Douwe Draaisma

Publications

Seahorses in the blob

Times Literary Supplement (6 May 2022)

Lithium: the gripping history of a psychiatric success story

Nature (vol. 572, 29 augustus 2019, 584-585)

Review of Lithium: A Doctor, a Drug and a Breakthrough by US psychiatrist Walter A. Brown. A compelling chronicle of John Cade’s serendipitous discovery of the most effective medicine for treating bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic-depression.

Probing the genetics of the mind

Nature (vol. 560, 8 augustus 2018, 166)

Review of Eric Kandel’s The disordered mind. What unusual brains can tell us about ourselves. Weighing up Kandel’s attempt to biologize psychiatry.

From meat to mind

Nature (vol. 556, 5 april 2018, 26-27)

Review of Michael Gazzaniga’s book From meat to mind: unraveling the mystery of how the brain makes the mind, a bold, yet not completely convincing explanation of the bond between mind and neurons.

Our useful inability to see reality

Nature (vol. 544, 20 april 2017, 296)

Review of Beau Lotto’s book The Science of Seeing Differently. His take on perception in one sentence: ‘Our species has been so successful not in spite of our inability to see reality but because of it.’

Listening in on yourself

Nature (vol. 532, 7 april 2016, 32-33)

Review of a study examining both ‘the voice within’ and verbal auditory hallucinations.

Oliver Sacks (1933-2015). Neurologist who made house calls

Nature (vol. 525, 10 September 2015, 188)

Obituary Oliver Sacks

In the blink of an I

Nature (vol. 524, 6 August 2015, 32-33)

Review of Anil Ananthaswamy’s book on the ‘maladies of the self’: The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations Into the Strange New Sciences of the Self’ (Dutton 2015)

Halving it all

Nature (vol. 518, 19 February 2015, 298-299)

Review of Michael Gazzaniga’s autobiography Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience, Ecco: 2015.

Eye on fiction: Generic images of autism

The Psychologist (vol. 27, October 2014, 768-769)

In this essay on stereotypes of autism in novels, films and real life, Douwe Draaisma argues that the account of the autistic experience in bestsellers like Rosie’s Project and The Curious Incident with the Dog in the Night-Time are a major force in shaping lay understandings of autism.

Losing the past

Nature (vol. 497, 16 May 2013, 313-314)

Review of Suzanne Corkin’s book on Henry M(olaison), Permanent Present Tense (2013), the most famous patient in brain science.

Echos, Doubles, and Delusions: Capgras Syndrome in Science and Literature

Style (vol. 43, 2009, 3, 429-441)

Mark Schluter, the main protagonist in Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006), suffers from Capgras Syndrome, a disorder characterized by the patient’s delusional belief that his near ones are replaced by doubles. Draaisma argues that by introducing two doctors for Mark – the one, Hayes, a modern, experimentally oriented neurologist; the other, Weber, an old-school neurologist versed in case studies – Powers presents a persuasive clash between two scientific styles.

Stereotypes of autism: On media representations of autism

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (27 May 2009, vol. 364, no. 1522, 1475-1480)

Ever since the movie Rain Man (1988), there is a proliferation of representations of autism in novels, TV-series and autobiographies. In the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Douwe Draaisma argues that it is of vital importance to scrutinize these representations and to check whether or not they are, in fact, misrepresenting autism. In quite a few cases, media representations of talent and special abilities can be said to have contributed to a harmful divergence between the general image of autism and the clinical reality of the autistic condition.

As if time had slipped a cog

American Journal of Psychology (119, no. 3, Fall 2006, 506-510)

A ship, gradually lowering sail

Nature (vol. 439, 9 February 2006, 662-663)

Review of Pat Thane (ed.), The Long History of Old Age (Thames and Hudson, 2005).

The tracks of thought

Nature (vol. 414, 8 November 2001, 153)

In both science and technology, metaphors direct the way we think, reason and hypothesize.

The graphic strategy: the uses and functions of illustrations in Wundt’s Grundzűge der physiologischen Psychologie

History of the Human Sciences (vol 14, 2001, 1, 1-24)

Illustrations played an important role in the articulation of Wundt’s experimental program. Focusing on the woodcuts of apparatus and experimental designs in the six editions of his Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (published between 1873 and 1911), Sarah de Rijcke and Douwe Draaisma investigate the uses and functions of illustrations in the experimental culture of the physiological and psychological sciences.

In pursuit of precision: the calibration of minds and machines in late nineteenth-century psychology

Annals of Science (vol 57, 2000, 1, 1-25)

Research on ‘the speed of thought’ in Wundt’s laboratory demanded extremely accurate time-measurements. Ruth Benschop and Douwe Draaisma detail how experimenters made deliberate efforts to bring themselves and their subjects under a regime of control and calibration similar to that which reigned over the experimental machinery.

An early Dutch study on déjà vu experiences

Psychological Medicine (vol. 23, 1993, 17-26)

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