April 30, 2006

The Architecture of Happiness:

We’re probably going to be seeing a lot of Alain de Botton in the coming months, as he’s out and about promoting his new book ‘The Architecture of Happiness’.

I’m a huge fan of de Botton, whose books such as ‘The Consolations of Philosophy’ have won widespread critical acclaim for making philosophy accessible and relevant to modern life.

But I felt he went off the boil with his last book Status Anxiety and after reading Jonathan Glancey’s review of his new book in The Guardian, I’m worried he may not have found a return to form.

However, I am going to read the new book (partly because I’m researching a feature on the role of psychology in Britain’s current building boom) so if there are any magazine or newspaper editors out there who’d like me to review it, please do get in touch ;-)

Also, while we're discussing de Botton, I should point you to his Times review of Cordelia Fine's book 'A mind of its own', in which he discusses whether the experimental approach to understanding the human psyche - that is, psychology - really is the right one:

"Expecting to study the mysteries of the mind, [psychology] students soon realise that they have set off down a far less glamorous and unusual path, for their field requires them not so much to explore new insights as to test old and quite simple ones according to a rigorous and patient scientific method. Psychology emerges as, depending on your point of view, either a gloriously or horrifyingly pedantic discipline".

--
PS. I virtually bumped into de Botton at Edinburgh airport once, but I’m (a) not that good with faces and (b) shy, so I persuaded my girlfriend to go and ask him if he was who I thought he was. Anyway, apparently he was utterly charming and self-effacing.

UPDATE: Alain de Botton appeared on Monday's edition of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4. And he's got his own TV series on Channel 4/ More 4.

Link to Alain de Botton's website, which includes full details of all his books, plus reviews, audio clips and much more.
Link to Guardian review of his new book.
Link to article on Britain's building boom.
Link to de Botton's review of 'A mind of its own'.

—christian.

The Happiness Formula:

There’s a new six-part series starting on BBC 2 this week called The Happiness Formula, and the companion website has all sorts of features including on-line video clips, happiness tests, and an article about the science of happiness.

Glancing through, it looks like among the key contributors are well-being psychologist Ed Diener, positive psychologist Martin Seligman, and Emeritus Professor of Economics Lord Layard, who’s been making a lot of noise recently in an effort to get the UK government to provide more therapists. Layard also wrote a book a few years ago called Happiness: Lessons from a new science.

The series comes at a time when there are increasing calls for the population's happiness, rather than it's prosperity, to be used as the main measure of the government's success.

Link to The Happiness Formula Website.
Link to article on the science of happiness.
Link to happiness test.

—christian.

April 29, 2006

'They're coming to take me away...' now online:

The recent Radio 4 documentary on the representation of madness in comedy (as mentioned by Christian in a previous post) is now online as a realaudio stream.

—Vaughan.

Omni Brain:

While on a recent link ramble I discovered the wonderfully anarchic Omni Brain - an electic and entertaining mind and brain blog.

It seems to be powered by cognitive scientists Steve Higgins and Sandra Kiume who are keeping the site posted with news on everything from vetinary psychiatry to the psychophysics of baseball.

Link to Omni Brain.

—Vaughan.

April 28, 2006

Ethics of human enhancement:

Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights is a conference that kicks off next month to debate how the age-old practice of human modification should be handled in modern times and in the future.

Yet, what, if any, limits should be considered to human enhancement? On what grounds can citizens be prevented from modifying their own genes or brains? How far should reproductive rights be extended? Might enhancement reduce the diversity of humanity in the name of optimal health? Or, conversely, might enhancements inspire such an unprecedented diversity of human beings that they strain the limits of liberal tolerance and social solidarity? Can we exercise full freedom of thought if we can't exercise control over our own brains using safe, available technologies? Can we ensure that enhancement technologies are safe and equitably distributed? When are regulatory efforts simply covert, illiberal value judgments?

The conference is being hosted at Stanford University Law School and runs from May 26-28.

Link to HETHR conference info (via BoingBoing).

—Vaughan.

Jury psychology:

Christian's posted a great summary on the BPS Research Digest of a recent study that examined factors in jury death penalty decisions, some of which are quite surprising.

It seems to reflect an increasing focus on the psychology of court room and jury interactions. It will be interesting to see these sort of findings will ever lead to additional rules in court room to try and eliminate the effects.

—Vaughan.

Think friend and enter:

Wired has a short piece on researchers from Carleton University who are attempting to use EEG signals in place of a password - so you can think 'pass thoughts' to get to your data.

"It is known there are differences between people's brains and their signals," says Carleton researcher Julie Thorpe, who's working on the project with Anil Somayaji and Adrian Chan. "Can we observe a user-controllable signal encoding hundreds or thousands of bits of information in a repeatable fashion? That's the real question. We think it may be possible."

The system has the potential to become a new kind of biometric security tool that -- in contrast to fingerprint readers, iris scanners or facial recognition -- would allow users to change their pass codes periodically.

Maybe this will lead to a new generation of hackers who train themselves to simulate others mental states in an attempt to forge 'pass thoughts'?

Link to article 'Your Thoughts Are Your Password'.

—Vaughan.

2006-04-28 Spike activity:

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

Scientific American investigate the neuroscience and treatment of Alzheimer's disease in a new feature article.

Researchers devise software that tracks the mood swings of 150,000 LiveJournal users.

The New York Times examines the neuropsychology of investor behaviour - christened neuroeconomics.

The New Atlantis Magazine takes an in-depth look at the trouble with the Turing Test (via 3quarksdaily).

In light of the first 'female viagra' The Observer discusses whether it will be a substitute fix for emotional problems in couples.

The New York Times examines evidence about the role of the gene neuregulin in the risk for schizophrenia.

Physicists devise mathematical model to simulate how sensory neurons operate.

UK nurses back harm-reduction scheme to supervise chronic self-harmers.

A curious case-vignette of a person with depression is published in The New York Times.

BBC News reports that female ovulation makes men more wary of 'rival' masculine males, according to a new study.

—Vaughan.

April 27, 2006

They're coming to take me away Ha Ha:

How comedians have tackled the world of mental health head on, with contributions from Paul Whitehouse and psychiatrist Dr. Peter Byrne. Coming up on BBC Radio 4 (which you can listen to live over the net) at 11.30 BST and repeated on Monday at 0.15 BST.

—christian.

NewSci: Likes love, neuroscience, psychology, GSOH:

I take it Spring has truly sprung, as this week's New Scientist keeps the theme of love alive by devoting a special issue to that most curious of human behaviours.

There's feature articles on everything from the psychology of finding (and keeping) the perfect partner to the darker side of obsession and stalking.

Unfortunately, the articles are only available if you stump up hard cash, except for a one-off personals page that has adverts from scientists around the world wanting to meet potential partners. Some are quite poetic:

60's CHILD (F), thrives on serendipity and chaos, globally involved, healthily skeptical. Curiously awaits nice guy with nourishing bio-psycho-social alternative to flaming hot cheetos for perspectives sharing. Los Angeles. Reply number: 134

Keep an eye out for any hypocoristics.

Link to this week's table of contents.
Link to New Scientist personals page.

—Vaughan.

April 26, 2006

Neuroscience for lovers:

Online science and humanities e-zine LabLit has an article about one guy's experience of 'luring the ladies' with smooth talking neuroscience chit-chat (and presumably it works well for luring men too).

So, next thing I know, I'm actually chatting away with three beautiful young ladies in a bar in Baltimore. And we're chatting about signal transduction mechanisms and the implications of cerebral ischemia! Not in strict scientific terminology of course, but in decent general terms. I explain about signal transduction by using the band as an example. The signal leaves the guitarist’s hand as he makes the strings vibrate. This is transmitted to the pick-ups in the guitar, and turned into a signal that travels along his cable to his amplifier (or amp, as we rock stars say). There the signal has to be transduced into a sound...

Link to article 'How to lure in the ladies with your PhD'.
Link to LabLit (via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

Fast Artificial Neural Network Library:

The Fast Artificial Neural Network Library is a programming library that takes much of the pain out of constructing artificial intelligence and cognitive modelling projects.

It is free software, incredibly professional, well documented, fully supported, and available for a number of programming languages both mainstream and obscure.

There's also a concise introduction to neural networks (pdf) which covers some of the operating principles for those wanting to know how they work.

Neural networks are used both as software tools for completing otherwise difficult tasks, and in cognitive science for simulating cognitive processes.

In neuropsychology, neural networks are often created to simulate a certain cognitive task, and then the network is 'damaged' to see whether the network can predict the effects of brain injury or impairment.

This connectionist approach to cognitive science was made particularly popular by the 1986 book Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition (ISBN 0262631121) by David Rumelhart and James McClelland.

Link to Fast Artificial Neural Network Library.
pdf of 'Neural Networks Made Simple'.
Link to Wikipedia page on 'connectionism'.

—Vaughan.

April 25, 2006

The Age of Neuroelectronics:

Technology and society magazine The New Atlantis has a comprehensive article on 'neuroelectronics' - the science of interfacing digital components with neural wetware.

The potential merging of mind and machine thrills, frightens, and intrigues us. For decades, experiments at the border between brains and electronics have led to sensationalistic media coverage, vivid science fiction portrayals, and dreams of cyborgs and bionic men. But recently, this area of science has seen remarkable advances—from robotic limbs controlled directly by brain activity, to brain implants that alter the mood of the depressed, to rats steered by remote control. Adam Keiper explores the peculiar history and present directions of this research, and considers the challenges of staying human in the age of neuroelectronics.

Link to article 'The Age of Neuroelectronics'.

—Vaughan.

Check dis - Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky:

YouTube has the fantastic clip of Ali G interviewing legendary Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky.

'nuff said.

Link to video clip on YouTube.

—Vaughan.

April 24, 2006

Uncovering hidden biases:

Science News has got an excellent article on one of psychology's most recent developments - the Implicit Association Test - a computerised task that claims to measure hidden or unadmitted biases.

The test involves reacting to (usually) words as they appear on-screen by classifying them into categories. The categories are altered to draw out differences in reaction time, which supposedly relate to the difficulty of associating certain concepts with each other.

The idea is that the measure of reaction time makes it particularly difficult to fake, and the association should be detectable even if it is usually over-ridden by the conscious mind.

The IAT has been used for everything from detecting hidden racial prejudices to examining violent associations in psychopaths.

It is still controversial, however, because it is not clear exactly what is being measured, other than some general concept of an 'association'.

Whether this is predictive of explicit beliefs or attitudes, or future action and risk (such as violence - particularly importantly in forensic psychology) is still an open question.

If you want to try the test yourself, there's an online version at Project Implicit.

Link to 'The Bias Finders' from Science News.
Link to Project Implicit.

—Vaughan.

SfN Brain Briefings online:

The Society for Neuroscience publishes monthly Brain Briefings that explain how basic neuroscience discoveries lead to clinical applications.

The newsletters cover recent advances in neuroscience research and are intended for a lay audience so are jargon free and easily digestible.

The webpage versions (rather than the pdf files) are referenced so you can also follow up any of the briefings by getting deep into the science if you get inspired.

Link to SfN Brain Briefings.
Link to Society for Neuroscience.

—Vaughan.

April 23, 2006

Torn by lightning:

I've never understood
what it is I'm not supposed to feel
like a bird on the wing in a swollen sky
my mind is torn by lightning
as it flies from the thunder behind

From the play 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane.

Kane suffered from intense periods of depression throughout her life. 4.48 Psychosis was published after her suicide and was probably meant to be published posthumously.

It relates her experiences of depression, psychosis and hospitalisation. Kane is considered one of the most important British playwrights of the late 20th century.

—Vaughan.

April 22, 2006

US Supreme Court reviews insanity defence:

PBS has streaming video and a careful analysis of the case of Eric Michael Clark, who at 17 and while mentally ill, shot and killed a police officer in Arizona. His case is currently the basis for a Supreme Court review of the insanity defence in US law.

Clark had reportedly been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was psychotic at the time of the offence, and was under the delusion that his town was being controlled by aliens.

Before the Supreme Court, Clark's lawyers argued that the insanity defence is so difficult to prove in his home state of Arizona as to make it unjust.

The criteria for the insanity defence varies wildly among US states, with some not allowing the plea, some following the M'Naghten rules and others having a more strict version.

The M'Naghten rules state that for a person to be sane (and therefore responsible), they must be aware that such an act is wrong, and that they were aware of the "nature and quality of the act" at the time.

If it can be established that mental illness had impaired either of these two conditions, the person can be declared legally insane.

However, Arizona only has the first of these conditions as the test for insanity. So even if a person is not aware of the nature of the act they are committing - if they have an abstract understanding that this act would be wrong - they can be held legally responsible for the act.

In Clark's case, his lawyers are arguing that although he knew killing a police officer was wrong, he believed the person to be an alien, and so was not able to apply his understanding to the situation owing to his mental impairment.

If the Supreme Court agree that Arizona's criteria for the insanity defence is unjust, other states might have to implement the M'Naghten rules.

If they rule that Arizona's criteria are adequate, other states may adopt this more strict criteria and reject the M'Naghten rules.

Link to video and analysis from PBS.
Link to coverage from The Washington Post.
Link to editorial on the case from the The Washington Post.
Link to coverage from CNN.

—Vaughan.

April 21, 2006

Phantom paralysis:

This month's brilliant Out of Mind column in Prospect magazine, written by psychiatrist Robert Drummond and Alexanader Linklater, deputy editor of the mag, is about a cambonian woman with phantom paralysis.

The woman's husband died recently following a massive stroke. They'd been married 42 years. An earlier stroke had left him with a weak arm and leg. Now his widow is complaining of similar symptoms - a completely limp arm, and a weak leg, but crucially, scans have revealed no physical explanation for her paralysis.

"The young psychiatrist asks if Kim Sieng feels depressed. She says she doesn't. He asks if she wants to talk more about her husband. Again she doesn't. Suddenly, he is conscious of a poignancy that Kim Sieng does not herself express. He can't resist the impression that she has somehow embodied her grief, telling him about it with her body".

The article describes how the psychiatrist was finding himself in the murky world of 'hysterical paralysis', part of Charcot's 19-th century notion of a dynamic neural lesion.

Here's how, at a public lecture at the Salpetriere, Charcot describes hysterical paralysis in a male patient, taken from Sebastian Faulks' outstanding novel Human Traces:

"This is an example of what an English colleague, Mr. Reynolds, referred to as 'paralysis by idea' - not imagined paralysis, for this man is as physically afflicted as any of my multiple sclerosis patients - no, paralysis by idea. An experience has been held out of conscious thought in such a way that it has been able to exert its influence directly upon the nervous system and thus upon the muscles of the patient. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the peculiar interest of this condition".

Link to this month's Out of Mind column (which unfortunately isn't free this time).
Link to last month's column (free access) on different perspectives of alcoholism.
Link to earlier Mind Hacks post on A Beautiful Madness, highlighting an earlier Prospect article by Drummond and Linklater.

—christian.

Who's the greatest?:

The Royal Institution are running an event on Thursday 27th April in London entitled Who's the greatest? Minds that changed our minds where the greatest contributors to modern psychology and psychiatry will be debated.

The four luminaries being championed include inventor of psychoanlaysis Sigmund Freud, philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, psychologist and intelligence researcher Hans Eysenck, and inventor of cognitive behavioural therapy Aaron T. Beck.

The debate will be hosted by King's College London. Tickets cost £8, with a discount for RI members and students. See you there!

Link to details of Who's the greatest? event.

—Vaughan.

2006-04-21 Spike activity:

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

People who experience 'near-death experiences' are also more likely to experience 'REM intrusion' - the mometary presence of sleep or dream-like states during wakefulness (see also here).

A study reports that racial diversity within a group of jurors improves deliberation and group decision making.

The New York Times looks at the psychology of bias, promotion and drug company influence.

Artificial intellgience robot football competition won by students from Plymouth University.

Mind grenade t-shirt!

Areas of the prefrontal cortex related to the self are silenced during intense sensory processing according to brain-scanning study.

Cognitive Daily examines an intriguing study of the effect of Barbie dolls on the body image of young girls.

—Vaughan.

April 20, 2006

Electronic media causing ADHD?:

Neuroscientist Baroness Greenfield was featured on Radio 4's Today Programme this morning [realaudio] arguing that children are being medicated for ADHD when the problem might be caused by the over-use of 'electronic media' leading to short attention spans.

One of the difficulties with this argument is that an attention problem in children with ADHD has yet to be reliably pinned down.

Current theories tend to emphasise more general processes like behavioural inhibition, inhibitory control and executive dysfunction.

Some researchers are so unimpressed that they argue that ADHD is just a vague label for the outcome in any number of different behavioural and emotional problems.

Therefore, even if 'electronic media' did lead to short attention spans, this probably has little to do with ADHD as it is diagnosed in the clinic.

Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether the constant use of 'electronic media' does lead to a short attention span. In fact, it probably has the reverse effect.

A study published in Nature in 2003 reported that people who play video games have better visual attention than people who do not.

A 2005 study reported that children diagnosed with ADHD perform no worse than other children on standard computer games, and on a neuropsychological test of attention designed to be more 'game-like' to keep children's interest.

At a recent conference preliminary data was presented from a study that suggested ADHD could be helped by getting affected children to play Dance Dance Revolution!

Perhaps the point about 'electronic media' has clouded a more important ethical issue that Baroness Greenfield addresses - the widespread medication of children with amphetamines or amphetamine-like drugs to treat behavioural problems.

A hundred years ago ADHD-like behaviour was undoubtedly dealt with by corporal punishment. This raises the question of whether medicalising and medicating this behaviour is just a more expedient, or a genuinely more humane approach to dealing with problematic children.

UPDATE: There's a short piece in The Guardian about the topic and the subsequent political debate.

realaudio of interview with Baroness Greenfield.

—Vaughan.

Lingerie sharpens the financial mind:

According to recent news reports, the sight of lingerie or a sexy woman significantly impairs male decision making. Unfortunately, the details have got a little blurred in the re-telling from the original research paper - to the point where most reports flatly contradict the study's conclusions.

The study involved a well-researched financial task known as the ultimatum game where one participant is given a sum of money (10 euros in this study) and has to decide how to split it with another. If the other participant accepts the split, both get to keep the money. If they don't, no one gets anything.

Researchers Bram van den Bergh and Seigfried Dewitte asked heterosexual male participants to play the game in pairs.

Before they started the game, they were variously shown pictures of sexy women in bikinis, landscapes, older women, younger women, or given t-shirts or lingerie to handle.

When participants saw gratuitous pictures of bikini-clad girls (like the one on the right), lingerie and the like, they were more likely to accept unfair splits than in the other conditions.

Although the average difference in the lowest accepted offers between 'sexy' and 'unsexy' conditions was pretty small (only 0.39 euros), the researchers could be statistically confident that the difference was reliable.

One frequently repeated claim in the news stories is that men with higher levels of testosterone were particularly likely to be affected in this way.

This was never actually measured in the study, however. What was measured was the difference in length between the second and fourth finger (digit ratio) which is thought by some to indicate the amount of testosterone the person was exposed to as a developing child in the womb.

This is one subtlety that many news reports left out, as firstly, it's controversial as to whether digit ratio does relate to testosterone exposure in the womb, and secondly, it's not clear how this relates to current levels of testosterone at all. In fact, immediate levels of testosterone can fluctuate wildly.

Probably, the study is best thought of as an interesting but preliminary finding, as there are many questions that could be asked about the study design and experience of the participants that might have affected the results.

Petra Boynton has a good analysis of some of these, including why the story has proved so popular with the media.

The best write-up of the study's details I've found is from Nature, who do the study justice and point out that the results actually contradict the idea that sexy images makes men less rational. In the study, they actually made men more rational.

If you're being offered money in the ultimatum game, for each offer, the single most rational thing to do is accept money every time, no matter how low the offer is, because if you don't, you get nothing. You're given the choice between something and nothing - a no brainer.

In reality, people don't do this, a sense of fair play stops most people accepting paltry offers. Actually, this probably makes sense in everyday life (who wouldn't want to enforce fairness in society) but in terms of the experiment, it can be self-defeating.

The fact that men who saw sexy images were more likely to accept lower offers rather than reject them and get nothing at all, suggest that their short-term rationality was actually enhanced.

Perhaps it is no co-incidence that the bikini celebrated its 60th birthday this week. I shall be monitoring the economy carefully for any signs of change.

Link to write-up of study from Nature.
Link to analysis from Petra Boyton.
Link to abstract of original research paper.

—Vaughan.

April 19, 2006

Shake it baby!:

BBC News are reporting that Belgian researchers are using a modified version of Duke Nukem 3D in brain imaging studies - unaware that Duke Nukem has been used in brain-scanning experiments since 1998.

The image on the left is from a 1998 paper published in Science by Dr Eleanor Maguire and colleagues. The paper is available as this pdf.

The Maguire study mapped out areas of the brain involved in navigating through space and spatial memory by editing the standard Duke Nukem game to include controlled tasks.

The brain activation can be seen in the hippocampus and caudate nucleus. The location is the LA Meltdown level. Come get some!

A recent study published in PLoS Biology by the same Belgian neuroscientists mentioned by the BBC extended this research by looking at delayed brain activity associated with learning various tasks. This included a spatial navigation task which also used a modified version of the Duke Nukem environment.

After participants had learnt one task, they were asked to wait before completing another. The learning from the first task induced long-term changes in brain activation which could be detected when participants were doing the second unrelated task.

This suggests that learning is an ongoing and evolving brain process, even when you've moved on to other things.

Duke Nukem has now featured in a whole raft of brain scanning experiments, often only described as being a 'virtual environment'.

Link to badly spun BBC News story.
pdf of Maguire and colleagues 1998 paper.
Link to summary of delayed learning paper.
Link to full text of delayed learning paper.

—Vaughan.

April 18, 2006

Mind and brain on Research TV:

I've just discovered 'Research TV' which features loads of free videos, or 'vodcasts', including several on psychology and neuroscience:

Link to Scanning brainwaves to read the mind, about combining MEG and fMRI brain imaging techniques.
Link to Hemianopia: looking into the dark.
Link to A happy marriage helps beat flu.
Link to Fit to fight depression.
Link to Brain Scans show ADHD differences.
Link to Not exactly brain surgery, about a virtual reality simulator for surgeons.
Link to Older and Wiser?: Tackling problems of the ageing brain.
Link to Magnetic milestones in children's brain tumour treatment.
Link to Job satisfaction depends on happiness.

There are probably others that I've missed too. I just watched the first one on 'Scanning brainwaves' and it includes some excellent shots of what a MEG scanner looks like with somebody in it (I've seen a fMRI scanner loads of times but not a MEG one), and in another clip you can also hear just how noisy an fMRI scanner is.

Warwick University are apparently behind Research TV, with Birmingham uni, Nottingham uni, King's College and Durham University as partners.

Link 1 and link 2 for previous Mind Hacks posts about online neurosci videos.

—christian.

Sleep-retardant properties of my ex-girlfriend:

The cover feature in this month's Null Hypothesis is an empirical investigation into one researcher's experiences of having a sleep-retardant girlfriend.

The paper is available as a pdf and was written by human computer interaction researcher Ryan Baker in an attempt to fathom why he was sleeping so poorly.

Baker selected the possible causes and put the data into a regression model to determine the effect each had on his sleep duration. The model showed the strongest effect when he slept with his girlfriend, so he presented her with the data.

I concluded by explaining that, due to her sleep-retardant properties, I could not continue to sleep with her, an act she termed "breaking up". I should mention that Hermina suggested that my data, being from an observational study rather than an experimental study, only shows correlations rather than causation, and that it was quite possible that I had only chosen to sleep at her apartment on nights when I was less tired, or that I had actually chosen to get less sleep on nights when I had come to her apartment.

She proposed that, instead of taking hasty action, we conduct an experimental study where we flip a coin each night to determine whether I would sleep at her apartment or my own, in order to prove a causative effect. Obviously, I rejected this suggestion. Although this study is insufficient to conclusively prove Hermina's causative role, this strong a correlation, and the importance of getting enough sleep, are sufficient together to suggest that action needs to be taken expeditiously.

Null Hypothesis is an anarchic and consistently funny UK science magazine that often contains gems like this, as well as curious news from the world of science.

pdf of Baker's paper.
Link to Null Hypothesis website.

—Vaughan.

Stephen Fry and neuropsychiatric genetics:

Actor, writer and film director Stephen Fry recently visited the neuropsychiatric genetics unit at Cardiff University - which is not a combination I'd ever thought I'd be writing about.

Fry has bipolar disorder, sometimes called manic depression, which can cause manic highs or deep disabling depressions.

His visit was apparently part of a BBC documentary on bipolar to be shown later this year, and the unit is one of the leading research centres for the genetics of psychopathology.

Link to write-up from Cardiff University.

—Vaughan.

April 17, 2006

When does the brain develop maths?:

An innovative study just published in the open-access science journal PLoS Biology provides intriguing evidence that the brain dedicates a region to understanding maths by as early as four years-old.

The researchers, led by neuroscientist Jessica Cantlon, used fMRI to brain-scan adults and four year-old children while they watched collections of shapes flash up in front of them.

In most conditions, the number of shapes and the type of the shapes stayed the same, so participants mostly saw pictures of 16 circles.

On rare occasions, the circles were replaced by squares or triangles, or alternatively, the number of shapes doubled to 32. This last condition was crucial, because it represented a change in the number of shapes presented on screen.

Most other things that could have caused a brain response were controlled for, so a change of brain activation here should indicate a neural response linked to detecting a change in number.

In this condition, both adults and four-year olds showed activation in an area called the intraparietal sulcus, part of the parietal lobe.

This area is known to be particularly involved in sophisticated number processing in adults using Arabic numerals (what we would normally think of as 'maths'), which suggests that this ability may be based on a very early mechanism for dealing with counting and numbers.

Interestingly, children showed this activation largely on the right hand side of the brain, whereas adults showed similar activation on both sides.

Cantlon and her team suggest that this is because basic number ability becomes more complex as we learn to do symbolic mathematical operations during and after school, which the pre-school children in the study were unable to do.

Link to summary of study.
Link to full text of scientific paper.

—Vaughan.

April 16, 2006

Goths and mental health:

There's an informed and critical review of the recent coverage about goths, self-harm and success, over at the Anxiety, Addiction and Depression Treatments blog.

One recent study from Glasgow suggested that although goth kids have a higher rates of self-harm, it is more likely that self-harmers are drawn to the goth subculture than vice-versa, as the majority reported that they began harming themselves before becoming goth.

This was reported quite unpredictably in the media, with the goth subculture either being represented as the cause or remedy of these problems.

Another recent study reported that goths are more likely to go into professional jobs and be financially secure later in life, suggesting a good outcome for the majority.

The Anxiety, Addiction and Depression Treatments blog examines the disparity between the recent reporting of these findings and the representation of goth in the mainstream media.

Link to 'The Rewards of Being Goth' on AADT blog.

—Vaughan.

Kitsch movie posters from the planet brain:

I've just discovered that the search term 'brain movie poster' brings up a collection of neuroscience-themed B-movie posters on popular image search engines.

It's interesting that the majority are from the 50s and 60s, the same time that both mass-produced psychiatric drugs and neuroscience research became widespread.

Maybe this spawned popular concern about the potential 'brave new world' about to occur - a worry seized upon by film makers wanting to make a quick buck in the B-movie business. Maybe recent 'brain movies' just have dull posters.

Either way, how could you not like a movie called Creature with the Atom Brain where an ex-Nazi mad scientist uses radio-controlled atomic-powered zombies in his quest to help an exiled American gangster return to power?

Link to 'brain movie poster' search on Google Images.
Link to 'brain movie poster' search on Yahoo! image search.

—Vaughan.

April 15, 2006

10 minutes of advice:

A strange auction I just found on EBay... Someone offering 10 minutes of advice about anything you want.

Perhaps I could ask about ways to solve the hard problem of consciousness?

—Vaughan.

Australian AITM on the psychology of terrorism:

Radio National's excellent All the the Mind focuses on the psychology of terrorism, cutting through some of the common myths about the personalities and motivations of those who commit terrorist acts.

Contrary to the political rhetoric, there is little evidence for terrorists being mentally unbalanced, although many have suffered previous trauma in their lives.

The programme features Dr Anne Speckhard and Dr Jerrold Post both of whom research the psychology of terrorism by working with victims and the perpetrators.

There's also more information in a previous Mind Hacks post that includes links to further articles and research on the topic.

mp3 and realaudio of programme.
Link to programme transcript.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on psychology of terrorism.

—Vaughan.

April 14, 2006

Thalbourne on the psychology of the paranormal:

ABC Radio National's In Conversation had a recent discussion about paranormal belief and experience with psychologist Dr Michael Thalbourne.

Thalbourne has conducted a huge amount of experimental research on psychological correlates of belief in the paranormal and what sort of mechanisms might predispose someone to have supernatural experiences.

Although his research and views are occasionally unorthodox, he has had a significant impact on this area of research.

mp3 or realaudio of programme.
Link to programme transcript.

—Vaughan.

2006-04-14 Spike activity:

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

Study finds more white matter in auditory cortex of people who have a gift for languages.

Male and female brains are differently active, even during rest, reports brain imaging study.

Recent experiment suggests successful community cooperation may rely on a way of punishing noncooperators.

Women have extremely high rates of dissatisfaction with their body image says widely reported but dodgy survey from a magazine.

Clumsy BBC headline of the week - Weak brain links 'explain autism' - that actually obscures genuinely interesting research.

Good article in the Boston Globe about research on brain-computer interfaces.

SPET study shows NMDA receptors in left hippocampus of people with schizophrenia may be less efficient.

Futurelab discuss the latest trend in marketing with a neuroscience spin: brain fitness.

Salon feature on "Our crazy mental health system".

BPS Research Digest reports that people with anxiety disorders suffer less accidents when under 25, but show a higher mortality after.

The Telegraph examines the metaphor of possession in understanding addiction.

As a group, Goths are more likely to self-harm, although probably due to self-harmers being attracted to the group for emotional and peer support reports New Scientist.

—Vaughan.

April 13, 2006

Little girl lost:

Insight into self-harming from Lovisa Pahlson-Moller, a 22-year-old who said she first self-harmed when she was just six years old. She hasn't cut herself for two years thanks partly to the relief that's come from writing a book about her feelings. Interview and book extract.

Also there's an extended interview here with Chris Holley, the nurse behind a controversial project at St George's Hospital, Stafford that allows patients to continue harming themselves under supervised conditions. BBC News coverage here.

—christian.

NewSci head electricity and 'myth' of mood drugs:

Today's New Scientist has two articles of interest to mind and brain enthusiasts: a critical analysis of mood stablising drugs, and an account of a new brain intervention that involves passing a small electrical current through the head.

The article on mood stabilisers is largely an edited version of an article by psychiatrist David Healy published in a special issue of PLoS Medicine (mentioned previously on Mind Hacks).

The other feature article is on a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), something I've not heard of before but which seems to have some serious research supporting its use.

It sounds like quackery, but it's not. A growing body of evidence suggests that passing a small electric current through your head can have a profound effect on the way your brain works. Called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), the technique has already been shown to boost verbal and motor skills and to improve learning and memory in healthy people - making fully-functioning brains work even better. It is also showing promise as a therapy to cure migraine and speed recovery after a stroke, and may extract more from the withering brains of people with dementia. Some researchers think the technique will eventually yield a commercial device that healthy people could use to boost their brain function at the flick of a switch.

Unfortunately, the article isn't available freely online, but you should be able to get the issue from your local newsagent or library.

Link to table of contents for this week's issue.

—Vaughan.

Mixing Memory on the 'hostile media effect':

Cognitive science blog Mixing Memory highlights the hostile media effect whereby people assume a report of an event is biased towards an opposing view if it appears in the mass media.

This is despite the fact that when the same report is presented in another format (as an essay, for example) it is assumed to be neutral, or even supportive of the reader's view.

The effect is particularly apparent when the report concerns some sort of conflict and the viewer is already aligned to one side. Interestingly, it doesn't matter which side, the bias will be attributed to the opposition regardless. When neutral people view the report, bias is rarely reported.

Serious psychological study of perceived media bias began in the mid-1980s with studies by Vallone, Ross, and Lepper, and by Perloff. In both studies, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian participants were presented with television news coverage of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and subsequent fighting. The pro-Israeli participants believed that the coverage was biased in favor of the Palestinians, and that it would make neutral observers feel less favorable towards their side, while the pro-Palestinians were convinced the coverage was biased in favor of the Israeli side, and that it would hurt their image in the eyes of neutral observers. This is despite the fact that when neutral observers did view the coverage, in Perloff's study, they failed to perceive any bias, and their opinions of the two sides stayed the same.

As always, there's more careful analysis and detailed references to the supporting research in the full post on Mixing Memory.

Link to 'Hostile Media Effects' on Mixing Memory.

—Vaughan.

April 12, 2006

Forced medication for execution:

US Judge Wayne Salvant has ordered that Steven Kenneth Staley, a death-row inmate who is so severely mentally ill as to be unable to comprehend his situation, can be forcibly medicated so he can be executed while mentally competent.

A stay of execution was previously granted as he was judged not to understand his situation due to impaired mental functioning.

Staley is not the first prisoner to find himself in this situation. In 2004, Charles Singleton was forcibly medicated and subsequently executed in Arkansas.

His case was considered by an appeals court that decided by 6 votes to 5 that forcible medication for execution was acceptable.

In 1986, the US Supreme Court stated that the execution of the insane was barred by the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, although the definition of insanity is left to individual states.

In 2002, the state of Texas executed Monty Delk. His last words were recorded in the state's execution report:

At his execution, Delk screamed profanities and gibberish. When the warden asked if he had a final statement, Delk shouted. "I am the warden! Get your warden off this gurney and shut up!" At 7:47 p.m., the warden signaled for the lethal injection to begin. After spouting more profanity, Delk blurted out, "You are not in America. This is the island of Barbados. People will see you doing this." Then, abruptly, he stopped speaking, and his mouth and eyes froze wide open. He was pronounced dead at 7:53 p.m.

Link to article on Staley judgement from The Star-Telegram.
Link to article on Singleton execution from CNN.

—Vaughan.

SciAmMind on AI and alcoholism:

The publishing of Scientific American Mind seems to have settled down into a bimonthly cycle with a new issue on the shelves and two of the articles freely available online.

The first tackles how successfully computer simulations of the mind represent genuine human thought and to what extent they will have to rely on simulating other human abilities and attributes - like perception and distributed neural networks.

The second online article looks at the neurobiology of alcohol and what this tells us about alcoholism and booze-related brain impairment.

Other articles, only available in the paid-for version, include a piece by Nobel prize winner Eric Kandel on future challenges for neuroscientists, and a feature article on one of neuropsychology's current hot-topics: mirror neurons.

Link to AI article 'Electric thoughts?'.
Link to neurobiology of alcohol article 'Staying sober'.

—Vaughan.

A Sense of Scale:

Psychiatric nurse and mixed media artist Ben Guiver's experimental radio broadcast is available to download today.

The show - a kind of remix of texts by Francois Roustang, Will Self, Hakim Bey, Adam Phillips and Jean Baudrillard - complements his exhibition of photographs and paintings at London's Foundry called "A sense of Scale", and will also be broadcast on Resonance FM at 7pm (BST).

Guiver, who runs an art group for people with mental health problems, told The Guardian: "The texts I've selected for my radio show deal with different types of social matrixes. It is about the privatisation of culture in the west and the cycle of intimidation".

Link to A Sense of Scale exhibition info and radio downloads.

—christian.

Disease mongering for fun and profit:

Open-access journal PLoS Medicine has a special on disease mongering - the practice of promoting medical conditions in an effort to boost drug sales.

Drugs are, of course, incredibly useful in treating suffering and disease, but their reality doesn't always match the marketing of either the compound or the diagnosis.

For example, the definition of many psychiatric conditions is often based on fuzzy criteria on what constitutes a mental disorder and what constitutes normal human suffering or impairment.

The official acceptance of a diagnosis can involve intensely political decisions because if a group of experiences are defined as a mental disorder, the government or insurance companies can be called on to provide care for the affected people.

If a drug company can get their medication licensed as an 'approved' part of the care package, they can obviously make a huge amount of money.

This has led to drug companies funding pressure groups both to get a condition recognised with an 'official' diagnosis or to raise awareness of certain diagnoses (which has the effect of increasing the rates of diagnoses, and, of course, prescriptions).

This is not to deny that people may genuinely be suffering, but whether that suffering is best treated by a particular drug is another matter.

Here is where science is supposed to settle the matter, except for the fact that drug companies have been known to suppress drug trials that find no effect, and ghost-write scientific papers to which respected scientists add their names (and prestige).

Individual doctors are persuaded to prescribe certain drugs by free gifts, meals, air tickets to visit conferences, and large-scale sponsorship of academic meetings.

It's all very murky and quite insidious. The PLoS Medicine collection has articles that point out some of the marketing practices that support this process.

Of particular interest to readers here might be the articles on female sexual dysfunction, bipolar disorder and ADHD, although the whole issue is quite thought-provoking.

The issue coincides with a conference currently being held on the same topic in Australia.

Link to PLoS Medicine collection on disease mongering (thanks Petra!)
Link to conference website.
Link to 2002 British Medical Journal special on disease mongering.
Link to coverage from BBC News.

—Vaughan.

April 11, 2006

The freakonomic take on bird flu:

Steven Levitt, the economist, and Stephen Dubner, the journalist – authors of Freakonomics – appeared on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme yesterday.

The pair are (in)famous for their alternative explanations of historical phenomena, based on their application of economic tools of analysis to social patterns. For example, they’ve argued that the 50 per cent fall in crime in the USA in the last 15 years was caused by the legalisation of abortion in the 1970’s. Unwanted children are known to be at increased risk of becoming criminals, and so the reduction in the number of unwanted kids has meant less crime (so the logic goes).

In this interview they suggest that, so long as it doesn’t spread to humans, the threat of bird flu here in the UK may paradoxically lead to health benefits as a result of millions of anxious people washing their hands more often.

—christian.

Gladwell on late-bloomers and prodigies in art:

Malcolm Gladwell recently gave a lecture on 'prodigies and late bloomers in art' which has been audio archived on The New Yorker website.

The lecture is an engaging tour through the lives of some famous late-starting artists and musings on what contributed to their latent talent, including painter Paul Cézanne and legendary rock-and-roll band Fleetwood Mac!

Be warned, however, the site is very fond of annoying pop-up windows.

Link to Gladwell audio lecture.

—Vaughan.

Impulsive acts:

The New York Times has an article which examines the sometimes contradictory psychology of impulsivity.

Doing new things is often among lists which promise us 'ways to happiness' in magazines and books, and yet problems with impulse control have been cited as a major factor in everything from ADHD to drug and gambling addiction.

One problem for researchers is this type of impulsiveness is not present in every facet of life and can be quite difficult to pin-down experimentally.

One reason true impulsivity has been difficult to capture in the lab, said Dr. Martha Farrah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, is precisely because "it is most manifest in these very high-stakes situations, when people are trying to get what they want, to stay focused, maybe trying to kick a drug habit." And that is when they break down.

Link to 'Living on Impulse'.

—Vaughan.

April 10, 2006

SciAm online special on The Child's Mind:

Apparently Scientific American have been doing 'online only' specials for a while, but they completely passed me by until they just released one on the The Child's Mind.

It's a collection of various articles that have been published in SciAm over the past few years on developmental psychology and neuroscience.

The issue is not freely available, it costs $5 to download, but this seems good value for those (like me) not wanting to pay for a full online subscription for issues they might never read.

I quite like the idea of a minimum payment for a one-stop collection of previously published special interest articles and I'm hoping other publishers will consider doing the same.

The special has articles with both clinical and 'pure research' angles, including "Why Children Talk to Themselves", "Scars That Won't Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse", "Uncommon Talents: Gifted Children, Prodigies and Savants" and "Think Better: Learning to Focus".

Link to info on The Child's Mind online special.

—Vaughan.

Fragmented minds part II online:

Part II of the Australian All in the Mind two-part series on schizophrenia is now online. The second part focuses on the current range of treatments for people diagnosed with the condition.

This includes both pharmacological and psychological approaches, and the programme discusses the current state of research and the advantages and disadvantages of various therapies.

The programme also explains how many current therapies are attempting to directly address difficulties which have been uncovered by cognitive science research.

mp3 or realaudio of programme.
Link to transcript of programme.

—Vaughan.

Gladwell on Tilly on the sociology of explanations:

Malcolm Gladwell writes an insightful review of "Why?" (ISBN 069112521X) by renowned sociologist Charles Tilly that tackles the social context and motivations for providing explanations.

A recent article in The Guardian also discussed the new book and summarised Tilly's five 'types' of explanation:

There are, Tilly suggests, at least five different ways to explain why things happen. To take Katrina as the example: the first explanation might be "convention" (there's always a monumental cock-up after a hurricane); the second, "technical explication" (in which the meteorologists precisely chart how weather conditions created the chaos); third, "codes" (in this case, the federal, state and city ordinances that prevented any clear line of responsibility emerging); fourth, "ritualistic" explanations (God's wrath or nemesis); and "fifth", stories.

In Gladwell's New Yorker review, he highlights the fact that these types of explanations have different social purposes and are typically used to achieve certain persuasive ends in a debate.

Proponents of abortion often rely on a convention (choice) and a technical account (concerning the viability of a fetus in the first trimester). Opponents of abortion turn the fate of each individual fetus into a story: a life created and then abruptly terminated. Is it any surprise that the issue has proved to be so intractable? If you believe that stories are the most appropriate form of reason-giving, then those who use conventions and technical accounts will seem morally indifferent—regardless of whether you agree with them. And, if you believe that a problem is best adjudicated through conventions or technical accounts, it is hard not to look upon storytellers as sensationalistic and intellectually unserious.

Gladwell (who was recently profiled in Psychological Science) makes links between Tilly's work and the work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman who similarly examined seemingly straighforward social interactions.

In his classic book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Goffman argued that how we present ourselves to others is often like a stage appearance, which we try to manage as much as possible to control the impressions that others draw from our 'performance'.

UPDATE: The first chapter of "Why?" is freely available from Princeton University Press in html or pdf format.

Link to Gladwell's review of "Why?" in The New Yorker.
Link to Guardian article on Tilly's "Why?".

—Vaughan.

April 09, 2006

Week 4, book draw winners:

Sunday night means entry to this week's Mind Performance Hacks book draw is now closed. A drumroll, please, while I pick this week's winners (as before, with an added sort to make the uniq command work properly)... and our two winners are John Doppke and Jose Antonio Ortega. Congratulations! I'll be in touch to get your addresses soon. Everyone: That's our last book draw--thanks for playing!

—Matt.

A very modern reality:

A poem by John Hegley from his 1993 collection Five Sugars Please (ISBN 0413773000).

Outsider art
As a bit of a break for Albert
from the hospital of the mind
I accompanied him to the park for a picnic
and a bit of crayoning enjoyment;
using just the one crayon
he liked to attend to a piece of paper
and meticulously obliterate the surface area.
Some time into the process
a couple who shared Albert's middle age
came sneaking a fascinated peek
over the shoulder of what they took to be
an amateur landscape artist
but found his interpretation of reality
just a little too modern.

—Vaughan.

April 08, 2006

Football medication:

I've just found an anomalous appearance of Norwich City Football Club in a commonly used prescribing manual for psychiatrists.

From the entry on p45 for the SSRI anti-depressant citalopram (trade name 'Cipramil') in The Psychotropic Drug Directory 2001/02 by Stephen Bazire (ISBN 1856421988):

In patients who had responded to citalopram 40mg/d for four months, halving the dose to 20mg/d for a maintenance phase (2-yrs) resulted in a 50% relapse rate, re-inforcing the view that full-dose maintenance therapy is required (n=50, Franchini et al, J Clin Psych 1999, 60, 861-65). It has a very low incidence of interactions.

The green and yellow 20mg pack in the UK has led to increased use among football supporters in the author's home city of Norwich.

—Vaughan.

April 07, 2006

Cosmic ordering:

Setting yourself achievable goals is a sensible step on the way to getting what you want in life.

So why, in the twenty-first century, do people have to dress up such a simple idea with kookie language and daft explanations?

TV presenter Noel Edmunds said his successful return to primetime TV was thanks to 'cosmic ordering'. He apparently wrote on a piece of paper what he wanted, before putting it under his pillow. He thinks he told the cosmos what he wanted and the cosmos duly granted it. There's even a book on it at the top of the Amazon best-seller list.

Thankfully, on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning, psychologist Prof. Richard Wiseman debunked the idea that the cosmos really does listen out for everyone's private requests before granting them. It has far more to do with the fact that 'lucky' people "know what they want in life and recognise opportunities when they come along".

Unfortunately, the editors of the programme gave equal weight to the opinions of astrologer Jonathan Cainer - "you decide what you want...you announce to the universe that it's your intention to get it...and it works, without a shadow of a doubt it works...And in my column I tell you when the best time is to put your order in", he said. Later he added "you can wish for harm to others and there's a strong chance it will happen". None of which was challenged by the interviewer.

OK, I'll have a go: "Dear Cosmos, please shut down the BBC Today programme for broadcasting absolute piffle".

Link to audio of the interview with Wiseman and Cainer.

—christian.

Art and consciousness:

Like a neuropsychological tag-team, the other half of the Brain Ethics blog duo has followed up his partner's recent Science and Consciousness Review article, with his own on Art and the Conscious Brain.

Martin Skov specialises in neuroaesthetics, the science of understanding how art and beauty is understood by the mind and brain.

Critics sometimes ask if the illumination of neurobiological mechanisms adds anything important to old-fashioned – i.e., philosophical – aesthetic inquiry. I think that already Plato and Aristotle already answered that. As they pointed out, works of art are created with the express purpose of provoking a mental representation in the brains that experience them. Thus, to understand the nature of art you also have to understand the cognitive processes responsible for turning the perceptual properties of any art object into a mental representation. How colour, lines, etc. are magically transformed into Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile is very much a question of how the brain works.

Neuroaesthetics is becoming an increasingly popular field in contemporary neuroscience, with an increasing number of books and even regular conferences now devoted to the field.

Update: It looks like Science and Consciousness Review are having some minor connection issues at the moment. Hopefully, normal service should be resumed shortly.

Link to Art and the Conscious Brain by Martin Skov.

—Vaughan.

Old spike activities republished:

In the old days, our regular Friday spike activity features would be published with the titles such as 'Spike activity yyyy-mm-dd'.

Unfortunately, the blogging software squashed a month's worth of these posts down to the same URL, meaning they don't properly turn up in searches and can't be linked individually.

We worked this out eventually, and so we started publishing them entitled with the date first, so each have an individual URL.

This didn't fix the old Spike activities, but I've now gone through and re-titled all the old format posts, so they should turn up properly in searches.

The fixed posts are all individually linked in the rest of the post, so have a browse through if you want more links than you can shake an electrode at.

Each of these entries has a collection of "quick links from the past week in mind and brain news". Unfortunately, it's not possible to describe them without reproducing each post in full, but click on a few and see what gems you find.

2005-01-21 Spike activity
2005-01-28 Spike activity
2005-02-04 Spike activity
2005-02-11 Spike activity
2005-02-18 Spike activity
2005-02-25 Spike activity
2005-03-04 Spike activity
2005-03-11 Spike activity
2005-03-18 Spike activity
2005-03-23 Spike activity
2005-04-01 Spike activity
2005-04-08 Spike activity
2005-04-15 Spike activity
2005-04-22 Spike activity
2005-04-29 Spike activity
2005-05-06 Spike activity
2005-05-13 Spike activity
2005-05-20 Spike activity
2005-05-27 Spike activity
2005-06-03 Spike activity
2005-06-10 Spike activity
2005-06-17 Spike activity
2005-06-24 Spike activity
2005-07-01 Spike activity
2005-07-08 Spike activity
2005-07-15 Spike activity
2005-07-22 Spike activity
2005-07-29 Spike activity

—Vaughan.

2006-04-07 Spike activity:

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

American Scientist reviews the toxicology of legal and illegal recreational drugs.

Sex and relationship psychologist Petra Boyton analyses the science behind recent reports that 'media exposure encourages teenage sex'.

Cognitive Daily considers some intriguing experimental evidence suggesting that those seeking fame should should avoid the company of those more famous than themselves.

Mixing Memory has a careful and enlightening analysis of the potential role of movitated reasoning in romantic relationships.

A new study suggests that mobile phone use may be linked to malignant brain tumours.

The Anxiety, Depression and Addiction Treatments blog has a concise summary of some of Richard Wiseman's work on the psychology of being lucky.

—Vaughan.

April 06, 2006

Neurochemistry hacker t-shirt:

Online t-shirt mongers Jinx Hackwear have a t-shirt emblazoned with the phrase 'Neurochemistry Hacker' - designed by hacker website Collusion.

I presume they're thinking of what we might knowingly call 'amateur brain chemists' rather than professional neuroscientists or psychopharmacologists, although the idea is broadly the same.

It reminds me of the popular 80s rave t-shirt that had 'drug testing in progress' across the front. Perhaps we need something more specific for the neuroscience community.

Maybe selective serotonin re-uptake inhibition or dopamine transporter modulation in progress?

Link to Neurochemistry Hacker t-shirt.

—Vaughan.

Observation balloons, mental break down, and female hysteria:

"As soon as he started work at the hospital he became...fascinated by the differences in severity of break down between the different branches of the RFC. Pilots, though they did indeed break down, did so less frequently and usually less severely than the men who manned observation balloons. They, floating helplessly above the battlefields, unable to either avoid attack or to defend themselves effectively against it, showed the highest incidence of breakdown of any service. Even including infantry officers. This reinforced Rivers's view that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace".

The thoughts of army psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers from the novel Regeneration by Pat Barker. In Regeneration, the first of a trilogy, Barker blends fact with fiction in her depiction of the relationship between Rivers and the celebrated poet Siegfried Sassoon, at Craiglockhart during the First World War.

—christian.

Fragmented minds:

The other All in the Mind (broadcast by Australian station Radio National) has the first of a two-part special on schizophrenia and psychosis.

The presenter talks to Angela, a young woman who has experienced some intense psychotic episodes and has been diagnosed and treated for schizophrenia.

Angela's experiences were so severe as to need several years recovery. Despite this, Angela is now back at work and enjoying a full life.

The programme also includes input from several researchers and clinicians who explain what is known about schizophrenia-related changes in the brain, as well as known risk factors for developing the condition.

Part two of the programme is due online next week.

The picture on the left is by artist Maureen Oliver and depicts the experience of psychosis (click for more information).

mp3 or realaudio of prgramme.
Link to transcript of programme.

—Vaughan.

April 05, 2006

All in the Mind LSD programme audio online:

A quick update on our previous post on the BBC All in the Mind LSD special. The realaudio archive of the show is now available online (now also linked from the original post).

Furthermore, BBC News has an additional article summarising the programme, and there's an interesting snippet (i.e. gossip) about the new series from The Telegraph.

Apparently, Claudia Hammond is a "glamorous psychology writer". Probably, just like us here at Mind Hacks (*cough*).

Link to BBC All in the Mind website.
Realaudio of programme audio.

—Vaughan.

More on psychedelic therapy:

Christian just reminded me that New Scientist had an article last year on psychedelic therapy research which is freely available online.

The article describes a number of recent and ongoing studies into the safety and efficacy of psychedelics for a range of disorders. This is despite difficulties caused by legal restrictions and political resistance to substances typically associated with the 'counter-culture'.

—Vaughan.

BBC All in the Mind on LSD:

BBC All in the Mind has just kicked off a new series with an excellent special edition on the latest developments in LSD research and therapy, and with a slew of new presenters.

The programme examines the science of how LSD acts on the mind and brain, as well as research on the use of psychedelics to treat cluster headaches and mental distress.

It’s nearly 40 years since LSD was made illegal, but now there's growing scientific interest in studying hallucinogenic drugs. In the 50s LSD was believed to be a wonder drug and used widely in psychiatry to treat conditions from depression to addiction.

In this week's programme Claudia finds out about the new research underway using psychedelics, and asks whether modern psychiatry is really the place for drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms and Ecstasy.

There are now three presenters to replace the previous All in the Mind frontman, Raj Persaud.

They include: Claudia Hammond, a psychology lecturer, author and past presenter of the excellent BBC series Emotional Rollercoaster (still archived online); Clinical psychologist and writer Tanya Byron, who was in a number of acclaimed child management programmes; and psychiatrist Kwame McKenzie, who is currently assistant editor at the British Journal of Psychiatry and a lecturer in psychiatry.

The diverse set of presenters should bring a fresh perspective on current mind and brain issues, and I'm hoping the programme is going to involve more in-depth whole programme discussions, as has been demonstrated this week.

The audio of the LSD programme will be archived online later today. I'll update this page to link to it when it arrives online.

The audio of the programme is now online and linked below.

Link to BBC All in the Mind website.
Realaudio of programme audio.

—Vaughan.

Why are women's brains smaller than men's?:

The Times has a short piece on the question of why female brains are generally smaller than male brains. The author speculates that it may be because women are generally more pleasant (and smaller in body size).

Surprisingly, the conclusions are largely drawn from evolutionary studies of foxes. Probably not one to take particularly seriously, although an interesting hypothesis nonetheless.

Link to article in The Times (via anomalist).

—Vaughan.

April 04, 2006

Support cognitive science in Poland:

A Polish reader posted the following on a previous post and I thought I would flag up for everyone here:

I'd like to invite you to participate in discussions on the new forum about neuroscience and cognitive science - http://kognitywistyka.fora.pl It is generally in Polish but there is also an English section (the main page --> "In English").

In Poland almost no-one is interested in cognitive science or neuroscience so we strongly need support. The forum is a part of http://www.kognitywistyka.net , the most popular vortal on cognitive and neural science in Central Europe.

Please help us to develop the forum and to propagate neuroscience and cognitive science in Poland.

If you have any questions, please contact the administrator at the address swacewicz(at)kognitywistyka(dot)net. In order to avoid abuse, you need to be a registered user to start new threads and write replies in the English section (but reading is always possible). In order to register, you have to click "Rejestracja" (at the main page - meaning: register) --> "Zgadzam się na te warunki" (meaning: I agree) and fill the forms. Translation:
Użytkownik - user
Adres email - email address
Hasło - password
Potwierdź Hasło - confirm password
Then change the value of "język forum"(language of the forum) into 'english'. That's all.

Every international guest will be welcomed warmly.

So if you'd like to talk cog sci and spread the word in Poland, you now know where to go!

—tom.

How World War I brought out men's maternal side:

"One of the paradoxes of the war - one of the many - was that this most brutal of conflicts should set up a relationship between officers and men that was...domestic. Caring. As Layard [a traumatised soldier Rivers hadn't been able to help] would undoubtedly have said, maternal. And that wasn't the only trick the war had played. Mobilization. The Great Adventure. They'd been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure - the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys - consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down".

The thoughts of army psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers from the novel Regeneration by Pat Barker. In Regeneration, the first of a trilogy, Barker blends fact with fiction in her depiction of the relationship between Rivers and the celebrated poet Siegfried Sassoon, at Craiglockhart during the First World War. One more excerpt to follow.

—christian.

the man who took 40,000 ecstasy pills in nine years:

The Guardian carries a story about a man who took 40,000 Ecstasy pills over nine years. The man sounds a wreck - paranoia, hallucinations, depression and extreme short-term memory loss, despite not having taken Ecstasy for seven years.

The story provides a good illustration of some of the methodological problems with proving that MDMA use is dangerous

This was an extreme case - does normal recreational use of ecstasy have the same effects, but less, or is the amount consumed by most people well within their ability to safely process the drug? Many animal studies which show harmful effects of MDMA use similarly extreme procedures - giving monkeys the equivalent of 50 pills over three days, for example. Although this demonstrates that MDMA can be harmful, the implications for 'normal' drug use among humans are not clear.

Other research, published today, but not mentioned in the Guardian article until towards the end, suggest that the side-effects of ecstasy use are temporary. The research mentioned failed to find a significant difference between users and non-users in either amount of depression or in neuroanatomical differences revealed by brain scans. But this can't prove that there's isn't an effect (because absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence).

The man was also a heavy cannabis user (and probably other things too), although this also isn't mentioned until the end of the article. It is hard to be sure which drug(s) caused his problems.

Finally, what kind of man would take 40,000 ecstasy pills?! His psychological and, potentially neurological, make-up was probably unusual before he went anywhere near the E

Link: 'The strange case of the man who took 40,000 ecstasy pills in nine years' (The Guardian)
Link: Erowid.org pages on MDMA

—tom.

Insanity in focus:

This is one I missed when it first appeared - the United Colors of Benetton magazine Colors had an issue focusing on mental illness and its treatment around the world.

Despite the flash-heavy website, there's some beautiful photography in there, including some self-portraits taken by patients (like the one on the right).

The issue features patients from Cuba, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Belgium and Los Angeles, and shows the striking inequalities in mental health treatment throughout both the developed and developing world.

The photographs from Cuba are also currently part of an exhibition at London's Institute of Psychiatry, where they are contrasted with photographs of patients resident in the Bethlem Royal Hospital during Victorian times.

Many of these Victorian-era photographs from the Bethlem are reproduced in a thought-provoking book called Presumed Curable (reviewed here).

Link to issue of Colors on madness.
Link to details of Institute of Psychiatry exhibition.
Link to review of Presumed Curable.

—Vaughan.

April 03, 2006

Last chance to win Mind Performance Hacks:

If you've caught my posts the last few Mondays, you'll know that I read and commented on Mind Performance Hacks, a new book from Ron Hale-Evans and O'Reilly (with some of the regulars of this blog contributing a hack or two) some weeks ago and we've been running free draws since. If you want to know more about that book, the sample hacks are worth a read, as is the support site if you want to dig deeper.

Now, at the time we managed to get hold of just a few copies to give away, and there have been 6 lucky winners so far. This week is our 4th and final book draw. You know the drill by now:

If you'd like a chance of winning one of 2 copies of Mind Performance Hacks, send an email to mphdraw4 at mindhacks dot com. If you don't win this time, you'll have to buy it. Good luck!

And here's the usual blurb: Next Sunday evening, UK time, I'll choose 2 emails randomly and, if you're a winner, I'll be in touch to get your address. Please include your name in the email; if my email to you bounces I'll choose a different one; cheaters will be excluded; organiser's decision is final; void where prohibited; etc. You don't have to be in the UK, and emails are deleted if you're not a winner (if you entered last week and didn't win, you're welcome to enter again). Please note that the email address is different from last time.

—Matt.

Six impossible things:

Several recent reviews have tackled biologist Lewis Wolpert's new book on the biology of belief Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (ISBN 0571209203).

In his book, Wolpert tackles religious belief in some detail, joining the fray with Daniel Dennett who has recently been promoting his own book on religion Breaking the Spell (see previously).

John Gray's review in the New Statesman is most skeptical about both Dennett and Wolpert, arguing that they're "of interest chiefly to anxious humanists seeking to boost their sagging faith".

The review in Time Magazine tackles the scientific arguments in more detail, as does the review in The Times, and are both more positive in their appraisal - with The Times going as far as saying it has "beautiful and sometimes breathtaking clarity".

Link to review in the New Statesman.
Link to review in Time Magazine.
Link to review in The Times.

—Vaughan.

Anarchic hand:

An article from The Psychologist has just been made available on the 'anarchic hand syndrome' - the brain injury-related condition where the hand performs actions against a person's will.

One evening we took our patient, Mrs GP, to dinner with her family. We were discussing the implication of her medical condition for her and her relatives, when, out of the blue and much to her dismay, her left hand took some leftover fish-bones and put them into her mouth (Della Sala et al., 1994). A little later, while she was begging it not to embarrass her any more, her mischievous hand grabbed the ice-cream that her brother was licking. Her right hand immediately intervened to put things in place and as a result of the fighting the dessert dropped on the floor. She apologised profusely for this behaviour that she attributed to her hand's disobedience. Indeed she claimed that her hand had a mind of its own and often did whatever 'pleased it'. This condition is known as anarchic hand: people experience a conflict between their declared will and the action of one of their hands.

The article is by neurologist Sergio Della Sala who has been researching anarchic hand syndrome for many years.

It discusses the possible causes of the condition, and what these disruptions to human 'free will' tell us about how the brain generates the conscious control of actions.

Link to article.

—Vaughan.

April 02, 2006

Week 3, book draw winners:

Hello folks, it's time to pick out the 2 winners for this week's Mind Performance Hacks free book draw (I'll do it the same way as a couple of weeks ago)... Congratulations to Mark Atwood and Monique Milgrom! Well done, and I'll email you soon to get your postal addresses. Everyone else, bad luck but don't worry--we're kicking off the last of our draws tomorrow. Look out for it!

—Matt.

Would like to meet...:

Admittedly, it's a fairly transparent marketing ploy for the BBC Doctor Who magazine, but the top five people in a poll to determine a historical person readers would most like to meet include four people who would likely be diagnosed with mental illness.

The top five are Winston Churchill, Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe and Martin Luther King.

It is likely that only Martin Luther King would be without a diagnosis. Churchill, Presley and Monroe all had significant periods of mental distress and Einstein reputedly had Asperger syndrome - although whether 'illness' is the best word to describe his unique way of looking at the world is another matter.

All great and fascinating people. Sadly, however, two of the four (Presley and Monroe) died in tragic circumstances.

Hopefully, both a wider recognition that mental distress and giftedness can go hand in hand, and continuing developments in mental health care will mean fewer great lives (whether famous or not!) will end in tragedy.

Link to 'Churchill tops time travel list' from BBC News.

—Vaughan.

Hypocoristic:

hypocoristic A pet name, such as Willie or honey. Ingenious and bizarre coinages may be encountered, as seen in the love messages published in some British national newspapers on St Valentine's Day.

From p152 of the Penguin Dictionary of Language (ISBN 0140514163).

There's more on hypocoristics here and here.

—Vaughan.

April 01, 2006

Deep brain stimulation for depression:

There's a piece in The Guardian discussing recent investigations into treating severe depression using deep brain stimulation - a technique that uses a permanently implanted electrode to stimulate a specific brain area.

This technique has been used to successfully treat some of the movement symptoms in Parkinson's disease and is now being researched to see if it can be applied more widely.

Preliminary research by neuroscientists in Canada and the Netherlands has already suggested that the treatment could prove effective. Last year, Helen Mayberg, a neurologist at Emory University's school of medicine in Atlanta, published the results of a decade of research which pinpointed a 2.5cm-wide part of the brain called the subgenual cingulate region (SCR) as playing a major role in dealing with affective information. The SCR is the lowest part of a deep band of tissue running along the central part of the brain. Dr Mayberg had noticed that this region was overactive in depressed people and that its activity correlated with their changing symptoms. When they were treated with antidepressant drugs, the activity went down.

Link to article from The Guardian
Link to Wikipedia article on DBS.
Link to previous post on Mind Hacks on 'Modern-day psychosurgery'.

—Vaughan.