Empathy is an important asset for a doctor. This ability to appreciate patients’ emotions and express this emotional awareness improves clinical outcomes, professional satisfaction, and patient adherence to medical recommendations, and is believed to significantly improve patient satisfaction. More on empathy and what it is can be read here There is a significant decline in empathy during the third year of medical school. This decline occurs during a time when the curriculum is shifting toward patient-care activities. Moreover, empathy for the mentally ill is often more difficult for physicians and med students, probably because they are unable to imagine the suffering of .....read more »

Most people think that love and sex are tightly related. Nevertheless the size of the overlap between these two varies with culture, history, education and social values. In the United States, males report having less problems imagining sex without love than females do; in China, however the link between love and romance seems to be generally less pronounced than in Western cultures; and in the West, the views of sexuality and love differed between the Victorian and the Freudian eras On a neurobiological level the brain systems for love, sex and attachment communicate and coordinate with one another. But if love and .....read more »

From the graphic above and down under you can see for each country how much chocolate per person per year (2007) was consumed in kilos. Found this graphic on the site of Alpha Galileo Europe's site of research news, thanks to David Bradley (@sciencebase). Eighteen EU countries were among the world's top 26 chocolate confectioneries consumers in 2007, ranking from 11.85 kg eaten per capita in Ireland, to 4.5 kg in France and 1.04 kg in Poland. The EU 27 consumed in total 2.5 million tons of chocolate products that year, which account for around half of the global consumption .....read more »

This is a colored scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of inner ear hair cells in the organ of corti, in the cochlea of the inner ear. One of the 62 stunning scientific images presented Popsci.com. They're not all medicine or neuroscience related but they're all stunning, have a look at them on Popsci.com, with explanations such as: These cells are surrounded by a fluid called the endolymph. As sound enters the ear it causes waves to form in the endolymph, which in turn cause these hairs to move. The movement is converted into an electrical signal, which is passed to the brain. .....read more »

Sinterklaas and Saint Nicolas in French, is a holiday tradition in the Netherlands and Belgium, celebrated every year on Saint Nicholas’ eve (December 5) or, in Belgium, on the morning of December 6. The feast celebrates the name day of Saint Nicholas, patron saint of, among other things, children. Special candy is made for this event such as chocolate characters and pepernoten. These chocolate characters come in all varieties and all kinds of chocolate. Dr Shock prefers the dark chocolate type. But he sure likes fair trade dark chocolate, because: Cocoa is an important world commodity, produced and consumed around the globe. However, .....read more »

From this excellent weekly round up I especially liked: Do countries with more mental illness have more suicides? From Neuroskeptic Although not all suicides are related to mental illness, unsurprisingly people with mental illness do have a much higher suicide rate than people without. So, all other things being equal, the rate of mental illness in a country should correlate with the suicide rate. Of course, all other things are not equal, and other factors might come into play such as the quality of mental health services. Mapping the Glutamate Receptor Want to know what it's all about the glutamate receptor? Should be interesting .....read more »

This presentation is not against porn, it puts it in perspective and warns for the excesses . One part of this talk is for above 18 years but she warns in the talk for these sections. Speaking from her personal experience, she argued that hardcore pornography had distorted the way a generation of young men think about sex, and talked about how she was fighting back with the launch of a website to correct the myths being propagated. The accompanying website: MakeLoveNotPorn.com Related posts: The Brain in Love What News Stories Might Make a Difference for the Future? Online .....read more »

Two weeks ago I went to a course about editing medical journals. You can read all about this course on the website of the firm of one of the excellent teachers: Pippa Smart (what's in a name). The other instructor was Dr Domhnall MacAuley is the Clinical Editor (Primary Care) with the BMJ, and was previously the editor of the British Journal of Sports Medicine. He's an enthusiastic experienced teacher about medical journal editing. What I've learned for the board of our journal? We should improve our contacts with reviewers and possible authors Redesign our website and lay out of the journal and .....read more »

Dating sites as well as social networking sites have search options. In the case of dating sites were people can look for interpersonal romantic relationships these search options deliver more options to search and more possible partners. More options with searching often are accompanied by excessive searching and decreasing the quality of the choices. In short: having more possible partners increases the searches instead of helping to decide based on the first search, "more means worse effect" it's also called. The proposed mechanism behind this effect is: a large set of options may increase cognitive load, leading individuals to make .....read more »