Should soldiers who survive suicide attempts be court-martialed — tossed from the military in shame? It’s a sticky question that gets stickier on examination. USA Today looks at it through the prism of a case in which a Marine private was court-martialed after being convicted of ‘self-injury’ after he slit his wrists in a barracks […]
Continue reading →Neuron Culture blogger and science journalist David Dobbs recently learned there was a hole in the middle of his brain. Listen to him recount the story in a new podcast.
Continue reading →My post two days ago on the links between depression and creativity sparked some smart comments. Perhaps the best was sent to me privately by the excellent blogger The NeuroCritic, and I am highlighting it in its own post here, with The Neurocritic’s permission, because it makes a an important point that I failed to note […]
Continue reading →Last night, reading the wonderful third chapter of Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine,* I came across some material, new to me, on the links between melancholy and creativity. I’m fairly familiar with this literature, but not the the last couple years’ worth, and in that time the stack has grown. Experimental work by researchers like Joe Forgas […]
Continue reading →So she describes in the midst of a long, fascinating interview with Terri Gross, which I had the pleasure of listening to during a rare long drive last week. (The video above is from Jon Stewart; quite entertaining.) The entire Terri Gross interview is splendid. But a high point — an unexpected stretch amid a conversation […]
Continue reading →Author’s: This post is an expansion of a feature I published a few weeks ago in New Scientist. It draws from research for a book I’m now writing, The Orchid and the Dandelion (Crown; ETA 2015). I originally explored this subject, at more length (and with monkeys) in a November 2009 Atlantic article, “Orchid Children.” A few years ago, […]
Continue reading →In 1864, in a radically risky move crucial to winning the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman led his army of some 80,000 men to Atlanta, burned it to the ground, and then marched to the coast of South Carolina, destroying almost all in his path. It was a wild, improbable gambit: He meant to and did […]
Continue reading →As faithful readers know, I’m working on a book, provisionally titled The Orchid and the Dandelion and likely to be published next year, about the orchid-dandelion hypothesis: the notion that genes and traits that underlie some of humans’ biggest weaknesses — despair, madness, savage aggression — also underlie some of our greatest strengths — resilience, lasting happiness, […]
Continue reading →Earlier this week, WBUR’s Here and Now ran a taped interview with me about “Beautiful Brains,” my recent National Geographic article on teen brain and behavior. (You can listen to the interview here.) It’s only six minutes long, but nicely edited to highlight, from a high-altitude evolutionary point of view, what distinguishes adolescence, when we peak […]
Continue reading →This guest post — a book review of Richard J. McNally’s What is Mental Illness — is by Jason Goldman, a University of Southern California graduate student in developmental psychology who blogs on behavior and psychology at The Thoughtful Animal. Goldman is also the psychology and neuroscience editor at ResearchBlogging.org and edited the science-writing anthology Open Lab 2010. When most […]
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