Click here to read a BBC Article about the story of Phineas Gage, a man who changed the study of neuroscience forever after a metre-long rod fired through his skull.
Thousands of patients are being wrongly diagnosed with high blood pressure because they find the experience of going to the doctor so stressful.
Click here to watch a BBC news report by Jane Hughes, explaining White Coat syndrome and now doctors in England and Wales are being advised to order extra tests to see if a patient’s blood pressure stays high even when they are back at home.
Click here or here to read about Karla Homolka who is one of Canada’s most infamous female convicts. She was released from prison after serving a short 12-year sentence for her involvement in drugging, raping, torturing and killing young girls over a decade ago. The dead teens included her own young sister whose innocence was offered by Homolka to her boyfriend as a gift.
I read an article in the latest New Scientist magazine (Sept 2010), which discusses research carried out by Crocket, et.al. (2010) at the University of Cambridge, testing the effects of anti-depressants on willingness to impose negative consequences on another even when it’s for the ‘greater good’.
24 healthy participants were presented with a moral dilemma while they were under the influence of the antidepressant citalopram – a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), which increases brain serotonin levels. The particpants played a game in which they were asked to accept or decline another player’s offer of a share of a sum of money. If they accepted the offer, each player kept their share. If they refused, both players were left empty-handed.
The participants given citalopram were about 10 per cent less willing to inflict harm on someone in order to benefit others compared with those given a placebo. Participants who had taken citalopram were more likely to accept a stingy offer, rather than punishing the other player’s greed by refusing it.
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective asserted that female prostitutes are likely to suffer from depression and have a low self-esteem due to their inability to fully develop through the Psychosexual stages of development, resulting in unresolved internal and external conflicts, many of which have to do with the child’s relationship with her parents. Freud believed that prostitutes were psychologically immature, suffering from neurosis or fixated in an early stage of development. Freud wrote ‘Infant Sexuality’ in 1909, where he explained the that prostitutes exploit their innate sexual perversion because the superego is undeveloped resulting in the woman having an ‘uncivilised’ sexual attitude. In his later work he explains that males come to terms with their mother having a sexual relationship with their father so she is a juxtaposition between a mother and (her bottom half) a sexual object/whore. Therefore, prostitutes are a representation for males of the forbidden love for their mother and the prostitute is being socially irresponsible for not controlling every woman’s subconscious urge to perversion and prostitution!
Click here to attempt this brainteaser, reportedly written by Einstein. It is difficult and Einstein said that 98% of the people in the world could not figure it out. Which percentage are you in?
Click here to watch and read about the ‘Game of Death’ where contestants on the show did not realise they were taking part in an experiment to find out whether television could push them to outrageous lengths. The game involved contestants posing questions to another “player”, who was actually an actor, and punishing him with 460 volts of electricity when he answered incorrectly………..
