May 31, 2007

The strength of weak touches:

The BPS Research Digest covers a simple yet fascinating study on the power on lightly touching someone's arm when trying to persuade them.

In this case, the psychology study involved a man asking women to dance or for their phone numbers.

A good-looking man approached 120 women in a night club over a period of three weeks, and asked them to dance. It was in the name of science – the man was an assistant to the psychologist Nicolas Guegen. Remarkably, of the 60 women who he touched lightly on the arm, 65 per cent agreed to a dance, compared with just 43 per cent of the 60 women who he asked without making any physical contact.

A second study involved three male research assistants approaching 240 women in the street and asking them for their phone numbers. Among those 120 women who the researchers touched lightly on the arm, 19 per cent agreed to share their number, compared with 10 per cent of the women with whom no physical contact was made.

Christian has a fantastic talent for finding really intriguing studies and this is a particularly good example.

Have a look at his article for more on why this effect might occur.

Link to BPSRD on 'The power of a light touch on the arm'.

—Vaughan.

Selling disgust:

An article in Time magazine discusses how an understanding of the psychology of disgust is being applied to selling products and the arrangement of items in supermarkets.

One key finding has been that disgust is heavily linked to ideas of contamination and this holds even when there's no risk - just the idea is enough.

For example, people are less likely to want to put a plastic spoon in their mouth that has touched fake plastic vomit, despite the fact that it is no more risky than putting a spoon in your mouth that has touched other plastic spoons in the packet.

Psychologists Andrea Morales and Gavan Fitzsimons has discovered that this principle applies to consumer products that are linked to things that can trigger disgust - rubbish bags, nappies, toilet paper and so on.

Crucially, the contamination principal works here, so people view things less favourably that have been near these products.

Strong preferences were just what the subjects exhibited. Any food that touched something perceived to be disgusting became immediately less desirable itself, though all of the products were in their original wrapping. The appeal of the food fell even if the two products were merely close together; an inch seemed to be the critical distance. "It makes no sense if you think about it," says Fitzsimons. More irrationally still, the subjects were less comfortable with a transparent package than an opaque one, as if it somehow had greater power to leak contamination. Whatever the severity of the taint, the result was predictable...

"More and more stores organize products by category," says Morales, "so you have a baby aisle, for example, with diapers and wipes and baby food all together." Supermarkets might want to rethink that arrangement.

Link to Time article 'The Science of Disgust'.

—Vaughan.

Dispelling ghostly images with electromagnets:

In a study investigating how the brain generates paranormal experiences and psychotic states, researchers used strong electromagnets to alter brain function and found they could reduce the number of times healthy volunteers saw spontaneously experienced false perceptions.

The researchers altered the function of the temporal lobes with a method called transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS while participants were asked to detect supposedly 'hidden' images in what were actually completely random dot patterns.

When compared to a control area at the top of the head, reducing left temporal lobe function significantly reduced the number of false perceptions.

During the procedure, participants were asked to look at a series of quickly presented dot patterns and told to indicate which had images 'hidden' within them.

Crucially, they were told not to guess and only to press a button when they genuinely detected a 'hidden' image. In actual fact, all the dot patterns were completely random and none contained 'hidden' images, so every 'detect' response was a false perception of meaningful information.

Just before each dot pattern was presented, the brain was stimulated with a pulse of TMS, either to the left or right temporal lobe, or a control spot at the top of the head known as the vertex.

TMS uses magnetic pulses to safely 'switch off' a small area of brain for a several hundred milliseconds.

When compared to the control area, temporarily 'switching off' an area on the left temporal lobe significantly reduced the number of false perceptions, suggesting that this brain area is likely to be involved in making meaningful connections, even when there's no meaning to be found.

Seeing meaningful information in random data is known as 'apophenia' and statistically is known as a false positive or a Type I error.

Previous research has shown that this tendency is known to be enhanced in people who report high levels of paranormal experience, and to a greater extent, in people who experience psychosis - the mental state involving delusions and / or hallucinations that is most commonly linked to schizophrenia.

Other evidence suggests that differences in temporal lobe function are common in people diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The paper is published in the May edition of Cortex, but a pre-print is available at the link below if you don't have access to the journal.

pdf of full-text paper.

Disclaimer: This study is from my own research group

—Vaughan.

May 30, 2007

Wiring the brain for synaesthesia:

Neurophilosopher has a great article on a brain scanning study showing that people with synaesthesia have different patterns of brain connections compared to non-synaesthetes.

You read a lot of articles on the brain that use phrases like "wired differently", suggesting that the connections in the brain are altered.

As the connections in our brain are changing all the time at the dendrite level, often this is just a meaningless way of saying "there's a difference".

Perhaps these sort of phrases are best applied to white matter which is the nearest you'll find to genuine wires in the brain.

White matter fibres run in bundles, they carry electrical signals, and they are insulated by a fatty covering called myelin.

The connections of white matter have been quite hard to study in living people until the development of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a brain scanning technology that can specifically pick out the white matter fibres and create maps like the one in the picture.

Rarely when articles talk about "different brain wiring" do they actually mean detectable differences in white matter though.

In the DTI study covered by Neurophilosopher this is exactly what was studied, and it does indeed seem to be different in people who experience synaesthesia, a condition where some of the senses are crossed so, for example, numbers might be also experienced as colours.

DTI is a type of magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that measures the diffusion of water molecules. In the brain, water diffuses randomly, but tends to diffuse easier along the axons that are wrapped in myelin, the fatty protein that insulates nerve fibres. Diffusion tensor imaging can therefore be used to infer the size and direction of the bundles (or "fascicles") of white matter tracts that connect different regions of the brain (above).

The Dutch researchers show that synaesthetes have more connections between the two adjacent areas in the fusiform gyrus than non-synaesthetes. They report their findings in the June issue of Nature Neuroscience.

As well as showing these differences between synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes, the authors also show that there are also differences in connectivity between synaesthetes who differ in the intensity of their sense-mixing experiences.

In other words, the researchers found people with synaesthesia had white matter 'wiring' between sensory areas that others don't have, and that this wiring differed depending on how much synaesthesia the participants experience.

Just from the fantastically straight-forward explanation of DTI imaging given above, you can see that it's a wonderfully written article.

Have a look at the full piece for more on this fascinating study.

Link to Neurophilospher on 'Imaging of connectivity in the synaesthetic brain'.
Link to abstract of scientific study.

—Vaughan.

Neuroplastic fantastic:

The New York Times has a review of a new book on how people have overcome brain damage through neuroplasticity - the brain's ability to re-organise itself.

While this is nothing new, the brain has always had this ability, the discovery is relatively recent and rehabilitation is increasingly designed to take advantage of this process.

The book is called The Brain That Changes Itself and is apparently a series of case studies of how people's lives have been improved by technology, psychotherapy or behavioural changes.

I suspect much of the excitement about neuroplasticity has been generated by the popularity of 'cognitive fitness' games, books and video games, all of which are based on the idea that you can 'train your brain' like a muscle.

While there is some truth in this, the effects are much less than many people might expect and certainly, most people don't completely recover from brain injury.

I wonder if this book, like Peter Kramer's 1994 book Listening to Prozac (ISBN 0140266712), will showcase the success stories, while most people's experience will be much more modest.

There's certainly nothing wrong with presenting the highlights of new and exciting therapies, but I wonder whether it raises some people's expectations unrealistically.

Anyway, I've not read the book yet so I will have to see how it is tackled when I get a copy, and we're certainly crying out for an accessible treatment of the subject.

Brain Damage, Brain Repair (ISBN 0198523378) is a great academic text, but it's hardly something you'd take to the beach with you.

Link to NYT review.
Link The Brain That Changes Itself book / author's website.

—Vaughan.

Memory exploratorium:

San Francisco's interactive science museum Exploratorium has a fantastic online memory exhibit, that includes articles, games, demonstrations and lectures from leading memory researchers.

The exhibit looks at the science of memory, as well as how it is used in art.

There's a great article that explains memory distortions via Philip K. Dick and a try-it-yourself demonstration.

And for some unknown reason there's a slideshow of a sheep brain dissection, when what would be genuinely informative would be to see the memory structures in the human brain.

It's like going to an air show and watching someone take a bicycle apart.

Apart from that, the site's fantastic. The lectures are particularly good. Most cover the science of memory, but one is on ideas of forgetting in myth and story.

Link to Exploratorium memory exhibit.

—Vaughan.

May 29, 2007

Finding the wily thief:

A study that followed the lives of young males for 20 years has found that cognitive ability predicted whether the person was likely to engage in violence or theft if they had a tendency for antisocial behaviour.

Way back in '79, the researchers recruited 698 males from 12 to 18 years of age from a random telephone survey in New Jersey. They kept in contact with them until the year 2000.

The researchers interviewed the participants and asked about any antisocial behaviour or offences.

They also tested the participants using neuropsychological tests of verbal IQ and executive function - the ability to co-ordinate mental resources that is closely linked to the frontal lobes.

In the males who did end up engaging in antisocial behaviour, the ones with cognitive difficulties tended to be violent, while the ones who were cognitively more able tended to steal.

In other words, low mental ability was associated with violence while the brighter individuals tended to engage in theft.

This could be because successful theft could require more thought, from planning a robbery to tricking another individual, whereas successful violence just requires a target.

One of the difficulties in interpreting these sorts of studies, is that they rely on participants admitting their own offences, so maybe more intelligent people are likely to describe their crimes differently.

However, it certainly wasn't the case that more able people simply kept quiet about antisocial behaviour, as both reported wrongdoings, but of a different type.

UPDATE: Romeo Vitelli makes an interesting point in the comments:

All things being equal, theft is regarded as being less serious than violence is. Given that this study depends on self-report, are the ones who commit violence less likely to admit to committing violent crimes than the ones who commit theft?

Link to abstract of scientific paper.
Link to brief jargon-free summary.

—Vaughan.

The paradoxes of mental accounting:

The Washington Post has a fascinating article on the psychology of mental accounting - a seemingly simple process but one which seems to have curious effects on how we decide to spend our money.

The article suggests we mentally divide our money for different purposes, and tend to be reluctant to change our thinking, even when it is against our interests.

There's a nice example of turning up to the cinema and discovering you've lost your $20 ticket. How would you feel about shelling out for another one?

Compare this situation to one in which you turn up to the cinema to buy a ticket, but find you've lost a $20 bill. How would you feel about buying a cinema ticket in this situation?

Intuitively, it seems as if the first situation is worse, because you're buying another ticket, when, in fact, the loss is exactly the same in both situations.

It also seems that we assign different sources of money to different purposes, despite the fact that money is completely interchangeable:

Arkes and his colleagues once cited an anecdote in a study: Employees of a publishing firm who were in the Bahamas for an annual meeting were each given a cash bonus for getting a big contract. Almost to a person, the bonus recipients took the money to a local casino and blew it. What is interesting is that most of these people did not lose more than the $50 -- they slowed down or stopped when they felt they were playing with their "own" money rather than with the $50 of "free" money. The irony, of course, is that the $50 these people lost was their own money, too.

The article has got some more great examples of how we make spending decisions based on our own idosyncratic internal accounting schemes.

UPDATE: An interesting note from jswolf19, grabbed from the comments:

In my mind, the loss of the ticket and the loss of $20 are not the same. It's possible that I might find either the ticket or the $20 later (that it's misplaced instead of lost). However, the ticket will have become useless to me whereas the $20 will not have.

Link to Washington Post article 'mental accounting' (thanks Enchilada!)

—Vaughan.

Virtual insanity:

Wired and The New York Times have just each published an article about the use of virtual reality to simulate the experiences of schizophrenic psychosis. This is a PR success for its creator, Janssen-Cilag Pharmaceuticals, but its hardly news, as they've been showing the system since 2000.

The system originally had the appalling name 'Paved With Fear' and was unveiled in September 2000.

The company, who manufacture the antipsychotic drug risperidone (aka Risperdal), toured the world with the 'Paved with Fear' truck.

The rig allows users to put on the VR goggles and explore a virtual world, while the software is programmed to simulate hallucination-like experiences - abusive voices, visual scenes transforming into sinister images and so on.

It was covered in 2002 by an NPR radio show that has some audio and images from the simulation.

In one simulation, a schizophrenic has auditory and visual hallucinations while trying to refill a prescription, and sees the word "poison" on a bottle of pills.

Its not often you meet psychotic patients who hallucinate drug company PR, but Janssen seem to think that refusing their product is a sign of madness.

The system has been taken around the world and show to police, psychiatrists and families of people with mental illness.

The system has since been re-branded with the less stigmatising name 'Virtual Hallucinations' and continues to make the headlines, despite the fact that many other people have used VR to simulate psychosis.

I wrote an article in 2004 about some of the systems and talked to their creators, and got some feedback from a programmer and a psychologist who have experienced psychosis themselves.

They concluded that while VR simulations might be a useful simulation of the perceptual disturbance in psychosis, it also involves distortions of meaning and thinking that can't be captured.

The systems covered in the article were based on experiences taken from patient interviews and were made independently.

Psychiatrist Dr Peter Yellowless recently published a paper on the system he developed, and one system has been built in online virtual word Second Life. There are instructions online so you can try it yourself.

Link to NYT article 'A Virtual Reality That's Best Escaped'.
Link to 2004 article on using VR for psychosis simulation and research.
Link to summary of Yellowlees' paper on psychosis simulation.
Link to instructions for Second Life simulation.

—Vaughan.

May 28, 2007

Polish psychologists ordered to assess Tinky Winky:

A Polish government minister has ordered psychologists to investigate whether BBC TV show Teletubbies promotes homosexuality in children.

Yes, you read that right the first time.

Here's some of the story from BBC News:

The spokesperson for children's rights in Poland, Ewa Sowinska, singled out Tinky Winky, the purple character with a triangular aerial on his head.

"I noticed he was carrying a woman's handbag," she told a magazine. "At first, I didn't realise he was a boy."

...

Ms Sowinska wants the psychologists to make a recommendation about whether the children's show should be broadcast on public television.

A 2004 study on the accessibility of mental health services in Poland found that the interval between being first assessed and getting mental health care was 12 weeks - much longer than all other European centres in previous studies.

A study on work difficulties in Poland published in 2006 found that mental and behavioural disorders were among the main causes of early inability to work.

And the government is ordering psychologists to assess Tinky Winky. It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

Link to BBC News story.

—Vaughan.

The state of commercial neuroscience:

NeuroInsights have released a report on the neurotechnology industry that uncovers the growing market for brain-based goods and services.

The 350 page report will set you back $4,500 (that's almost $13 dollars a page!), but has been summarised by Zack Lynch, the company's managing director, on his blog.

Some of the highlights include:

2006 venture capital investment in neurotechnology rose 7.5% to $1.666 billion

Neurotech industry revenues rose 10% in 2006 to $120.5 billion; this includes neuropharmaceutical revenues of $101 billion, neurodevice revenues of $4.5 billion, neurodiagnostic revenues of $15 billion

The Neurotech Index of publicly-traded neurotechnology companies was up 53% from its December 31, 2003 conception to March 31, 2006, outpacing the NASDAQ Biotech Index which gained 7% during the same period

In other words, the brain is big money, and it's only likely to get bigger.

Needless to say, this makes us, the brain-owning public, equally blessed and cursed.

Commercial companies want us to spend our money on their products, meaning as well as developing technologies, they are likely to promote new ideas of well-being or ill-health to motivate us to use them.

This also tends to mean that problems faced by those with money (i.e. people in developed countries) get priority over the problems more typical of less developed countries.

So, treaments for diseases endemic in the developing world, like sleeping sickness, caused by trypanosoma infection and leading to brain disorder and eventual death, will likely be slow in coming.

However, we can be sure that some new advances in commercial neuroscience will be of huge benefit to many people.

The difficulty for us, and the investors, is that sometimes it is only clear which of the advances is significant with the benefit of hindsight.

Link to NeuroInsights industry report with free executive summary.
Link to Zack Lynch's summary and comments.

—Vaughan.

Brain patch:

An artist on Etsy is selling this wonderful iron-on brain patch based on an antique anatomical illustration.

For only $5 plus packing, you can get one of these delivered to your door and attached to, well, whatever you'd want a beautiful brain illustration attached to.

And if you can't think of any reason you'd want a iron on brain patch, go see the drawing in more detail.

The cortex has obviously been subject to a little 'artist license', but it's still a striking image.

Link to vintage medical anatomy illustration of the head and brain fabric patch.

—Vaughan.

May 27, 2007

Setting yourself back 30 years with hypnosis:

Celebrity hypnotist Paul McKenna on BBC Radio 4's music programme, Desert Island Discs:

"When you hear a song, back in say the 70s, the first time you heard it, it sounded absolutely fantastic and it'll never sound like that again. So, I age regressed myself - I know this sounds a little unusual - and took myself back and then whacked on Sister Sledge, and it just sounded phenomenal. It sounded like it did years ago. It was fresh, with those amazing big disco drums..."

Paul McKenna, confusing the sound of drums with the sound of serious hypnosis researchers banging their heads against the wall.

—Vaughan.

Broadcasting from the silent land:

If you've got half an hour, you could do a lot worse than spending it listening to ABC Radio National's All in the Mind interview with neuropsychologist Dr Paul Broks, author of Into the Silent Land (ISBN 1843540347).

Broks writes in a part philosophical, part hallucinatory style, focusing on patients whose understanding and experience of the self has been disturbed by brain injury.

It's one of my favourite books on neuropsychology, and Broks touches on many of its themes in the interview.

Broks has also written the play On Ego (ISBN 184002609X), which was based on part of the book, but which I found a little luke warm when I saw it and seemed to lack the originality of his writing.

However, he notes in the interview that he's currently writing another play with the Royal Shakespeare Company about a woman who has intense religious experiences and temporal lobe epilepsy (the two often co-occur), which sounds immensely promising.

Broks will also be appearing at three events at the Sydney Writer's Festival (two of which are free) so wander along if you happen to be in Sydney on May 31st or June 2nd.

Link to AITM interview with Paul Broks.

—Vaughan.

May 26, 2007

Guide to Psychology Blogs:

PsyBlog has just published the first part of a guide to online psychology and neuroscience blogs, and says some jolly nice things about Mind Hacks in the process.

PsyBlog author Jeremy also highlights a few more of the many good online reads, but is too modest to mention himself, so I thought I'd pitch in an redress the balance.

Go see PsyBlog, it certainly deserves to be on the list.

Link to PsyBlog Guide to Psychology Blogs - Part 1.

—Vaughan.

Inkling on Human Nature:

I've just discovered online science mag Inkling Magazine and noticed that their Human Nature section is full of great mind and brain articles.

Recent articles cover the safety of antidepressants for teenagers, the health risks of love and a brief interview with neuroscientist, author and stroke survivor Jill Bolte Taylor.

There's a whole stack more, so have a browse and see what lights your candle.

Link to Inkling's 'Human Nature' articles.

—Vaughan.

May 25, 2007

Down the barrel of a nail gun:

The ANZ Journal of Surgery just published the summary of a conference paper describing 12 patients with head injuries caused by nail guns. It makes for some surprising reading.

You might think brain injuries from nail guns would be rare, but there are a startling number of case studies in the medical literature.

A recent review of suicide attempts by nail gun noted it was unusual, but this new case series suggests that many of this type of brain injury are caused in this way.

In fact, out of the 12 cases, three quarters were attempting to kill themselves.

Mostly, the cases concern a single nail, but one case was particularly extreme:

The other case involved a staggering 24 nails of 5cm length and represents the largest number of intra-cranial nails in a surviving patient.

This beats the previous record of 12 nails, held by a man reported in a case study from a neurosurgery team in Portland, Oregon.

The picture is the X-ray of Isidro Mejia, who survived a nail gun accident in 2004, where he was unfortunate enough to have four nails embedded in his skull and two in his neck.

Removal of a nail often involves a craniotomy, where the surgeons have to cut around the bit of skull where the nail is embedded, and remove it in one piece.

There are some images of this operation in an article from the Spanish language neurosurgery journal Neurocirugía which is available online as a pdf.

Link to abstract of nail gun head injury case series.
pdf of Spanish language case report of neurosurgical nail removal.

—Vaughan.

Skywalker: personality disordered or misunderstood?:

Wired has picked up on the annual 'psychiatrists diagnose fictional character' story by noting that researchers have diagnosed Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader, with borderline personality disorder. But is he genuinely disordered or just misunderstood?

The diagnosis of personality disorder describes someone who is consistently emotionally unstable, impulsive and has difficulty forming stable relationships, often seeming aggressive and lacking in self-control.

Borderline personality disorder or BPD is a subtype, particularly characterised by feelings of emptiness and unstable identity, suicide and self-harm, extreme and fluctuating views of others, and occasional paranoid thinking.

In 1988 two psychiatrists published an influential study that questioned the diagnosis of personality disorder, suggesting it was just a label for patients that psychiatrists didn't like.

Lewis and Appleby gave a group of psychiatrists a number of clinical case studies, and asked them to rate their attitudes towards the patients, and say how they would treat them.

All the psychiatrists were given the same descriptions, except that some included an additional piece of information: that the patient had been given an earlier diagnosis of personality disorder.

This simple piece of information led the patients to be rated as less deserving of care, more difficult, manipulative, attention-seeking, annoying, and more in control of their suicidal urges and debts.

The authors of the study concluded that personality disorder "appears to be an enduring pejorative judgement rather than a clinical diagnosis. It is proposed that the concept be abandoned".

Although widely used, the diagnosis is still controversial, with some researchers arguing it is a useful and important classification, although admitting there's still plenty of work to be done.

So does Anakin Skywalker have borderline personality disorder? He probably fulfils the diagnostic criteria.

But the questions should really be 'does the diagnosis do anything except express our dislike for him?' and 'will medicalising his problems help him to improve his life?'.

Link to Wired article on diagnosing Anakin Skywalker (via OmniBrain).

—Vaughan.

2007-05-25 Spike activity:

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

The BPS Research Digest reports on yet another study on the cognitive benefits of meditation.

CrimePsychBlog picks up on an interesting study on the etiology of the psychopathic serial killer.

Core cognitive ability is mostly developed before adolescence, reports SciAm.

Accidental Mind has some illustrated brain notecards to download.

ABC Radio National's Health Report has a special on Alzheimer's disease, testosterone and the ageing brain.

Developing Intelligence investigates the neural basis of planning abilities.

The use of oxygen just after a stroke may actually harm the brain rather than help it, suggests a new study reported in SciAm.

Companies tune in to the potential of sound for marketing, reports The Economist.

A couple of interesting news stories on the treatment of mental illness in the US military are picked up by Corpus Callosum.

Wired report on new commercial prototypes for 'home use' magnetic brain stimulators.

A perceptual deficiency may make us better foragers, suggests research expertly covered by Cognitive Daily.

SciAm investigates the effects of having half the brain surgically removed.

—Vaughan.

May 24, 2007

Rainbow accessories:

A man walks into a psychologist's office. "Doctor", he says, "I've fallen in love with two school bags and I'm worried I'm abnormal". "There's no need to be concerned", says the psychologist, "I think you're just bi-satchel".

(thanks Kevin!)

—Vaughan.

Narrative self, split brain:

If you liked our recent post on what the stories of our lives say about us, Philosophy Now has an article on how the self might be based on our ability to create narratives.

The article looks at how the self has been related to our ability to make narratives out of the disconnected events in our lives, and particularly focuses on the theories of philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur.

MacIntyre emphasises that the concept of personal identity is not only logically dependent upon the concept of a narrative, but it's also the other way round. In other words it is meaningless to talk about a character biography unless one presupposes that its subject has a personal identity. The biography must be about a continually-existing thing. Conversely, it is pointless, meaningless, to state that some being has a personal identity through time, and at the same time deny that this being has a possible biography.

...

[In Ricoeur's theory] narratives, or more precisely plots, synthesise reality. A plot fuses together intentions, causal relations, and chance occurrences in a unified sequence of actions and events. Ricoeur seems to think that the plot creates a unified pattern in a chaotic series of events, ties them together, making them meaningful wholes.

This idea has also been taken up by more cognitive science-oriented philosophers, most notably, Daniel Dennett.

In his paper 'The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity', Dennett argues that the main function of consciousness is to generate a sense of narrative for our experiences.

He references experiments on 'split-brain' patients, whose cortical hemisphere's cannot directly communicate because their main link, the corpus callosum, has been severed.

In some situations, these patients seem to show a self which isn't a unified whole, where some knowledge and experience is accessible to some parts (like perception) but not others (like speech).

Despite these obvious divisions, the patients report that they still feel like an apparently unified "sole inhabitant" of the body, as if their narrative is maintained.

Link to Philosophy Now article 'Don Quixote and The Narrative Self'.
Link to Dennett's article 'The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity'.

—Vaughan.

Confronting suicide on campus and online:

Two articles published yesterday examine youth suicide by focusing on the increasing number of suicides among US college students and how Korean authorities are trying to crack down on suicide websites and online pacts.

An article in the The LA Times examined how student suicides are leading people to question the adequacy of campus mental health services.

The student years often put a particular strain on mental health.

Because of existing support, many people are now able to attend university that would have never gone before because their mental disorder couldn't be adequately managed.

However, the transition to university life can put additional strain on some people, and the late teens and early twenties are when most mental health problems emerge, even for people who don't attend college.

The New York Times article investigates how suicidal young people in South Korea are using the web to trade tips and organise suicide pacts.

As part of a wider suicide prevention plan, The Korean authorites are now trying to crack down on these websites in a bid to stop young people encouraging each other's suicidial tendencies.

Link to LA Times article 'Suicides a symptom of larger UC crisis'.
Link to NYT article 'Tracking an Online Trend, and a Route to Suicide'.

—Vaughan.

May 23, 2007

Headlong into brain injury and skullduggery:

These completely passed me by last year but are well worth checking out: BBC Radio 4 broadcast a couple of excellent radio programmes - one on the effects and treatment of mild brain injury and other other on the doomed historical attempt to link intelligence to skull size.

Mild traumatic brain injury doesn't necessarily mean that effects are minor.

For some people, fatigue, poor concentration, memory difficulties and irritability may continue when the immediate affects of the injury have subsided.

These symptoms can be quite dramatic, even after simple concussion, and there is now significant interest in this post-concussional syndrome as it is quite disabling for some people.

What is interesting, is that there is evidence that these symptoms can arise out of a combination of the original brain damage plus psychological distress and poor coping strategies.

In other words, it's not just the brain injury that causes the problems but also how people make sense of and deal with their experience.

The programme on skull size and intelligence looks at how early 20th century researchers tried to link intelligence to skull size in the futile attempt to prove that various races where biologically inferior.

A dodgy aim but an important chapter in the history of science gone wrong.

Link to documentary on mild brain injury.
Link to documentary on intelligence and skull size.

—Vaughan.

The story of your life:

The New York Times has an interesting piece on an often neglected area of psychology that looks at the significance of the stories we use to explain our lives to ourselves and others.

A small but active area of research called 'narrative psychology' has been examining how we make and use stories about our experiences for some years now.

The NYT article picks up on some research findings from Dr Dan McAdams' research group that show some common themes in life stories and suggest they may be linked to particular psychological characteristics:

In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people's current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.

By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner. Often, too, they say they felt singled out from very early in life — protected, even as others nearby suffered.

The article also suggests that the narratives are heavily influenced by our social knowledge, so we apply cultural templates for stories of success, failure and redemption to best make sense of our experience.

Link to NYT article 'This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It)'.

—Vaughan.

The irrational guide to gaming the system:

The latest edition of Scientific American has a freely available feature article on how our decisions are often irrational in game theory terms, but can still be more beneficial than the supposed rational choice.

Game theory tries to understand choices when individuals are working independently and each choice affects the other person's gains or losses.

In other words, it asks the question 'considering I don't know what choice the other person is going to make, what is the best option to maximise my own outcome?'.

This was famously the basis of the American Cold War policy of stockpiling huge amounts of nuclear missiles.

Obviously it would be better if there were fewer nuclear weapons in the world, but if the USA decided to reduce the number of missiles, how could it trust the Soviets to do the same?

Game theory suggested that the best option was to have so many weapons that they could destroy the other country. This way, if the other country reduced their stockpile, they were safe, and if they didn't, both countries were equally armed.

If this were the case, the potential outcome for starting a nuclear war would be the destruction of both countries. As each wanted to avoid this fate, the idea was that it resulted in a stable but uneasy standoff.

Without a hint of irony, the policy was called MAD, short for Mutual Assured Destruction.

While this is perhaps an extreme example of game theory in action, it can be applied to many situations in which gains and losses are dependent on another person's choices.

In essence, it's a mathematical take on a psychological guessing game.

The SciAm article looks at how there are many situations where game theory predicts the most rational outcome, but which may actually lead to much less gains for everyone than if people make an irrational response.

One version of the most rational outcome is the Nash equilibrium, named after Nobel-prize winning mathematician John Nash, who was also the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind.

This is where everyone has settled on a choice where no one has anything to gain by choosing something else.

As the article discusses, this rarely happens in practice, however, and in many cases people just take the risk that they may get screwed over and maximise their benefits as a result.

This suggests that game theory can be a narrow view of human interaction (for example, it doesn't account for the role of dialogue in the arms race).

This was also a criticism made by Adam Curtis, producer of documentary series The Trap, who argued that game theory had given a cynical and oversimplified view of human psychology that has been disastrously applied to politics.

Whether you buy Curtis' political view or not, it's a fascinating example of how trying to model psychological decision making can have a huge influence on world politics.

Curtis' documentary is variously available online, but unfortunately, video streaming sites are blocked from work, but it seems to turn up quite frequently on a Google search.

And if you want more on economics and rationality, ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone just had a programme on the ethics of economic rationalism.

UPDATE: The Trap episode 1, episode 2 and episode 3 are available on Google video. From some reason episode 3 is in three 20 minutes chunks, but the next chunk is linked from each page.

Link to SciAm article 'The Traveler's Dilemma'.
Link to The Philosopher's Zone on economic rationalism.

—Vaughan.

May 22, 2007

Encephalon 23 arrives:

The 23rd edition of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon has just been published, this time ably hosted by Madam Fathom.

A couple of my favourites include a fantastic article on inducing slow wave sleep by stimulating the brain with magnets - from the wonderfully named Phineas Gage Fan Club, and some excellent coverage from The Neurocritic on an intriguing theory about how higher cognitive functions might be organised in the brain.

If you want more of the latest musings from the internet's keenest mind and brain writers, you know where to go.

Link to Encephalon 23.

—Vaughan.

A Secret not worth keeping:

If you roll your eyes every time you hear more media hype surrounding the pseudoscientific 'think your way to victory' film The Secret, Scientific American has a short, sharp, shock of a reply to its dodgy claims about the mind and brain.

A pantheon of shiny, happy people assures viewers that The Secret is grounded in science: "It has been proven scientifically that a positive thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought." No, it hasn't. "Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we're not loving and we're not grateful." Those ungrateful cancer patients. "You've got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week." Sure, if you convert your body's hydrogen into energy through nuclear fission. "Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you." But in magnets, opposites attract--positive is attracted to negative. "Every thought has a frequency.... If you are thinking that thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency."

The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell's equations any electric current produces a magnetic field. But as neuroscientist Russell A. Poldrack of the University of California, Los Angeles, explained to me, these fields are minuscule and can be measured only by using an extremely sensitive superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) in a room heavily shielded against outside magnetic sources.

Actually, I'm all for anything that helps people to think more positively, but basing your advice on misinformation and empty promises is a recipe for disaster.

Link to SciAm article 'The (Other) Secret'.

—Vaughan.

Is the mental health system racist?:

BBC's Newsnight programme just had an interesting video report on the renewed debate about whether mental health services are institutionally racist.

While these accusations have been made for some time, what is new is that some black and ethnic minority mental health workers who work in these communities are starting to argue that this label actually makes it more difficult to provide fair treatment to their patients.

The subject was recently tackled in one of regular debates held at the Maudsley Hospital in South East London, which is available online as a podcast.

It is widely known that in the UK, black and ethnic ethnic minority people are much more likely to be diagnosed with a psychotic mental illness, such as schizophrenia, than other members of society.

While this was originally thought to be a sign of racism in itself, studies have suggested that this pattern is true of almost all immigrant communities (e.g. Finnish immigrants to Sweden), rather than simply a black and white issue, and that the rates still hold when psychiatrists are asked to diagnose cases based only on their symptoms with the ethic origin hidden.

The debate has now largely moved on and the focus is now on outcomes and experiences in the mental health system.

For example, regardless of the higher rates of psychosis, it seems that when in contact with mental health services, outcomes for Afro-Carribean people are much worse than white people.

This is where the subtlety in the debate lies. Higher rates of diagnosis in one racial group are not necessarilly a sign of discrimination, but poorer outcomes after treatment has started are more likely to suggest this group is not being fairly treated.

An influential report called 'Breaking the Circles of Fear' found that people from ethnic minorties tend to have a more negative experience of the mental health system and fear the consequences of becoming involved with it.

Furthermore, it found that mental health professionals were often afraid of talking about race issues for fear of appearing racist.

Psychiatrists Prof Swaran Singh (pictured) and Dr Shubulade Smith argue in the video report that accusations of racism actually make it more difficult for people from ethnic minority communities to get fair treatment, as it interferes with sensible clinical decision making.

In contrast, campaigners like Lee Jasper and psychiatrist Dr Kwame McKenzie argue that unless we admit that the system is racist, problems won't be adequately addressed.

One important factor might be that immigrant communities tend to be poor, live in urban environments, have weaker family support and have higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, all of which have been found to increase rates of schizophrenia.

This makes it difficult to disentangle the effects of mental health treatment, and a society where black and ethnic minority groups are more likely to live stressful and depressed communities.

The fact that ethnic minority psychiatrists are now starting to challenge the idea that the mental health system is racist must be a positive sign, however, as twenty years ago, most would be in agreement that it was not set up to deal with the needs of minority communities.

Link to BBC News on the debate with video report.
Link to podcast of Maudsley Debate 'The Race Blame Game'.

—Vaughan.

May 21, 2007

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!:

I've just found an entry on PubMed for a curious sounding case study:

An unusual perversion: the desire to be injured by an automobile operated by a woman.

American Journal of Psychiatry. 1960 May;116:1032.

KEELER MH.

I imagine it caused havoc during rush hour.

Unfortunately, the paper doesn't have a summary, and I'm not able to access back issues of the AJP at the moment, so it will have to remain a mystery for the time being.

Link to PubMed entry.

—Vaughan.

A report from LSD creator's 100th birthday conference:

Online science magazine Litmus Zine has a interesting report of one person's experience of last year's LSD conference that was convened to discuss the science of this curious molecule and celebrate discover Dr Albert Hoffman's 100th birthday.

The conference took place in Basel, Switzerland and the attendees were reportedly a strange mixture of neuroscientists, hippys, psychologists, artists, sociologists and visionaries.

The article weaves the history of LSD with the topics of the conference, giving an account of the drug's past and present.

I've not come across Litmus Zine before, but it looks like it's got some great content already online and aims to take a fresh approach to science writing.

Link to article 'Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out … Get Well?' (thanks Mat!)

—Vaughan.

Jerry Fodor's aunt:

Many thanks to Ulrich Mohrhoff for reminding me of the Jerry Fodor article I was trying to remember where he explains his theory of mental representation to his aunt.

The article is called "Fodor's Guide to Mental Representation: The Intelligent Auntie's Vade-Mecum", published in Mind, (New Series, Vol. 94, No. 373, Jan., 1985, pp. 76-100) and reprinted in Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (ISBN 0262071533).

The whole article doesn't seem to be available online, but the first page does seem to appear on JSTOR.

The opening paragraph is wonderful:

It rained for week and we were all so tired of ontology, but there didn't seem to be much else to do. Some of the children started to sulk and pull the cat's tail. It was going to be an awful afternoon until Uncle Wilfred thought of Mental Representations (which was a game we hadn't played for years) and everyone got very excited and we jumped up and down and waved our hands and all talked at once and had a perfectly lovely romp. But Auntie said she couldn't stand the noise and there would be tears before bedtime if we didn't please calm down.

Link to first page of 'Fodor's Guide to Mental Representation'.

—Vaughan.

May 20, 2007

You can’t make metaphysics out of fudge:

Philosopher Jerry Fodor has written a wonderfully entertaining review of Galen Strawson's new book 'Consciousness and Its Place in Nature' for the London Review of Books.

In his book, Strawson looks at the assumption that consciousness arises from the physical matter of the brain and comes to the startling but coherent conclusion that maybe everything has the capacity for consciousness.

Fodor explains it like so:

So, then, if everything is made of the same sort of stuff as tables and chairs (as per monism), and if at least some of the things made of that sort of stuff are conscious (there is no doubt that we are), and if there is no way of assembling stuff that isn't conscious that produces stuff that is (there's no emergence), it follows that the stuff that tables, chairs and the bodies of animals (and, indeed, everything else) is made of must itself be conscious. Strawson, having wrestled his angel to a draw, stands revealed as a panpsychist: basic things (protons, for example) are loci of conscious experience. You don't find that plausible? Well, I warned you.

Fodor is always a great read (just have a look at the first paragraph of the review) and he often writes amusing and original articles.

One of his papers (and for the life of me I can't remember which) takes the form of him explaining a philosophical argument to his aunt.

His ideas causes all sorts of controversy in cognitive science. For example, he argues that humans have a language of thought - a sort of common basic code that all thought is based on.

Artificial intelligence researchers love this approach, as you might expect, but it drives many people nuts as they object to the ideas that the mind is just an information processor and that concepts and beliefs can be independently represented in the brain.

My favourite retort is from a book by Still and Costall called 'Against Cognitivism' (ISBN 0745010253) who write that Fodor's theories are

"where one tries to keep a reasonably straight face while presenting the absurd consequences of the scheme as exciting theoretical revelations".

Have that sir!

There's a funny tagline at the bottom of Fodor's review relating to such criticisms which made me chuckle:

Jerry Fodor teaches philosophy and psychology at Rutgers University. Everyone wonders why he is writing still another book about the language of thought.

And if anyone knows the name of the Fodor article I can't remember, do let me know!

Link to review of 'Consciousness and Its Place in Nature' (via 3Q).
Link to details of book.

—Vaughan.

May 19, 2007

Is the US over-diagnosing bipolar disorder in children?:

New Scientist has an open-access article on the increasing tendency for atypical American children to be diagnosed with 'juvenile bipolar disorder'.

Children are being increasingly diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the US, despite the fact that there is limited evidence for its validity and disagreement about its symptoms.

As we reported in a previous Mind Hacks article, mental disorder presents differently in children (for reasons that are not well understood) and diagnosis is fraught with difficulties.

Not least because children often are not able to report their thoughts and emotions adequately, and many different forms of distress get expressed as 'misbehaviour', making it hard to distinguish between different causes.

One of the other effects of the increasing number of children diagnosed with bipolar, is that an increasing number are being medicated with drugs that have barely been tested in anyone other than adults.

This is despite the fact that parenting programmes, such as the Webster-Stratton 'Incredible Years' programme, are known to be effective ways of improving behaviour.

Advocates for the disorder argue that it has been previously unrecognised and only now is it being properly diagnosed, and that it causes serious distress and impairment in affected children and their families.

The NewSci article looks at some of the trends in diagnosis and treatment, and speaks to child mental health researchers on both sides of the fence.

Link to NewSci article 'Bipolar children - is the US overdiagnosing?'.

—Vaughan.

May 18, 2007

The benefits of persistence:

Philip Dawdy is an investigative journalist who runs the Furious Seasons blog and he's been on Eli Lilly's case for some time.

He's been following the ongoing legal proceedings over whether the drug company obscured information about the side effects of antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, and has been posting some seemingly incriminating documents online that have probably made the company quite uncomfortable.

His work has just got him a mental health award that was voted for by mental health professionals and service users.

It was created by a corporate sponsor who fund the award but get no say in who receives the honour. The name of the sponsor? Eli Lilly.

I love the smell of irony in the morning.

Link to Furious Seasons on forthcoming award.

—Vaughan.

How doctors think, but psychiatrists still a mystery:

Dr Jerome Groopman has written a book on the psychology of medical decision making called How Doctors Think but interestingly, he specifically excludes psychiatrists, as he says their thought processes are too complicated to understand.

Groopman talks about his book on the NPR radio programme Fresh Air, which also has the introduction of his book available online.

The end of the introduction is telling:

I quickly realized that trying to assess how psychiatrists think was beyond my abilities. Therapy of mental illness is a huge field unto itself that encompasses various schools of thought and theories of mind. For that reason, I do not delve into psychiatry in this book.

Among the medical profession psychiatry is one of the more poorly paid and less respected specialities, possibly because traditionally 'dangerous' medical interventions (such as surgery) are limited, and it often involves dealing with disturbed and difficult patients - which makes it seem less glamorous to the public.

You'll notice this at election time. Politicians are quite happy to stand next to grateful working folk who've just had a life threatening tumour removed, but are strangely reluctant to stand next to oddly behaving unemployed people who've just been saved from suicide.

This lack of status belies the fact that psychiatrists deal with the most complex conceptual problems.

There is very little discussion about the philosophy of cardiology because we tend to understand disordered hearts on a limited number of levels.

In contrast, the philosophy of psychiatry is a huge area, because understanding the disordered mind involves drawing together a number of different levels and approaches in the context of one person's life and experience.

Psychology, neuroscience, sociology, physiology, philosophy, ethics and law are all needed for even the most simple of consultations. And this is just for starters.

This is not to say that other types of medicine are straightforward, but they certainly deal with fewer philosophical difficulties on a day-to-day basis.

This leads to uncertainty and doctors generally hate not knowing what's happening as it's often considered a sign of failure.

Psychiatrists, good ones at least, will spend a lot more time saying they don't know than other doctors. They handle a lot more uncertainty, and this is what makes some physicians uncomfortable.

The fact that someone could write a book on the thought processes of physicians but won't even attempt to start on the mental life of psychiatrists is, I think, a very sincere compliment.

Link to NPR Fresh Air on 'How Doctors Think'.

—Vaughan.

2007-05-18 Spike activity:

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

Discover magazine interview Marc Hauser about the psychology of moral reasoning.

Mixing Memory picks up on an article tracking the history of the concept of mind.

The Guardian has an opinion piece by an NHS psychologist arguing that psychosis is over-medicalised.

ABC Radio National's discussion programme Ockham's Razor takes an in-depth look at auditory processing deficits.

The Neurophilosopher investigates the curious case of the anarchist's pickled brain.

BBC News reports on research suggesting women have lower sex drives in secure relationships.

People with levels of testosterone are more likely to feel rewarded by other people's anger, reports Science Daily.

What is a neural network and how does its operation differ from that of a digital computer? Scientific American 'asks the expert'.

The sight of the female body is more rewarding for men, than the sight of the male body is for women, according to research reported in The Telegraph.

Madam Fathom looks at the increasing cross over between neuroscience and economics.

Sarin gas may have affected brains of US soldiers, according to The New York Times.

More cool visual illusions from Cognitive Daily.

BBC News notes that antidepressant use in the UK rose 6% during the last year.

—Vaughan.

May 17, 2007

Quinn Norton has her sixth sense removed:

Reporter Quinn Norton, who had a magnet implanted into her finger to allow her to 'feel' magnetic fields has finally had it removed - returning her to the normal world of the 'five senses'.

We reported on the operation last year, and Norton wrote up her experiences in an extended Wired article that also looked at the role of body modification in extending the human sense range.

Norton notes that even though she glad she's had the magnet removed (it wasn't without problems - it broke up in her body and got infected) she still misses the extra sense:

In the background of all this are the questions the magnet led me to, the ones that make the magnet look pedestrian. Human augmentation and even advanced treatment really begin to erode at what we think humans are, in society, in the justice system, in medicine itself. What are we going to become inevitably is also the question of who we are now, and beginning to ask the former brings home how little we know about the later.

I'm excited and scared to be trying to find out. I miss my magnet, but I knew it wasn't well understood when I started. I'm glad I know what a spinning drive and a ringing telephone wire feel like. I'm sad I can't feel them anymore.

Link to Quinn Norton on losing her sixth sense.
Link to Wired article on magnet implant.

—Vaughan.

Rare risks and irrational responses:

Security guru Bruce Schneier has written an insightful article for Wired about rational precautions for rare risks, and why the typical response after a rare catastrophe is usually psychologically satisfying but practically irrelevant.

He writes the article in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, which have caused a number of bizarre responses by people worried about whether it might happen again (banning fake guns in theatrical productions, for example).

Trying to reduce the risk from the rare people who are both violent and mentally disturbed is often the responsibility of forensic psychologists and psychiatrists.

Interestingly, they don't spend their whole time thinking 'how can we stop this person murdering someone', as although this is the sort of thing that hits the headlines, it's actually incredibly rare.

People who have already murdered someone are generally locked away and don't pose much of a risk, but for someone who has never murdered anyone or never attempted to, predicting whether they will can be very difficult.

In fact, it's difficult to gather data to determine whether your predictions are accurate or not.

Imagine you have a risk assessment that predicts that a person is highly likely to murder someone.

To best evaluate your prediction, you'd want to wait and see if it turns out to be true, but in these circumstances, you can't. You have to intervene.

Once you've intervened, you don't know whether your prediction was true or not.

Forensic mental health professions spend a lot of time thinking, as Schneier recommends, 'have we done everything that is feasible to reduce the risk to the public based on what we know about the most common risks'.

In other words, they focus on the principle of maximising safety, rather spending all their time and energy on highly unlikely events that may be impossible to predict.

As they tend to be so frequently in touch with the legal system, their second line of thinking tends to be 'if the extremely unlikely does occur, will we be seen to have done everything that was required by the courts', because at the end of the day, the law is the final say on what is acceptable when predicting the unpredictable.

Link to 'Virginia Tech Lesson: Rare Risks Breed Irrational Responses'.
Link to information on forensic psychology.
Link to online book on forensic psychiatry from the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

—Vaughan.

BBC Case Notes special on multiple sclerosis:

BBC Radio 4's weekly medical programme Case Notes just had a special on multiple sclerosis. The programme looks at what we know about the brain disorder and investigates the controversial use of cannabis as a treatment.

Some neurons in the brain have extended sections called axons that allow the neuron to transmit signals over distance.

The signals travel down the axon as electrical pulses, and as with electrical wires in the house, the signalling is more efficient when it is insulated from the outside world.

Axons are insulated by a layer of fatty covering called myelin.

In MS, the myelin starts to degrade and the neurons are eventually unable to send signals, becoming useless and withering.

It is not clear why this happens, but it might be because a problem with the immune system means the body starts attacking and destroying the myelin.

The destruction of myelin in the brain is not evenly spread out and doesn't continue at a steady rate, meaning that people with the disorder may have difficulties with a whole variety of different brain functions.

This pattern might differ from person to person, and might progress at a different rate.

Movement, memory, attention, mood, perception and speech can all be affected (to name but a few), and the person is at a much higher risk for mental illness as a result.

Currently, there is no cure for MS but several treatments are known to slow the disorder or help with the symptoms.

These can include drugs that regulate the immune system and steroids to limit the damage.

However, many patients report that cannabis significantly helps with the symptoms.

While cannabis treatment is illegal in most countries, researchers are trying to understand what is it about cannabis that helps, and are working on developing medications based on cannabinoids.

The programme looks at these treatments, as well as looking at the science of MS, and how is it managed by the clinical team.

Link to Case Notes special on MS.

—Vaughan.

May 16, 2007

Visual illusions competition winners announced:

OmniBrain has alerted me to the fact that the winners of the 2007 Visual Illusion contest have been announced, with all of the top ten entries viewable online.

Most of the entries are animated and range from the striking to the subtle.

My favourite is the one pictured, simple but effective, which you really need to see in action to get the full effect.

There's many more at the link below, most with psychological explanations of how they work.

Link to top 10 winners.

—Vaughan.

Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness wins science book prize:

As an update to an earlier story, psychologist Daniel Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness has been announced as the winner of The Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

The book is a hugely entertaining look at the science of happiness, covering everything from brain science to decision making experiments using sandwiches.

It's perhaps most interesting for presenting research on how bad we are at predicting how happy our choices will make us, and how future events will impact our sense of well-being.

One useful recent additon to the book's website is a brief study guide for lecturers wanting to use the book, as Gilbert does, for teaching students.

Link to announcement from The Royal Society.
Link to coverage from BBC News.
Link to book website.
Link to Daniel Gilbert's lab homepage.

—Vaughan.

Happy Birthday Prozac:

Prozac is twenty and The Observer celebrates with an article noting 20 things you may not know about the drug that was supposed to make us 'better than well'.

Prozac is the brand name for the drug fluoxetine and was so successful that it has become a by-word for antidepressants and psychiatric drug treatment.

Its popularity was partly due to it being a safer alternative to the older tricyclic antidepressants, such as amitriptyline, and the addictive benzodiazepine drugs used to treat anxiety, such as Vallium.

Also, it came at a time when depression was becoming destigmatised and more widely recognised. Helped in no small part, of course, by Eli Lilly heavily funding a number 'public education' campaigns and depression support groups.

During the 1990s Prozac was truly considered a wonder drug.

Psychiatrist Peter Kramer's 1994 book Listening to Prozac (ISBN 0140266712) had case studies of people who's marriages were saved, porn addiction was cured (!) and generally became better, more thoughtful people after taking the drug.

Notably, several of the case studies were not people who were clinically depressed. Kramer wondered whether we would take such drugs to improve on normality rather than to treat pathology, and coined the term 'cosmetic pharmacology' for the former.

As the 90s drew to a close, clouds started to form and the sunshine started to fade.

The storm broke in 1998 as court cases focused on the negative effects of Prozac and related drugs and an influential paper was published suggesting the drug wasn't as effective as it was thought.

Drug company Smithkline was sued by the family of a man who killed himself and his family after taking the related drug paroxetine, also known as Paxil or Seroxat.

The court case involve psychiatrist Dr David Healy who had been investigating the possible role of Prozac in stirring up suicidal thoughts in some depressed patients.

Healy discovered that Eli Lilly had obscured the adverse effects of Prozac from their pre-release drug trials and was subsequently subjected to a dirty tricks campaign by the company.

This became a legal case in itself and he eventually settled for what are thought to be significant out-of-court damages.

Furthermore, an influential paper published by Irving Kirsh and Guy Sapirstein (wittily titled 'Listening to Prozac but hearing placebo'), analysed a series of antidepressant drug trials and reported that only 25% of the improvement in the patients was due to the drug, the rest, the data suggested, was placebo effect.

Researchers started to challenge the virtually evidence free message that 'low serotonin causes depression' on which the marketing campaigns for SSRI drugs relied.

More recently, worries have emerged about Prozac and related drugs increasing suicidal thoughts in some children (again with allegations about drug companies burying negative findings), with antidepressants now carrying a warning on the box to alert doctors and clinicians.

The pendulum has swung back a little since then, with recent studies indicating that while some children will have an increase in suicidal thinking, they are a small minority and, generally, the benefits outweigh the risks in most children.

Current evidence suggests that Prozac is an effective treatment for depression, although it's not without side-effects and, on balance, is about as effective as most other antidepressants.

Prozac is a useful treatment for depression and anxiety, but is no longer the 'wonder drug' it once was - and we're probably all better off for having a more balanced view.

The Observer article is a guide to the drug and its wide-ranging impact on society, covering everything from its neurochenical effects to its influence on the music scene.

Link to Observer article 'Eternal sunshine' (via Furious Seasons).

—Vaughan.

May 15, 2007

Staying awake record attempt live on the web:

Tony Wright is aiming to beat the world record for staying awake, and you can watch him on a webcam. The record is currently held by Randy Gardner who managed 11 days without sleep.

A previous record was famously claimed by Radio DJ Peter Tripp who stayed awake for 8 days, but used methylphenidate (Ritalin) to help him fight off sleep.

Methylphenidate is a form of amphetamine and it's known to increase the risk of psychosis in some people. Sleep deprivation is also linked to psychosis.

Needless to say, Tripp was quite psychotic by the end of his 'wakeathon' with hallucinations and paranoid delusions.

As it wasn't widely known that Tripp had taken stimulants, it was assumed that sleep deprivation led to madness.

This is why Gardner suggested at the final press conference that he was perfectly fine, announcing that "I wanted to prove that bad things didn't happen if you went without sleep".

Contrary to Gardner's claims, it was obvious that the lack of sleep was causing cognitive difficulties, as well as temporary delusions and hallucinations, although not to the same extent as Tripp suffered.

We know now that sleep deprivation causes significant mood problems, reality distortion and profound cognitive difficulties.

So, if you're watching the webcam you might see some rather unusual behaviour, as Tony Wright is likely to be experiencing some very odd things as time goes on.

Link to Tony Wright's record attempt webpage (via MeFi).
Link to live webcam.

—Vaughan.

Hume on the perversions of John Locke:

18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume makes a dig at John Locke in the footnote to one of his most famous books - A Treatise of Human Nature.

Hume wrote that completing the Treatise, at the age of 26, affected his mental health, causing 'philosophical melancholy and delirium'.

Footnote 1. I here make use of these terms, impression and idea, in a sense different from what is usual, and I hope this liberty will be allowed me. Perhaps I rather restore the word, idea, to its original sense, from which Mr LOCKE had perverted it, in making it stand for all our perceptions.

Link to Wikipedia page on David Hume.
Link to online copy of A Treatise of Human Nature.

—Vaughan.

How the Mind Works: The video lectures:

The Technology, Entertainment, Design conference has strayed from its original focus and now hosts a wide-ranging set of talks, including a number on 'How the Mind Works', all of which are available online as streamed video.

I'm always a bit suspicious of anything in psychology with grand titles like this.

I remember smiling to myself when I started reading Steven Pinker's (actually very good) book of the same name, where he wrote in the first few pages that the book won't actually tell you how the mind works, but will just help explain what we've worked out already.

I thought it would be better called 'What I Think About What We Know About How the Mind Works So Far', but I suspect the publisher's would have objected.

The joke goes that Daniel Dennett's equally as grandly titled book 'Consciousness Explained' should really be called 'Consciousness Explained Away', as he argues that their is no such thing as qualia and no hard problem to solve, two of the main issues thought to be key in consciousness research.

If you want to know more about Dennett's views on consciousness, you can have a look at his TED lecture.

The other talks are fascinating and diverse. Helen Fisher talks about the psychology and biology of love, Daniel Gilbert talks about happiness and why we are so bad at understanding it, Ray Kurzweil talk about how we're shortly all to become super evolved drug-enhanced semi-robots.

There's plenty of other talks as well, so see what catches your interest. None of them will tell you how the mind works, but they'll tell you some of what we know so far.

Link to videos of TED mind, brain and society talks.

—Vaughan.

May 14, 2007

My Dream:

A poem by Ogden Nash entitled 'My Dream'.

This is my dream,
It is my own dream,
I dreamt it.
I dreamt that my hair was kempt.
Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.

—Vaughan.

Minds and computers:

ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone just had an excellent edition on artificial intelligence and whether a computer could ever simulate the mind.

The guest on the show is philosopher Matt Carter, who's also just written a book on the subject called Minds and Computers (ISBN 0748620990).

For half an hour, the programme is a remarkably comprehensive guide to some of the key issues in the philosophy of artificial intelligence and computational models of mind.

Alan Saunders: Is it an interesting question because we think that perhaps we could develop computers that are like us in some intellectual respect and to whose rights we will perhaps have to give recognition? Or is it because we think that the computational model will tell us something about our own minds?

Matt Carter: It's an excellent question, and I think the answer is both. There's a sense in which we really hope to understand our own minds better through this kind of computational understanding, and certainly the computational theory of mind is currently by far the most dominant theory in the philosophy of mind and the culture of sciences broadly. But there are also a number of people working on strong artificial intelligence projects, and the ultimate goal of those projects is to produce man-made artifacts that have minds in precisely the same sense, or some very similar sense, in which we take ourselves to have minds.

Link to Philosopher's Zone on 'Minds and Computers'.

—Vaughan.

Neuropsychoanalysis: Freud and the brain:

Bookslut has an in-depth interview with neuropsychologist Dr Mark Solms, one of the pioneers of neuropsychoanalysis, the field that attempts to test, extend and integrate Freudian ideas with modern neuroscience.

Twenty years ago, Freud's ideas were considered virtually obsolete by mainstream cognitive scientists, but some recent findings have suggested a neurocognitive basis for some key Freudian ideas.

For example, a 2001 paper by Anderson and Green suggested that people can effectively suppress unwanted memories from consciousness and that the executive system (considered a key control function of the frontal lobes) may be responsible.

More recently, a study of brain injured patients who confabulate (produce false or unlikely memories without intending to deceive) have reported that the false memories are more likely to be positive and emotionally uplifting, suggesting a level of wish fulfilment.

In the interview, Solms discusses the future of neuropsychoanalysis, addresses some of the criticisms, and talks about his new translation of Freud's complete works.

Link to Mark Solms interview.
Link to Wikipedia page on neuropsychoanalysis.

—Vaughan.

May 13, 2007

Face contributes most to overall attractiveness:

New Scientist has a short report suggesting that the face contributes more to the overall impression of attractiveness than the body.

The research was led by biologist Marianne Peters who asked participants to rate the attractiveness of a number of people, presented as photographs of either the whole person, the face only or the body only.

They found that faces account for more of the variation among ratings than do bodies; in other words, faces are more important. For women rating men, 52 per cent of the attractiveness score was made up by the face rating, while for bodies it was 24 per cent. The trend was similar when men rated women, with 47 per cent of a woman's overall attractiveness accounted for by her face, and 32 per cent by her body.

Interestingly, the face and body affected the overall attractiveness independently and there was no interaction.

For example, there was no 'double whammy' effect for having a face and body that were both rated either high or low on the attractiveness scale.

Link to NewSci report 'The face, not the body, attracts a mate'.
Link to abstract of scientific paper.

—Vaughan.

May 12, 2007

Bioterrorism and the brain:

ABC Radio National's All in the Mind has a compelling discussion about the development and dangers of weapons designed to target the brain and nervous system.

The guests on the programme are Prof Malcom Dando and Dr Mark Wheelis, who have recently written a paper for the International Red Cross entitled 'Neurobiology: A Case Study of the Imminent Militarization of Biology' [pdf].

The programme largely focuses on what we known about the secret development of nerve agents, based on the glimpses we see of them in action - for example, during the Moscow theatre siege of 2002, where Russian special forces used an opiate-based 'knock out gas' that resulted in the death of 129 hostages.

Interestingly, one of the guests notes that although these sorts of compounds are banned for use in war under international treaties, these regulations can have specific exemptions that allow them to be used in civilian 'crowd control' operations.

So while it would be illegal to use some drugs as weapons against soldiers, governments are, in some cases, allowed to use them on their own population.

It's fascinating and somewhat troubling coverage of a too-rarely discussed topic.

Link to AITM on 'Bioterrorism and Your Brain'.
Link to full-text of 'Neurobiology: A case study of the imminent militarization of biology'.

—Vaughan.

May 11, 2007

Weird world of the Psychological Atlas:

Archive.org has a copy of a 1948 book entitled the Psychological Atlas that is full of weird and wonderful things from the world of 1940s psychology and beyond.

It's got some serious psychology in there, mixed in with the paranormal, weird and curious stuff, probably reflecting the public understanding of the field at the time.

The Second World War was a critical time for psychology as many influential psychologists (like Gordon Allport and JJ Gibson) were employed to help select recruits and design better functioning equipment.

This helped significantly with psychology being taken seriously as a science, and this slightly post-war volume probably still has some of the hangovers from the pre-war years.

A fascinating read nonetheless.

Link to Psychological Atlas (via BoingBoing).

—Vaughan.

Brain scan lie detection still truth or dare:

The Scientist has an article on the latest developments in the world of fMRI lie detection, looking at how accurate and reliable the technology really is.

This is a particularly hot topic because a commercial company, No Lie MRI, are marketing a brain scan lie detection service.

This is despite the fact that neuroscientists and the legal system are still unconvinced that it is accurate enough to be useful.

Interestingly, the company was partly funded by the US Government, and you can bet that they'll be trying the system, even with the low accuracy rates, in case it proves useful for the secret services.

Probably the main advantage for most buyers is that is looks intimidating and high-tech.

Like with the polygraph test, many people put through the system will undoubtedly be more truthful because they believe that they will be caught if they lie.

In terms of its ability to catch genuine lies made by an individual, it's still fairly limited though.

Not least because most brain imaging research is done as group studies. The results are usually based on average brain activity across all participants, rather than on any one individual.

Also, the studies don't really resemble real-world conditions:

And in the real world, lying is verbal and carried out in defiance of instruction, and the stakes are incomparably higher. Rather than missing out on a $20 study reward, being caught in a lie could mean life in prison. Lying under these circumstances comes with an emotional component that is poorly elicited by a playing card, she argues.

"Applied fMRI studies of the kinds done so far have similar limitations to those of typical laboratory polygraph research," according to a 2003 National Academy of Sciences report. "Real deception in real life circumstances is almost impossible to explore experimentally. You can't randomly assign people to go do crimes. I do think that's an inherent limit," says Gabrieli, a professor of cognitive neuroscience. Others worry about the level of nuance that fMRI-posed questions can accommodate.

Still, researchers are hoping further studies will help improve the system, until, maybe, it will be the most accurate lie detection system in existence.

Until then, it's an interesting field, but I wouldn't bet your life on it.

Link to Scientist article 'Watching the Brain Lie'.

—Vaughan.

2007-05-11 Spike activity:

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

One I missed a while ago: Developing Intelligence looks at a paper that actually attempts to define consciousness (rather than relying on the usual "we all know what we're talking about, don't we?" definition).

The Toronto Globe and Mail reports on research suggesting that doing good deeds improves our health.

Marriages are slightly more likely to end in divorce when the couple have daughters, according to research covered by Slate.

The Globe and Mail investigates the effect of the higher rates of Alzheimer's disease in people with Down Syndrome.

Amateur boxers have higher levels of neurofilament light in their cerebrospinal fluid after fights, suggesting they suffer some level of brain damage despite the protective head gear.

Study shows greater amygdala activity in response to fearful faces in people who were closer to the 9/11 disaster.

Another study on the psychological benefits of meditation: it may fine-tune control over attention.

The LA Times reports that some US states still happy to execute people with intellectual disabilities.

InQuisitive Mind, a new online social psychology magazine has been launched.

—Vaughan.

May 10, 2007

The art of non-verbal attraction:

PsyBlog has just published a couple of short articles on non-verbal communication, one examining a common myth, and the other looking at how it indicates attraction between people who've just met.

The first article is on the research that debunks the myth that '93% of communication is nonverbal'.

Just the precision of those sorts of statements make me suspicious. To quote the wise words of comedian Vic Reeves "88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot".

The second article examines a study that looked at the dynamic patterns of non-verbal communication when men and women met for the first time, and looked at how these patterns were related to attraction.

Contrary to many previous findings, attraction was predicted by patterns of synchronisation and not simple mirroring of body language. What emerged were rhythmic structures of movement synchrony - patterns of bodily movement people adopted. In common with previous research, Grammer et al. (1998) found it was women who tended to start and control these patterns. Indeed, the more interested a woman was in a man, the more complicated these patterns became.

There's more on this impressive study in the PsyBlog article.

Link to article on myth of non-verbal communication.
Link to article 'The Nonverbal Symphony of Attraction'.

—Vaughan.

Treating children, pushing drugs:

The New York Times has another investigative article on the pharmaceutical industry, this time looking at how promotions aimed at psychiatrists encourage the prescription of antipsychotic drugs to children.

As far as I know, none of the newer 'atypical' antipsychotics are licensed for children (actually, I'd be interested to hear otherwise).

This doesn't mean doctors can't prescribe them, as they have the freedom to prescribe 'off-label' whatever they feel would help the individual, but it does mean that the drug companies can't advertise them for this purpose.

'Off-label' drug promotion is illegal, but it is an open secret that it occurs widely.

Notably, the number of children prescribed atypical antipsychotics has soared in recent years, and in the only US state that keeps records of drug company promotional spending, promotional money seems to be a key factor:

From 2000 to 2005, drug maker payments to Minnesota psychiatrists rose more than sixfold, to $1.6 million. During those same years, prescriptions of antipsychotics for children in Minnesota’s Medicaid program rose more than ninefold.

Those who took the most money from makers of atypicals tended to prescribe the drugs to children the most often, the data suggest. On average, Minnesota psychiatrists who received at least $5,000 from atypical makers from 2000 to 2005 appear to have written three times as many atypical prescriptions for children as psychiatrists who received less or no money.

It seems that these drugs are increasingly being prescribed for a whole range of different disorders in children, despite limited evidence for their effectiveness in some conditions and a shocking lack of studies on the long-term effects.

The fact is, psychiatric drugs have an important and useful part to play in treating mental illness, sometimes even in children.

Unfortunately, this sort of underhand marketing and out-of-control prescribing puts some parents off when their children would genuinely benefit, and unnecessarily gives powerful and potentially dangerous drugs to some children when they could be helped in other ways.

The answer? Stick to the science when prescribing - just say no to drug promotion.

Link to article 'Psychiatrists, Children and Drug Industry’s Role'

—Vaughan.

It's not a quirk, it's a feature:

Prof Richard Wiseman tackles some of the quirkier findings in the psychological literature in a New Scientist article which has been made freely available online.

The article accompanies the launch of Wiseman's new book, Quirkology, which apparently looks at these sorts of curious research studies in more detail.

He's also created a very impressive inattentional blindness demonstration video on YouTube. Simple but very cool.

Presumably the gorilla in the background is a nod to Daniel Simons and Chris Chabris' classic study of the effect, published, rather brilliantly, under the name 'Gorillas in Our Midst' [pdf].

It's the only psychology experiment I've ever come across that used a man in a gorilla suit. Unsurprisingly, it won an IgNobel prize, but is actually a valuable contribution to our understanding of the mind.

Link to NewSci article 'A quirky look at our quirky species'.
Link to cool inattentional blindness demo.

—Vaughan.

May 09, 2007

Five minutes with Petra Boynton:

Dr Petra Boynton is a social psychologist, researcher, author, broadcaster, blogger, and award winning sex educator.

She's an advocate for evidence-based sex education, amid the largely sensationalist media coverage of the subject, and a tireless campaigner for sexual equality, having worked to improve media sex coverage both in the UK and internationally.

As well as conducting extensive research into sexual attitudes and behaviours, she also promotes the public understanding of social and health science research through her teaching, writing and broadcasting.

Petra has kindly agreed to talk to Mind Hacks about her work, motivations and current interests in the world of sex research.

Why sex research?

There are two reasons why I got interested in sex research. Firstly I was always very interested in research methods and keen to evaluate whether lab-based psychology studies could make sense outside that context, as well as assessing flaws within different social research methodologies. Obviously that would make me fairly dull and so I thought one way to liven this up would be to look at how sex was studied and go from there.

Secondly when I was at school I wanted to work in a family planning clinic but I got told to stop showing off (I also got told I wasn't up to going to university). So there was definitely an interest in sexual health from an early age.

I'm interested in researching sex now for several reasons. It's an area where there's still a lot of ignorance, fear, stigma and taboo. There's an increasing amount of pressure on us to be sexual and yet still a lot of unanswered questions.

Within sexual health there's a lot of need to understand why people are taking risks, as well as a need to show how sex research is both important and a relevant area of study. Sadly there is some pretty poor sex research out there - often coming from commercial companies - and that needs to be challenged.

What book would you recommend to make someone enthusiastic about sex research?

Rather than a book I'd recommend a visit to the Kinsey Institute's website that outlines different areas of studying sex and the Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology which has lots of useful free online courses. Both of those sites have links to other great resources, online reading and books.

Sex is one of the most under-researched of human behaviours. What do you think needs to happen for sex research to be taken more seriously?

I think sex research is taken seriously in some areas now, but not all. For example sexual health research, studies on sexually transmitted infections (including HIV) and sexual problems have been taken seriously although those that are quantitative in nature (e.g. trials or epidemiological research) tend to have a higher profile than qualitative research.

There is now a lot of money available for sex research on sexual dysfunction since drug companies can see the opportunity for profit - and that has led to some researchers taking money to produce research that isn't as always as ethical or robust as it should be. What does need to happen to improve sex research is a more critical approaches to funding and ethics, a willingness to embrace a wider range of methodological approaches, and training of staff to complete such research sensitively.

Sadly at the moment we're seeing sex 'research' misused by PR companies so there are 'sex surveys' galore in the media. That gives a poor impression of sex research, alongside the unqualified 'sexperts' in the media. Sex researchers need to show good practice and to challenge some of the dodgier approaches out there.

I think within science there's still a prejudice amongst some towards studying sex - partly because of people's sexual hangups, and partly because 'good science' is not supposed to be about social issues or things we're all interested in and know a bit about.

I remember someone saying about me in a blog 'she's writing about sex and she actually understands science'. We need to show that we're completing rigorous and robust research - and also have research with measurable and effective outcomes. That should show the wider scientific community, media and the public that sex is a legitimate area of study.

What are the main difficulties in conducting your research?

There are issues of funding. Often the public want to know things like 'how do you fall in love?' or 'how do you know you've met your perfect partner?' which are interesting questions but ones that aren't at the top of the research priority list.

That's partly because funding is limited to key areas, and also because many sex researchers want to be taken seriously and so won't take on topics or questions that could make them seem lightweight.

There are problems with drug company funding - if you are willing to complete research into sexual functioning problems then there is cash for you. Although there are issues about your own academic freedom and conflict of interest that arise as a result.

Often there are problems with accessing the public as obviously this can be a very sensitive area and you need to be sure you've got the right people doing research appropriately. Many people want to talk about sex, but you have to be careful to ensure you get the right participants and also treat them respectfully.

We have seen examples in the developing world in trials for HIV drugs and similar where the training and support of researchers and ethical treatment of participants is not what it should be. So there are problems with some studies/researchers giving others a bad name.

There are issues of method - quantitative approaches tend to be favoured - at least within the health area of sex research. There are still some outdated views of methodologies circulating within the discipline, and evidence based practice isn't always observed.

Finally there's the issue of how to go about sex research. As with any other area of study you're under pressure to often do work as quickly and cheaply as possible so investigations that require more expensive kit - such as brain scanners or thermal imaging - may be less easier to use than questionnaires.

There are some concerns that ethics committees can be more skittish the more invasive sex research might be, and it is interesting that this is a key area where we're becoming increasingly 'hands off' in our methodological approaches. The public tends to assume sex researchers spend their time watching people having sex or fitting them with probes, whereas you're more likely to be doing an online interview or questionnaire.

I'd like to see the opportunity to explore a wider range of methods, and training to ensure we can study all aspects of sex in a sensitive manner.

What are you excited about at the moment?

There's some very interesting work coming out about how our ancestors had sex - it's causing a lot of debate as some scientists are rather upset about the idea our ancestors might have had sex for pleasure, may not have been monogamous and perhaps had a different interpretation of gender than we do now.

I wouldn't say I was excited about this, but I am concerned about the debate on HIV and circumcision for men in Africa. A number of trials suggest that routine circumcision of men can reduce HIV prevalence. Many global health organisations are encouraging we now explore this option.

However there's a growing body of medics opposed to male circumcision who're fighting this on the grounds of disapproving of circumcision per se, whilst practitioners like myself are more concerned of any programme that targets men in countries where women's social position is seriously disadvantaged. That debate is set to run, but in the meantime the concerns about the spread of HIV continues.

Name three under-rated things

Sex education. Whenever I do a public science event people start asking me questions about the science of sex, but pretty quickly start wanting to know 'am I normal?', 'what's female ejaculation?', 'how do you know if you're a sex addict?', 'can men orgasm without ejaculating?' You quickly become aware that there are masses of sex questions people have because they've not recieved good quality sex education and don't know where to get objective advice about sex from now.

Knowing your history. You can't study anything in social science without understanding historical and cultural issues. This is particularly the case in the study of sex where there's a trend towards reductionism - just studying hormones, the brain or behaviour. To really understand sex you need to understand history, culture, global differences and sex as an holistic issue rather than just one issue. Otherwise it just doesn't make sense.

Being reflexive. I don't think it's the place of social scientists to be 'objective'. I don't think you can be objective but you can be transparent. That means thinking about the work you're doing, piloting your research, getting feedback from others and constantly trying to work out how you can do better. It also means talking to people you're studying - and getting them to feed back on or shape the research you are doing. That's often discouraged in research either due to poor training or lack of time, but it is essential.

—Vaughan.

Encephalon 22 hits the virtual shelves:

Issue 22 of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just arrived, this time hosted by anthropologist John Hawks.

A couple of my favourites include a compelling article from Madam Fathom on the evolution of the nervous system and another by Pure Pedantry on the complex considerations needed to answer the question 'Do autistic people have a deficit in reading faces?'.

There are many more great articles in the rest of issue 22.

Link to Encephalon 22.

—Vaughan.

A brief history of neuroscience:

There's been a wonderful series of posts at neuroscience blog Neuroevolution which have charted the history of cognitive neuroscience from ancient Greece to the age of the brain scanner.

There's been 26 posts in all, each of them a beautifully illustrated snapshot of a groundbreaking discovery.

The series tells the story of how we've come to understand more and more about the workings of the mind and brain, with each discovery building on the lessons of history.

Highly recommended.

Link to "History’s Top Insights Into Brain Computation".

—Vaughan.

May 08, 2007

Understanding wisdom:

You would think they'd be lots of good psychological theories of wisdom, as it's something we talk about all the time in everyday life, but there just isn't.

Psychologists have traditionally avoided the subject, although, thankfully, this is now starting to change and the New York Times has an in-depth article looking at some of the recent findings.

The article also looks at why the subject has been ignored, partly, of course, because it's quite hard to define.

Nevertheless, one person who has pioneered the study of wisdom is neuropsychologist Dr Vivian Clayton who began studying this most valued of human traits in the 1970s.

Between 1976, when she finished her dissertation, and 1982, Clayton published several groundbreaking papers that are now generally acknowledged as the first to suggest that researchers could study wisdom empirically. She identified three general aspects of human activity that were central to wisdom — the acquisition of knowledge (cognitive) and the analysis of that information (reflective) filtered through the emotions (affective). Then she assembled a battery of existing psychological tests to measure it.

Clayton laid several important markers on the field at its inception. She realized that "neither were the old always wise, nor the young lacking in wisdom." She also argued that while intelligence represented a nonsocial and impersonal domain of knowledge that might diminish in value over the course of a lifetime, wisdom represented a social, interpersonal form of knowledge about human nature that resisted erosion and might increase with age. Clayton's early work was "a big deal," Sternberg says. "It was a breakthrough to say wisdom is something you could study." Jacqui Smith, who has conducted wisdom research since the 1980s, says it "was seminal work that really triggered subsequent studies."

The article discusses some of Clayton's early groundbreaking work in the field and goes on to look at what modern psychology and neuroscience is telling us about how we understand wisdom and act wisely, particularly in terms of emotion and maturity through the later years.

Link to NYT article 'The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis'.

—Vaughan.

Submarine psychology:

I just found this interesting snippet in a BBC News story about the development and imminent launch of the new Astute class Navy submarine:

It may be one of the most sophisticated submarines ever built, but the project has been beset with problems. The three submarines are £900m ($1.8bn) over budget and four years behind the original schedule.

But a new boss at Barrow, Murray Easton, introduced big changes when he arrived a few years back.

A team of psychologists was brought into the yard to improve management effectiveness, and to create better ways of communication. Even now a psychologist is present at every board meeting.

I could write everything I know about organisational psychology (psychology applied to business, team work and organisations) on the back of napkin but I'm curious as to what role a psychologist would play at board meetings.

However, while trying to find out (and failing) I found two short articles (one and two) on 'submarine psychologists' who work for the Navy researching life on board underwater vessels.

Link to BBC News story 'Alien submarine breaks technical barriers'.
Link 1 and link 2 to articles on 'submarine psychologists'.

—Vaughan.

Criminal violence and the brain:

Open-access science journal PLoS Biology has another fantastic article that investigates what neuroscience tells about about the causes of antisocial behaviour and how damage to the brain can, in rare cases, lead someone to become violent.

The article looks at research on the neuropsychology of violent criminals, as well as 'forensic neurology' - the science of understanding how brain injury can remove the normal inhibitions for aggression.

Some striking case studies are covered as well as possible ways of understanding and managing criminality.

Criminality and violence is a difficult area, as personal motivations and influences are complex. The paper notes that:

To be clear, there is at present no reason to believe that all criminal behaviours, or indeed even all violent criminal behaviours, are the result of organically dysfunctional brains. However, there is ample evidence to suggest that some kinds of dysfunction are likely to increase the probability of some kinds of behaviours that society labels as criminal.

The discussion also covers how the legal system might make sense of these new brain discoveries, in light of neuroscience evidence being increasingly used in court cases as a way of determining if someone is telling the truth, and as a way of arguing for reduced responsibility for a criminal act.

Link to PLoS Biology article 'Law, Responsibility, and the Brain'.

—Vaughan.

May 07, 2007

Leyla, darling won't you ease my worried mind:

While looking for neuroscience videos we've found some pretty weird stuff on YouTube before, but despite their quirkiness, at least they made sense. This one's just completely baffling.

It seems to be a sort of love letter, presented as a brain diagram, with a disco backing track. Apparently it's dedicated to someone called Leyla, and it's from a teddy bear.

I'm assuming it makes sense to someone out there.

Link to YouTube video 'Neuroscience with Patchy'.

—Vaughan.

Don't stand so close to me:

NPR has a short video report on how social conventions, like keeping personal space, transfer into virtual worlds like Second Life.

The report focuses on the work of psychologist Nick Yee who we interviewed last November about his research into the social psychology of virtual worlds.

Yee and the NPR reporter go and field test some of his findings in Second Life, demonstrating that we use the same rules of social psychology taken from physical space to moderate online interactions.

As an aside, Yee's has recently written a fascinating article on the psychology of how players develop superstitions in virtual worlds.

Link to NPR report with video and podcast.

—Vaughan.

Withdrawn behaviour:

Author Bruce Stutz writes about his experience of depression, stopping antidepressants and the science of SSRI withdrawal in an article for the New York Times.

Withdrawal from SSRI medication, a group which includes drugs such as Prozac, Seroxat and Zoloft, is known to cause considerable discomfort in about 1 in 5 people.

It's been spun as a 'discontinuation syndrome' by the drug companies, as 'withdrawal symptoms' sounds a bit too much like what drug addicts have.

Although SSRIs are not addictive in the sense that they don't cause a strong desire to take more, the brain does go through a significant period of readjustment when the drug leaves the body.

The NYT article examines Stutz's experience of treatment for depression, and how he coped with the withdrawal symptoms that he was unlucky enough to experience.

The piece also takes a look at the neuroscience of serotonin and mood, with a more critical analysis than is often found in some mainstream science articles.

Link to NYT article 'Self-Nonmedication'.

—Vaughan.

May 06, 2007

Fairy tale psychiatry:

A funny list from McSweeney's entitled "The Names of Snow White's Seven Dwarfs After Being Prescribed Paxil, Ritalin, Prozac, Lithium, Provigil, and Benadryl."

—Vaughan.

How much do parents shape our personality?:

Prospect magazine has an engaging article by psychologist Judith Rich Harris who argues, contrary to popular belief, that parents are not the most important influence in a child's development.

Harris wrote a book called The Nurture Assumption, and more recently No Two Alike, that both took a similar line, suggesting that the influence of the home environment is relatively small in shaping a child's personality.

She bases this on research suggesting that children can and do adapt their behaviour according to whether they're with their parents, with others, in the home, or otherwise.

Harris suggests that child behaviours that remain the same across various environments are more likely to be influenced by genetics.

In other words, she argues that the idea we relate to others in specific ways because we've learnt certain core relationship styles with our parents is mistaken, and in fact, we develop context and person specific relationship patterns that can be seen even from an early age.

She gives the example of the classic distinction made between the personalities of first and last born children:

Firstborns and laterborns do behave in characteristic ways when they're in the presence of their parents and siblings, but they drop these behaviours when they're away from their family. Like James in [TV programme] Child of our Time, they adapt their behaviour to their setting. The firstborn who dominates his younger siblings at home doesn't automatically assume that he will also be able to dominate his classmates. After all, even though he's the largest child at home, he may turn out to be the smallest one in the playground. Research confirms that firstborn children are, on average, no more dominant in the playground than are laterborns. Nor do laterborns go through life permanently cowed. A laterborn who is pushed around by his older brother at home is fully capable of stepping into a dominant role with his peers.

Link to Prospect article 'Why home doesn't matter'.
Link to Wikipedia page on Judith Rich Harris with many links.

—Vaughan.

May 05, 2007

Bot-on-bot action:

Alice and Jabberwacky are the world's leading AI chatbots and they've finally met.

The rendezvous is described in an article from Discover magazine, who got in touch to say that it's a teaser for their already-on-the-shelves special issue 'The Brain: A User's Guide' which seemed to be curiously absent from their website.

The limits of the bots' abilities are clear from some of the transcripts, but there are some truly sublime moments in their as well:

A: Do you dream?
J: Yes, I dream.
A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?
J: I remember them vividly.
A: What do you remember about it?
J: I think I shouldn't flirt with a robot.

If you think robots shouldn't be flirting with each other, you may want to have a look at a previous Mind Hacks article on the confusion that occurs when humans try their luck with AI systems - either real or imagined.

Link to Discover article 'I Chat, Therefore I Am...'
Link to Mind Hacks article 'The Robots are Coming'.

—Vaughan.

May 04, 2007

Latest formula donkey hits the headlines:

Another scientist has sold his soul to the God of PR and promoted a nonsense formula in the media - this time for the 'perfect Page 3 girl'. For those not used to the British tabloid press, page 3 traditionally displays a picture of a topless girl.

The offender on this occasion is Cambridge University medical researcher Dr David Granger, who is seemingly trying to promote a commercial diagnostics company by talking drivel to the media.

I honestly don't know how this happens. If I was looking to hire a commercial science company, one that had just advertised itself with some spectacularly bad pseudoscience would be bottom of my list.

Link to Dr Petra with the gory details.

—Vaughan.

What sort of person volunteers for a prison experiment?:

Zimbardo's famous 'Stanford Prison Experiment' is often cited as an example of where circumstances influence average people to take up abusive roles.

In a recent article in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland tested the idea that the people who volunteer for this sort of study were truly 'average' and found that they had character traits that could encourage abuse.

To recruit participants, the researchers used the newspaper advert from the original Stanford Prison Experiment, as well as another advert that was identical, except for the mention of 'prison life'.

They found that volunteers who responded to the advert that mentioned 'prison life' scored significantly higher on measures of the abuse-related dispositions of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance and lower on empathy and altruism.

This suggests that circumstances may not be the only factor in influencing the sort of behaviour seen in the original study, as some people may have particular attitudes that could make abuse more likely when the circumstances allow for it.

There is further commentary and analysis of the research over at the ever-excellent CrimePsychBlog.

Link to CrimePsychBlog on 'Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment'.
Link to abstract of research study.

—Vaughan.

2007-05-04 Spike activity:

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

Deep brain stimulation research continues with trials of DBS for memory problems and as a way of implanting artificial vision systems.

ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone takes a look at the philosophy of art and emotion.

Cognitive Daily has a demo and explanation of how we learn to keep track of multiple moving objects.

The Observer reports on a study suggesting that girls with more feminine names are least likely to go into maths and science-based professions. See previously for other research on how our names influence behaviour.

Magnetic pulses may be able to trigger slow wave sleep in insomniacs, reports The Independent.

What neural mechanisms underlie "fluid intelligence? Developing Intelligence looks at one of the latest studies.

New Scientist reports that native speakers of Russian, which lacks a single word for "blue", discriminate between light and dark blues differently from native English speakers.

PsyBlog investigates research on sex differences in understanding non-verbal communication.

New Scientist reports that anatomical brain differences have been found in sufferers of the controversial 'Gulf War Syndrome'.

Research investigating implicit racial bias in NBA referees is analysed by Mixing Memory.

Wired has an article on the Pentagon showing their next-generation 'brain interfaced' electronic binoculars.

The Neurophilosopher has some fantastic coverage of the recent study that scanned the orginal brains that led Broca to discover Broca's Area and inspire the science of cognitive neuropsychology.

—Vaughan.

May 03, 2007

Psychoanalysis of Resident Evil and Silent Hill:

Resident Evil and Silent Hill have been given a psychoanalytic interpretation by two academics wanting to undercover the underlying symbolism of these popular video games.

The analysis attempts to illustrate how "the poststructuralist divide between Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis plays out in the differences between the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series".

Needless to say, the article is steeped in the language of psychoanalysis and postmodernism. But if you can get through the jargon, it's an entertaining essay on the narratives used in the game play and plot of the two games.

Silent Hill significance stems from its avant-garde status: it anticipates our familiarity with these conventions and works to subvert them, problematizing our desire for stability and coherence. These subversions work by collapsing the distances between player, avatar, and game unsettling our expectation to retain a clinical distance between the twisted world of our avatars and the sacred normality of our own real world.

This is epitomized near the end of Silent Hill 3 when a professorial character inquisitively questions the "enjoyment" that Heather, our avatar, draws from killing the threatening abjections around her. When she responds that she has only killed monsters, Vincent replies with "they look like monsters to you..." Our game play, which until this point has been comfortably positioned as an analytic activity helping Heather work through her traumas, becomes traumatic.

Vincent punctures the fictional fantasy screen, speaking not only to Heather, but also to us. Suddenly the game world collapses around us-for a moment we are subjected as murders, potentially as psychotic as our avatar and/or as one of the very psychopaths we so confidently believed we were killing.

Nothing can be trusted. No longer is it clear that we are working to uphold symbolic order. No longer is it clear that any such order ever has or could so securely exist. Put simply, Resident Evil maintains desire for a Freudian dynamic (one in which order is out there), Silent Hill opens us up to a Lacanian one (one in which, to quote Derrida, "order is no longer assured"

Link to 'Saving Ourselves: Psychoanalytic Investigation of Resident Evil and Silent Hill'.

—Vaughan.

Delivering email directly to the mind:

The current issue of the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry has a curious letter about a patient who had the delusional belief that emails were being delivered directly to her mind:

Dear Editor

We report the case of an elderly lady with no experience of using a personal computer or internet technology, whose delusional experiences included the direct personal receipt of email.

Ms T, an 84-year old female with a 40-year history of schizoaffective disorder, presented with a delusional belief that something precious and of value 'for all people' had been inserted into her body by a doctor in Germany in the 1950s. She had sought medical help because she believed that an abdominal operative procedure would be necessary to remove a "rat and a teddy bear made of diamonds" that she believed had grown within her.

Following admission, she remained highly guarded, distressed and preoccupied with the need of urgent surgery, which she demanded every time she met her medical team. When asked about the origins of this belief and her desire for surgery, she said that she had gained knowledge about this from a friend, whom she had seen last in 1945.

She explained that she received emails from this friend. These arrived in her mind, exactly like electronic mail, but were managed without a computer. Rather than receiving messages in text form, she received what she described as 'an impression in my mind', which conveyed an unequivocal meaning to her. She also believed that her friend had some valuable information for the medical team and that he would be able to contact the senior physician by a similar mechanism.

Following 4 weeks of treatment with risperidone 1.0 mg bd her mental state improved to the point where she stopped receiving the emails, gained insight into her primary belief and told us that she was satisfied that surgery was no longer needed.

There have been previous reports of delusions specific equipment components (Schmid-Siegel et al., 2004) and general activity in the internet (Tan et al., 2004). Most reported cases tend to be in young people, often with a particular experience in using the internet (Bell et al., 2005). To our knowledge, there have been no previous reports of the particular delusion of email receipt by the self. Our case shows that internet-based delusions are not restricted to the young or to those familiar with use of the internet.

Dr Malgorzata Raczek
Prof Robert Howard

Link to PubMed entry for letter.

—Vaughan.

Optimal excitability:

Nobel prize-winning psychologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) gives a description of brain activity that eerily echoes the results of modern brain scanning studies.

The quote is from a lecture given in 1913 and published on p222 of the book Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes: Twenty-Five Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity Behavior of Animals.

"If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous, then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot with fantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form, surrounded by a darkness more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemisphere."

—Vaughan.

May 02, 2007

Hand in Glove:

And who could resist finishing the day with rock n' roll?

Seed magazine has an account of rock producer turned cognitive neuroscientist Dan Levitin meeting with rock musician David Byrne, and 3QuarksDaily have found a curious reference to 80s group The Smiths in a book on the philosophy of mind.

The first paragraph of philosopher Akeel Bilgrami's book Belief and Meaning (ISBN 0631196773) contains a reference to The Smiths track 'Bigmouth Strikes Again':

Content is what is specified by sentences or propositions in that-clauses when we attribute intentional states to agents. Thus, in the attribution, "Smith believes that Bigmouth has struck again," the sentence or proposition (Bigmouth has struck again) which follows the "that" specifies the content.

Link to Dan Levitin and David Byrne interview in Seed.
Link to 3QuarksDaily on philosophy and The Smiths.

—Vaughan.

Marijuana and the causes of madness:

Huge numbers of news sources are reporting on recent neuroscience studies that have linked the effect of cannabis on the brain to the development of psychosis.

The excitement is because the 2nd International Cannabis and Mental Health Conference is currently under way in London where scientists from around the world are presenting the latest research on the effects of cannabis.

Luckily, the conference programme and summaries for all the research presented are available online as a pdf file, so you can get a more accurate idea of what the studies have found.

It is now clear that cannabis increases the risk of psychosis in some people who have a family history of psychosis and / or certain versions of the COMT gene.

However, the main thrust of the news stories is that even a single dose of THC, the main ingredient in cannabis that causes the 'high', can trigger psychotic symptoms.

A study by Dr Cyril D'Souza noted that:

Δ-9-THC produced schizophrenia-like positive and negative symptoms, altered perception, increased anxiety, produced euphoria, disrupted immediate and delayed word recall, impaired performance on tests of attention and working memory without impairing orientation.

The difficulty is that just because something seems to cause similar effects to psychosis, it doesn't necessarily mean it is strongly linked to it.

For example, a dose of alcohol can 'produce' similar symptoms to Alzheimer's disease - loss of memory, disorientation, mood swings, aggression and so on - but that isn't a good basis to say that the alcohol is doing the same thing in the short-term as the degenerative brain disorder does in the long-term.

More convincing are the results from the cognitive tests: impairment in immediate and delayed recall, attention and working memory without impairing orientation.

This is because the subjective effects of both cannabis and psychosis are, well subjective, but the cognitive effects are measurable with controlled neuropsychological tests.

One particularly interesting study from Dr Cecile Henquet found that when compared to controls, patients experienced a greater increase in psychotic experience after taking THC, but also had a greater improvement in their mood.

This might explain why people with psychosis will often continue smoking cannabis even when they know it causes their mental state to deteriorate.

Another fascinating finding, is that as well as containing the possibly psychosis increasing THC, cannabis also seems to contain an antipsychotic called cannabidiol or CBD.

One study presented by Prof Markus Leweke found that purified CBD had a beneficial effect equal to amisulpride, a widely used pharmaceutical antipsychotic medication.

If you're interested in finding out more about the cutting-edge of cannabis research the surprisingly readable conference programme is well worth checking out.

Link to conference programme and research summaries.

—Vaughan.

Does sex on first date boost relationship chances?:

Dr Petra Boyton casts a critical eye on recent media stories suggesting that sex on first date releases 'brain hormones' that increase trust and intimacy that might improve the long-term chances of a relationship. So what does neuroscience tell us about the link?

The claim is made by Dr Barry Gibb [insert Bee Gees joke here] in a new book The Rough Guide to the Brain.

The claim is likely based on the fact that the hormone oxytocin has been reported to increase trust in humans when deliberately administered by experimenters, and has been linked to sexual response in humans.

The trouble is, the evidence for a strong and consistent link with sexual response isn't really there yet.

A recent review article examined the role of hormones in sexual arousal and looked specifically at oxytocin, noting that:

Carmichael et al. (1987) found that plasma OT [oxytocin] increased around the time of orgasm in men and women, remaining raised for at least 5 min after orgasm.... In a recent study of men, OT increased in some subjects following ejaculation, but the individual variability was such that the group effect was not significant (Kruger et al. 2003a).

Murphy et al. (1987) reported an increase in OT in men during sexual arousal, which persisted beyond ejaculation, but with no obvious increase at ejaculation. In a study of women, Blaicher et al.(1999) found an increase in OT 1 min after orgasm, but levels were close to baseline by 5 min post-orgasm.

It is difficult to draw clear conclusions from this literature on OT and sexual arousal. Whether the increase of OT around orgasm, which has been somewhat inconsistently observed in the human literature, has any specific function, rather than being an epiphenomenon of other changes, remains uncertain...

In other words, the evidence for oxytocin being released consistently during sex is mixed and its significance is unclear.

Even if sex and the oxytocin 'trust boost' was reliably linked, you would need to do a study looking at whether couples trust each other more after having sex for the first time to really be sure whether the effect actually had an impact.

Sex causes such a strong behavioural, psychological and neurochemical change that a small release of oxytocin might be completely insignificant among the storm of other effects.

So does sex on first date increase the chances of a long-term relationship?

We don't know, and what we do know about the neuroscience of sexual response doesn't really tell us either.

UPDATE: Susan Kuchinskas has added some insightful commentary to this post. Check the comments section.

Link to Dr Petra Boyton's article.
Link to full text of scientific article 'The endocrinology of sexual arousal'.

—Vaughan.

May 01, 2007

An owner's manual for the brain:

So when did Discover magazine get so good? They've got an excellent 'Mind and Brain' section with a long list of feature articles freely available online.

Actually, what I wanted to feature was a one off magazine called 'Discover presents The Brain: An Owner's Manual', which I found on the shelves of my local newsagent.

It's labelled 'Spring 07', so is obviously current, but I can't find anything about it on Discover's website.

Check it out if you get the chance though. It's solely dedicated to psychology and neuroscience and has some fantastic articles, but also includes some beautiful photos of intricate brain structures and has some neuropsychological tests to try.

Also, there are interviews with psychologist, author and diagnosed bipolar patient Kay Redfield Jamison, and Nobel prize-winning biologist and consciousness researcher Gerald Edelman.

Why this special issue isn't mentioned on their website is something of a mystery though.

Link to Discover magazine 'Mind and Brain' section.

—Vaughan.

Getting emotional about cognitive science:

The Boston Globe has a well-researched article on how emotion has become increasingly important in scientific models of the mind.

Only two decades ago, cognitive psychology rarely discussed emotion and was largely about the supposedly 'cold' computational aspects of mind: memory, attention, problem solving, language and so on.

It is now being recognised that emotion plays an important role in all of these aspects of mental life, largely because of developments in neuroscience.

This new science of emotion has brought a new conception of what it means to think, and, in some sense, a rediscovery of the unconscious. In the five decades since the cognitive revolution began, scientists have developed ways of measuring the brain that could not have been imagined at the time. Researchers can make maps of the brain at work, and literally monitor emotions as they unfold, measuring the interplay of feeling and thinking in colorful snapshots. Although we aren't aware of this mental activity -- much of it occurs unconsciously -- it plays a crucial role in governing all aspects of thought. The black box of the mind has been flung wide open.

As an aside, the author of the piece is science writer Jonah Lehrer, who also writes neuroscience blog Frontal Cortex.

Link to Boston Globe article 'Hearts and Minds'.

—Vaughan.

Science of hypnosis:

Hypnosis and Suggestion is a fantastic website created by Dr Matt Whalley, an academic hypnosis researcher who gives a level-headed and detailed account of what is known about the science of hypnotic states and suggestion.

Hypnosis is a well researched psychological phenomenon and, increasingly, it is being investigated by cognitive neuroscientists.

What we know is that some people are more susceptible to hypnotic suggestions than others.

Research has shown that the level of hypnotic susceptibility is known to be stable across the life span and related to genetics.

A twin study shown that hypnotisability is likely to be heritable and recent molecular genetics studies have shown that it may be influenced by a gene known as COMT.

Interest has recently begin to focus on what makes some people highly hypnotisable compared to others.

A recent study looking at brain structure found that the front part of the corpus callosum was almost a third bigger in highly hypnotisable people.

This matches up with other neuroimaging studies which have suggested that highly hypnotisable people show differences in the function of frontal lobes, particularly the anterior cingulate cortex.

These differences are likely to be linked to an ability to become very 'absorbed' in things, with a simultaneous reduction in conflict and distraction when highly focused.

This might explain why hypnotic suggestions seem to have their effect on highly hypnotisable people, as they become absorbed in what the hypnotist says and can voluntarily 'switch off' the need to constantly self-monitor and evaluate their own reactions.

Interestingly, research suggests that we aren't very good at working out how hypnotisable we are.

Matt Whalley's site is a fantastic introduction to what is known about the science of hypnosis, including a list of frequently asked questions, an overview of the current theories of hypnosis, its history and its use by legitmate clinicians.

A fascinating read and well worth investigating if you're curious about this intriguing human phenomenon.

Link to Hypnosis and Suggestion website.

—Vaughan.