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Link feast

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

06 September 2014

By Christian Jarrett

How Do Hallucinogens Work On The Brain?
Just one of the articles in a hallucinogens-themed special issue of The Psychologist that’s entirely free to access.

Famous Milgram ‘Electric Shocks’ Experiment Drew Wrong Conclusions About Evil, Say Psychologists
The Independent reports on a new analysis of feedback provided by participants in Milgram’s studies.

Why Walking Helps Us Think
Ferris Jabr reflects poetically on the psychological benefits of perambulation.

Preventing Suicide: A Global Imperative
“Every 40 seconds a person dies by suicide somewhere in the world,” says the WHO introducing its new report.

Surgeons and GPs [and Clinical Psychologists] More Likely to Cause Car Accidents Than Other Workers
The Guardian analyses insurance data and finds that, like their medical colleagues, clinical psychologists and psychotherapists are among the most accident prone drivers.

Neuroscience: Where Is The Brain in The Human Brain Project?
Yves Frégnac & Gilles Laurent lament the way that neuroscience, especially cognitive neuroscience, is allegedly being side-lined by a focus on technology in this European mega-project.

This Elderly Man Was Born With His Brain Hemispheres Disconnected. Did It Affect His Life? Hardly
The remarkable case of a man who discovered, aged 88, that he’d lived his whole life without a corpus callosum, apparently with little ill-effect.

The Point of Pointing
We point with our fingers, the Yupno of Papua New Guinea point with their noses. Virginia Hughes explores cross-cultural differences in this fundamental human behaviour.

Being Human or Not
Ruby Wax criticises the fashion for presenting oneself as eternally busy and infallible. “To be human,” she says, “is to be able to say, ‘I screwed up. I don’t know what I’m doing. I am scared. I’m lost'”.

People With Mental Illness Are More Likely to Be Victims of Homicide Than Perpetrators
Over at the Mental Elf blog, David Steele reports on new research that looked at UK homicide data.