The BBC today has an interesting article by Mark Brown of British mental health magazine One in Four: Do famous role models help or hinder? The context is that in Britain, charities and other advocates for people with mental illness have become fo...

In a short blog post last week, Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), announced that the organization would be "re-orienting its research away from DSM categories". After criticizing the fact that Unlike our d...

I've been wondering: Suppose neuroscientists faced absolutely no financial or ethical constraints. What would that allow us to do? What kind of hitherto-intractable questions would we be able to answer? Well, the money would certainly let us make...

Prescriptions of antipsychotic (aka neuroleptic) drugs in North American children and adolescents have been rising rapidly in recent years. But why? Gabrielle Carlson of Stony Brook Children's Hospital offers her thoughts in a brief paper: The Drama...

Four years ago, neuroscientists became aware of an ominous-sounding manuscript entitled "Voodoo Correlations In Social Neuroscience". This piece was eventually published under a more prosaic name but it still hit home, with nearly 500 citations so fa...

Neuroscience has revealed that Lady Gaga's song Born This Way is probably about a psychopath. Or something. HuffPo says - Psychopathic Brain 'Lacks Basic Hardwiring' To Feel Compassion, Research Suggests Meanwhile, the Daily Mail report - Is this ...

A new paper could prompt a rethink of a technique that's become very hot in neuroscience lately: Confounds in multivariate pattern analysis The authors are Princetonians Michael T. Todd and colleagues, and the method in question is multivariate patt...

You love to hate them: people in power who talk the talk but don't walk the walk. I'm sure most of us have suffered a boss who tells you to do things that he or she doesn't. But do these people become hypocrites because they are in positions of power...

In 2002 I read The Blank Slate. With all due respect to Steven Pinker one of the most fascinating aspects of this book was actually a review of the work of another psychologist, Judith Richard Harris. Harris' own views are explicated crisply in The N...

If you're ever engineering a nuclear power plant with a lefty, beware: apparently, the same features of their brain that make them left-handed might also make them avoid using exact numbers.  Even more surprising, just having a left-handed relative m...

Glossolalia - 'speaking in tongues' - is a practice best known in association with 'Charismatic' branches of Christianity. Practitioners, often as part of religious services, produce streams of speech which correspond to no known language. But could...

In lieu of an explanatory blurb, we give you this Seinfeld clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrL9z3Kvww Bystander reaction to women fighting: developing a theory of intervention. "This article explores accounts of bystanders to female-on-femal...