Feast
Our round-up of the latest juicy titbits in the world of psychology.
07 October 2011
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All week long BBC Radio 3 has been running a series of programmes “The Darkest Hour” on insomnia.
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“You love your iPhone, literally,” claimed a risible neuro-nonsense op-ed column in the New York Times. Leading psychologists and neuroscientists aired their irritation in a joint letter to the paper. Neurocritic dissects the column’s claims.
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The mighty Steve Pinker has a new book out ““The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined“. Scientific American Mind interviewed him about the book. Positive review from Slate magazine. Negative review in Prospect magazine.
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The latest issue of our own Psychologist magazine is out now, and includes an open-access comment special on the recent English riots.
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Science writing whiz, Ed Yong, has an excellent feature on neuroaesthetics in this month’s Times Eureka science magazine (via free PDF or Times website).
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Nature has a news feature on the increase in retractions of science papers.
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NPR has an article and podcast about the way psychology helped locate the ship HMS Syndney, lost off Australia during World War II. [Read our own report on this research].
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The latest episode of BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind is available on iPlayer and includes a chat with the researcher behind the “how to break a habit” research that we covered recently.
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The latest Neuropod podcast is online and includes a feature on how the brain is adapted for reading.
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Psychologist Aric Sigman wrote a tendentious article about the health risks of daycare for babies and young children. Developmental psych expert Prof Dorothy Bishop took him to task for scare-mongering and misrepresenting the literature. So too did the Guardian’s Ben Goldacre. Read Sigman’s response and the response from the editors of The Biologist, where the much-criticised article was published.
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This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 80-year-old Tomas Transtroemer, is a psychologist. Congratulations Tomas!