Misbehaving: being clever and wicked is a form of creativity

Creativity can bring about unchecked harm, but it's up to us how we wield it.Aeon counter – do not remove

Suppose you forgot it was your partner's birthday, but you know that they would appreciate the smallest of gestures, say a bouquet. It's late at night and no florists are open. The cemetery on your way home has recently had a funeral, and you walk across the site and pick up a good-looking bouquet of roses from someone's grave. You then head home, and the flowers are happily received by your partner.

Would you say that you hurt anyone?

Keep reading Show less
morality philosophy creativity mind brain psychology productivity

Why the Rosenhan Experiment still matters

One flew east, one flew west, eight shrinks flew into the cuckoo's nest.

  • In 1973, eight experimenters faked insanity to see how easy it was to get into a mental hospital. The hard part was getting out.
  • Their findings sparked a great debate over how psychiatry treated patients and how accurate diagnostic procedures were.
  • In an age marked by a lack of proper mental health care, the finding that it was too easy to get a doctor's attention seems shocking.
Keep reading Show less
psychology public health prison mental health

Scientists are creating music to unlock your brain’s potential

Soon, parents may be able to prescribe music to their kids to help them focus.

  • Instead of prescribing medications to kids with ADD or ADHD, Clark and his team at Brain.fm are looking to music as another option for treatment.
  • Through a grant from the National Science Foundation, the company is developing music that features "neural-phase locking" — a combination of different principles that create specific characteristics in the brain, such as increased concentration or relaxation.
  • As long as they're listening to the music, the neural phase-locking aspect of Brain.fm's tunes has the potential to keep people focused.
brain productivity technology startup health neuroscience medical research mind dan clark

'Self is not entirely lost in dementia,' argues new review

The assumption "that without memory, there can be no self" is wrong, say researchers.

Photo credit: Darren Hauck / Getty Images
Mind & Brain

In the past when scholars have reflected on the psychological impact of dementia they have frequently referred to the loss of the "self" in dramatic and devastating terms, using language such as the "unbecoming of the self" or the "disintegration" of the self. In a new review released as a preprint at PsyArXiv, an international team of psychologists led by Muireann Irish at the University of Sydney challenge this bleak picture which they attribute to the common, but mistaken, assumption "that without memory, there can be no self" (as encapsulated by the line from Hume: "Memory alone… 'tis to be considered… as the source of personal identity").

Keep reading Show less
medical research medicine alzheimer's brain memory identity dementia

Why radicals can't recognize when they're wrong

It's not just ostriches who stick their head in the sand.

Image source: Shutterstock
Mind & Brain
  • Not only does everyone have personal experience with how difficult it can be to change people's minds, but there's also empirical research showing why this is the case.
  • A new study in Current Biology explains why some people seem to be constitutionally incapable of admitting they're wrong.
  • The study shows the underlying mechanism behind being bull-headed, and there may be some ways to get better at recognizing when you're wrong.
Keep reading Show less
mindfulness meditation personality mind brain psychology

Microdoses of LSD change how you perceive time

A study on the effects of LSD microdosing shows some fittingly strange results.

Stephen Pond/Getty Images
Mind & Brain
  • A new study offers some of the first evidence that microdosing – taking tiny, regular doses of LSD – does have measurable effects.
  • Subjects taking LSD were less accurate when estimating how long an image appeared on a screen than subjects who were sober.
  • The mechanism that causes this effect remains unknown, but several ideas have been put forward.
Keep reading Show less
cognitive science medical research psychology science time neuroscience mind brain memory drugs psychedelic LSD