I’ve written an article for the Discover Magazine’s blog The Crux on what the DSM diagnostic manual is supposed to do. This is quite an interesting question when you think about it. In oth...
Frontiers are in short supply. No explorer will again catch that first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean with “wild surmise,” take the first steps on the moon, or arrive first at the Challenger...
The media is buzzing this morning with the shocking news that children spend ‘more than six hours in front of screens’. The news is shocking, however, because it’s wrong. The sound b...
If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs. If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’...
A fantastic short film about what you might see when your mind is uploaded to an online storage cloud in 2052. It’s subtitled “the Singularity, ruined by lawyers”. The piece is by fu...
My column for BBC Future from last week. The original is here. Thanks to Martin Thirkettle for telling me about the demo that leads the column. Our brains are programmed to cancel out all manner of c...
A video on the history of human sacrifice is available from Science magazine as part of their special issue on human conflict. Sadly, all the articles are locked behind a paywall but the video is free...
While writing this post, I will get bored. I will get tired of looking at these words and crave a distraction. And so I will click away from this page and head somewhere else, amusing myself with a to...
Don’t miss an important article in this week’s Nature about how psychologists are facing up to problems with unreplicated studies in the wake of several high profiles controversies. Positi...
Samuel Beckett, born in a suburb of Dublin in 1906, was a native English speaker. However, in 1946 Beckett decided that he would begin writing exclusively in French. After composing the first draft in...
What would you see if you could look inside a hallucinating brain? Despite decades of scientific investigation, we still lack a clear understanding of how hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic ac...
An article in Slate claims to have detectected a ‘logic hole’ in how much sympathy we feel for people with mental illness as both psychopathy and autism are ‘biological disordersR...
My latest WSJ column is about a new paper looking at how priming people to think about religion can improve their performance on various measures of self-control, even if they don’t believe in God:...
This Sunday’s New York Times Book Review contains a critical review of Imagine by Christopher Chabris, a psychology professor at Union College and co-author of The Invisible Gorilla. I enjoyed his b...
BBC Radio 4 has just started an excellent series called The Digital Human that looks at how we use technology and how it affects our relationship to the social world. It’s written and presented...
A ‘saucy sex survey’ has been doing the rounds in the media that claims to be one of the largest studies on the sex lives of UK citizens. Unfortunately, it seems to be a bit of a let down...
The first ever medical report on the effects of magic mushrooms is featured in an article in Current Biology. The excerpt is from a 1799 report entitled ‘On A Poisonous Species of Agaric’...
Every day, millions of single adults, worldwide, visit an online dating site. Many are lucky, finding life-long love or at least some exciting escapades. Others are not so lucky. The industry--eHarmon...
If I read the phrase “as addictive as cocaine” one more time I’m going to hit the bottle. Anything that is either overused, pleasurable or has become vaguely associated with the dopa...
What's a quick way to boost a student's working memory? Tell them that learning is difficult and failure is common. At least that's a conclusion from a French research study that tested 111 6th...
ABC Radio National’s technology and society programme Future Tense has a good discussion of how much evidence supports popular fears about young people and technology. It’s got some great...
The new edition of the APA Monitor magazine has an article that discusses the psychological impact of solitary confinement in light of its growing use in American prisons. One of the most interesting...
Of all the names for a neurological disorder in the history of medicine, the most awesome has got to be ‘Dark Warrior epilepsy’. The condition was reported in a 1982 edition of the British...
One of the disappointing things about the upcoming US presidential elections is that none of the potential candidates has promised the people a made-to-order knitted brain hat. Fear not though, as cit...
My column for BBC Future from a few days ago. The original is here. Mindhacks.com readers will have heard most of this before, thanks to Vaughan’s coverage of the Baroness and her fellow travell...
The two best psychology and neuroscience radio shows, both confusing called All in the Mind, have just started new series in the last couple of weeks. BBC Radio 4′s programme, which takes more o...
Why are some people more religious than others? Answers to this question often focus on the role of culture or upbringing. While these influences are important, new research suggests that whethe...
From a couple of weeks ago, my column from BBC Future, about everyday brain quirks (as I’ve mentioned previously). Thanks to Maria Panagiotidi for help with this one. “Earworms”, som...
The Observer has a fantastic debate between neuroscientists David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis about how much brain science tells us about free will and the unconscious. It’s a wonderful pairing...
Neuroscientist Sophie Scott gave a fantastic talk on the science of laughter for a recent TEDx event that you can now watch online. Talks on the science of humour are famously humourless (usually made...
BBC Radio 4′s brilliant psychology series Mind Changers has made a comeback and has a new season looking at some of the biggest ideas in cognitive science. It has kicked off with programmes on S...
The latest Journal of Neuroscience features a study on the neuroscience behind Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s famouse Rotating Snakes illusion and to celebrate they’re made a ‘Rotating BrainR...
A case report in Forensic Science International describes a man who had a taser dart penetate his skull and damage his frontal lobes after getting in a drunken confrontation with police. Curiously, th...
The Chinese character for epilepsy has been changed to avoid the inaccuracies and stigma associated with the previous label which suggested links to madness and, more unusually, animals. The new name,...
In the mid 1990’s, Apple Computers was a dying company. Microsoft’s Windows operating system was overwhelmingly favored by consumers, and Apple’s attempts to win back market sh...
I’m writing a fortnightly column for BBC Future, about everyday brain quirks (as I’ve mentioned previously). My marvellous editor has told me I can repost the columns here, with a three da...
From Life Hacker, look at the puzzle to the left. How long does it take you to solve? Preschoolers solve in 5-10 min, whereas programmers take an hour. Overthinking is a real problem at times, a...
A fascinating study just published in Psychological Science has found that solving problems in a foreign language reduces cognitive biases. The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Re...
I’ve got an article in today’s Observer about the unreliability of ‘lie detectors’ but why people still tend to spill the beans when wired up to them. It turns out that polygra...
In 1992, the BBC broadcast Ghostwatch, one of the most controversial shows in television history and one that has had a curious and unexpected effect on the course of psychiatry. The programme was int...
A group of black bloc researchers fed up with the lack of interest in replicating psychology studies has set up a strike force called the The Reproducibility Project that will recreate all 2008 studie...
Notice that, even as you fixate on the screen in front of you, you can still shift your attention to different regions in your peripheries . For decades, cognitive scientists have conceptualized atte...
More data supporting the range of perceptual difficulties in dyslexia. In the figure below, researchers found that dyslexic subjects showed delayed responses to sounds (HP stands for Huggins Pitch, T...
Answer - it depends. In the paper Taking More Now: The Optimality of Impulsive Choice Hinges on Environment Structure, researchers at the University of Texas found that the reward environment involvin...
My latest Head Case column in the WSJ explores a forthcoming Psychological Science paper by Neil Brewer (not online yet) that shows how the flawed memories of eyewitnesses might be improved: The bigge...
Today’s Observer has a remarkably vicious article about post-natal depression in fathers that is quite breathtaking in both its ignorance and its venom: “One notices more talk of postnatal...
There comes a time when this body we have always taken for granted suddenly insists on being noticed. I used to think that stretching before running was for suckers, that my muscles didn’t need...
Slate has a wonderful article on the science of city walking that examines how pedestrians behave when moving through the city and how our behaviour is being captured to model the flow of people throu...
Two cases of hallucinated fairy tales from the medical literature. In this case [pdf] from The Bulletin of the Yamaguchi Medical School, a ballerina presents with magical hallucinations during an epis...
The New York Times has a short but thought-provoking piece on the benefits of supersition and magical thinking. This part particularly caught my eye: For instance, in one study led by the psychologist...
Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal--the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already h...
A fascinating excerpt about a hallucinogenic drug called DiPT that only causes hearing distortions – from p310 of the book Hallucinations: Research and Practice: A member of the tryptamine chemi...
Eric Kandel is a titan of modern neuroscience. He won the Nobel Prize in 2000 not simply for discovering a new set of scientific facts (although he has discovered plenty of those), but for pioneering...
A fascinating article in the journal Crime and Delinquency tracks the evolution of London gangs from their ‘boys on the street’ beginnings to organised crime syndicates. Sociologist James...
Nature has an article looking at the future of fMRI brain scanning in light of its long-lasting hype and recently discovered problems. Brain scanning has become massively popular both in the scientifi...
If you ask the average person in the street why some people cut themselves you’ll get the answer that they’re trying to ‘get attention’ which is a common but unhelpful stereoty...
What's the difference between noticing the rapid beat of a popular song on the radio and noticing the rapid rate of your heart when you see your crush? Between noticing the smell of fresh baked br...
BBC Radio 4′s documentary series Analysis has a fascinating programme that explores the little-asked question ‘What is Money?’ – and the answer turns out to be scarily psycholo...
One of the forthcoming books I’m most excited about is Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes: A smarter way of thinking about people who think differently. Like Oliver Sacks (and Steve has written...
In a recent New Yorker, I profiled Roger Thomas, the head of design for Wynn Resorts. Thomas is a remarkably talented interior designer – he’s received nearly every accolade in the field &...