December 2008
31 posts
To Sorrow, I bade good-morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant to me, and so kind.
- John Keats
Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption →
In recent years, drug companies have perfected a new and highly effective method to expand their markets. Instead of promoting drugs to treat diseases, they have begun to promote diseases to fit their drugs. The strategy is to convince as many people as possible (along with their doctors, of course) that they have medical conditions that require long-term drug treatment…
…To promote...
Antidepressants may damage more sex lives than... →
Sexual symptoms have long been known side effects of the popular Prozac class of antidepressants, but a growing body of research suggests that they are far more common than previously thought, perhaps affecting half or more of patients.
And a handful of recent medical and psychological journal articles document a small number of cases in which sexual problems remain even after a patient goes off...
Humor as social bargaining... →
Gruner offers an account of how humor might have arisen, which argues strongly for superiority theory. He posits that whereas our ancestors might normally have resorted to violence in order to assert their status within a social hierarchy, those who instead employed derisive humor would have garnered a significant evolutionary advantage. Since high social status generally entails greater access to...
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster....”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
“There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good...”
– Abraham Maslow
'Internet addiction' idea built on foundations of... →
A study just published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior has reviewed all of the available scientific studies on internet addiction and found them to be mostly crap. And not just slightly crap, really pretty awful.
To quote from the research summary:
The analysis showed that previous studies have utilized inconsistent criteria to define Internet addicts, applied recruiting methods...
Grieving: 7 tips to get you through the holidays →
“There’s a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever...”
– Pema Chodron
“In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The...”
– William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
(a book which captures the actual experience of depression like few others ever have)
Gift-Giving for Lovers →
Research suggests that women don’t seem to mind if they receive the less-than-perfect gift. Men, on the other hand, are a different story.
More Than Just Being A Sentimental Fool: The... →
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of...”
– Carl Jung
“What you remember about your life is almost certainly not accurate. Adults have...”
– Do people’s memories about their life history follow a predictable pattern? (via azspot) (via peterwknox) (via robot-heart)
Two cases of compulsive swearing - in sign... →
The medical journal Movement Disorders reported two case studies of people who were deaf from birth and had the tic disorder Tourettes, leading them to compulsively swear in sign language.
Tourettes is often associated with compulsive swearing, although this only happens in a minority of cases. It is more commonly associated with compulsive actions, that can be non-word vocal sounds, or actions...
“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.”
– T.S. Eliot
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
– Søren Kierkegaard
Watchsomethingchanged:
Cognitive Daily writer Dave Munger says we spot faces looking at us faster than we see the parts of those faces.
He uses the clip above as a test. “A grid of 100 pictures of Greta will be flashed for about 1/3 of a second. Can you spot the photos where she’s looking at you?”
The weird thing is, I can’t!
Obama in Your Heart: How Obama tapped into a... →
In his forthcoming book, Born To Be Good (which is not a biography of Obama), Keltner writes that he believes when we experience transcendence, it stimulates our vagus nerve, causing “a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat.” For the 66 million Americans who voted for Obama, that experience was shared on Election Day, producing a collective case of...
“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each...”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Study: the dynamic spread of happiness in a large... →
Abstract:
Objectives To evaluate whether happiness can spread from personto person and whether niches of happiness form within socialnetworks.
Design Longitudinal social network analysis.
Participants 4739 individuals followed from 1983 to 2003.
Main outcome measures Happiness measured with validated fouritem scale; broad array of attributes of social networks anddiverse social ties.
Results:...
Cyberchondria: Study of the Escalation of Medical... →
…the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure. We use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web. We performed a large-scale, longitudinal, log-based...
“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think...”
– Kurt Vonnegut
Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in... →
New Studies on Black and White vs. Colored... →