Category Archives: News

‘Legal marijuana’ and a ban on brain function

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 [...]

On the perimeter of the synthetic cannabinoids

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 [...]

Radio 4′s brilliant brain season now being scattered

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 [...]

Steven Pinker: a life in brawls

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 [...]

A case of simulated fragmentation

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, [...]

The cutting edge of the easy high

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 [...]

Book review: Willpower by Baumeister & Tierney

“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. [...]

Masters on the mind

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 [...]

Bad riot neuroscience: cite the power

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, [...]

A response to the Baroness

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 [...]

Doubts about social contagion

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 [...]

The malware of medical science

Just when you thought the pharmaceutical industry had used up every dirty trick in the book, it has been revealed that a ‘study’ of the epilepsy drug gabapentin (aka Neurontin) was never really intended to investigate the medication, but was primarily intended to get doctors to prescribe it more often. A report published in the [...]

A 30 second piece of our minds

A new book has been published called 30 Second Psychology. It’s been written by some familiar folks and aims to capture fifty of the most important theories of psychology in one punchy package. It’s been edited by Christian Jarret of the BPS Research Digest and includes contributions from me, Mo Costandi, Dave Munger and Tom [...]

Where next for chronic fatigue after XMRV a bust

Nature News has an excellent piece reviewing the state of play after the first reports of the XMRV virus in people with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) have been put in doubt both by a string of failed replications and evidence of contamination in the original research samples. Chronic fatigue syndrome or CFS is associated with [...]

It came from the Amazon

The Guardian has a curious report about “the latest drug to emerge from South America” which is supposedly “twice as powerful as crack cocaine at just a fraction of the price”. What the journalist doesn’t know, I suspect, is that this is a common form of cocaine paste that is widely known around the region. [...]

The return of BBC All in the Mind

I’ve just realised the latest series of BBC Radio 4′s excellent All in the Mind has started and has been running some fantastic shows. So far, the programmes have covered everything from portable baby labs to psychopaths to mirror-touch synaesthesia where people feel the sensations that they see in other people. If you want the [...]

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