Neurogenesis? Depression? Marmosets?

This brilliant article by Jonah Lehrer accomplishes so much, so elegantly and logically, that the best I can do is direct you to it and invite you to read.

Breast cancer, statistics, and grapefruit

Carol Tavris is a social psychologist who's written before about how cognitive dissonance makes it difficult for us to admit our mistakes. Now, she turns her spotlight on how our thinking is manipulated by statistics and the media. This time, she and Avrim Bluming, a medical oncologist, have written an article about the risk factors for breast cancer and how they've been publicized in the media, feeding the fear of women around the world.

Millions of women felt compelled to trade in their hormone replacement therapy for hot flashes after publicized reports of higher rates of breast cancer in women taking those hormones for menopausal symptoms. More recent analysis may reduce those fears.

Part of the problem, on the part of the journalists who write the articles that end up under headlines that misinform us, is the difficulty of explaining complex science in three paragraphs. And many of us are also guilty of reading those three paragraphs and actually changing our lives as a result - without going to the source of that information to see what it really reports.