Skip to content

The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

Studies of the content of dreams confirm what most of us already suspect: dreams are more likely to be nasty than pleasant, or as the researchers put it, “negative dream contents are more frequent than corresponding positive dream contents”. A recent study reports that threatening experiences are more frequent and intense in dreams than in real life. All this is in line with the entertaining (and not implausible) ‘threat simulation theory’ of dreams, according to which the evolutionary function of dreams is to simulate threats so that our ancestors could spend their nights rehearsing attacks by enemies and predators.

So dreams have a serious negative bias. All of this might have been extremely useful back then. But an unwelcome consequence is that we spend a large portion of our life in pointless misery. Clinical depression is often understood as a disposition to obsessively accentuate the negative. It seems all of us are clinically depressed during certain hours of the night. Think of a human life and how many hours of sleep it contains. Of these, many are spent dreaming. And most of these dreams are unpleasant in different ways. If we add all this up, dreaming makes our lives significantly worse, on balance. Shouldn’t we do something about this?

Read More »The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

How to Improve on Bolt’s Performance

You might think after Usain Bolt’s almost superhuman performances in the 100 and 200 m that the war on doping has been won. However winning one battle is not winning the war. As the example of Lyudmila Blonska shows, doping is still occurring. It is almost certain that there are other medals and world records that were achieved by athletes who were doping but were not caught. The sophistication  of the technology means that just because we are picking up fewer positive tests, it does not mean that there are fewer athletes doping

Read More »How to Improve on Bolt’s Performance

Silicon dreams: digital drugs and regulation

A new worry has hit parents: digital drugs. The idea is that sounds can affect brain states, so by listening to the right kind of sounds desired brain states can be induced – relaxation, concentration, happiness, PMS relief or why not hallucinations? Apparently "idosers" walk around high on sound. Just the right thing for a summer moral panic – kids, computers, drugs and pseudoscience.

Read More »Silicon dreams: digital drugs and regulation

When the heart stops: harvesting organs from the newly (nearly) dead

In the New England Journal of Medicine yesterday, doctors from Denver reported on three controversial cases of heart transplantation from newborn infants. These cases are striking for several reasons. They were examples of so-called ‘donation after cardiac death’ (DCD), an increasingly frequent source of organs for transplantation, but done very rarely in newborns. They are controversial because the transplanted organs were hearts that were ‘restarted’ in recipients after they had stopped in the donor. Transplant surgeons waited only a relatively short period after the donor’s heart had stopped (75 seconds) before starting the organ retrieval process. These transplants raise serious questions about the diagnosis and definition of death.

Read More »When the heart stops: harvesting organs from the newly (nearly) dead

Postcode lotteries

In its just-published report Taking Exception on the allocation of cancer drugs by UK Primary Care Trusts, the Rarer Cancers Forum (http://www.rarercancers.org.uk)  provides further evidence of a ‘postcode lottery’ operating within the UK National Health Service. For example (p. 26), the Mid-Essex PCT has granted 96% of requests to its ‘exceptional cases panel’, while neighbouring South-West Essex PCT has granted none.

Read More »Postcode lotteries

Would you rather be invisible or be able to fly? (Or: are you a sneaky superhero?)

If, like
me, you were one of the kids whose preferred superpower was invisibility, you
may soon be in luck. The BBC reports
today that US scientists have
created a material that could one day be used to make people and objects invisible. The material, which has so far been created
only on a microscopic scale, neither absorbs nor reflects light,
meaning that anyone looking at an object covered in it would see what
lies behind the object rather than the object itself. It’s likely that such technology will be
snapped up first by the military, but perhaps, in years to come, invisibility
cloaks will be available to all.

For some,
the idea of being invisible is distasteful. Being invisible means being able to get away with anything – and
why bother to act morally when you can be sure that you’ll never be caught
out? In this case, would a world full of
people who can turn invisible at the drop of a hat be a world full of thieves,
cheats, and sneaks?

Read More »Would you rather be invisible or be able to fly? (Or: are you a sneaky superhero?)

Cold and Calculating NICE

Yesterday’s Daily Mail online contains an opinion piece bemoaning the decision by NICE – the UK body responsible for rationing healthcare resources – to decline funding for four new treatments for Kidney Cancer. The Mail complains:

…what does NICE offer by way of explanation? A cold, calculating statement that, while the drugs work for many of those with advanced kidney cancer, they are not ‘cost-effective’.

What a clinical way to assess whether a person should be afforded precious extra months and years of life, or consigned to a ‘death sentence’.

I don’t want to defend NICE’s decision in this particular case, but the Mail’s attack on NICE’s "clinical" decision-making process is clearly unjustified.

Read More »Cold and Calculating NICE

The point of death

The Guardian yesterday reported the death of the man who had been so tragically shot in Antigua, with his wife, three weeks after their wedding. It began like this:

"Ben Mullany, the newlywed who was shot on honeymoon in Antigua in an attack that killed his wife, Catherine, died in hospital in Wales yesterday after his life support machine was switched off.  The 31-year-old trainee physiotherapist, who had suffered a fractured skull and had a bullet lodged in the back of his head, was flown back to Britain while in a coma on Saturday. Tests carried out when his condition stabilised after the 24-hour journey established he was brain dead." 

This is a familiar way of describing such happenings, even among clinical professionals.   Brain death is pronounced, so the life support machine is switched off, and the patient dies.   The clear implication is that brain death is not death.  The machine is still keeping the patient alive, and it is switching off the machine that causes real death. 

Read More »The point of death

Slaves to consent?

Nature reports that in response to analysis done by bioethicist Robert Streiffer (and published in the Hastings Center Report), Stanford University may withdraw the use for research of several of its publicly funded stem cell lines because of concerns about consent. In 2001 President Bush decreed that only lines already in existence would be eligible for federal funding – 21 lines were subsequently approved by the NIH.

Read More »Slaves to consent?