Search
Simon Oxenham
The best and the worst of psychology and neuroscience
Simon Oxenham covers the best and the worst from the world of psychology and neuroscience. Formerly writing with the pseudonym "Neurobonkers", Simon has a history of debunking dodgy scientific research and tearing apart questionable science journalism in an irreverent style. Simon has written and blogged for publishers including: The Psychologist, Nature, Scientific American and The Guardian. His work has been praised in the New York Times and The Guardian and described in Pearson's Textbook of Psychology as "excoriating reviews of bad science/studies”.
Follow Simon on Twitter
Like Simon on Facebook
Follow Simon on Google+
Subscribe via Email
Subscribe via RSS
Contact Simon directly by Email
Read Less
Update 13/05/13 12PM: The Guardian have now corrected the article to place David Eagleman’s quote in appropriate context. 1.55PM: The paragraph has now been cut completely with the following note “A paragraph that […]
There has been much focus over recent years, on brain machine interfaces (BMI) allowing for the direct control of a computer by electrodes placed on or near the brain. Unfortunately […]
Last week a paper ($) was published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that is rocking the world of neuroscience. The crack team of researchers including neuroscientists, psychologists, geneticists and statisticians analysed […]
Last night Ben Goldacre appeared on BBC Newsnight (viewable from UK ip addesses or portals only, for the next 7 days) discussing the ongoing havoc caused by the MMR scare in […]
The latest edition of the manual psychiatrists use to assess patients has gone through a major and controversial set of changes.
With terrorism at the forefront of public consciousness, it is easy to let civil liberties slip off the radar. This is unfortunate, if we learned anything from the classic psychology […]
The Center for Perceptual Systems at The University of Texas at Austin has just released a free web-app that will denoise and enlarge photos in a heartbeat to an extent […]
Fellow pseudonymous neuroblogger Neuroskeptic(to whom I owe a great deal in inspiration) has published a fantastic piece in Trends in Cognitive Sciences ($) on the benefits to science of anonymity. Last November Neuroskeptic became […]
First things first – I’m not a doctor, but the surprise new rules issued by the GMC (the British regulator for doctors) still worry me. Not just because I might perhaps one day […]
In the 1960’s Stanley Milgram introduced the lost letter technique which had a notable impact on the field of social psychology (unfortunately the original paper is still paywalled even though […]
Update: Following the publication of this post and all of your thoughtful responses, the Big Think editors have decided to discontinue the Big Think’s relationship with Kanazawa. This is a response […]
There has been a lot of tragically depressing news regarding academic copyright recently. Aaron Swartz committed suicide after being hounded for downloading academic papers and now Indian students are being denied access […]
Autism is a complex phenomenon with an extremely broad spectrum of effects that vary in every individual, a new interactive simulator aims to provide only a hint at what it is like […]
There has been much chatter recently about the new found potential of “big data”. Google NGram for example, tracks usage of words in books and Google Flu Trends does what it says on the […]
There are many things we can criticise the US for, but freedom of speech is not (at present) one of them. The US not only have the valuable First Amendment rights […]
The video below is a new public service announcement from the US FDA on the risks of drinking grapefruit juice when taking medication. We’ve known for over a couple of […]
We’ve known for some time that there is a great disparity in the number of followers people have on Twitter – 80% of Twitter users have less than 10 followers, […]
Can’t go over it. Can’t go under it. Can’t go around it. Gotta go through it. Many generations will remember with affection growing up singing the song above. This generation […]
Psychological Science in the Public Interest evaluated ten techniques for improving learning, ranging from mnemonics to highlighting and came to some surprising conclusions.
Evidence has emerged that a bizarre and potentially inhumane treatment which originated in the US is now being used on children in the UK. The therapy involves a caregiver holding […]