I have just discovered that the book of Helmut Kiene”Komplementäre Methodenlehre der klinischen Forschung. Cognition-based Medicine. Berlin – Heidelberg – New York: Springer; 2001, 193 S. ISBN 3-540-41022-8 is now being online available as PDF – a must read for all clinical researchers.
Addendum 26 Feb 2021
Sorry for the title that involuntarily replicated a title from paper published already 14 years before https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7647644/
515 citations of an article in 5 years – it is timely to revisit “Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion” by Eisenberger in Science magazine. I was refered to that study by “Lob der Schule” (an excellent book).
Participants were scanned while playing a virtual ball-tossing game in which they were ultimately excluded. Paralleling results from physical pain studies, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was more active during exclusion.
These are bad news for all victims of workplace bullying or university harassment – their brains will react like under stimulation of physical harm leading to aggression as found in many studies
A wide variety of studies with animal as well as human subjects demonstrate that pain often gives rise to an inclination to hurt an available target, and also, at the human level, that people in pain are apt to be angry.
So, the final aggression of the victim is used to further isolate it – a vicious circle.
Rolling Stones
Blues Brothers
10.1.2019 revisited
The facts seem to be now largely accepted, see an article in Psychology Today: Is Social Pain Real Pain? and the 2012 review by Eisenberger. More recently some authors even think that “The salience of self, not social pain, is encoded by dorsal anterior cingulate and insula“.
Nature has a headline about “how to stop blogging”
Is the scientific conference in its death throes? Researchers have long anguished about the hyper-competitive culture that leads attendees to suppress their most interesting unpublished results. Such protectiveness can only be worsened by the increasing dissemination of results beyond the conference hall by bloggers.
Oh, do they really ask if scientific conferences are in its death throes? Big scientific conferences that have deadlines 1 year in advance? Big scientific conferences where I take notes for 6 or 8 hours and discover in the evening that there is nothing, definitely nothing new?
I have no answer on that question – the differentiation between qualified science, parascience and quack is not easy. Nature medicine, however, knows
The recent controversy kicked off when The Australian newspaper and The Scientist magazine reported on the existence of the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine … Continue reading What is a fake journal?
A recent opinion article in Nature may serve as my diving board here. Althoug texts are much better edited by professional journalists, the content isn’t better (driven mainly by press release). And of course, journalists must write about topics outside of their knowledge zone. Funny, they resemble
more that of a priest, taking information from a source of authority and communicating it to the congregation.
Journalists don’t have enough time for the details while bloggers can restrict themselves to their main expertise ;-) raising also a large amount of public awareness.
We are equipped with senses to react to sudden environmental changes but we do not even have any reflex to react to slow and gradual environmental changes. Wikibooks has a nice entry about Peter Senge that covers in more detail his “5th sense”. I found this entry by the beer game(while reasoning about logistics of science factories).
Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Continue reading Encased in darkness
Thenew book by Gibson “It Takes a Genome: How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick” raises some interesting points (from the Amazon review)
Our genome is out of equilibrium, both with itself and its environment. Simply put, our genes aren’t coping well with modern culture. Continue reading Clash between our genes & environment
It would be interesting to follow up this historical (1571x cited) paper on mechanisms of consumer choice. Are there similar mechanisms in science consumation e.g. the price we are willing to pay after having read an abstract?
We have learned new genomics and metabolomics (etc not to confuse with economics!) while even complete websites are now dedicated to the omics explosion. What I do not understand is the increasing omics use in completely unrelated fields like humanomics – a good or bad omen?
Besides another critical review of the impact game this month in LJ, I found a ever more devastating paper at the University of Konstanz – click for the Babelfish translation. Continue reading Stagnancy at terrific speed or the impact of impact
Being asked to give another presentation on whatesoever topic and to deposit my slides on whatsoever intranet, the famous quote of John Sweller came to my point
It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.
So, as I tend to use only slides with cartoons and figures (but no bullet points which are in my notes only) these illustrations are rather useless as a stand-alone file at any Ilias platform. In other words
if your presentation visuals taken in the aggregate (e.g., your “owerPoint deck”) can be perfectly and completely understood without your narration, then it begs the question: why are you there?
I remember a lecture by my doctoral advisor who came in the lecture room with just 1 glass slide in his shirt pocket … More intelligent comments about that issue at presentationzen.com
A slide set that I would have liked as a trailer for my recent talk about science and religion…
When I could not replicate results from original data of a recent study I thought this to be my private problem. It seems, however, that I am not alone here when reading another reanalysis attempt:
We reproduced two analyses in principle and six partially or with some discrepancies; ten could not be reproduced.
Continue reading I can not confirm that
Nassim Taleb points in his black swan book (p181 in the German edition 2008) towards the “toxicity” of continuously added information. He is citing experiments from the 1960ies where students were offered increasingly sharp pictures of water pipes. Students in the group with slightly inceasing sharp pictures had much more problems to recognize the pipe in constrast to the group being offered the same picture without any interim pictures. Together with the experiments of Stuart Oskamp it seems more difficult to discover real breakthroughs when being too deeply involved (and obsessed by getting the complete literature in a particular field). This even questions my daily Pubmed alerts; I will change them now to monthly update.