The return of All in the Minds

The two best psychology and neuroscience radio shows, both confusing called All in the Mind, have just started new series in the last couple of weeks.

BBC Radio 4's programme, which takes more of a magazine format featuring several topics each week, has just kicked off with a programme about stress, humour and discussing personal mental health issues.

On the other side of the wires, ABC Radio National’s programme has begun with an edition on the genetics of mental illness and one on self-harm. I really recommend the genetics programme, by the way, as it takes a fresh look at the whole concept.

Both come highly recommended so do tune in your wireless. Or click your mouse. Whichever is easiest.

Link to BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind
Link to ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind

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Playlist: All kinds of minds

(TED is on its annual two-week vacation. During the break, we’re posting playlists from the TEDTalks archive. We’ll be back with new talks on August 29th.)

“If you could only see the world the way I see it …” Four TEDTalks from non-neurotypical thinkers, people whose minds work in extraordinary and unusual ways.

1) Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works — sharing her ability to “think in pictures,” which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.

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2) At TED’s Full Spectrum Auditions, comedian Joshua Walters, who’s bipolar, walks the line between mental illness and mental “skillness.” In this funny, thought-provoking talk, he asks: What’s the right balance between medicating craziness away and riding the manic edge of creativity and drive?

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3) Daniel Tammet has linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia — meaning that his perception of words, numbers and colors are woven together into a new way of perceiving and understanding the world. The author of “Born on a Blue Day,” Tammet shares his art and his passion for languages in this glimpse into his beautiful mind.

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4) Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks brings our attention to Charles Bonnet syndrome — when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations. He describes the experiences of his patients in heartwarming detail and walks us through the biology of this under-reported phenomenon.

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Playlist by Emily McManus.

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A 30 second piece of our minds

A new book has been published called 30 Second Psychology. It’s been written by some familiar folks and aims to capture fifty of the most important theories of psychology in one punchy package.

It’s been edited by Christian Jarret of the BPS Research Digest and includes contributions from me, Mo Costandi, Dave Munger and Tom Stafford.

The book covers everything from psychotherapy to cognitive neuroscience and, as normal, the others have done a much better job than me. Thankfully, though, I have been edited into sense.

Here’s part of my entry on Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychology and how it inspired client-centred counselling, nude psychotherapy and love-ins.

Abraham Maslow trained as a hard-nosed experimental psychologist who became disillusioned with defining human nature through lab experiments and was dissatisfied with the Freudian alternative. Instead of seeing humans as the passive recipients of experience or slaves to unconscious drives, Maslow saw us as motivated by an ultimate need to become fulfilled and ‘self-actualized’ where we are at peace with ourselves and others and have the psychological freedom “to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” Humanistic psychology grew from this inspiration and placed subjective lived experience, rather than the unconscious mind, at the centre of human nature.

These ideas were taken up by psychotherapists, most notably by Carl Rogers, who based ‘client-centred therapy’ on the principles of genuineness and acceptance of a person’s basic worth. Although Maslow was sometimes uncomfortable with how his approach was adopted by the 1960s counter-culture, leading to everything from love-ins to nude psychotherapy, his central themes of respect for individual autonomy and the encouragement of personal development are now at the core of all most modern psychological treatments and his ‘hierarchy of needs’ is still considered a important theory of human motivation.

Link to more details from the publishers.
Link to book on Amazon.

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“Great minds think alike. Creative minds think together”: TED Full Spectrum auditions

Reggie Watts discourses on the nature of TED onstage at TED Full Spectrum Auditions. Credit: James Duncan Davidson. Watch the TED Full Spectrum Auditions archive video >>

Seventeen Full Spectrum audition finalists presented their TEDTalks on Tuesday night at one of the swellest TED venues yet: the Hiro Ballroom in Manhattan (TED’s Corvida Raven shot this panorama from the balcony).

TED’s curator, Chris Anderson, and content director, Kelly Stoetzel, hosted:

Photo: James Duncan Davidson.

The lineup: Dr. Jane Rigby talked about the next wave in space telescopes — what comes after Hubble? During the talk and afterward, Dr. Amber Straughn took questions via Twitter as @Astraughnomer.

Architect James McBennett shared a simple, stunning idea: Why hasn’t the brick changed in 6,000 years? The future of cities is built of brick, built ad hoc as need arises. We can make bricks better, lighter, even self-assembling. (Side note: McBennett, who came here from Ireland, brought with him a next-wave brick he’d made on a 3D printer. But customs seized the brick, suspicious it contained contraband, and smashed it.) Regardless of lack of props, it’s a huge idea.

The amazing Onyx Ashanti stepped onstage wearing an iPhone strapped to his arm, a brick-size controller in each hand, and a custom mouthpiece molded of silicon — and proceded to improvise 6 minutes of “beatjazz,” controlled by body movements. Read more about him on the MAKE blog >>

Starting her talk in a rocking chair, wrapped in an old-lady robe, Beth Urech stepped up to say: “I was born in 1941. The same year as Wonder Woman!” Her talk was a reminder to people of “a certain age” not to ever quiet down.

Medical visualizer Virgil Wong talked about his work knitting together portraiture and medical data, using art to help people tell the stories of their bodies and the illnesses they’ve survived. Insanely quotable: “Medicine helps us live longer lives. But art is why we live.”

Storyteller Joe Sabia used his iPad to connect with the ancient and ever-evolving art of entertaining an audience, starting with the story of Lother Meggendorfer, creator of the first pop-up books.

Lior Zoref had to get a visa to come here from Israel, in a hurry. His visa man asked, “What are you going to the US for?” Lior: “to give a TEDTalk.” Visa man: “I love TED! Approved!” His talk was crowd-sourced among his network on Facebook. He even crowdsourced his closing line — now the headline of this post.

The Flux Foundation presented the collaborative installation they built at Burning Man in 2010, and talked about the nonprofit arts organization they created as a result of that project. An audience-participation project involving postcards was seeded at the Tuesday event … news as it happens …

Speed painter Erik Wahl whipped out a new perspective on a familiar face while philosophizing about vision.

Digital luthier Eric Singer showed off and played some of the new instruments he has built. Why create new instruments, when we have plenty of old ones? Because it expands what we can create musically, expands creativity, unlocks a masterpiece that’s just waiting for the tools to be built to express it.

Sound visualizer Jared Ficklin showed how to express music with data and with fire. Fire codes prevented him from demoing his flame table at the Hiro Ballroom, but you can find fabulous video on his site. In the second half of his talk, he showed song visualizations that might point toward the future of finding music we like.

When he was a teenager, comedian Joshua Walters had an episode of mental illness that left him pretty sure he was Jesus Christ. It wasn’t all bad, he says: “There’s no drug that can get you as high as you feel when you think you’re Jesus.” He talked the balancing act between mental illness and “mental skillness” — surfing the wave of whatever your damage is.

Geek Cesar Kuriyama has been capturing one second of video every day. It’s a simple idea but incredibly powerful — read our postshow Q&A with Cesar and watch his video . Many people left the ballroom having committed to do this. If you have too, hit up the comments and let’s get a group started over at TED Conversations.

We all speak “ball,” says Kevin Carroll, who took the stage with beatboxer Shamik Dynamic to tell the story of how a ball saved his life, and how he’s playing it forward by traveling the world sharing the connecting power and joy of throwing, catching, kicking a ball.

Racer, maker and entrepreneur Chris Plough told the story of how he and his team at Oznog Racing drove a used ambulance from the UK to Mongolia, and what they learned along the way. A sweet story with a powerful punch.

Tania Luna talked about surprise. She’s a “surprisologist” who creates experiences that shake people out of their ruts. Because, as she says: “Surprise intensifies our emotions and senses. We pay attention. When we’re surprised, we learn.” Did her TEDTalk turn into a dance party? Yup. Shouldn’t they all?

Reggie Watts gave a discourse on the very nature of the TEDTalk and TED itself, looped in on itself. It was raw and immediate and spectacular.

Watch the TED Full Spectrum Auditions archive video >>

Follow most of these finalists on Twitter >>

This crowdsourced headline courtesy adividedbys

Joshua Walters onstage. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

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