Category Archives: Togetherness

An unplanned post-mortem

June 1, 2012 – 1:02 pm

My latest Beyond Boundaries column for The Psychologist explores the space between he we study suicide and the experience of families affected by it: Suicide is often considered a silencing, but for many it is only the beginning of the conversation. A common approach to understand those who have ended their own lives is the [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Hearing and Language | Comments (1)

The bathroom of the mind

June 1, 2012 – 12:15 pm

The latest issue of The Psychologist has hit the shelves and it has a freely available and suprisingly thought-provoking article about bathroom psychology. If you’re thinking it’s an excuse for cheap jokes you’d be mistaken as takes a genuine and inquisitive look at why so little psychology, Freud excepted, has been concerned with one of [...]

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

What is the DSM supposed to do?

May 22, 2012 – 4:57 pm

I’ve written an article for the Discover Magazine’s blog The Crux on what the DSM diagnostic manual is supposed to do. This is quite an interesting question when you think about it. In other words, it asks – how do we define mental illness – both in theory and in practice? The article tackles how [...]

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

Sigman and the skewed screen of death

May 22, 2012 – 9:23 am

The media is buzzing this morning with the shocking news that children spend ‘more than six hours in front of screens’. The news is shocking, however, because it’s wrong. The sound bite stems from an upcoming talk on ‘Alcohol and electronic media: units of consumption’ by evidence-ambivalent psychologist Aric Sigman who is doing a guest [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (4)

Uploaded to the Life network

May 19, 2012 – 2:21 pm

A fantastic short film about what you might see when your mind is uploaded to an online storage cloud in 2052. It’s subtitled “the Singularity, ruined by lawyers”. The piece is by futurist Tom Scott who obviously sees the consciousness uploading business far more pessimistically than me. Personally, I’m going to get uploaded to a [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (2)

A history of human sacrifice

May 18, 2012 – 12:19 pm

A video on the history of human sacrifice is available from Science magazine as part of their special issue on human conflict. Sadly, all the articles are locked behind a paywall but the video is free to view and has science writer Ann Gibbons discussing how the practice evolved through the ages and how archaeologists [...]

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

She’s lost control

May 15, 2012 – 12:38 pm

An article in Slate claims to have detectected a ‘logic hole’ in how much sympathy we feel for people with mental illness as both psychopathy and autism are ‘biological disorders’ that people ‘can’t help’ but we feel quite differently about people affected by them. The ‘logic hole’, however, doesn’t exist because it is based on [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (20)

A look inside digital humanity

May 11, 2012 – 12:25 pm

BBC Radio 4 has just started an excellent series called The Digital Human that looks at how we use technology and how it affects our relationship to the social world. It’s written and presented by psychologist Aleks Krotoski and the first two episodes are already online. The first discusses the tendency to capture and display [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (9)

Sex survey a let down in bed

May 9, 2012 – 8:27 pm

A ‘saucy sex survey’ has been doing the rounds in the media that claims to be one of the largest studies on the sex lives of UK citizens. Unfortunately, it seems to be a bit of a let down in bed. The study has been carried out by an unholy alliance between one of the [...]

By vaughanbell | Leave a Comment

Testing the foundations of teen tech panics

May 6, 2012 – 3:21 pm

ABC Radio National’s technology and society programme Future Tense has a good discussion of how much evidence supports popular fears about young people and technology. It’s got some great comments from the always insightful Danah Boyd about how restrictions on the physical freedom of young people through fears about safety have led to increasing socialisation [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (1)

In solitary

May 6, 2012 – 9:03 am

The new edition of the APA Monitor magazine has an article that discusses the psychological impact of solitary confinement in light of its growing use in American prisons. One of the most interesting points is that evidence for the effect on solitary confinement on prisoners is actually quite limited due to difficulties studying incarcerated people. [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (2)

The rise and fall of Dark Warrior epilepsy

May 3, 2012 – 8:21 pm

Of all the names for a neurological disorder in the history of medicine, the most awesome has got to be ‘Dark Warrior epilepsy’. The condition was reported in a 1982 edition of the British Medical Journal and was so named because the patient had seizures – but only while playing the Dark Warrior video game. [...]

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

The delightful science of laughter

April 28, 2012 – 3:54 pm

Neuroscientist Sophie Scott gave a fantastic talk on the science of laughter for a recent TEDx event that you can now watch online. Talks on the science of humour are famously humourless (usually made all the more dire by the desperate inclusion of some not very funny ‘funny cartoons’) but this discussion of laughter is [...]

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

How Ghostwatch haunted psychiatry

April 21, 2012 – 1:45 pm

In 1992, the BBC broadcast Ghostwatch, one of the most controversial shows in television history and one that has had a curious and unexpected effect on the course of psychiatry. The programme was introduced as a live report into a haunted house but in reality, it was fiction. This is now a common plot device, [...]

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

An antidote to post-natal venom

April 15, 2012 – 10:49 am

Today’s Observer has a remarkably vicious article about post-natal depression in fathers that is quite breathtaking in both its ignorance and its venom: “One notices more talk of postnatal depression in fathers. I use the word “talk” advisedly, scientific proof still being in short supply. Were hormonal levels tested? Was postpartum bruising measured? How about [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (22)
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