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Like a part of me is missing

April 18, 2013 – 8:06 pm

Matter magazine has an amazing article about the world of underground surgery for healthy people who feel that their limb is not part of their body and needs to be removed. The condition is diagnosed as body integrity identity disorder or BIID but it has a whole range of interests and behaviours associated with it […]

Posted in Togetherness | Comments (2)

A stiff moment in scientific history

April 13, 2013 – 8:10 pm

In 1983 psychiatrist Giles Brindley demonstrated the first drug treatment for erectile dysfunction in a rather unique way. He took the drug and demonstrated his stiff wicket to the audience mid-way through his talk. Scientific journal BJU International has a pant-wettingly hilarious account of the events of that day which made both scientific and presentation […]

Posted in Remembering | Comments (4)

Amid the borderlands

April 7, 2013 – 10:00 am

I’ve got an article in The Observer on how some of the best evidence against the idea that psychiatric diagnoses like ‘schizophrenia’ describe discrete ‘diseases’ comes not from the critics of psychiatry, but from medical genetics. I found this a fascinating outcome because it puts both sides of the polarised ‘psychiatry divide’ in quite an […]

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

A cuckoo’s nest museum

April 1, 2013 – 3:40 pm

The New York Times reports that the psychiatric hospital used as the backdrop for the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has been turned into a museum of mental health. In real life the institution was Oregon State Hospital and the article is accompanied by a slide show of images from the hospital […]

Posted in News, Remembering | Comments (2)

Gotham psychologist

March 30, 2013 – 1:50 pm

Andrea Letamendi is a clinical psychologist who specialises in the treatment and research of traumatic stress disorders but also has a passionate interest in how psychological issues are depicted in comics. She puts her thoughts online in her blog Under the Mask which also discuss social issues in fandom and geek culture. Recently, she was […]

Posted in books | Comments (6)

Hallucinating sheet music

March 30, 2013 – 11:06 am

Oliver Sacks has just published an article on ‘Hallucinations of musical notation’ in the neurology journal Brain that recounts eight cases of illusory sheet music escaping into the world. The article makes the interesting point that the hallucinated musical notation is almost always nonsensical – either unreadable or not describing any listenable music – as […]

Posted in Seeing | Comments (5)

The postmortem portraits of Phineas Gage

March 23, 2013 – 1:53 pm

A new artform has emerged – the post-mortem neuroportrait. Its finest subject, Phineas Gage. Gage was a worker extending the tracks of the great railways until he suffered the most spectacular injury. As he was setting a gunpowder charge in a rock with a large tamping iron, the powder was lit by an accidental spark. […]

Posted in Inside the Brain, Remembering | Comments (5)

A new horizon of sex and gender

March 20, 2013 – 11:06 pm

If you only listen to one radio programme this week, make it the latest edition of BBC Radio 4′s Analysis on the under-explored science of gender. The usual line goes that ‘sex is biological while gender is social’ – meaning that while genetics determines our sex, how masculine or feminine we are is determined by […]

Posted in Linkage | Comments (5)

A brief history of narcoanalysis

March 16, 2013 – 8:20 am

The judge in the case of ‘Colorado shooter’ James Holmes has made the baffling decision that a ‘narcoanalytic interview’ and ‘polygraph examination’ can be used in an attempt to support an insanity plea. While polygraph ‘lie detectors’ are known to be seriously flawed, some US states still allow evidence from them to be admitted in […]

Posted in Remembering | Comments (1)

Happiness rebuilt

March 14, 2013 – 9:59 pm

I’ve written a piece for SpotOn NYC on the contrast between the effects of brain injury depicted in Oliver Sacks-type books and the typical effects in patients on neurology wards. These books are not inaccurate but neither do they represent the common outcomes of brain injury. Sometimes the reality is quite different from what people […]

Posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (1)

The history of the birth of neuroculture

March 9, 2013 – 8:35 pm

My recent Observer piece examined how neuroscience has saturated popular culture but the story of how we found ourselves living in a ‘neuroculture’ is itself quite fascinating. Everyday brain concepts have bubbled up from their scientific roots and integrated themselves into popular consciousness over several decades. Neuroscience itself is actually quite new. Although the brain, […]

Posted in Theory, Togetherness | Comments (3)

2013-03-08 Spike activity

March 9, 2013 – 6:21 pm

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: Brain freeze from a slurpee was blamed for a five car pile up in Texas according to Jalopnik. Salon takes a nuanced look at hook-up culture. It’s a culture? I thought it was a hobby. Housewives, tranquilliser use and the nuclear family in Cold […]

Posted in Linkage | Comments (3)

The uncertain dance of the spoken word

March 7, 2013 – 9:12 pm

Stanford Magazine has a wonderful article by a writer who relies on lip-reading and experiences speech through this subtle movement-based language. Rachel Kolb skilfully describes how this works, and more importantly, feels. The part where she describes how she experiences accents is just amazing: Accents are a visible tang on people’s lips. Witnessing someone with […]

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

The rise of everyday neuroscience

March 3, 2013 – 1:17 pm

I’ve got a feature article in The Observer about how our culture has become saturated with ‘neuroscience talk’ and how this has led to unhelpful simplifications of the brain to make the same old arguments. This is often framed as a problem with ‘the media’ but this is just the most obvious aspect of the […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (2)

2013-03-01 Spike activity

March 3, 2013 – 11:39 am

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: Providentia overs the curious history of Japan’s suicide volcano. Skepticism about ‘social priming’ is driven by a long-history of doubt about subliminal priming of behaviour. Good piece on Daniel Simons’ Blog. The New York Times has an amazing video about technology to enhance the […]

Posted in Linkage | Comments (2)

A neurobiological graphic novel

March 2, 2013 – 4:49 pm

The Guardian has a video about the collaboration between neuroscientist Hana Ros and artist Matteo Farinella as they’ve been working on the neurocomic project to create a brain science graphic novel. The finished project isn’t quite out yet but the artwork is looking amazing. The film about the collaboration covers how they worked together and […]

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