Category Archives: News

Christmas brain lectures available worldwide

January 7, 2012 – 7:21 pm

This year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures were a fantastic trip through neuroscience and the brain – and you can now watch them online from anywhere in the world. The Christmas Lectures are a traditional event where a leading scientist is chosen to present the latest developments in a fun and engaging way to a lecture [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (4)

The manual that must not be named

January 7, 2012 – 3:56 pm

The American Psychiatric Association have used legal threats to force a critical blog to change its title because they didn’t like it being called ‘DSM Watch’. The ‘DSM Watch’ website, now called ‘Dx Revision Watch‘, is one of the better websites keeping track and critiquing the upcoming changes to psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, the DSM-5. On [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (13)

Clinical test copyright bullying legally dubious

December 30, 2011 – 12:35 pm

James Grimmelmann, Associate Professor at New York Law School, has written on the takedown of an open-access cognitive screening test by the copyright holders of the Mini Mental State test. He says “any copyright claim here is legally weak and morally indefensible”. His piece is worth reading in full not only because he sets out [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain, Theory | Comments (2)

Diagnostic test takedown by copyright bullies

December 29, 2011 – 1:48 pm

The New England Journal of Medicine report on how the authors of key screening test, the Mini–mental state examination, have initiated a take-down of an open, validated and freely-available equivalent due to it also asking test-takers to recall three words, a string of numbers and some basic questions about the date and location. The Mini–mental [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain, Togetherness | Comments (13)

Mixing up a decade of All in the Mind

December 12, 2011 – 2:51 am

The amazing ABC Radio National programme All in the Mind is ten years old and is celebrating by mixing up some specially themed editions from its extensive archives. First up is the psychology and neuroscience of sex that tackles everything from gender myths to the neuroscience of female orgasm. The following edition, to hit the [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Hearing and Language | Leave a Comment

‘Legal marijuana’ and a ban on brain function

December 9, 2011 – 1:33 am

The United States Congress has just passed a bill to ban ‘legal marijuana’ incense products and ‘bath salts’ stimulants – a legal move which, possibly for the first time, prohibits substances based on their action in the brain and not solely their chemical structure. The bill is an amendment to the Controlled Substances Act which [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (11)

On the perimeter of the synthetic cannabinoids

November 20, 2011 – 5:09 pm

The synthetic weed story has just taken an interesting turn. Until now, all synthetic cannabinoids found in ‘herbal incense’ products have been taken from the scientific literature but a new previously unknown compound has just been discovered suggesting the underground labs are starting to innovate. Cannabinoids are a type of compound related to the active [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (7)

Radio 4′s brilliant brain season now being scattered

November 12, 2011 – 7:42 pm

BBC Radio 4′s Brain Season is in full swing, which, in typical BBC fashion, is both brilliantly conceived and chaotically scattered over their webpages like a drunken farmer chasing birds off his field with a seed planter. A good place to start is the brain season blog post which lists all the programmes in the [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (7)

Steven Pinker: a life in brawls

October 23, 2011 – 8:15 pm

There’s an excellent interview with Steven Pinker on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific that takes a look back at his work and his involvement with a long list of enjoyable controversies. For those over-saturated with discussion about his new book on the decline of violence, The Life Scientific interview is actually a [...]

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

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 books | Comments (8)

The cutting edge of the easy high

October 10, 2011 – 2:56 am

Perhaps the most complete scientific review of what we know about synthetic cannabis or ‘spice’ products has just appeared in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. These ‘legal highs’ are typically sold as nudge-nudge wink-wink ‘incense’ but contain synthetic cannabinoids which have a similar effect to smoking dope but are legal in many countries. We covered the [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain, Integrating | Comments (2)

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 books | Comments (16)

Masters on the mind

September 15, 2011 – 2:52 am

Edge has just kicked off their 2011 Master Class with a fantastic course on ‘The Science of Human Nature’ delivered by an impressive line-up of leading cognitive scientists. Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist [...]

By vaughanbell | Leave a Comment

Bad riot neuroscience: cite the power

August 28, 2011 – 12:25 am

The Guardian Notes and Theories blog has a fantastic article on media science distortion by brain researchers whose study got falsely reported as showing a link between rioting and ‘low levels of a brain chemical’. The actual study, which you can read online as a pdf, did not mention rioting and did not investigate it, [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (3)

A response to the Baroness

August 19, 2011 – 5:19 pm

The Independent have just published a letter I wrote to them in response to their recent opinion piece by Susan Greenfield. She claims that computers are at risk of causing ‘mind change’ while scientists are ignoring the issue. Needless to say, I was not impressed. I was interested to read Professor Susan Greenfield’s opinion piece [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (8)

Doubts about social contagion

July 5, 2011 – 3:27 am

Slate has an important article about how the studies behind last year’s headlines saying that things like divorce, obesity and loneliness spread through social networks like a ‘contagion’ may not be as sound as the stories suggested. The headline grabbing study on ‘divorce contagion’ has still yet to be published as it hasn’t made it [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory, Togetherness | Comments (3)
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