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Link feast

Our pick of this week’s 10 best psychology and neuroscience links.

25 July 2015

By Christian Jarrett

Our pick of this week’s 10 best psychology and neuroscience links:

Making Holidays Work
With the holiday season in full swing, work and organisational psychologist Jessica de Bloom (writing for The Psychologist) takes a tour of the world of vacation research.

Experimental Psychology: The Anatomy of Obedience
Brendan Maher at Nature reviews two films probing notorious US psychological experiments.

Social Priming: Money for Nothing?
Neuroskeptic looks at a new study that failed to replicate the finding that thinking of money makes people more politically conservative.

Neuroscientist Sam Harris Selects 12 Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read
From Bertrand Russell to the Buddha, or why you should spend a weekend reading the Qur’an (from the Brain Pickings blog).

Teenagers Debunked
A transcript of “The Psychologist presents…” at Latitude Festival, supported by the Wellcome Trust. The discussion was chaired by editor of The Psychologist Jon Sutton, and featured cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and novelist Fiona Neill.

Are You a Head Person or a Heart Person?
At New York magazine, I looked at research that says your answer to this question is telling.

Placebo Effects in Medicine
A useful overview from the New England Journal of Medicine.

Daniel Kahneman: ‘What would I eliminate if I had a magic wand? Overconfidence’
According to the Nobel laureate in this interview with the Guardian, overconfidence “is built so deeply into the structure of the mind that you couldn’t change it without changing many other things.”

Me and My New Brain (TV show)
This new documentary from BBC Three tells the stories of people who have survived serious brain injury.

The Strange Phenomenon of Musical Skin Orgasms
Some people feel music so strongly the sensations can be compared to sex. How does a good song move the body and mind in this way, asks David Robson at BBC Future.