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
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 […]
Almost a year ago I posted a blog post titled ‘A Yale Professor’s One Man Rampage Against PloS, the Internet and a Belgian Research Group‘, covering the case of a […]
Last Friday Aaron Swartz committed suicide, shortly before his Federal trial was due to begin. According to the US Attorney’s press release, “if convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in […]
RIP Aaron Swartz, you will not be forgotten.
Fortunately there are an ever widening array of resources that will keep you immunized against the nonsense.
The problem of scientists manipulating data in order to achieve statistical significance, labelled p-hacking is incredibly hard to track down due to the fact that the data behind statistical significance is often unavailable for analysis by anyone other than those who did the research and themselves analysed the data.
Back in August I wrote a post covering a rash of reports on the worrying rise of bad science in TED talks. A couple of months later TED pulled the following […]
Breaking The Taboo, the acclaimed film packed with hard hitting footage, facts, figures and interviews with former world leaders and drug tzars is now available to watch in full for free: […]
Just over a month ago I attended a debate (at Bristol Festival of Ideas) between Howard Marks, the man who at one point was the world’s most prolific cannabis dealer – […]
Huge changes are currently taking place in the way new ideas are bought, sold and fought over. It is now not uncommon for companies to exist that do nothing except sue other […]
Last night, the group of researchers responsible for the creation of the SPAUN project – that just published the first large scale model of a functioning brain to produce complex behaviours began […]
As a society we have come to value the importance of creativity for prosperity and we have invested plenty of resources into understanding how to make employees more creative. Unfortunately, […]
Mind Lab is an awesomely mind-bending little project created by Japan’s Science and Technology Agency. It consists of four fully interactive classes of about fifteen minutes each on the workings of […]
Dr. Oliver Sacks’ 2013 book Hallucinations is a tremendous anthology of case studies of hallucinatory experiences recorded through his decades of work as a clinical neurologist, his analysis of clinical […]
A professor specialising in spatial analysis at London’s UCL has produced a wonderful interactive map of London produced purely with a peppering of dots marking the locations individuals tweeted from […]
Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale has created an expertly delivered whistlestop tour of psychology for the Big Think. The talk outlines the differences between […]
Update (Jan, 2014): Amir’s patent application (search for no. 12/743357) has been rejected due to prior art by Mathews and MacLeod. Update (Feb, 2013): Following this blog post Amir corrected two […]
Two major papers have recently been published that may or may not surprise you. Please excuse the sarcy title, in all seriousness these are fantastic papers that provide evidence for […]
An article published in The Telegraph over a month ago remains on The Telegraph website with a headline that is so spectacularly incorrect that the BBC has reported that the article […]