Psychology Links

I spent last Saturday teaching neuroscience/psychology to 100+ kids via Splash. It was a survey course, so there were a lot of references and recommendations I made, and some of the kids asked me to put them all in an email. It’s a good list, so I thought I’d also share it here.

Videos

Video of a “split brain” patient - someone whose corpus callosum was severed to control his epilepsy.

A video showing disorganized speech in a patient with schizophrenia.

Video of a man having one of the speech centers of his brain disrupted by transcranial magnetic stimulation.

A man with Wernicke’s Aphasia. This occurs when Wernicke’s Area is damaged and involves difficulty comprehending speech. The patient in the video has fairly fluid speech, but the content makes little sense.

A man with Broca’s Aphasia. This occurs when Broca’s Area is damaged and involves difficulty producing speech. The patient in the video can understand the person they’re talking to, but cannot produce fluid speech.

Websites

Learn neuroanatomy by browsing around a 3D model of a brain.

Participate in and learn about the Implicit Associations Test, which explores our unconscious biases.

This website has a bunch of examples of and explanations for some of the most interesting thought experiments in psychology. I particularly recommend the sections ‘Elementary, My Dear Wason?’ and ‘What Does Mary Do?’

MindHacks: perhaps my favorite neuroscience/psychology blog.

Books and Movies

Non-Fiction

Various works from Oliver Sacks, especially Awakenings, the story of men and women who slept for over thirty years before being awakened by a new drug, L-Dopa. Also recommended are two collections of stories from his years as a clinician, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. Several of Sacks’ works, including Awakenings, have been turned into movies.

V.S. Ramachandran is another writer who has published some great collections of clinical stories, including Phantoms In the Brain and The Tell Tale Brain.

Touched With Fire, a book by Kay Redfield Jamison, about art, creativity, and bipolar disorder. Jamison is a research psychologist, and also someone who lives with bipolar disorder, a struggle she details in her memoir An Unquiet Mind.

Thinking In Pictures, by Temple Grandin, a scientist with autism.

Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio explores the neurobiological relationship between emotion and reason.

Mirroring people by Marco Iacoboni, on mirror neurons and empathy.

Girl, Interrupted: A memoir by Susanna Kaysen about her experienced in a psychiatric hospital as a teen. It was adapted into a popular movie.

Obedience to Authority, a detailed look by Stanley Milgram at his famous study, which found that participants were willing to give others painful shocks if ordered to by an authority figure.

Fiction

Wikipedia has a nice list of books, movies and tv shows featuring characters who deal with mental illness. Some of these may have very adult themes, so consider asking a parent or teacher who knows you well if they think you would get something out of reading them. Some of the books I read at your age and enjoyed include Ordinary People, a book about a boy struggling with suicidal thoughts, and I Can Hear the Mourning Dove, a story about a girl with depression and schizophrenia.