Simon Oxenham
The best and the worst of psychology and neuroscience
Simon Oxenham covers the best and the worst from the world of psychology and neuroscience. Formerly writing with the pseudonym "Neurobonkers", Simon has a history of debunking dodgy scientific research and tearing apart questionable science journalism in an irreverent style. Simon has written and blogged for publishers including: The Psychologist, Nature, Scientific American and The Guardian. His work has been praised in the New York Times and The Guardian and described in Pearson's Textbook of Psychology as "excoriating reviews of bad science/studies”.
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Don’t read this blog post. Definitely don’t read it to the end. Didn’t I tell you not to read this blog post? You’re still doing it… We can laugh at […]
Imagine if I were to ask you to donate blood tomorrow. Now imagine that I were to offer you $7 to do the very same thing. Would this incentive make […]
A while back I wrote a post about the problem of pseudoscience in TED talks and how this problem was made so much worse by the failure across the board […]
According to an article published yesterday in Popular Mechanics based on an article published this week in Current Biology, a new application named “Ultimeyes” has been created that can train […]
Update March 25th 2014:The Psychiatric Timeshave republished the article along with responses from those involved. On 6th December 2013 the journal Psychiatric Times published an article online by Richard Noll, a […]
A spellbinding case of justified paranoia is documented this week in the New Yorker. Researcher Tyrone Hayes upset the manufacturer of the second most popular herbicide in the US (since […]
Coursera is a service that allows top universities around the world to share their material online. Without spending a penny I’ve completed courses on Coursera from universities including Stanford and […]
I’ve written a guest post over at Dean Burnett’s Guardian Science blog about an important piece of information that is not getting through to people who have had brain injuries. See […]
Over recent years a new industry has exploded that sells educational interventions purportedly based on neuroscience to schools. In 2006 a paper published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience reported that teachers […]
In a fascinating interview Stanford University psychological anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann describes meeting modern day “witches”, taking a “magic” course, experiencing bizarre (non-drug-induced) hallucinations and generally “hanging out in the magical […]
According to urban legend, sports stars who appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated will subsequently experience bad luck. This seems counterintuitive but time and time again the Sports Illustrated […]
Yesterday the first instalment of a promising new documentary tackling conspiracy theories was published. Kirby Ferguson, creator of the rather fabulous documentary: Everything is a Remix, funded the documentary on Kickstarter and […]
Over the past century a war has been fought in universities around the world which has resulted in countless bottles of red ink spilled over students’ work, in the form […]
If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to sit through the Gameshow “Deal or No Deal”, you might have concluded as Charlie Brooker put it, that the entire show is “actually […]
It’s an impressive project that can push the frontiers in one field, a new crowdfunded project looks set to make a splash in three. Until now, the research grade EEG […]
In this end of year roundup I present the top ten of my posts from the last year, selected by your mouse clicks, along with a “too long, didn’t read” […]
A few weeks ago Mayor of London Boris Johnson said some questionable things about IQ tests and the benefits of greed, income inequality and shaking boxes of cornflakes. Dorothy Bishop wrote an […]
Professor David Nutt who was recently awarded the Nature/Sense About Science prize for standing up for science, this month gave a short talk at Bristol TEDx which might make you […]
In September I covered a paper that described the massive amount of bias created in the legal system in parts of the US where forensic laboratories are paid in return […]
Prof. David Nutt is a man who needs no introduction. The expert psychiatrist, neuropsychopharmacologist and Chair of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) was made world famous by former […]
Recently under the US government shutdown many scientists discovered for the first time what it is like to be cut off from science, but for others not having direct access […]
A comment on my most recent blog post reminds me both why I love blogging and why comments on science blogs are such a good thing. The commenter might write […]
Last week Sciencepublished a “sting operation” that runs the risk of tarnishing the entire phenomenon of open access publishing, however the paper is only representative of a tiny and very […]
It couldn’t be more grimly ironic that science and medicine are being obstructed by a stalemate over payment for health care. Here’s a short message to America from the UK […]
There’s been a lot of criticism lately of badly written science, following the publication of Michael Billig’s Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences in which […]
A few months ago I posted a piece on the alarming resurgence in the use of lie detectors in the UK and the US. A new documentary looks at the use […]
A new image editing method will have graphic designers cheering and weeping in equal measure. The new technique lets you take a two-dimensional image, and with as little as three […]
A disquieting paper has been published in the journal Criminal Justice Ethics, that suggests the decisions of forensic scientists are being influenced by payments for convictions. The authors Roger Koppl […]
If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time you’ll probably be familiar with the name Sokal from the Sokal affair, the scandal in 1996 in which physicist […]
A paper titled “Welcome to My Brain” has been published in the journal Qualitative Inquiryby Sage which is so unintelligible that it is baffling beyond belief. Unfortunately, the paper is […]