Sam Talks About...

Many of us have terrible sleeping patterns, often as a result of staying up late for assignments, parties or just not realising it’s so late. This may have been especially true throughout fresher’s week and the first few weeks of lectures at university. It can be very easy to get into this habit, and it only takes a couple of late nights in a row to really throw your body clock out of touch with the rest of the world! This is a problem that is very concerning to those who are aware, however very few people are aware of the current lack of sleep being attained by many adolescents. To be clear, I refer to adolescents as those who have started/ gone through puberty but are not yet full adults (i.e. 14-21 year olds). One often cited study found that over 45% of adolescents in the USA have inadequate sleep (less than the recommended 8.5-9.5h per day on a regular basis). This lead to 15-52% of students reporting excessive sleepiness, frequent daytime sleepiness, oversleeping and sle

This is a common question that I'm sure everyone has asked themselves, and so have scientists for hundreds of years! Sigmund Freud, the famous psychologist, was the first to investigate this phenomenon and coined it 'infantile amnesia'. His view was that memories of the first few years of life were repressed because they were too traumatic to deal with at such a young age, as the relevant coping mechanisms for a confusing and often cruel world had not developed yet. Nowadays not many people give much weight to Freud's explanations of childhood development (mostly because it's complete garbage).  In more recent times, Simcock and Hayne (2002) hypothesised that long term memory formation was dependant on language, based on the fact that infantile amnesia seemed to disappear at about the same time as language developed. However, many other animals also exhibit infantile amnesia so language development cannot be the full answer (although it may play a role). 

Last week was big for me, it was the culmination of the past few months of work that had led me to waiting in Manchester Airport, ready to head off to my first conference as a medical writer. It was the European Society of Paediatric Endocrinology (ESPE) Annual Conference of 2015. Our client had a satellite symposium within the conference, at peak lunch hour. Unsurprisingly, 800 free lunch boxes can amass quite a crowd and we managed to fill most of the seats before the symposium started! My job on site, as medical writer, was to check the content that the speakers had provided (after some back and forth over email before heading out) was accurate and clear and to assist in crafting new drafts of the presentations that would project clearly once the content was finalised and had received comments from the authors and the various branches of the client’s internal approval team. Once we got on site, Jill (my boss), Nadine (the project manager) and Tony (the PowerPoint Wizard) an