Brains and minds
ddobbs | September 4, 2009
photo: U.S. Forest Service
Notables of the day:
John Hawks ponders the (bad) art of citing papers you've never read.
Clive Thompson ponders the new literacy spawned of engagement with many keyboards.
A poll on public education shows how much opinion depends on framing, context -- and who else thinks an idea is good. In this case, people liked the idea of merit pay more if told Obama likes it.
Mind Hacks works the placebo circuit.
And Effect Measure weighs in on the weird contrasts and (limited) parallels between swine flu and avian flu.
And for fun, fire lookout towers, from BLDGBLOG. You…
ddobbs | September 2, 2009On the radar of late:
Neuroskeptic ponders reports that antidepressant use in the U.S. has doubled in the last decade. As he notes, perhaps the most troubling thing finding in the study is that
the number of Americans using an antipsychotic as well as an antidepressant increased by a factor of more than 3. This is, frankly, extremely troubling, since antipsychotics are by far the worst psychiatric drugs in terms of side effects. There is evidence that some antipsychotics can be of use in depression as an add-on to antidepressants, but there is better evidence for other alternatives, such as…
Furious Seasons: Researcher who claimed 3-year-olds get depressed may have undisclosed industry ties
ddobbs | August 31, 2009If nothing else, this points out the need to clarify what "past 5 years" means in declaring history of possible conflicts of interest. 5 years before publication -- or research and writing? Presumably there's a difference, if we're specifyng a time frame anyway
ddobbs | August 11, 2009Massive feature finished, should be in print this November ... but more on that later. By way of returning to blogdom, a few of the few notables I've had time to read lately:
Effect Measure, usually quite restrained about predictions, joins quite a few others in predicting the swine flu will hit us pretty hard this fall. (The U.S. has already had 6,506 hospitalized cases and 436 deaths, despite it not being flu season. And while we've been tracking health-care debacles debates and pondering Palin, the flu has been hitting the southern hemisphere pretty hard.) Now, not later, when you're sick…
ddobbs | August 2, 2009
I just finished reading Erica Goode's Times story on the suicides of four soldiers who served together in a small North Carolina-based Guard unit in Iraq from 2006 to spring 2007. This is a witheringly painful story. Goode, who has done quite a bit of science writing as well as substantial reporting from Baghdad, tells it with an unusual freshness of perspective and clarity of vision.
She starts where I suppose she must:
On Dec. 9, 2007, Sergeant Blaylock, heavily intoxicated, lifted a 9-millimeter handgun to his head during an argument with his girlfriend and pulled the trigger. He was 26…
ddobbs | July 29, 2009Pardon the long silence. A couple of posts fell to tech issues. And I'd love to blame the hiatus on a vacation.
But mostly I've been off-blog and, for social media purposes, offline, because I've been immersed in writing a long feature. It's a fun, meaty, juicy, really substantial story, one of two great assignments I've been working on this summer. And I'm greatly enjoying it, especially when it goes well. But as I've found before, the longer (and deeper) the feature, the more exclusively I seem to need to give it my attention. Thus the lack of blogging, and of tweets.
I don't seem to mix…
ddobbs | July 9, 2009Effect Measure alerted me to this very touching video, which shows the crowd at Fenway coming to the rescue of a kid who starts to lose it while singing the national anthem. Revere's set-up first, then some thoughts of my own:
I don't know what's going to happen with swine flu. I do know that if there is a nasty flu season we'll all get through it better if we help each other, not run from each other. It's national independence day in the US, so I thought this clip of the crowd singing the National Anthem (hat tip, Paul Rosenberg at Open Left) at Boston's Fenway Park (home field of the Boston…
ddobbs | July 4, 2009In case you missed them (or miss them, and want to read again ...)
The (Illusory) Rise and Fall of the "Depression Gene"
DIY circumcision with nail clippers Go figure.
Oliver Sacks meets Jon Stewart
Wheels come off psychiatric manual; APA blames road conditions
Alarming climate change chart of the day
Swine flu count in US hits 1 million; can't wait till flu season!
Will government involvement drive up health-care costs?
What if you could predict PTSD in combat troops? Oh, who cares...
ddobbs | July 2, 2009An article from the Standard ponders why, despite widespread recognition that the country needs health care reform, we may not get it.
The relatively new field of behavioral economics--a blending of psychology and economics--helps makes sense of these clashing views. One major tenets of this sub-discipline is that people value a "loss" about twice as much as they value a "gain." And as a result, people are more risk averse than might be suggested by traditional, rational economic theory. In other words, instead of "rationally" weighing risks and rewards equally and then forming a judgment,…
ddobbs | July 2, 2009What's been distracting me lately from the big story I really really need to finish writing ...
A splendid, rich fracas over Chris Anderson's Free, set off particularly by a pan from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. The net fairly exploded -- search, and ye shall find -- with many noting that a pot was calling a kettle black. E.g., Itâs like War of the Speakerâs Bureaus and a more gently titled but equally damning (to Gladwell) post by Anil Dash. ,And one young writer accused Anderson of being a feudal lord. Anderson himself has been remarkably unfiltered in his tweet-pointers to reviews,…
ddobbs | June 30, 2009I have suspected for some time now that the band oddly close process designed to produce the DSM-V --- the diagnostic statistical manual that is psychiatry's diagnostic guide and Bible --- would create an explosion of some sort. But I didn't think it would explode quite so soon.
As Daniel Carlat outlines in a wonderful post â a must read, very high infotainment value â this is a pretty entertaining missing match. We have Allen Frances, a prominent psychiatrist who helped produce the previous edition of the DSM, leveling some very harsh criticisms of the process designed to produce a new…
ddobbs | June 30, 2009Okay, Jonah saw this first -- but in case you missed it there, here's a snip from Jon Stewart interviewing Oliver Sacks about music and the brain.
This is a nice meeting. I've not met Stewart, but I had the pleasure to spend some time with Sacks while working on a couple stories, and he once gave me a book about Alexander Agassiz because he liked my book about Agassiz -- and I'm happy to see him exert his usual charm and humor here in this Stewart segment.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Oliver Sacks
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political…
ddobbs | June 30, 2009
[note: addition/corrections at bottom added an hour after orig post. additions underlined. deletions struckthrough. See *]
Meet the meta-placebo: A new study suggests that ADHD meds do much of their work by producing placebo effects -- and more constructive behavior -- among the parents, teachers, and other caretakers of the kids actually taking the meds. Via ScienceDaily:
A recent review of research by University at Buffalo pediatric psychologists suggests that [ADHD] medication, or the assumption of medication, may produce a placebo effect -- not in the children, but in their teachers,…
ddobbs | June 25, 2009Much much much ado on the web this week, on the too-many fronts I try to visit. From my list of notables:
Carl Zimmer, who clearly doesn't sleep, writes up a nice post about a Nature paper announcing Limusaurus, a newly discovered fossil that is, Zimmer notes, is "not -- I repeat NOT -- the missing link between anything"-- but nevertheless sheds some light on how dinos may have turned into birds (more or less). Bonus: Great pictures of Carl holding up three fingers.
Ed Yong, who seems to be drinking the same strength coffee as Carl Zimmer lately, looks at an interesting correlation: Hidden…
ddobbs | June 17, 2009Big psych news of the day is that a big JAMA study debunked the "depression gene" -- that is, this big new study (by Risch et alia, in JAMA, today) found that, contrary to a famous earlier big study (Caspi et alia, in Science, 2003), the short ("bad") form of a particular gene called 5-HTT does NOT make a person more vulnerable to depression. Or, to flip it:: Caspi 2003 had found that having a short version of 5-HTT, which affects processing of serotonin, put someone at more risk of depression if they experienced (as adults) repeated stressful life events. Risch 2009, crunching data from a…
ddobbs | June 16, 2009Neuroskeptic offers an elegant unpeeling of a study seeming specifically designed to find a marketing-friendly distinction for a drug -- Abilify -- otherwise undistinguished.
Suppose you were a drug company, and you've invented a new drug. It's OK, but it's no better than the competition. How do you convince people to buy it?
You need a selling point - something that sets your product apart. Fortunately, with drugs, you have plenty of options. You could look into the pharmacology - the chemistry of how your drug works in the body - and find something unique there. Then, all you need to do is…
ddobbs | June 3, 2009Forgive my recent blogopause. i was fishing, and then traveling, and then writing rather head-down intensely -- all activities I have trouble mixing with blogging and social media such as Twitter, which I've also left idle these last days.
So what gives with all that? I often find it awkward to switch between blogging or twittering and engaging deeply immersive physical activities. This hiatus, for instance, started when I went fishing last Tuesday on Lake Champlain for salmon -- a piscatorial retreat before a highly engaging work trip to NY, DC, and environs to talk to scientists and see my…
ddobbs | May 19, 2009
Found some Koufax footage. About halfway through this short clip he Ks Mantle, looking, and a bit later, in the dark footage toward the end, is a good strip of him throwing the devastating curve. Note there the emphatic downward motion of his shoulder -- which brought down his hand the faster, which (along with big, flexible hands and fingers) helped him make the ball spin 15 times on the way to the plate instead of the MLB-standard 12-13.
Following up my curveball coverage of last week, faithful reader and Cognitive Daily maestro Dave Munger wrote in noting that Arthur Shapiro, one of the…
ddobbs | May 18, 2009
A ring-tailed lemur, via Afarensis
Here's one that'll grab you. Via Discover's 80beats science news blog:
A small, lemur-like creature may have been an early ancestor of monkeys, apes, and humans. A magnificently preserved fossil dating from 47 million years ago reveals an animal that had, among other things, opposable thumbs, similar to humans', and unlike those found on other modern mammals. It has fingernails instead of claws. And scientists say they believe there is evidence it was able to walk on its hind legs [ABC News].
This from a study to be published in PLoS ONE tomorrow, and which…
ddobbs | May 15, 2009
Koufax, bringing the four-seamer. God save the guy at the plate.
I always look forward to the Illusion of the Year contest, but this year brings a special treat: a new explanation of how the curveball baffles batters.
Just a few days ago, during BP, my friend Bill Perreault threw me one of those really nasty curves of his, and though I read it about halfway in, I was still ahead -- and still unprepared for the sudden slanting dive it made at that last crucial moment. The good curves do that: Even when you have that millisecond of curveball detection beforehand, they still seem to take a…