A new study conducted by neuroscientists at Duke University explains how we can feel confident and certain about events that never occurred. It all depends upon the area of the brain that is processing the memory. Read more →

Back in September, Sudip Ghosh offered a review at Brain Blogger of a new book on anorexia, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters.

One of the many aspects of the complex problem of eating disorders is body image. It was informative, then to come across an article summarizing a wide variety of research findings on body image. I’ve picked out a few of the more interesting and perhaps less well-known ones: Read more →

I keep hearing that all our children are being diagnosed ADD. Perhaps this comes from our fear of being maligned, diagnosed, and forced to conform to some dystopian, fascist mind control future in the making. Or perhaps it’s fueled by our morbid fascination with subcultures of freaks. Hence, this article’s title, inspired by the classic movie, Freaks, at the point where a beautiful but dastardly woman is horrified to be inducted into the world of circus freaks. And things go downhill from there. Read more →

To my utter delight, at last there is a book that lashes out at the spectra of thinness and beauty that sets off millions of our young girls, on an obsessive path of starvation and self-punishment.

Perfecting oneself has been mainly a matter of self-discipline and education for the most major part of human history. The association of perfection and thinness is a mysterious recent phenomenon, which is hard to explain. For young girls it’s a difficult cycle to get out of — media pressures, the continuous barrages of images of successful, “thin” women on screen and television, pages and volumes of slimming diets and exercises exhorting an “all out war” on fat. This in turn creates a paradigm of personal based on one’s body weight and “slim and trim” looks. It does not take time for it to develop in to a full-scale obsession, and the focal point of the lives of millions of young girls. And no wonder anorexia and bulimia have now become two of the commonest psychiatric disorders in this age group. Read more →

The genetic basis for Alzheimer’s disease has been a focus of research in recent years, and the gene most studied so far has been the ApoE gene, which codes for apoprotein E, a blood protein concerned with the transport of lipids in blood. Specifically, ApoE is thought to be associated with the development of atherosclerosis, the laying of fatty plaques inside the walls of our arteries. Read more →

A new study presented by the World Health Organization points to the international community’s efforts to curb interpersonal violence and its mental and physical consequences. This past week nearly 200 experts on violence prevention assembled in Scotland for “Milestones 2007,” a gathering intended to critically examine advances made since the WHO release of the “World Report on Violence and Health,” in 2002. At the time of its original publication, a portion of this landmark report highlighted the psychological impact of interpersonal violence, supporting emerging research on the long-term, medically-related consequences of violence. This on-going study acts to solidify the link between violent behavior and consequently, mental distress. Read more →