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A delusional life on film

June 3, 2012 – 3:51 pm

A curiously recursive case of psychosis, reported in the latest issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, about a person who worked on a reality TV show who had the delusion that they were on a reality TV show. Mr D. was working on a reality television show when he was hospitalised after causing a public disturbance. While [...]

Posted in Togetherness | Comments (1)

An unplanned post-mortem

June 1, 2012 – 1:02 pm

My latest Beyond Boundaries column for The Psychologist explores the space between he we study suicide and the experience of families affected by it: Suicide is often considered a silencing, but for many it is only the beginning of the conversation. A common approach to understand those who have ended their own lives is the [...]

Posted in Hearing and Language, Togetherness | Comments (1)

The bathroom of the mind

June 1, 2012 – 12:15 pm

The latest issue of The Psychologist has hit the shelves and it has a freely available and suprisingly thought-provoking article about bathroom psychology. If you’re thinking it’s an excuse for cheap jokes you’d be mistaken as takes a genuine and inquisitive look at why so little psychology, Freud excepted, has been concerned with one of [...]

Posted in Theory, Togetherness | Comments (2)

A bridge over troubled waters for fMRI?

May 28, 2012 – 5:12 am

Yesterday’s ‘troubles with fMRI’ article has caused lots of debate so I thought I’d post the original answers given to me by neuroimagers Russ Poldrack and Tal Yarkoni from which I quoted. Poldrack and Yarkoni have been at the forefront of finding, fixing and fine-tuning fMRI and its difficulties. I asked them about current challenges [...]

Posted in Inside the Brain, Theory | Comments (8)

The trouble with fMRI

May 27, 2012 – 10:16 am

I’ve written a piece for The Observer about ‘the trouble with brain scans’ that discusses how past fMRI studies may have been based on problematic assumptions. For years the media has misrepresented brain scan studies (“Brain centre for liking cheese discovered!”) but we are now at an interesting point where neuroscientists are starting to seriously [...]

Posted in Inside the Brain, Theory | Comments (2)

Neuro images

May 24, 2012 – 8:52 pm

So how did I not know about the amazing neuroimages blog? It has plenty of beautiful pieces like this taken from neuroimaging to historical neuroscience to, er, edible brain sandwiches.

Posted in Inside the Brain, Seeing | Leave a Comment

What is the DSM supposed to do?

May 22, 2012 – 4:57 pm

I’ve written an article for the Discover Magazine’s blog The Crux on what the DSM diagnostic manual is supposed to do. This is quite an interesting question when you think about it. In other words, it asks – how do we define mental illness – both in theory and in practice? The article tackles how [...]

Posted in Theory, Togetherness | Comments (1)

Sigman and the skewed screen of death

May 22, 2012 – 9:23 am

The media is buzzing this morning with the shocking news that children spend ‘more than six hours in front of screens’. The news is shocking, however, because it’s wrong. The sound bite stems from an upcoming talk on ‘Alcohol and electronic media: units of consumption’ by evidence-ambivalent psychologist Aric Sigman who is doing a guest [...]

Posted in Togetherness | Comments (4)

Legal highs making the drug war obsolete

May 19, 2012 – 9:32 pm

If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs. If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’s important to remember that the first examples, synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘K2′ incense, were only detected in 2009. Shortly [...]

Posted in Inside the Brain, News | Comments (32)

Uploaded to the Life network

May 19, 2012 – 2:21 pm

A fantastic short film about what you might see when your mind is uploaded to an online storage cloud in 2052. It’s subtitled “the Singularity, ruined by lawyers”. The piece is by futurist Tom Scott who obviously sees the consciousness uploading business far more pessimistically than me. Personally, I’m going to get uploaded to a [...]

Posted in Togetherness | Comments (2)

A history of human sacrifice

May 18, 2012 – 12:19 pm

A video on the history of human sacrifice is available from Science magazine as part of their special issue on human conflict. Sadly, all the articles are locked behind a paywall but the video is free to view and has science writer Ann Gibbons discussing how the practice evolved through the ages and how archaeologists [...]

Posted in Remembering, Togetherness | Comments (2)

Psychology and the one-hit wonder

May 16, 2012 – 9:45 pm

Don’t miss an important article in this week’s Nature about how psychologists are facing up to problems with unreplicated studies in the wake of several high profiles controversies. Positive results in psychology can behave like rumours: easy to release but hard to dispel. They dominate most journals, which strive to present new, exciting research. Meanwhile, [...]

Posted in Theory | Comments (6)

She’s lost control

May 15, 2012 – 12:38 pm

An article in Slate claims to have detectected a ‘logic hole’ in how much sympathy we feel for people with mental illness as both psychopathy and autism are ‘biological disorders’ that people ‘can’t help’ but we feel quite differently about people affected by them. The ‘logic hole’, however, doesn’t exist because it is based on [...]

Posted in Inside the Brain, Togetherness | Comments (20)

A look inside digital humanity

May 11, 2012 – 12:25 pm

BBC Radio 4 has just started an excellent series called The Digital Human that looks at how we use technology and how it affects our relationship to the social world. It’s written and presented by psychologist Aleks Krotoski and the first two episodes are already online. The first discusses the tendency to capture and display [...]

Posted in Togetherness | Comments (9)

Sex survey a let down in bed

May 9, 2012 – 8:27 pm

A ‘saucy sex survey’ has been doing the rounds in the media that claims to be one of the largest studies on the sex lives of UK citizens. Unfortunately, it seems to be a bit of a let down in bed. The study has been carried out by an unholy alliance between one of the [...]

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How the British missed a trip

May 8, 2012 – 1:18 pm

The first ever medical report on the effects of magic mushrooms is featured in an article in Current Biology. The excerpt is from a 1799 report entitled ‘On A Poisonous Species of Agaric’ from an issue of The London Medical and Physical Journal. The psychological effects of hallucinogenic, or ‘magic’ mushrooms were first documented in [...]

Posted in Inside the Brain, Remembering | Comments (6)
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