Brainaction

All animal life achieves centrally organised awareness. Each species specialises during evolution in some way to perceive better its environment. Birds excel at  vision and dogs at smell. The vulture manages both. Humans turned inwards to achieve self-awareness. Zoltan Torey (link...

As we blog on, the British Journal of Psychiatry redeems itself. Its second issue for 2012 provides in editorial and original research papers a peek into a future that puts aside descriptive diagnosis for solutions that connect mental states to...

We are the creatures of our times, and they are a’changing. The first turning of the saeculum (see the group mind) following World War II generated a wave of drug addiction. In those halcyon days throughout the western world a...

In the opening editorial of its bicentennial volume, the British Journal of Psychiatry plainly sighted the elephant in the room in terms that left no doubt it had always been there. In discussing psychiatry’s failings the author blamed the descriptive...

Psychiatrists bemoan the deficiencies of their diagnostic labels while ignoring the cause, they use the wrong method, descriptive diagnosis (see Psychiatry). It identifies the symptoms that occur together as implying that they have a common cause. The reasoning survives because...

No other branch of medicine generates so many critics from within its ranks. The devotion of psychiatrists to their craft impels them. They wrestle daily with its failings  or wince as they cope with those of their colleagues. They address our...

Pill pushing has inevitability in the best of all possible worlds. It brings good and bad. It reflects the free enterprise that built the modern world. The bonanza of effective medication that capitalism produced seen besides the insignificant output of...

Our minds pose a mystery. We perceive what goes on around us very well. In striking contrast to that magnificent awareness we perceive nothing of how our brains manage it. Electrical recording demonstrates that we have no awareness of the...

Asked his recipe for long life, my wife’s father would respond “Keep breathing.” He kept to his advice into his tenth decade. But even the best things in life taken to excess brings their penalties. Overbreathing brings about the greatest...

The Ancient Greeks made great strides in knowledge using mind exercises alone. The analysis of the irreducible units of matter brought Democritus to a remarkably modern understanding of atoms and energy. Aristotle sought the atom, so to speak, of thought....