association with the Institute of Ideas. A […]

The complete works of Charles Darwin are being published online, free for anyone to read and search. Among his many works, perhaps the one of most interest to Mind Hacks readers will be The expression of the emotions in man and animals, published in 1872. Link to Charles Darwin online.

‘The God Delusion’, Richard Dawkins’ forthcoming book on religion, is “incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory” according to Andrew Brown (author of the Darwin Wars), writing in Prospect magazine. To a psychologist (or anyone taking a scientific approach to religion), what’s particularly of interest, is not so much whether or not God exists, but why so […]

The latest news reports of The Psychologist magazine now appear online first, freely available for anyone to read. Recent entries include a report on the Royal Institution debate: “What’s the worst ever idea on the mind?”; a discussion of whether increased rates of autism are all down to changes in diagnosis; and – is it […]

Don’t worry, this isn’t about telepathy and doesn’t involve Uri Gellar. No, it’s about a team of three Italian researchers who won $10000 in a brain-activity interpretation competition organised by the University of Pittsburgh earlier this year. Entrants were provided with the fMRI data and behavioural reports recorded when four people watched two movies. The […]

Psychologist Richard Davidson (pictured below) of the W.M. Keck lab for Functional Brain Imaging and Behaviour at the University of Wisconsin has been named one of the world’s Top 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He’s most famous for researching the neural correlates of meditation and for collaborating with the Dalai Lama: “East and […]