Audio

May 042012
 

 

 

 

 

Two old favorite foods that have newly discovered benefits. 

Feb 042012
 

Dr Jason Buhle explains his pain relief experiment and what it means in this audio interview. Pain relief is a compelling subject for people living with physical discomfort. Some new work suggests that there are two different ways you can use your brain to get some relief. The power of placebos has been long studied – if you think something is going to do you good then it can. And distraction can also be useful in pain management – getting your mind off it really works. But are they the same effect? Apparently not according to this new research.

Jan 312012
 

If there was an ipad size machine with electrodes that attach to your skull which enhanced your motor skills, your vision, your decision making, mathematical ability, language, memory, and attention. Who wouldn’t want one? And if the improvements lasted a year, with no side effects? Sold. That’s the promise of Transcranial direct current stimulation, but

Jan 312012
 

How you think about your illness may play a bigger part in how well you recover (or whether you don’t) thsan the actual severity of the disease according to a new paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science. Hear what Prof Keith Petrie told Bob Hughes about patient expectations about their diseases in this story

Jan 302012
 

When we’re put on a box, we just aren’t as creative as when we escape and ‘think outside the box’ Dr Angela Leung of the Singapore Management University has found. And when we gesture with both hands (acting out ‘on the other hand’) we get more creative too. When people walk around a box – like a quadrangle they don’t get ideas that are as good as when they roam freely, too. And that applies even when people are moving an avatar in second life.

Jan 212012
 

How do others see us and how do we see them? The science of ‘mind perception’ is the work of Professor Kurt Gray of the University of Maryland’s Mind Perception and Morality Lab. His work ranges from how people see those in a persistent vegetative state as worse than dead, to how people are more sympathetic to someone who’s a victim than a villain. Dr Gray examined how we see naked people differently. We don’t objectify them as popular culture suggests.

Jan 132012
 

“If it bleeds, it leads,” goes the cynical saying with television and newspaper editors. In other words, most news is bad news and the worst news gets the big story on the front page. So one might expect major newspapers to contain, on average, more negative and unhappy types of words — like “war,” “ funeral,” “cancer,” “murder” — than positive, happy ones — like “love,” “peace” and “hero.” But it turns out to be the opposite.

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