In my new Wired article on memory, I discuss the concept of memory reconsolidation – the act of remembering a memory changes the original memory trace – and how that process might, one day...
A study just published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences gives a wonderful example of the little recognised complexity of epileptic seizures. The article describes three cases of people who take the...
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of t...
BBC Radio 4′s The Life Scientific recently profiled psychiatrist, schizophrenia researcher and stand-up chap, Robin Murray, who talks about how his understanding of the condition has drastically...
A bizarre and funny tumblr called Neuroscientist Ryan Gosling that has nothing but pictures of Ryan Gosling making hot neuroscience innuendos. It was bound to happen eventually.
Professional basketball player Jeremy Lin has taken the sports world by storm, but he was once a bench-warming outcast. How many more Jeremy Lins are out there? The evidence suggests teams are terribl...
My recent New Yorker article (a partial excerpt from my forthcoming book, Imagine) is now freely available online. It’s about the ideal way to generate ideas in a group and covers everything fro...
During America's most popular TV event, the Superbowl, one much-anticipated advertisement featuring supermodel Adriana Lima painted a pretty sad state of affairs with regards to love. [More]...
Saint Valentine is the patron saint of both lovers and epilepsy – sadly, a little known fact. There is one wonderful example of this divine coupling, however, where the passionate saint appears...
I’ve just read a striking article recounting cases of violence associated with delusions about household pets. Although the academic paper is locked, a copy is available online as a pdf. The cur...
On March 23rd London will host a unique conference on the neuroscience, psychiatry and interpretation of revelatory visionary experiences. It’s been put together by Quinton Deeley from our resea...
The Boston Globe looks at the increasing evidence against the idea that there are some universally expressed facial emotions. The idea that some basic emotions are expressed universally and have an ev...
The New Yorker has a fantastic article on how creativity and innovation spring from group structure and social interaction. The piece is framed as tackling the ‘brainstorming myth’ –...
I’ve just found this amazing bluesy hip hop track by George Watsky and the GetBand about having an epileptic seizure in front of a girl your trying to impress. As well as being an astute observa...
The New Yorker nicely summarises a recent study on how teenage girls make sense of online bullying and harassment in a way that is more acceptable to their peer group. The article is on the tragic sto...
Broadmoor Hospital is one of the highest security psychiatric hospitals in the UK and it has made a series of videos that describe what goes on behind their very high walls. Broadmoor is possibly one...
Here’s a brain teaser: Your task is to move a single line so that the false arithmetic statement below becomes true. IV = III + III Did you get it? In this case, the solution is rather obvious -...
Disability advocates were seeing red after two elderly women with medical conditions were allegedly strip-searched by TSA agents at New York’s JFK airport last December. You’d have to have...
We’ve reported before on the Univeristy of Idaho’s goCognitive project. It’s a enticing collection of videos and demonstrations, including many guest spots by the glitterati of cogni...
From overlawyered.com we hear that in 1995, New Mexico state senator Duncan Scott introduced a legislative ammendment providing that When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant’...
You can tell a lot about a person from their body. And I don’t just mean how many hours they spend at the gym, or how easy it is for them to sweet-talk their way out of speeding tickets. For the...
The great mystery of memory is how it endures. The typical neural protein only lasts for a few weeks, the cortex in a constant state of reincarnation. How, then, do our memories persist? It’s as...
Do you enjoy having time to yourself, but always feel a little guilty about it? Then Susan Cain’s “ Quiet : The Power of Introverts ” is for you. It’s part book, part manifesto...
I’ve always been fascinated by the failures of genius. Consider Bob Dylan. How did the same songwriter who produced Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde also conclude that Down in the Groove...
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon show us why it's hard for us to listen to two people talking at one time. In addition to listening to the individual messages, we have to use bilateral brain pathways...
I’ve published a couple of free ebooks recently: Explore your blind spot shows you how to reveal the gap we all have in our visual experience of the world, and discusses what it means about cons...
The New Atlantic has an in-depth biographical article on psychologist Abraham Maslow – one of the founders of humanistic psychology and famous for his ‘hierarchy of needs’. Maslow is...
Atheists are one of the most disliked groups in America. Only 45 percent of Americans say they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate, and atheists are rated as the least de...
The Rolling Stones launched their career in a social therapeutic club, designed to help troubled youth with communication skills. The club became legendary in rock ‘n roll history but its therap...
Opposites attract. Although we love to repeat this optimistic cliche about human natures, decades of psychological research have demonstrated that the trusim isn’t true. Rather, people seek out...
From NY Times: "For years school curriculums have emphasized top-down instruction, especially for topics like math and science. Learn the rules first — the theorems, the order of operations, Newton...
We hear a lot about zombies these days – in films, in music and even in philosophy – but many are unaware that in 1997 The Lancet published a medical study of three genuine Haitian zombies...
I’ve got a long article on the problem of concussions in high school football up at Grantland: Here are the opening paragraphs: If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside i...
Ask a bride before walking down the aisle “How likely are you to get divorced?” and most will respond “Not a chance!” Tell her that the average divorce rate is close to 50 perc...
The New York Times has an excellent article on the challenges faced by couples after one member survives brain injury. Carers sometimes say that, after brain injury, their partner is emotionally unres...
An unfortunate case of a high-impact graffiti-based neurotrauma recorded this afternoon in Bogotá on the corner of Carrera 14 and Calle 26 near the Cementerio Central. ...
January is the month of broken resolutions. The gyms are packed for a week, Jenny Craig is full of new recruits and houses are cleaned for the first time in ages. We pledge to finally become the perso...
The Boston Globe has an excellent article about supposedly culture specific mental illnesses and how they are an ongoing puzzle for psychiatry’s diagnostic manual. These conditions are called cu...
This year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures were a fantastic trip through neuroscience and the brain – and you can now watch them online from anywhere in the world. The Christmas Lect...
The American Psychiatric Association have used legal threats to force a critical blog to change its title because they didn’t like it being called ‘DSM Watch’. The ‘DSM Watch&#...
I’ve just written a piece for the Discover Magazine blog The Crux about a new study that used anaesthetics to “put people under” and test the limits of their conscious mind even afte...
The Psychologist has an article on the surprising effect of seeing a digital avatar of yourself – as if looking at your body from the outside. The piece covers a range of effects found in psycho...
The British Journal of Psychiatry’s ’100 words’ series continues with a very brief guide to the DSM psychiatric manual and its ongoing revision. DSM is an American classification sys...
You’re out to dinner at a restaurant that just recently opened. Steamed mussels or steamed calamari? Three cheese ravioli or eggplant parmesan? Strawberry cheesecake or chocolate mousse? With so...
The APA Monitor has an article on how ‘nervousness’ in 1800s America was treated by sending male intellectuals ‘out West’ for prolonged periods of cattle roping, hunting, rough...
Anyone can learn to have lucid dreams, and this ebook tells you how. Lucid dreams are those dreams where you become aware you are dreaming, and can even begin to control the reality of the dream. Adve...
James Grimmelmann, Associate Professor at New York Law School, has written on the takedown of an open-access cognitive screening test by the copyright holders of the Mini Mental State test. He says &#...
The New England Journal of Medicine report on how the authors of key screening test, the Mini–mental state examination, have initiated a take-down of an open, validated and freely-available equivale...
New Scientist reports that Uganda has been hit by a new outbreak of the mysterious ‘nodding syndrome’ or ‘nodding disease’ that seems to be an unknown neurological condition th...
We lie to ourselves all the time. We tell ourselves that we are better than average -- that we are more moral, more capable, less likely to become sick or suffer an accident. It’s an odd phenome...
An article on the history of dementia lists the somewhat odd causes for the degenerative brain condition as given by the pioneering French psychiatrist Jean Etienne Esquirol in 1838: Menstrual disorde...
A new article on the founder of criminology, Cesare Lombroso, recounts the curious tale of how he met War and Peace author Leo Tolstoy to confirm his theory on how genius and madness were linked. Amon...
Sigmund Freud gets a bad rap from modern science. (The immunologist Peter Medawar summarized the feeling of many with his remark that psychoanalysis is the “most stupendous intellectual confiden...
Let’s imagine that I suggest you look for lions while we are strolling through the park. For most people reading this, the local park will be an unlikely place to find a lion. If you take...
I’ve got a new article in the latest Wired. It’s about a lot of different things: cholesterol enzymes, complex systems, the struggles of modern medicine, chronic back pain, Albert Michotte...
The Atlantic has a long but engrossing piece on the impact of military and intelligence robotics on the ethics of combat. To be fair, it goes way beyond just robots and also discusses implants, digita...
The Economist has a fascinating article about the weird way that pedestrians behave as they walk through cities and how this knowledge is being applied to make city-living easier and safer. IMAGINE th...
A fascinating note on the social meaning of eyes and why people are much more reluctant to donate the cornea after death than other bodily organs. From a recent article in the journal Transplanatation...
We’ve mentioned some amazing advances in brain scanning unborn babies before on Mind Hacks and this image is another step in that remarkable science. The coloured fibres in the image are still-d...
In 1995, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a controversial exhibition entitled “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt,” in which works considered to be genuine Rembrandts were displayed alongside t...