Author Archives:

Khat out of the bag

February 17, 2013 – 10:49 am

Finding myself at a loose end yesterday I decided I’d try and track down one of London’s mafrishes – a type of cafe where people from the capital’s Ethiopian, Somali and Yemeni community chew the psychoactive plant khat. I’d heard about a Somali cafe on Lewisham Way and thought that was as good a place […]

Posted in Togetherness | Comments (12)

2013-02-14 Spike activity

February 15, 2013 – 4:34 pm

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: “Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I’ve started seeing it everywhere”. Genius line from a Jon Ronson blog post. The Dana Foundation research showing the genetic risk for psychiatric conditions can be seen early in development. The fantastic Neuroskeptic blog has moved to […]

Posted in Linkage | Comments (4)

An online sickness

February 14, 2013 – 10:32 pm

The first academic review article on ‘Munchausen by Internet‘ – where people fake the identity of an ill person online – has just been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Munchausen syndrome is a common name for facticious disorder where people consciously fake illnesses for their own gain. This is distinguished from malingering […]

Posted in Togetherness | Comments (5)

Synthetic highs are mutating

February 12, 2013 – 9:51 pm

A new study on the chemicals in the latest batch of legally sold ‘synthetic highs’ has found what looks like an unintended hybrid drug. As regular Mind Hacks readers will know, I’m a keen watcher of the murky ‘legal high’ market. We seem to be in the unprecedented position where sophisticated grey-market pharmacologists are rapidly […]

Posted in News | Comments (10)

Hallucinations of the inner body

February 10, 2013 – 10:00 am

One of the least understood symptoms in psychosis are hallucinations called cenesthesias. These are ‘inner body’ feelings that often don’t correspond to any known or even possible bodily experiences. A team from Japan has just published a study of patients who experience cenesthesias in the mouth. Here are a selection of the hallucinations: “Feels like […]

Posted in Togetherness | Comments (11)

Unpretentiousil: stops douchebaggery at its root

February 9, 2013 – 5:22 pm

A revolutionary new medication for Hyper Involuntary Panic Stress Tension Elevation Response (HIPSTER Disorder) has become available. Now available from all good lo-fi dubstep jazz lounges (via BoingBoing)

Posted in Nonsense | Leave a Comment

2013-02-08 Spike activity

February 9, 2013 – 11:07 am

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: The New York Times covers the recent upsurge of robots-taking-over-the-world anxiety. To the bunkers! The dodgy practice of psychologists trying to patent therapeutic techniques is covered by Neuroskeptic. The Humanist discusses the explosion of the unhelpful concept of sex addition. Forensic psychology nerds: In […]

Posted in Linkage | Comments (6)

A memory of shifting sands

February 9, 2013 – 10:19 am

The New York Review of Books has a reflective piece by Oliver Sacks on the swirling mists of memory and how false recall has affected authors and artists throughout history. [Science] is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that […]

Posted in Remembering | Comments (1)

Hallucinema Paradiso

February 7, 2013 – 8:49 pm

The Barbican Centre in London has a Cinema and Psychosis event on the 17th March where we’ll discuss how the silver screen can represent the altered states of psychosis. Rather than focus on ‘how films depict mad people’, which usually just involves appalling stereotypes, we’re interested in how cinema can depict delusions and hallucinations. The […]

Posted in News | Comments (1)

The dark patch of death

February 5, 2013 – 10:17 pm

We’ve covered some dodgy neuroscience journalism in our time but The Daily Mail has such as amazing piece of tosh, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be serious or the result of huffing bathroom cleaner. Now I try and avoid writing about The Daily Mail because it’s so science impaired it’s a bit like […]

Posted in Nonsense | Comments (19)

Death of a booty chemical

February 3, 2013 – 10:09 am

I’ve got a piece in The Observer about why dopamine isn’t a ‘pleasure chemical’ but how this idea is likely to stay because it’s too useful for the media. It provides a simplified explanation for a whole range of behaviours and sexes-up science stories, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. If there were […]

Posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (1)

Previously unrecognised drugs scourge

February 3, 2013 – 9:14 am

At last, the scourge of catnip has got the attention it deserves with this hard-hitting film. It reveals the mind-bending effects and devestating impact of this feline street high. Do you know where your kitties are?

Posted in Nonsense | Comments (2)

Emotions are included

February 1, 2013 – 11:18 pm

New Republic has an interesting piece on how corporations enforce ‘emotional labour’ in their workforce – checking that they are being sufficiently passionate about their work and caring to their customers. It focuses on the UK sandwich chain Pret who send a mystery shopper to each outlet weekly and “If the employee who rings up […]

Posted in Theory, Togetherness | Comments (11)

2013-02-01 Spike activity

February 1, 2013 – 8:42 pm

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: Do amusing titles affect the perception of research? Some initial findings from Rolf Zwaan. The New York Times celebrates fifty years of The Feminine Mystique. Feminist classic or Britney album? You decide. Humans are flocking everywhere notes Wired Science. With a particular flocking tendency […]

Posted in Linkage | Leave a Comment

Violating the prime directive

January 31, 2013 – 9:12 pm

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an in-depth article that explores the controversy over social priming, which suggest that our behaviour can be changed by exposing us to certain concepts. The most famous study in the genre was led by psychologist John Bargh, who is the focus of the story and who found that people […]

Posted in News | Comments (3)

Culture of the digital playground

January 30, 2013 – 10:45 am

Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has spent several years researching hacker culture, hanging out with coders, geeks and cypherpunks to understand the beliefs and boundaries of the community they inhabit. If you want a flavour of what Coleman has been working on her interview in Wired is a good place to start but the best place to […]

Posted in Togetherness | Comments (1)
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,621 other followers