I'm a breezy person who likes to say yaka-wow

[drdoug]

I am a breezy person who likes to say yaka-wow.

What?

Well, there's a typo in Baroness Greenfield's latest puff (or puff-adder?) piece in The Times, and it's turning in to a memeOn the whole Royal Institution debacle, I note briefly

Comments

[moral_vacuum]

I think I love you. In a seemly, intellectual way.

BTW: Perhaps the "yaka wow" is actually a reference to guitar stylings found in blaxploitation film soundtracks?

[makyo]

and schizophrenia ('Why don't you just ignore those voices in your head')I read quite a fascinating article in the Guardian a while back, part of the "my grim experience" feature they have in the Weekend magazine, about a schizophrenic guy who'd started talking back to the voices in his head. After some years of seeing various psychiatrists, all the while with these voices in his head telling him to do a range of terrible and/or self-destructive things, finally one psychiatrist said "hang on, if a real person told you to go out and kill someone you wouldn't do it, so why do you pay any attention to imaginary voices telling you the same things?" So the next time it happened, he just said, out loud, "I'm sorry, I'm too busy to talk to you right now" and it worked. Over the next few years he carried on doing this, managed to get his life back together (while getting occasional odd looks on the bus) and gradually the dark, destructive, sinister voices lost their influence, faded away, and started to be replaced with happier, more

[vinaigrettegirl]

I read that article, too.

I'm rather on the Baroness's side without saying she's wholly right. She isn't but she raises entirely valid questions. She's no more outrageous about computer use in childhood than Dawkins is about religion, but she actually knows something about the developing brain.

Dr. Goldacre can't really be an expert in every specialist subject he writes about; I think she has more research experience in neurophysiology of the developing brain than many of her detractors have; and whilst she does have the odd unfortunate soundbite to her debit, she has reams of sound research also which never hits the news.

[steer]

She does have reams of sound research which makes it all the more sad when she puts her name and reputation to the less sound stuff (like "Mind Fit") or makes "president of the royal institution says" pronouncements about things of which she clearly knows very little.

[k425]

PWNED!

[steer]

What on earth has happened to her because she used to appear as a reasonable competent scientist doing good work in her field.

How do you go from that to spouting random opinions and flogging specious "improve your IQ" games while saying "I'm a scientist so it's true".