Forgotten Brain Teaching Two Dogs Sarcasm
Teaching Good Sex by Laurie Abraham (New York Times): Incredible article about sex educator Al Vernaccio and how he teaches sex education to kids at a private school in Philadelphia. Instead of teaching ‘abstinence only’ or ‘abstinence preferred’, he is more interested in teaching teens what sex is like, and in getting them to understand the very adult responsibilities and rights that go along with sex - after all, if not for him, these kids will be learning about sex mostly from porn, and that can be very misleading. [via everyone]
The Two Year Window by Jonathan Cohn (The New Republic): In 2004, when Mark Latham was the leader of the opposition, he made a big thing about trying to improve early child development. It served to humanise him at the time, and make him seem something different to the aggressive bully that he was, but he was right about it, as you can see from this article; if we want to make our countries a better place, making sure that children get the right care in the first first years is bang-for-buck more effective than pretty much any other thing you could spend it on. [via the Browser: you have to read it via The Browser for it to be ungated, thus me linking to them rather than TNR]
The Forgotten Patients by Robert Langreth and Rebecca Ruiz (Forbes): Psychiatrists, for various reasons, know very little about how to help suicidal patients. This is partly because the pharmaceutical companies that fund research in mental health try to make sure that suicidal patients are excluded when they test new drugs for treating depression - it’s a legal nightmare. This means that we really have very little idea whether it’s a good idea to give suicidal patients the drugs they are usually given. However, some approaches may help more than others; lithium (usually used for treating bipolar disorder) apparently reduces suicide attempts by 80%, and for the subsection of suicidal people who have borderline personality disorder, dialectical behaviour therapy (a variant of CBT) is apparently quite effective. [via]
Brain Scan Overload by Jonah Lehrer (Wall Street Journal): Don’t trust those pretty pictures of brain scans you see in a fair amount of the things I post: they’re misleading and limited in what they can show. Lehrer here explains quite well the limits of fMRI and what you should be conscious of when people try to use the technique to prove things.
The Science Of Sarcasm? Yeah Right by Richard Chin (Smithsonian Magazine): Yes, somebody has actually put together a Sarcasmatron. And it picks up sarcasm in written language 77% of the time. And this article has the following, very interesting quote which I feel Stephen Colbert should be aware of: “If you suddenly think that Stephen Colbert is right wing, that’s when I would worry [about potentially having brain damage].” [via]
Puppy Pregnancy Syndrome: Men Who Think They Are Pregnant With Dogs by Jesse Bering (Scientific American): Yes, this is an actual culture-bound condition. Men in a village in India really do think that they are in danger of giving birth to puppies. Through their urethras. Ouch. Bering talks about how people have been put on antidepressants in order to make them less worried about all this.
