flynn002

Here’s a problem I encountered the other day. I’d left my keys at home (a bad start). But I’ve learned to arrange life to allow for cognitive failures, and I knew there was a spare key in the keybox in my PA’s office. My PA was on holiday, and her door was locked, but I was not foiled by this because there’s a spare key to her room in another keybox (#2) outside her door. Both keyboxes have numeric codes, but codes for the keyboxes have been set to be memorable, even by someone with a barely functioning hippocampus. So I managed to get into my PA’s office, extract key for my office, lock up her office, enter my office, and do a full day’s work. It was going in the other direction, restoring my office key to the keybox, that proved challenging. Before you read on, you might want to give your frontal lobes a little work-out: what should the correct sequence of events be? Well, here’s what I did: 1.    Go down corridor to keybox to retrieve key to PA’s office. Unable to read...

Well, I had not planned a blogpost this morning, but I am goaded to do so by growing frustration as I attempted to read a review that was published in Trends in Neurosciences. The authors were proposing a novel theory in a controversial area, and came out with definitive statements, such as “Imaging studies have revealed the involvement of brain regions including the basal ganglia and cerebellum”. Quite appropriately, they supported such assertions with references. But the journal format meant that these references were identified only by numbers, so I had to flip to the reference list at the back of the paper to find out what was being referred to. The paper had over 70 references, and in the course of reading it, I reckon I did this about 20 times. I would have done it more, but it was distracting and I had to put down my mug of tea each time while I hunted for the relevant page. If I forgot the number on the way (a not unusual occurrence at my age), I had to go through this loop aga...

In a previous blogpost , I criticised a recent paper claiming that playing action video games improved reading in dyslexics. In a series of comments below the blogpost, two of the authors, Andrea Facoetti and Simone Gori, have responded to my criticisms. I thank them for taking the trouble to spell out their views and giving readers the opportunity to see another point of view. I am, however, not persuaded by their arguments, which make two main points. First, that their study was not methodologically weak and so Current Biology was right to publish it, and second, that it is unfair, and indeed unethical, to criticise a scientific paper in a blog, rather than through the regular scientific channels. Regarding the study methodology, as noted above, the principal problem with the study by Franceschini et al was that it was underpowered, with just 10 participants per group.   The authors reply with an argument ad populum, i.e. many other studies have used equally small samples. This ...

 © cartoonstock.com So you’ve slaved away for weeks giving up any semblance of social or family life in order to put your best ideas on paper. The grant proposal disappears into the void for months during which your mental state oscillates between optimistic fantasies of the scientific glory that will result when your research is funded, and despair and anxiety at the prospect of rejection. And then it comes: the email of doom: “We regret that your application was not successful.” Sometimes just a bald statement, and sometimes embellished with reviewer comments and ratings that induce either rage or depression, depending on your personality type. There are three things worth noting at this point. First, rejection is the norm: success rates vary depending on the funding scheme, but it’s common to see funding rates around 20% or less. Second, resilience in the face of rejection is a hallmark of the successful scientist, at least as important as intelligence and motivation. Third, the...

Here’s a paradox: Most scientists would give their eye teeth to get a paper in a high impact journal, such as Nature, Science, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Yet these journals have had a bad press lately, with claims that the papers they publish are more likely to be retracted than papers in journals with more moderate impact factors . It’s been suggested that this is because the high impact journals treat newsworthiness as an important criterion for accepting a paper. Newsworthiness is high when a finding is both of general interest and surprising, but surprising findings have a nasty habit of being wrong. A new slant on this topic was provided recently by a paper by Tressoldi et al (2013) , who compared the statistical standards of papers in high impact journals with those of three respectable but lower-impact journals. It’s often assumed that high impact journals have a very high rejection rate because they adopt particularly rigorous standards, but this appear...

The Master said: "I never refuse to teach anyone, not even those so lowly they come offering nothing more but a few strips of dried meat."    Confucius,  The Analects 7.7 It’s that time of year again when hopeful applicants are being interviewed for postgraduate places in the UK. The bar is set ever higher: gone are the days when a good first degree would guarantee you an interview. In my own department, the sad reality is that even for those with stellar CVs, the amount of funding is pitifully small. If you’re really smart and motivated and determined to get a doctorate, the only way forward may be self-funding. But here’s the problem: student loans will cover undergraduate but not postgraduate study. If you’re on a full-time course, it can be hard to find a job that would begin to cover your costs. So the only option may be to find friends or relatives willing to give or loan you the money. For a doctorate in Experimental Psychology at Oxford (UK and EU students), this ...