Stories by Daniel Barron

Physicians often ask you to rate your agony on a scale from one to 10—but the response doesn’t necessarily say anything useful

We’re forced to fill that role because our government has failed to mount an adequate response to COVID-19. Meanwhile our cities burn, and police assault the very citizens that fund their existence

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote medical consultation seems like a no-brainer—but it’s not that simple

A resident physician investigates the causes of skyrocketing tuition

Can clinicians help their patients even in the absence of certainty?

After nearly a century of effort, psychiatry's best diagnoses leave much to be desired

Some psychiatrists think it might be, but the data are still too sparse to be sure

The Open Science movement champions transparency, but how much and how quickly is a matter of dispute

Neuroscientists are increasingly convinced that using the term restricts our understanding of the brain and behavior

When you go free diving, physical strength is not enough

There might be a way—and if so, we could use it to detect and treat them in the earliest stages, before they become debilitating

We like other people in part because they think the way we do—but we may also think alike as a result of being friends

Their facial muscles work fine, but the neural networks that let them recognize the feeling of happiness take a while to develop 

When physical agony persists without an evident cause, the culprit may be how the sufferer’s brain is wired

A California experiment shows it can actually save businesses money

Having parents present is crucial during an infant’s first weeks of development—but institutions that train physicians don’t always seem to care

Political activism is traditionally off-limits for academics, but policy needs to be informed by knowledge and expertise

Though the brain damage can be severe, a recent study shows that areas involved in language, emotion and memory are evidently spared

We throw these terms around casually, but in a clinical setting they might be too vague to be useful

My response to a critique of a recent post

An influential subset of psychiatrists argue—absurdly—that neuroscience has little clinical relevance

How did an educated, elderly engineer wind up with a heroin habit? 

We need to approach the brain as a computational organ, one to be evaluated with measurements and calculations