When I first heard that the medical examiner for the Sandy Hook shooting had asked for a genetic profile of the apparent shooter, Adam Lanza, I suggested on Twitter that this would end badly: The results will almost certainly be close to meaningless, but any variants formerly associated with particular behaviors, rightly or wrongly, will […]
Continue reading →How long has PTSD been around? Is the response to trauma outlined in our current PTSD diagnosis something that has long happened to a subset of people facing trauma? Or did our current concept of PTSD rise from cultural and medical concerns and definitions peculiar to a particular time in history? This question is debated fiercely. […]
Continue reading →For this bizarre story I thank the incomparable Vaughan Bell, who writes brilliantly on all things neuro, psych, and weird. Follow him at Twitter, at Mind Hacks, where he frequently blogs, and in his work for the Guardian and Slate. He’s amazing. And he brought this to Mind Hacks: A case report in Forensic Science […]
Continue reading →For months — has it only been months? — UK neuroscientist and baronnes Susan Greenfield has been blasting Twitter and other social media for destroying the minds of the young. Today over at the invaluable Mind Hacks, the inestimable Vaughan Bell, who has tangled many times with Greenfield’s Twitter attacks, brings us the latest development. […]
Continue reading →Vaughan Bell has pegged what sounds like a fascinating paper on the “total information war” the US is now fighting — and why it is fighting it. The paper, writes Bell, “serves as an essential general introduction to how military thinking has moved on from assuming wars are fought with troops on the ground to […]
Continue reading →Don’t miss this. Over at Mind Hacks, blogger, psychiatrist, and writer Vaughan Bell, always on the lookout for items of scientific importance and wonder, has turned up an entertaining study of teenage swearing. Teenagers love to swear. Says who? Says science you melon farmers. And what could be better than a top ten of teenage […]
Continue reading →I just finished listening to Alok Jha’s podcast at Guardian about ScienceOnline. What a pleasure! Jha gracefully captures what drives science (and all) blogging, and what it offers readers — and writers — that they can’t get elsewhere. Jha and his producers also convey beautifully the spirit and intersection of interests that makes ScienceOnline so […]
Continue reading →let me repeat what happened. i coded everything. then [a research assistant] coded all the trials highlighted in yellow. we only had one trial that didn’t agree. i then mistakenly told [another research assistant] to look at column B when he should have looked at column D. … we need to resolve this because i am not sure why we are going in circles.” … The gist of the information is that, as appropriate to good practice, the protocol was originally designed to blind (or deafen) coders to the monkeys’ stimulus, so that the coder would merely observe a monkey in each trial, with the sound off and no knowledge of which pattern was being played, and score the monkey’s changes in behavior.
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