Psy News

September 5, 2010

The labyrinth of Inception

Filed under: Psychology Articles — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 11:00 pm
When you have a hammer, everything can look like a nail and people have been banging the shit out of Inception. The sci-fi movie of the year has attracted numerous ‘neuroscience of Inception’ reviews despite the fact that the film has little to say about the brain and is clearly more inspired by the psychological [...]

15 Vote(s)

August 25, 2010

Neuroscience of Murder and Aggression: Epidemiology

This is the second in a five part series on the neuroscience of murder and aggression.  This post will address some key issues in the epidemiology of murder and antisocial personality disorder.  The number of murders in the U.S. has been stable at between 16,000 and 17,000 per year over the 2000 to 2008 time period..  The number peaked at around 24,700 in 1991.  The number has

6 Vote(s)

June 23, 2010

Neuroscientists can predict your behavior better than you can

In a study with implications for the advertising industry and public health organizations, neuroscientists have shown they can use brain scanning to predict whether people will use sunscreen in the next week better than the people themselves can predict whether they will do so. This is the first persuasion study in neuroscience to predict behavior change.

15 Vote(s)

February 10, 2010

Brain skulls on the front, splatters on the back

Filed under: Psychology Articles — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 8:00 am
You wait ages for a neuroscience-themed dress to appear (and believe me, I have) and then two come along at once.After my discovery of neuro streetwear for the female fashonista last week, comes a brain themed tutu dress for the riotgrrl neuroscientist.The description is actually quite poetic:Brain skulls on the front, splatters on front and back. Distressed style: Imagery has unique cracks, spla

9 Vote(s)

February 5, 2010

Time to think

Bioemphemera has found some wonderfully left-field brain illustrations by Dutch graphic designer Rhonald Blommestijn. The image on the left is a brain made out of clocks.Blommestijn's blog is full of strikingly surreal eye-candy that manages both to inspire a feeling of wide-eyed wonder and illustrate scientific themes.They're certainly very original takes on the subject and the neuroscience imag

6 Vote(s)

January 7, 2010

A clarion call for a decade of disorder

Filed under: Psychology Articles — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 10:00 pm
This week's Nature has an excellent editorial calling for a greater focus on the science of mental illness and summarising the challenges facing psychology and neuroscience in tackling these complex conditions.It's generally a very well-informed piece, but it does make one widely repeated blunder in the last sentence of this paragraph:Frustratingly, the effectiveness of medications has stalled. N

12 Vote(s)

January 5, 2010

The Neuroscience of MySpace

Filed under: Psychology Articles — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 10:00 pm
How does popularity affect how we judge music?We tend to say we like what other people like. No-one wants to stand out and risk ridicule by saying they don't enjoy universally loved bands, like The Beatles... unless they're trying to fit into a subculture where everyone hates The Beatles.But do people just pretend to like what others like, or can perceived popularity actually change musical prefe

17 Vote(s)

December 8, 2009

Encephalon 79 ends the year

Filed under: Psychology Articles — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 8:00 am
The 79th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just been published online with this edition appearing on the mighty Mouse Trap blog.A couple of my favourites include coverage of a fascinating experiment on Neuronarrative that managed to induce false memories of completing certain actions and another on the recent badly reported 'sweets linked to childhood viol

14 Vote(s)

December 4, 2009

Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth

One of the most regularly recited pieces of popular neuroscience is that women are more likely to use both hemispheres of the brain to process language while men tend only to use one. It turns out, this is a myth - it is simply not supported by the current evidence.In 2008, a meta-analysis study looked at all the evidence for differences in the balance of language processing in the brains of men

10 Vote(s)

November 29, 2009

Encephalon 78 saunters in

The 78th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has recently appeared on the Providentia blog with the latest in mind and brain writing from the blogosphere.A couple of my favourites include a piece on The Mousetrap about the self in the eyes of the founding father of cognitive psychology - Ulrich Neisser, and a post that review robots controlled by brain simulatio

15 Vote(s)
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