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...

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...