Humor: The Psychology of Living Buoyantly (The Plenum Series in Social/Clinical Psychology) (The Springer Series in Social/Clinical Psychology)
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 16 hours ago
I've just found an odd study on whether rap and heavy rock music encourages 'inappropriate behaviour' in psychiatric patients when compared to easy listening and country tunes. It sounds like it could be something from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but as I don't have access to the full text, I'm still not sure what the 'inappropriate behaviours' were (air guitar? MC Hammer trousers') A comparison...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 20 hours ago
Darryl Cunningham draws amazing comics about psychiatry and mental illness, drawn from his time working as a student nurse on psychiatric wards. His comic strip Psychiatric Tales has been regularly appearing online and he's just posted the amazing and heartfelt last chapter along with an announcement that the series is to be published as a book by Blank Slate Publishing in February. If you want to...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: What should count as an illness in the DSM-V? Asks Psychiatric Times with a brief discussion on the concepts of mental disorder . Addiction Inbox is a fantastic blog about drug abuse and addiction. There's an excellent article on the anthropology of office gossip over at The New York Times . New Scientist reports on a convicted murderer who got...
Pluralist Speaks (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
At a hundred, Claude Levi-Strauss observed the binary structure that death follows life. I was never really a 'believer' in the Levi-Strauss scheme. And yet... There is plenty of evidence that there is some sort of mental brain structure, in that we do learn languages and their grammar far faster than copying from those around us. There seems to be a meta-language structure in the brain that allows...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
I've discovered that if you search for "says psychologist" on Google, you get a giant avalanche of wtf. I encourage you to try it for yourself, but here are a few of the highlights, all taken from headlines of news stories. Twitter makes you dumb, says psychologist Boys have it worse, says psychologist Faith schools breed terrorism, says psychologist Change is possible for gays, says psychologist...
Cognitive Daily (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Greta and I did our undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, or as a commonly-sold T-shirt on campus put it, "where fun goes to die." To say that Chicago didn't emphasize academics over a social life is to deny that people literally lived in the library (a full-scale campsite was found behind one of the stairwells in the stacks; students had been living there for months). It's...
Sentient Developments (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
From the four corners of the web: J.D. Trout - The Science of the Good Society | Point of Inquiry J.D. Trout is a professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, and an adjunct professor at the Parmly Sensory Sciences Institute. He writes on the nature of scientific and intellectual progress, as well as on the contribution that social science can make to human well-being. He is the author of...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
The latest issue of Wired UK has a cover feature on breaking ideas for 2010. Mind and brain innovations feature strongly and several are freely available online. I might immodestly recommend the piece on ' neurosecurity ' and how researchers are having harden neural implants against hackers, as it was written by me. Regular readers will know we broke the story back in June, although it was great to...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Some impressive graffiti of a brain-powered robot from the future, found on a wall near the Hospital San Vicente de Paúl in Medellín.
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
The Philip K. Dick novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch features a portable device which allows patients to consult with the virtual psychiatrist Dr Smile . If I'm not mistaken, the system seems to have re-invented by this research team: Virtual patient: a photo-real virtual human for VR-based therapy Stud Health Technol Inform . 2004;98:154-6. Kiss B, Benedek B, Szijártó G, Csukly...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
The Economist has a delightful article on how we self-justify our dubious behaviour after the event using spurious reasons. It turns out we often deceive ourselves into believing that our hastily constructed justifications are genuinely what motivated us. The article riffs on a recent study by marketing researchers Zoë Chance and Michael Norton , who asked male students to choose between two...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
The Neurocritic has found this wonderful designer sofa made around EEG or 'brain wave' data captured from artist Lucas Maassen , who also created the wonderful piece of furniture. There's more about the construction of the piece on a page on Maassen's website, but it's running a bit slow at the moment, so you may need to be a bit patient for it to load. However, there's more about the piece at The...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
As regular readers will know, we often note the passing of the regular British ritual where the UK government asks a group of scientific advisers to give evidence on the harmfulness of drugs and then ignores them. The unwritten rule is that everyone feigns mild exasperation and then goes about their business as if nothing had happened, but the Home Secretary Alan Johnson has gone and spoiled the party...
Tom Nelson (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
What would it take to replace coal in the U.S? « Green Hell Blog It would take a massive effort to replace coal production. Peabody Energy, which owns North Antelope and is the world’s largest private sector coal company, says replacing coal would be a gargantuan task. It would require 2,400 times more solar generation , 40 times more wind power, 250 new nuclear plants, almost double the...
Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
One of the most important films in the history of psychiatry, depicting treatment of 'shell shocked' British soldiers during World War One, has just been made freely available online by UK medical charity the Wellcome Trust who are currently putting lots of their archive film online. The film was made by Sir Arthur Hurst in 1917 when large numbers of soldiers with 'shell shock', later to be called...
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