Having won two gold medals in the 2017 under-18 kayaking world cup when she was just 15, it’s fair to say Georgia Carmichael was in peak condition. But just six weeks after the event, she was struck down with searing headaches, chronic fatigue and an unbearable sensitivity to bright lights. Within months, she had suffered a … Read more
BOOK OF THE WEEK DANCING BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON by Gyles Brandreth (Michael Joseph £14.99, 464 pp) What a piece of work is Gyles Brandreth, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, and how like an irrepressible Butlin’s Redcoat or jolly tambourine-banging clergyman, insisting that we absolutely must ‘keep those synapses happy!’ … Read more
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients could receive new treatments after scientists discovered how fear forms in the brain. Biologists in the US say that ‘fear memory’ is formed as pathways between two small regions of the brain strengthen following a traumatic event. Experiments on mice brains proved that aversive stimulus caused increased activity between these … Read more
MISCELLANY UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE by Tom Standage (Economist £8.99, 272 pp) This is what Tom Standage, deputy editor of The Economist, calls ‘a compendium of explanations’. It’s uncommon knowledge in two senses of the word: in the normal sense of ‘rare or infrequently encountered’, and also as in the meaning ‘exceptional and extraordinary’. In short, it’s … Read more