Tom Stafford's Blog, page 151

Are crime dramas warping the legal system?

[image error]The Economist has an interesting article on the 'CSI effect' which suggests that television crime dramas are altering jurors' expectations of the relevance and power of scientific evidence and hence affecting how court judgements are made.

The article is largely based on a forthcoming paper to be published in Forensic Science International that argues the 'CSI effect' is influencing how forensic evidence is interpreted and understood by professionals and the public alike.

Nevertheless, both...

US Army PTSD treatment: heaven and hell

[image error]BBC News and The New York Times have just each published articles on the US Army's treatment of psychologically traumatised soldiers so different that you'd think they were talking about entirely distinct programmes.

Two articles have just appeared on the BBC website giving a very positive view of the US military's treatment of Army veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health problems.

The articles largely focus on the programme at Fort Hood and...

Can I get an amen?

[image error]This is an fMRI study on how Christian faith healers influence the brains of believers and non-believers. It is an absolutely remarkable experiment when you think about it but I still don't know quite what to make of it.

The power of charisma--perceived charisma inhibits the frontal executive network of believers in intercessory prayer.

Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2010 Mar 12. [Epub ahead of print:]

Schjoedt U, Stødkilde-Jørgensen H, Geertz AW, Lund TE, Roepstorff A.

This study used functional...

Questioning 'one in four'

[image error]The Guardian has an excellent article questioning the widely cited statistic that '1 in 4' people will have a mental illness at some point in their lives. The issue of how many people have or will have a mental illness raises two complex issues: how we define an illness and how we count them.

Defining an illness is a particularly tricky conceptual point and this is usually discussed as if it is an issue particular to psychiatry and psychology that doesn't effect 'physical medicine' but it is a...

Questionning 'one in four'

[image error]The Guardian has an excellent article questioning the widely cited statistic that '1 in 4' people will have a mental illness at some point in their lives. The issue of how many people have or will have a mental illness raises two complex issues: how we define an illness and how we count them.

Defining an illness is a particularly tricky conceptual point and this is usually discussed as if it is an issue particular to psychiatry and psychology that doesn't effect 'physical medicine' but it is a...

Charlie Rose Brain Series online and complete

[image error]The Charlie Rose discussion show has an ongoing series on the brain and all of the episodes are available online where some of world's leading neuroscientists extensively tackle the big questions of the field.

I'm just watching the programmes at the moment and while they can seem a little stiff at times, it lovely to see neuroscience being discussed without being dumbed down but while key concepts are explained and explored.

The discussions are co-hosted by Charlie Rose and Nobel prize winning ...

Cultures of foreplay

[image error]I've just read a fantastic article in the Journal of Sex Research on culture and how we decide what is a sexual disorder or 'paraphilia'. It has a fascinating section where it talks about cultural variation in common or acceptable sexual practices and it touches on how foreplay differs between societies.

Kissing during foreplay, it seems, is not universal and seems to be a particular fetish of Western lovers.

Finally, in most cultures, sexual intercourse is preceded by some degree of...

2010-04-23 Spike activity

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

[image error]

The New York Times discusses how a belladonna hallucination could have been the start of alcoholics anonymous.

Dream rehearsal helps remembering, according to a study covered by Not Exactly Rocket Science.

The Times covers breezy people who go around saying yaka-wow. Some yaka-wow socks are also in progress.

An interesting in-scanner set-up for live face-to-face interaction during brain imaging experiments is covered by the BPS Research...

The busy night

Two things I love are sleeping and data collection. Now, thanks to a new iPhone app, I can do both at once.

Sleep Cycle uses the accelerometer in the iPhone to record vibrations in your mattress caused by you moving in the night. In this way it acts as an actigraph, keeping a record of your body movement, which in this context reflects how deeply you are asleep.

[image error]Here is the data from my last night's kip. As you can see I show a fairly typical pattern: sleeping deeper in the first half of the...

One thousand matter-of-fact dentists

[image error]For some reason, I find this study that analysed children's drawings of dentists hilarious.

You can almost sense the existential despair of someone who spent months of their life analysing kids' unconscious representations of dentists to discover they just think of them as the guy with the furniture and a patient.

Children's drawings about dentistry.

Community Dent Oral Epidemiol. 1976 Jan;4(1):1-6.

Taylor D, Roth G, Mayberry W.

Drawings about the dentist at work were solicited from 1,101...