Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
The New York Times has a fascinating piece on the online community of people who believe they are being ‘gang stalked’.
Completely destroy the immune system with chemotherapy and rebuild it with stem cells. A radical experimental treatment that seemed to halt multiple sclerosis with 1 death in 23 out of 24 patients people. One died. Reported by BBC News.
Aeon has a piece on the social function of human sacrifice.
Using image processing to improve reconstruction of movies from brain activity. Remarkable but trippy extraction of video from brain activity from Jack Gallant’s lab. Deep dream esque.
The Washington Post has an interesting piece on the history of seeing racism as a mental illness and its problems.
A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved. The Atlantic has a good piece on Attention Schema Theory.
Mosaic has an excellent balanced piece on the effect of screens, smartphones and devices on young people.
There’s a good obituary for recently deceased legendary psychologist Jerome Bruner in The Washington Post.
Time reports that most violent crimes are wrongly linked to mental illness.
The widely-reported link between older fathers, spontaneous DNA mutations in sperm, and chance of offspring with autism may be due to a confound: men who carry risk factors tend to have children late in life. Good reporting from Spectrum.
Mind Hacks 
The question is not how harmful are screens to young children. Rather, how harmful is it to keep them screen-free until they are older or demand one? Does an 18 month-old infant really suffer without an iPad? How about at 6? There are plenty of ways to learn computer science without the Internet or games. Girls often become interested in science through an interest in pets or wildlife. Outdoor exercise is important for mental and physical health. If this 18 month old is fixated on the iPad, isn’t she missing out on other things?