Mind Hacks: June 2007 Archives

June 29, 2007

Inside the psychotic world of Grand Theft Auto:

A brief article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 2001 reported the case of a young man who suffered delusions that he was a player inside a computer game.

The game isn't mentioned by name, but it seems to be Grand Theft Auto.

The authors of the case study point out that they're not suggesting that computer games cause psychosis, but they comment on how it's a somewhat unusual illustration of how ideas from a person's life get incorporated into the themes of psychosis.

A young man was admitted from prison to a psychiatric facility after reports that he had been acting in a bizarre manner. He had been arrested for stealing motor vehicles and assaults with weapons. At interview he was found to be experiencing the delusion that he was a player inside a computer game (adult-certificate game, widely available) in which points are scored for stealing cars, killing assailants and avoiding police vehicles.

Psychotic symptoms had emerged slowly over two years. His family had noticed him becoming increasingly withdrawn and isolated from social activities. He developed delusions that strangers were planning to kill him and also experienced auditory hallucinations, constantly hearing an abusive and derogatory voice. Previously a computer enthusiast, he began to play computer games incessantly. He felt that the games were communicating with him via the headphones.

In a complex delusional system he came to believe he was inside one of these games and had to steal a car to start scoring points. He broke into a car and drove off at speed, believing he had `invulnerable' fuel and so could not run out of petrol. To gain points he chose to steal increasingly powerful vehicles, threatening and assaulting the owners with weapons. Later he said he would have had no regrets if he had killed someone, since this would have increased his score.

After arrest and while in prison he continued to believe he was in the game, despite initial medication. When he was admitted to hospital six weeks later, part of ward management was to deny him access to computer games. Nothing abnormal was found on physical examination, blood investigations, drug screen, electroencephalography or a computed tomographic brain scan. Paranoid schizophrenia was diagnosed and he responded well to further treatment with antipsychotic medication.

Similarly, 'rock and roll delusions' have occasionally been reported in the medical literature (David Bowie seems to be a favourite).

Link to JRSM full-text article 'Computer Game Delusions'.

—Vaughan.

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Can't compute the wood for the trees:

Computer scientist David Gelernter has written an in-depth article for Technology Review where he criticises the possibility of creating artificial consciousness, but has high hopes for unconscious artificial intelligence.

My case for the near-impossibility of conscious software minds resembles what others have said. But these are minority views. Most AI researchers and philosophers believe that conscious software minds are just around the corner. To use the standard term, most are "cognitivists." Only a few are "anticognitivists." I am one. In fact, I believe that the cognitivists are even wronger than their opponents usually say.

But my goal is not to suggest that AI is a failure. It has merely developed a temporary blind spot. My fellow anticognitivists have knocked down cognitivism but have done little to replace it with new ideas. They've showed us what we can't achieve (conscious software intelligence) but not how we can create something less dramatic but nonetheless highly valuable: unconscious software intelligence. Once AI has refocused its efforts on the mechanisms (or algorithms) of thought, it is bound to move forward again.

Gelernter is a a great writer and an interesting guy, not least because of his brush with death, courtesy of disturbed anti-technologist Ted Kaczynski aka 'The Unabomber'.

Link to TechReview article 'Artificial Intelligence Is Lost in the Woods'.

—Vaughan.

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2007-06-29 Spike activity:

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

Couple of good radio shows on philosophy: In Our Time on the history of 'common sense philosophy' and The Philosopher's Zone has a special on the late Richard Rorty.

When do children think wishes can come true? Mixing Memory examines a psychology study that aimed to find out.

Scientific American investigates the neuroscience of irrationality and economic decision-making.

New Hitachi 'brain-machine interface' uses infrared light to read brain activity.

Prospect Magazine has a short article on the psychology of suicide bombers.

Experts say video games are not an addiction. Pope still catholic.

Why do we find it harder to recognise faces of other races than our own? Cognitive Daily looks at the influence of experience.

Supporters of 'child bipolar disorder' champion write to the Boston Herald with a strong defence of his work.

New Scientist covers a virtual world that can be explored through the power of thought (with video).

Wired looks at some of the revelations about behavioural control studies from recently de-classified CIA documents.

When brain damage helps. Developing Intelligence looks at a study that found that patients with frontal lobe damage actually do better on some reasoning tasks.

If there such a thing as photographic memory? Scientific American 'asks the expert'.

The excellent NYC radio show RadioLab has a special on Memory and Forgetting, featuring a well-known science blogger.

—Vaughan.

June 28, 2007

The hardest cut: Penfield and the fight for his sister:

In 1935, world renowned neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield published three remarkable case studies describing the psychological effects of frontal lobe surgery.

They remain a fascinating insight into the link between brain and behaviour, but one case was unlike anything Penfield had tackled before.

It described the fight to save the life of his only sister.

Penfield's sister, Ruth, had been experiencing splitting headaches since the age of fourteen. Suddenly, at the age of twenty, she experienced a Jacksonian seizure - a fleeting but distinctive type of neurological disturbance that can cause an almost eerie succession of involuntary movements.

Ruth's cortex was mercifully quiet for the next eight years, until she unexpectedly suffered a succession of seizures, in a pattern which would become increasingly common as she reached her early 40s.

By that time it became clear that she was suffering from a type of glioma, a particularly dangerous form of brain tumour caused by a cancer of the glial cells, the essential building blocks that support the very structure of the brain itself.

Penfield undoubtedly knew that her life was in grave danger. He had spent his adult life travelling the world training as a brain surgeon and had worked with some of the finest neuroscientists of his time.

He stepped in to undertake the operation himself and opted to remove almost the entire right frontal lobe, a radical form of brain surgery that had barely been tried before.

Ruth Wilder surgical drawing Then, as now, the majority of these operations are done while the patient is awake, so the surgeon can check that they're not unnecessarily removing any areas needed for speech, memory or other essential functions.

We can only imagine what was running through the mind of brother and sister as one began the attempt to save the other's life by moving surgically through the brain.

Throughout his professional life, Penfield often considered what the brain could tell us about the possible existence of the soul, and it would be hard not to speculate on whether this profound experience had any bearing on his quest.

If he was troubled by these existential issues at the time, he remained outwardly cool. The operation was a success.

Penfield's sister did worry during the operation, but not, seemingly, about her life. Penfield's colleague, Colin Russel had sat by Ruth throughout the operation, and afterwards noted that her main anxiety was a sisterly concern about embarrassing her younger brother at work.

Russel, neuroscientist to the last, noted "She said that she had felt so afraid of causing you distress by making an exhibition of herself... When I remarked that the only exhibition I had seen was one of the best exhibitions of courage that it had been my fortune to witness, she expressed her gratitude so nicely that one could not help wondering how much of the frontal lobe had to do with higher association processes".

Ruth recovered and returned to work as a valued wife and mother of six children. She found planning and organisation difficult, something that we would now call dysexecutive syndrome, but lost none of her eloquence and good humour.

Quite suddenly, after two years, her symptoms returned. The tumour had regrown and was successfully removed, this time by Penfield's mentor, Harvey Cushing, but this last-ditch attempt only bought her a few final months and, sadly, she died shortly after.

Ruth Wilder postmortem brain Nevertheless, her brother's operation had gained her two more valuable years with her family, but it was not enough to save her.

The experience had a profound impact on Penfield, who was inspired to found the Montreal Institute of Neurology, then, as now, one of the world's leading centres for brain treatment and research.

Penfield obviously struggled with the decision to publish a clinical case study on his sister's treatment, but eventually included it with two other cases in a 1935 article for the journal Brain, writing that "if she were alive, I am sure she would approve of such an analysis in the hope it would help others".

As an academic case study, it is almost unique, as it weaves the medical language of neurology with fragments of memories and heart-felt tributes.

As a historical document, we learn as much about Ruth Wilder as neurosurgery itself. As a piece of science, it remains a skilful description of a rarely performed operation and an insightful commentary on the link between the frontal lobes and psychological function.

Penfield became one of the most important neurosurgeons of his generation, advancing a type of medicine only just finding its feet while making some of the most significant advances in neuropsychology - the science of linking mind to brain.

Throughout his career, family was never far from his mind, and after his retirement, and shortly before his own death, Penfield wrote Man and His Family, stressing the need to nurture and encourage positive family life.

It's fitting that his legacy is not only a contribution to scientific knowledge, but also a hospital and institute that allows neuroscience to be applied where it is most needed - helping individuals affected by brain disorder. Truly, Penfield's speciality.

Link to more about Wilder Penfield.
Link to Penfield's Brain paper, sadly not open-access.

—Vaughan.

Is bigotry a mental illness?:

The Psychiatric Times has an interesting article discussing whether bigotry should be classified as a mental illness. The author concludes no, but the discussion gives an important insight into how we decide what is a mental illness and what is not.

Most people might think that an opinion, no matter how disagreeable, shouldn't get someone diagnosed with a mental disorder.

The difficulty comes when deciding what criteria you should use to decide that someone's mental state has gone beyond what is normal and should be considered an illness.

Generally, if a mental state is considered to cause distress or impairment, it's considered to be a sign of mental illness.

This goes for physical illness as well. A physical difference is only considered an illness if it causes problems as a result.

However, someone who is extremely racist might genuinely suffer problems as a result of their opinions.

As we reported previously, a small group of psychiatrists are pushing for a diagnosis of 'racist disorder' to be included in the next revision of the diagnostic manual on this basis.

One argument to be wary of in the justification of this, or any other mental disorder, is that 'it must exist because biological differences can be found between people thought to have the condition and those without'.

As the mind and behaviour is just a reflection of brain function, any difference, no matter how trivial (ice cream preference for example), will have a related biological difference.

As with physical illness, biological differences in themselves can't define an illness, because they have to be linked to what is considered serious distress or impairment in everyday life.

Biology might tell us why the difference occurs, but it can't tell us whether the difference should be considered good or bad.

This decision is essentially a value judgement, because what is considered serious, distressing, impairing or relevant to everyday life aren't cut-and-dry decisions and are made on the basis of a consensus of opinions.

In some cases, such as cancer, it's easy, because everyone agrees that an early painful death is bad.

In other cases, particularly for mental illnesses, the issues can be a lot less straightforward because there there are few obvious and direct effects of mental states.

These issues ask us to question what we consider an illness and highlight that the decision is as based as much on social considerations and context, as on the science of biology.

The Psychiatric Times article tackles exactly these sorts of issues in its discussion of bigotry, and is a great guide to the philosophical issues involved in classifying mental disorder.

If you want to explore further, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a great entry on mental illness that tackles many of the conceptual difficulties.

Link to Psychiatric Times article 'Is bigotry a mental illness?'
Link to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on mental illness.

—Vaughan.

Kidman new face of brain game, will it sharpen the mind?:

As a sure sign that cognitive improvement games have gone mainstream, Nicole Kidman has been announced as the new face of Nintendo's latest 'brain training' title.

The idea that mental training will actually help boost your mental skills is relatively new.

It was traditionally thought that the mind and brain just start losing their edge after young adulthood and your best hope was to learn to use your remaining resources more effectively as you age.

However, studies started to appear in the late 1990s suggesting that practicing certain tasks could act as a sort of 'mental workout', actually improving mental abilities directly in people with disorders like Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia.

Most people weren't fully convinced of the benefits in healthy older people until a key study was published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association that showed modest but reliable improvements, even after five years.

The effects were typically small (often too small to be picked up without standard tests), but interestingly, the training also had a knock-on effect on the participants' ability to look after themselves effectively on a day-to-day basis.

It seems that cognitive training may have a stronger effect in people with mental impairments. A recent review of 17 studies found a positive effect on mental abilities, everyday activities and mood in people with Alzheimer's.

However, as far as I know, no controlled trials have ever been published on any off-the-shelf 'brain training' game, including Nintendo's. You'd guess from the medical literature that they might have a similar effect, but it's yet to be shown for sure.

Link to BBC News article 'Kidman to be new face of Nintendo'.
Link to JAMA article 'Long-term Effects of Cognitive Training...'

—Vaughan.

June 27, 2007

Formula 1 and Iraqi psychiatry on AITM new series:

A new series of BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind has just kicked off with the first programme investigating the psychology of Formula 1 drivers and including an interview with an Iraqi psychiatrist involved in rebuilding the country's mental health services.

The programme talks to Jenson Button, Honda's top driver, Tony Lycholat, Head of Human Performance at Honda, and Dr Kerry Spackman a neuroscientist who is consultant to the Maclaren team.

In relation to mental health in Iraq, Dr Sabah Sadik is interviewed about his role as National Advisor for Mental Health to the Iraqi Ministry of Health.

The Iraqi mental health system has virtually collapsed since the invasion in 2003, and as recently reported by the Washington Post, the conflict has left intense psychological scars on many of the country's children.

Link to first in the new series of BBC All in the Mind.

—Vaughan.

Psychiatrists top list of drug maker gift recipients:

The New York Times continues its theme of investigating psychiatry and mental health with an article noting that US psychiatrists receive drug company 'gifts' worth the largest amount among all the medical specialities.

The data is only from two states, because they are the only ones which have gone public with their records of payments to doctors.

The practice is widespread and usually doesn't take the form of direct cash payments, but instead funds everything from trips to conferences (which are often little more than marketing presentations in luxurious holiday destinations), to expensive meals and outings, to footing the bill for medical school events and symposiums.

The extent of the funding is quite eye-opening: the article reports that the average payment to each psychiatrist in Vermont last year was over $45,000 dollars.

Vermont officials disclosed Tuesday that drug company payments to psychiatrists in the state more than doubled last year, to an average of $45,692 each from $20,835 in 2005. Antipsychotic medicines are among the largest expenses for the state’s Medicaid program.

Over all last year, drug makers spent $2.25 million on marketing payments, fees and travel expenses to Vermont doctors, hospitals and universities, a 2.3 percent increase over the prior year, the state said.

The number most likely represents a small fraction of drug makers’ total marketing expenditures to doctors since it does not include the costs of free drug samples or the salaries of sales representatives and their staff members. According to their income statements, drug makers generally spend twice as much to market drugs as they do to research them.

The state of psychiatric drug marketing is shocking. It's gone beyond the point of promotion to what seems to be little more than outright bribery.

As you might expect, this practice has a strong and significant effect of the prescribing behaviour and attitudes of doctors when medical decisions should be taken on the best empirical evidence rather than on marketing information provided by commercial vendors.

UPDATE: An important clarification from Doctor X, taken from the comments:

While I am concerned about the influence of big pharma on psychiatry, I was taken aback by the figures presented in the Times story. I did a little checking and found that the Times article grossly misrepresented the facts as presented in the original Vermont report. The $45,000 per year figure is for the top 11 psychiatrists who are recipients of pharma money. The report does not indicate the average or median for psychiatrists across the state, but extrapolating from the report figures it looks like $1000.00 per year is probably more typical and closer to the median figure for all psychiatrists. The mean is probably in the neighborhood of $4,000 per psychiatrist, a figure that is probably skewed upward by a heavily lopsided distribution of money and fees paid to top recipients.

Further explanation here.

Link to NYT article 'Psychiatrists Top List in Drug Maker Gifts'.

—Vaughan.

Enough about you doctor, what about me?:

The New York Times reports on a new study that examined how doctors disclose information about themselves during patient consultations. The study found that disclosures are usually for the benefit of the doctor and rarely help the patient.

The study recorded 113 doctor-patient interactions and analysed the conversation for themes, timing, effect and number of self-disclosures.

Self-disclosure is usually specifically covered in clinical training and, if done carefully, is thought to enhance the relationship with the patient and make them feel more at ease.

In this case, the research team found that none of the self-disclosures were primarily focused on patient concerns and only 4% were useful, providing education, support, explanation, or acknowledgment, or prompting some indication from the patient that it had been helpful.

The study also contains a few transcripts, including this gem:

Physician: No partners recently?

Patient: I was dating for a while and that one just didn't work out. . . . about a year ago.

Physician: So you're single now.

Patient: Yeah. It's all right.

Physician: [laughing] It gets tough. I’m single as well. I don't know. We're not at the right age to be dating, I guess. So, let's see. No trouble urinating or anything like that?

As was found in a previous study, it was also found that the longer the doctor talked about themselves, the less likely it was to be useful.

We tend to think of medical diagnosis as a scientific process, but so much of it relies on conversation, with patients - to get their experience of symptoms, and colleagues - to get their opinions and advice. In other words, it relies as much on negotiation as diagnostic tests.

Another key element is how the doctor transforms the patient's personal problem into a medical one, so he or she can apply medical knowledge and problem-solving techniques to it.

As found by a key study in medical sociology, doctors use various non-scientific strategies to interpret the objective medical symptoms while making a diagnosis.

When medicine is discussed as 'part art, part science', the art seems to be in how doctors interact with their patients and interpret their concerns, which seems to be equally as important as medical tests.

Link to NYT article 'Study Says Chatty Doctors Forget Patients'.
Link to abstract of study.

—Vaughan.

June 26, 2007

Harnessing humans for subconscious computing:

Technology Review has an article on using humans as part of a digital face recognition system. Uniquely, you don't have to take part in any deliberate recognition, the system uses electrical readings to automatically measure the response of the brain - even if you're not aware of it.

The system, developed by Microsoft Research, takes advantage of the fact that when we see something we recognise as a face, a specific electrical signal is generated by face-perception brain activity that can be picked up by electrodes.

Crucially, this brain activity happens automatically, we don't have to make a special effort.

Last year, I wrote an article entitled 'Hijacking Intelligence', noting that software is increasingly being designed to use humans as 'biological subroutines' for the things computers find most difficult.

Labelling pictures is one such task - it's something humans find trivial, computers find difficult, and it's needed in large numbers to create an index for image searches.

To get round this problem, Google designed an online game that involved labelling pictures. Humans play for fun, while Google get the benefit of your intelligence for their database.

This new system takes it a step further, as you don't have to be doing anything related for it to take advantage of your 'mental work'.

For example, a picture could flash up every time you hit save on a word processor, or every time you look at a certain website.

Each time your brain signals that you've seen a face, the system reads your recognition activity and sends it back to the main database to classify the image.

This might be one way of sifting through security images to see which should be inspected in more detail.

As a substitute for advertising, maybe you'd be offered free internet access if you had the system installed. Your brain would pay the bills.

While the system has only been developed as a proof-of-concept, it's interesting, if not a little scary, to speculate how technology will harness our mental skills, even when we're not aware of it.

Link to Technology Review article 'Human-Aided Computing'.

—Vaughan.

Tooth marks reveal childhood trauma:

Childhood stress can interfere with the development of the teeth to the extent that a traumatic experience leaves a recognisable line in the tooth enamel that remains as a record of past traumas.

I discovered this when reading about a study published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences [pdf] that used these lines to compare the number of childhood traumatic experiences that occured in people diagnosed with schizophrenia and healthy controls.

New approaches to the problem of estimating stress during early brain development are required. In this regard, human enamel has promise as accessible repositories of indelible information on stress between gestation and the age of 13. Stressful experiences induce long-term activation of the sympatho-adrenal system, slowing of tropic [growth-related] parasympathetic functions, and they then induce disrupted secretion of the enamel matrix.

During the brain development (in infancy, childhood and preadolescence), ameloblast activity in human enamel is slowed during 1 to 2 days of extreme stress, and the segment of enamel rods is smaller and often misshapen, making a particular dark line seen by the use of a microscope (we referred this line to Pathological Stress Line, PSL in short). Retzius reported that this line is incremental lines reflecting the layered apposition of enamel during amelogenesis (Retzius, 1937), and after that this line is termed the Retzius line. The line is conceptually akin to tree rings which are markers of environmental adversity in the tree's life.

Schizophrenia was once thought to be largely caused by genetic factors, but in the last decade a number of studies have shown that childhood trauma contributes to the chance of developing the disorder.

One difficulty with this type of research is that it often relies on people remembering back to their childhood after the onset of psychosis, which could mean that the memories aren't perfectly reliable in some cases.

Stress-induced lines in tooth enamel are one way of looking at the link between trauma and schizophrenia that doesn't rely on potentially hazy memories of the past.

Link to abstract of study.
pdf of scientific paper.

—Vaughan.

Why don't ethics professors behave better?:

If you spent your whole life trying to work out how to be ethical, you would think you'd be more moral in everyday life. Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has found that this isn't the case, and asks the question "Why don't ethics professors behave better than they do?".

Initially, this was based on a hunch, but Schwitzgebel, with colleague Joshua Rust, has begun to do research into the question. They've found some surprising results.

At a recent philosophy conference, he offered chocolate to anyone who filled in a questionnaire asking whether ethicists behaved better than other philosophers.

It wasn't long before an ethics professor stole a chocolate without filling in a questionnaire. (This reminds me of a famous psychology study that found that trainee priests on their way to give a talk on 'The Good Samaritan' mostly ignored someone in need if they were in a hurry!).

When the results came in, ethicists rated other ethicists as behaving better, but other philosophers rated them as no more moral than everyone else.

In another study, Schwitzgebel investigated whether people interested in moral issues are more likely to steal books. By looking at library records, he's found that books on ethics are more likely to be stolen than other philosophy books.

So why aren't ethics professors more ethical than the rest of us? Schwitzgebel wonders whether it is because there is a difference between emotional engagement with moral issues and a more detached reasoning style that is necessary for careful analysis, but which may not make someone feel compelled to act more ethically.

Ominously, he notes that "More and more, I'm finding myself inclined to think that philosophical reflection about ethical issues is, on average, morally useless".

It is interesting that there are similar problems in other professions. For example, doctors don't follow health advice adequately and are much more likely to suffer from mental illness.

As an aside, Schwitzgebel has made all his papers and publications available online and has a fantastic blog that is well worth keeping tabs on.

Link to Schwitzgebel's articles on 'The problem with ethics professors'.
Link to Schwitzgebel's homepage with publications and blog links.

—Vaughan.

June 25, 2007

Law, ethics, brain scans and mind reading:

ABC Radio National's All in the Mind has just broadcast the first of a two-part series on using neuroscience to read the mind.

The first programme investigates whether neuroscience can tell us anything about criminality and violence, and what role brain-based evidence will play in the court room.

The programme talks to many of the delegates from last April's The Law and Ethics of Brain Scanning conference which was one of the first to consider the legal issues of brain scans in detail.

All of the conference talks have been put online as mp3 files so you can listen to the talks yourself if you want to hear more.

In the mean time, this edition of All in the Mind covers the key issues and next week's will investigate some more (as yet undisclosed) aspects of so-called 'mind-reading' technology.

Link to AITM on 'Mind Reading'.
Link to The Law and Ethics of Brain Scanning conference audio.

—Vaughan.

Encoding memory: from a free issue of SciAm:

To celebrate the launch of a redesign, Scientific American have made the July edition freely available online as a pdf file. The cover story examines the search for how the brain encodes memories.

The issue is only available online until the end of June (one more week!) so you'll need to be quick, but it's a copy of the entire issue.

On a related note, the June 25th podcast is on the neurology of boxing-related brain damage.

pdf of July 2007 Scientific American (via Neurophilosopher).
Link to July edition table of contents.

—Vaughan.

Oldest children have highest IQ: a family effect?:

Science has just published a study of almost a quarter-of-million people providing strong evidence that oldest children have slightly higher IQs, and, most interestingly, the evidence suggests that this isn't a biological effect - it's likely to do with family environment and upbringing.

In fact, first-born children are known to have a number of psychological differences. For example, they are less likely to be gay, show differences in autistic-like traits, and are typically less severely affected by schizophrenia if it occurs.

These differences have often been explained by a theory that argues that the mother adapts her immune system during the first pregnancy and it might not be fully attuned to later children and this might affect the brain development of subsequent children.

In order to test this idea the Science study looked at the records of almost 250,000 Norwegian army recruits, all of which have routine IQ tests and full medical and family histories.

It turned out, as has been found many times before, that first-born children had higher IQs by about 3 points on average.

Crucially, it also turned out that some second-born children who had an older sibling who had died young also had higher IQs.

In other words, although they were second-born biologically, they were brought up as the oldest child after their sibling passed away.

Being brought up as the oldest child seems to be the crucial factor: family-rank, not birth order affects IQ. This suggests that the immune system theory is unlikely to explain this effect.

This has generated a great deal of discussion and many parents are interested in whether they can provide the 'first child advantage' to their younger children as well.

The New York Times featured the study and just published a follow-up article discussing the role of family-dynamics in the development of intelligence after all the interest it generated.

Some psychologists are suggesting that the effect might be because older children get the chance to coach the junior family members which may help them consolidate knowledge and provide practice in manipulating information.

It's also interesting that a recent study on birth-order in Thai medical students found exactly the reverse pattern. Younger siblings were found to be more intelligent and have more positive personality factors.

All of these studies suggest that culture and environment are crucial factors during childhood, both for mental and emotional development.

Link to abstract of Science study (thanks Laurie!).
Link to NYT write-up.
Link to NYT on intelligence and family dynamics.

—Vaughan.

June 24, 2007

Unique brain energy:

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells."

Wise words from the purveyor of the most delightful nonsense, Dr Seuss.

—Vaughan.

June 23, 2007

Mind the gap: science and the insanity defence:

Reason Magazine has an excellent article on why our knowledge about the psychology and neuroscience of mental illness doesn't really help when trying argue for or against the insanity defence in court.

The insanity defence concerns whether a person accused of a crime should be considered legally responsible.

Some of the first legal criteria for judging someone 'not guilt by reason of insanity' are the M'Naghten Rules created after Daniel M'Naghten tried to assassinate the British Prime Minister Robert Peel in 1843.

He ended up killing Peel's secretary, but when caught was found to be suffering from paranoid delusions and it was judged that his crime was motivated by his unsound mind and he didn't understand the 'nature and quality' of what he did.

Most Commonwealth law in this area is still based on these criteria, and most US law was too, until shortly after John Hinckley shot US President Ronald Reagan and was found not guilt by reason of insanity.

This caused a backlash against the insanity defence and many US states have variously abolished it or made it much more difficult to prove (near impossible in some cases).

The Reason Magazine article examines why, when it does arise, the evidence is largely based on descriptions of the person's mental state and why recent advances in understanding mental illness don't really help very much.

One of the main reasons is that studies that find differences between people with mental illness and those without, do so on the group level. The same differences might not be present when comparing any two individuals.

In other words, on average, there are mind and brain differences between people affected by mental disorders and unaffected people, but the individual variation is so great that you couldn't reliably say it would be present in one particular person.

As these criminal trials are focused on the actions of one individual much of the objective science goes out the window because it can't reliably indicate an diagnosis, state of mind or reasoning abilities on the individual level.

This means that the most relevant evidence is usually the testimony of a psychiatrist or psychologist who is giving his or her clinical, descriptive judgement of the person's state of mind.

The Reason Magazine article examines what sort of dilemmas this causes, and considers how developments in psychology and neuroscience are likely to impact on the legal judgement of insanity.

It's an excellent guide to some of the key issues and the difficulties of making legal judgements on subjective states of mind.

Link to article 'You Can't See Why on an fMRI'.

—Vaughan.

June 22, 2007

Personalised drugs:

The New York Times has an interesting opinion piece on using genetic tests to determine which psychiatric drugs will be most effective and least problematic.

It is starting to become known that people with certain genes or sets of genes react to drugs differently.

These could be genes related to aspects of brain function, or, just as importantly, liver function, because many psychiatric drugs are broken down by enzymes in the liver.

For example, enzyme CYP2D6 metabolises a whole range of psychiatric drugs including antidepressants and antipsychotics.

Some people have certain versions of the CYP2D6 gene which means they have much less of the enzyme and so break these drugs down at a much slower rate.

This means the same dose of the drug in these people will have a much stronger effect, which can lead to increased side-effects.

There are many more examples of how genes influence the effects of drugs, and doctors would ideally like to be able to test people beforehand to see which drugs might be better.

Like most mass-market industries, the drug industry prefers a 'one size fits all' approach, advertising their pill as suitable for anyone with a particular condition.

The idea of genetically testing people for drug suitability is causing them a bit of a headache at the moment, as they're desperately trying to think of ways to make money out of it.

The New York Times article is quite positive about the effect this will have on the relationship between medicine and industry:

Aside from the potential to transform clinical psychiatric practice, these new developments will surely change the relationship between doctors and the drug industry and between the industry and the public. Direct-to-consumer advertising will become nearly irrelevant because the drugs will no longer be interchangeable, but will be prescribed based on an individual’s biological profile. Likewise, doctors will have little reason to meet with drug company representatives because they won’t be able to give doctors the single most important piece of information: which drug for which patient. For that doctors will need a genetic test, not a salesman.

Of course, it could just lead to people with common genes being prescribed cheap, widely available treatments, while those with rarer genetic profiles having to pay more for expensive, niche medicines.

Almost certainly, it will lead to the drug industry getting into the genetic testing market, probably with equally as many advantages and drawbacks as exist with their current marketing strategies.

Link to NYT on 'On the Horizon, Personalized Depression Drugs'.

—Vaughan.

Are we computers, or are computers us?:

Philosopher Dr Pete Mandik has published an interesting thought on his blog that questions whether the common 'computer metaphor' used to describe the human mind is really a metaphor at all.

Cognitive psychology typically creates models of the mind based on information processing theories.

In other words, the mind and brain are considered to do their work by manipulating and transforming information, either from the senses, or from other parts in the system.

It is therefore common for scientists to talk about the mind and brain in computer metaphors, as if they are information processing machines.

Mandik questions whether this is really a metaphor at all:

There is a sense of the verb "compute" whereby many, if not all, people compute insofar as they calculate or figure stuff out. Insofar as they literally compute, they literally are computers. Further, the use of "compute", "computing", and "computer" as applied to non-human machines is derivative of the use as applied to humans.

It strikes me as a bit odd, then, to say that calling people or their minds "computational" is something metaphorical.

Indeed, the term 'computer' was originally a name for a person who did mathematical calculations for a company.

Calculating machines were then given the supposedly metaphorical name 'computers' as they did equivalent work to the human employees.

Mandik questions whether we should think of any of these examples as genuine metaphors, since they're describing the same operations.

However, a key issue for cognitive science is whether there are reasonable limits in describing mind, brain and behaviour in mathematical terms.

The fact that we can adequately describe some things mathematically doesn't solve this problem, because there may be things that are impossible to describe in this way which we simply don't know about.

Often though, we just assume that we haven't found the right maths yet, when the reality may be far more complex.

Link to Pete Mandik post with great discussion.

—Vaughan.

Link to this post | Comments (9)

2007-06-22 Spike activity:

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

Science reports that forced donations activate brain areas associated with altruism.

The New York Times reports that half of all continuing medical education courses in the United States are now paid for by drug companies and are often little more than marketing exercises.

The Neurophilosopher finds some beautiful antique brain anatomy drawings.

Men react more positively to children with facial appearance resembling themselves, suggesting genetic relatedness, while women's reactions are more influenced by healthy looks.

Pure Pedantry has some fascinating analysis of some 80,000 year-old ornaments.

More coverage on the long-term neurological effects of concussion in NFL players from The New York Times.

Did Hitler have syphilis? Wild speculation abounds in a recent psychiatry conference presentation.

Research has consistently found that materialism makes you unhappy, but The New York Times reports that it may not make you better off either.

What makes a movement seem artificial? Cognitive Daily looks at how we perceive movements in computer animations.

Self-effacing people are secretly confident, suggest new study on the differences between declared and inner self-esteem.

Backlash over child bipolar disorder: Scathing articles published in the SF Chronicle and Boston Globe.

Mixing Memory published an gripping article on the psychology of metaphors that generated two great follow-ups.

Discover Magazine looks at the new generation of aptitude measurements in psychology that hope to go beyond IQ.

—Vaughan.

June 21, 2007

Next step brains: Evolution or optimisation?:

This week's edition of ABC Radio National's opinion programme Ockham's Razor has Dr Peter Lavelle speculating about a future when computers will match or outstrip the human brain.

Taking a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach, Lavelle looks to a time when we'll extend our capabilities with electronics and cybernetic expansions.

But he doesn't stop there. He continues way past where most futurists stop and thinks about the possible end points for the human race if our trend for technological integration continues.

A fun and wildly speculative way to spend 15 minutes if you like your neuroscience with a touch of wide-eyed wonder.

Link to programme details and audio.

—Vaughan.

The attractions of complex plastic bags:

Another snippet from the Journal of Forensic Sciences, this time from a post-mortem case report from the July edition:

"We here report the case of a 34-year-old man who died due to asphyxia, secondary to body wrapping in the largest and most complex plastic bag ever involved in a published case of autoerotic death."

People are sources of such surprising sexual diversity and you can just feel the curiousity radiating from the case report.

Despite the seemingly unusual nature of the death, over 400 autoerotic fatalities have been reported in the medical literature, suggesting that similar practices are probably conducted safely on a much wider basis.

For people who deal with tragic circumstances on a day-to-day basis, the intellectual fascination helps cope with the emotions these sorts of cases stir up.

I remember sitting in a cafe with a forensic psychologist happily chatting away, when the people next to us stood up and moved to another table as they seemed to be increasingly put off their food.

Being able to eat lunch while discussing gruesome case reports is one of the benefits of this form of coping strategy.

Link to abstract of 'Complex autoerotic death with full body wrapping in a plastic body bag'.

—Vaughan.

Labelling emotions reduces their impact:

A brain scanning study has found that naming emotions reduces the intensity of emotion processing in the brain, possibly outlining a brain network responsible for the old saying 'a problem shared is a problem halved'.

A team led by psychologist Dr Matthew Lieberman brain-scanned participants while they looked at pictures of faces that had different emotional expressions.

Earlier studies have found that naming an emotion seems to reduce its impact but this study went to particular lengths to make sure it was actually naming the emotion that helped, rather than just naming something, or identifying the emotion in other ways.

Participants were also scanned while having to name a face with a proper name, like Jane or Peter, or while matching the face to one with a similar emotional expression. This last task involved identifying the emotion but not naming it.

It turned out that when naming an emotion, and not for the other tasks, activity in a frontal lobe area called the the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (right VLPFC) significantly increased while activity in the amygdala decreased.

The amygdala is known to be heavily involved in processing emotions and seems to be regulated, at least in part, by the VLPFC.

These findings are consistent with this idea. The VLPFC increases its activity to dampen down the emotions triggered by the amygdala.

However, it's not clear whether this happens equally for both positive and negative emotions, as 80% of the faces in the study had expressions of anger or fear, while only 20% displayed happiness or surprise, so this data only really tells us about unpleasant feelings.

We know that observing emotion in others makes us more likely to feel the same thing ourselves, but it's not the same as experiencing an emotion 'first-hand', so we need to be a bit careful in assuming that this study fully represents the more everyday experience of talking about our emotions.

This experiment gives us a good understanding of the brain circuit involved reducing emotional impact via naming, but it doesn't tell us much about why this occurs.

This is one of the major drawbacks of neuroimaging studies. They often just redescribe an effect in terms of brain activity.

Of course, this is essential knowledge, but we need to do more than just have several types of description and it is why the results from brain scanning studies need to be integrated with behavioural, experimental, clinical and subjective reports to be fully informative.

Link to write-up from APA Monitor.
Link to write-up from Scientific American.
Link to abstract of scientific study.

—Vaughan.

June 20, 2007

Profiling serial killers and other violent criminals:

I just noticed that the January edition of the Journal of Forensic Sciences is freely available online, which contains psychological case reports on two serial killers and a football hooligan.

The journal is always a fascinating read, as it combines academic papers on everything from molecular analysis to psychological profiling.

The psychology case reports are often more influenced by a Freudian, interpretive style of explanation than in many other areas of psychology.

This is perhaps because the reports are largely from the USA which was historically most influenced by Freudian ideas and still retains a stronger influence in clinical and forensic psychology.

It is possibly also because it's quite hard to do controlled studies on violent criminals, and so single case studies are more likely to draw on interpretive ideas that were specifically developed to delve into the mind of individuals.

For example, the FBI's Behavioural Science Unit will partly analyse a crime scene using interpretive methods to link the symbolism of certain actions (e.g. covering a victims face after the murder) with the emotional state of the killer (e.g. shame).

The APA Monitor has an intriguing article on FBI profiling if you want to know more, and if you want some examples of the sorts of thinking that goes into criminal profiling, the case reports in the January edition are a good place to start.

Link to 'Paths to Destruction: The Lives and Crimes of Two Serial Killers'.
Link to 'The Hooligan's Mind'.
Link to 'Criminal profiling: the reality behind the myth'.

—Vaughan.

Pugilistic Discussion Syndrome:

The Wired Alt-Text blog has an amusing list of made-up diagnoses for internet users, covering all the major pathologies of online interaction.

This is my favourite:

Pugilistic Discussion Syndrome

In this curious form of aphasia, the subject is unable to distinguish between a discussion and a contest. The subject approaches any online forum as a sort of playing field, and attempts to "win" the discussion by any means necessary. The rules of the imaginary contest are apparently clear to the individual as he or she will often point out when others break them, but when asked to outline these rules the individual is reluctant, perhaps not wishing to confer an "advantage" on any "opponents." The conditions for winning are similarly difficult to pin down, although in some cases the individual will declare himself the winner of a discussion that, to all others, appears to be ongoing.

Of course, the next step is for an ambitious young researcher and a support group of affected families to champion the cause. Shortly after, a precise list of symptoms for each diagnosis will be created.

Some initial research will demonstrate that the behaviour in a particular category can be reduced by a particular psychiatric drug, at which point a drug company will fund a 'public education campaign' about the disorder.

Now flush with cash, the researchers and support groups will lobby for mainstream acceptance (inclusion in the DSM being the crowning glory), and as soon as that happens, the drug company will push for a licence for their treatment to be approved for the condition.

Voila. Another dreadful disease has been recognised, de-stigmatised and treated. The march of progress moves ever forward.

On a more serious note, what I've just described is a typical process by which new psychiatric conditions become mainstream.

Some people, and their families, may genuinely suffer from the effects jokingly described under 'Pugilistic Discussion Syndrome'.

It is always worth helping people to suffer less, but the question you should ask yourself when you hear about a new mental illness is not whether people are suffering (which they almost certainly are), but whether the best way to alleviate that suffering is by deciding it should be diagnosed and treated by the medical profession.

Medicine uses science, but the decision over what is worth researching and treating is based on a mixture of political, personal, scientific and economic concerns.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in psychiatry. An essential question for critical thinking in this field is 'who benefits from this approach?'.

The answer should always be the patients, but it isn't always clear that this is the case. We need to keep asking ourselves this same question over-and-over to make sure psychiatry is serving those most in need.

So, if you want to get involved with medical progress, consider some of the conditions on Wired's satirical list.

Link to 'Narcissistic Blog Disorder and Other Conditions of Online Kookery'.

—Vaughan.

What aliens taught us about self-justification:

Newsweek has a brief but interesting article on the new generation of research focused on cognitive dissonance - our desire to reconcile ill-fitting beliefs and actions which can lead us to self-justify in the most curious ways.

The theory is one of the most important in psychology but has a rather unusual origin.

It originated with psychologist Leon Festinger who came up with the idea after studying a UFO cult.

The cult believed in a prophecy that aliens would land at a certain date and destroy the earth. The date came and went and no aliens appeared, but a curious thing happened.

While some believers became disillusioned and left, others strengthened their beliefs. Festinger asked 'why would your belief strengthen if there's evidence against it?'.

He thought that it might result from a process of trying to make sense of two conflicting things - in this case, acting as a cult member, but having your belief in a prophecy disproved.

Perhaps to reconcile these positions and make yourself feel more at ease, you could either change your actions (leave the cult), or, change your other beliefs to fit (maybe the prophecy was a test of faith?).

Festinger set decided to test this idea in the lab with a now classic experiment.

He asked groups of students to volunteer for an experiment. In the study the students were asked to complete a dull and repetitive task.

Afterwards they were asked to persuade another student to volunteer. For this, half the students were paid one dollar, half twenty dollars.

The students were put in the position that their actions (persuasion) conflicted with their belief that the task was boring.

The students who were paid only one dollar rated the task as more enjoyable than the twenty dollar students.

While the paid students could justify their persuasion by telling themselves they were doing it for the money, the unpaid students justified it to themselves by changing their opinion of the task - "Actually, it wasn't that boring after all".

Many more studies have born out the theory, suggesting that we are motivated to reduce conflicts in our actions and beliefs, partly because we feel discomfort when they do not adequately match.

The Newsweek article looks at some of the more recent research in this area, and touches on some of the neuroscience studies which are trying to work out how the brain is involved in this process.

Incidentally, the author of the piece, Wray Herbert, also has a blog that is full of other great articles.

Link to Newsweek article 'Toothless is Beautiful'.

—Vaughan.

June 19, 2007

The pathologies of social rejection:

Today's Washington Post has an article on the psychology of rejection in children's social circles and its possible long-term effects on behaviour and mental health.

It comes in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre and it aims to make sense of bullying and rejection by looking at scientific studies in the area.

These have uncovered which things make a child more likely to be rejected, and what is likely to occur when it happens.

One key finding is that early rejection means that children are less likely to develop social skills, meaning continued rejection is more likely.

This has led to a focus on 'early intervention' for troubled children to try and prevent them from getting caught up in the vicious circle of social exclusion.

This is a valuable project because rejection is known to be associated with depression, behaviour problems and chance of becoming involved in criminal activities.

The article looks at some of the recent studies that have focused on this area, and talks to some of the professionals involved in trying to make a difference with vulnerable young people.

Link to article 'A Better Response to Rejection'.

—Vaughan.

Homosexuality in body, brain and behaviour:

The New York Magazine has an in-depth article on the science of sexual orientation and whether the biological factors which may make someone more likely to be gay, also make them more likely to appear gay to others.

There are now a range of established findings that suggest that gay men are likely to have a number of physical traits not shared by straight men (the findings on gay women are a lot less clear-cut it seems).

For example, a 2004 study [pdf] found that gay men were much more likely to have a counter-clockwise hair whorl (as pictured) than straight men.

Other studies have found differences in finger lengths, size of structures in the hypothalamus (a deep brain area), and on a number of psychological abilities like mental shape rotation and navigation to name but a few.

Some researchers believe that the same biological conditions that increase the chances of homosexuality, also increase the chances of some of these body, brain and mind differences.

While genetics is thought to play a part, researchers are also interested in the time when an unborn child is developing in the womb.

Interestingly, many of the differences are linked to hormone exposure in the womb and can be seen to different degrees in both gay and straight men.

One of the critical questions is still how much of the influence is to do with biological factors and how much with social influence, opportunity and freedom of expression.

The New York Magazine is a fantastic guide to the science of sexual orientation, but is also a wonderful commentary on how this research is perceived by parts of the gay community and what it might mean for gay politics.

The only slight drawback is that it repeats the 'scientists tried to turn sheep gay' myth, but apart from that, it's a compelling read.

UPDATE: Discover Magazine just had a feature article on the genetics of homosexuality which accompanies this piece nicely.

Link to article 'The Science of Gaydar'.

—Vaughan.

Mirror touches:

Nature reports on a recently discovered form of synaesthesia where affected individuals actually feel a sensation when they observe someone else being touched.

Synaesthesia is a condition where senses become crossed, so people might seeing colours when they encounter numbers, or tastes when they hear certain words.

This new form of synaesthesia was found by accident, during a talk by neuropsychologist Dr Jamie Ward:

"We first came across the mirror-touch synaesthesia by chance," says Ward. The sensation of touch was being discussed at a UCL neuroscience seminar, and someone suggested, as a thought experiment, imagining that people felt what they saw. A colleague of Ward's objected, vigorously insisting that everyone does, in fact, feel what they see. It was the first time Ward had realised such a condition could exist.

"There may be a lot of such people around, since they are unaware that that they have the condition. They think it is normal," says Ward. When he started to look for people who experience mirror-touch synaesthesia, he had little trouble finding them, he says.

Ward collaborated with Michael Bannisy to study the condition and they found that they affected people were more likely to confuse an observed touch with a real touch than unaffected people under experimental conditions.

They also found that people with the condition were especially sensitive to other people's emotions, rating much higher on measures of emotional empathy.

The study is published in Nature Neuroscience but I've just discovered there's also a great write-up over at The Neurophilosopher.

Link to Nature news story.
Link to write-up from the The Neurophilosopher.

—Vaughan.

June 18, 2007

Encephalon 25 hits the tubes:

Edition 25 of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon has just been published on PsyBlog.

A couple of my favourites includes GrrlScientist on why smart people don't all make smart choices and Memoirs of a Postgrad on whether AI systems will need bodies to be truly intelligent.

It has all the latest on the last fortnight's mind and brain writing, so head on over for more great articles.

Link to Encephalon 25.

—Vaughan.

Natalie Portman, cognitive neuroscientist:

Natalie Portman is best known for her roles in Hollywood movies like Star Wars, Cold Mountain and V for Vendetta. What is less known is that she was co-author of a scientific paper on the neuroscience of child development. This is about her research.

Portman, whose real name is Natalie Hershlag, left acting to pursue a psychology degree at Harvard during 2000.

While there she was employed as a research assistant in Prof Stephen Kosslyn's neuropsychology lab where she got involved in a study investigating the link between frontal lobe development and visual knowledge in infants.

The study investigated object permanence - the ability to understand that objects do not disappear from the world when they are out of sight, something that typically develops in the first year of life.

Researchers have argued that the frontal lobes are particularly important for this skill, but the trouble is, you can't put babies in conventional brain scanners to easily test the idea. They just wriggle about too much.

Portman's study, led by neuroscientist Dr Abigail Baird, used a relatively new method for measuring brain function called near-infrared spectroscopy.

This technology relies on the fact that near-infrared light can penetrate the skull, and that blood carrying oxygen, and blood that has given up its oxygen, absorbs the light differently.

The idea is that the device beams light into the frontal lobes, and you can work out how hard this area is working from how much oxygen-rich blood there is.

The advantage is that this technology is safe for children, and can be worn as a sort of high-tech hat, meaning there's less of a problem if the child being tested moves about.

During the study, infants were shown a toy, which was then hidden under a cloth. Children who have object permanence - who know that it hasn't disappeared - look for it under the cloth.

Children without this skill just ignore the cloth and look for something else to do, because the memory of the toy is gone.

The study tested 20 infants, every four weeks, from the ages of 5-12 months. To see what changed in the brain as the ability emerged, the researchers compared infrared light absorption from a time when the kids first looked for the toy, to an earlier time, when they just forgot that it existed when it was out of sight.

The team discovered that the frontal lobes suddenly kicked in when children develop the knowledge that hidden objects still exist, providing an understanding of which brain areas are involved in this important mental function.

The study also demonstrated that near-infrared spectroscopy could be used successfully to study the brain development of very young children.

The paper was eventually published in the journal Neuroimage, under Natalie's real name, with the title 'Frontal lobe activation during object permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy'.

It has since been cited by at least 20 different studies that have built on its findings.

And if you want to read the study in full, it is available as a pdf file at the link below.

pdf of Neuroimage paper.

—Vaughan.

Amazon tribe challenges the structure of language:

Chomsky famously argued that a core property of all language was recursion - the ability to include units of meaning inside other units. Anthropologist Daniel Everett argues in an article for Edge that the language of the Pirahã people is not like this, and might suggest that our understanding of the structure of language needs to be re-thought.

Language researchers like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker are often called 'nativists', meaning they think our core language abilities are inherited and suggest that all the individual languages have the same underlying components.

Research based on this idea looks at the structure and neuroscience of language to try and work out the basic elements.

Chomsky and colleagues argued in a 2002 paper [pdf] that human language has only one core property - recursion, which Everett also describes in his article:

The essence of human language is, according to Chomsky, the ability of finite brains to produce what he considers to be infinite grammars. By this he means not only that there is no upper limit on what we can say, but that there is no upper limit on the number of sentences our language has, there's no upper limit on the size of any particular sentence. Chomsky has claimed that the fundamental tool that underlies all of this creativity of human language is recursion: the ability for one phrase to reoccur inside another phrase of the same type. If I say "John's brother's house", I have a noun, "house", which occurs in a noun phrase, "brother's house", and that noun phrase occurs in another noun phrase, "John's brother's house". This makes a lot of sense, and it's an interesting property of human language.

Finding a language which doesn't have the supposedly 'universal' property of recursion challenges the Chomsky theory and, potentially, the whole idea that a 'language instinct' is somehow genetically inherited.

Everett argues that the Pirahã language doesn't have recursion (or numbers and few colour names), presumably partly as a result of the particular habitat that the tribe lives in.

Everett's article is also fascinating as it describes his first encounter with the Pirahã as a Christian missionary, and his subsequent rejection of his missionary work and focus on linguistics.

It also describes the culture and mindset of the people and has some of Everett's personal reflections on his research and experiences.

There's also a video about the topic and its possible effect on our understanding of language on the same page, and a recent NPR radio show investigated the Pirahã controversy in more detail.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Austin for sending in a link to an enjoyable article from The New Yorker that is a fantastic guide to the language and its impact on science.

UPDATE 2: There are some fantastic comments, corrections and additional links in the comments that are definitely worth reading. Thanks to everyone who's contributed!

Link to 'Recursion and Thought: Why the Pirahã don't have numbers'.
Link to NPR radio show.

—Vaughan.

Link to this post | Comments (4)

June 17, 2007

Smuggling drugs into the brain:

Open-access science journal PLoS Biology has a fascinating article on the latest developments in getting drugs across the blood-brain barrier - the body's strict border control that keeps the brain free of foreign substances.

The blood-brain barrier is a filtering system in the capillaries, the smallest blood vessels in the brain, to prevent molecules over a certain size reaching the brain itself (click image for larger version).

This makes good biological sense as it keeps the brain free of a whole range of potential poisons and infections but is a pain for drug designers.

There are many drugs which would have an effect but can't get from the blood into the brain because the molecules are too big.

For example, Parkinson's disease involves the death of dopamine neurons in the nigrostriatal pathway of the brain - a key circuit for movement - which is partly why the disease causes tremor and rigidity.

The obvious thing to do would be to give people dopamine to make up for the lost neurons, but it turns out that dopamine molecules are too big to cross the blood-brain barrier. If you swallow a dopamine pill, it won't reach the brain.

Eventually someone hit on the idea of giving people levodopa or L-DOPA - a molecule that the body eventually transforms into dopamine and is small enough to cross the barrier.

So, you swallow an L-DOPA pill, it crosses the barrier and is changed into dopamine inside the brain itself. Clever.

Substances given with the intention that the body will transform them into the desired drug are called prodrugs and finding prodrugs small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier is one method for getting round the delivery problem.

This is fine if what you're trying to deliver can be transformed into something useful but for many drugs this isn't possible, so other methods have to be found.

New techniques are being developed which take advantage of the fact that the blood-brain barrier makes special exceptions for certain essential proteins.

The idea is that a drug molecule will be 'wrapped up' in a familiar protein and so will be smuggled across the barrier, only to be released when it reaches the other side.

Other techniques involve a mechanical approach to the problem where a device is implanted to pump the drug straight into the brain. Needless to say this direct intervention approach is favoured by neurosurgeons (the armed wing of the neuroscience world).

The PLoS Biology article discusses these are other developments and looks at how this problem is now becoming a core focus of drug development as useful medicines have sometimes been invented only to be found to be unusable in practice.

Link to PLoS Biology article 'Bridging the Blood-Brain Barrier'.

—Vaughan.

June 16, 2007

Fatherhood in the mind and brain:

Both Time and Slate have just run articles on the often neglected field of fatherhood, where they report on the significant brain changes and unique psychological processes linked to male parenthood.

I sometimes think you can't blame fathers for feeling like they're unimportant when science has relegated them to a footnote in the parenting process.

This is slowly beginning to change and increasingly research is showing that fatherhood and impending-fatherhood has a unique effect on the mind and brain.

For example, fathers have unique hormonal changes during their partner's pregnancy and when interacting with their child that significantly affects their brain.

And yet despite these findings, few scientists treat the physiology of fathers as a serious subject in its own right. Researchers have been investigating some of the hormonal swings in humans for almost a decade, and longer in other species; still, most of this work remains on the fringe. Between 2000 and 2006, the journal Hormones and Behavior published nearly three times as many studies of mothers as of fathers, and this year the count so far is 16 to three. A 2000 review framed research into physiological fatherhood as "an opportunity to better understand maternal behavior, by studying parental behavior in the absence of pregnancy and lactation." Interest in how men's bodies prepare themselves for fatherhood only seems to matter to the extent it sheds light on mothers. Meanwhile, the ways in which dads screw up their kids is a thriving area of research.

It's also interesting how stories on fatherhood are presented.

BBC News recently reported on a new study (which I haven't been able to track down yet, except as a press release) that looked at couvade syndrome - where fathers experience physical symptoms as their partners go through pregnancy.

This is entirely explained in terms of 'anxiety' and being 'attuned' to their partners.

This is despite the fact that researchers have been arguing for over a decade that the syndrome is equally as influenced by the biological changes brought on by fatherhood.

In contrast, the popular reporting on pregnancy and women is awash with the effects of hormones on behaviour and often ignores the psychological aspect.

In other words, women who experience changes in thinking or behaviour are described if they're slaves to their hormones whereas symptoms in men are due to anxiety and over-identification.

It's an interesting twist on how our stereotypes about sex roles and parenting play out in science and popular culture.

The Time and Slate articles attempt to redress the balance by examining research on the role of fathers and how their body and brains react to pregnancy and childcare.

Link to Slate article on what fatherhood does to the body and the brain.
Link to Time on the psychology of fatherhood.

—Vaughan.

June 15, 2007

Unnatural selection:

Overheard in a bookshop last week:

"I'm looking for a book called The God Delusion.
It's by Richard Darwin."

Is this the first case of the God Capgras Delusion I wonder?

—Vaughan.

A Trephined Irish Skull:

Many thanks to Alex and the Neurophilosopher, who sent in the article I had no luck getting hold of in the previous post on trepanation - the surgical technique of putting a hole in the skull.

The brief article is from the 1923 edition of the anthropology journal Man and describes ninth century brain surgery on a 22-year-old man.

If you're wondering why it describes the operation as trephination, it's an alternative word for trepanation. Click on the image for a larger version.

A Trephined Irish Skull
Man, Vol 23, (Nov 1923), p180
Thomas Walmsley

Cennfaelad, a young Irish chief, had his skull fractured by a sword-cut at the Battle of Moyrath AD 637. He was under treatment for a year afterwards at the celebrated school of Tomregan (now in Co. Cavan), where the injured part of his skull and a portion of his brain were removed. He recovered and afterwards became a great scholar and a great jurist. Such is one record of early Irish surgery.

The skull reproduced here (Fig. 1) is that of a young male about twenty-two years of age, which was obtained, along with a number of other skulls, from early Christian (ninth century) graves at Nendrum Monastery in Island Mahee, Strangford Lough. The other skulls, with a few more of the same period from another locality, I hope to describe at a later date, but this one is of sufficient interest to be described separately.

For on the left side, towards the anterior-inferior angle of the parietal bone and just within the temporal line, there is a trephined opening. The diameter of the opening is 8mm, but it originally must have been more, for the edges have healed all round; this can be seen better on the inner surface. Round the opening, on the outside of the skull, for a distance of 3mm, the bone is bevelled as if it had been scraped away. On the inside there is no such bevelling; rather the bone is slightly raised and tuberculated round the original margin of the opening.

There are no marks of injury on the skull, and there is no evidence of disease. The deficiency above the mastoid is due to the falling out of a sutural element.

—Vaughan.

2007-06-15 Spike activity:

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

The New York Times has an article on the controversial diagnosis of sensory integration disorder.

Simon Baron-Cohen writes on The Biology of the Imagination in Entelechy magazine.

Neanderthals were less likely to be mentally ill according to some speculative research.

The Society for Neuroscience has a useful list of online neuroscience databases.

Alzheimer's disease may quadruple by 2050 according to projections in a recent study.

A psychologist claims he spotted a live dinosaur in 1971. You read it here first.

Hugs are more effective for comforting women, words better for men, according to a new study reported in The Independent.

MeFi features the art of Alexander Pavlovich Lobanov, Russian deaf-mute confined to psychiatric institutions for over 50 years.

A funny letter in this week's New Scientist warns about the tragedy of Juvenile Obnoxiousness Disorder.

Developing Intelligence investigates the autobiographical blur between fantasy and reality.

Women are more likely to be attracted to men who share physical similarities with their father but only if they had a good relationship with him, reports Live Science.

PsyBlog covers a curious study on how the speed and flow of men's urination in a public lavatory was affected by invasions of personal space.

BBC News has an article on Couvade syndrome, where men experience physical symptoms associated with pregnancy.

The Phineas Gage Fan Club finds a wonderful demonstration of diffusion tensor imaging - a brain scanning technology that maps white matter connections in the brain.

—Vaughan.

June 14, 2007

The reflected relationship: the science of transference:

This week's Science News has an article on transference, originally a Freudian concept of how feelings from one relationship can affect another if the two people share similarities.

In its simplest sense, transference is taking out your feelings of frustration on your partner when you've just had an argument with the bus driver. You've just transferred them from one person to another.

More commonly, it's used to describe the idea that you re-experience certain feelings and relationship patterns you developed with important people in your childhood when you meet new people who share similarities with the original person.

In other words, if you didn't trust your father, you're less likely to trust people who remind you of your father.

Transference is key in Freudian psychotherapy, where the therapist attempts to be a 'blank screen' onto which the patient can project and transfer their feelings through the therapeutic relationship.

This allows the therapist to see the process in action and make the patient aware of it, so they can change and improve their relationship patterns.

This is one Freudian concept that has remained quite popular in modern psychology, although it's rarely been subjected to controlled research.

This is beginning to change, however, as some researchers are starting to test the idea experimentally, and finding that the effects seem to be measurable in the lab.

The Science News article looks at some of the research being conducted by Profs Susan Andersen and Glen Gabbard that has been exploring this interesting interpersonal effect.

Link to Science News article 'Past Impressions'.

—Vaughan.

The latest in sleep science:

A Blog Around the Clock has a couple of useful posts that collect the highlights from one of the biggest international sleep research conferences.

Sleep 2007 finishes today in Minneapolis and is a mecca for psychologists and biologists wanting to understand this still mysterious process.

If you want to have a look at exactly what's been discussed, the programme is available online, although A Blog Around the Clock links to more comprehensive articles about some of the most interesting developments.

Link to A Blog Around the Clock conference coverage part 1.
Link to A Blog Around the Clock conference coverage part 2.

—Vaughan.

Like a hole in the head: An illustrated history of trepanation:

Neurophilosopher has written an absolutely fantastic post on the history of trepanation - the surgical procedure that has been carried out since prehistoric times and involves drilling a hole in the head.

Neurophilosopher always has great articles but this is also wonderfully illustrated and has all the gory details of this fascinating procedure.

The trepanned skulls found at prehistoric European sites contained round holes, which varied in size from just a few centimetres in diameter to nearly half of the skull. They are most commonly found in the parietal bone, and also in the occipital and frontal bones, but rarely in the temporal bone. In the earliest European skulls, the holes were made by scraping the bone away with sharp stones such as flint or obsidian; later, primitive drilling tools were used to drill small holes arranged in circles, after which the piece of bone inside the circle was removed. The late Medieval period saw the introduction of mechanical drilling and sawing instruments, whose sophistication would continue to increase for several hundred years.

The article takes you through the prehistoric origns of the procedure, to how it developed around the world, to its modern uses for surgery and recreation (yes, recreation!).

The picture at the top is from a trepanned skull from the Hunterian museum in London that also showed signs of neurosyphilis infection. There's more about it in a previous post.

I also found a good example of a trepanned skull in the National Museum of Ireland but unfortunately they don't allow pictures and don't have images of it available.

However, this article has an interesting snippet about the various examples of the procedure discovered in the country:

From Ireland several interesting examples are available. A trepanned skull of a thirteen-year-old child, probably early Christian, was recovered from Collierstown in Co. Meath (Martin, 1935). Two further trepanations each of late Mediaeval date, one from Ballinlough (Co. Laois) and the other from Maganey Lower (Co. Kildare), were found during recent excavations.

A fourth specimen was discovered in a stone-lined grave at the Abbey of Nendrum on Mahee Island in Strangford Lough (Martin). The abbey was destroyed in 974 A.D. by fire. It is highly likely that in those days "major surgery" was performed in monastic institutions (Fleetwood, 1951). Legend has it that Cennfaeladh, whose skull was fractured by a blow from a sword during the battle of Moyrath in Co. Down (637 A.D. ), was operated upon by St. Bricin, the Abbot of Tuaim Drecain, an accomplished surgeon and scholar (Fleetwood).

And this page has an image of a 7th century gargoyle-esque carving of St Bricin with trepanning tools in one hand and a skull in the other.

Apparently, the treatment worked so well that Cennfaelad, an Irish chieftan, recovered his intellect and improved his memory so that on his recovery he became a great scholar, whose name 'Kennfaela the Learned' is known in Irish literature to this day.

There's more about this case, and about trepanning in Ireland, on this page, and, if you've got a subscription to JSTOR, which I don't have unfortunately, there's an academic article here. Do let me know if you can get hold of a copy!

Link to Neurophilospher on 'An Illustrated History of Trepanation'.

—Vaughan.

June 13, 2007

Cognitive science news mashup:

CogNews.net is a website that takes feeds from a number of cognitive science sites and puts them in one place for your viewing pleasure.

It has three categories with feeds from a few essential sites in each: Mind and Cognition (which includes us!), Neuroscience, and Artificial Intelligence and Robots.

The site has been put together by Marek Kasperski who obviously gets as much of a kick from cognitive science as we do.

Link to CogNews.net.

—Vaughan.

New brain scan combines best of both:

ScienceDaily reports that the first images from a new type of brain scanner that combines both magnetic and radiation-based imaging have been shown at a recent medical conference.

The new technology is called MR/PET because it allows magnetic resonance and positron emission tomography scans to be conducted at the same time.

MRI uses very strong magnets that align the spin of the atoms in your body. It then sends a radio pulse which knocks the atoms out of alignment.

After the knock, the atoms return to their previous alignment but the time taken will differ, depending on the body tissue. As they return, they send off their own pulse, and this can be picked up and turned into an MR image of the tissue by computer software.

PET involves adding a small amount of oxygen or glucose into the body that the brain uses to do its work. Crucially, the substance has been altered so it is slightly radioactive.

As the brain works, the areas that are most active will be slightly more radioactive, and this can be measured to generate a map of brain activity.

You can create similar maps using functional MRI, but one advantage of PET is that it is especially good at 'resting PET', meaning you're not asked to do any tasks. It just gives a general picture of which brain areas are most active.

This is particularly useful if the medical team think your brain might be structurally intact but may have areas which are under or overactive, or want to know the effects of structural damage in one area on function in the rest of the brain.

PET can also be used to track the effects of specific chemicals in the brain (by making them slightly radioactive and injecting them), which is something that fMRI currently can't do very well.

Previously, to combine the two scans, someone would have to go into a MR scanner to get a structural image, and then go into a PET scanner to get a measure of activity, and computer software would impose the PET image onto the MR image.

This causes problems because the two images aren't perfectly aligned and so information gets lost.

Imagine you are trying to fit a photo you took from an airplane onto a street map. You might need to stretch or edit the photo to make it fit properly, and in doing so, you might miss bits out or blur important details.

The reason the combined MR/PET will be useful is that the two scans are taken at exactly the same time, so no information is lost.

It also means patients with fragile brains won't need to be moved between scanners.

One of the difficulties with combining the types of scanning before is that PET normally uses photomultiplier tubes to detect the effects of radiation, which don't work in magnetic fields, but now new sensors have been developed which are MR safe.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any images of the new scans online (please let me know if you find or have any!).

However, if you want to know more, Radiology Today magazine has a more in-depth article and Siemens, the creator of the technology, has some information as a webpage and pdf.

Also there's an image of the scanner from a Cambridge University team also working on the technology.

Link to ScienceDaily on new MR/PET images.
Link to Radiology Today article on the technology.

—Vaughan.

Bullets, bleeds and bangs - brain injury animations:

Brain injury resource site Neuroskills has a nifty page of brain animations, including a selection showing how various types of brain injury occur.

They're a bit clunky in places and the point of injury seems to be illustrated with a small science-fiction-like stellar explosion, but they're genuinely informative and quite fun to watch at times.

They include the effect of a bullet to the head, stroke, shaking injuries, animations highlighting the main anatomical areas, the functioning of healthy and damaged neurons and a few others thrown in for good measure.

Link to Neuroskills animations gallery.

—Vaughan.

June 12, 2007

Mind Hacks is mercury:

Humbug has put together a wonderful periodic table of blogs and it looks like Mind Hacks is the mercury of the internet. I'm hoping it's because we're shiny and interesting rather than neurotoxic.

Link to Humbug periodic table.

—Vaughan.

The psychology of self-accusation, from 1902:

Every month, the British Journal of Psychiatry has a section that prints 100-year-old excerpts from medical journals relevant to modern psychiatry.

They are usually both fascinating and shocking. As a brief window on the past, they can show a very different understanding of mental disorder, but not always the respect that people with psychiatric difficulties deserve.

This from a 1902 letter to the Lancet about people who go to court to accuse themselves of a crime that they haven't committed.

The committal of a notorious crime which excites popular imagination and which remains undetected for a time often leads to the appearance in law courts of self-accusing culprits who charge themselves with being the authors of the crime in question. Dr. Ernest Dupré of Paris in a paper read before the Annual Congress of French Alienists and Neurologists recently held at Grenoble attempts to delineate with exactitude the psychological nature of "auto-accusation" and to show that certain morbid elements play an important part in it.

He points out that "auto-accusation" is not often or merely the result of a weak-mindedness; the subject of it is a person who has positively developed general ideas of unworthiness, guilt, and remorse, and in a word is suffering from mild melancholia with vague delusions of guilt and sin. Another type of self-accuser is the proud and vain "degenerate" who with a brain warped by congenital anomaly of development constructs romances of which he readily persuades himself to be the hero or the martyr.

There is, adds Dr. Dupré, a marked contrast between these two types. The one is abject, lowly, self-humiliating; the other proud, egiostic, and vain. Among other types of the same abnormality are found persons of alcoholic or hysterical character.

The full letter goes on to describe the supposed characteristics of the 'alcoholic self-accuser' and the 'female self-accuser' who was apparently likely to be suffering from 'marked hysteria'.

One of my favourites is a curious case report of a Cambridge student who had seemed to have lost his identity.

There's many more historical gems in the archives that are well worth checking out.

Link to '100 years ago' section of the British Journal of Psychiatry.

—Vaughan.

Detect lies by getting the story in reverse order:

The Times has an interesting piece on a police interview technique that asks the suspect to tell the story in reverse order. A recent study has found this makes it more likely that liars will give themselves away.

The research has been conducted by Prof Aldert Vrij and colleagues who specialise in the psychology of police interviews and deception.

The idea behind it is that you have to expend considerable effort when you're lying not to look stressed and to make sure your story doesn't contradict itself.

One way of making this less easy, is to put additional strain on your mental resources by asking you to do something more difficult with the story.

This is especially tricky for liars, because for people who are telling the truth, explaining the events in reverse order is less of an effort than for people who are making the story up.

When someone is using their concentration to do this harder task, they will concentrate less on making sure they look comfortable with their story, and so are more likely to let signs of stress slip out.

On the other hand, they may have to concentrate harder on making themselves look relaxed, and make some errors in their story.

This is known as a type of 'cognitive load' interview and is routinely used in police investigations.

It's not a sure fire way of detecting deception, because liars who are better at concentrating will be less likely to give themselves away, but it seems to increase the chances of the police working out if the suspect is trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

Deception Blog has some more information about the technique, and some links to additional coverage if you want to explore further.

Link to Times article on the technique.
Link to round-up from Deception Blog.

—Vaughan.

June 11, 2007

The purpose of psychology:

"The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best."

A quote from the French writer and philosopher Paul Valéry.

—Vaughan.

Nerve signals may be shock wave riders:

Wired has a good break down of theory that says that nerve cells don't work on electricity as we assume, but instead transmit signals using pressure waves, and crucially, this might explain how anaesthetics work.

The idea that nerve cells send their signals as pressure waves is not brand new. Known as the Soliton model, it was first published in 2005 by Drs Andrew Jackson and Thomas Heimburg and was thought a bit of a curiosity.

It challenges the model of nerve cell functioning that was developed by Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, both of whom won the Nobel prize for their work.

Their discovery was that nerve cells can be understood as electrical circuits and that the transmission of nerve signals or action potentials can be described using a simple elegant mathematical formula.

This formula describes how nerve cells work remarkably well and is still the basis of much modern neuroscience.

So suggesting that the Hodgkin-Huxley model is wrong is likely to piss a lot of people off, and that's exactly what the Soliton model has done.

However, this new paper suggests it could explain how anaesthetics work, which is one of the mysteries of modern neuroscience.

It's a totally left-field idea, but if it works out, it would be a revolution in both neuroscience and medicine.

Link to Wired article on application of the Soliton model to anaesethics.
Link to 2005 scientific paper on the Soliton model.

—Vaughan.

Uncanny valley - the movie:

The Age has a brief article looking at how film makers are trying to avoid the 'uncanny valley' - the phenomenon where artificially created characters seem more unnervingly odd as they are made more life-like.

The idea is that we're so used to picking up the subtlies of human appearance that android-like figures seem cold and stilted whereas less life-like cartoons or animals can often seem more expressive and 'warm' because we aren't distracted by their not-quite-right attempts at being human.

This is a concept developed by robotics researchers but is also important when film-makers are trying to make likeable characters that audiences will warm to.

The article has noted that film makers have spent a lot of time trying to develop computer software to simulate things like hair movement, in an attempt to improve realism.

It's hard to say what exactly is off-putting about 'artificial humans' though, so it's not easy to know what to focus on to improve their likeability.

This might be one area where significant advances in human-computer interaction might be driven by the film and entertainment industry.

Link to article 'When fantasy is too close for comfort'.

—Vaughan.

June 10, 2007

The mind is a metaphor:

Dr Brad Pasanek is a literature researcher at the University of Southern California who has created a database of metaphors of the mind used in 18th century English literature.

It allows you to search by everything from standard keywords to the politics of the author and has over 8,000 entries.

As illustrated by Douwe Draaisma's excellent book Metaphors of Memory, our scientific understanding of the mind often uses metaphors of the latest technological developments.

It's no accident that we now tend to understand the mind in computational terms, as an information processing system, whereas in past centuries it was thought to operate on the principles of pressures, fluids and vapours.

Pasanek also runs a blog that highlights some of the background and history to the more interesting examples.

Link to The Mind is a Metaphor database.
Link to The Mind is a Metaphor blog.

—Vaughan.

June 09, 2007

A window on the mind:

BBC Radio 4 science programme Frontiers just had a special edition on using brain scans to read the mind.

There's been various reports in the media about research studies that have been able to identify subjective mental states or intentions from patterns on brain scans, mainly reported as a sort of 'mind reading' technology.

While these are genuinely interesting studies, they're really not at the stage of being able to 'read' anyone's thoughts.

The first thing to ask yourself when you hear this sort of claim is 'has the effect been shown to work on individuals, or only as an average over a group?'. The next is 'what task was the effect demonstrated on?' and finally think about how reliably the effect could be demonstrated.

For example, on a recent brain imaging study that attempted to predict intentions, the prediction was made for individuals, but only between one of two possible options and the best reliability was 71%.

In other words, this study found that for each individual, when looking back at the data, with a choice deliberately designed to be predictable, their choice could be worked out before they made it about two-thirds of the time.

It's hardly likely to concern anyone worried about the privacy of their thoughts.

It is a start though, and the implications of how the technology might be used as it becomes more accurate are certainly thought provoking.

The special edition of Frontiers talks to some of the researchers involved in this work and tackles the ethics of the technology.

Link to Frontiers on 'Mind-reading' (with audio).

—Vaughan.

June 08, 2007

Legal drug paraphenalia:

Wired magazine has a slide show of the ~~bribes~~ promotional gifts given out at last month's American Psychiatric Association by pharmaceutical companies trying to get doctors to prescribe their drugs.

It's all fairly tacky stuff but they're expensive enough to be motivating. These sorts of things are handed out willy-nilly by drugs reps and your local doctor's office is likely to be awash with these sort of semi-useful adverts.

At conferences, to get the more expensive gifts you usually have to complete a short quiz, which in reality is a push poll designed to make the key marketing points more memorable.

They tend to ask questions like:

In a 2003 research study [conducted by our company] of over 2,000 people, which drug was found to be most effective for condition X?

Was it:
a) our new drug Fixitall^TM
b) ye olde elixir of quicksilver
c) competitor's drug [which incidentally, just had bad press]

In reality though, these sorts of promotions are really the tip of the iceberg. What you don't get from the slide show, is that possibly the majority of people at the conference will have had their trip funded by drug companies, probably with dinners, cocktail parties and excursions thrown in.

Those who don't, end up staying in cheap hotels, miles from the conference, in the seedy parts of town, because either they have to pay the whole trip themselves or their departments will only give modest amounts as it is assumed you can just get drug company money.

You can see why choosing to remain as uninfluenced as possible by drug company promotion is less attractive for some.

Of course, most clinicians argue that these sorts of things don't influence them, but we know from exactly the same type of research that clinical science is based on that it has a strong and significant effect on attitudes and clinical practice.

What's more, patients look upon these gifts much less favourably than clinicians do.

If you want to know more about the effects of drug company promotion and the bias in the advertising material, have a look at No Free Lunch.

As an aside, if there is a big psychiatric conference in town, go to the less glamorous area of the city, and you'll find groups of researchers having a much better time. One of the disadvantages of attending the corporate events is attendees are expected to behave like the Queen at a garden party, so no-one "upsets the funders". Very dull indeed.

Link to Wired article 'Prescribe Me!' (via BB).
Link to No Free Lunch campaign.

—Vaughan.

Neuro-war-on-terror-tainment:

Lie Lab is a three-part TV series where they use the not-very-accurate brain scan lie detection method to test high profile people who have been accused of lying.

The programme quotes a 90% accuracy for fMRI lie detection, but this is a best estimate and has been found in group studies, in lab conditions, where the lies are relatively benign - such as saying you haven't seen an image when you've been shown it earlier.

It's not clear how well they detect highly motivated lies. Also, it seems that the brain scans are better at detecting lies than truths.

This is important, because you could get a 100% lie detection rate by classifying everything as a lie. Being able to adequately separate truth and lies is the key to accuracy.

The first episode tested two ex-Guantanamo bay detainees accused of being terrorists but eventually release without charge, the second tested a woman convicted of poisoning her daughter with salt who protests her innocence.

Needless to say, the results are largely inconclusive.

If the technology were any better, I'd write in and see if they can get Tony Blair for the grand finale.

The best thing about the programme is Prof Sean Spence, who's done some of the key research studies on the neuroscience of lying and fMRI lie detection, and does his best to point out the ambiguity of the whole process.

UPDATE: Thanks to Deception Blog for pointing out that the series is available over the web for viewers in the UK or Eire via Channel 4's on demand service. It's on some private bittorrent trackers but I've not seen it on any publice ones yet. Keep a look out.

Link to Lie Lab website.
Link to Spence's research papers (most of which are open-access).

—Vaughan.

2007-06-08 Spike activity:

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

A Polish man wakes up from a 19 year 'coma' and is remarkably functional (with video).

New Scientist reports that folic acid could protect against strokes.

From last year's NeuroFest: A puppet show about autism called 'The Boy Who Wanted to be a Robot' is available on YouTube - part 1 and part 2.

The Mouse Trap has an insightful discussion on the psychology and neuroscience of imagination.

Advert for the London 2012 Olympics triggers seizures in some people with epilepsy. No word on the headaches caused by the logo.

Neuroscience video blog Channel N has found some vintage footage of neuroimaging experiments.

Research covered by New Scientist suggests that forgetfulness is a tool of the brain. Also see the case of Solomon Shereshevskii, a man studied by A.R. Luria, who had a problem with not being able to forget.

The Neurophilosopher finds some wonderful antique brain illustrations.

Brain injuries raise risk of Alzheimer's disease, reports New Scientist.

CNN report on advances in neuroprothetics: Surfing the web with nothing but brainwaves.

The US Military are working on a humanoid battlefield robot to rescue fallen soldiers.

Providentia notes that the American Psychological Association are to review gay conversion therapy policy.

Furious Seasons notes Eli Lilly's sudden interest in funding a charity who train dogs to help depressed people since they've released an anti-depressant for canines.

In other animal news: Cognitive Daily find previously suppressed evidence of Pavlov's cat.

—Vaughan.

June 07, 2007

Know blood, know the brain:

The Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism publishes cutting edge scientific research on brain scanning and blood flow, and it's just put a collection of some of the key papers from the last few years online, for free.

It is particularly important that neuroscientists understand blood flow because this is what PET and fMRI, the two most popular forms of brain scanning, rely on to investigate brain activity.

Broadly speaking, both attempt to estimate which parts of the brain are most active by measuring which areas of the brain have the most blood going to them.

Despite the fact that brain scans look like a map of activity, the link between blood flow and the work done by neurons is still not fully understood.

For example, in fMRI, there seems to be a delay from when neuron activity occurs, to when the blood flow responds. A 2003 study [pdf] found that this delay was about two seconds long and was slower to return to normal the older you get.

While two seconds might seem a short amount of time, in brain time, it's an age, as scientists are usually trying to understand changes that occur on the millisecond level.

Also, it's not clear how closely the changes in blood flow reflect the quality and extent of neuron activity, because blood needs to move around the brain for many different reasons.

Therefore, an important goal in neuroscience is to try and solve these questions, to improve how we understand brain function from brain scans.

The online collection has articles that describe some of the most important research in this area from the last few years.

The papers are technical and in-depth, but even if you aren't a neuroscientist, click on a few and just get a feel for what's involved.

At the very least, the images can be truly beautiful.

Link to MRI and PET imaging collection (via BrainWaves).

—Vaughan.

Learning field sense:

Wired has an article on 'field sense' - a sportsman's ability to infer seemingly unknowable information from subtle perceptual cues.

This means that some sportsman appear to have a 'sixth sense' of where players are on the field, or can work out where a ball is likely to go before it is struck.

This tends to be present in pro-sportsman and previously, it was just thought to be something you're born with. An advantage that makes some people more likely to rise to the top.

Wired magazine covers recent research in sports psychology suggesting it's actually something that it learnt, and might well be teachable.

What happened in that fraction of a second? A lot, Farrow reasoned. Up to a point, he theorized, the direction of a serve was fundamentally unpredictable: Whatever clues existed weren't ones that an opposing player could discern. By the time the ball had been hit, on the other hand, even a novice could make a plausible guess at its trajectory. What separated the pros from everyone else was the ability to pull directional information out of the early stages of a swing and therefore to predict a split second earlier where to head. This fraction of time is game- changing. A serve going 120 miles per hour takes approximately a third of a second to travel the 60 feet from baseline to service line. This means that an expert, who doesn't have to wait until contact, has twice as long to move, plant his feet, and swing.

This discovery fit with something Farrow and other tennis researchers had already suspected: Reflex speed is not the key factor in returning a serve. "People have tested casual players and experts, and their reaction times are essentially the same," Farrow says. The fact that Roger Federer can drill back a 140-mile-per-hour serve is partly a matter of muscle control. But it's also about processing subtle visual cues to predict where the ball will go and get to the right spot.

Link to article 'Wayne Gretzky-Style 'Field Sense' May Be Teachable'.

—Vaughan.

Dissolved and synthetic space:

Developing Intelligence has an interesting look at a brain-injured patient from the medical literature who can identify objects, but can't locate them.

RM suffered two strokes, damaging both sides of his occipito-parietal cortex (see the image above). This region of the brain is known to be important for spatial computations; this pattern of damage will often result in Balint's Syndrome, characterized by three primary problems: the inability to perceive more than one object at a time (simultagnosia), the inability to reach towards objects that are being focused on (optic apraxia), and severe problems in changing which object the eyes are focused on (optic ataxia). Such patients are essentially blind outside the focus of their attention, and cannot locate, reach for, or track the spatial movements even of items that are within their focus of attention. In some ways, this represents the complete dissolution of spatial awareness; Robertson quotes a description of Balint's "as if there is no there, there."

The article suggests that the brain damage may have a caused a problem in 'visual binding'.

The 'binding problem' is the question about how the brain can process different aspects of an experience in different parts, but we still get an impression of a single combined perception.

For example, we know that colour is largely processed in an area of the visual cortex called 'V4' and motion processed in an area called 'V5', yet unless we suffer brain damage, we just experience a moving coloured object as a single experience.

Somehow, these different processes are combined into our conscious experience. It's still a mystery, but patients like the one discussed in the Developing Intelligence article are giving us important insights into how the brain does the job, by seeing how it breaks down after injury.

The article also makes the interesting suggestion that while Balint's syndrome and similar disorders might be the visual binding system not working properly, synaesthesia, where the senses are combined, might be visual binding working too hard.

Chris goes on to explore this idea in more detail, in a further article that looks at the research on visual binding in people with synaesthesia.

Link to DevIntel article 'Dissolved Space: The Strange Case of Patient RM'.
Link to DevIntel article 'Synthetic Space: Binding Errors In Synesthesia'.

—Vaughan.

June 06, 2007

Neurosurgical removal of knife in head:

The picture is a man with a knife blade embedded in his head. It's from a case report in the Croatian Medical Journal by a group of neurosurgeons who reported how it happened, and how they safely removed it.

The man was stabbed in the head by his daughter, who's ominously described only as a 'drug addict' in the case report.

The blade penetrated 8cms into his skull but he was conscious on admission to hospital, he remembered the event, and had not fainted during or after the assault.

The surgical team used a grinder to remove the handle from the knife and CT scanned the patient's head, and found the blade was at the very edge of the brain.

The neurosurgeons removed the knife, and the man recovered with no brain injury and no damage to the facial nerve.

pdf of full-text paper.

—Vaughan.

Child Ritalin use doubles after divorce:

A study just published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal reports that children are twice as likely to be prescribed Ritalin after their parents have divorced.

Ritalin is the trade name for the amphetamine-like drug methylphenidate. It is typically prescribed for ADHD, a diagnosis which describes problems with staying focused, impulsiveness and / or hyperactivity.

Drug companies and some charities have invested a lot in selling the idea that ADHD is a purely neurological disorder and that the child's family life has little to do with it.

This study suggests that this isn't the case, and that the child's environment and relationships, in combination with possible genetic and neurological differences, have a significant effect on their behaviour.

Actually, this won't be news to most clinicians, who know that relationships and the environment have an effect even on conditions known to have a clear and defined neurological basis. For example, loneliness is known to contribute to the risk for Alzheimer's disease.

In a sense, all psychological problems are problems with the brain, because the brain and the mind are just different ways of describing the same thing, and the environment has its effect through our neurons.

But this doesn't mean it is possible to explain all human behaviour on only one level, and doing so will only give you part of the picture.

This study provides evidence that child behavioural problems are not best understood as neurological problems only, or that Ritalin is being used inappropriately to manage the behaviour of distressed children. Most probably, it's a bit of both.

To be fair, this isn't the only interpretation. The researcher notes that the known genetic component of ADHD could mean that the parents of children with behavioural share similar traits and so might be more likely to divorce because of this. It would be surprising if this accounted for the whole effect though.

People often use psychiatric diagnoses as if they're explanations when really they're nothing more than descriptions. The idea is that science will 'fill in the gaps' and explain how these differences occur.

The trouble is, the behaviour described by an ADHD diagnosis could occur because of genetic influences on brain development, because divorce is causing emotional distress, because the child is being bullied, or for any number of other reasons.

Ritalin is likely to help regardless of what is causing the child to be disturbed, because it helps the child focus by boosting attention.

The question is, should children be prescribed drugs because they are distressed by a divorce? There's no definite answer in every case as each child and each situation is different.

But perhaps we should be concerned that children are likely being prescribed psychiatric drugs as a 'quick fix' for emotional distress and behaviour problems when research shows that parent training programmes are safe and effective.

Link to full-text scientific paper.
Link to write-up from Yahoo! News.

—Vaughan.

Encephalon 24 is released:

The 24th edition of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon has just been published at psychology blog The Phineas Gage Fan Club.

A couple of my favourites include a post on deep brain electrode recordings from the human nucleus accumbens and a post on a psychological sex differences study run on 200,000 participants (wow).

For more articles, on everything from law to neural information storage, follow the link below for the full edition.

Link to Encephalon 24.

—Vaughan.

June 05, 2007

Innate kindness and the moral brain:

The Washington Post published an interesting article last week on research suggesting that human traits like generosity and altruism may be innate.

It describes a number of experiments which are tackling the relatively new field of 'moral neuroscience', which aims to understand how the brain is involved in moral decision-making.

What is interesting is that some of the brain areas found to be associated with this form of reasoning are those thought to be quite 'old' in evolutionary terms.

In one 2004 brain-imaging experiment [pdf], Greene asked volunteers to imagine that they were hiding in a cellar of a village as enemy soldiers came looking to kill all the inhabitants. If a baby was crying in the cellar, Greene asked, was it right to smother the child to keep the soldiers from discovering the cellar and killing everyone?

The reason people are slow to answer such an awful question, the study indicated, is that emotion-linked circuits automatically signaling that killing a baby is wrong clash with areas of the brain that involve cooler aspects of cognition. One brain region activated when people process such difficult choices is the inferior parietal lobe, which has been shown to be active in more impersonal decision-making. This part of the brain, in essence, was "arguing" with brain networks that reacted with visceral horror.

Such studies point to a pattern, Greene said, showing "competing forces that may have come online at different points in our evolutionary history. A basic emotional response is probably much older than the ability to evaluate costs and benefits."

Link to Washington Post article.
pdf of paper mentioned in excerpt.

—Vaughan.

Insecurity service:

Despair Inc has this fantastic parody of the t-shirts worn by private security firms at concerts, gigs and public events. So now you can wear the t-shirt and advertise yourself as a member of the insecurity team.

The company makes some fantastic parodies of corporate motivational merchandise, including a great range of demotivating posters.

Link to Despair Inc's 'Insecuritee'.

—Vaughan.

The rewards of being female:

A recently published study has found that females show greater brain activation to uncertain rewards during the most fertile stage of the menstrual cycle, perhaps explaining why women dress more attractively and have altered sexual preferences during this time.

The dopamine system is known to be involved in reward processing, and one of the current theories is that it is particularly involved in reward prediction - that is, it signals when we might expect to find something gratifying.

The key female sex hormone estrogen is known to alter dopamine function, so it was thought that females might show changes in how they experience rewards when estrogen levels fluctuate during the menstrual cycle.

The most direct dopamine-related rewards are drugs like cocaine and amphetamine, and studies have found that the same dose feels stronger during the fertile follicular phase of the cycle.

Research, largely conducted with straight women, has found that females dress more attractively during this phase and have altered sexual preferences so that they experience more masculine looking, assertive males as more attractive.

This new study by Dr Jean-Claude Dreher and colleagues fMRI brain-scanned men and women during a gambling task, and looked at between-sex differences and within-cycle differences in brain activity.

They found that women have a greater response to rewards than men in the amygdala and hippocampus, both key emotion areas.

They also found that during the most fertile follicular phase of the menstrual cycle, women show more activity when predicting rewards, particularly in the amygdala and another key emotion and reward area, the orbitofrontal cortex.

When the reward was delivered (a win in the gambling task), women showed stronger response in a number of reward-related areas during the fertile phase, including the striatum, a dopamine-rich deep brain area.

It seems that the hormone cycle makes brain areas related to the prediction and experience of rewards become more active when women are more fertile. This might explain why the menstrual cycle can alter women's sexual preferences and behaviour.

If you want more details of the study, the full paper is available at the link below.

Link to PubMed entry for the scientific paper.
pdf of full-text scientific paper.

—Vaughan.

June 04, 2007

Not seeing the wood for the trees:

Simultanagnosia is where a person can't perceive more than one object at a time. They literally cannot see the wood for the trees. There are two main types that differ depending on the location of the brain injury which has caused the syndrome.

Damage to the dorsal stream can cause dorsal simultanagnosia, where the patient cannot see two or more objects at the same time.

Damage to the ventral stream can cause ventral simultanagnosia, where the patient can see multiple objects, but can only identify one at a time.

The following is from p61 of the 1970 book Brain Damage and the Mind (ISBN 0140801405) by Moyra Williams, who describes a gentleman with dorsal simultanagnosia:

A sixty-eight-year old patient studied by the author had difficulty finding his way around because "he couldn't see properly". It was found that if two objects (e.g. pencils) were held up in front of him at the same time, he could see only one of them, whether they were held side by side, one above the other, or one behind the other.

Further testing showed that single stimuli representing objects or faces could be could be identified correctly and even recognized when shown again, whether simple or complex... If the stimuli included more than one object, only one would be identified at one time, though the other would sometimes "come into focus" as the first one went out...

If long sentences were presented, only the rightmost word could be read... If a single word covered as large a visual area as a sentence which could not be read, the single word was read in its entirety... If the patient was shown a page of drawings, the contents of which overlapped (i.e. objects were drawn on top of one another), he tended to pick out one and deny that he could see any others.

Recent evidence has suggested that although the unseen objects may not be consciously available, carefully designed psychological tests can detect they have been registered at some unconscious level.

The book Visual Agnosia by Prof Martha Farah covers a number of curious object perception disorders that occur after brain injury, including simultanagnosia.

The book's webpage has a table of contents and some sample chapters freely available online.

Link to webpage for Visual Agnosia.

—Vaughan.

For Therapeutic Purposes:

A poem from the book Uncut Confetti by the brilliant John Hegley:

For Therapeutic Purposes

I have not been quite right in the head
Like a balding tyre, I've been losing my grip
I have been given various medications
to help me cope
anti-depressants
anti-psychotics
And my brother has given me
a skipping rope.

Hegley's poems move effortlessly between the comic and the achingly poignant, and often touch upon the more curious aspects of human nature.

—Vaughan.

James Watson and the missing gene:

The New York Times is reporting that James Watson, co-discover of DNA, will have the whole of his DNA sequence made publicly available, with the exception of one gene known as apolipoprotein E.

Watson doesn't want to know which version of the gene he has, as it is one of the strongest predictors for the development of Alzheimer's disease.

In fact, it's the only gene which has specifically been shown to increase risk for the brain disorder.

The gene for apolipoprotein E, or ApoE as it is more widely known, comes in three main forms or alleles called ApoE ε2, ε3 and ε4.

Studies have consistently shown that the more ApoE ε4 alleles you have, the higher the chances of developing Alzheimer's disease and the younger the age it will begin to take effect.

In fact, having two ApoE ε4 alleles virtually guarantees you'll have Alzheimer's by the age of 80 and if you do get Alzheimer's disease, the presence of this allele seems to make it more likely that you'll experience delusions and psychosis.

The gene codes for the apolipoprotein which combines with fats (such as cholesterol) in the body and transports them to various places, including the liver, where they are broken down.

Alzheimer's disease is linked to the accumulation of 'amyloid plaques' and 'neurofibrillary tangles' in the brain, both of which are abnormal clumps of protein.

The presence of the ApoE ε4 allele makes these protein clumps more likely, even in people who have not developed the disorder.

However, the exact link between ApoE and fat processing, protein clumps and Alzheimer's disease is still not fully understood.

What Watson does understand, however, is that he could work out how likely he is to develop Alzheimer's disease from the versions of the gene he carries, and it seems he'd rather not live with the knowledge.

This is not an uncommon situation, as people with genetic disorders, or people whose close family have genetic disorders, often have to decide whether they want to know the chances of them or their children developing a potentially life-threatening disease.

Genetic counselling is a service that assists the the person in understanding the risks and possible outcomes based on the science of genetics, as well as dealing with the emotional impact of the sometimes difficult process of discovery and decision-making.

Link to NYT article 'Genome of DNA Discoverer Is Deciphered'.

—Vaughan.

June 03, 2007

Neurotech industry consultant profiled:

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on neurotech industry consultant Zack Lynch, who you might know from the blog Brain Waves.

Lynch is executive director of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization, an umbrella organisation for the commercial neuroscience sector, and managing director of NeuroInsights, a business intelligence service.

The San Francisco Chronicle article looks at Lynch's aims and work, in partnership with his wife, neurobiologist Casey Lynch, as well as giving an insight into how the neurotech industry is becoming an increasingly important force in the marketplace and in policy making.

Lynch is an interesting guy to watch. He'll always pitch for industry, but his job relies on him having a balanced view of what's likely to work out in the marketplace.

Interestingly, the article also notes he's written a book on the neurotech industry that's recently found a publisher:

The first neurotechnology project Lynch took on in 2001, a book titled "Brain Waves," just landed a publisher. The book allows Lynch to take his favored "200-year view," speculating on how business, politics and culture will evolve in a future era of neurotech inventions that might change the way people think and communicate. Lynch is fascinated by the ethical and social dilemmas that might emerge. If drugs can enhance memory, for example, would college entrance exams still be fair? "Who's going to be able to afford this?" Lynch asks.

Link to article 'Brainstorming about the brain'.

—Vaughan.

June 02, 2007

SciAmMind on team success and kids on drugs:

The latest edition of Scientific American Mind has just been published, and as is customary, two of the feature articles are freely available online.

The first is on the psychology of teams and how science is attempting to understand what makes a successful and productive working party.

The article describes effective team learning strategies and how emotions help groups bond during work.

These researchers trained college students to assemble transistor radios either alone or in groups of three. A week later the subjects were tested with their original group or, for people who received solo training, in newly formed groups. Members of groups that had trained together remembered more details, built better-quality radios and showed greater trust in fellow members' expertise. People in newly formed groups were less likely to have the right mix of skills to complete the task efficiently and knew less about one another's strengths.

The second article looks at the controversial topic of prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and evidence that the use of psychiatric drugs alters the growing brain.

This is weighed up against the evidence that in children with serious mental illness, an untreated disorder may alter the growing brain.

It's a difficult topic because it often boils down to picking the lesser of two evils, although, because of lack of research, it's often not easy to tell which will have the least negative effect for any given child.

It's a fascinating article on one of the major issues facing psychiatry today.

There are also articles on expertise and the role of mirror neurons in stroke recovery in the full edition, as well as all the regular features.

Link to article 'The Science of Team Success'.
Link to article 'Kids on Meds -- Trouble Ahead'.

—Vaughan.

June 01, 2007

Identity disorder and the future of technology:

Polymath physician Dr Ray Tallis has written an optimistic article in the latest edition of Philosophy Now magazine arguing that human technological enhancement is over-hyped but no reason for fear.

Tallis is a professor of geriatric medicine, so it's no surprise that he sees some of the most applicable benefits of technological advances for diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Critics have suggested that using technology to enhance human abilities, whether by drugs, implants or genetics, will lead to an erosion of our sense of identity.

Tallis looks back on past promises and argues that this is unlikely to be the case:

The most often repeated claim is that we are on the verge of technological breakthroughs – in genetic engineering, in pharmacotherapy and in the replacement of biological tissues (either by cultured tissues or by electronic prostheses) – which will dramatically transform our sense of what we are and will thereby threaten our humanity. A little bit of history may be all that is necessary to pour cooling water on fevered imaginations.

In 1960, leading computer scientists, headed by the mighty Marvin Minsky, predicted that by 1990 we would have developed computers so smart that they would not even treat us with the respect due to household pets. Our status would be consequently diminished. Anyone seen any of those? Smart drugs that would transform our consciousness have been expected for 50 years, but nothing yet has matched the impact of alcohol, peyote, cocaine, opiates, or amphetamines, which have been round a rather long time.

As well as making some telling philosophical points, the article is quite funny in places, as Tallis uses some of his literary skills to good effect.

Link to Philosophy Now article 'Enhancing Humanity'.

—Vaughan.

Freud, neurobiology and psychotherapy:

American TV discussion host Charlie Rose has a series of programmes available online where some of the world's leading researchers discuss Freud, neurobiology and the latest in psychological treatments for mental illness.

The first programme is a discussion of the legacy of Freud, with neurobiologist Eric Kandel, Freudian psychotherapist Peter Fonagy, inventor of cognitive therapy Aaron Beck and psychiatrist Charlie Roose.

It is a great guide to the differences between Freudian and cognitive approaches to psychotherapy, as well as how it relates to brain function and modern neuroscience.

A second programme looks at a similar topic, but expands the discussion to include cognitive psychological research and also includes psychologists Nancy Kanwisher, Nora Volkow, Rebecca Saxe and Liz Phelps.

Finally, one is a special interview with Eric Kandel, which is guest hosted by fellow Novel Prize winner Harold Varmus, who, incidentally co-founded PLoS - the organisation behind some of the world's finest open-access science journals.

—Vaughan.

2007-06-01 Spike activity:

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

A disquieting feeling of strangeness?: Just found this great 2001 paper on the 'the art of the mentally ill' on PubMedCentral.

Brain scan can predict response to antidepressants, reports New Scientist.

Neurophilosophy has an excellent article on famous amnesia case HM.

Pesticides 'up Parkinson's risk' according to BBC News.

Scientific American reports that Scottish scientists uncover a striking link between genes for brain size and tonality in spoken language.

Developing Intelligence investigates the neuroscience of imagination.

Forbes profile a cognitive scientist. Still no word from Hello magazine.

The rate of diagnosed clinical depression among retired American football players is strongly correlated with the number of concussions they sustained, reports The New York Times.

Pure Pedantry looks at research on storing computer information in biological neurons.

Young children can crudely add and subtract numbers before they have learned the rules of arithmetic, reports Scientific American.

Brain Ethics highlight a new book by the widely liked and respected neuroscientist, Chris Frith.

—Vaughan.