Mind Hacks

Stanford Magazine has a fascinating article on how speakers of different languages think differently about the world. The piece focuses on the work of psychologist Lera Boroditsky and covers many of her completely intriguing studies about how the conceptual tools embedded within languages shape how we think. “In English,” she says, moving her hand toward […]

In light of the retraction of the infamous Lancet paper that first started the MMR panic, the Point of Inquiry podcast has a fantastic interview with doctor and vaccine developer Paul Offit who has received death threats for publicly refuting the spurious connection between childhood jabs and autism. He’s also the author of the book […]

Sometimes songs get ‘stuck in our head’. In German, this experience is known as having an ‘earworm‘ and a new study shortly to be published in the British Journal of Psychology surveyed the typical features of this common phenomenon. What particularly struck me was that “the length of both the earworm and the earworm experience […]

I’ve just found an odd study on whether rap and heavy rock music encourages ‘inappropriate behaviour’ in psychiatric patients when compared to easy listening and country tunes. It sounds like it could be something from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but as I don’t have access to the full text, I’m still not sure […]

There’s a neat study in Perception finding that listening to music through headphones warps our comfort zone of interpersonal space. The researchers asked participants to walk up to another person from various angles until they reached the edge of their comfort zone. Without them knowing the researchers measured the distance, and this was compared between […]

The International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry has a brief case report of a man who began hallucinating whole operas that would start every evening shortly after sunset. A 74-year-old retired mathematician had to undergo emergency surgery due to an ischemic perforation of the colon. Three days after the operation, he began to suffer from near […]

The New York Times has an article on the simple but effective idea that a statistical analysis of word frequency in written text can be a guide to the psychological state of the author. It’s a technique that’s been pioneered by psychologist James Pennebaker who has conducted a considerable amount of intriguing research to back […]

I’ve just found this fantastic auditory illusion after browsing through Tom’s blog. It’s a YouTube video but the visuals are just text, all you need to do is listen and replay. It’s like the audio equivalent of a moving spiral. It always seems to be moving up but you realise after a while it can’t […]