Posted in PTSD, brain and behavior, psychology in the media, research on July 17, 2008 | No Comments »
Fascinating piece at Cognitive Daily on headlined topic, from a 2007 study. One idea that occurs immediately, is that this idea lends credence to treatments for PTSD that involve physical movements, even re-dramatizing the event. Here’s an excerpt:
A new study adds an unexpected method to the list of ways to spur memories about our past: [...]
Posted in brain and behavior on June 18, 2008 | No Comments »
Or is there a difference? This remains a heated discussion in cognitive sciences, neuroscience, philosophy. No answer in sight really. But here’s a snapshot of the complexity of your brain. Taken from Daniel Carlat’s piece in Wired:
A typical brain contains 100 billion neurons, each of which makes electrical connections, or synapses, with up to 10,000 [...]
Posted in blogging, brain and behavior, neuroscience, psychotherapy, what psychologists do on June 17, 2008 | No Comments »
A blog of note: The Neurocritic. Just another great blog that keeps an eye on science and trends in scientific thought.
The full name of the blog is: The Neurocritic: Deconstructing the most sensationalistic recent findings in Human Brain Imaging, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Psychopharmacology. Neurocritic seems to specialize in keeping the “bio” part of biopsychosocial [...]
Posted in ADHD, brain and behavior, psychology in the media on June 11, 2008 | No Comments »
An astute post at Mind Hacks about the cover story of Atlantic magazine, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. The main point — there is no evidence, no data, no study that supports the idea that internet use lessens attention spans, as the Atlantic article suggests. Mind Hacks writer Vaughn rightly points out:
While the Atlantic article [...]
Posted in brain and behavior, mindfulness, neuroscience on June 9, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Be one of the many many people that have checked out this video. Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist, describes her experience after suffering a massive stroke in her left brain. Her experience, oddly, was ecstatic. A piece about her ran in the New York Times on May 25.
But to really get a sense of [...]
Posted in Big Pharma, Freud, PTSD, brain and behavior, cognitive-behavior therapy, human problems, medical model, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychology in the media, psychotherapy, psychotropic drugs, science and psychology on May 8, 2008 | No Comments »
From Biological Psychiatry to Aplysia californica. Recently read Charles Barber’s Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation, a book noted elsewhere on this blog. It’s a compelling read that covers a lot of ground — the rise of Big Pharma and what he calls “The Triumph of Biological Psychiatry” (a history of how psychiatry [...]
Posted in Big Pharma, brain and behavior, compliance professionals, diagnosis, medical model, psychiatry, psychology in the media, social psychology on April 22, 2008 | No Comments »
Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, was recently interviewed by the Chicago Tribune. I got this courtesy of Ken Pope. Here’s how the interview ended:
Q: The diagnosis “social anxiety disorder” opened up a huge new market
for drug companies marketing SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors). What happened?
A: Basically, as soon as SmithKline [...]
Posted in analytic psychotherapy, brain and behavior, information processing, mind-body split, neuroscience, psychology in the media, van der Kolk on April 17, 2008 | No Comments »
A tragic disconnect. A friend of a friend of mine had a tragic thing happen to her. It had to do with what I’m calling the mind-body disconnect. She had had an extensive battery of tests (CAT scans? MRIs?) done. She had had cancer, but it looked like she was in remission. Unfortunately, the doctors [...]
Posted in brain and behavior, mindfulness, psychology in the media on March 25, 2008 | No Comments »
Three Common myths about the brain in a Scientific American article, one involving the common mistake, written about here previously, of confusing correlation and causality.
Myth: We only use 10 percent of our brainpower.
Myth: Some people are left-brained, others right-brained.
This myth has to do with alpha waves — see the following:
We can achieve a deeper sense [...]
Posted in anxiety, brain and behavior, consumer interest, depression, diagnosis, psychology in the media, psychotropic drugs on March 4, 2008 | No Comments »
Yet more on the SSRI theory of depression. Here’s the full headline of a thought provoking press release from Florida State University: Media Perpetuates Unsubstantiated Chemical Imbalance Theory of Depression. The piece focuses on a few often overlooked facts: (1) That depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” remains unproven and (2) That SSRIs [...]
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