Neuroskeptic

After four years, Neuroskeptic is no longer an indie blog - I've moved to Discover Magazine blogs.The new address is here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/So please stop using this blogspot site; don't link to it, don't visit it, etc. All the posts are on the new one. The new RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/neuro-skeptic/Comments on this blog are now turned off but all old comments have been transferred to the new site, and you can comment there.

Over the next few days, Neuroskeptic will be moving to Discover Magazine. Which is very exciting.This will mean no new posts for at least a week, while we sort out the technical issues of the transition, and I've also turned comments off - all existing comments will be moved over to the new blog, however.For more updates you can follow me on Twitter...See you on the other side soon!

Late last year, the excellent Neurobonkers blog covered a case of 'Profiteering from anxiety'.It seems one Nader Amir has applied for a patent on the psychological technique of 'Attentional Retraining', a method designed to treat anxiety and other emotional problems by conditioning the mind to unconsciously pay more attention to positive things and ignore unpleasant stuff.For just $139.99, you can have a crack at modifying your unconscious with the help of Amir's Cognitive Retraining […]

For years, I and others have been arguing that the current system of publishing science is broken. Publishing and peer-reviewing work only after the study's been conducted and the data analysed allows bad practices - such as selective publication of desirable findings, and running multiple statistical tests to find positive results - to run rampant.So I was extremely interested when I received an email from Jona Sassenhagen, of the University of Marburg, with subject line: Unilaterally raising […]

An editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal by Roger Collier highlights the problem of Person-first language: Laudable cause, horrible prosePerson-first language (or language that is person-first, as it prefers to be known) is the nice idea that rather than calling someone, say, "blind", we should call them "a person who is blind", so as to remind everyone that they're not defined by their blindness but are a person first... clever, eh?No. For one thing, it's just bad English. As […]