Mind Hacks

While browsing the ever-vigilant (and mildly addictive) Neurofuture blog I was alerted to the fact that the Dana Foundation have an archive of podcasts online, including their Gray Matters radio series and other in-depth neuroscience discussions.

They include a conversation with Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel, Nancy Andreasen on the creative brain and a number of other wide-ranging programmes on everything from neuroethics to mental illness.

Also available is a page with all the programmes as realaudio files.

Link to Dana Foundation podcasts directory.
Link to Dana Foundation realaudio archive.

Today is the 150th birthday of the late Sigmund Freud, controversial granddaddy of psychoanalysis who sparked off the modern interest in the unconscious and the use of ‘talk therapies’ in treating mental distress.

The Times has a critical article examining his legacy and finishing with a tongue-in-cheek quiz to test your knowledge of the great man and his theories.

Alternatively, The Calcutta Telegraph has a piece on Freud’s last surviving patient, Margarethe Walter, who spoke at an event to celebrate the anniversary.

The National Ledger starts an article by looking at the amount of kitsch freud merchandise available, and goes on to examine the relationship between Sigmund Freud, and his daughter Anna Freud, in a remarkably well-informed article that muses on the possible impact of this on Freudian theories.

And now’s probably a good time to revisit the five-part BBC Radio 4 series Freudian Slips – a series of 15 minute programmes each dedicated to one of Freud’s key works. The series is archived online.

BBC All in the Mind has a special on the psychological impact of combat and military psychiatry.

New presenter and psychiatrist Dr Kwame McKenzie investigates the mental health provisions of the armed forces, and the new developments introduced to support the emotional well-being of soldiers operating under intensely stressful conditions.

Dr Kwame McKenzie takes a look at the mental health of the military. With nearly one in 5 US soldiers returning from Iraq with psychological problems there’s growing concern about the mental health of soldiers. Dr McKenzie attends a NATO conference in Brussels looking at psychological support, and talks to Major General Patrick Cammaert, a former Dutch Marine, who now leads 15,000 UN peace keepers in DR Congo. Lieutenant-Colonel Carl Castro and Dr Brenda Wiederhold explain how the US is using predeployment briefings and Virtual Reality to help soliders cope, and Professor Simon Wessely talks about the situation in Britain.

The Army is using the psychological model of Transformational Leadership to reform its training regime, and All in the Mind visits the Infant Training Centre at Catterick to see if it’s making any difference to new recruits.

And Dr McKenzie talks to two veterans being treated by Combat Stress about their psychological breakdowns following active service.

Presumably, they mean Infantary Training Centre rather than Infant Training Centre!

Link to All in the Mind webpage.
realaudio of programme.

Psychologist Richard Davidson (pictured below) of the W.M. Keck lab for Functional Brain Imaging and Behaviour at the University of Wisconsin has been named one of the world’s Top 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He’s most famous for researching the neural correlates of meditation and for collaborating with the Dalai Lama:

“East and West not only meet in Richard Davidson’s laboratory; they are also starting to exchange a great deal of useful information about human experience and human potential”.Read more

Freakonomist Steven Levitt also features in the list, with a brief eulogy by Malcolm Gladwell.

Hey Mind Hacks readers – Which psychologists or neuroscientists do you think should have made the list, and why? Comments are open.

Link to Richard Davidson’s website.
Link to article in Time magazine.

By combining a hand-held global positioning system with a galvanic skin response sensor (that measures the sweatiness of your fingers), London-based artist Christian Nold has created a gadget that measures your arousal as you walk around. Superimposing the data onto your route, using something like Google Earth, allows you to see a kind of ’emotion map‘ for where you’ve been.

Nold has tested the device on over 300 people so far (his data is publicly available), and is looking for academic and commercial research partners to explore the project’s potential.

Link to Bio-mapping website.
Link to Bio-mapping documentary download.

We’re probably going to be seeing a lot of Alain de Botton in the coming months, as he’s out and about promoting his new book ‘The Architecture of Happiness’.

I’m a huge fan of de Botton, whose books such as ‘The Consolations of Philosophy’ have won widespread critical acclaim for making philosophy accessible and relevant to modern life.

But I felt he went off the boil with his last book Status Anxiety and after reading Jonathan Glancey’s review of his new book in The Guardian, I’m worried he may not have found a return to form.

However, I am going to read the new book (partly because I‚Äôm researching a feature on the role of psychology in Britain‚Äôs current building boom) so if there are any magazine or newspaper editors out there who‚Äôd like me to review it, please do get in touch 😉

Also, while we’re discussing de Botton, I should point you to his Times review of Cordelia Fine’s book ‘A mind of its own’, in which he discusses whether the experimental approach to understanding the human psyche – that is, psychology – really is the right one:

“Expecting to study the mysteries of the mind, [psychology] students soon realise that they have set off down a far less glamorous and unusual path, for their field requires them not so much to explore new insights as to test old and quite simple ones according to a rigorous and patient scientific method. Psychology emerges as, depending on your point of view, either a gloriously or horrifyingly pedantic discipline”.

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PS. I virtually bumped into de Botton at Edinburgh airport once, but I’m (a) not that good with faces and (b) shy, so I persuaded my girlfriend to go and ask him if he was who I thought he was. Anyway, apparently he was utterly charming and self-effacing.

UPDATE: Alain de Botton appeared on Monday’s edition of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4. And he’s got his own TV series on Channel 4/ More 4.

Link to Alain de Botton’s website, which includes full details of all his books, plus reviews, audio clips and much more.
Link to Guardian review of his new book.
Link to article on Britain’s building boom.
Link to de Botton’s review of ‘A mind of its own’.

There’s a new six-part series starting on BBC 2 this week called The Happiness Formula, and the companion website has all sorts of features including on-line video clips, happiness tests, and an article about the science of happiness.

Glancing through, it looks like among the key contributors are well-being psychologist Ed Diener, positive psychologist Martin Seligman, and Emeritus Professor of Economics Lord Layard, who’s been making a lot of noise recently in an effort to get the UK government to provide more therapists. Layard also wrote a book a few years ago called Happiness: Lessons from a new science.

The series comes at a time when there are increasing calls for the population’s happiness, rather than it’s prosperity, to be used as the main measure of the government’s success.

Link to The Happiness Formula Website.
Link to article on the science of happiness.
Link to happiness test.