The British are Incredibly Sad

Or so says Oliver James(*) on this BBC radio show in which he also says things like "I absolutely embraces the credit crunch with both arms".Oliver James is a British psychologist best known for his theory of "Affluenza". This is his term for unhappiness and mental illness caused, he thinks, by an obsession with money, status and possessions. Affluenza, James thinks, is especially prevanlent in English-speaking...

Autism, Testosterone and Eugenics

The media's all too often shabby treatment of neuroscience and psychology research doesn't just propagate bad science - it means that the really interesting and important bits go unreported. This is what's just happened with the controversy surrounding a paper from the Autism Research Center (ARC) at Cambridge University - Bonnie Aeyeung et. al.'s Fetal Testosterone and Autistic Traits. For research...

Biases, Fallacies and other Distractions

One of the pitfalls of debate is the temptation to indulge in tearing down an opponent's arguments. It's fun, if you're stuck behind a keyboard but still feeling the primal urge to bash something's head in with a rock. Yet if you're interested in the truth about something, the only thing that should concern you is the facts, not the arguments that happen to be made about them.Plenty has been written...

Dorothy Rowe Wronged, also Wrong

(Via Bad Science) Here's the curious story of what happened when clinical psychologist Dorothy Rowe was interviewed for a BBC radio show about religion. She gave a 50 minute interview in which she said that religion was bad. The BBC, in their wisdom, edited this down to 2 minutes of audio which made her sound as if she was saying religion was good. She was annoyed, and complained. The BBC admitted that they'd misrepresented her and apologized. Naughty.But that's not the point of this post. Because...

Critiquing a Classic: "The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations"

One of the most blogged-about psychology papers of 2008 was Weisberg et. al.'s The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations.As most of you probably already know, Weisberg et. al. set out to test whether adding an impressive-sounding, but completely irrelevant, sentence about neuroscience to explanations for common aspects of human behaviour made people more likely to accept those explanations...

Lessons from the Video Game Brain

See also Lessons from the Placebo Gene. Also, if you like this kind of thing, see my other fMRI-curmudgeonry(1, 2)The life of a neurocurmudgeon is a hard one, but once in a while, fate smiles upon us. This article in the Daily Telegraph neatly embodies several of the mistakes that people make about the brain, all in one bite-size portion.The article is about a recent fMRI study published in the Journal...
 
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