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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A few months ago I posted a piece which has become my most popular blog post by quite a landslide.The postcovered various techniques for learning and looked at the empirical […]
A new paper published in Perspectives in Psychological Science (open access) suggests there is “a fundamental design flaw that potentially undermines any causal inference” in much psychology research. The paper […]
Why open access makes no sense (with a satirical slant).
Up until 800 years ago, guilt and innocence in the UK was regularly determined not by judge and jury but through a process known as trial by ordeal: “There were […]
The wakefulness drug modafinil, dubbed “Professor’s little helper” has in some circles become the go-to drug for pushing the clock back. Much of the distribution is conducted illicitly, meaning the patient […]
At the turn of the century when the internet first began to blow up, a wonderful technology emerged called Rich Site Summary, now more commonly known as Really Simple Syndication […]
There were three great scientific horse races in the last century. The first two, the race to the moon and the race to split the atom have been widely reported. […]
Don’t try this at home A man who expects to soon be blind has implanted a magnet into his ear, which can now be used as a wireless headphone. The […]
I love a good protest song, this one by Auditory Canvas couldn’t be more salient. The tune is dubbed entirely with particularly resonant segments of John F Kennedy’s “President and […]
A seemingly unintentionally ironic paper has just been published in Science titled “A HUMAN RIGHT TO SCIENCE“. I presume it’s an important paper because the title is in BLOCK CAPITALS. […]
I think we should all take a moment to consider the news that everyone who continues to protest in Istanbul’s Taksim square is to be considered a terrorist. Let’s just […]
I was pretty disappointed to read a post from fellow Big Think blogger, Steven Mazie. The backlash has been substantial, he has already had to rehash. His post begins with […]
I’m not sure where to begin on the ethics of this. On the up side, inspiring kids to learn about technology such as this could directly lead to promising careers […]
A spine chilling new documentary addresses the myriad of new tools for surveillance that are now being put to use in the the UK’s capital city. We learn of the […]
With the Welsh measles epidemic only now beginning to slow I thought now would be a good time to repost Daryl Cunningham‘s fantastic explainer (below) on how we came to be in […]
Matthew Hankins over at Psychologically Flawed has harvested an amusing list of quotes from studies that failed to find a significant result: a borderline significant trend (p=0.09) a clear trend […]
Daniel Dennett has posted a fantastic set of “seven tools for thinking” in an article in the Guardian that has gone so viral that if you haven’t seen it yet, […]
Can experimental findings look too good to be true? Last week I wrote a blog post about some experiments showing a counterintuitive finding regarding how the need to urinate affects […]
A couple of years ago Dr Mirjam Tuk won an IgNobel prize for the paper “Inhibitory Spill-Over: Increased Urinating Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains” in Psychological Science. Tuk […]
Mike Taylor over at the Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog created the wonderful flowchart above to help researchers decide whether to post in an open access journal. A few months […]
Update 13/05/13 12PM: The Guardian have now corrected the article to place David Eagleman’s quote in appropriate context. 1.55PM: The paragraph has now been cut completely with the following note “A paragraph that […]
There has been much focus over recent years, on brain machine interfaces (BMI) allowing for the direct control of a computer by electrodes placed on or near the brain. Unfortunately […]
Last week a paper ($) was published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that is rocking the world of neuroscience. The crack team of researchers including neuroscientists, psychologists, geneticists and statisticians analysed […]
Last night Ben Goldacre appeared on BBC Newsnight (viewable from UK ip addesses or portals only, for the next 7 days) discussing the ongoing havoc caused by the MMR scare in […]
The latest edition of the manual psychiatrists use to assess patients has gone through a major and controversial set of changes.
With terrorism at the forefront of public consciousness, it is easy to let civil liberties slip off the radar. This is unfortunate, if we learned anything from the classic psychology […]
The Center for Perceptual Systems at The University of Texas at Austin has just released a free web-app that will denoise and enlarge photos in a heartbeat to an extent […]
Fellow pseudonymous neuroblogger Neuroskeptic(to whom I owe a great deal in inspiration) has published a fantastic piece in Trends in Cognitive Sciences ($) on the benefits to science of anonymity. Last November Neuroskeptic became […]
First things first – I’m not a doctor, but the surprise new rules issued by the GMC (the British regulator for doctors) still worry me. Not just because I might perhaps one day […]
In the 1960’s Stanley Milgram introduced the lost letter technique which had a notable impact on the field of social psychology (unfortunately the original paper is still paywalled even though […]