flynn002

A couple of weeks ago, the Observer printed a debate headlined “ Do we need to change the way we are thinking about mental illness ?” I read it with interest, as I happen to think that we do need to change, and that the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM5) has numerous problems. The discussion was opened by Simon Wessely, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who responded No. He didn’t exactly defend the DSM5, but he disagreed with the criticism that it reduces psychiatry to biology. The Yes response was by Oliver James, an author and clinical psychologist, who attacked the medical model of mental illness, noting the importance of experience, especially childhood experience, in causing psychiatric symptoms. I happen to take a middle way here; there’s ample evidence of biological risk factors for many forms of mental illness, but in our contemporary quest for biomarkers, the role of experience is often sidelined. The idea that y...

Guest post by Patrick Rabbitt http://www.flickr.com/photos/sciencemuseum/3321607591/ This week, a paper by Woodley et al (2013 ) was widely quoted in the media (e.g. Daily Mail , Telegraph ). The authors dramatically announced that the average intelligence of populations of Western industrialised societies has fallen since the Victorian era. This is provocative because previous analyses of large archived datasets of intelligence tests scores by Flynn and others show the opposite. However, Woodley et al did not examine average intelligence test scores obtained from different generations. They compared 16 sets of data from Simple Reaction - Time (SRT) experiments made on groups of people at various times between 1884 and 2002. In all of  these experiments volunteers responded to a single light signal by pressing a single response key.  Data for women are incomplete but averages of  SRTs for men increase significantly with year of testing.  Because Woodley et al regard...

Photo from http://www.pa-legion.com Here’s an interesting question to ask any scientist: If you were to receive no more research funding, and just focus on writing up the data you have, how long would it take? The answer tends to go up with seniority, but a typical answer is 3 to 5 years. I don’t have any hard data on this – just my own experience and that of colleagues – and I suspect it varies from discipline to discipline. But my impression is that people generally agree that the academic backlog is a real phenomenon, but they disagree on whether it matters. One view is that completed but unpublished research is not important, because there’s a kind of “survival of the fittest” of results. You focus on the most interesting and novel findings, and forget about the rest. It’s true that we’ve all done failed studies with inconclusive results, and it would be foolish trying to turn such sow’s ears into silk purses.   But I suspect there’s a large swathe of research that doesn’t fal...