Synaptic Self: How our Brains Become who we Are

How do we manage patients who become unemployed?

The number of unemployed patients presenting in general practice will increase over the next 12 months. Unemployed patients are likely to present with physical and psychological problems, including insomnia, depression, anxiety and a worsening of cardiovascular risk factors; family members are also likely to be affected. GPs have an important role in early detection and management of these heal...

How our brains reason logically

The aim of this article is to strengthen links between cognitive brain research and formal logic. The work covers three fundamental sorts of logical inferences: reasoning in the propositional calculus, i.e. inferences with the conditional ‘‘if...then’’, reasoning in the predicate calculus, i.e. inferences based on quantifiers such as ‘‘all’’, ‘‘some’’, ‘‘none’’, and reasoning with n-place relat...

We are the ones who impede our own progress.

To the Editor: Recently, an updated Practice Advisory has been published regarding perioperative visual loss associated with spine surgery. I feel the need to highlight certain statements in the Advisory that are contradictory to the long-standing effort in the anesthesiology/critical care communities to place fluid management on a more rational basis. Starting decades ago, significant effort h...

Raising our voices to say who we are.

Smarter than we think: when our brains detect that we are biased.

Human reasoning is often biased by stereotypical intuitions. The nature of such bias is not clear. Some authors claim that people are mere heuristic thinkers and are not aware that cued stereotypes might be inappropriate. Other authors claim that people always detect the conflict between their stereotypical thinking and normative reasoning, but simply fail to inhibit stereotypical thinking. Hen...