1. Atlantic published a truly dazzling long-form feature about anaesthesia and consciousness, including instances when people wake during surgery, and the on-going attempts to build a machine that can somehow measure the level of a person's awareness (their consciousness). (see also).
2. Bang in the middle of the Xmas and New Year festivities, BBC Radio Four broadcast a timely special edition of its Thinking Allowed programme all about intoxication (now on iPlayer).
3. It's never too late to learn a new skill, says Gary Marcus in an up-beat essay for the New Yorker.
4. Vaughan Bell for The Observer wrote a column arguing that violent video games are unlikely to be the catalyst for mass killings, and that playing them could even have cognitive benefits. But this is a controversial area. Daniel Simons recently took to his blog to argue that the evidence-base for the cognitive benefits of video games is woefully weak: "There’s no reason to think that gaming will help your real world cognition any more than would just going for a walk." [check the comments on Simons' blog for debate between him and Bell].
5. It's the season for "Best-Of" lists. Forbes had a good one (compiled by David DiSalvo): "The Top 10 Brain Science and Psychology Stories of 2012".
6. Psychology Today listed their 25 most popular blog posts of 2012: relationships and gender were the dominant themes.
7. Wiley made a whole suite of papers on siblings relationships available for free.
8. The latest Neuropod podcast was posted online, including an item on the genetic and other mechanisms underlying autism.
9. The BPS Social Psychology Section wrote to the Times Higher Educational Supplement, protesting at the way the whole discipline is being tarred by the Stapel brush.
10. The psychology of make-up.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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