March 31, 2005

Fantasy friends:

While most children believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny at some point, researchers are now starting to discover that children's fantasy worlds are more subtle than previously suspected, and may even last into adulthood.

An in-depth article from Science News Online examines a child's understanding of fantasy characters and how imagination is being used to help children cope with traumatic and painful medical procedures.

One surprising finding is that although one third of 7-year olds seem to have imaginary friends, similar experiences can last into adulthood. Some professions may even rely on this experience to help their work.

Psychologist Marjorie Taylor interviewed 50 fiction writers ranging from an award-winning novelist to scribblers who had never been published. Of those authors, 46 provided vivid examples of made-up characters who had taken over the job of composing their life stories and who sometimes resisted their creators' attempts to control the narrative. Some fictional folk wandered around in the writers' houses or otherwise inhabited their everyday world.

Link to article from Science News Online.
Previously on MindHacks: Imaginary friends are linked to positive psychological development in children.

—Vaughan.

March 30, 2005

More cartoon fun:

Further to the dinosaurs Vaughan speaks of below, there is a Flash-based dynamic comic* at Neuroscience for Kids which is a nice intro to the entire nervous system, with Sam and his friendly neurons. In addition, there are also suggestions for a number of neuroscience-based fun lesson plans, like synaptic tag.

Sam's brainy adventure: link

*No, a cartoon this does not make. Although action within panels, rather than dynamic transitions such as Scott McCloud's The Right Number (click where it says to preview the work, unfortunately the full deal does cost an imposing 50c to view), does start to push the boundaries somewhat. But speech bubbles and panels maketh the medium - at least, McCloud would argue that.

—Alex.

Banishing depression with exercise:

This week is Mental Health Action Week, and a major attempt is being made to highlight the beneficial effects of exercise in treating depression.

Depression is commonly treated with antidepressant drugs, and for some people, these may be the most effective treatment.

For mild or moderate depression however, regular excercise is known to work as well as medication in some people.

Exercise is also known to complement the use of antidepressant drugs, may prevent further relapses, and could help counter the slightly increased risk of heart problems recently linked to depression.

Although doing exercise may seem daunting during a period of depression, a gentle start is a good way to ease yourself into the habit.

If you live in the UK, you may be able to get referred to a tailored exercise programme, prescribed by your GP.

Link to more information from mentalhealth.org.uk

—Vaughan.

Tyrannosaurus reflex:

In a wonderful comic strip, dinosaurs explain the neural mechanism of why locking the hands together can release the knee jerk reflex.

It's not often the finer points of neurological examination are explained by cartoon dinosaurs, but may this be the first in a long line of comic book / neuroscience fusion spectaculars.

Link to dinosaur / neurophysiology comic strip (via tradetricks.org)
Link to information about the reflex examination.

—Vaughan.

March 29, 2005

Turn on, tune in, spin out:

Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell studies attention deficit disorder (ADD) and is becoming increasingly concerned that using information technology is causing an acquired form of the condition.

He argues that the constant task-switching required when using the likes of mobile phones, email and instant messaging can lead to an effect he has called 'Attention Deficit Trait' or ADT.

This shares some of the same features of ADD, such as impaired concentration, restlessness and increased distraction, but seems to improve when individuals are away from the workplace.

In contrast, ADD is usually thought to be a relatively fixed condition, presumably present from birth, although not diagnosable until about 6 years of age.

As outlined in a recent Scientific American article (PDF), it is known that simple television viewing can have both short and long term effects on the mind, including impairments in basic cognitive functioning.

Cynics might suggest that the same parallels might not apply to other technology and this might be Hallowell's attempt to make a name for himself in the lucrative world of business psychology.

It is unlikely however, that information technology is entirely neutral with regards to psychological function, although there is relatively little hard evidence to judge how positive or negative these effects might be.

Link to interview with Dr Halliwell on ADT.
Link to summary from techdirt.com.
PDF of Scientific American article on the psychological effects of television.

—Vaughan.

March 25, 2005

2005-03-23 Spike activity:

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news, with internet radio easter special:

An archive of old advertisements for hypnotism books and training guides.

Researchers argue Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was inspired by the hallucinogenic effects of ergot.

Scientists link gene to dyslexia (again).

A specialist in the psychology of trauma recounts his own experience of being in a near-fatal car crash and his view on the psychological effects of post-trauma stress.

New York Times article on people who have a compelling desire to have a limb amputated.

Recent work in the field of neuroeconomics (the neuropsychology of economic decision making) is challenging traditonal notions of rationality.

People tend to fancy others with differing facial features, but trust those with similar features.

Terri Schiavo case highlights lack of knowledge in certain areas of neurology.

25% of US adults have received mental health care over a two-year period.

Article from Psychology Today on the co-option of psychological terms into everyday language.

Easter radio special

A few things to relax with over the easter holiday... Mind and brain radio programmes from around the world, broadcast over the last week and archived for your listening pleasure:

BBC Radio 4 had a series of five 15-minute programmes on the work of Sigmund Freud.

An edition of Check Up, also on Radio 4, tackles obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD.

And one more from Radio 4... This week's edition of Material World discusses the neurobiology of body clocks and circadian rhythms.

ABC Radio National edition of All in the Mind discusses the neuroscience of movement and dance (transcript, realaudio).

Another Radio National programme, Ockham's Razor, takes a critical look at mental illness and society (transcript, realaudio).

Scientists who decoded movement signals from an awake human with brain-implanted electrodes are interviewed on the SETI Radio Network's science show Are we alone ? (mp3).

—Vaughan.

March 24, 2005

Do you really want to quit?:

I have a question about dialog boxes on my computer. This is something I mentioned last night, and I'd appreciate some help.

Below is a picture of a well-assembled dialog box. UI folks say that dialog box options should be verbs, not nouns, but that's not important here. (ie, you should have options "Don't save" and "Save" for the question "Save this document?" instead of the buttons "OK" and "Cancel.") I'm going to talk about why it's well-assembled, but first:

Mac trivia! While the Mac (actually, the Lisa, but the Lisa informed the Mac) was being designed, the "OK" button did used to be an action: it used to be labeled "Do It." But the space between the two words was too small, and the users read the button label as "dolt" and got kind of offended and wouldn't push it. True fact!

Back to that dialog box...

If you ask someone a question, you usually give the positive answer first: Yes, No; OK, Cancel. But in this case, the box is the other way round (Cancel, OK). Why is this good? It's good because of the keyboard shortcuts. Here's my keyboard:

The keyboard shortcut for "OK" is the Return key, and that's on the right of my keyboard, which matches the position of the button on the dialog boxes. The shortcut for "Cancel" is the Escape key, and that's on the left, also matching the button position.

At this point, you're thinking "so what?" but on my flight to a conference last week, I encountered the following interface--and apologies for the photo quality, as it's of a small, dim screen situated on the seatback infront of me:

I'm trying to exit a game called "Magma Zone" and the game is giving me a confirmation dialog. The options are the way round we use in speech, "Yes" then "No." However, the button for "Yes" is on the right of the control pad - which you can see in the bottom half of the picture (I'm holding it up to the screen) - and the button for "No" is on the left. The dialog box, which you see, and the control pad, which you act on, have the buttons in opposing directions.

When you're half asleep on a plane, in a funny kind of state anyway, this interface is catastrophic. Even when I knew what was happening, when I'd already taken a photo and examined the remote and so on, even when I knew all that, it took me a good few tries to leave the game.

Good for Magma Zone, not so good for me. (The problem, or benefit, of Mind Hacks is that you zero in on these fractional second frustrations, and start watching yourself to see when it happens. It's great, actually, as a designer to be able to examine UIs with this perspective.)

My question: What's going on that makes this so hard? I have a number of ideas, and a member of the audience at Foyles suggested another really good one last night, but I'm going to hold back on those for a bit. Suggestions please! (And feel free to speculate and throw ideas out there, we'll figure it out.)

—Matt.

When faces fade:

Prosopagnosia is an inability to recognise faces. It most commonly occurs after brain injury, although this week's New Scientist reports on a recently completed study on a type of inherited prosopagnosia, suggesting a genetic basis for face recognition.

The research was an international effort, led by husband and wife team, geneticists Thomas and Martina Grüter. Notably, Thomas has a particular interest in this area, as he has prosopagnosia himself.

Unfortunately, the New Scientist article is only available to subscribers The full article is now available online, and Mind Hacks has spoken to two members of the research team about this intriguing study: Thomas on his own experience of prosopagnosia and the genetics of face recognition, and neuropsychologist Hadyn Ellis on the implications for the developing field of 'cognitive genetics'.

Thomas and Martina are part of a team of geneticists from the Institute of Human Genetics in Münster, Germany. They became interested in how Thomas' condition seemed to run in families and decided to study it in more detail.

They recruited neuropsychologists from Cardiff University, initiating an international effort to examine the genetic basis of face perception.

The main finding of the study was that prosopagnosia seemed to be inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion, meaning only a single gene from one parent is needed to cause the condition.

Could it really be the case that the development of face recognition relies on a single gene ? We tackled Thomas on this controversial interpretation, but first we wanted to know, what it is like having prosopagnosia?

How did you first realise you were unable to recognise faces as well as other people?

When I didn't recognize my teachers in the street. Some didn't care, but others were not amused. Most of the time, I wasn't even aware that I had overlooked them, if so, they didn't say a word.

What is it like having prosopagnosia ? For example, do faces seem strange or distorted to you?

Faces look perfectly normal, they just fade in my memory very quickly. I can recognize emotions as well as other people, maybe better.

To most people, not being able to recognise faces would seem a great disability. Why do you think most people with hereditary prosopagnosia are not significantly impaired by their condition ?

They have had all of their life to cope with the problem. They have learned to recognize people by other features like gait [walking style] or voice. And, of course, like colorblind people, they cannot imagine how it feels to remember faces normally.

On the basis of this study, you have argued that a single gene may be heavily involved in developing face recognition skills. Early studies in cognitive genetics also made bold claims (a 'gene for language' for example) only to soften the claims when these genes were found to have wider effects.

Do you think that this potential 'face recognition gene' is likely to be genuinely face specific ?

The so-called language gene FOX2P was found to control the expression of other genes, instead of influencing the brain development directly. Still, the studies gave us a valuable insight into the regulation mechanisms of the genetic code.

The genetic code is not like a "blue print" of the body, in reality, the relationship is much more complicated. If we find the gene responsible for prosopagnosia, it may well be a regulator gene like the language gene, but of course, it may also be a gene influencing the connectivity of brain areas directly.

What is an important next step for the research and how do you see it being useful for people who might be affected by hereditary prosopagnosia ?

For people with hereditary prosopagnosia, an early diagnosis can make their life a lot easier. Our next step will be the development of a standard diagnostic procedure for prosopagnosia. Other groups are now trying to pin down the anatomical and functional difference in the brains of prosopagnosics.

In May, 2005, we will open a prosopagnosia clinic at the Insitute of Human Genetics in Münster, where hereditary prosopagnosia can be diagnosed and we can advise parents about the probability of their children being affected. Of course, we will also tell the parents how they can recognise the disorder in their children and what they can do to help. It is also important to remind everyone that prosopagnosia is not a disease, it is a cognitive disability, nothing more.

The bigger picture is that this study is part of an increasing focus on understanding how genetics influence the development of the mind and brain. Team member and neuropsychologist Hadyn Ellis is convinced this will be an important step in understanding brain development.

"Until recently, genetics and neuropsychology have been separate areas of research. We are now able both to accurately measure brain function and target precise areas of the human genome. With these developments in the human sciences, it has become possible to link these effects with increasing accuracy.

This might eventually allow us to answer some of the age old questions about the role of nature and nurture in human development".

The paper will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Cortex.

---

Hungry for more info on cognitive genetics? Check out this paper (PDF) from a recent issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

—Vaughan.

March 23, 2005

What motivates cognitive science ?:

Online editions of The Times and Guardian have a review of neurobiologist Steven Rose's new book The 21st Century Brain, that discusses the motivations behind the funding and support for neuroscience research.

Rose is a controversial critic of many aspects of mainstream science, and his new book argues that the recent explosion in psychology and neuroscience has been driven by funders only wanting directly marketable results, rather than knowledge about the brain for the good of all. This, he argues, goes hand-in-hand with profit-driven drug development, neuromarketing and other explicity commercial projects.

What Rose seems particularly concerned about, is not commercial projects per se, but the effect that such funding is having on neuroscience itself. For example, the promotion of purely biological theories of mental illness by drug companies has worried many scientists who want a more wide-ranging approach.

Link to book review from The Guardian.
Link to book review from The Sunday Times.
Link to book review from Times Online.

—Vaughan.

March 22, 2005

Reminder: Talk at Foyles is tomorrow, Wednesday:

Just so you all the Londoners know, Mind Hacks at Foyles is at 6.30pm tomorrow. They're expecting the tickets to sell out later today, so grab yourself a ticket if you haven't already. See you then! ps. Bring a pen, for experimental purposes.

—Matt.

The fine art of neuroscience:

This week's issue of the science journal Nature has a number of articles on science and art. Sadly most are closed-access, although one gem is freely available.

An article by psychologist Patrick Cavanagh discusses the techniques of visual art and how they can inform neuroscience, particularly in understanding the construction of the visual system.

Artists use this alternative physics because these particular deviations from true physics do not matter to the viewer: the artist can take shortcuts, presenting cues more economically, and arranging surfaces and lights to suit the message of the piece rather than the requirements of the physical world.

In discovering these shortcuts artists act as research neuroscientists, and there is a great deal to be learned from tracking down their discoveries. The goal is not to expose the 'slip-ups' of the masters, entertaining as that might be, but to understand the human brain. Art in this sense is a type of found science - science we can do simply by looking.

If this is a topic that interests you, you could do a lot worse than tracking down the 17th March edition of Nature at your local library. The other articles in this series tackle links between science, poetry and music, to name but a few.

Link to Kavanagh's article The Artist as Neuroscientist from nature.com

—Vaughan.

March 21, 2005

Test Your Synaesthesia:

Dear Kathryn

I've been thinking about the way you see colours that go with each number, and also colours for each day of the week. It's called synaesthesia- but you probably know that- and you seem like the have number-colour synaesthesia (which is common). There are other kinds like sound-colour synaesthesia or even sound-taste synaesthesia (people who get a taste whenever they hear certain sounds!). Anyway we were talking about it at Burning Man, maybe, or at Christmas, and I seemed to be able to guess the same associations between numbers and colours as you actually see, even though I know I'm definitely not synaesthetic (did you know that synaesthesia is much more common in women than men?). So I thought what I was probably doing was remembering a synaesthetic association from childhood (did you know that synaesthesia is far more common in children?), and that was how I was getting a colour for each number- from memory .

So, next thought, is there a way to distinguish between someone who just has a memory of an association- or is just imaging an association- from someone who really is seeing actual colours when they are shown numbers? Is there, in other words, a test we can do to check if you are really synaesthetic? And of course there is, so I thought I'd write to you and tell you about it and you can have a go.

We'll get to the test in a sec, but first here's how it works. It works because colours are obvious. They jump out at you, they're a kind of visual building block (there's an early part of the visual system devoted to colours, and neural specialisation is always a good indicator of importance). So, say if you look at a collection of black things and some of them are red you don't need to search - the red things just jump out at you. Something we (I mean psychologists) sometimes call 'pop-out' (technical, eh?). You can demonstrate this to yourself like this. Your job will be to look at a collection of black symbols, and spot the red coloured ones. Click on this link to open the image in a new window. What you should find is that you don't have to look at them one by one ("what colour is that one? black. Move on. What colour is that on? black. Move on" etc etc), insteaad you just instantly spot the ones which are coloured red. They pop-out at you. No effort required, the answer is just delivered direct to your conscious awareness.

So here's the test of synaesthesia (well, it's a test of number-colour synaesthesia at least, which is one kind you have. Do you have any others?). If numbers really do create an actual experience of colour for you, then different numbers should pop out at you in the same way that different colours should. The trick is to control for the different shapes that numbers normally have. So what some very clever people did [2] was use two numbers that have the same shape, 5 and 2, but are each the reverse of each other upsidedown. Anyway, yes, the test. Your job is similar to last time: look at the image here and try and spot the numbers which are different from all the others. If you can do it as automatically and easily as with the first image then you are really synaesthetic and when you see numbers you really do get an honest-to-goodness perceptual experience of colour. If you can't, well then it's not a perceptual phenomenon, but more of a memory and imagination phenomenon (which doesn't make it not real, it just makes it less unusual).

So this is one way you can confirm to yourself, or test someone else to see if they are properly synaesthetic. Another way is to put them in a brain scanner, and you can see that, for example, numbers really do activate the visual cortex [1].

I've put some links and references at the end here, in case you want to read more about it all. It's really gripping stuff - I'm convinced this is going to be one of the areas of psychology where loads of progress is made in the next few years. The first Ramachandran paper [2] is a great place to start and the second one [3] gives some interesting thoughts on why synaesthesia occurs - perhaps because of excessive 'cross-wiring' between different bits of the brain, or, more accurately, a failure to remove cross wiring which everyone has in infancy (brain development after birth actually involves killing off brain cells that aren't used- 'neural pruning'- rather than growing new ones). This would also explain why synaesthesia is more common in the young. There's all sorts of interesting things discussed in the paper, including the higher incidence of creativity reported in synaesthetes and the idea that synaesthesia helped humans develop language (because by connecting different senses it gives a kind of natural symbolism. Me and Matt talked about this more in the book [Hack #50]). The other paper I've put in the references is one by a guy called Benny Sannon, who discusses synaesthesia created by taking psychoactives, and his own "extensive, firsthand, experience" with Ayahuasca - a powerful kind of loopy juice which has traditional uses in the indigenous tribal cultures of the upper Amazonian. [4]

Anyway, hope this has been fun for you. I'll give you a call soon
Love
tom

Links:

the taste of music (mindhacks.com)

Fantastic bibliography of different researchers and their theories of synaesthesia (and links to many PDFs) here

This guy has done out the numbers and the alphabet so you can see if you get how they look for him

Matt Webb's notes on the 'phenomenology of synaesthesia' paper

References:

1. Elias, L. J., Saucier, D. M., Hardie, C., & Sarty, G. E. (2003). Dissociating semantic and perceptual components of synaesthesia: behavioural and functional neuroanatomical investigations. Cognitive Brain Research, 16(2), 232-237. PDF of draft here
   
2. Ramachandran, V.S. and Hubbard, E.M. (2001), Synaesthesia: Awindow into perception, thought and
   language, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(12), pp. 3–34. PDF here
   
3. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. and Edward M. Hubbard. (2003). The phenomenology of synaesthesia. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10(8): 49–57. PDF here
   
4. Shanon, B. (2003). Three stories concerning synaesthesia - A commentary on Ramachandran and Hubbard. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, 69-74. PDF here
   

—tom.

March 20, 2005

Reviewing the brain on film:

Movies often borrow themes from psychology and neuroscience, although only a few have the compliment returned by scientists in the field. Two recent films however, have sparked engaging commentaries from a number of scientists, owing to their accurate depiction of brain function.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was praised by Kirk Jobsluder for eschewing the clichés of a linear 'videotape' memory, and Steven Johnson for accurately capturing the role of emotion in memory.

Johnson's article also touches on another highly regarded film, Memento, but is surprisingly critical, despite the lead character displaying almost identical memory problems to famous cases in the medical literature. One of the most notable is Patient HM, although there are several well-known cases with similar impairments.

Rashmi Sinha further discusses the influences of clinical neuroscence in Memento with some insightful comments, but my favourite has got to be this wonderfully geeky review from a team at Rutgers University:

Unlike patient HM, Shelby acquired his anterograde amnesia through an accidental brain injury. This does happen, but it's much more common for people to develop anterograde amnesia from a stroke, viral encephalitis, chronic epilepsy, or the interruption of the brain's oxygen supply due to near-drowning or strangulation (hypoxia or anoxia).

Nevertheless, the prize for the most popcorn consumed in the service of science undoubtedly goes to neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale, for her comprehensive reviews of movies about epilepsy and amnesia. Surprisingly, animated movie Finding Nemo is rated as a particularly accurate portrayal of amnesia.

Personally, I'm a big fan of The Man with Two Brains, but I think that's just wishful thinking.

Spare popcorn ? Check out some videos from PBS on amnesic patients EP and 'Chuck', and the neuroscience of memory.

—Vaughan.

March 19, 2005

Are psychiatric drugs stifling art ?:

An article just published on kuro5hin.org discusses whether psychiatric drug treatment is robbing society of artistic talent.

Many authors have argued that mental illness and creativity are linked. Perhaps most notably, psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison discussed the associations between mood disorder and creativity in her book Touched with Fire.

Although Jamison largely deals with literary figures, other researchers have noted high levels of mental disorder in jazz musicians, with one researcher even suggesting that Buddy Bolden, the founder of modern jazz, may have developed jazz improvisation in response to his cognitive impairments.

The kuro5hin article isn't the most clearly structured piece you'll ever read, but is brimming with ideas, and asks important questions about whether the suppresion of mental illness necessarily involves the suppresion of creative thought.

Link to the kuro5hin article Pharmaceuticals and the Death of Art.

—Vaughan.

March 18, 2005

Spike activity 2005-03-18:

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Researchers from the University of Zurich suggest kindness to strangers may be uniquely part of human nature.

An insightful article on mindfulness meditation discusses its benefits for mental health and the supporting research.

Hormone treatment for prostate cancer has been shown to have effects on thinking, showing a link between hormones and cognitive ability.

Genetic studies have suggested that an inclination to certain forms of religious belief may have a genetic basis.

"In discussing pathology I discovered that yawning and spontaneous ejaculation were mentioned concomitantly in terminal rabies. In discussing pharmacology I found a link between yawning and spontaneous orgasm in withdrawal from heroin addiction". Donald MacLeod, writing in the Guardian, reports on the research that suggests sex and yawning may be linked. Doesn't that always happen ? Oh, maybe that's just...

New PLoS Biology articles on neuroaesthetics and the molecular biology of human brain evolution.

Many world leaders believe in the supernatural, astrology, ghosts, weapons of mass destruction etc.

An inventor has created cutlery with built-in electrodes for use on dates. These measure skin conductance, which is known to rise during stress or discomfort. The article doesn't mention that conductance also rises when a person is aroused, which could lead to some wonderfully comic situations.

—Vaughan.

March 17, 2005

Studying the nose to understand bipolar disorder:

Nerve cells from the nose are helping scientists study the neural basis of bipolar disorder, the condition often known as manic depression.

These cells, called olfactory receptor neurons, are located just inside the nose, and are similar in many ways to cells within the brain, but are easier (and safer) to get to.

The research team, led by Professor Chang-Gyu Hahn, examined how these cells reacted in people diagnosed with bipolar disorder, when compared to the same cells from people without the condition.

Calcium is an important part of how a nerve generates a signal (known as an action potential) and the olfactory receptor neurons from the bipolar group showed much less calcium activity than the control group.

This study provides important clues about how differences in neural signalling may be related to emotion and mood regulation, and describes an innovative approach to researching nerve signals in humans.

Link to write-up from sciencedaily.com.
Link to study abstract.

—Vaughan.

March 16, 2005

Am I genetic ?:

A new three-part series called Two's a Crowd has started on BBC Radio 4, tackling the the biology of personal identity.

It got a few trailers on air, but has otherwise slipped surruptitiously onto the schedule with not so much as a supporting web page. Luckily, the programme is available as a realaudio archive for a week after each show has been aired (Tuesdays, 11am GMT).

A particular focus is the possible biological bases of personality, particularly with reference to the so-called 'big five' personality traits, that have come to dominate personality research.

BBC, if you're listening, any chance of some supporting information on the web ? It seems too good a series to be lost among the schedule.

Link to realaudio archive of latest edition of Two's a Crowd.

—Vaughan.

March 15, 2005

Fighting for mental space:

Adbusters activist Kalle Lasn is interviewed on another fascinating editon of ABC Radio National's All in the Mind, arguing that we should try and reclaim the 'mental space' increasingly occupied by brands, advertisements and slogans.

Lasn argues that our increasingly information rich society is causing psychological interference and inhibiting creative thought, while media manipulation is crushing diversity and eroding our ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.

Furthermore, he links this tendency with the level of mental illness and distress that is so prevalent in the Western world, and argues that we could be witnessing 'the mental breakdown of nations'.

Even if you don't agree with his views, Lasn has identified a neglected area that will undoubtedly become more important as media becomes all pervasive, and is well worth listening to.

Link to realudio archive of programme.
Link to transcript.

—Vaughan.

March 14, 2005

Brain injury: how much do you know ?:

Today marks the start of Brain and Brain Injury Awareness week, an event to alert people to the exciting developments in the world of neuroscience and pass on some potentially life saving information.

Brain Awareness Week is an international event, so there may be events near you.

A great deal of our knowledge of how the brain works has been worked out from studying people who have suffered brain damage. This field of research is known as cognitive neuropsychology, and is greatly indebted to people who generously give their time, often after suffering disabling injuries.

In the UK, an estimated 1 million people in Britain attend hospital each year as a result of a head injury, and the figures for other parts of the world can be equally as high.

People or their families who suffer the effects often rely on charities for ongoing support and rehabilitation. So if you feel like making a difference, this week would be perfect to choose a favourite brain charity to donate to.

Although you could also help out by printing out leaflets or information, or perhaps passing on a link to a brain injury website to someone you know.

It's a great way of saying thankyou to people who have volunteered their time after brain injury, and the information may even save someone's life.

Link to brain injury information from the BBC.
Link to Brain Awareness Week information from the Dana Foundation.

—Vaughan.

March 13, 2005

The science of brainwashing:

In the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the fictional company Lacuna Inc. offers to alter the mind by erasing painful memories.

A new book on 'brainwashing' by neurobiologist Kathleen Taylor questions whether such technology is likely to exist by looking at the history of such claims and the science of 'thought control'.

Taylor recently appeared on ABC Radio National's In Conversation to discuss her book and issues including the origins of brainwashing in the Korean War, cults, advertising, neuroscience and free will.

Link to realaudio archive of radio show.
Link to review of the book from The Times.

—Vaughan.

March 12, 2005

The psychology and neuroscience of gifted children:

The Boston Globe has an excellent article about the psychology of gifted children and how many of them have fared in adult life. It describes the difficulties some have in adjusting, and the importance of maintaining traditonal childhood activities.

Consider the contrasting fates of two prodigies from the early 20th century. Norbert Wiener entered Tufts University in 1906 at age 11 and went on to graduate studies at Harvard in 1909. That same year, a brilliant 11-year-old named William James Sidis also enrolled at Harvard. Wiener became the father of cybernetics. Sidis became a recluse who collected streetcar transfers. He died alone and disillusioned at the age of 46.

On a related note, neuropsychologist Brian Butterworth has studied brain activity in a 'mathematical prodigy', and found that compared to others, he used different brain areas to perform calculations.

Link to Boston Globe article (via Metafilter).
Link to paper (PDF) on Butterworth's study of brain activity in a mathematical prodigy.

—Vaughan.

March 11, 2005

Through the k-hole:

What do squat parties in Brixton, vetinarians in Buckinghamshire, and cereals in Budgens have in common?* The answer, of course, is Special K.**

Ketamine is a tranquillising agent that was widely used until patients began to complain of its hallucinogenic effects, which they experienced when coming out of sedation. Not too fun. Except, of course, for those who take it for pleasure - of whom, according to ongoing research by Mixmag magazine and the Institute of Psychiatry, there have been more than a fourfold increase between 1999 and 2003. Apart from this population, the drug is still administered as a tranquilliser for animals, and also young children for whom the trippy effects don't seem to occur. Notably, after Putin banned the drug in Russia in 2003, Bridget Bardot campaigned for a reversal, on the basis that it would result in more suffering for animals; whether the implications for children were weighed is not on record, but in any case Russia reversed the ban in '04. Notably, the drug is not illegal in the EU, and whilst a controlled substance is low down in priority, at least in the eyes of the law. But if you're an ocassional taker, or curious about it, I suggest you read further, to get the skinny on the cognitive neuropsychopharmacology of ketamine.

My friend and colleague Celia Morgan has been doing her PhD on the cognitive effects of ketamine with Val Curran at UCL; Prof Curran gave a presentation about this last month; again, some findings described below may not yet be published.

To give the basic neurochemistry, ketamine is an nMDA antagonist - this means it acts on a specific type of neural receptor in the brain, the nMDA receptor, found throughout the brain but particularly in the cortex, and it act by suppressing its normal activity (whilst an agonist would boost it). This leads to an excessive release of the neurotransmitter glutamate. This lays a case for a possible harmful effect of ketamine: nMDA antagonists have been shown to disrupt long-term potentiation (the neural mechanism by which learning takes place in the brain). And the receptors are particularly heavily distributed in memory-critical areas such as the hippocampus and surrounding areas, which means adverse effects are likely to impact on memory.

Moreover, clinical reports document that being on ketamine produces symptoms very similar to those seen in schizophrenia. The similarities have been so striking as to contribute to a shift away from purely dopaminergic models of schizophrenia to nMDA hypofunction models, which suggest that glutamate as well as dopamine are responsible for the abnormal function of the schizotypic brain. (see e.g. Olney and Farber 1997).

Morgan and Curran have been investigating this using cognitive and neuropsychological testing, alongside clinical-style inventories of schizotypic symptoms and thoughts. One aspect of their research uses healthy people, dosed up with ketamine. Relative to doses of placebo, ketamine-addled subjects were impaired across a variety of tasks - short-term memory, attention, and problem solving. They also gave higher ratings when asked to score a number of schizophrenic-type experiences, such as such as 'The world does not feel real to me'.

Anyone investigating specific populations (like patients, drug users or people with developmental disorders), rather than imposing different conditions on a generic population, will tell you nightmares of exclusion criteria, control group selection and so on. The difficulty with ketamine users is that they invariably take a lot more than ketamine - cocaine, weed, ecstacy and even more obscure drugs. Their solution was to accept poly-drug users in the ketamine group - and to match with a control group of poly-drug users, who had never done ketamine. In effect, this is a subtraction technique, similar to the kind that underlies many imaging studies (activation difference between complex and baseline tasks shows you the activation due to the processes unique to the complex task), and underlies much of the presuppositions of cognitive neuropsychology.

Compared to this control group, ketamine users were poorer on days following their drug intake, and still poorer three days afterward. As ketamine has a very short half-life, it seems fair evidence that this may represent neural degeneration (already established in laboratory work - Olney et al 1998), rather than active effects of the drug. (To make sure of this, they also compared subjects from their non-chronic use experiment after three days, and the placebo and ketamine group were not performing at different levels.) Their poorer performance was shown on tests of source memory, story recall, verbal fluency (being able to list words of a specific criteria rapidly) and speed of semantic processing (what things mean). They also, needless to say, showed higher ratings of schizotypic type symptoms. A follow-up study on a sample of former chronic users is also a window into how enduring these effects are; changes in certain measures were heavily correlated with changes in ketamine intake, but many others, including the schizotypic symptoms, continued to persevere. What is perhaps the most ominous of the findings is the apparent irreversability of the impairment produced in episodic memory (personal memories of events and instances), and possibly also attention.

Abstract of paper on healthy individuals link
Abstract of longitudinal paper in Addiction link
Drugscope Briefing paper, with some details of legal status, vulnerable groups, and usage rates link
Some older stories from the bbc on ketamine - link & link - clearly cocaine is far more newsworthy than club drugs these days...

*Non-UK readers, insert your own amusing locations (to wit: lively if rough urban area; rural dull spot; corner-store-cum-supermarket). Once you have done this, laugh appreciatively, and wonder at the marvel of international collaboration. Truly, is there nothing we cannot do?

** I hasten to add that Special K the cereal is not in any way hallucinogenic, unless you can hallucinate from eating damn fine flakes. Of maize!

—Alex.

2005-03-11 Spike activity:

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

More articles on the neuropsychology of religious experience (from The Times) and synaesthesia (from Wired).

Laughter, it seems, is good for the heart.

New Scientist article on a new breed of lie-detector that measures blood flow in the face. "You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of a sudden..."

Brain implants tested as a method to help treat severe depression.

A brain imaging study show how tunes may get 'stuck in your head'.

Extrapolation of brain volume from the skull of homo florensis suggest that they are not humans with microencephaly, as some critics claim.

A brain scanning study with autistic children shows eye contact may activate areas associated with negative emotion.

—Vaughan.

March 10, 2005

Inner space in outer space:

A recent article from 'Inside Bay Area' discusses the work of psychiatrist Nick Kanas and his team, who study the minds of astronauts.

Kanas heads up the Human Interactions in Space project, that studies the psychology of space travel, both to improve mission efficiency and maintain mental health during its completion.

The research team uses a number of techniques. One method is to use simulated missions, where participants are required to live in confined spaces or conduct procedures while being observed. Another is research on astronauts during 'live' missions.

Link to article from Inside Bay Area.
Link to brief summary of book 'Space Psychology and Psychiatry'.

—Vaughan.

March 09, 2005

The taste of musical notes:

A paper published in recent issue of the scientific journal Nature, describes a case of a woman who has the synaesthetic experience of tasting sounds and seeing them as specific colours.

She is a professional musician and uses her unique gift to pick out specific notes and tone intervals. Her abilities were tested by asking her to identity specific tone intervals while tasting sour, bitter, salty or sweet solutions.

When compared to other musicians, she found it more difficult when the taste of the solution differed to the taste usually produced by the tone interval, than when they matched.

Link to study summary from nature.com.
Link to writeup from wired.com

—Vaughan.

March 08, 2005

How would clones think ?:

In Michael Marshall Smith's novel Spares, a disaffected cop decides to free human clones, kept for their body parts.

Although fiction, Smith's book presents an interesting thought experiment and brings some salient questions to mind. For example, what would be the psychological effect of discovering that you had been cloned, or actually were a clone ?

With the science and ethics of cloning being debated widely in the media, ABC Radio National's All in the Mind programme recruits a psychiatrist, a geneticist and an expert on ethics to discuss the possibilities.

Link to programme transcript.
Link to realaudio archive of radio programme.

—Vaughan.

March 07, 2005

National Geographic on the Mind:

The latest issue of the National Geographic magazine is a special issue on the mind.

It contains a compelling account of open brain surgery, where, as is usual, the patient is conscious and given tests during the operation to make sure removed sections are not crucial for language.

The other articles cover a variety of important developments in mind and brain science, including the neuropsychology of spiritual experience, emotion and navigation, plus some remarkable photographs.

Two of my particular favourites are articles on an exceptional autistic boy (mentioned in an earlier post by Tom) and a neurologist with hypergraphia - the incessant need to write.

There's some excerpts and video footage freely available online, but the best content seems to be in the magazine only.

—Vaughan.

March 05, 2005

Cognitive Daily:

The world of psychology blogging gets bigger and bigger - or at least my knowledge of it does. Welcome Cognitive Daily - 'a new cognitive psychology article nearly every day', and that has to be a good thing

—tom.

March 04, 2005

2005-03-04 Spike activity:

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Judges are likely to rate people who perform last in a competition more highly, regardless of their ability.

Boston authorities are investigating an ex-stripper to see if she has been pretending to be a psychologist.

An excellent article on the burgeoning field of 'neurotheology' - V.S. Ramachandran's experiments on religion and temporal lobe epilepsy suggests they people with the condition may react more strongly to religious concepts.

Members of Mensa are to be DNA tested to study the link between high intelligence and dementia.

Article on Harvard psychologists' studies of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.

—Vaughan.

Mind Hacks at Foyles, March 23rd:

When I was a kid, I remember making a trip to London and visiting Foyles bookshop for the first time. In the days before book superstores, Foyles was unimaginably vast, and dense, and amazing. That was a special day. Years later, there aren't books piled everywhere, the maze of shelves and rooms has been untangled, and it's been updated: you no longer have to get a little green ticket from an attendant before paying. It's still got its charm, one of the best (and biggest) book selections in London, and my favourite cafe in the centre--one of the few cafes to have free wifi, good coffee, heavy wooden tables, and jazz.

What I'm coming round to is that Tom and I will be speaking about Mind Hacks at Foyles on Wednesday, March 23rd, and it's enormously exciting to be talking in a place with such history. If you're in London, you should come along (it's at 6.30pm, after work, in the Gallery on the 2nd floor). It'll be great fun--we're going to show off some of our favourite hacks, talk about what we learn from them, and try some [gulp] audience participation in the experiments too.

More info on the Foyles site (you'll need to get a ticket), and the publicity blurb's below. Do come, and spread the word!

Let's try something else too: If you use Outlook, click to add Mind Hacks at Foyles to your calendar. If you use Apple iCal, click here to add the event.

Release follows...

Mind Hacks at Foyles:

Ever wondered why people have their "special mug" for the morning cuppa? It's all to do with training and the reward of caffeine. And would you like to know how to cheer yourself up by manhandling your face, or why faded jeans do wonders for your legs, or that each of us is blind for 90 minutes a day? The answers to these can be found in cognitive neuroscience, and at "Mind Hacks at Foyles."

"Mind Hacks," the book, requires no specialist knowledge and takes you on a tour through 100 facets of the machinery of our brain, from psychology tricks known centuries to the latest high-technology research. Using experiments and unusual demos (we call them "hacks") we examine vision, motor skills, memory and how we make decisions--the brain's moment-by-moment workings that make up everyday life.

In "Mind Hacks at Foyles," Tom Stafford & Matt Webb demonstrate (live!) happiness, jeans and optical tricks to see how the brain responds, and in the process learn a little bit more about how this fearsomely complex organ works.

No previous neuroscience experience necessary! Please bring a pen - and your brain - if you'd like to play along.

—Matt.

March 03, 2005

Quirks and Quarks:

This saturday, Mind Hacks goes audio - you can hear an interview I did yesterday with a Canadian radio show, CBC's Quirks and Quarks ("the show that defi[n]es science"!). It's broadcast on Saturdays on CBC Radio One from 12:06 - 1pm.

You can hear me discussing the book and going through a few of the hacks. For those of you who have read the book I can't promise a lot of added value - but hopefully I was pretty coherant, and definitely excited, and it might be a good introduction to anyone thinking of getting the book. (it was also loads of fun to do, thanks guys!)

I think you'll be able to hear the interview over the internet as it happens, but they will also certainly put it up as an MP3 afterwards. While you're at the site, you can browse the show's eight year backlog of audio files, which is a pretty impressive corpus of science broadcasting.

The blurb from the Q&Q site:

Mind Hacks: Tips and Tricks for Using your Brain.

Did you know that you go blind every time you move your eyes? And that what you're seeing affects what you're hearing? And that you can get stronger just by thinking about it? Well, it's all strange but true, according to a neuroscientist who's just written a new book containing 100 Tips and Tricks for using your brain. It's a catalogue of illusions and experiments that show just how powerful, and how peculiar, the human brain really is - and you can try them all at home.

—tom.

Simulating seizures:

Engineers from UC Berkley have created a mathematical model of the brain as it undergoes an epileptic seizure, and matched it with recordings taken from electrodes implanted into the brain of a person with epilepsy.

Epilepsy is often described as a 'storm' of electrical signals, suggesting lots of random and chaotic brain activity, but in fact, quite the opposite occurs - groups of neurons suddenly become inappropriately synchonised.

This can be seen from the image on the right - a graph of brain recordings taken from a person having a seizure. These were recorded from electrodes safely implanted into the brain by the UC Berkley team.

Instead of supporting their normal functions these neurons work in time with nearby neurons, that usually have a completely different role in the brain.

This can lead to loss of consciousness and limb shaking commonly associated with epilepsy. The rhythm of the muscle jerks are often dictated by the rhythm of the synchronised neurons.

Sometimes people just have absences, where they can lose consciousness for a few seconds with no other noticable effects. The person who has the seizure may not even know this is happening.

With some types of seizure, people may remain conscious, but have unusual sensations, feelings of deja vu, or perhaps just peculiar thoughts and mental images.

The effects of epilepsy vary greatly with the parts of the brain involved and from person to person.

The newly created mathematical model will allow researchers to create computer simulations of epilepsy, allowing theories to be tested out and 'virtual experiments' to take place.

Learn how to deal with epileptic seizures.

Link to item from UC Berkley News.
Link to story from sciencedaily.com.

—Vaughan.

March 02, 2005

Gay men and maps:

Gay men seem to read maps in a similar way to women. Although this seems like an insigificant finding, it may help uncover some of the neural functions that are related to sexual preference, as these abilities are known to involve specific areas of the brain.

In fact, this isn't the first study to find a similarities between gay men and women in spatial abilities. Result published in 2003 showed that both women and gay men performed better on a memory test for locations than straight men.

These sorts of abilities are known to rely heavily on area of the brain known as the hippocampus and differences in these abilities are likely to reflect differences in how these brain structures process information.

What is not clear however, is how much these differences can account for individual sexual behaviour. This is because sexual behaviour can be motivated by a wide range of different desires and motivations, all of which may be supported by complex network of brain structures. Few of these are currently known about or understood.

Link to story from New Scientist.
Link to story from The Telegraph.

—Vaughan.

March 01, 2005

Sharks, scary music and the temporal lobes:

The film starts. It's a calm day at sea and there's nothing for miles around except for a lone fisherman, relaxing and hoping for a catch. Deep below the water, something stirs. Urgent music starts, your adrenaline starts pumping and you know something terrible is about to occur. Your heart is racing, and according to recent research, so are your temporal lobes.

Neuropsychologist Nathalie Gosselin and her colleagues have been studying the brain's response to scary music, and has recently published an intriguing study on a series of patients who have had parts of their temporal lobes and amygdala surgically removed, to treat otherwise untreatable epilepsy.

Gosselin's team played the patients various pieces of music and found that although they could recognise peaceful, happy and sad music, their perception of scary music was impaired.

This wasn't a problem with sensory monitoring of the music, as the patients performed normally when asked to detect subtle timing errors which had been implanted into some of the pieces.

It has been known for a while that the amygdala (which are located in the inner temporal lobes) are involved in the perception of emotion in other people's faces, and this study shows that these areas may be essential in understanding fearful emotions in music, and perhaps other abstract aspects of the world.

Link to study summary.

—Vaughan.