Testosterone has a crucial, if poorly understood, effect on male behaviour. It contributes to aggressivenes, libido, tumescence and sexual performance. Some scientists believe that the ratio of index finger length to ring finger length indicates how much testosterone we were exposed to in our mother’s womb. This has led some Palm reader’s to use clues from the ‘index finger:ring finger’ ratio to deduce gendered behavioural characteristics of a client… hmmmm??? Concretely, what we do know ...

By Daniel Lende “You study sin,” my dinner companion said with a smile at a recent conference. I reached for my wine, and after a modest sip (really!), replied, “Vicio. In Colombia it’s called vicio. Vices.” In Colombia vicio covers a whole range of activities—video games, playing pool, and yes, drugs. Even better, when vicio becomes the adjective “enviciador,” favorite snacks and sweets come into the picture. People start to eat, and it’s hard to ...

By Daniel Lende In the previous post Wanting to Craving: Understanding Compulsive Involvement with Drugs, I wrote: Different domains of subjective involvement can be linked to dopamine [function] – wanting more and more, the sense of an urge or push to use (often not a conscious desire), and the heightened focus on places and actions and times that lead to using. The scale I developed showed good internal consistency, adding support that these three senses ...

By Daniel Lende A long-time research project of mine has been to understand how adolescents get hooked on drugs. Querer más y más, as they say in Colombia, to want more and more. When people get addicted – whatever the substance may be – they often report urges, cravings, and obsessive thinking as a primary force in why they keep using or relapse. Knowing the consequences often doesn’t matter, especially in those moments when that ...