Hello dear reader. I apologise for my silence over the past couple of weeks. It has been a busy time, what with the end of the exam period and the end of the summer term in the UK. But I have not forgotten about you! I have updated the jobs page and added some videos to the resources page (including a nice summary of music and mood studies from Frank Russo’s lab in Canada). I hope you enjoy. In addition I have just read a really nice study that I thought I would share with you. It appears in PloS ONE so you can all access the paper, which is…

This week the UK press covered a report that looked at the effect of music during surgery. You can read about the coverage on the BBC here and listen to an interview with the author of the report here on BBC Radio 4’s Today program. The report was authored and carried out by Apul Parikh, cosmetic surgeon at John Radcliffe Hospital Oxford. As far as I can tell, this is not a published paper but rather a report into series of medical trials on 100 patients where half had surgery in the standard operating environment under local anaesthetic and half had the same experience except that they heard music in…