Category: Mind, Body & Health
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Two stories related to brain function. One did not come as much of a surprise – the other did. The first one claims that how you solve math problems may depend on the language you speak. I wonder what Thomas Friedman will make of these findings. He will probably clamor for making Mandarin compulsory in…
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Scientists are going to report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that men’s chances of being gay may be influenced by birth order and the gender of the preceding siblings. Apparently, the prenatal conditions in the mother’s womb after she has given birth to multiple sons, increases a younger son’s chances…
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This report combines a couple of peculiar and oddly unexpected (for different reasons) stories that were recently in the news – one from the world of entertainment and the other from the annals of medical research. Contrary to what scientists have long suspected, smoking marijuana does not appear to cause any increase in the risk…
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News of innovations in drug and medical research including those affecting women’s health make for interesting reading. While I do not take an academic interest in all pharmaceutical R&D, I do pay a fair amount of attention to what is reported in the popular news outlets. A story on the front page of Houston Chronicle…
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I have previously spoken out about the need for safe and sensible measures to promote womens’s reproductive health and the immeasurable harm done to progress in this field by meddlesome religious bigots. Two of my angrier comments are here and here. This morning at Leiter Reports, I came across yet another evidence of the foolish and…
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Many of us find waiting in the doctor’s office for a surgical procedure more stressful than the procedure itself. Most of us prefer to remove a band-aid with a quick yank rather than a slow pull. Sometimes the human brain dislikes waiting for an unfavorable outcome more than it does the outcome itself. The cost…
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A little more than a week ago I posted an article here about a book by John Carey – "What Good Are Arts?" in which the author questions the value/ futility of defining "art". Carey surmises that the definition of good or bad art is best left to the consumer until there is a…
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Filing for taxes is hard enough for the mentally sound. Ploughing through tax forms, available deductions, hidden loopholes and the fear of a tax audit can turn most people quite batty around this time of the year. But for those whose mental faculties may be failing, the tax season can be especially taxing. In fact,…
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Here is something to ponder. "In the largest scientific test of its kind, heart surgery patients showed no benefit when strangers prayed for their recovery. And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications. Doctors in the $2.4 million study could only guess why. The researchers emphasized that…
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Remember Andrea Yates? The Houston woman who on June 20, 2001 systematically drowned her five young children in the bath tub and then calmly called the police? She is up for retrial. She will be tried a second time for the murders and her insanity or the lack of it will again be an issue.…
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I wrote this at my blog a day or two ago, and I’m going to reproduce it here–it sparked a couple of interesting comments, and I suspect Ruchira has a larger readership than I do: In light of this story, Tigtog poses this question: Should men who are not soldiers be held to the same…
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Author and journalist Maia Szalavitz has a guest column up at the London Times. Part confession, part social criticism, the piece is a moving look at the stigma attached to antidepressant use. Our culture–and I know, there is no "our culture," no "American culture" or "western culture"; there are too many subcultures, and this generalization…
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