Steve Jones

Episode 1: Why does (digital) parenting feel so hard? Listen now | How should we think about parenting in a digital age?

Screen Sense: Parenting in a Digital World, the new podcast from @shuhbillskee.bsky.social and I - first episode is now live. We hope you enjoy it. open.substack.com/pub/screense...

An advertisement for cocaine, listing the various merits of the drug. It says that it is "a first-class, thoroughly reliable preparation" that has "been fully recognized by the majority of physicians, surgeons and chemists."

THE MERITS OF OUR COCAINE - a pharmaceutical advert from 1907. A "first-class, thoroughly reliable preparation" that has "been fully recognized by the majority of physicians, surgeons and chemists."

Apropos of the today's executive order, here's my class slide which summarizes the results of vote audits over the past decade or so. To a pretty close approximation, individual-level voting fraud doesn't exist in this country.

Can’t wait for haidt and twenge to explain how this all shows social media is to blame

A giant brain at the center of a futuristic city, radiating a complex network of roads (a metaphor for the peripheral nervous system)

Since it's #brainawareness week, I want to take a break from the ongoing dystopia to celebrate my favorite organ and repost some of my favorite #neuroscience #sciart!

Let's start with this #scifi brain city I just made for an upcoming Italian graphic novel 🧠 🏙

#cervello #comics #graphicmedicine

I’ve now posted the National YRBS data, 2015-2023, here. I’ll add the state and district data soon.

www.datalumos.org/datalumos/pr...

The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey has monitored the wellbeing of America’s high school students since 1991.

Since 2015, it’s been a vital source of data on LGBQ youth. In 2023, it provided the first ever nationally representative sample of transgender teens.

As of this morning, it’s gone.

Are Cell Phones Really Destroying Kids’ Mental Health? Jonathan Haidt once heralded an “ultrasocial” world. Now he’s one of social media’s most prominent critics.

"If we want to make Americans less reliant on smartphones, we have to address the problems of misery among all Americans. [Stresses on parents and kids] enhanced by diminishing promises of a flourishing future... demand a more comprehensive—and political—approach."
newrepublic.com/article/1903...

A wax model chopping the top off the head to show the internal structures of the brain.

An unusual view of the brain. This wax model was made in Florence by Clemente Susini in the 18thC, and shows internal structures. The forehead is at the top of the picture - you can see the frontal sinuses in the (wax!) bone and at the back (bottom of the picture) the cerebellum, further dissected

If we want to make Americans less reliant on smartphones, we have to address the problems of misery among all Americans. Parental stress reflects on children and young adults, who often witness all the ugly consequences of a cruel society and economy. Direct stresses on youth, enhanced by diminishing promises of a flourishing future, a sense of planetary demise, tightening social restrictions, educational failure, and the rise of public cruelty in real life and social media, demand a much more comprehensive—and political—approach than Haidt can offer with his laser-focus on phones. The danger of emphasizing a single cause for such a widespread and deadly problem is that there is a good chance we would fail to address the range of the real contributing factors.

This is a really thoughtful long-read about smartphones, Haidt, and the need for more curiosity about the recent rise in reported MH problems

By @sivav.bsky.social

newrepublic.com/article/1903...

Campus Map
**My new book comes out next week, pre-order now: bit.ly/OOYM

YouTube video by OK Go OK Go - A Stone Only Rolls Downhill (Official Video)

New video from OK Go just dropped, with some cool instances of holistic face perception

My new book comes out in TWO WEEKS (1/28)! Check out this comic I drew, and pre-order a copy for your brain

The point of a trans athlete ban isn’t to save women’s sports, which most right wing commentators openly despise. The point of a trans athlete ban is to hand the Federalist society and the ADF a legal precedent for banning trans women from everything else, too.

A very happy Jess Hartnett with a sample copy her her brand new text book, Psychological Statistics for Everyone.

I can't believe that I can finally share my book. I've worked so, so hard to make statistics accessible and entertaining for our students. Find your Norton rep here: wwnorton.com/find-your-rep. If you want to request a copy, go here: wwnorton.com/books/978132...

Waffle House Index - Wikipedia

Reminds me of the Waffle House index - might be a fun comparison en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_...

With a single typo, Steve miseducates years of students about the classic Ponzo illusion

Psych version

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume?

Developmental psychologist: it looks like a gap but actually you can crawl right across

A wax model of a dissected head showing the brains and underlying structure

This wax model from the 19th century shows the internal structure of the brain - complete with its protective covering, the meninges. Wax models like this were used for teaching anatomy to medical students at a time when it was difficult to find bodies to dissect.

Photo: Wellcome Collection.

A map of the U.S., color coded to show the modal religion in each county.

New post! Teach mode by discussing the most common religion in each U.S. county.

notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2024/12/moda...

I wrote an article about my dad's death, and how it affected my views on assisted dying, published in the Times

Free version here

What my dad’s death taught me about the assisted dying debate Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and her sisters knew their father, the neuroscientist Sir Colin Blakemore, had always planned to go to the Netherlands in the face of terminal motor neurone disease. But the real...

I wrote an article about my dad's death, and how it affected my views on assisted dying

Free version of the article in the next post

Views are my own, not those of the institutions or academies I'm associated with

www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcar...

I am not critiquing the paper here at all, but this finding is essentially that, when you ask the bias machine to draw a picture of a concept it has biases about, it draws a biased picture

Online version here: ggia.berkeley.edu/practice/36_...

F*ck Amazon. We've got seven full days of gift guides coming — all featuring Texas-based businesses. First up: @iamleslierangel.bsky.social found 22+ stores, all owned by — and celebrating — communities of color.

thebarbedwire.com/2024/11/29/f...

‘Our brains dehumanise homeless people’ | BPS Lasana Harris is a Professor of Social Neuroscience at University College London. He tells Jennifer Gledhill why we have become desensitised to homeless people and how we can remedy the situation.

Great interview with Lasana Harris in @psychmag.bsky.social on how our brains dehumanise homeless people and what we can do about it. www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

Self-Diagnosis of Mental Disorders: A Qualitative Study of Attitudes on Reddit Abstract There is concern that a growing number of individuals, especially adolescents, are diagnosing themselves with mental disorders. However, there has been limited empirical research into this phenomenon: why it might happen, what the costs and benefits might be, and what the implications are for anyone who is experiencing distress. To address this, this study used reflexive thematic analysis to explore attitudes toward self-diagnosis of mental disorders as expressed on the discussion website Reddit. From 1195 user comments, five themes were generated: (1) There is tension over who is the expert in diagnosis; (2) Self-diagnosis is a route to self-understanding in an inaccessible system; (3) Teenagers on social media are the problem; (4) Self-diagnosis can become self-fulfilling, and (5) Now no one is believed. Together, these themes highlight that there is considerable anger, derision, and criticism targeted toward people who self-diagnose with mental disorders, and that this is particularly targeted toward adolescents who self-diagnose on or as a result of social media. The findings have important implications for understanding how to support and validate people, particularly adolescents, who (sometimes accurately) use diagnostic language to express how they are feeling.

*NEW PAPER*: Public attitudes towards self-diagnosis of mental disorders

In this study, we explored people’s attitudes towards self-diagnosis of mental disorders by analysing 1,000+ comments on the discussion forum website Reddit

(summary in thread below)

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Transgender Activists Question the Movement’s Confrontational Approach Facing diminishing public support, some activists say all-or-nothing tactics are not working. “We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds.”

Even by the abysmal standards of the NYT's coverage of trans rights this is shocking
www.nytimes.com/2024/11/26/u...