Tom Stafford's Blog, page 133

The psychic origins of EEG

[image error]Oscillatory Thoughts has an excellent post on Hans Berger, the inventor of EEG, who created the technology not solely to investigate the electrical signals of the brain, but to try and uncover the neural basis of 'telepathy'.

It turns out, Berger was a big believer in psychic phenomena: namely telepathy. He believed that there was an underlying physical basis for mental phenomena, and that these mental processes—being physical in nature—could be transmitted between people. Thus, in order to...

Chasing the mechanical dragon

[image error]A coin operated 'opium den', found in the Musée Mécanique antique mechanical arcade on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco.

For only 25 cents you can see some rather glassy-eyed Chinese gentlemen, a door which reveals a skeleton, and a dragon that appears through the window.

It's no coincidence that this somewhat eccentric piece of carnivalia originates in San Francisco, as it was the first place in America to ban smoking opium.

The city passed the 'Opium Den Ordinance' in 1875, timed to take...

2010-07-30 Spike activity

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

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Popular Science reports on proposals to study the obscure hallucinogen ibogain as a treatment for opiate addiction.

A study on how money restricts life's pleasures is covered by PsyBlog.

Yale Alumni Magazine looks at research "which seeks to use robots not to perform tasks for humans but as a means of investigating the inner workings of human behavior and psychology".

The chance of getting executed for killing a white person is about three...

Booty calling

[image error]Someone, somewhere, can look you straight in the eye and say "I've got a PhD in booty call research".

A new study just published online in the Journal of Sex Research investigates where the booty call falls on the spectrum of relationships.

Positioning the Booty-Call Relationship on the Spectrum of Relationships: Sexual but More Emotional Than One-Night Stands

Peter K. Jonason; Norman P. Li; Jessica Richardson

Journal of Sex Research

Most research on human sexuality has focused on long-term...

The experiment requires that you continue

[image error]Spanish daily El País recently published an article on psychologist Stanley Milgram which had this amazing photo of the young conformity researcher where he looks surprisingly beatnick.

Sadly the photo isn't dated but it makes quite a contrast to the better known photos where he looks much more like the typical professor of the age.

He looks both wonderfully creative and slightly haunted, which seems to capture his contribution to psychology perfectly.

The article is also worth checking out but ...

Poker face science

[image error]The best 'poker face' is probably not a neutral expression, but a happy one, as it led to a greater number of opponent mistakes in a study just published in PLoS One.

The research looked at how poker playing was influenced by the emotional expression of opponents and discovered that blank and threatening expressions had little effect, but a positive expression tends to lull people into a false sense of trust and puts them off their game.

Taken from the study abstract:

This study investigates...

Plastic punk

[image error]Some awesome geek moves from the science of phonetics, as applied to the new wave punk classic 'Ça Plane Pour Moi' previously and falsely believed to have been sung by Plastic Bertrand.

From the AV Club report:

A staple of any new-wave dance night (ask a white person), "Ca Plane Pour Moi" made a chart-stopping star out of Belgian singer Plastic Bertrand (né Roger Jouret) and provided him with his most lasting legacy—except an expert linguist has just proved that Bertrand didn't actually sing...

From on hayo

[image error]An amazing passage about the use of coca among of the indigenous Kogi and Ika people of Colombia, taking from p24 of anthropologist Wade Davis' magical book on the ethnobotany of ceremonial chemicals, One River.

In a sacred landscape in which every plant is a manifestation of the divine, the chewing of hayo, a variety of coca only found in the mountains of Colombia, represents the most profound expression of culture. Distance in the mountains is not measured in miles but coca chews. When two...

SciFoo bound

[image error]Mind Hacks updates may be a little hit and miss over the next week as I'm off to San Francisco for SciFoo - the Nature / Google / O'Reilly science anti-conference.

Apart from conferencing I'll be sleeping on floors and wandering the streets but normal service should be resumed in a week.

Rebranding Freud

[image error]McSweeney's has a funny piece where Freud visits the ad agency Sterling Cooper from the Mad Men television series:

FREUD: Well, as you know, we've dominated psychology for decades. But lately we've begun losing our share of the market to Behaviorism. People want a more comforting interpretation of their lives. They don't want to be told that they're suppressing base urges, or that their problems can be traced back to how they learned to use the toilet.

DRAPER: But that's always been your...