October 31, 2005
Essential sites for students:
As the new academic year is in full flow, students might find themselves with a raft of information and little to paddle with.
Mind Hacks has collected a list of favourite internet resources for mind and brain sciences students to help with getting yourselves ashore.
News, views and scientific developments
The mind and brain sciences are among the fastest moving areas in terms of research and discovery. Getting to grips with the area can sometimes seem daunting, partly because of the academic language, or just due to the sheer volume of information that needs navigating.
The following are some of our favourite sites that condense or communicate the essentials in a more accessible manner:
100 most influential cognitive science publications of the 20th century.
A panel from the Center for Cognitive Sciences at the University of Minnesota voted for the 100 most influential works in cognitive science. Each is listed with a comment as to why it is important.
Classics in the history of psychology
A full-text collection of some of the most influential works in the development of psychology.
Metapsychology reviews
A psychology, neuroscience and mental health book review site. Updated monthly with 10-20 new book reviews.
MIT Courseware 'Brain and Cognitive Sciences'
MIT put all the documentation for their academic courses online. This is their mind and brain collection.
BrainBlog
A great site that constantly finds brain-related curios from the medical literature.
Your amazing brain...
Neuroscience, explained as it should be. A fantastic site that includes interactive demos, tests and experiments.
BPS Research Digest
The British Psychological Society release a jargon free fortnightly summary of interesting or eye-catching research. Available on the web or as an email digest.
Cognitive Daily
Scientific papers on cognitive psychology explained in an engaging and relevant way. A great resource for keeping up with the latest and understanding how cognitive psychology is done.
Update: Christian has further suggested the British Psychological Society magazine The Psychologist. All issues older than 6 months are completely free and the forum has a section where students can post questions about psychology or advertise their availability for work experience etc. Christian is not an entirely disinterested party as he does work for the magazine, but as I don't, and regularly use it myself, I'd certainly recommend checking it out.
The practice of practical psychology
As well as keeping up with other people's research, you're likely to getting to grips with some of your own. Research, experimental design and data analysis are often the most challenging parts of the course for new students. These sites might help with that challenge.
Experiments in Psychology
Free software that allows you to take part in some of psychology's classic experiments as a way of learning about experimental design and analysis. Windows only unfortunately, but an interesting package nonetheless.
Research Methods in the Social Sciences: An Internet Resource List
Put together by the University of Miami, this page has a host of links to everything from pages about doing research on the internet, to tips on designing questionnaires.
'Research Companion' discussion board
Currently a hidden gem, psychologist and research expert Petra Boynton runs a message board for discussing research, asking questions and swapping tips. As well as covering the usual topics of study design and data analysis, it also covers issues such as ethics, researcher safety and participant wellbeing. Its focus is on postgraduate research, but undergraduate students might also find it useful. More details here
Know of any other useful sites for students?
Feel free to paste the web address as a comment to this page.
[Thanks to Christian for many of the suggestions here]
—Vaughan.
October 30, 2005
The 'aboutness' of thought...:
- You know, Ollie, I was just thinking.
- About what?
- Nothing. I was just thinking.
Laurel and Hardy accidentally struggle with the problem of intentionality in the 1943 film Jitterbugs.
—Vaughan.
October 28, 2005
2005-10-28 Spike activity:
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Interactive websites can significantly help people with chronic illness (via Slashdot)
"Your brain's sex can make you ill" says clumsy BBC headline, hiding a story about tailoring treatments by sex.
Chronic nicotine and alcohol consumption seem to have a 'double whammy' on mental function.
Cool visual illusions that change on distance of viewing (via BoingBoing).
Email users and victorian letter writers share similarities in frequency of replying.
People with schizophrenia not fooled by certain optical illusions.
Wired features a story by a deaf man as he gets a cochlear implant to restore his hearing.
Cognitive Daily discuss research on why experts have better memory for their field of expertise.
—Vaughan.
October 27, 2005
The addicted brain:
Does an alcoholic have a disordered brain or a flawed character? The latest issue of Nature Neuroscience contains a special focus supplement on addiction that is freely available online for the next three months.
The Focus contains the latest reviews and commentaries on the neuroscience of addiction, including discussion of the changes caused by drugs to brain circuits and synapses; the cortical and sub-cortical brain areas that mediate the reinforcing effect of drugs; how drugs affect people’s decision making, tipping the balance in their consideration of immediate rewards weighed against future costs; the genetic influences on personality traits that predispose people to addiction; as well as consideration of the social stigma of addiction and the difficulties of developing effective treatments.
Link to Focus table of contents (all free until Jan' 06)
—christian.
NewSci on creativity:
Today's New Scientist is a special edition on creativity, tackling the subject from a number of angles.
Unfortunately, very little of it seems to be available online, so it might require a trip to the library or newsagents.
If you do get hold of a copy, however, you'll find articles on the psychology and neuroscience of creativity, as well as tips from artists, scientists and researchers to increase your own creative output.
If you're not able to get a copy, you may want to look at a couple of articles online from past issues of The Psychologist that discuss 'Computer models of creativity' (PDF) and 'Creativity and innovation at work' (PDF).
Link to New Scientist.
PDF of article 'Computer models of creativity'.
PDF of article 'Creativity and innovation at work'.
—Vaughan.
Criminal and forensic psychology on the web:
CrimePsychBlog has been keeping my attention over recent weeks as it keeps tabs on the world of forensic and criminal psychology.
It's regularly updated with developments from the world of forensic cognitive science, and with snippets from the mainstream news that has a criminal psychology angle.
Recent posts include an account of false memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus taking the stand in a recent murder trial, the controversy over whether hypnosis can improve witnesses' memory and a pointer to an article on 'What makes terrorists tick?'.
Link to CrimePsychBlog.
—Vaughan.
October 26, 2005
Perceptual distortions are common in population:
Researchers from Cardiff University report that anomalies of sensation and perception are common in the general population, with more than 1 in 10 reporting higher levels than the average of patients diagnosed with psychosis.
The research project was inspired by a need for a comprehensive measure of anomalous sensory experience and perceptual distortion, as the majority of existing measures are derived from psychiatric assessment techniques.
Consequently, they often focus on specific forms of perceptual distortion, such as 'visions' or 'voices', and do not always cover other types of anomalous experience.
To tackle this problem the researchers designed, tested and validated, a new measure of anomalous perceptual experience that specifically uses non-clinical language to ask about a wide range of phenomena, including unusual touch sensations, changes in time perception and being unable to distinguish one sensation from another.
Sensory distortions are traditionally associated with mental or neurological illness, although recent work is now suggesting that unusual experiences are distributed throughout the population (this is known as the 'continuum model of psychosis').
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when patients with psychosis completed the measure high levels of unusual experience were reported.
It is not clear, however, why some people with high levels of unusual experiences become distressed and impaired by their experiences, often leading to a diagnosis of mental illness, while others are able to function and remain untroubled by them.
One possibility is that there might be different sources for different types of unusual experience. When the types of experiences reported by healthy individuals in the study were analysed for how they clustered together, three themes emerged.
One cluster was associated with relatively benign smell and taste experiences, another with experiences potentially related to temporal lobe disturbance and another with experiences traditionally linked to psychosis.
This suggests that the distribution of perceptual distortions found in the population may be driven by a number of underlying processes, all which might contribute to producing strange experiences in the individual.
The research is published as an open-access paper in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin.
Disclaimer: This paper is from my own research group.
—Vaughan.
October 25, 2005
Possible explanation for premenstrual moodiness:
New Scientist is reporting that the 'moodiness' experienced by some women during the premenstrual phase of the menstrual cycle may be linked to the function of the orbitofrontal cortex.
The oribitofrontal cortex (OFC), the part of the brain that lies just above the eyes, is known to be involved in emotional regulation.
The research, led by (the wonderfully named) Xenia Protopopescu from Cornell University, brain-scanned 12 women who did not experience mood changes during their menstrual cycle.
They found that an area in the OFC increased in activity when participants reacted to emotionally-laden words during an experimental task when in their premenstrual phase.
Crucially, there was less recorded activity for the same task when it was completed during the post-menstrual phase, suggesting emotional regulation was most needed during the earlier, premenstrual period, to maintain a steady mood.
The researchers have suggested that women who experience fluxations in mood during their cycle may not have such effective emotional regulation, although the exact mechanism of how the hormonal changes affect the function of the brain is still unclear.
The complexity of the issue is highlighted by the finding that other, more dispersed areas of the OFC, showed the opposite pattern of activity during the same experiment.
Link to New Scientist article.
Link to abstract of academic paper.
—Vaughan.
October 24, 2005
Childhood trauma and schizophrenia:
Continuing the schizophrenia theme - the latest issue of the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica is a special edition on the link between childhood trauma and schizophrenia.
The new findings support the argument for a bio-psycho-social approach to psychosis and come in the wake of a recent article in Psychiatric News, published by the American Psychiatric Association, about the overmedicalisation of psychiatry, and an article in the October issue of The Psychologist, published here in the UK, subtitled 'what happened to the 'psycho' and 'social' in explanations of mental illness?'.
If you don't have access to the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, Oliver James wrote an essay in Saturday's Guardian on the new findings and their implications for the treatment of schizophrenia. For example, he says that a review of 13 studies found that between 51 to 97 per cent (depending on the study) of people diagnosed with schizophrenia had previously suffered sexual or physical abuse. His essay says the new findings will shake the intellectual foundations of the psychiatric establishment like an earthquake.
Update:A report on one of the papers from this special issue of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica now appears on the BPS Research Digest here
—christian.
Schizophrenia featured article on Wikipedia:
Schizophrenia is today's featured article on wikipedia and already activity has hit fever pitch.
It's an article I've been quite heavily involved with over the last few years, and it has proved as much a project in diplomacy and fire fighting as it has in understanding the science and history of this complex diagnosis.
There are many contrasting (and at times conficting) views of schizophrenia and trying to balance all of these approaches to produce a rounded article has been an ongoing mission for the various regular editors of the article.
The article discussion page is full of some of the more memorable and ill-informed additions, including "Medication skipping schizos murder people everywhere" and someone threatening to contact CNN if their edits weren't included.
Since it has been posted to the front page it has been the subject of both incisive and clarifying edits, as well as vandalism and unfounded sloganism.
Isn't the internet great ? :/
Link to wikipedia entry on Schizophrenia.
—Vaughan.
Dreams made real:
Artist Jesse Reklaw takes people's descriptions of their dreams and turns them into beautifully pencilled four panel comic strips on her website SlowWave.com.
Interesting, Jesse also asks for a physical description of the person submitting the dream, so she can include their likeness into the story.
The archives are wonderfully offbeat and suitably surreal.
My favourites include a dream about going to a bar to hire drunken body parts and one about finding the subway full of penguins. A new dream is uploaded every week.
Link to SlowWave.com
—Vaughan.
October 21, 2005
2005-10-21 Spike activity:
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
New York Times on 'Life Hackers' researching the interaction between humans and computers.
Neuroscientist Mike Merzenich interviewed on whether new technology is making us more intelligent or less.
Children born prematurely are to be studied to see how their brains adapt to damage.
Great article by Carl Zimmer on the new paper in the controversy over whether the 'hobbit' is a new species of human or person with microcephaly.
More on Clancy's psychological research on self-confessed alien abductees.
BBC Radio 4 science programme Material Word on the development of music and language.
Mapping of immigation patterns in US show family, not economic reasons, are strongest influence.
Implant for deaf and hearing-impaired designed to boost music appreciation.
Vastly oversimplified neuroscience used to sell dating service.
—Vaughan.
October 20, 2005
Sociology focus for 'Thinking Allowed':
BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed seems to have changed its focus and now concentrates on sociology.
Previously, it billed itself as "weekly discussion on topical issues of academic concern" but now seems to be advertised as discussing the "latest social science research".
In this series it has covered topics ranging from the social influence of the pharmaceutical industry to the role of sociology in public life.
The BBC's biography for the presenter, Laurie Taylor, also makes interesting reading. As well as being a Professor of Sociology, Taylor has previously been a teacher, actor and librarian.
Link to Thinking Allowed website and realaudio archives.
—Vaughan.
October 19, 2005
High strength magnetic pulses alter touch sense:
Open-access science journal PLoS Biology reports that high strength magnetic pulses, targetted at a specific area of the brain, can make areas of the body more sensitive to touch.
The use of focused magnetic pulses to stimulate the brain, a technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS, is now becoming commonplace in neuroscience research.
It allows researchers to slightly alter the function of a brain area using a hand held magnetic coil. The resulting changes can hopefully be detectable using behavioural or psychological measures.
Like most neuroscience studies, research projects using this technique start by wondering whether a particular brain area is necessary for a particular type of mental activity or behaviour.
Unlike other techniques, such as brain scanning - that typically only find correlates of thought or behaviour - TMS allows researchers to make causal inferences. In other words, they can judge whether the area they are targetting is involved in causing the thought or action to occur.
Traditionally, TMS is used in research to safely inhibit or disrupt function in a brain area for a short period of time. More recently, it has been found that TMS (particularly when given in 'trains' or repetitive bursts) can be reliably used to increase activation in brain areas, over longer time periods.
The PloS Biology study targetted an area of the brain involved in somatosensory functions (mainly touch and body image) and found that they could increase skin sensitivity on the finger, when they aimed for the brain area that holds the 'finger map'.
Link to PLoS Biology summary.
Link to story from nature.com.
Link to PLoS Biology full text paper.
—Vaughan.
October 18, 2005
Missing in action:
What's happened to PsyBlog and Mixing Memory? Two of my favourite cognitive science blogs have gone mysteriously quiet.
Answers on a Zener card please...
—Vaughan.
Brain scans, mental illness and false promises:
The New York Times has an insightful article on the utility of brain scans for helping and treating people with mental illness.
Mental illness is diagnosed on the basis of a clinical interview, where the clinician interviews the patient and encourages them to explain aspects of their first-person experience.
This means that the criteria for diagnosis, although internationally agreed upon, are subjective - in that it is the clinician who decides whether they are present or not.
For example, the DSM criteria for clinical depression include items such as depressed mood, loss of pleasure, feelings of guilt and low self-esteem. None of these can be measured objectively.
When brain scans arrived, particularly those that measured brain function, it was hoped that there would finally be an objective test for many mental disorders based on the biology of the brain.
There has been some success in finding biological differences between the brains of healthy and diagnosed individuals. The problem is that these differences are not reliably diagnostic.
For example, when a group of people with depression and without depression are compared, reliable differences in brain function can be found. However, this only reflects the fact that individuals with the diagnosis are more likely to show the difference, but there are also individuals with the diagnosis who do not have the same differences.
This also ignores the fact that the diagnosis and definition of mental illness are often culturally influenced. The fact that homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association until 1973 is a notorious example.
Another complication is that there is often an element of subjective decision making in analysing brain scans - to produce the familiar 'brain images' we are used to seeing.
The media often miss many of these subtleties, portraying brain scans as more impressive than many scientists give them credit for.
The New York Times article, therefore, does an admirable job of tackling some of these issues and outlining the promises and pitfalls of the neuroscience of mental disorder.
This comes at a time when psychiatry is looking beyond the current diagnostic manuals as the sole definition of mental disorder, and considering the concept of the 'endophenotype' - measurable aspects of biology thought to be the key underlying components that increase risk for mental disorder.
Link to New York Times article 'Can Brain Scans See Depression?.
Link to academic paper on the 'endophenotype' concept.
—Vaughan.
October 17, 2005
Thinking about thoughts:
Is yours a box or a Swiss army knife? Last Saturday’s Guardian carried an essay by Charles Fernyhough comparing the use of mind metaphors by psychologists and novelists.
In fiction, the mind is often conceived as a container, be it an aviary confining the wildlife of human cognition, as in Plato’s Theaetetus, or the ante-rooms and winding passages of a character’s mind in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But, Fernyhough writes, the mind as container metaphor fails to account for the idea of inaccessible procedural knowledge, such as the ability to ride a bike, or to capture the dynamic, flowing nature of thought. By implying a fixed boundary between what is in mind and what is not, the container metaphor also fails to encapsulate the idea of embodied cognition “which sees mental processes as shaped by the mutual interactions of mind, body and world” Fernyhough says.
Fernyhough suggests the mind as container metaphor continues to appeal despite its failings because “it fits with our cherished beliefs about the primacy of the unitary, indivisible self”, in contrast with cognitive psychology’s conception of the mind as a “Swiss army knife bristling with separate information-processing modules”.
Novelists have, however, adopted cognitive psychology’s metaphor of the mind as a machine. Fernyhough gives the example of a passage from Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore: “I crunch along the gravel, the mercury light beating down on me, and try to get my brain in gear. Throw the switch, turn the handle, get the old thought processes up and running. But it doesn’t work – not enough juice in the battery to get the engine to turn over”.
Fernyhough ends by suggesting that imperfect metaphors are better than none. The tendency for contemporary novelists to write in the first-person allows them to convey thoughts as they would speech “rather than getting to grips with its dynamics and complex simultaneities” he says, before concluding: “When thought becomes no more than unspoken speech, fiction’s gleaming reputation as a mirror of human consciousness will inevitably begin to tarnish”.
Link to full Guardian essay
Link to online databank of mind metaphors
—christian.
Confabulation:
Mind Hacks radio favourite All in the Mind has an edition on confabulation, the brain injury-related condition where patients produce sometimes bizarre false memories.
Although patients obviously report untruths when asked a question, confabulation is not considered lying, as patients do not seem to be deliberately deceiving the listener.
Some confabulations are fairly mundane. For example, I met one paralysed patient who explained that he spent the morning walking in the park when asked how his day had been.
Others can be quite fantastical. Another gentleman claimed he had received 'splinters' in the head from a machine gun malfunction when fighting aliens.
It is thought that confabulation occurs because the areas of the brain involved in controlling recollection and evaluating the resulting memories (particularly the the frontal lobes) are damaged.
Confabulations are thought to be different from delusions, as they are usually not fixed, with some patients reporting different things when asked the same question again.
The study of confabulation is also interesting because it inspired one of the only neuropsychological studies to use a qualitative approach (i.e. not converting behaviour into numeric measurements).
Neuropsychologists Paul Burgess and Tim Shallice asked friends to recall life events, such as a recent holiday, and examined transcripts of their discussions to see how people verified their memories (e.g. "It must have been in June, because it was just after my brother's birthday...").
From this they generated a model of normal memory verification and proposed how it could break down after brain injury.
All in the Mind discusses this intriguing condition, with the recently moved-to-Australia Martha Turner, and London based researcher Katerina Fotopoulou.
mp3 or realaudio of programme.
Link to programme transcript.
Link to short article about confabulation.
—Vaughan.
October 14, 2005
Deafhearing:
In blindsight you lose the conscious experience of vision due to loss of the visual cortex, but you retain the ability to respond to visual information (due to intact subcortical visual processing). You don't think you can see, you have no experience of 'seeing', but you can make rudimentary visually guided behaviours. I've been told that the experience is a lot like being able to make guesses which feel completely uninformed but are startlingly accurate.
Parallel to visual processing, auditory processing is also done subcortically and cortically (replace 'visual cortex' with 'auditory cortex', replace 'superiour colliculus' with 'inferior colliculus'). I'm sure the correspondence isn't exact, but how's this for a prediction: deafhearing - following loss of auditory cortex the conscious experience of sound would be lost, but the ability to make responses based on noises would be retained due to intact subcortical auditory processing.
I haven't trawled the annals of neuropsychology to see if this condition has ever been documented - and I’m not going to just yet since I prefer to sit here and speculate! - but I think it is strong possibility.
(interesting tangent: the link above, and here, draws out the parallel between blindsight and normal 'intuition' where we are required to make choices before all the (sensory) evidence is in)
—tom.
2005-10-14 Spike activity:
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Former wold champion boxer Frank Bruno admits cocaine may have played a part in his earlier mental breakdown.
The LA Times discusses a form of religious obsessiveness called scrupulosity.
A poem by Adrian Mitchell is chosen as the poem that most people would like to see launched into space for any other life forms to potentially read (encounter?).
A forensic lab worker is investigated for stealing human pituitary glands to dope racehorses.
1980's photos from parties at an abandoned psychiatric hospital (via BoingBoing).
China opens an internet addiction clinic.
The brain's language areas become more lateralised with age.
New research shows how HIV affects the brain (I can't find the original scientific paper yet though).
Researchers 'identify' (doesn't say how) influential words in CVs and job applications.
Early life stress can increase risk of memory loss in later life.
A former crack user talks about his addiction.
—Vaughan.
October 13, 2005
The moral brain:
Where and how is human morality processed and represented by the brain? A freely available review by Jorge Moll and colleagues in the latest issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience proposes a new model based on neuroimaging and clinical data – the event-feature-emotion complex framework (EFEC) – that makes specific predictions about the kinds of moral impairment that will follow from damage to different brain regions.
In contrast with earlier models that have advocated the idea of a rational prefrontal cortex suppressing our amoral emotional drives, the EFEC framework posits a more integrative three-way system, whereby the prefrontal cortex stores information about moral values, social interactions and expected outcomes, the emotional limbic system codes for the reward value of our behavioural choices, and the superior temporal sulcus allows us to extract relevant functional and social features from the environment, like a sad face or aggressive gesture.
The review gives the example of localised cognitive processes that would occur in response to the sight of an orphan girl. The prefrontal cortex will predict the kind of life the girl is likely to have, the superior temporal sulcus will detect the sadness in her face and body language, and recognise her helplessness, and the limbic regions will give rise to feelings of sadness, anxiety and attachment. Taken together, “these component representations give rise to a ‘gestalt’ [unified] experience by way of temporal synchronisation”, the authors say.
The framework allows for specific predictions to be made about the behavioural and cognitive consequences of dysfunction to these brain areas, depending on whether such impairment occurs developmentally or is acquired later in life. So, for example, an adult who acquires damage to the posterior superior temporal sulcus would be expected to lose the ability to recognise the socially-relevant aspects of people’s facial expressions and body language, and so their moral behaviour dependent on the detection of these signals would be impaired. But their moral reasoning and understanding of social rules would remain intact and they could say how one ought to behave if questioned about situations verbally. In contrast, early developmental disorders affecting this brain region – autism, perhaps – would actually impair the acquisition of social knowledge and social rules.
Presenting concise summaries of other models (including ‘conflict processing’ accounts; Antonio Damasio’s ‘Somatic Marker Hypothesis’; the ‘social response reversal model’; sociopathy as a failure of theory of mind; the ‘structured-event-complex framework’, and the ‘moral sensitivity hypothesis’), the review argues for the favourable utility of the EFEC framework.
Now the EFEC framework can be used to guide the design of future experiments, the authors say. “Understanding the neural basis of moral cognition will help to shape environmental, psychological and medical intervention aimed at promoting prosocial behaviours and social welfare”, they conclude.
Link to review (free, but requires registration)
—christian.
Genetics of slow wave sleep:
Researchers have identified a gene that seems to be involved in the amount of deep or 'slow wave' sleep a person gets during the night.
Slow wave sleep, typically characterised by EEG readings of less than 5 cycles per second, is thought to be important for allowing the brain to change its structure.
This process of reorganisation is known as 'plasticity' and is thought to be particularly important for the consolidation and filtering of memories.
Led by sleep researcher Julia Rétey, the team from the University of Zurich found that different versions of the gene related to the breakdown of the neurotransmitter adenosine were present in people who differed in their duration of slow wave sleep.
Interestingly, caffeine's sleep fighting properties are thought to be due to the fact that it blocks adenosine receptors, suggesting that the adenosine system may be a crucial piece in understanding how and why we sleep.
Link to article on study from Science website.
Link to study abstract.
Link to excellent Wikipedia article on sleep.
—Vaughan.
October 12, 2005
Online survey aims to prevent missing persons:
Researchers from the University of Sydney are asking anyone who has suffered from anxiety or depression to complete an online survey in a research project that is aiming to understand the role of mood and stress in motivating missing persons.
Nearly 2,000 people go missing in the UK every year, with other countries also having significant numbers of people who seemingly 'disappear'.
It is thought that some people who do become missing may be suffering with problems of anxiety, stress, depression or low mood.
The University of Sydney study is asking people who are currently experiencing such difficulties, or who have experienced them in the past, to complete a short anonymous online questionnaire.
Importantly, you don't have to have actually 'gone missing' yourself, only to have experienced anxiety or depression, although the study asks about the desire to leave your current situation.
The study aims to prevent further occurrences of people going missing through a better understanding of such thoughts and behaviour. It also plans to minimise the suffering of the families of missing people by providing the most appropriate services available.
Link to Missing Persons Study at the University of Sydney.
—Vaughan.
October 11, 2005
"Eyeballs sound like creaking doors":
ABC Radio's Health Report has a programme about Superior Canal Dehiscence Syndrome, a condition that leads to supersensitive hearing. So sensitive, in fact, that whispers can sounds like thunder, and sufferers can hear their own bloodflow and eyeball movements.
The condition is thought to occur due to a crack in the bony casing that surrounds the inner ear.
Normally, sound is channeled from the outside world, through the ear canal to the inner ear. Here lies the cochlea, the organ that translates sound waves to nerve impulses for the brain.
This arrangement efficiently picks up and filters external sound. When the bony casing to the inner ear is damaged, however, the filtering is thought to stop working as efficiently, so sounds 'leak in' from other places - including from the inside of the body.
People with this condition have very sensitive hearing, sometimes leading to pain and discomfort. Occasionally, their strange experiences are mistaken for mental illness, where unusual perceptions can sometimes occur.
A person interviewed for the programme describes her experience as where:
Eyeballs sound like creaking doors, eyelids opening and closing have a scratchy sound, bones and joints creak.
mp3 or realaudio of programme audio.
Link to programme transcript.
—Vaughan.
October 10, 2005
Ask philosophers about the mind:
Ask Philosophers is a site where anyone can pose a question to be answered by some of the leading lights in world philosophy, including specialists in the philosophy of mind.
Scientists are often disappointingly dismissive of philosophy, usually without a good understanding of the breadth and depth of the modern discipline.
Philosophers are increasingly taking the role of 'theoretical scientists' - by understanding the scientific data in great detail and applying the tools of conceptual analysis to make sure current theories are conceptually water tight (or highlighting areas where they are not).
This is particularly important in the cognitive and clinical sciences because many philosophical problems are encountered on a day-to-day basis.
For example, the mind-body problem - that tries to understand the relationship between physical biological processes and thought - comes into stark relief when a clinician encounters a patient with brain injury.
Similarly, the age-old philosophical problems of understanding belief and knowledge become particularly important when the medical community have to define what it is to have a delusion - something that is usually considered a form of 'damaged' belief.
In the Ask Philosophers philosophy of mind section there are already some fantastic questions and answers online.
One person asks if a person who is given medication to make her forget a potentially terrifying surgical experience was ever actually afraid, another asks about whether it is possible to think about the thought you are thinking.
Anyone can pitch a question, so if you have any burning queries, philosophy's finest are waiting for your challenge.
Link to Ask Philosophers Mind section.
—Vaughan.
October 07, 2005
2005-10-07 Spike activity:
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Users are more likely to agree with opinions when they're delivered by a computer generated head that mirrors their movements.
The Times discusses a recent meeting on the 'Science of Happiness and the new focus on 'positive psychology'.
An outbreak of a rare form of the brain infection encephalitis threatens parts of India.
PINs, codes and passwords strain the brain (via BrainBlog).
Scientific American discusses research on what are being increasingly called 'Halle Berry neurons' (see also previously on Mind Hacks).
Clowns help children cope with uncomfortable surgery but annoy Doctors (I love the image of a Clown squirting surgeons with trick flowers during surgery, much to the child's delight).
A symposium on LSD is announced for 2006, on the centenery of its discovery discoverer (via MetaFilter).
Do computer harm children's development? Yes, argues educator Lowell Monke.
—Vaughan.
October 06, 2005
Brains needed!:
The UK Parkinson's Disease Society Tissue Bank is asking people to donate their brains after they die, to aide the fight against Parkinson's disease.
The service, located in London's Imperial College, gets only one donation from someone with a healthy brain compared with 25 donations from people with Parkinson's disease.
Postmortem brains of healthy people are essential so researchers can compare diseased tissue with unaffected tissue and draw valid and accurate conclusions about the condition.
Parkinson's disease is known to occur when dopamine neurons die in the brain's nigrostriatal pathway. It is not clear exactly why this happens, however.
Research that compares the postmortem brains of affected and unaffected people is, therefore, an essential part of understanding why this occurs, hopefully leading to the development of new treatments.
So, if you want to help in this essential research, you can will your brain to the Parkinson's Disease Society Tissue Bank.
Link to UK Parkinson's Disease Society Tissue Bank (Thanks Dr Petra!).
—Vaughan.
October 05, 2005
Scientific American web awards:
Scientific American have given out their 2005 Science & Technology Web Awards and Mind Hacks made the list:
For anyone who ever fell asleep in their own drool while trying to read a neuroscience textbook, welcome to Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford and Matt Webb's riveting companion blog to their book of the same name, which takes a decidedly fun approach to neuroscience. Emphasizing an empirical approach to understanding one's own brain, the site reports on the latest developments in such areas as reasoning, memory, attention and language, plumbing the depths of journals and magazines, obscure Web sites and personal experience. A hearty banquet results: the musings of a man mistaken for a sex bot, an interview with a software developer, and reflections on why we laugh are all on the highly unpredictable and entertaining menu.
It's always great to get awards but it's even better to hear that there's plenty of people out there enjoying what we're doing and finding new angles on the fascinating world of psychology and neuroscience.
Link to Scientific American Science & Technology Web Awards 2005.
—Vaughan.
UK 'Kinsey report' reveals 1950s sex lives:
BBC News describes a suppressed sexual behaviour survey conducted in the 1950s, in the wake of the Kinsey Reports that first described the then shocking truth about the sexual behaviour of American participants.
The British survey followed the Kinsey's studies by only a few years, but reportedly revealed information considered too uncomfortable to publicise and subsequently remained unpublished (although the BBC story doesn't indicate who was responsible for suppressing it).
Findings in the survey included:
One in four men admitted to having had sex with prostitutes, one in five women owned up to an extra-marital affair, while the same proportion of both sexes said they had had a homosexual experience.
The techniques used in the study would be considered vastly unethical by today's standards, and were even dodgy when compared to the research methods used by Kinsey on the other side of the Atlantic.
The research is further discussed in a BBC television programme called Little Kinsey to be shown on BBC Four on Wednesday 5 October, at 2100 BST.
Link to "Britain's secret sex survey".
—Vaughan.
October 04, 2005
Non-invasive neuroprosthetics:
Nature reports that by simply recording the brain's electrical signals from electrodes on the scalp, researchers have enabled trained participants to reliably control computer equipment, a feat normally associated with physical implants in the brain.
This is part of the growing science of neuroprosthetics, that aims to create technology that directly interfaces with the brain.
It is being particularly championed for people with paralysis, who do not have the use of their limbs, or people with damaged sensory organs, who might have their senses improved by technological replacements.
Previous trials of the technology have resulted in electronic implants to replace damaged retinas and a microchip implant that allows a paralysed man to control a computer.
These sorts of technologies typically require complex, experimental and invasive surgery, so being able to control technology via a skull cap and surface electrodes would be a more convenient option.
One of the disadvantages, well known to scientists who use forms of EEG recording to research the brain, is that the skull 'smears' the signal from the brain. Furthermore, muscle activity can introduce large amounts of electricial noise into the recording.
To get round this, mathematical analysis is used to filter out the unwanted interference, usually by averaging over several trials of the same task, allowing underlying brain activity to be inferred.
This is not an exact science, however, meaning the moment-to-moment 'decoding' of electrical activity needed for instant control of technology is more difficult to acheive.
Link to article 'Computer users move themselves with the mind'.
—Vaughan.
October 03, 2005
'Connectome' call for human brain mappers:
An article in open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology reviews current knowledge and calls for a comprehensive map of the brain's connections.
Echoing the aims of the Human Genome Project the authors argue that a detailed 'connectome' is needed to fully understand how different areas of the human brain interconnect.
There is already a good understanding about how some areas of the brain connect, but it is currently not available in a single database, and there are crucial pathways that are not described in sufficient detail.
Having accurate information about the physical layout of the brain would allow a better understanding of the significance of brain activity from neuroimaging studies, and the effects of brain damage on areas not directly affected by the injury.
The paper in PLoS Computational Biology is part of a growing trend to integrate measures of activity (typically attributed to averaged or relatively rough locations in the brain) with detailed anatomical maps.
A recent toolkit released for SPM - a popular brain scan analysis package - allows researchers to judge the probability of activity arising from different areas in the brain, each is which is distinguished by differences in the microscopic structure of the neural tissue.
Link to article 'The Human Connectome: A Structural Description of the Human Brain'.
—Vaughan.
