Category: Nonsense

Sometimes, it’s just harder to do it without the innuendo. HelmetsRUs have a multi-sport helmet that has a brain painted on the outside.

While we usually tell people to wear helmets to keep the rocks out of their brain, this is the first time you might have to avoid keeping your brain out of the rocks.

I have to say, it’s a bit of a weird product if you think about it. I mean, would you buy a jock strap with your balls painted on the outside?

Obviously, that was intended to be a rhetorical question, but I’ve come to realise that the internet has killed rhetorical questions because you can always find someone who has lived your figure of speech, no matter how bizarre you make it.

Really? You own several you say? Could I interest you in a brain helmet…

Link to brain helmet.

Australian comedy show The Chasers War on Everything has a fantastic sketch about a Jerry Springer-style philosophical talk show hosted by Noam Chomsky.

The script is entirely new but the ideas seems to have been taken from a funny text that has been making the rounds for some years on the net, based on the same premise.

Chomsky was genuinely in a comedy show once, albeit unwittingly, when he was interviewed by Ali G. If you’ve not seen it, it’s also very funny.

Link to The Chomsky Show sketch (via @anibalmastobiza).

Good God there’s a lot of scientific research on chewing gum. And I mean a lot. Here’s just a few of the latest bulletins from the front line of chewing gum cognitive science.

Chewing gum does not induce context-dependent memory when flavor is held constant [link]

Effects of chewing gum on mood, learning, memory and performance of an intelligence test [link]

Effects of caffeine in chewing gum on mood and attention [link]

Chewing gum alleviates negative mood and reduces cortisol during acute laboratory psychological stress [link]

Chewing gum and context-dependent memory: the independent roles of chewing gum and mint flavour [link]

Chewing gum and context-dependent memory effects: a re-examination [link]

Chewing gum and cognitive performance: a case of a functional food with function but no food [link]

Role of glucose in chewing gum-related facilitation of cognitive function [link]

Chewing gum can produce context-dependent effects upon memory [link]

Chewing gum differentially affects aspects of attention in healthy subjects [link]

Chewing gum selectively improves aspects of memory in healthy volunteers [link]

Effects of three principal constituents in chewing gum on electroencephalographic activity [link]

Smell and taste of chewing gum affect frequency domain EEG source localizations [link]

And not one on whether chewing gum loses its flavour on the bedpost overnight.

Actually, those are just a sample of the cognitive science studies on chewing gum, and there are many more. If you count all scientific studies with ‘chewing gum’ in the title, you get more than 540 to date.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments, a great addition from historian of psychology Chris Green:

There is a long history of “scientific” (read: “industrial”) research into the effects of chewing gum. The Beech-Nut company hired Columbia U. psychologist Harry Hollingworth to do a study of the “psychodynamics” of gum-chewing in the mid-1930s. Philip Wrigley also commissioned research and used the “results” (mainly, that gum-chewing reduces tension and improves concentration) to convince to U.S. Army to include (his) gum in the rations of every American soldier who served in WWII. He also tried to convince a variety of businesses to supply gum to their workers, on the strength of the same basic argument.

The Australian military is seeking a human race Judas to design intelligent and fully autonomous robots that will be able to “neutralise threats” for a prize pot of $1.6 million.

From BBC News:

The government wants to develop an “intelligent and fully autonomous system” capable of carrying out dangerous surveillance missions.

Senior officials in Canberra have said they hope that unarmed robotic vehicles will do some of the army’s “dirty work” in such hazardous theatres.

The ultimate plan is for groups of these sophisticated machines to be sent into battle to help neutralise the enemy.

That’s their ultimate plan you idiot, not ours.

Our ultimate plan is to take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Link to Aussie military’s International Challenge To Destroy Humanity.
Link to BBC News on the end times.

What modern home could not benefit from some brain-shaped porcelain salt and pepper shakers, I hear you ask. Apparently they even have magnets so the two hemisphere snap together into a whole brain.

Obviously, you’ll need to do an impromptu callosotomy to use them but at least you’ll have the fun of doing some split-brain experiments with your seasoning.

Not to be confused with AC/DC’s rather more saucy Brain Shake of course.

Link to brain salt and pepper shakers from Think Geek.

Rarely does one see a tribute to both the Wu-Tang Clan and the biochemistry of neuronal signalling in the same place, but it has been done, and the results are nothing short of a musical spectacular.

It’s a hip hop guide to neurobiology, so just sit back, relax and go with the flow (of ions as they pass through the cell membrane).

One of best bits is seeing the names of all the rappers: Sarah Tonin, Dopa-a-Mean, Gift of GABA. You get the idea.

Link to Synaptic Cleft by the Glut-tang Clan (via Greg Laden).

It’s an age old story. Girl meets boy. We presume girl loses boy, because she goes mad in a shoe shop. Girl is taken to hospital for a CT scan, then to an art gallery, and then hospital again where she trashes a room with lots of unnecessary medical equipment in a fit of despair. Yes, it’s the video for The Hours ‘See the Light’ starring the beautiful Sienna Miller.

The video is by Hollywood director Tony Kaye, the art is by Damian Hirst, and the clichés by Charles Dickens.

To be fair, it’s an excellent track, and Miller is emotionally convincing, but I’m always baffled why mentally distressed women are always portrayed in their nighties.

It’s as if bed clothes and unbrushed hair are a unique sign of female psychiatric disorder.

Actually, that might be one to send to the DSM-V committee, although I suspect they’re already on the case.

Link to The Hours video ‘See the Light’ (via @sarcastic_f).

Today’s Bad Science covers a particularly offensive bit of poor science reporting where preliminary results were misreported as suggesting that “women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped”.

The study has not yet been published and more worryingly showed none of the things claimed in the article published in The Telegraph, which raises the question of where such a disturbing spin came from.

The British Psychological Society put out a press release which mentioned none of the main claims of the newspaper article, but still seems a little unwise considering that the research was only in its early stages.

Link to Bad Science on ropey reporting of the study.

Dapper British t-shirt blog Hide Your Arms have collected 101 of the best robot t-shirts available anywhere on the net.

It has every type of robot reference you can possibly think of and there are some genuinely beautiful garments hidden amid the torrent of mechanised irony.

Enjoy them while you can because when the robot war comes we’ll all be naked except for a bar code tattoo.

It’ll be worse than it sounds. I promise.

Link to Hide Your Arms 101 robot t-shirts.

Comedian “Weird Al” Yankovic has made a 3D movie about the brain that stars himself and will premier at the Orange County Fare in California. I didn’t think I’d ever find myself writing that sentence, but life is strange like that.

According to the spiffy website, the 10 minute movie is intended to be both entertaining and educational, and from the clips on the website, it looks kinda loca. Click on ‘Adventures of Al’s Brain’ for a taste of the chaos.

It’s interesting how neuroscience has made its way so firmly into popular culture. While walking into the tube at London’s Euston station the other day, I noticed a huge advert for a new Mercedes sports car with the slogan “Warning: May increase serotonin levels” emblazoned across it.

Presumably they’re relying on the ‘antidepressant boosts serotonin’ angle without realising that SSRIs more reliably produce sexual dysfunction than happiness.

I like to think that a bit of their unconscious was shining through.

Link to Al’s Brain website with video and merchandise (via @mocost).

From 1907, the front cover from sheet music for a ragtime tune called Brain Storm Rag, from way before it was cool to label everything as being related to neuroscience in some way.

If you’re musically inclined you can also download the full publication as a PDF, musical notation included, to play at your leisure.

If you’d like to record it and upload it to the net, do let us know and we’ll happily link to it as I’d love to find out what is sounds like.

Link to Brain Storm Rag online version.

The ephemera assemblyman blog has a mesmerising gallery of last century stage hypnotist posters that are an irresistible combination of camp send-up, schlock horror and roll-up roll-up razzmatazz.

If you’re familiar with the history of hypnosis you’ll notice more than a few passing references to George du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby, titled after a beautiful but tone-deaf young woman who is transformed into a breathtaking singer through through the power of hypnosis.

But Trilby is unaware of her transformation and is not a willing participant, being under the thrall of the manipulative hypnotist Svengali.

Indeed, we still used the word ‘svengali’ to refer to a manager or music mogul, although it has lost many of its more sinister associations.

The novel is notable for its anti-semitic undertones, as the hypnotist fulfils the racist stereotype of the ‘cunning Jew’, but it has also been the basis of hypnosis myths to the present day – not least the idea that it can be used to ‘enthrall’ people against their will.

I also suspect that the novel is largely responsible the remarkably extensive hypnosis fetish community who get kicks from roleplaying sexual ‘mind control’ fantasies.

Link to hypnotist posters gallery (via @mocost).

The Times has a long and tiresome article about how the ‘digital overload’ is affecting our brains which is only notable for one thing, it mentions not a single study on how digital technology affects the brain.

Imagine that. You can write 2,000 words for one of the world’s leading newspapers without a single established finding in the whole piece. Not one.

Actually, it’s worse than that, as this article contains an anti-fact. It cites the ’email damages IQ’ PR stunt as the results of a legitimate study when it was a marketing exercise for, ironically, a computer company.

Rather oddly, a recent article from New York Magazine followed exactly the pattern (no relevant studies, email damages IQ gaff), but came to the opposite conclusion.

As we mentioned at the time, the studies on the effect of digital technology support none of this public pant wetting.

Journalists. Have you been affected by the economic downturn? Are you finding that it’s difficult to get your work in print?

Don’t waste your time writing about politics or the economy and be imprisoned by the tyranny of evidence – write whatever the hell you want about technology and the brain and get the world’s finest publications to pay your bills. Your editor clearly can’t tell the difference.

…and breathe. In with anger, out with love.

No, it’s not working.

Link to where do they get these people from?

Oh dear. It looks like psychologist Glenn Wilson has fallen off the wagon again. From the man who brought you the ’email hurts IQ more than cannabis’ PR stunt before repenting, comes the ‘the way you hold your drink reveals personality’ PR stunt.

This time it’s to promote a British pub chain and God bless those drink sodden journos who have gone and given it pride of place in the science section of today’s papers.

Even the BBC (who should know better but rarely do) have put it in their health section:

Dr Glenn Wilson, a consultant psychologist, observed the body language of 500 drinkers and divided them into eight personality types.

These were the flirt, the gossip, fun lover, wallflower, the ice-queen, the playboy, Jack-the-lad and browbeater.

Dr Wilson, who carried out the work for the [get free advertising somewhere else] bar chain, said glass hold “reflected the person you are”.

I would point out that it’s not published, or even sensical, but is there really any point when the whole premise is so ridiculous that you’d have to be virtually paralytic to take it seriously.

Wilson has actually done a great deal of serious research and is well known for his work on personality but occasionally seems to go on inexplicable media binges on the tab of corporate advertising.

Sadly, we’re the ones left with the hangover.

BBC News has one of those not-very-good ‘brain area for x’ news stories on its site, but it had this quote from Simon Baron-Cohen which made me chuckle

For some people, socializing is an intrinsic reward, just like chocolate or cannabis.

I wondered why I get glazed looks at parties, and now I know.

This page on herbal treatments for amnesia made me laugh out loud:

Amnesia is usually caused by some traumatic event, like an accident or a blow to the head. It may also be caused by taking certain sedatives. Some cases are caused by disease like Alzheimer’s, which directly affects the brain, or because of poor brain circulation. A poor memory may also be exacerbated by a lack of stimulation. Some cases of amnesia are also psychologically based, caused by neurosis or anxiety…

Herbal Treatments

Rosemary ‚Äì taking rosemary tea may help improve the memory as well as support the entire body’s systems. This tea can be taken as needed for forgetfulness…

Walnut ‚Äì this proven memory booster is a good natural remedy for loss of memory. Eating walnuts on a regular basis will help recover memories…

Black pepper ‚Äì mix five finely ground black pepper seeds with a teaspoon of honey and take it twice per day to help the memory and to improve amnesia…

Rosemary, Walnut and Black Pepper? There’s probably some vegan restaurant in San Francisco that’s cured hundreds by now.

Link to herbal cures for amnesia page.