A report in today's newspaper says that children with attention deficit disorder (ADHD) can't switch off the default mode network (DMN) in their brains, the daydreaming function. Stimulant drugs such as methylphenidate may help to switch off this DMN, turn down the volume, as it were, and enable the ADHD sufferer to focus on a task.

These findings are interesting, but they do not address the question of why so many children are suffering from the condition in the first place. We've reached a point where plenty of us know a child personally who's being medicated to improve his or her behavior. Half a million prescriptions for Ritalin - one version of methylphenidate - are filled every year. That is worrying in itself of course, the dosing-up of so many young children with drugs that alter their behavior. But even more alarming is just to think of the changes in society that are creating disturbed children in such numbers. Especially, it is staggering to contemplate the casual neglect and abandonment of children that occurs.

Basically, what's happening is that some people carelessly have children, don't look after them properly and then someone else - the state, the care system - takes over. The process of abandonment combined with lack of love and maltreatment is actually altering the young brains of these children - causing brain damage, really. That's how you get disorders like ADHD: the odd behaviors point to something having changed in the chemistry of the brain, perhaps even in its structure.

The image of the ancient but youthful-looking sage meditating on a mountaintop might be closer to reality than you think, according to a new study that found that after a three-month stay at a meditation retreat, people showed higher levels of an enzyme associated with longevity.

The study is preliminary and didn't show that meditation actually extends life, but the findings suggest a possible means by which it could.

Researchers led by Tonya Jacobs of the University of California-Davis compared 30 participants at a meditation retreat held at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado with matched controls on a waiting list for the retreat. Participants meditated six hours per day for three months. Their meditation centered on mindfulness - for instance, focusing solely on breathing, in the moment - and on lovingkindness and enhancing compassion towards others.

One of psychology's most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.

The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.

The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.

Many people taking powerful psychiatric medications that increase their risk of weight gain and diabetes are prescribed those drugs when there's little evidence that they will get any benefit from them, a new study shows.

What's more, experts say that even when these drugs, which are known as atypical antipsychotics, are prescribed as recommended, they may not be safer or more effective than the less expensive, older medications that they've apparently replaced.

"Atypical agents were once thought to be safer and possibly more effective," says study researcher G. Caleb Alexander, MD, an assistant professor in the department of medicine at the University of Chicago Hospitals. "And what we've learned over time is that they are not safer, and in the settings where there's the best scientific evidence, they are no more effective."

Men rarely jump at the chance to catch the latest tear-jerker with their wives or girlfriends, although some grudgingly oblige. And there might be a biological reason for their hesitation.

New research suggests that women's tears emit chemical signals that turn men off.

After sniffing odorless tears from women who cried during a sad movie, men in a study were less attracted to the opposite sex and less sexually aroused, as assessed by self-reports, physiological measurements and neuroimaging tests, than men who sniffed saltwater. Their testosterone levels also sank, according to the study, published in Science Express.

The authors, led by Noam Sobel, associate professor of neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, suggested that this tear-borne "chemosignal" represents a novel, functional role for crying.

Shedding tears has long been considered a form of human communication. Babies, who can't ask for food, cry when they're hungry. And even among speaking adults, tears can provoke empathy and sympathy. But whether emotional tears themselves serve a function has long been a mystery.

In the Sixties, a groundbreaking series of experiments found that 65 per cent of us would kill if ordered to do so.

We have vain brains; we see ourselves as better than we really are. We like to think that we exercise free will, that put into a situation where we were challenged to do something we thought unacceptable then we'd refuse. But, if you believe that, then you are probably deluded.

I make this claim, based partly on the work of psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram devised and carried out ingenious experiments that exposed the frailty and self-delusion that are central to our lives. He showed how easy it is to make ordinary people do terrible things, that "evil" often happens for the most mundane of reasons.

I first read about Milgram's work when I was a banker in the Seventies, working in the City. I was so fascinated by his ideas that I re-trained as a doctor, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist. Instead I became a science journalist. Recently I got the chance to make The Brain: A Secret History, a television series which reveals how much we have learnt about ourselves through the work of some of the 20th century's most influential, and deeply flawed, psychologists.

In the course of making the series we found rare archive and first-hand accounts of the many inventive and sometimes sinister ways in which experimental psychology has been used to probe, tease, control and manipulate human behaviour. High on the list of psychologists I wanted to learn more about was Stanley Milgram.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Milgram struggled to understand how it was that German soldiers in the Second World War were persuaded to take part in barbaric acts, such as the Holocaust. As he once wrote: "How is possible, I ask myself, that ordinary people who are courteous and decent in everyday life could act callously, inhumanely, without any limitations of conscience."

Milgram was working as an assistant professor at Yale University in 1960 when he dreamt up an experiment that would try to answer that question. It was beautifully designed to reveal uncomfortable truths about human nature. Milgram described the moment he had the idea as "incandescent".

Discovery Channel is teaming with the Vatican for an unprecedented new series hunting the deadliest catch of all: Demons.

The Exorcist Files will recreate stories of real-life hauntings and demonic possession, based on cases investigated by the Catholic Church. The project includes access into the Vatican's case files, as well as interviews with the organization's top exorcists - religious experts who are rarely seen on television.

"The Vatican is an extraordinarily hard place to get access to, but we explained we're not going to try to tell people what to think," says Discovery president and GM Clark Bunting.

Bunting says the investigators believe a demon can inhabit an inanimate object (like a home) or a person. The network executive says he was initially skeptical when first meeting the team but was won over after more than three hours of talks.

The District's troubled juvenile justice agency is looking for a yoga teacher, or maybe a tai-chi instructor, to work with some of the city's most dangerous youths. The idea for the new Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services programming comes from interim deputy director Barry Holman. Late last month, Holman e-mailed the agency's staff to see if they have "hidden talents that might be tapped to further our work with the young people in our care." In the e-mail obtained by The Washington Examiner, Holman said his primary interest was in finding among the staff an instructor certified in yoga, tai-chi, or another "mind-body connection discipline."

Taunted, harassed and pushed to a deadly breaking point. Last year, stories of teen bullying brought to life the heartbreaking consequences of young lives cut short by ruthless and unchecked behavior. Recent media coverage of these violent acts has heightened the awareness of the deadly consequences of bullying, but has done little to stop it from happening.

According to a new Kellogg School study, people fail to understand the consequences of the social trauma experienced by victims of bullying, teasing and ostracism. This "empathy gap" can be devastating because it means victims often do not get the support, intervention or advocacy they need.

"Everyone knows that social trauma is unpleasant, but people are often blind to the full severity of these experiences and therefore don't do enough to protect or intervene when victims suffer," said study leader Loran Nordgren, assistant professor of management and organizations. "News stories in recent months centered around bully victims who took their own lives out of desperation and fear, whether harassed physically in school, or emotionally via text message, online or through social networks. Only by having a heightened sense of empathy to victims' true suffering can we begin to pave the way for reform and new policies."

Sometimes it's almost impossible to talk without using your hands. These gestures seem to be important to how we think. They provide a visual clue to our thoughts and, a new theory suggests, may even change our thoughts by grounding them in action.

University of Chicago psychological scientists Sian Beilock and Susan Goldin-Meadow are bringing together two lines of research: Beilock's work on how action affects thought and Goldin-Meadow's work on gesture. After a chat at a conference instigated by Ed Diener, the founding editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, they designed a study together to look at how gesture affects thought.

For the study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Beilock and Goldin-Meadow had volunteers solve a problem known as the Tower of Hanoi. It's a game in which you have to move stacked disks from one peg to another. After they finished, the volunteers were taken into another room and asked to explain how they did it. (This is virtually impossible to explain without using your hands.) Then the volunteers tried the task again. But there was a trick: For some people, the weight of the disks had secretly changed, such that the smallest disk, which used to be light enough to move with one hand, now needed two hands.