Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Nick Haslam

There may or may not be an epidemic of autism, but the idea of 'autism' has been remarkably catching. Once understood as a vanishingly rare condition, identified only in 1943 ...

... (read more)

Over at the academy, the lecture is not what it used to be. Colourful slides and short videos accompany the spoken word, and this audio-visual feast can be ordered take-away, lecture recordings instantly downloadable from the university’s ‘learning management system’. Students sit, laptops open, alternating their gaze between the lectern and the web. Many stay home, speeding up the recordings to whiz through the dull bits. Academics speculate on whose lectures will be chipmunked the most.

Most of these students are digital natives, a generation that has grown up with the Internet, Facebook, immersive video games, and mobile devices. According to Susan Greenfield, a prolific Oxford neuroscientist, the natives are restless. They are also narcissistic, superficial, passive, inattentive, uncentred, and aggressive. In Mind Change, Greenfield ties these failings together as a syndrome of our time. Its cause, she argues, is the steady encroachment of digital technologies into our lives. Greenfield has raised concerns about their influence for many years, and her book attempts to marshal the scientific evidence to support them.

... (read more)

The brain, notes philosopher Paul Churchland, is the engine of reason and the seat of the soul. David Roland’s memoir of stroke and its aftermath presents a vivid picture of engine failure and a soul unseated. His book lays bare the disorienting realities of brain injury and his gradual but faltering steps towards recovery. In time he adjusts to having a somewhat less powerful cognitive engine and achieves a more well-upholstered sense of self.

... (read more)

An unsuspecting reader might guess that this book belongs to the disreputable genre of psychobiography. Beginning with Sigmund Freud’s analysis of Leonardo da Vinci (1910), which explored themes of unconscious homosexuality and maternal attachment, biographers have attempted to make sense of individual lives with the aid of psychological theory, most often of a psychoanalytic stripe.

... (read more)
Page 2 of 2