Glider

Aw shucks!

I have a few papers out (and one accepted last month...yay!), but they have already been reviewed and I have had feedback on them, ta very much

No, you can't feel your brain. There are no sensory nerve endings in the cortex. This is why brain surgery can be performed without anaesthetic (beyond a local, injected into the scalp, which does have sensory nerve endings). Headaches are more often due to tension in the scalp, or as Fafalone said, baroreceptors in deep blood vessels. Can your brain get tired? Yes. People can live longer without food than they can without sleep. Deprive somebody of sleep for long enough, and they will die.

The cerebral cortex and the neo cortex are the same thing. The cerebral cortex is the outer layer of the brain. It consists of 6 cell layers. It was that last part of the brain to evolve, hence the term 'neocortex'. The cortex covers the whole brain, not one side or the other. It is the crinkley surface that you see in pictures of the brain (many convolutions; gyri and sulci). The cortex is associated with 'higher' functions; consciousness, language understanding and production, cognition, abstraction, problem solving, motor and sensory integration and so-on. Things like love and empathy are more likely to be associated with the limbic regions, which are considered the 'emotional core' of the brain.

I have never seen data on lateralisation by ethnicity, so I don't think there is a relationship. I could be wrong, but I believe 20% of human beings are left handed, regardless of ethnicity. There used to be a cultural influence which may have distorted the data in the past, in that left handed people used to be forced to use their right hand from early school age. That doesn't happen any more though.

Ahhh...you're one of those who believe their thinking is not influenced by their feelings . Not here I won't. I do that only when I get paid for it.

So, by your objection to, and subsequent same-context use of the term 'created', we can assume that you're operating under a faith when it comes to human beings, but not for any other life? Gee, you're just full of interesting li'l contradictions, aintcha?

You don't see this as somewhat contradictory? As anger is a feeling, and one not particularly conducive to rational thought, surely that places you in the former category.

Good question. Another one is; if you wanted to retain your anonymity, why didn't you just cite the author in the third party? There would have been no grounds for anybody to link the authors' name with you. In fact, there still aren't.

What do you mean 'State of Great Britain'? And what has this to do with biology?

Clearly, you can't. Your post was not a summary of what I said. Please don't put words in my mouth. My post simply outlined a few of the methods some therapists use to guide sessions, in response to the question "What techniques or methods do therapists use to guide a session?". Whilst it is clear you have strong feelings concerning therapy as whole, the reasons you present demonstrate only that you know even less about it than I do (and I know very little about therapy). I do know that no therapist would treat any two clients exactly the same, whatever their approach. Therapy sessions are, by definition, client driven. That is to say, the therapist is only a 'partner' in the client/therapist relationship, not a leader. The client decides where they go, the therapist acts only as a guide, to help the client focus, be aware of their own reactions to certain things, and to 'hold their hand' through the more difficult areas. Whilst on the whole, I have very little time for some of the 'woolier' schools of therapy (e.g. Freudian psychoanalysis), some approaches are very effective (e.g. CBT). It's much more common these days, that therapists don't stick to any one approach, but are 'eclectic therapists' who trained in several styles of therapy. This (they say) helps them to tailor their approach more effectively to the needs of the client. In any event, I can say that I don't know enough about most approaches to therapy to make a valid judgement concerning their efficacy or worth. Are you certain you do? I have no idea why, as far as I can tell, my post is fairly neutral in nature. Quite right, I never made any judgements concerning therapy, so why would it get you started? I think a therapist would find this of some significance.

Drinking orange juice (or anything with vitamin C) is supposed to help. Coffee and tea are supposed to increase the cravings. However, I suspect that is behavioural, as most smokers smoke with coffee or tea, so there is an habitual association there to begin with.

It depends on the school. Gestaltists, Freudians, Humanists, Eclectics etc. all use different techniques (or mixed in the case of eclectic therapists). However, I'm not really from that end of Psychology, and I don't know too much about it, but I do know that of all the different approaches available in psychotherapy, cognitive-behavioural therapy has been shown to produce the most reliable results. The techniques used to guide a session are manifold. The most important is silence. People get uncomfortable in silence, so if they provide a 'clipped' answer to a probe, the therapist will remain silent for a little longer than is 'socially comfortable'. Often the client will start talking again. The therapist has to maintain a state of 'free floating attention', i.e. has to listen without focussing on any details too much. They have to listen to 'flow', so that when it changes, or the rhythm breaks, they recognise that as a signal that the client has approached something meaningful. The therapist will also be looking for things like shielding; topics the client avoids (often without realising it), so what is not said is often important too. By guiding a client around the topic, the 'blank' (i.e. the shielded area) often get shown up 'in relief' as it were. Reiteration, areas a person returns to frequently. Changes in affect, i.e. signs of discomfort or other emotional changes, and many other things. All these provide clues to the therapist, and based on these clues, the therapist can begin to guide their client into the area that needs to be addressed. E.g., once the therapist has a 'feel' for the area being avoided in sheilding, they will then begin to get specific, and guide the client directly into that topic. That would be an example of a Freudian approach. Their aim is to locate the original cause and work through it. This can take a very long time. CBTs on the other hand, feel that you can't actually go back to the original problem, as it is in the past, and the real problem is your current mode of thought and behaviour. Their aim is to help you recognise how you respond to certain stimuli, events/situations, and to help you change the way you percieve them and respond to them. They deal with the here and now situation, Freudians deal with the 'child'.

It would appear so. The irony is that whilst whoever tried to sue the government would have to pay a fortune to lawers to bring the action, the government would use our money to pay for their defence. Moreover, if the government lost, who do you think would pay?

I agree. Many child problems are stemming from parents fears (or just bad/lazy parenting), resulting in children staying in their rooms glued to a TV/computer, rather than going out, burning off energy and learing to socialise. However, changes/improvements to the sensitivity of diagnostic procedures also account for the increase in children diagnosed with disorders. I think her following quote is a bit out of order: "Money is behind all this. Psychologists want the work and lower the diagnosis threshold accordingly". This is a charge that would get any Psychologist thrown out of the BPS. Does she have evidence for this? Moreover (I may be wrong), but I don't think Psychologists are allowed to make diagnoses, I think only people holding an MD (physicians and psychiatrists) can make diagnoses. I know for a fact that Psychologists can't prescribe drug interventions either. They too can be prescribed only by somebody holding an MD.

Funny how human rights movements are prepared to fight for human rights, until it's one they don't thing a human should have. Makes you wonder who really decides what constitutes a 'human right', and whether it's something that can be awarded or withheld.

Funding is a problem. It's not so much that there isn't the money, it's that what money there is is being misdirected and wasted (e.g. a large police undercover op. was just thrown out of court, the judge having slammed the police for several 'illegal actions'. This cost the taxpayer £25, 000,000). The government is very hands on, and in the opinions of most doctors, this is a principal cause of the problem. This government is fixated on 'targets' (unrealistic in many cases). Whilst some hospitals have achieved these targets, they have had to redirect staff, from what they should be doing, to the 'target' problem. Also many have had to shut beds to reach these 'targets'. There are now something like 1.3 managers per open bed in the NHS. There aren't that many nurses! Most doctors here believe the best thing the government could do for the NHS would be to leave it alone, and concentrate on not pi**ing taxpayers money up the wall with pointless schemes designed only to make the government look good. The medical field is profitable only in private practice. However, the profit margin is reducing exponentially as doctors are confronted with more and more litegous patients (and more and more spurious claims and complaints, encouraged by 'no-win-no-fee' lawyers). The insurance premiums medics have to pay to cover their practice now costs so much that many can't afford it, and are leaving medicine. The practice of law, however, remains profitable.

They still consider it a form of plagiarism. Unfortunately, where students want to be that lazy and refuse responsibility, you can't really just 'let them'. I do agree in principle, but you have to catch the little buggers first. The onus is on the tutor to produce evidence of plagiarism. In suspected cases, the tutor has 5 days to track down the original source(s). Sometimes this can be as simple as a Google search, other times it means trawling loads of gateways, and trips to the library. This is a waste of the tutors' time, but the only other option is to allow the work through (which would be unfair to other students). Students are becoming a lot more sophisticated in the methods they employ to cheat. It's like Mission: Impossible sometimes. Pens with digital recording capabilities etc., and I just think that the increasing number of 'buy your essays here' and other such designed to help students avoid any kind of actual work (or more importantly, actual learning) is completely out of order.

Of course there's a gap in the market; all those students who can't be bothered to check their own work. But in my opinion, it's a gap that really shouldn't be filled. Tutors are already fed up with being presented with downloaded essays which have been (poorly) adapted in an attempt to make them relevant to the work the students were assigned. However these are relatively easy to detect (due in no small part to the American spelling). The last thing tutors need is a system which 'improves' the students own work (a kind of e-plagiarism if you think about it). It's bad enough that many students can't even use a spell checker properly (where 'Dear Sir or Madam', and 'Dead Sod or Moron' are equally acceptable), and can't be arsed to proofread. I can't see any benefit to students in gravitating toward a system where ultimately, all they need to do is type in an appropriate title and some online system writes the bloody thing for them.

Beyond spelling and grammar, I doubt it. More to the point, there is no point. Tutors don't want to be assessing the eficacy of some online system, they want to assess your work. If you write something, and have it checked and corrected by a third-party, then the tutor will not be assessing your work; any errors you made in the original will not be there, the tutor won't get to correct them, nor provide appropriate feedback and you will learn nothing. Surely it would be of more value to you in the long term to put a little effort in now? Do the reading and learn to express your ideas in text without some piece of technology (or some third-party) doing it all for you. That way, you will at least have earned whatever grade/feedback you get.

I think you're right. The harder end of Psychology comes as a bit of a shock to many students, especially those who thought it was all about women in long gypsy skirts and dripping with 'empathy' saying "...and how do you feel about that?" (I admit freely that I am biased against the 'pink and fluffy' end of Psychology). It happens a lot. It's a shame because in many cases, I think if they stayed and applied themselves, they might actually find it quite rewarding. Hehehe...If it were, the drop-out rates would be a lot lower! Absolutely. My first degree was in Psychological Science. This is essentially 40% Psychology, 40% physiology/neurology & 20% Research methods and statistics, but even the straight Psychology degree has psychobiology at introductory and advanced levels as core modules. Also, optional modules such as psychopharmacology, clinical psychology. This is true. The emphasis on the biological component is increasing too. It never made sense to me that people could study Psychology and not be tought anything about the brain. Admittedly this is partly driven by a bias toward my own degree compared to straight Psychology degrees. However, the trend now is increasingly towards the neurological bases of behaviours and psychopathologies. Even social psychologists are now using functional Magnetic Resonance Imagers (fMRI) in their research. As a point of interest, recent research using these imagers is providing huge amounts of information concerning the neurological bases of emotion, and is leading to a slow but sure return to a (modified) form of determinism. Many people resist this, but I think that's down to human vanity (as Nietzsche said). Nobody like to feel that they are not in complete control of themselves.

I agree, I was being ironic. I have a theory. I think that many people choose Psychology as a 'cop-out' degree; an 'easy option' for people who just 'want a degree' but don't want to work too hard for it, and have no real interest in the subject. Combine this with 'widening participation' and you have the recipe for a room full of barely literate slackers; people who can't string a sentence together, let alone a coherent argument and couldn't give a toss anyway. Then, with all the student support mechanisms that are in place, they are encouraged to blame everybody and everything but themselves when they get crappy grades (widening participation has a lot to answer for). On the upside, a few years ago, the British Psychological Society decided that it was tired of graduate psychologists who couldn't understand research (which, after all, is the backbone of Psychology), so they stated that for a degree to be recognised by the BPS, the student had to have taken, and passed a full course of research methods (two years, at introductory and advanced level). This increased the drop-out rate significantly (which I consider evidence in support of my theory). Even now though, many students appendicise research methods, believing that "I'm taking Psychology, but they make us take research methods", when, in fact, it's the other way around. Research methods is more the essence of Psychology than any other module. The other modules are mearly introductions into the different aspects of Psychology, and everything they learn in them was gained through the application of research methods. However, this doesn't apply to all Psych. students. There are those with a genuine interest, and real ability. Those who understand the science and actually want to apply what they learn and take up some facet of Psychology as a career. It is a shame that they appear to be the minority though. Although I have no basis for comparison, I suppose this problem must exist in many subjects, where those students with a genuine interest and aptitude for the topic constitute the smaller portion af any class. It does piss me off that so many consider being 'a graduate' a ticket to a job, but have no interest in the subject they are taking. Why can't they bugger off and do 'media studies' or something?

Aha! My error. It was hard to tell, the 'no wrong answer' thingy being followed so closely by "I'm no fan of Psychology". It's just that I meet so many people who genuinely believe there are no wrong answers in Psychology. Unfortunately, many of these are undergraduate Psychology students, which is a bit odd, if you think about it.

There are cases treatments differing according to ethnicity. This is mainly due to ethnicity related differences in tolerance to certain chemical interventions. A commonly known example is the inability to metabolise alcohol which is prevalent in the Japanese population. There are also ethnic related differences in risk to certain diseases as well as propensity for genetic pathologies (e.g. sickle-cell anaemia in West African populations).

I think you're right. I think it's extremely unlikely that anyone could remember events within their first year. Firstly, not too much makes sense enough to be remembered (i.e. we have no cognitive 'hooks' to link events to each other and form the traces that would allow us to recall them), and secondly most experiences would be overwritten due to the huge amount of neural development going on in the first year of life (programmed cell death, synaptic formation, reinforcement and extinction etc.). Most people don't begin to remember stuff until between 2 and 4 years old, and even then, the first memories tent to be 'flashbulb' memories, and not trains of events. As far as I know, in therapy, it's used to re-experience old trauma so that the individual can work through it, this time accompanied and guided by a therapist. I have absolutely no idea of its efficacy. There is a huge problem with false memories though, as has been evidenced by the cases brought brought falsly against 'abusive' parents, that were subsequently refuted and thrown out of court. The therapists had been (without intent in most cases) planting the suggestion of childhood abuse whilst the subjects were in a state of altered/increased suggestibility. In light of that, I would doubt the validity of any testimony gained under hypnosis. The bottom line is, even if you could access a memory under hypnosis that couldn't be got at under normal conditions, the memory would still be a reconstruction of events as the subject percieved them to be, not necessarily events as they happened. The original encoding of the memories would still have been subject to the individuals' own perspectives and subjective interpretation. The police are getting heavily into 'cognitive interview' techniques though. These have been shown to be useful. Having said all that, whilst hypnosis may be flawed as a method of recall, it's very effective in modulating pain. I think it's because in these cases, it's working on a much deeper (preattentive) level, and doesn't involve conscious reconstruction of past events, but the 'reinterpretation' of a novel event.