Metaphors of illness and healing

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a really interesting programme this week entitled Metaphor for Healing. I don’t think you’ll be able to listen to it (unless it’s still on the BBC iPlayer) but they’ve put up a good page about it on the bbc website. There’s obviously a link between issues of metaphor and those of [...]

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The colour of water

Look at the colour of this water. It’s an amazing colour isn’t it?

Why is it that colour? It’s the effect of all the leaves on the trees of the forest through which the stream is flowing. On another day, in another season, this very water (well, actually, this very stream, not this very water!), looks [...]

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Pharmakon

Pharmakon, by Dirk Wittenborn, ( ISBN 978-0747598107), is a good read. It’s a novel which tells the story of one American family, starting with a focus on the father, a psychologist, then following the story of his youngest son. The territory of the book is the treatment of mental health, and in some ways, that [...]

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Popco

I enjoy books for different reasons. Popco, by Scarlett Thomas, (ISBN 978-1847673350) is one of several novels I’ve read this summer and which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. It strikes me the novels I’ve read are all very different and I wondered if maybe I enjoyed such diversity in the same way I enjoy the company of [...]

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Strange things happen…..

The other day Ian sent me an email with a link in it (he does this quite a lot!). It was to a book which he thought would interest me. I followed the link and, yes, it sounded really up my street. The book was called “Friends in Low Places”, by James Willis and it [...]

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Patterns

Whether its due to synchronicity or something about focus, attention and awareness, I find that I often have the experience that something I’ve been reading about crops up in all kinds of places. At the moment it’s pattern-spotting. In fact, this pattern-spotting theme is a fundamental one for me. I think it’s an important part [...]

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Infectious disease

The treatment of infectious diseases is often presented as one of the great success stories of modern medicine. There’s no doubt that antibiotics have the potential to kill many bacteria in life threatening situations and so have saved many lives. Antivirals don’t have as good a success rate as antibiotics (despite the strange current craze [...]

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What will change everything? – The End of Analytic Science

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s answer to Edge’s 2009 question is the view that it’s time now to start to focus on how branches of knowledge connect to, and influence each other, and to develop a new science which goes beyond the current complexity science by emphasising the relationships between phenomena rather than the phenomena themselves as discreet [...]

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to see ourselves as others see us

That famous line from Burns’ “To a Louse”…….Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us – lovely sentiment, but just not possible! I was reminded of it as I read two related articles by Emily Pronin recently (published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,Vol. 28 No. 3, March [...]

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What will change everything? The idea of negative and iatrogenic science

EDGE questions attract such interesting responses every year. This year the question is “What will Change Everything?“
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, poses the response that “the idea of negative and iatrogenic science” will change everything. Here’s his main point…
I will conclude with the following statement: you cannot do anything with knowledge [...]

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