2008-12-05 Spike activity

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Neurophilosophy discusses a newly discovered form of synaesthesia – touch-emotion synaesthesia.

Psychological highlights from the most recent Society for Neuroscience conference are collected by the BPS Research Digest.

Discover Magazine has a punchy bio of Noam Chomsky.

Antidepressants that leak into the water supply affect fishes’ brains, according to research covered by Science News.

A whole lotta coverage of the ‘body swapping’ research has appeared over the last few days. The best has been an article on Not Exactly Rocket Science, a piece from The New York Times and a write-up from Wired.

New Scientist picks up on research suggesting psychopaths have an eye for the underdog.

A review of a new book on the author of Roget’s thesaurus sounds fascinating – “The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget‚Äôs Thesaurus” – and appears in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Neuronarrative interviews Jonah Lehrer and asks him about the art, mind and brain.

A rather breathless title but an interesting write-up of an experiment finding the same thing seems more painful if someone deliberately inflicts it – from Discover.

The British Journal of Psychiatry has a study showing that IQ predicts likelihood of murder – the higher your IQ, the less likely you are to get knocked off.

The U.N. investigates electromagnetic terrorism – a somewhat bizarre episode reported by Wired.

The Washington Post looks at a recent neuroscience study perhaps suggesting the origins of the ‘senior moment‘.

Obama invents a new emotion, reports Slate.

NPR Radio has a fascinating short segment suggesting that colour perception switches sides in brain during development.

A letter in the American Journal of Psychiatry discusses web-based communities of possibly delusional people and comes to a similar conclusion as myself regarding the validity of the diagnostic criteria.

The New York Times reports on the politics of looking calm and unruffled vs looking concerned.

Baby boys may show spatial supremacy, have robot army, will crush puny humans under foot, reports Science News. I paraphrased the last two points you understand.

The New York Times has a curious piece on the possible psychological effect (based on nothing but pure speculation it must be said) of which time watches are set to when the appear in adverts.

A follow-up from our piece on Rudolpfo Llin√°s discusses the role of brain oscillations in schizophrenia (thanks CopperKettle).