As it is the season of spooks, Michael Marshall of the Merseyside Skeptics Society conducted a test of the psychic abilities of two professional and highly experienced mediums (see report here ). The test was similar to one used by O’Keefe and Wiseman (see page 267 of the A2 Complete Companion). Each psychic produced a reading […]
Read moreAuthor: Cara Flanagan
Tickets still available for the exciting conference in March with … PROF ELIZABETH LOFTUS (and also PROF DAVID WILSON) March 19 or March 20 (nearly sold out). Make your reservations now, no deposit required, pay February 1st. Full details here Also – there is a CPD EVENT with Prof Loftus, see here And finally, there is still time to fix up a trip […]
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Here’s an interesting application of understanding stress. People who have spinal injuries usually lose control of their autonomic nervous system as well as their limbs, which means that their bodies do not respond to stress signals from the brain in the same way that normal people do – ‘normally’ an athlete, at the start of […]
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This week there was a programme on TV about The Boy who can’t forget (see here ), about people who remember everything. They’re not the only ones with special recall. There are also people who don’t forget faces, they recognise anyone they have ever met (see Caroline Williams ‘Face savers’, New Scientist, September 15). It has been […]
Read moreIn the search to explain why some people become addicted while others don’t, one answer has been that some people have an addictive personality i.e. they are just more likely to become addicted. Support for this idea comes from the phenomenon of ‘addiction transfer’, described in a recent article by Samantha Murphy in the New Scientist […]
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Thomas Szasz died on September 8, at the age of 92. He made a major contribution to the way we view psychiatry and mental illness. Along with David Rosenhan (‘Sane in Insane Places’) and psychiatrist Ronald Laing, Szasz was seen as part of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, However Szasz felt ‘anti-psychiatry’ was just another […]
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Sex testing for elite female athletes is a highly charged issue. In the A2 Complete Companion (page 105 3rd edition) we have written about the past decision by the Olympic committee to decide gender on the basis of obvious physical differences. Just before the 2012 Olympics the committee released new regulations which involve measuring testosterone levels. There are […]
Read moreIn our A2 Complete Companion we reported a study by Knutsson et al. (1986) who found that shift workers were three times more likely to develop heart disease than non-shift workers. A study just published by Hackam et al. ( 2012 ) confirms this, claiming a 24% increased risk of a coronary event and 5% increased risk of stroke. […]
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