Is "practice makes perfect" an age-old adage to live by or just thinking inside-the-box?

According to University of Michigan associate professor Zachary Hambrick, endless hours spent trying to perfect a skill could be a waste of time.

In a new study published in the journal Intelligence, Hambrick and a team of American researchers suggest that "deliberate practice is not sufficient to explain individual differences in performance" among musicians and chess players.

"Practice is indeed important to reach an elite level of performance, but this paper makes an overwhelming case that it isn't enough," Hambrick said. "The evidence is quite clear that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice."

In the study, the team reviewed 14 studies involving chess players and musicians and looked explicitly at how practice routine was related to performance. They found that time spent practicing accounted for only about one third of the measurable skill differences in both music and chess.

Hambrick said that the discrepancy can be explained by other factors such as intelligence, innate ability, or age.

There is far more to mothering than giving birth. Just ask Alison Fleming. The University of Toronto Mississauga psychology professor has spent the past four decades researching the complex neurobiology and psychology involved in motherhood. Through her work, she has learned that while the hormonal changes associated with birthing help prepare females to take care of their young, maternal behaviours don't just come automatically; they develop over time.

"There's a lot of stuff that comes into play.... It's not like there's an instinct called mothering," Fleming says, noting that fathers also undergo hormonal changes when exposed to their babies, and that women who adopt become every bit as attached and attracted to their children as those who raise their own offspring. "I think it's just a matter of getting the experience and the interaction."

The numerous studies Fleming and her colleagues have conducted over the years have contributed to a greater understanding of why mothering matters, and have provided insight into what drives mothers to nurture their young. A mother's love, support and physical touch (or, in the absence of a mother, the simulation of sensitive parental care) are all critical to the offspring's healthy brain development and social and emotional development, she says. And the greater the exposure a mother has to her babies, the stronger her motivation becomes to care for them.

Even though most companies on paper say they don't tolerate bullying in the workplace, bullies can still thrive in office environments.

This may be explained by a social gift many bullies share: They know how to strategically abuse their coworkers - with belittling comments, deliberate exclusion and the like - while still garnering positive evaluations from their supervisors, researchers say.

"Many bullies can be seen as charming and friendly, but they are highly destructive and can manipulate others into providing them with the resources they need to get ahead," Darren Treadway, associate professor of organization and human resources at the University of Buffalo, said in a statement.

In a new study, Treadway and colleagues measured bullying behavior and career success for by looking at behavioral and job performance data from 54 employees at a mental health organization in the northwest U.S. The researchers found a strong correlation between bullying, social competence and positive job evaluations.

This week we were joined by Dr. Colin Ross, a psychiatrist who received his M.D. from the University of Alberta in 1981 and completed his specialty training in psychiatry at the University of Manitoba in 1985. He is the author of over 170 papers in professional journals, most of them dealing with dissociation, psychological trauma and multiple personality disorder. He is a past president of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation and Trauma and a former Laughlin Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists.

Dr. Ross is also the author of 27 books, including, The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations By American Psychiatrists, Military Mind Control: A Story of Trauma and Recovery and The Great Psychiatry Scam.

In his book, The C.I.A. Doctors, Dr. Ross provides proof, based on 15,000 pages of documents obtained from the C.I.A. through the Freedom of Information Act, that there have been pervasive, systematic violations of human rights by American psychiatrists over the last 65 years. He also proves that the Manchurian Candidate "super spy" is fact, not fiction. He describes the experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new identities, hypnotic access codes, and new memories in the minds of experimental subjects.

In The Great Psychiatry Scam, Dr. Ross provides evidence that modern psychiatry is actually a pseudo-science, with many of the main accepted theses about the causes of human mental illness actually disproven by psychiatric experiments and research.

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Your brain often works on autopilot when it comes to grammar. That theory has been around for years, but University of Oregon neuroscientists have captured elusive hard evidence that people indeed detect and process grammatical errors with no awareness of doing so.

Participants in the study -- native-English speaking people, ages 18-30 -- had their brain activity recorded using electroencephalography, from which researchers focused on a signal known as the Event-Related Potential (ERP). This non-invasive technique allows for the capture of changes in brain electrical activity during an event. In this case, events were short sentences presented visually one word at a time.

Subjects were given 280 experimental sentences, including some that were syntactically (grammatically) correct and others containing grammatical errors, such as "We drank Lisa's brandy by the fire in the lobby," or "We drank Lisa's by brandy the fire in the lobby." A 50 millisecond audio tone was also played at some point in each sentence. A tone appeared before or after a grammatical faux pas was presented. The auditory distraction also appeared in grammatically correct sentences.

This approach, said lead author Laura Batterink, a postdoctoral researcher, provided a signature of whether awareness was at work during processing of the errors. "Participants had to respond to the tone as quickly as they could, indicating if its pitch was low, medium or high," she said. "The grammatical violations were fully visible to participants, but because they had to complete this extra task, they were often not consciously aware of the violations. They would read the sentence and have to indicate if it was correct or incorrect. If the tone was played immediately before the grammatical violation, they were more likely to say the sentence was correct even it wasn't."

Disrupted sleep is so commonly a symptom of depression that some of the first things doctors look for in diagnosing depression are insomnia and excessive sleeping. Now, however, scientists have observed for the first time a dysfunctional body clock in the brains of people with depression.

People with major depression, also known as clinical depression, show disrupted circadian rhythms across brain regions, according to a new study published today (May 13) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers looked at post-mortem brain samples from mentally healthy donors and compared them with those of people who had major depression at the time of their death.

They found that gene activity in the brains of depressed people failed to follow healthy 24-hour cycles.

"They seem to have the sleep cycle both shifted and disrupted," said study researcher Jun Li, a professor of human genetics at the University of Michigan.

When trouble approaches, what do you do? Run for the hills? Hide? Pretend it isn't there? Or do you focus on the promise of rain in those looming dark clouds?

New research suggests that the way you regulate your emotions, in bad times and in good, can influence whether - or how much - you suffer from anxiety.

The study appears in the journal Emotion.

In a series of questionnaires, researchers asked 179 healthy men and women how they managed their emotions and how anxious they felt in various situations. The team analyzed the results to see if different emotional strategies were associated with more or less anxiety.

The study revealed that those who engage in an emotional regulation strategy called reappraisal tended to also have less social anxiety and less anxiety in general than those who avoid expressing their feelings. Reappraisal involves looking at a problem in a new way, said University of Illinois graduate student Nicole Llewellyn, who led the research with psychology professor Florin Dolcos, an affiliate of the Beckman Institute at Illinois.

"When something happens, you think about it in a more positive light, a glass half full instead of half empty," Llewellyn said. "You sort of reframe and reappraise what's happened and think what are the positives about this? What are the ways I can look at this and think of it as a stimulating challenge rather than a problem?"

Study participants who regularly used this approach reported less severe anxiety than those who tended to suppress their emotions.

In 1987, Adrian Raine, who describes himself as a neurocriminologist, moved from Britain to the US. His emigration was prompted by two things. The first was a sense of banging his head against a wall. Raine, who grew up in Darlington and is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was a researcher of the biological basis for criminal behaviour, which, with its echoes of Nazi eugenics, was perhaps the most taboo of all academic disciplines.

In Britain, the causes of crime were allowed to be exclusively social and environmental, the result of disturbed or impoverished nurture, rather than fated and genetic nature. To suggest otherwise, as Raine felt compelled to, having studied under Richard Dawkins and been persuaded of the "all-embracing influence of evolution on behaviour", was to doom yourself to an absence of funding. In America, there seemed more open-mindedness on the question and, as a result, more money to explore it. There was also another good reason why Raine headed initially to California: there were more murderers to study than there were at home.

When Raine started doing brain scans of murderers in American prisons, he was among the first researchers to apply the evolving science of brain imaging to violent criminality. His most comprehensive study, in 1994, was still, necessarily, a small sample. He conducted PET [positron emission tomography] scans of 41 convicted killers and paired them with a "normal" control group of 41 people of similar age and profile. However limited the control, the colour images, which showed metabolic activity in different parts of the brain, appeared striking in comparison. In particular, the murderers' brains showed what appeared to be a significant reduction in the development of the prefrontal cortex, "the executive function" of the brain, compared with the control group.

British Psychological Society to launch attack on rival profession, casting doubt on biomedical model of mental illness

There is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful, according to the leading body representing Britain's clinical psychologists.

In a groundbreaking move that has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society's division of clinical psychology (DCP) will on Monday issue a statement declaring that, given the lack of evidence, it is time for a "paradigm shift" in how the issues of mental health are understood. The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry's predominantly biomedical model of mental distress - the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs. The DCP said its decision to speak out "reflects fundamental concerns about the development, personal impact and core assumptions of the (diagnosis) systems", used by psychiatry.

Dr Lucy Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist who helped draw up the DCP's statement, said it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes.

Why do CEOs who excel at golf get paid more, despite poorer stock market performance?

To see how easily the mind jumps to the wrong conclusions, try virtually taking part in a little experiment...

...imagine that you are presented with information about two groups of people about which you know nothing. Let's call them the Azaleans and the Begonians.

For each group you are given a list of positive and negative behaviours. A good one might be: an Azalean was seen helping an old lady across the road. A bad one might be: a Begonian urinated in the street.

So, you read this list of good and bad behaviours about the Azaleans and Begonians and afterwards you make some judgements about them. How often do they perform good and bad behaviours and what are they?

What you notice is that it's the Begonians that seem dodgy. They are the ones more often to be found shoving burgers into mailboxes and ringing doorbells and running away. The Azaleans, in contrast, are a sounder bunch; certainly not blameless, but overall better people.

While you're happy with the judgement, you're in for a shock. What's revealed to you afterwards is that actually the ratio of good to bad behaviours listed for both the Azaleans and Begonians was exactly the same. For the Azaleans 18 positive behaviours were listed along with 8 negative. For the Begonians it was 9 positive and 4 negative.

In reality you just had less information about the Begonians. What happened was that you built up an illusory connection between more frequent bad behaviours and the Begonians; they weren't more frequent, however, they just seemed that way.