Tom Stafford's Blog, page 137

Gambling on our cognitive biases

[image error]The Economist has an excellent special report on gambling that covers everything from what makes slot machines attractive to the psychology of poker.

If you read the lead article there are links to the whole series in a sidebar embedded in the text. However, those particularly interested in the psychology of gambling may want to check out some specific pieces.

A short article looks at how compulsive gambling has become medicalised as it has been changed from a moral failing to a psychiatric...

2010-07-09 Spike activity

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

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The Wall Street Journal reports that 'picky eating' is being considered as a new mental illness for the next DSM. I think they're just trolling us now.

Becoming angry in negotiations was thought to be a widely effective strategy, but not, it turns out, when negotiating with people from an East Asian background. New study covered by The BPS Research Digest.

The Telegraph has an excellent article on the neuroscience of persistent vegetative...

First class in the mile high therapy club

[image error]Vanity Fair has a great article that charts the very early days of LSD. Before the drug became a symbol of hippy psychedelia, it was used by a select group of psychiatrists to facilitate 'LSD psychotherapy' and became popular among the Hollywood set of the 1950s.

To understand why LSD had such a grip on the American psychiatrists who had access to it, it's useful to know some background about how psychiatry pictured the human mind in the mid-20th century.

Most importantly, it was the height of ...

Scanning in another world

[image error]Neuroscientists sometimes forget just how different the experience of an MRI scan is from everyday life. I've just found this intriguing study that asked patients who had scans for the first time how they felt about the experience - the most common theme was the 'sense of being in another world'.

There is a delightful bit in the study where one man compares it to being in a space capsule.

The participants' overall experience of going through the MRI scan was a sense of being in another world...

The mixed blessing of children

[image error]The New York Magazine has a truly excellent article on why having children tends to make people less happy. This result has come up in numerous studies but the article carefully explores this counter-intuitive finding in all the depth it deserves, reflecting on the changing culture and expectations of parenting.

The article starts with this lovely bit of academic trivia:

The idea that parents are less happy than nonparents has become so commonplace in academia that it was big news last year...

Tripping into an artificial experiment

[image error]The NeuroKüz blog covers a new study in which research participants were asked to take the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin before being asked to take part in a pretend brain scan in a fake fMRI machine.

If the situation seems a little odd, a bit trippy even, it's actually more common than you think as almost all functioning brain scanning centres now have fake brain scanners that are used to test out experiments before running them 'live'.

Brain scanning is a very expensive business and an hour ...

Civilian deaths and vengeance in Afghanistan

[image error]Wired's Danger Room reports on a new study finding that civilian causalities in Afghanistan lead to anti-coalition feelings and an increase in insurgent attacks. Although this would seem to be blindly obvious, the study adds some morbid detail to the picture and provides evidence for some in the US military who had suggested no such link existed.

The study was completed by four economists and it reports its uncomfortable results in stark statistical terms. Interestingly, not all civilian...

Neuroplasticity is not a new discovery

[image error]We recently discussed how the term 'neuroplasticity' is widely used as if it were a precise scientific concept, when, in fact, it is virtually meaningless on its own. Several commenters suggested that while not scientifically meaningful, it serves as a useful reminder that we no longer think the brain is 'fixed' as we did 'about 20 years ago'. This is also part of the neuroplasticity hype, and, as I'll demonstrate, discussions of neuroplasticity go back as far as the 1800s.

This is not to say ...

Sentiment mining your internet stream

[image error]ABC Radio National's Background Briefing has good documentary on the growing practice of 'sentiment mining' social media networks where companies attempt to glean emotional reactions or consumer opinions - typically to products - from our spontaneous internet output.

Essentially it's a form of text mining but applied to social media. For example, a specialist agency might scan for every mention of a product online over the last month and then apply custom analysis to draw out what people feel ...

On violating the computational contraints of the mind

[image error]One of the Reuteurs blogs has a somewhat rambly post about being wrong in journalism which does, however, contain this absolute gem:

I try hard to believe the opposite: that many if not most of my opinions are wrong (although of course I have no idea which they are), and that many of the most interesting and useful things I write come out of my being wrong rather than being right. This is not, as Wilkinson noted to Cowen, an easy intellectual stance to hold: he calls it "a weird violation of...