Category Archives: books

A treasure hunt for the mysteries of mind and brain

January 21, 2012 – 2:22 pm

I’ve published a couple of free ebooks recently: Explore your blind spot shows you how to reveal the gap we all have in our visual experience of the world, and discusses what it means about consciousness that this gap is kept hidden from us most of the time. Control Your Dreams, co-written with Cathryn Bardsley [...]

By tomstafford | Comments (11)

Control your dreams (ebook)

December 30, 2011 – 2:43 pm

Anyone can learn to have lucid dreams, and this ebook tells you how. Lucid dreams are those dreams where you become aware you are dreaming, and can even begin to control the reality of the dream. Adventure, problem-solving and consequence-free indulgence await! And for those interested in the mind, lucid dreams are a great place [...]

By tomstafford | Also posted in Authors | Comments (9)

Explore your blind spot (free ebook)

December 12, 2011 – 8:09 pm

I’ve written an ebook called ‘Explore your blind spot’. It’s about, er, exploring your blind spot! In the best tradition of Mind Hacks I take you from the raw experience to the cutting edge of scientific theory. The blind spot is a simple phenomenon of our visual processing, but one we don’t notice day to [...]

By tomstafford | Also posted in Authors | Comments (7)

A review of Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature

October 18, 2011 – 2:27 am

I’ve written an in-depth review of Steven Pinker’s new book on the decline of violence for the latest Wilson Quarterly I thought getting a free copy and working on a review would be great fun but was rather taken aback when the 848 page book landed on my doorstep. I shouldn’t have been because there [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory | Comments (8)

A case of simulated fragmentation

October 15, 2011 – 5:19 pm

The New York Times has an excerpt of a book that claims to expose one of the most famous psychiatric cases in popular culture as a fraud. Based on an analysis of previously locked archives the book suggests that the patient at the centre of the ‘Sybil’ case of ‘multiple personality disorder’ was, in fact, [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in News | Comments (8)

The father of Randle P. McMurphy

October 10, 2011 – 12:56 am

An article in the Journal of Medical Humanities has a fascinating look at one of playwright Samuel Beckett’s early novels – an exploration of madness and mental health care that foreshadowed One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest. Beckett is best known for Waiting for Godot, but his novel Murphy was previously one of the best [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Integrating | Comments (1)

A profession with “no” at its core

October 3, 2011 – 6:44 am

I’ve just finished Randy Olson’s “Don’t be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an age of style” (after loving his article in New Scientist, “Top five tips for communicating science “). Olson is a marine biologist turned filmmaker, so knows the world of science from the inside, and from the outside perspective. This book is [...]

By tomstafford | Comments (16)

Book review: Willpower by Baumeister & Tierney

September 27, 2011 – 2:41 pm

“Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength”, Roy Baumeister & John Tierney, 2011 I’ve just finished this book, and yet I still couldn’t tell you what it was trying to claim. It’s a grab-bag of research on willpower, nearly all of it done by social psychologist Baumeister and colleagues, and including his celebrated experiments on ego-depletion. [...]

By tomstafford | Also posted in News | Comments (16)

Out of Mind online

August 21, 2011 – 2:10 pm

Paul Broks is a British neuropsychologist who wrote a brilliant and insightful column on the brain and its disorders for Prospect magazine in the early 2000s, all of which are now freely available online. The ‘Out of Mind’ column ran for the best part of five years. Alternately whimsical, profound and poetic, it recounted ephemeral [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Leave a Comment

Book review: Crazy Like Us

July 14, 2011 – 12:25 am

‘Cultures become particularly vulnerable to new beliefs about the mind and madness particularly during times of social anxiety or discord’, notes Ethan Watters in this compelling book. Watters sees social discord as making cultures ‘vulnerable’ to new beliefs, rather than simply ‘receptive’, and this sentence captures both the depth of insight in Crazy Like Us [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Comments (5)

Grief, mental illness and psychiatry’s sad refrain

May 19, 2011 – 5:51 pm

Scientific American covers a coming shake-up in how grief is defined in relation to mental illness as the forthcoming DSM-5 diagnostic manual aims to radically redefine how mourning is treated by mental health professionals. It’s worth saying that the DSM-5 has yet to be finalised and will not appear until 2013 but the changes to [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory | Comments (16)

An anatomy of The Anatomy of Melacholy

May 14, 2011 – 6:07 pm

BBC Radio 4′s In Our Time tackled one of the most important books in the history of psychology, psychiatry and literature – Robert Burton’s classic 17th Century text The Anatomy of Melancholy. Although the book is commonly referred to by its abbreviated title it actually has the far more wonderful name of ‘The Anatomy of [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Remembering | Comments (3)

A connoisseur’s list of essential psychology

April 24, 2011 – 1:07 am

Every month since 2008 The Psychologist magazine has run an interview with a leading psychologist where they ask them to name one book or journal article, either contemporary or historical, that all psychologists should read. The BPS Research Digest has compiled all the answers into handy and fascinating list. A few of the answers: Mistakes [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Other People | Comments (4)

The Rough Guide to Psychology

April 15, 2011 – 2:08 pm

Friend of mindhacks.com and contributor to the original Mind Hacks book, Christian Jarrett has written the “The Rough Guide to Psychology“, published this month, and a right rip roaring read it is too. It’s a whistle-stop tour through all aspects of the science of mind and behaviour, which reveals just how diverse and rich the [...]

By tomstafford | Also posted in Authors | Comments (2)

The (cut price) Narrative Escape

February 15, 2011 – 5:28 pm

My ebook The Narrative Escape is available at a reduced price for a limited time. Publishers 40kbooks have got a February special offer, meaning that you can read my 6000 or so words about dreams, stories and morality for less than a dollar. UK readers : that’s seventy-one pence! As if the price wasn’t enough [...]

By tomstafford | Also posted in News | Comments (4)

A new level of chutzpah in psychiatric ghostwriting

November 30, 2010 – 3:34 pm

The New York Times has a revealing article about how a popular textbook for family doctors on how to treat mental illness, apparently written by two big name psychiatrists, was almost entirely written by a ghostwriting service under the direction of a large drug company. Two prominent authors of a 1999 book teaching family doctors [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in News | Comments (7)
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