After mailing a package of video files and documents to NBC, Cho left for Norris Hall at 9:45 a.m. and chained the entrances shut before opening fire in the halls and classrooms. For nine minutes he attacked faculty and students alike, finally committing suicide with a gunshot to his head.
Psychology
No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech by Lucinda Roy
by Ryan Van Cleave
May 11th, 2009
Love Junkie by Rachel Resnick
by Kelly Hartog
November 12th, 2008
It takes an enormous amount of courage for Resnick to put her life story on the page. Her writing is as stripped, raw and intense as her emotions, and at times you don’t want to read further. But you do, anyway, with a kind of abject horror. The two main men that parade through her life, who ultimately woo, use and abuse her are truly the type of guys your mother would warn you to stay far away from.
School Rampage Killers: A Psychological Portrait
by Paul Comstock
October 27th, 2008
The shooter had convinced himself that killing was gutsy and masculine. Based on his misreadings of Nietzsche and from repeated viewings of the Oliver Stone film, Natural Born Killers, he had convinced himself that the killer was a kind of superior being, and that killing constituted a form of “Natural Selection.”
Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder by David Healy
by Garan Holcombe
September 10th, 2008
He refuses to accept the dominance of money over medicine and the alarming diagnoses of bipolar disorder in infants. ‘We now have a system that inhibits our abilities to find cures while encouraging companies to seek short-term profits by co-opting bipolar disorder for the purposes of increasing the sales of major tranquilizers to infants. Giving major tranquilizers to children is little different from giving children cancer chemotherapy when they have a cold.’
Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness
by John Holt
September 4th, 2008
Jaynes, a psychologist who taught at Princeton up until his death in 1997, showed how ancient peoples from Mesopotamia to Peru could not “think” as we do today, and were therefore not conscious. Unable to introspect or contemplate metaphor-driven scenarios, they experienced auditory hallucinations — voices of gods actually heard as the Old Testament or the Iliad — which, emanating from the brain’s right hemisphere, told an individual what to do in circumstances of novelty or stress.
Jill Bolte Taylor’s Right Brain Wants to Tell Us Something
by Paul Comstock
July 2nd, 2008
“I had a rare congenital malformation in the blood vessels of my left hemisphere and at the age of 37 the malformation (AVM) blew and resulted in a major hemorrhage in the left half of my brain. On the morning of the stroke, I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I describe myself as an infant in a woman’s body.”
Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness
by Paul Comstock
January 17th, 2008
“In waking we tend to think The Dream vanishes, evaporates in daylight like morning dew on grass. But it doesn’t. The unsettling Matrix-esque truth here is that we all live in world-simulations, pretty much all of the time. The brain isn’t out in the world; it’s locked in a dark box in your head. Patterns of information ting against our senses and get routed into the brain for model assembly. One of the core insights of the science of perception is our models of the world are heavily interpreted—our own expectations and cultural mores and personal history shape “The Real,” so that in some ways our personal little submarines move through an ocean of our own making.”
What is intelligence? by James R. Flynn
by Garan Holcombe
November 1st, 2007
‘The Flynn Effect’ was the phrase Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray coined in their book The Bell Curve, to describe the enormous gains in IQ scores in the 20th century from one generation to the next, which James R Flynn, Professor Emeritus at the University of Otago, did so much to measure and document.
Crossing Styx
by Jascha Kessler
October 30th, 2007
What happens to children is that they usually pass from believing that everything presented by television is real to a later conviction that “nothing is real.” In other words, the world has become crowded, permeated and possessed by the fictive.
History of Madness by Michel Foucault
by James Hollis
August 8th, 2007
By the 1700s the “correctional” metaphor prevails and most of them are placed in moral and physical restraints in order to correct their aberrant attitudes or behaviors. Many of these souls were chained as animals in appalling conditions which would get us convicted if we treated our dogs similarly today. Such unfortunates included those convicted of debauchery, crime, and sexual license “where reason was the slave of desire and a servant of the heart.” (I suppose all of us would require sequestration under those criteria).
Allen Shawn Discusses Phobias
by Paul Comstock
June 13th, 2007
“When I finally encountered the concept of ‘agoraphobia’, I recognized myself. I have an intense fear of being trapped or isolated.”
Fool’s Paradise: The Unreal World of Pop Psychology by Stewart Justman
by Bradley Kreit
June 10th, 2007
Imagine, for a second, that instead of claiming the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the Declaration of Independence promised happiness itself, whatever that might be, as a guaranteed right. In a sense, that subtle shift in language would be a promise of utopia—you will be happy—where the burdens and difficulties of life simply melt away.
Faking It by William Ian Miller
by Paul Blairon
June 10th, 2007
At turns erudite and droll, it reads like the collaborative effort of Harold Bloom and Dave Barry.
Devil In The Details – by Jennifer Traig
by Kelly Hartog
April 11th, 2007
All parents of adolescents despair of them, particularly those with teenage daughters. Endless hours on the telephone, picky eating habits, emotional outbursts.
Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
by Paul Blairon
April 11th, 2007
According to Becker, man is torn between his symbolic, self-conscious awareness and his animal nature. The same creature that names himself, imagines, explores and speculates is in the end, food for insects.
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