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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | yesterday
BBC Radio 4 has an excellent documentary on how 'brain washing' techniques and psychological coercion were used by the British military for interrogations during the Second World War. Newly uncovered documents implicate psychiatrist Alexander Kennedy in the use of sensory deprivation, disorientation and mind-altering drugs on prisoners during secret service interrogations on foreign soil. The piece...
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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | yesterday
Henry Markram , leader of the Blue Brain neural tissue simulation project, has sent an angry email to IBM following their widely-reported but misleading announcement that they'd created a simulation as complex as a cat brain. This has come some months after similar headlines declared that an equivalent of a 'mouse brain' had been simulated by the IBM-affiliated Blue Brain project. The initial claims...
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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | yesterday
Originally published earlier this year in Prospect magazine, Tom has put a copy of his fantastic article online where he discusses our capacity for improvisation and how it links with a post-brain damage condition call confabulation where patients seem unable to stop themselves inventing unlikely stories. Confabulation occurs most typically after frontal lobe damage and causes patients to give clearly...
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Blog Business World (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
The Future That Brought Her Here The Memoir of a Call to Awaken By: Deborah Denicola Published: June 1, 2009 Format: Paperback: 368 pages ISBN-10: 0892541482 ISBN-13: 978-0892541485 Publisher: Ibis Press "This is the story of a depressed skeptic's spiritual awakening", writes teacher and acclaimed poet Deborah Denicola, in her deeply moving personal account of her spiritual journey The Future...
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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
New Scientist has a gallery of striking photos taken from Christopher Payne's book that details his photographic tour of abandoned asylums in the US. In both the UK and the US, and, I suspect, in many other countries, there are numerous unused decaying mental asylums that have become obsolete as 'care in the community' has become the flag under which mental health services have been reformed or ignored....
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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
Colombia has an official Day of the Psychologist and you might be forgiven for thinking that it's a self-declared promotional event by the psychology association here, but it isn't, the day is established by law. Article 92 of Law 1090 establishes 20th November as the official celebration. Psychology departments around the country usually celebrate the day with conferences and parties. I was kindly...
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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: Neuroanthropology has an excellent piece on the late Lévi-Strauss and the development of the scientific study of cultural cognition and anthropology. The Book of the Week in the Times Higher Education Supplement is 'What Intelligence Tests Miss'. Wired UK has a short but sensible piece on 'how to tell if somebody is lying '. In a nutshell,...
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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
Neurophilosophy has an excellent piece on 'time-space' synaesthesia where affected individuals experience units of time - such as hours, days, or months - as occupying specific locations in space relative to their own body. The image on the right is taken from a BBC News article on time-space synaesthesia and was drawn by one lady to illustrate how days of the week appear to her. However, Neurophilosophy...
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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
New Scientist reports on a new study on how a gene that gives protection against the deadly brain disease kuru became more common in people exposed to the condition through their cannibalistic tradition of eating the bodies of dead relatives. Kuru is a prion disease, meaning the damage is caused by a poorly arranged or folded protein molecule which can trigger the same damaging changes in other proteins...
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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
A study on male gamblers just published in the Journal of Gambling Studies found that having a girl on your arm does bring 'luck' of sorts, as slot machine gamblers had fewer losses when accompanied by a female. I am tempted to label this the 'James Bond Effect' but in gambling, good fortune is relative, so if you think good luck means pissing slightly less of your hard earned cash down the drain...
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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
I've just found a remarkable 1963 study [ pdf ] from the Archives of Opthalmology in which 24 blind participants took LSD to see if they could experience visual hallucinations. It turns out, they can, although this seems largely to be the case in blind people who had several years of sight to begin with but who later lost their vision. Those blind from a very early age (younger than two years-old)...
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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
Seed Magazine has an interesting piece on the ' uncanny valley ' effect, where humanoid figures become increasingly more attractive until they're 'a bit too lifelike' and start seeming uncomfortably eerie. It's a fantastic piece because it discusses the development of the concept of 'uncanniness' - from the initial explanations by Freud to some tentative experimental studies that attempts to explain...
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Mr. Verb (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
We haven't noted the passing of Claude Lévi Strauss here yet (nor that of Dell Hymes). For a piece that talks about Lévi Strauss in connection to linguistics, check out this obituary, including these quotes: he came into contact with structural linguistics, a behaviouristic amalgam of European and American theories, and particularly the more imaginative work of Roman Jacobson, the Russian...
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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/17/2009
The New York Times has a fascinating article on how surgeons are attempting to treat aggressive and fatal brain tumours by injecting chemotherapy drugs directly into the brain. One of the challenges for drug makers is that there are many substances that would otherwise have an effect in the brain, but it's very hard to get them there from the bloodstream because the blood-brain barrier filters out...
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Mind Hacks (Free subscription) | 11/17/2009
The Wall Street Journal has a revealing article on why Argentina has the largest concentration of psychologists anywhere in the world and why it has a long-standing cultural fascination with psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a set of psychological theories and form of psychotherapy based strongly on the ideas of Freud. Buenos Aires is one of the world centres of psychoanalysis and has been since the...
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