Link feast

Replication: Is the glass half full, half empty, or irrelevant?
Is psychology research in crisis or not? The question is back on the agenda thanks to a new comment piece in the journal Science. Ella Rhodes at The Psychologist brings you the low down. Or if you haven’t got much time, she sums things up: “It’s possible the paper that said ‘paper that said that psychology isn’t reliable isn’t reliable’, isn’t reliable”.

Most Popular Theories of Consciousness Are Worse Than Wrong
They play to our intuitions, but don’t actually explain anything, writes Michael Graziano at The Atlantic.

Intelligent Birds: What Does Their Behaviour Mean, And Are We Just Anthropomorphising?
The latest from Sofia Deleniv’s blog The Neurosphere.

The Medical Approach To Mental Illness Has Been A Success
Guardian readers respond to an article by psychologist Richard Bentall in which he criticised the BBC for presenting an overly biological view of mental health.

Words and Meaning
This is the first contribution by Tim Lomas for his new occasional column at The Psychologist magazine: “I have long been interested in how language carves up the flux of our phenomenological world,” he begins.

Here’s A Technique The Most Productive People Use To Stay Focused
A trick suggested by Charles Duhigg in his new book Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business.

Doing a TED Talk: The Full Story
Tim Urban of the Wait But Why Blog (where he writes about procrastination among other things) was asked to give a TED talk. This is the amusing story of what happened.

Everything Is Crumbling
An influential psychological theory, borne out in hundreds of experiments, may have just been debunked. How can so many scientists have been so wrong, asks Daniel Engber at Slate.