A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Tom Wolfe: his 1996 predictions foreshadowed dubious media stories of neural circuits for infidelity and political orientation. Photograph: Jim Cooper/AP Perhaps Wolfe’s most astute observation was cultural: how the collapse of Freud and Marx had pushed people into using the language of cognitive science for explanations of human behaviour. He also noticed that [...]
PHOTO: A man shows off his body art, including eyeball tattoos, at a tattoo festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2014. (Flickr: Augusto dos Santos) The Baird Government has been criticised for recently regulating the practice of eyeball tattooing, as the New South Wales Opposition calls for a ban on the procedure. The [...]
Shutter stock If you want to strike up a new relationship, simply smile. It works because people are much more attuned to positive emotions when forming new bonds than they are to negative ones such as anger, contempt or sadness. Don't try to fake it, however, because people can recognize a sincere smile [...]
People who misuse prescription pain relievers all have one thing in common, University of Georgia researchers have discovered: a history of recent illicit drug use. How they acquire such drugs varies according to age, however. The findings, published in the journal Addictive Behaviors, may help health care providers and others curb painkiller misuse. In a [...]
Interdiscplinarity forces us to think in new ways. Photograph: Helen Pynor/GV Art Due to its incredible complexity, the brain is an immensely challenging subject of study. The average human brain has about 90 billion neurons that make 100 trillion connections or synapses. Scientists believe this staggering number of neurons is responsible for the [...]
Stan Grant delivers a speech on racism When journalist Stan Grant stepped onto the podium in a large Sydney hall on a cold October evening to address a crowd of about 100, he had only an idea of what he wanted to say. What emerged has gone viral online. Grant has been compared to [...]
Lifehack A Harvard scientist has rejected the idea wealth, fame and success can make for a “good life” – and instead argued that strong relationships are what make people happy and healthy. Robert Waldinger, clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is the fourth director of a 77-year-long Study of Adult Development. The study [...]
(Photo : University College London) In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram famously conducted experiments in a Yale University basement showing that people will apparently inflict pain on another person simply because someone in a position of authority told them to. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biologyon Feb. 18, 2016 have [...]
Concussions are common in sport, but few realise just how damaging a concussion is to the brain. Credit: Mark Nolan News that actor Will Smith will boycott the Oscars has overshadowed promotional coverage of his latest film, Concussion, which examines the effects of repeated head injury. In the film, Smith plays the real-life neuropathologist Bennet [...]
Pornography is easily accessible to children online. Photo: Phil Carrick The sooner parents realise the risk their child will be exposed to pornography online is real the better. No longer is it OK, if it ever was, to say, "I don't understand tech", or "I don't use it, so I don't get it". The [...]
