Category Archives: News

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)

Berlin Plan #1: The Change Blindess Experiment

June 8, 2012 – 12:22 pm

I’m giving a talk and leading an ‘experience treasure hunt’ in Berlin on July 11th (see here). The aim will be to show how our perception works, using examples from city life. Cities, like all environments, channel our attention. One of the things I’m planning on doing is to recreate a classic experiment which shows […]

By tomstafford | Comments (8)

Meet me in Berlin

June 7, 2012 – 8:45 am

On July 11th I’ll be running a workshop as part of the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin. The lab is a temporary public space, in the neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg, dedicated to encouraging ‘open dialogue about issues related to urban living’. I’ve been invited by Corinne Rose, a psychologist and artist who has an interest […]

By tomstafford | Comments (5)

Legal highs making the drug war obsolete

May 19, 2012 – 9:32 pm

If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs. If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’s important to remember that the first examples, synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘K2′ incense, were only detected in 2009. Shortly […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (34)

The return of All in the Minds

May 1, 2012 – 8:40 pm

The two best psychology and neuroscience radio shows, both confusing called All in the Mind, have just started new series in the last couple of weeks. BBC Radio 4′s programme, which takes more of a magazine format featuring several topics each week, has just kicked off with a programme about stress, humour and discussing personal […]

By vaughanbell | Leave a Comment

A new symbol for epilepsy in Chinese

April 24, 2012 – 8:14 pm

The Chinese character for epilepsy has been changed to avoid the inaccuracies and stigma associated with the previous label which suggested links to madness and, more unusually, animals. The new name, which looks like this just makes reference to the brain although the story of how the original name got its meaning is quite fascinating […]

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

I predict a riot (based on a single study)

April 19, 2012 – 8:09 pm

A group of black bloc researchers fed up with the lack of interest in replicating psychology studies has set up a strike force called the The Reproducibility Project that will recreate all 2008 studies from three major cognitive science journals. That sound you can hear. That’s shit hitting the fan. The Chronicle of Higher Education […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory | Comments (9)

The future of fMRI

April 4, 2012 – 4:02 pm

Nature has an article looking at the future of fMRI brain scanning in light of its long-lasting hype and recently discovered problems. Brain scanning has become massively popular both in the scientific community and in the media, in great part because the pictures it produces seem quite intuitive: images of the brain with colours on […]

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

Inside The Ailing Brain

March 30, 2012 – 8:31 am

The Ailing Brain is a fantastic documentary series on the brain and its disorders that’s freely available online. It has been produced in Spanish but the first part is now on YouTube with English subtitles. The series is among the best neuroscience documentary series I have even seen (along with Susan Greenfield’s Brain Story – […]

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

Goodbye Colombia, for now

March 22, 2012 – 4:04 pm

A few days ago I moved back to the UK after spending three years working in beautiful Colombia. I had the pleasure of learning from some fantastic colleagues and managed to find myself working across the country from the Amazon to the Andes. As a small and inevitably inadequate token of my appreciation I’d like […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (2)

A mental space filled with flowers

March 14, 2012 – 5:11 pm

An entire psychiatric hospital has been filled with flowers before demolition as part of a beautiful art installation to remember a place “rich with a history of both hope and sadness.” Art website Colossal has amazing pictures of the sublime artwork. In 2003 a building housing the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC) was slated for […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (6)

Reminder: revelatory experiences conference

March 13, 2012 – 7:36 pm

A final reminder about the revelatory experience conference where the psychology, neuroscience and anthropology of visionary experiences will be discussed in London on March 23rd. Rather than debating whether such experiences are ‘true’ or not, it’s more aimed at discussing how well our current tools of science, medicine and interpretation help us make sense of […]

By vaughanbell | Leave a Comment

Catching the krokodil

March 8, 2012 – 4:42 pm

Over the last few months somewhat sensational media reports have appeared discussing a cheap Russian heroin-like drug nicknamed ‘krokodil’ due to it causing scaly lesions at the site of injection. It has been variously headlined as a ‘designer drug’ or ‘the drug that eats junkies’ but until now it has not been discussed in the […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (10)

Did drug money keep the banks high and dry?

March 2, 2012 – 1:13 am

A little known but striking comment from the then executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on how illegal drug money was the only thing that kept the banks afloat during the 2008 crash. Vienna-based UNODC [United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime] Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said in an […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (8)
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