Category: Nonsense

The Dummies series of books have been hugely successful guides to everything from fixing computers to learning languages although they’ve recently started to publish self-help books on psychological themes.

Unfortunately, they don’t fit quite as well into the general theme and hilariously, one of the titles is called Building Self-Confidence for Dummies.

UPDATE: Some great follow-ups grabbed from the comments (thanks skagedal and OmegaSupreme!):

There’s also the “Complete Idiot’s Guide” series, they have the similarly wonderfully named title “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Enhancing Self-Esteem”.

Troy McClure in the Simpsons had a self help video called “Get Confident, Stupid” !

Link to book details (thanks Catrin!).

The photos are of a mysterious and inventive brain puzzle that seems to have popped up on various places on the web.

It allows you to 3D slice an MRI brain scan in multiple ways, and unlike other puzzles, it needs to be assembled with the picture on the inside.

Curiously, the various web pages which discuss it don’t say where it’s from, so we don’t know whether it’s just someone’s one-off brilliant idea, or whether it’s a commercially available product.

Like all great puzzles, it’s conceptually very simple – just a brain scan printed out in slices and cut to fit the the surfaces on the relevant section of blocks – but it looks devilishly difficult to complete.

And once it’s done, you have a genuinely useful 3D scan model to play with.

If you don’t get it right away, have a look at some of the other photos and it will all become clear.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments (thanks prlwytzkofsky).

It was made by Neil Fraser, a software engineer at Google. See
here and here. Cool stuff indeed!

Link to photos (thanks Sandra!)
Link to more photos and more links!

If there were prizes for sheer genius, this would get the top spot. Psychologist Alan Reifman teaches psychology and he also writes song lyrics. When he sees something psychological that particularly inspires him, he writes a song about it to the tune of a popular hit and posts it on his social psychology lyrics blog. The results are sheer joy.

In honor of a talk I attended at UCLA on May 15 by Jean Twenge, on changes in college students’ personality traits and attitudes over time, I’ve written the following song….

Dr. Jean Twenge
(May be sung to the tune of “Eleanor Rigby,” Lennon/McCartney)

Dr. Jean Twenge, spends her time looking at journals and computer screens,
What are the means?
Temporal contrasts, how are today’s youth different from three decades ago?
Are they high or low?

Look at all the samples,
That used the same measure,
The data are ample,
Historical treasure,

Starting with gender, she noted patterns in females’ masculine scores,
Found that they’ve soared,
So many more traits, so many statistics, reside on libraries’ shelves,
Into which she delves,

Look at all the samples,
That used the same measure,
The data are ample,
Historical treasure…

And there’s plenty more where that came from.

If you want the best in social psychology research distilled into the musical magic of the last century’s pop (and I know you do), you need look no further.

Link to SocialPsych Lyrics blog.

The Jumping Brain is a limited edition toy created by artist Emilio Garcia that is a detailed plastic model of the brain, with, erm… webbed feat.

It comes in traditional lab demo gray, as well as red, green and blue and even has its own MySpace page.

The development of the project is even documented online, so you can see how the curious idea went from drawing board to webbed wonder.

Link to Jumping Brain website.

It’s an age old story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy is psychoanalysed, psychologically tested, strapped into a brain machine and plays the girl like a giant cello before escaping on a motorbike and throwing the wheelchair-bound doctor into the river.

Yes, it’s the video for Thomas Dolby’s 1982 synth-pop hit She Blinded Me with Science, which presumably doesn’t refer to the psychoanalysis part.

The mad scientist featured in the video was actually real life British scientist Magnus Pyke, who was best known for educating the UK public about science during the 80s and 90s.

Thomas Dolby is an eccentric synth-pop pioneer who seemed to have a bit of a thing about beautiful Japanese women, psychology and barely comprehensible videos.

Link to She Blinded Me with Science video.

In 1964 the journal Medicine, Science and the Law published an article entitled ‘Unusual Cases 2 – The Purple Brain Death’.

Sadly, the journal is no longer in print and the article isn’t available so I have absolutely no idea what it was about, but it sounds intriguing doesn’t it?

If anyone ever does find out what made this case so unusual, and what a purple brain death is exactly, do get in touch.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the BBC’s standard brain picture which always has a strangely purple tinge.

Link to PubMed entry.

Tania Hennessy is a scientist who sells beautiful visual illusion necklaces over the internet under the name Aroha Silhouettes.

The one pictured is a Penrose rectangle, a type of impossible shape of which the Penrose triangle is the most famous (and you can buy one of those too!).

However, there are many other impossible objects you can get as necklaces or earrings, all designed as striking silhouettes.

And if it’s not for you, you could always buy one for the girl in your life.

How often will you ever have the opportunity to use the line “No honey, I wasn’t staring at your breasts, I was marvelling at how a relatively simple collection of edges can demonstrate the conflicting constraints of the visual perceptual system”.

Obviously, make sure she’s wearing the pendant at the time. It’s not an all purpose excuse.

Link to Aroha Silhouettes (via Microservios).

The opening verse from The La’s 1988 indie hit There She Goes:

There she goes
There she goes again
Racing through my brain
And I just can’t contain
This feeling that remains

Link to The La’s playing There She Goes.

Shirley Ghostman is a TV psychic whose guests are completely unaware that he’s a spoof and his over-the-top antics are just the creation of comedian Marc Wootton.

In one episode he goes up against well-known psychologist and skeptic Chris French whose dry responses turn out to be funnier than Ghostman’s camp send-up.

French is head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmith’s College in London, which studies the psychological attributes that lead people to believe in the paranormal.

Some of the unit’s publications are online in their archive although you’ll have to wait for one of the best, “The ‘Haunt’ Project: An attempt to build a ‘haunted’ room by manipulating complex electromagnetic fields and infrasound”, as it’s soon to be published in a special edition of the neuropsychology journal Cortex.

Link to Shirtley Ghostman vs a wonderfully sarcastic Chris French.

Web Therapy is an incredibly funny and wonderfully made web series about a psychologist who does chaotic three-minute therapy sessions via webcam. It stars Lisa Kudrow, who plays the over-involved Fiona Wallace who can’t quite keep her personal issues out of the sessions.

It’s a really simple premise but is a very well observed satire on therapy and has some sublimely funny moments as Wallace tries to use the therapy sessions to justify her bad behaviour.

To be honest, the thought of Lisa Kudrow playing a psychologist kind of put me off, owing to a hang-over from Friends, but she plays quite a different character and does a fantastic job .

Link to Web Therapy (via BoingBoing).

If mental illness doesn’t exist, how come the dark forces of heavy metal know so much about it? Almost the whole range of psychopathology can be found on the cover of heavy metal albums.

You may never need buy a psychiatry textbook again.

Are you listening Thomaz Szasz?

Are you?

 

Continue reading “Everything I know about psychiatry, I learnt from heavy metal”

Dana Kotler and Joy Gibson are two dancers and medical students at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine who decided they’d like to illustrate the neuronal action potential through the medium of modern dance. It’s a rather unique interpretation and one that will likely stay with me for a while.

And if that doesn’t interest you, just think of girls in leotards throwing salt at each other in the service of a scientifically accurate dance spectacular. And from what I can make out, they’ve illustrated potassium flow with bananas.

Even better, they even go on to illustrate how the action potential breaks down during demyelenating diseases.

And if you still have your dancing shoes on, Scientific America has a brief but interesting article discussing why we might enjoy dance at all.

Link to Action Potential – the performance.
Link to SciAm on ‘Why do we like to dance?’

Neuroanthropology has alerted me to these wonderful ‘brain maps‘ from a 1912 book on phrenology that attempted to map how the bumps on the head related to the ‘higher faculties’.

Phrenology as a science was doomed owing to the simple fact that bumps on the head can’t be reliably linked to any ‘faculties’, but it did prompt scientists of the mind to start thinking that brain areas might be related to specific functions.

The opposing school of thought was that the brain was homogeneous, and that there was no specialisation of function for particular areas. This theory was most fully formed by Karl Lashley’s idea of mass action which was published in 1950.

Now we know that certain brain areas are specialised for certain functions, but the debate focuses on to what extent areas are specialised, how many specialisations there are, and as part of what network.

Unfortunately, many media stories love the “x is the brain area for y” angle, which is a vast oversimplification and ignores the wonderful complexity of our most mysterious of organs.

UPDATE: Thanks to Neuroanthropology and Neurophilosophy who mailed to say I’d got my knickers in a twist. The link is to a Neuroanthropology post (now fixed), although apparently Neurophilosophy wrote about the same thing last year. Normal service will be resumed shortly – presumably after my brain kicks back into gear.

Link to images from phrenology book.
Link to Neuroantrhpology commentary.

You’re in the operating theatre, about to undergo a serious surgical procedure and the anaesthetic is starting to take effect. You can hear a beautiful acapella song that seems to be a remarkably geeky composition on anaesthesiology, but you’re not sure whether it’s the consciousness altering drugs that are causing strangely harmonious hallucinations or whether the doctors are really doing multi-part harmonies.

Actually, it turns out that a group of anaesthetists are really singing an acapella song dedicated to the practice of painkilling and they’ve been kind enough to upload their version to YouTube.

The medical group is called the Laryngospasms and their strangely melodic song is replete with classic lines like “Co2 is high, I think you’re going to die”.

And if that isn’t bizarre enough, I recommend another wonderful track called ‘Waking Up Is Hard To Do’ with the line “patient’s going down, doobie doo down down”.

Unconsciousness never sounded so good.

Link to Laryngospasms song ‘Breathe’.
Link to Laryngospasms song ‘Waking Up Is Hard To Do’.

“Songs of Couch and Consultation” is a 1961 novelty album of songs about the psychiatric profession by folksinger Katie Lee (who, according to Utah Philips, went on to become an environmental activist and one of the founders of EarthFirst!). The songs are reported to be in dubious taste, but you can hear a sample of three here, including MP3s of “Will to fail” (“I secretly am enjoying myself / while slowly i’m destroying myself”!) and the marvellous big band feeling of “Repressed Hostility Blues”.

link Cover art of Katie Lee’s “Songs of Couch and Consultation”.
link WFMU blog post on the album, including MP3s.

I’ve just noticed that various US Military Psychological Operations (PSYOP) units have created their own online merchandise, so you can buy t-shirts, mugs and even teddy bears branded with unit insignia.

In fact, the teddy bear picture here seems to be emblazoned with the insignia of 346th PSYOP Airborne Company.

Perhaps the most impressive online store has been created by 5th PSYOP Battalion who have created their own custom products and images.

For those wanting something a bit more official looking, one online store has the patches for virtually every US PSYOP battalion.

In fact, CafePress seems to have a large number of PSYOP related merchandise although it’s obviously a mixture of military memorabilia and civilian creations who just want to use PSYOP images for its hipster value.

On the more disturbing end of the scale, t-shirts with the slogan “PSYOP: Because Physical Wounds Heal” seem to be regularly featured on EBay.

There’s also quite a few PSYOP promotional videos on YouTube, including this slightly clunky film that has a hint of 80s corporate video about it. Gotta dig that music.