Tom Stafford's Blog, page 150

The civil rights psychosis

The latest All in the Mind from ABC Radio National has a fascinating discussion about how the definition of schizophrenia shifted throughout the 20th century in the USA as it morphed from being a disease of the withdrawn middle class female to being the affliction of the aggressive black man.

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The program is an interview with psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl who discusses his new book The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease.

Unfortunately, discussions about mental illness and ...

Saints of the underworld

[image error]National Geographic Magazine has a nuanced, tragic and colourful article about the growing numbers of unofficial saints in Mexico that are called on to protect against death in the increasingly turbulent cities, or have been created as revered patrons of the criminal underworld by gangs and drug traffickers.

"The emotional pressures, the tensions of living in a time of crisis lead people to look for symbolic figures that can help them face danger," says José Luis González, a professor at...

K-Space Division

[image error]This is an amazing summary of a study just published in the latest edition of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. I have no idea what it's about but it helps if you read it in the voice of Dr Spock.

Susceptibility mapping in the human brain using threshold-based k-space division.

Magn Reson Med. 2010 May;63(5):1292-304.

Wharton S, Schäfer A, Bowtell R.

[Captain:] A method for calculating quantitative three-dimensional susceptibility maps from field measurements acquired using gradient echo imaging at...

Centre of attraction

[image error]Women who have a smaller waist in relation to their hips tend to be perceived as more attractive. Some argue this is an evolutionary tendency, a desire for women who are perceived to be more fertile, while others suggest it is just a product of the media who, from porn to Prada, laud the image of small waisted women.

The New York Times covers a fascinating study which tested these ideas in an innovative way - by seeing whether blind men, who have avoided the body shape bias of visual media...

2010-04-30 Spike activity

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

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You could not ask for a better combination. Coverage of the mirror movement mutation in a piece from Not Exactly Rocket Science and an article on Neurophilosophy.

The Independent covers the frankly mind-bending news that David Cronenberg is to make a film on the relationship between Freud and Jung with Keira Knightley playing Jung's lover. I would have gone for Bruckheimer for director myself.

Fantastic research on whether it is best to

Against the grain

[image error]I've just discovered the powerful story of the German psychiatrist Alice Ricciardi-von Platen. She refused to take part in the growing eugenics movement in the 1930s Germany that targeted people with mental illness for sterilisation and euthanasia, resisted the Nazi party and wrote a book documenting Nazi medical abuses of psychiatric patients after being asked to observe the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg.

As a result, she was ostracised from the German medical community and her book was...

The endangered languages of New York City

[image error]The New York Times covers a fantastic project that is attempting to track down some of the world's most endangered languages - by scouring the streets of the Big Apple.

The Endangered Language Alliance is a project that aims to connect speakers of rare tongues but also to use the opportunity to study the languages academically potentially before they disappear.

The article notes that New York City is the most linguistically diverse place on the planet and there are often more speakers of...

Cell intelligence and surviving the dead of winter

[image error]New Scientist has an interesting article on whether single cells can be considered intelligent. The piece is by biologist Brian Ford who implicitly raises the question of how we define intelligence and whether it is just the ability to autonomously solve problems. If so, then individual cells such as neurons might be considered 'intelligent' even when viewed in isolation.

However, he finishes on a bit of an odd flourish:

For me, the brain is not a supercomputer in which the neurons are...

Breathing a sigh of relief to reboot respiration

[image error]A delightful study on the function of sighing has just been published in the journal Physiology and Behavior which suggests that our wistful deep breaths reboot our respiration and work as an unconscious stress management strategy.

Researchers, led by psychologist Elke Vlemincx, asked participants to wear monitoring devices that kept track of their breathing and chest muscles while they were asked to complete stressful pressured mental arithmetic tasks, or an attention task that required...

The politics of social engineering

[image error]My latest 'Beyond Boundaries' column for The Psychologist discusses politics, social engineering and the use of mimes as a traffic calming measure.

For those following the UK election, there are also elections here in Colombia, albeit to choose the president. In the running is the mathematician, philosopher and ex-Mayor of Bogotá Antanas Mockus who, whether you agree with his policies or not, is genuinely one of the most interesting politicians in the world.

The (English language) documentary...