Tom Stafford's Blog, page 153

2010-04-16 Spike activity

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

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Should kids be bribed to do well in school? asks Time magazine. Oldest trick in the book tested out by researchers.

Neurophilosophy covers a study finding that wrinkle smoothing Botox injections may diminish the experience of emotion owing to their paralysing effect on facial muscles.

There's an article that traces the history of placebo controlled studies back through tests of mesmerism into their origin in Christian exorcism rites in The...

Breezy people

[image error]The Times has an interview with neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, largely to do with the recent political tussles in UK science, but where she uses the opportunity to comment on how computer games are 'as much of a risk to mankind as climate change'. But wait, the best is yet to come - this part is a beautiful as it is baffling:

She is concerned that those who live only in the present, online, don't allow their malleable brains to develop properly. "It's not going to destroy the planet but is...

Corridors of the mind

[image error]I've just discovered the joy of searching Flickr for photos of psychiatric ward corridors which turns up some amazing images of hospitals past and present, and photos of institutions that are slowly, and sometimes beautifully, decaying.

The great numbers of abandoned hospitals are mostly due to the shutting down of the old monolithic psychiatric hospitals in the second half of the 20th century.

As the buildings were often built as large permanent structures, often with great architectural...

Hacking toy EEGs

[image error]Frontier Nerds has an excellent guide to toy EEGs (the commercially available 'mind control' games) and detailed instructions on how to hack the MindFlex to use it as a brain-computer interface.

In the last year or so, numerous 'mind control' games have appeared that are essentially cheap consumer EEG devices with a dull as ditch-water games attached. For example, the 'Force Trainer' reads off EEG signals and levitates a ball. Yes, that's it.

There are developer's kits available for some of...

Social warfare

[image error]A news story in today's Nature notes that the US military are pumping more money into social science research which is considered to be an important 'game changing' component of 21st century warfare.

The unconventional wars now being fought by the US military have also bolstered interest in the social sciences. With the military trying to stave off a growing insurgency in Afghanistan, the Pentagon now believes that understanding cultural dynamics is at least as important as weapons...

From madhouse to mainstream

[image error]It's not often that historians are described as kicking ass, but the latest issue of the The Lancet has a barnstorming piece by Andrew Scull that gives an uncompromising history of psychiatry from the mad house to Big Pharma.

It must be said that the article is oriented more toward American psychiatry. Although similar influences have been present in European psychiatry, it has been much less subject to, shall we say, the mood swings that have tended to pull the American psychiatric community ...

Neurodemonology

[image error]There is a long-standing myth that before the Enlightenment, all the experiences and behaviours we would now classify as madness were thought to be due to demonic possession.

This idea has been comprehensively debunked and it is now clear that both of these concepts have run side-by-side and medieval courts often went to great lengths to try and distinguish the two 'states'.

I've just read a fascinating article about 'Demonology, Neurology, and Medicine in Edwardian Britain' from the Bulletin...

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

[image error]The Frontal Cortex reports on an interesting study that found that the personality characteristics teachers define as creative are the same ones that make their pupils least likeable in the classroom.

Eric Barker recently referred me to this interesting study, which looked at how elementary school teachers perceived creativity in their students. While the teachers said they wanted creative kids in their classroom, they actually didn't. In fact, when they were asked to rate their students on a...

Heart breaker

[image error]It seems you're more likely to die from a heart attack when having sex while having an affair, than during sex with your regular partner, although this seems largely to apply to men.

A case report in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine reports on the death of a woman who had a heart attack during extra-marital sex, something unusual in women. This is not conclusive about the heart attack risk of affairs in itself, of course, but the article reviews some suggestive evidence about sex...

On the outer limits

[image error]The latest edition of RadioLab discusses the limits of endurance, human memory and artificial intelligence in a particularly good programme from the top tier science show.

The section on human endurance looks at the competitors in the Race Across America, an 800km bicyle race where the cyclists sleep on an hour or two a night and eventually start hallucinating as they race.

The story of Mr S, a case of someone with a seemingly limitless who was documented in A.R. Luria's book The Mind of a...