What goes on in the brain when everything seems to be going wrong, or - for that matter - right? Say, when you feel fearful rather than motivated? Last week, in a piece entitled Beyond the DSM, we reviewed how the NIMH is orienting its research toward learning more about how brain circuitry affects behavior and emotions. Part of this includes... Read more
Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. You know the drill. But what about if you have issues about your mother? What then?
I’m not prepared to air my mother issues in public. All you need to know is that all of my life I had to deal with a certain cognitive dissonance between what society saw as the ideal and what I experienced in reality.... Read more
You may have heard that several days ago, Thomas Insel, head of the NIMH, announced in a blog post, Transforming Diagnosis, that “the NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”
He went on to say that: “We will be supporting research projects that look across current categories – or sub-divide... Read more
I may have mentioned that I have been working on a novel. I finished my first draft a few weeks ago. First draft is a polite term for a piece of writing that is as incomprehensible as it is unreadable. In this regard, there is little difference between the amateur and the master. A few drafts later, there is all the difference in the... Read more
We know that bipolar and other mental illnesses affect behavior, but what precisely is behavior? Rather than go for a definition, maybe it’s best to look at a select sampling of classic experiments and observations representing wildly disparate fields. Let’s get started:
Conditioned Reflex - Ivan Pavlov’s celebrated... Read more