NewsUCanUse with Tony Delroy February 3 NewsUCanUse with Tony Delroy February 3 Delroy's NightLife Feb 042012 ABC Radio's Tony Delroy 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, and if the improvements lasted a year, with no side effects… Who wouldn’t want one? Transcranial direct current stimulation, according to Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh can have remarkable effects on our brains – and it’s so close, that at Oxford they’re thinking about the ethics of boosting brains like this. We’ve all heard the expression ‘thinking outside the box’ but does it really mean what it says? Yes according to a Singapore researcher Dr Angela Leung who put people in boxes and found they weren’t as creative as those outside the boxes. How you think about your disease has been linked to how well you’ll recover and now some new meta research that shows there is a link that doctors should be aware of? It’s a lesson for doctors and patients – Prof Keith Petrie of Auckland University says preconceptions about diseases can mean patients don’t follow doctors orders. An American researcher has been getting people to electrocute their friends and then asking how much it hurts? It’s not like Stanley Millgram who gave this a bad name in the 60s. Dr Kurt Gray from the Maryland Mind Perception and Morality Lab has been showing that electric shocks hurt less when people think they’re done kindly. Listen to the conversation here… Print PDF
RSS
PDF