An alert student forwarded me a rather bizarre report from MSNBC about a discussion among British psychiatrists about the use of the label “schizophrenia.” According to these psychiatrists, schizophrenia “has no scientific validity, is imprecise and stigmatizing.” Labeling is always an issue in psychopathology. We have to have some agreement that Read more…
Advertisements during football games often feature a stereotypical view of men who love football and women who love to shop. Now it appears that men and women are about equally likely to be “compulsive shoppers.” (Now I’m waiting for research on “compulsive football watching.”) A recent survey of over 2500 Read more…
The results of a number of research studies over the past 2 or 3 decades suggest that breastfeeding, particularly for more than four months, improves the cognitive performance of children. This is a difficult research question to answer, due to the many confounding variables. Breastfeeding mothers tend to be more educated Read more…
An alert student forwarded to me an article in the BBC that relates to our class discussion about the brain’s reward circuitry. The author notes the classic studies of Olds and Milner in rats and Heath in human participants, and updates us on the potential use of brain stimulation. Tipu Aziz Read more…
Philanthropists Paul G. Allen and Jody Patton funded the non-profit Allen Institute for Brain Science, located in Seattle, WA, to “identify and address key issues in neuroscience.” One of the Institute’s first achievements is the Allen Brain Atlas, a publicly available and free resource that shows which of 21,000 genes Read more…