Tom Stafford's Blog, page 125

The first man with autism

The Atlantic has an amazing article about the first person ever diagnosed with autism, the now 77 year-old Donald Triplett, who plays a mean game of golf and seems to be doing just fine.

The piece tracks the history of both Triplett and our understanding of autism which has changed radically since the diagnosis was first used in the 1940s.

However, it is Triplett's life story which really bring the article alive.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Donald's life is that he grew up to be an...

Once and future gayness

Never one to avoid opening Pandora's box, Bering in Mind has an excellent discussion on whether it's possible to predict adult sexual orientation from childhood traits and behaviours.

As the article notes, there are a host of heated debates about the merits of trying to 'predict homosexuality' but even as a purely scientific question, it turns out to be challenging research.

For the most accurate data, prospective studies – where you see how people change over time – are ideal, but...

An uneven hail of bullets

Gunshot wounds to the head are a major cause of death among soldiers in combat but little is known about where bullets are more likely to impact. A study just published in the Journal of Trauma looked at common bullet entry points among soldiers who died in combat and found clear patterns – but the researchers are not sure why.

The study, led by physician Yuval Ran, looked at Israeli combat deaths from 2000 to 2004 and tracked where bullet entries appeared on the skull (illustrated above)...

Touching the space between us

Slate has an excellent article on the psychology of collaborations that highlights the often underplayed role of the creative relationship and bemoans are obsession with the illusory 'lone genius'.

The author is Joshua Wolf Shenk who you may recognise from one of the best psychology articles I've yet read – an Atlantic article on happiness and ageing – which we covered last year on Mind Hacks.

This new piece is part of a ongoing series that aims to pick up on our cultural neglect of the...

How culture can invert genetic risk

Neuron Culture has a fantastic piece on how a long touted 'depression gene' turned out to reduce the risk of mood problems in people in East Asians and why we can't always understand genetic effects on behaviour without understanding culture.

The piece riffs on the long-established finding that the short variant of the serotonin transporter or 5-HTTLPR gene is more common in people with depression, until psychologist Joan Chiao found that East Asians are more than twice as likely to have the g...

Twilight novels 'could be altering the brain'

The Twilight series of young adult novels "could be affecting the dynamic workings of the teenage brain in ways scientists don't yet understand" according to a bizarre article from LiveScience.

To be fair, the premise of the article is quite correct, Twilight novels (along with everything) are indeed altering the brain in ways we don't understand, because the brain changes in response to any and every experience we have – plus, we don't have omniscient powers of all-knowing.

The report has...

The death of 'right brain thinking'

A new study published in Psychological Bulletin has just reviewed all the neuroscience research on creative thinking and found no good evidence for the pop-culture idea that the right side of the brain is more involved in 'creative thinking'.

Sadly, the full text isn't available online, but the abstract of the study contains all the punchlines:

A review of EEG, ERP, and neuroimaging studies of creativity and insight.

Psychol Bull. 2010 Sep;136(5):822-48.

Dietrich A, Kanso R.

Creativity is a...

The baroque art rifle

Anthropologist Wade Davis's wonderfully vivid description of the effects of Amazonian hallucinogenic plants from page 216 of fantastic book, One River:

In the case of yagé, some twenty one admixtures have been identified to date. Two of these are of particular interest. Psychotria viridis is a shrub in the coffee family. Chagopranga is Diplopterys cabrerana, a forest liana closely related to yagé. Unlike yagé, both of these plants contain tryptamines, powerful psychoactive compounds that when...

Dopamine crystal method

A beautiful image of dopamine crystals viewed with polarized light.

From the description: "A polarized light micrograph of dopamine crystals. Dopamine is a naturally occurring precursor of norepinephrine that affects various brain processes, many of which control movements, emotional responses and the experiences of pain and pleasure. Dopamine receptors are especially clustered in the midbrain. The drug L-DOPA, used to help sufferers of Parkinson's disease, is converted in the brain to...

An emotional timeline of 9/11

The graph below records levels of sadness, anxiety and anger, in words taken from US pager messages, sent as the day of September 11th 2001 unfolded. The analysis is reported in a study just published in Psychological Science. Click for a larger version of the graph.

 

 

Link to PubMed entry for study.

Link to DOI entry for study.