Trouble in mind
If you or someone you know has been troubled enough to enter a psychiatrist's office, she or he has probably emerged with a prescription and a diagnosis, possibly even a numerically coded label like...
View ArticleDoctoring the Mind
Perhaps you saw the front-page New York Times article that profiled an old school psychiatrist who has gone completely over to a practice of brief med checks.read more
View ArticleTrying to reduce mind to neurobiology? You can’t get there from here
Is mind an illusion? When we introspect, are we merely passive observers of a process over which we have no real influence? If so, what are the implications for the science of mental function?read more
View ArticleOrganic mind
Medicine can sometimes be a lot like auto mechanics. If you listen to master mechanics like the guys on Car Talk, you can almost hear the wheels turn as they ask probing questions to narrow the...
View ArticleAre brains just fleshy computers?
Computers have been beating chess masters for several years now, and just last month a computer dominated the tv quiz show Jeopardy. What's to stop a computer from achieving human-like...
View ArticleThe Plastic Brain
Life molds our brains into ever more finely tuned instruments. Stress dulls them. Here's how that works.read more
View ArticleZombie free zone
Philosophers were obsessed with zombies long before the recent movie craze. A philosophical zombie is a creature that acts like a regular person in every way, but has no mind. As a thought experiment,...
View ArticleStirred, Not Shaken
Some of the most dangerous patients a physician will ever encounter are hyper-aroused. That is, the normal mechanisms to sustain and modulate conscious alertness have gone haywire, and have rendered a...
View ArticleEnergy crunch
Does a lack of energy make you not want to do anything? I say (with a few exceptions) it's the other way around. Not wanting to do anything makes you feel a lack of energy. I would also argue that when...
View ArticleAgitation Situation
Agitated people tend to be described in cataclysmic ways: She exploded, he had a meltdown, she blew her top, he burned with rage. What fuels these cataclysms of arousal?read more
View ArticleSate ain't so
You feel parched so you look for a drink. Your stomach grumbles so you raid the fridge. You're drowsy so you snooze. You feel randy and you start to pay close attention to the contours of the bodies of...
View ArticleNight moves
Sleep is a funny kind of behavior--the more effort you put into getting it, the more elusive it becomes. We spend more time at that activity--well, inactivity--than at anything else we do in life...
View ArticleEatin' and excretin'
When you get right down to it, we humans have one big thing in common with the lowly worm: we are all comprised of living tissue wrapped around a tube that takes in food at one end and puts out waste...
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