I so wish it were true... “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is”

Fen/phen and valvular heart disease: if it sounds too bad to be true, perhaps it isn't.

On the basis of a hypothesis that combination drug therapy might be effective in promoting weight loss, Weintraub et al. (1) administered two approved appetite suppressants with different mechanisms of action in a double-blind trial of 81 patients with simple obesity. They showed that the combination, popularly known as fen/phen—fenfluramine (a serotonergic agent) and phentermine (an amphetamin...

So good it has to be true: Wishful thinking in theory of mind

5 In standard decision theory, rational agents are objective, keeping their beliefs independent from their 6 desires. Such agents are the basis for current computational models of Theory of Mind (ToM), but the 7 accuracy of these models are unknown. Do people really think that others do not let their desires color 8 their beliefs? In two experiments we test whether people think that others enga...

If it is to be, it is up to me.

LCZ696: too good to be true?

This issue of the European Heart Journal contains a major statement by the PARADIGM-HF Investigators, who present an ‘putative placebo’ analysis for LCZ696, a new medicine that yielded a remarkable reduction in total mortality and heart failure events in patients with significant heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HF-REF). (NB: I serve as a consultant on Novartis’s cardiovascular–met...

If I saw it, it probably wasn't far from where I was looking.

People are most likely to see something if their gaze is directed at it. Thus if they saw something they may be biased towards believing that they had been looking at it. In order to examine whether this is so we asked participants where a target that jumped to a new position every 250 ms had been at a moment indicated by a flash or a tone. The jumping introduced uncertainty about where the tar...