Scintilla

It can take some bottle to share an anecdote, so it's somewhat harsh when your friend shoots you down with an impatient accusation that you've told them this story before. You'd think they'd be more understanding - most of us seem to be far better at remembering who's told us what compared with to whom we've told what. Psychologists characterise this as a distinction between "source memory" and "destination memory", and according to Nigel Gopie and Colin MacLeod, the latter form is surprisingly under-researched. They've just published a new study suggesting that we're poor at remembering to whom we said what because of the self-focus associated with disclosing information, rather than receiving it. This self-focus, they argue, disrupts the memory processes that would otherwise associate what was said and to whom. The good news is that their finding points to a remedy.

A nice complement to the one paper (Ng et al) I detailed last week is a paper that actually came out just before hand (Choi et al). Whereas the Ng paper used whole exome targeted sequencing to find the mutation for a previously unexplained rare genetic disease, the Choi et al paper used a similar scheme (though with a different choice of targeting platform) to find a known mutation in a patient, thereby diagnosing the patient.The patient in question has a tightly interlocked pedigree (Figure 2), with two different consanguineous marriages shown. Put another way, this person could trace 3 paths back to one set of great-great-grandparents. Hence, they had quite a bit of DNA which was identical-by-descent, which meant that in these regions any low-frequency variant call could be safely ignored as noise.

Contour Drawing Rating Scale (Thompson & Gray, 1995) - established as a reliable and valid measure of body size perception.Anorexia nervosa, an obsessive and unrelenting quest for thinness, is one of the most deadly psychiatric disorders. The documented mortality rate ranges from 3.3% to 18% in different studies (Herzog et al., 2000), and those with the disorder are ten times more likely to die from their illness than a comparable healthy population.

I've done a few posts recently about fertility, so how about the next stage, parenthood?

I've opened up these scarsI'll make you face thisI pulled myself so farI'll make you, face, this, now!---Linkin ParkDeliberate self-harm, or self-injury, is becoming increasingly recognized as a problem affecting adolescents and young adults. Rates are difficult to determine, as the behaviors are often concealed. One recent study tracked a group of 1400 Midwestern US high school students over a 5 year period (Muehlenkamp et al., 2009).

Image via Wikipedia I recently came across this article by Rosengren and Hickling about how children explain seemingly impossible or extraordinary transformations in terms of magic or trickery or natural/physical explanations based on their ages and developmental level. To summarize the study , I’m presenting the abstract:

I’m not planning to blog a lot on the Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples as is openly accessible. Your comments are going to carry a lot more weight there than here. But I’ll try and keep track of what other people are saying elsewhere. I’m expecting this to be the first paper of a developing argument, so I’ll need to see what people identify as problems and address them. There’s two comments in the Times today which I think neatly highlight one of the issues. One is from Efrosyni Boutsikas and the other from Mary Beard.

A couple of years ago, I re-posted an old article of mine about homeopathy discussing its ludicrous claims, its feeble attempts to provide a scientific explanation for those claims, and basically pointing out that no solid evidence has ever been found that infinitely diluted solutions of spurious ingredients have any more beneficial effect on a patient than a glass of fresh water. The post got a very late critique from someone in the homeopathy “industry”, so I took each of their points and updated my original post, making it even more robust than it had originally been. Incidentally, that first draft was written originally for a medical magazine and had been checked over by a homeopath and a general practitioner, so it’s not that it hadn’t been in half decent shape to begin with.

Imagine you've just paid an expert good money for their verdict and they say to you: "Can you hang on a couple of minutes whilst I don't think about this". You'd be forgiven for thinking they've gone silly. They may have. But another possibility is that you've chosen a shrewd expert who's totally up-to-speed with the latest decision-making research: Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues have just shown that people with expertise in football are better at predicting match outcomes when they spend time not consciously thinking about their predictions.In an initial experiment, 352 Dutch undergrads were divided into football experts and non-experts, based on their self-ratings, and they were all asked to make predictions (home or away win, or draw) about four forthcoming football matches in the top Dutch league - the Eredivisie.

Young children benefit socially and intellectually the more their carers engage and respond to them. Recognising this, we can train nursery staff to be as responsive to the children in their care as possible. But a new study by Claire Vallotton raises an interesting and under-examined issue - what if there's something about some infants that leads their carers to engage with them more, thus giving them an advantage over their peers?Vallotton filmed interactions between 18 student caregivers and 10 infants (aged between 4 and 19 months) at the Infant and Toddler programme at the UC Davis child development lab. Carers working here were taught "baby signing" - this is a gesture-based system for pre-verbal infants and adults to communicate with each other. For example, pointing the hands inwards, towards the mid-line, with fingers touching, is the sign for "more".