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Link Feast

Our pick of the best psychology and neuroscience links from the past week or so.

07 February 2015

By Christian Jarrett

Meet Your Brain (video)
Watch these young children introduce you to the basics of neuroscience.

Exporting Trauma: Can the Talking Cure Do More Harm Than Good?
It’s dangerous to assume that other cultures will benefit from our own Western approaches to psychotherapy, says Anna Leach in the Guardian.

How Your Eyes Trick Your Mind
An interactive guide to the history of visual illusions and what they’ve taught us about the mind.

Trying to Be Less Stupid: The Hard Work of Brain Science
An interview with Michael Gazziniga, cognitive neuroscience pioneer who performed some of the breakthrough studies on split-brain patients.

The Trip Treatment
“Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results,” says Michael Pollan in the New Yorker.

Even Cockroaches Have Different Personalities, Scientists Find
Some are shy, others are bold.

A Memory Expert Explains Brian Williams’s ‘False’ Memory
A US news anchor recently apologised for inventing an account of when he was shot down in a helicopter over Iraq. Memory expert Lawrence Patihis says it’s plausible that Williams experienced a false memory.

Response to the Book Review Symposium: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (pdf) [more misunderstanding of psychology by sociologists]
At the end of 2013, four sociologists tore into the arguments made by Steven Pinker in his book about the historic decline in human violence. In this retort, the psychologist dismantles their criticisms with flair and erudition.

How Real Are Facebook Friendships? [more psychology of Facebook]
The photographer Tanja Hollander found that most of her friends on the network were willing to pose for portraits, and they showed her great hospitality, even those she’d never met or hadn’t seen for years.

Beware Of The Pseudoscience Of Self
When it comes to understanding how we came to be the way we are, there’s no control group, says Tania Lombrozo, so we should make causal inferences with great care.