Editor’s Selections: Candy, Cocaine, Autism and Schizophrenia
November 8th, 2011 Editor's Selections 14 Comments
Jason Goldman selects several notable posts each week from Psychology and Neuroscience. He blogs at The Thoughtful Animal.
Lots of good stuff as usual, this week.
- Do you still have leftover Halloween candy? While eating that “fun size” candy bar while nobody is watching, consider that eating sweets may actually make you sweeter. Juli, writing at Psych Your Mind, has the details.
- People have long been fond of calling marijuana a “gateway drug.” But can the same be true of nicotine? Maybe. A new paper is described at United Academics, where the blogger writes, “In a study published this week in Science Translational Medicine, Kandel and her team now show that, in mice at least, nicotine causes epigenetic changes — long-lasting changes in the control of gene expression — that subsequently boost the response to cocaine.”
- There’s a theory that autism and schizophrenia are, in a sense, opposite sides of the same coin. Or, more specifically, disorders that lie on opposite ends of a spectrum. The idea is that “natural variations in several factors such as sense of self, gaze, agency, social cognition, local versus global processing and others creates a spectrum at the end of which lie the two disorders.” Find out more at NeuroJC. By apparent coincidence, Bjorn Brembs also has a fascinating post this week on the same question!
That’s it for this week… Check back next week for more great psychology and neuroscience blogging!
