Category Archives: News

Technophobia: a talk at the Royal Institution

November 11, 2012 – 8:14 am

I’m going to be talking about technophobia, media panics and how technology really affects the mind and brain, next Tuesday at the Royal Institution in London. The talk will be a trip through the history of technology scares – from Ancient Greece to Facebook, a look at how the modern media deals with concerns about […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (3)

British Psy Ops in Afghanistan

October 27, 2012 – 10:36 am

BBC News has an extremely rare article on the UK military’s psychological operations group and their work in Afghanistan. The piece reports how the 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group have been given the Firmin Sword of Peace – an accolade recognising the building of community relations awarded by, well, the UK military. Get your plaudits […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (3)

Press Release Spam (an interlude)

October 25, 2012 – 7:04 am

Sorry to interrupt your normal psych/neuro programming, but this is just a short note to say that I have retired the tom@mindhacks.com email address. If you wish to contact me or Vaughan, please tweet us (details in rightbar). I’ve retired the email address because of the amount of PR spam I’ve been getting, which has […]

By tomstafford | Comments (8)

Neural skull

October 20, 2012 – 4:55 pm

Some more amazing artwork from parallel universe neuro designer Emilio Garcia. You may remember we’ve previously featured Garcia’s jumping brain and brain print skate decks on Mind Hacks.   Link to Garcia’s Skull Brain piece.

By vaughanbell | Leave a Comment

Human error in psychology research: a rough guide

October 13, 2012 – 1:53 pm

Science writer Ed Yong has just posted the audio of a fantastic talk on problems in psychology research and how to fix them. The talk was delivered at Bristol University but is remarkably direct and he pulls no punches in pointing out psychology’s scientific flaws. Interestingly, Yong makes the point that this is not a […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory | Comments (2)

The great rock n’ roll brain scramble

October 13, 2012 – 1:52 pm

It’s not often you see someone licking a brain in a rock n’ roll video and get to think to yourself “well, there’s a funny story behind that”, but this is one of those occasions. The video for singer Candice Gordon’s new single Cannibal Love starts out as a TV cooking programme and ends in […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (1)

No, internet addiction is not an ‘official mental illness’

October 4, 2012 – 9:49 pm

The media has been buzzing with the supposed news that ‘internet addiction’ has been added to the list of ‘official mental disorders’. This is nonsense, but it tells us something oddly disappointing about how the media handles tech scare scores. This recent wave of ‘the internet is making us crazy’ drivel stemmed from an article […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Nonsense | Comments (11)

Fake pot industry generating novel, untested drugs

September 16, 2012 – 10:44 pm

There’s an excellent article on the highs and increasing lows of the synthetic marijuana ‘legal high’ industry in the Broward Palm Beach New Times. The piece is an in-depth account of how a legal high company called Mr. Nice Guy became the biggest fake pot manufacturer in the US. It describes in detail how the […]

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

The Cognitive Science Safari

September 9, 2012 – 8:22 pm

Just a quick note to anyone who ends up here because of the Wall Street Journal article, more info about the ‘cognitive science safari’ in Berlin can be found here.

By tomstafford | Comments (1)

A dark and complex past

August 27, 2012 – 8:16 am

In a story that could be the plot for a film, one of the world’s pioneering anthropologists has been found to have been a member of both the Nazi SS and the French resistance during the Second World War. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff retains legendary status in anthropology and particularly in Colombia, where he first lived with […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Remembering | Comments (13)

Communicating at the speed of thought

August 16, 2012 – 7:16 am

Your humble hosts, Tom and Vaughan, have written an article for Trends in Cognitive Sciences about how social media is changing mind and brain research. The piece is both a brief introduction to blogs and Twitter, as well as an overview of how scientific debate happens online and how it is affecting the traditional approach […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (1)

How the FBI sees the psychopath

July 26, 2012 – 7:17 pm

The latest FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin is a special issue on the criminal psychopath. Apart from the use of eye-scorching clip-art, it’s notable more what it tells us about how the FBI approaches the concept of psychopathy than necessarily being a great introduction to the topic. Some of the most revealing articles are written by […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (2)

No, the web is not driving us mad

July 13, 2012 – 7:07 pm

Oh Newsweek, what have you done. The cover story in the latest edition is an embarrasing look at non-research that certainly doesn’t suggest that the internet is causing “extreme forms of mental illness”. The article is a litany of scientific stereotypes and exaggeration: The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Nonsense | Comments (25)

Feed your head

June 29, 2012 – 7:21 pm

LiveScience has a spectacularly bad article that covers the toxicology results of Rudy Eugene, the ‘Miami cannibal’ who was immediately labelled as being high on ‘bath salts‘ and was predictably, not high on bath salts. But don’t let the Parp! Parp! Clown Taxi notion of drugs causing cannibalism put you off from suggesting that drugs […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (9)

Berlin plan #3: Instant social knowledge through unconscious perception

June 19, 2012 – 10:22 am

So I think I’ve figured out the third and final intervention I want to run for the cognitive science safari I’ll be leading in Berlin on the 11th of July. Regular readers will recall that I first wanted to try a field test of the change blindness phenomenon, and to follow that up with an […]

By tomstafford | Comments (7)

Berlin plan #2: Contagious attention

June 11, 2012 – 9:21 am

As I’ve mentioned, I’ll be leading a ‘cognitive science safari’ in Berlin on 11th of July. We’ll be generating some experiences based on classic psychology experiments, experiments which tell us important things about how cities organise our perceptions. Previously I described how I’ll be trying to revive a classic change blindness experiment. For my next […]

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