February 29, 2008

Autism reconsidered:

Wired covers the beginning of a possible revolution in how we understand autism from both a humanistic and a scientific point of view.

The article starts by discussing Amanda Baggs who is a non-speaking but incredibly articulate young woman with autism.

We discussed her video previously on Mind Hacks which remains a remarkably inspiring challenge to how we understand and value people who experience the world differently.

This alternative view of autism as a variation rather than a disorder in human neurology has been taken up by some researchers, and the article also looks at how recent neuropsychology research is starting to reframe the condition.

The first test, known as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale, has helped solidify the notion of peaks of ability amid otherwise pervasive mental retardation among autistics. The other test is Raven's Progressive Matrices, which requires neither a race against the clock nor a proctor breathing down your neck. The Raven is considered as reliable as the Wechsler, but the Wechsler is far more commonly used...

What the researchers found was that while non-autistic subjects scored just about the same — a little above average — on both tests, the autistic group scored much better on the Raven. Two individuals' scores swung from the mentally retarded range to the 94th percentile. More significantly, the subset of autistic children in the study scored roughly 30 percentile points higher on the Raven than they did on the more language-dependent Wechsler, pulling all but a couple of them out of the range for mental retardation.

While the majority of autism research is very much disorder based, the article is a wide-ranging look at the autism spectrum and a great review of some of the new thinking that beginning to challenge the status quo.

Link to article 'Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know'.

—Vaughan.

Fragments of consciousness:

Dana's online neuroscience magazine Cerebrum has a fantastic article on trauma and dissociation - the splitting of consciousness that apparently makes some aspects of the mind inaccessible to others.

Dissociation is a term that's used rather loosely in modern psychology and psychiatry. It is sometimes used to be synonymous with derealisation or depersonalisation, describing a feeling of being detached from reality or not being 'grounded' in your usual sense of self.

However, in its original and most interesting formulation by the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, it describes the splitting of consciousness so one part of conscious experience is compartmentalised, becomes inaccessible, is literally 'dis-associated' from the rest.

Its not clear why it occurs, but Janet's theory (often erroneously ascribed to Freud) suggests its a defence against psychological distress. Like the mental equivalent of brushing something under the carpet until you're unaware it existed or you even did the brushing.

Regardless of whether it is genuinely a 'defence' in this sense, it is thought to be at play in conversion disorder, where a person might experience paralysis despite having no damage to the muscles or nervous system (so called 'hysterical paralysis').

There is now growing evidence that the high level control systems in the brain deliberately inhibit the movement in the immobile limb, outside the conscious control of the patient.

It is also thought to be the mechanism by which hypnosis has its effect on those susceptible to it. In this case, however, it is a form voluntary dissociation guided by suggestion - meaning someone can have the experience of, for example, limb movement without the associated sense of having willed the action.

One of the most striking demonstrations of this form of dissociation is where some people can be hypnotised not to be bothered by pain, despite the fact they can report on its intensity - even to the point of surgical operations being possible without anaesthetic in some rare cases.

Perhaps it's not surprising then that dissociative disorders, where patients are seemingly permanently dissociated from their memory (dissociative amnesia) or dissociated from their senses or actions (conversion disorder) are particularly linked to trauma.

The most controversial of these syndromes is what used to be called 'multiple personality disorder', but is now called 'dissociative identity disorder' to suggest that the patient's very personality structure has become dissociated from itself, seemingly leading to several identities or 'alters'.

It's partly controversial because it was so obviously over-diagnosed in a period of 1950s and 60s American psychiatry that was seemingly drunk on Freudian theory without recourse to the strong coffee of scientific testing.

But its also controversial because its so rare despite still being in the diagnostic manuals. For example, I've never met a patient with the condition, and I've never met anyone who's met a patient with the condition, whereas I've seen many patients with dissociative amnesias and conversion disorders.

The Cerebrum opens as if it's about 'multiple personality disorder' but don't be fooled - it's actually a really good review of what cognitive science has told us about how trauma might cause dissociation (almost all the research mentioned is on memory rather than 'multiple personalities').

This is still a controversial area but the article gives the case for the link. The article presents evidence that experience of childhood abuse, both physical and sexual, may be particularly linked to dissociation, perhaps suggesting that it arises from an attempt at a 'defence' in some cases.

Cognitive scientists are now increasingly interested in dissociation and hopefully this new level of interest should unlock some of the its mysterious secrets.

Link to article 'Coming Apart: Trauma and the Fragmentation of the Self'.

—Vaughan.

2008-02-29 Spike activity:

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

"Chewing gum and context-dependent memory: the independent roles of chewing gum and mint flavour": A lovely forthcoming paper from The British Journal of Psychology.

Bloggingheads.tv has a video debate on natural *cough*, sorry, experimental philosophy.

Pure Pedantry investigates the neurological basis of the "runner's high".

Have you been in psychotherapy doctor? The New York Times has an article on the dying tradition of psychiatrists being in therapy.

A new book on 'neuroarthistory' is picked up by My Mind on Books.

Bolding going back to 1962. The Sunday Herald reports on a recently discovered neuroreceptor link found between psychosis and effects of LSD.

Parapsychologist Dean Radin is interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle.

We respond differently to babies' faces within 150 milliseconds. Cognitive Daily covers a MEG study of face recognition responses in the brain.

BBC News reports that poor diet is linked to bad behaviour in children.

To the bunkers! $24 billion spend predicted to developed autonomous robot armies. You have 20 seconds to comply!

The first human nerve tissue transplant has been completed. Next step, Robocop (we hope).

Wired reports on a psychologist leading the competition to develop a film recommendation algorithm and win the Netflix Prize.

How do psychologists study what we know about ourselves? Psychologist Virgina Kwan writes a guest article for the BPS Research Digest

Against compulsory happiness: The LA Times discusses the miracle of melancholia and BBC News asks is depression good for you?

First Monday ponders whether whether the increasingly media obsessed world needs to be understood as an attention economy.

Deric Bownd's has a primer on executive function in the prefrontal cortex.

—Vaughan.

February 28, 2008

The normality of strangers:

"The only normal people are the one's you don't know very well."

A quote from the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler. Not sure exactly where this quote comes from, but it's widely quoted on the net.

Adler was hugely influential in the early Freudian circle and coined the term 'inferiority complex' to describe what he thought was the innate sense of inferiority we are all born with and need to learn to manage as part of our development.

He believed that this developmental process shaped the personality and was reflected in each person's individual personality traits.

UPDATE: I've just noticed that there don't seem to be any photographs of Alfred Adler Smiling. Cheer up Dr Adler.

—Vaughan.

Medicated Americans:

Scientific American Mind has a fantastic article on the endemic use of antidepressant drugs in the United States. It starts with some surprising statistics: 11 percent of American women and 5 percent of men are on antidepressants.

Serious clinical depression is devastating, and if ever you needed convincing that mental illness should be taken as seriously as physical illness, you only need to meet someone suffering in the depths of a mood disorder.

In contrast, the article notes that the modern concept of depression and the diagnostic criteria have been increasingly widened to cover states of low mood or disinterest that would previously have never been thought of as a medical problem.

It's full of interesting snippets from the scientific literature to suggest the pervasive influence of this new broader 'depression' on society.

For example, a 2007 study found that 1 in 4 people treated for depression have recently experienced a major emotional setback, such as a marriage break-up, a job loss or a financial crisis - suggesting the emotional difficulties may be part of a normal reaction to a serious life event.

A 2006 study found that three-quarters of people prescribed antidepressants receive them for a non-licensed or 'off label' reason - for a purpose that there is no strong evidence for.

Furthermore:

If statistics serve, we know a number of things about the Medicated American. We know there is a very good chance she has no psychiatric diagnosis. A study of antidepressant use in private health insurance plans by the New England Research Institute found that 43 percent of those who had been prescribed antidepressants had no psychiatric diagnosis or any mental health care beyond the prescription of the drug. We know she is probably female: twice as many psychiatric drugs are prescribed for women than for men, reported a 1991 study in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Remarkably, in 2002 more than one in three doctor’s office visits by women involved the prescription of an antidepressant, either for the writing of a new prescription or for the maintenance of an existing one, according to the ­Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This is not to dismiss the suffering of those who have less disabling mood problems - each of which can be a torment in itself.

The key question though, is should it be the responsibility of medicine to prevent these unpleasant mood states, and if so, is medication the answer?

Psychological therapies are known to be effective treatments when depression first occurs and better than drugs in preventing relapse, and for much mild - moderate depression increasing activity levels and light exercise can be strikingly effective.

For more serious cases, a combination of drugs and psychological treatment is the most effective treatment.

The boundaries of illness say as much about our society as they do about our medical advances because it is impossible to define illness without making a value judgement about what point normal variation becomes a pathology.

Depression and antidepressants and complicated because there are many interests - individual, professional, scientific and financial - all shaping how we detect and treat 'it'.

Over these last few months it has become clear that medication is not as effective as the published evidence has led us to believe, and that we need to radically rethink how we understand mood problems and help those who suffer them.

While the SciAm article focuses on the US where the problem is most apparent, it is clear that this is an issue facing many countries in the West.

Link to SciAm article 'The Medicated Americans'.

—Vaughan.

Encephalon reminder:

Just a reminder that we will be hosting the next edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival here, next Monday.

So if you want your writing featured send a link to your article to:

encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com

...and we'll look forward to including it.

—Vaughan.

February 27, 2008

You don't say:

According to a BBC News article brain scans have revealed "a possible biological basis for cocaine addiction".

Next week: brain scans reveal 'possible' biological basis for thoughts, feelings, actions and neurological illness.

—Vaughan.

The metaphysics of a Jazz Thing:

A fantastic study has just been released by open-access science journal PLoS One that investigated the neuroscience of jazz improvisation.

Jazz musicians were put inside an fMRI brain scanner and were asked to do complete a number of different musical exercises using a specially adapted magnet-friendly keyboard.

The musicians were asked to demonstrate musical scales, a pre-practised fixed piece, and an improvisation exercise while their brains were scanned.

A summary of the study by the John Hopkins medical school team gives the main results:

The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.

The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

Some years ago, psychiatrist Sean Spence suggested that Jazz music may have been born owing to the 'the father of Jazz', Buddy Bolden, having schizophrenia and suffering from associated frontal lobe impairments.

Spence argued that reduced frontal lobe function meant that Bolden could only improvise, as he didn't have the cognitive control to stick to pre-learnt pieces.

At the time improvisation was considered a sign that you couldn't play 'proper music' well enough, but Bolden took improvisation to a new level with wondrous flights of fancy and, as the legend goes, jazz was born. That's not the whole story of course, but it's possibly an ingredient.

While these new findings don't give us much of a lead on whether this might have been the genuine beginning of jazz music, it's interesting that the idea that reduced frontal lobe function 'frees up' the over-inhibited playing of set pieces, is consistent.

Link to PLoS One article on the cognitive neuroscience of Jazz.
Link to study summary.
Link to BBC News on Spence's theory.

—Vaughan.

Behavioural Obamanomics:

Theories are made great by those whom they inspire. Perhaps then, it is not surprising that the fresh new face of the US presidential race has been inspired by behavioural economics, one of the fresh new faces of cognitive science.

The New Republic magazine has an article on how the Obama campaign have adopted behavioural economics - the science of how people actually reason about money, as opposed to how they should - as their mainstay of economic policy.

Unsurprisingly, The New Republic, generally a centre-left publication, hold out great hope for the partnership of this new science and an Obama government.

You can find subtle evidence of this influence across numerous Obama proposals. For example, one key behavioral finding is that people often fail to set aside money for retirement even when their employers offer generous 401(k) plans. If, on the other hand, you automatically enroll workers in 401(k)s but allow them to opt out, most stick with it. Obama's savings plan exploits this so-called "status quo" bias.

What is more interesting though is that cognitive science is starting to make inroads into policy development outside the traditional area of defence (where psychology, and more recently neuroscience, have traditionally been key in driving defence spending).

Link to The New Republic article 'The Audacity of Data'.
Link to intro to behavioural economics (both via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

February 26, 2008

Chuck Close and perceptual Science:

I just discovered the wonderfully perceptive artist Chuck Close did a cover for Science magazine back in 1999.

Close was renowned for doing huge super-realistic paintings of portrait photographs that seem more real than real. When you get up close you notice that he's painted in insanely small details, like individual hairs that stretch into the background and blur as they become out of focus in the original photograph.

Painting this sort of detail on such a huge scale makes you question how real photographs really are, as it gives them an surreal quality despite looking like wonderful likenesses. It's an uncanny perceptual effect.

In 1988, Close suffered a stroke in his spinal artery, restricting his movement and confining him to a wheelchair.

Close was determined to continue painting and thought about how he could still paint with his inability to do fine detail because of his damaged nervous system.

His later paintings, like the one featured on this cover, break down images almost into perceptual units. As you move away from them, they coalesce into photorealistic images.

His paintings lose a lot when you can't see them in their original towering sizes, so if you ever get the chance to his work 'live', don't miss it.

He's a wonderful 'perceptual explorer' and a wry commentator on our photo obsessed age.

Link to BBC News article on Chuck Close cover.
Link to search of his pictures (just stunning).

—Vaughan.

The 7even sins of memory:

PsyBlog has just finished its series on the 'seven sins of memory' that fade and distort what we try to remember, based on memory researcher Dan Schacter's book on the same name.

The 'seven sins' are:

1. Transience
2. Absent-Mindedness
3. Blocking
4. Misattribution
5. Suggestibility
6. Bias
7. Persistence

And PsyBlog looks at each one, discussing what research has told of us about this particularly memory difficulty and how it affects our record of things past.

If you're interested in reading more, Schacter's 1999 book comes highly recommended.

Link to PsyBlog on the 'Seven Sins of Memory'.

—Vaughan.

New antidepressants all bark and no bite?:

The new generation antidepressants are no better than placebo in mild-moderate depression according to a new analysis of published and unpublished trials that were submitted during the drugs' approval.

The study is published in PLoS Medicine and despite the huge headlines it has generated, is not entirely surprising.

Psychologist Irving Kirsch, who led this new research, has conducted several previous studies looking at the effectiveness of SSRI antidepressant drugs and found similar results, although this is the first time that the study has factored in the severity of depression.

This study focused on the drugs fluoxetine (Prozac), venlafaxine (Effexor), nefazodone (Serzone), and paroxetine (Seroxat or Paxil) and used the US Freedom of Information Act to request data on (mainly) negative trials that haven't been published to complement the data set from published trials.

In this new analysis, only in severe depression did these medications show a distinct improvement over placebo, and this, the authors suggest, is because of the reduced placebo effect in the severely depressed, rather than than the fact that the medication has a differential effect in those most affected by mood disorders.

It's important to note that the study didn't show that the drugs had no effect in mild-moderate depression. They were all associated with an improvement in depression, but this was no different from placebo (a powerful effect in itself).

It's also important to note that this finding doesn't apply to all antidepressant drugs, and that it doesn't apply to the use of these four drugs in all situations. They are also commonly prescribed for anxiety disorders which weren't investigated in this study.

However, this is another example of how drug companies' attempts to obscure data from negative trials are coming back to haunt them.

The Times has one of the best write-ups but as usual, the PLoS article has a jargon-free summary included so you can get the findings from the source even if you're not familiar with scientific writing.

UPDATE: An important clarification from PJ, taken from the comments:

I think that by saying "this was no different from placebo" you are being misleading. Strictly speaking it was statistically different from placebo but did not reach the NICE criteria for a clinically significant difference:

"a three-point difference in Hamilton Rating Scale of Depression (HRSD)scores or a standardized mean difference (d) of 0.50"

Thanks PJ!

Link to full-text of PLoS Medicine paper.
Link to Times write-up.

—Vaughan.

February 25, 2008

Psychosis and the coming glutamate revolution:

Dopamine has been the big player in understanding schizophrenia since antipsychotic drugs were discovered. All current antipsychotics have their main effect by blocking dopamine function in the mesolimbic pathway and there's now significant evidence that this is the location of one of the major dysfunctions.

It's been clear for a while that this isn't the whole story though. Ketamine and PCP, two glutamate-focused drugs that barely touch the dopamine system directly, are heavily linked to schizophrenia and can intensify psychotic symptoms.

Findings such as these have sparked a flurry of interest in understanding the role of glutamate in psychosis, and there's now an intense interest in developing drugs that might target this system.

One of the key hopes is that these newer drugs will have fewer side-effects, as, in some, antipsychotics are have unpleasant and unhealthy adverse consequences.

The New York Times has just published a great article on the development of these new drugs, just in mid-testing stage, and on the neuroscience that motivates them.

People who use PCP often have the hallucinations, delusions, cognitive problems and emotional flatness that are characteristic of schizophrenia. Psychiatrists noted PCP’s side effects as early as the late 1950s. But they lacked the tools to determine how PCP affected the brain until 1979, when they found that it blocked a glutamate receptor, called the NMDA receptor, that is at the center of the transmission of nerve impulses in the brain.

The PCP finding led a few scientists to begin researching glutamate’s role in psychosis and other brain disorders. By the early 1990s, they discovered that besides triggering the primary glutamate receptors — NMDA and AMPA — glutamate also triggered several other receptors.

They called these newly found receptors “metabotropic,” because the receptors modified the amount of glutamate that cells released rather than simply turning circuits on or off. Because glutamate is so central to the brain’s activity, directly blocking or triggering the NMDA and AMPA receptors can be very dangerous. The metabotropic receptors appeared to be better targets for drug treatment.

The article talks about some of the new drugs in development, and the fact that this is where drug companies are placing their (quite substantial) bets at the moment.

Link to NYT article 'Daring to Think Differently About Schizophrenia'.

—Vaughan.

The Lobotomist documentary available online:

After being put back from January, the fantastic documentary on Walter Freeman and the rise and fall of the frontal lobotomy is finally available to view online.

Unfortunately, it's been cut up into little chunks and is only available as a Quicktime or Windows Media stream, which makes it a pain to watch and completely inaccessible to anyone not using Windows or Mac.

Needless to say, a better quality version is available on some torrent servers as a sensibly packaged video file and the healthiest torrent seems to be this one.

It's a fantastically well-researched and balanced documentary, looking at the history of the procedure, Freeman's over-identification with the operation and its abandonment as the problems became clear.

The tale is tragic for many reasons, not least of which is Freeman's flawed personality and unwillingness to admit that the lobotomy was not the miracle cure he initially claimed.

There's plenty more background information on the programme website and the Neurophilosophy article on the history of the procedure has some more details.

Link to The Lobotomist website and streamed version.
Link to Mininova torrent.

—Vaughan.

February 24, 2008

The ghost of moral madness:

Only the morally weak and degenerate became mentally ill in the 18th century. At least, that's what the popular theories of the time suggested. Madness was caused by moral failings and those who lost their mind were sinners.

We like to think that we live in enlightened times and that only in the far outskirts of the religious fringe are mental disorder and immorality thought to be (presumably gay) bedfellows.

Politics is one of the few areas were accusations of mental illness are considered fair game. I don't mean simply calling someone or their ideas 'mad', 'loony' or 'crazy'. I mean suggesting a politician or a political group has a diagnosable mental disorder.

US psychiatrist Lyle Rossiter published a book in 2006 claiming that liberalism was a form of clinical mental illness. Bang up to date with the latest in 1920s Freudian analysis, Rossiter claims that liberalism is caused by problems with relationships as a child, leading to a pathological fear of abandonment and an obsessive need for an omnipotent control of others.

Presidents fair little better. A 2004 book claimed George W Bush is an untreated alcoholic, while a 2000 book claimed Clinton was racked with compulsions.

In the UK, so many people accused Tony Blair of being insane that an article was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine that gathered the accusations and wondered why otherwise respectable clinicians feel the need to diagnose public figures.

It seems this is one of our last bastions of publicly acceptable prejudice against mental illness. We would be horrified if politicians were labelled epileptic because of their views, but barely blink an eyelid when they're called schizophrenic.

This makes it all the more ironic that numerous successful politicians have been genuinely mentally ill. Winston Churchill was famously pursued by his 'black dog' throughout his time as Prime Minister and a recent biographical study by Duke University found evidence for psychiatric problems in 37 US Presidents from 1776 to 1974.

One of the most remarkable stories from recent years comes from Scandanavia, where Kjell Magne Bondevik, the then serving Prime Minister of Norway, announced he needed three weeks sick leave owing to an episode of depression.

Bondevik returned to work and was re-elected in the subsequent election. He's now retired from politics, campaigns to fight the stigma associated with mental illness and was recently interviewed (realvideo) about his experiences on BBC's Newsnight programme.

It's a optimistic story for many reasons, but the fact that the Norwegian electorate seemed more concerned with his past record than his diagnosis gives us genuine hope that we're slowly banishing the ghost of moral madness.

Link to JRSM article 'The Madness of Politics'.
realvideo of Kjell Magne Bondevik interview.

—Vaughan.

February 23, 2008

Maternal disorder:

The drowning of five children by their mother, Andrea Yates, was a case that forced many to confront an issue that most would rather ignore. Yates was one of the rare cases of women with puerperal (childbirth associated) psychosis who kill their children.

This week's ABC Radio National's All in the Mind talks to three forensic clinicians who research and work with women who have either killed or injured their children while mentally ill.

It's an extraordinarily emotive issue, both due to the cries of condemnation from those appalled by what they consider 'evil' acts, and the concerns of others worried that focusing on the issue will strengthen the largely unfounded stereotype of the 'dangerous mentally ill'.

All in the Mind manages to tackle the issue incredibly sensitively, a rarity in a world where these tragic situations only ever seem to get attention as sensational news stories or political point-scoring.

The programme looks at the sorts of mental states which have led to these tragedies and talks to two female forensic psychiatrists about how they deal with the strong emotions that these cases stir up.

If you're interested in a more academic approach to the research in this area, psychiatrist Margaret Spinelli wrote an important 2004 article on maternal infanticide in the American Journal of Psychiatry that's freely available online.

The programme also tackles the difficult subject of female sex offenders and how clinical science is being applied to preventing and treating this subset of the forensic population.

Link to AITM on maternal disorder.
Link to AJP article on maternal infanticide.

—Vaughan.

February 22, 2008

War apparently boosts Iraqi teenagers' self-esteem:

Who would have guessed the Iraq war would be so uplifting to the children of Baghdad? According to research funded by the US Military, the invasion boosted the self-esteem of Iraqi teenagers.

The BPS Research Digest covers the study which took place in the summer of 2004, a year after the invasion.

With this new found benefit of invasion, the next target seems obvious - those self-deprecating Canadians!

Link to BPS Research Digest write-up of the study.

—Vaughan.

Psychology Today, every day:

Psychology Today is a bimonthly US magazine that's traditionally been thought of as a 'pop psychology' publication but has made efforts in recent years to be more scientific. They've just launched a blog network and have attracted some big names in academic psychology to contribute.

Authors include psychiatrist Peter Kramer, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa and MIT media lab cognitive scientist Dan Ariely, as well as the regular editorial staff from the magazine.

Some of the authors aren't due to start in earnest until the beginning of March, but there's some good material on there already and looks very promising.

Link to Psychology Today blogs.

—Vaughan.

2008-02-22 Spike activity:

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

The New York Times tackles the debate about whether psychiatric drugs can increase suicide in some instances.

To the bunkers! Agent Kurzweil at work again: Machines to match man by 2029. Virtuality and reality to merge.

Yale psychiatrist Charles Barber argues in the Washington Post that healing a troubled mind takes more than a pill.

PsychCentral covers a new guide on how to apply research findings to treatment with psychological therapies.

How the Media Messes with Your Mind: Scientific American has a brief article on how recognising two common fallacies can help you separate fact from media fiction.

Neuroanthropology asks whether studies on culture and neuroscience are all brain and no culture?

Philosopher and New Mysterian Colin McGinn reviews Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia in the New York Review of Books.

The non-sight senses of blind people are not more acute but they may develop new skills to compensate, reports PsyBlog.

Vivid but inconclusive examples vs ambiguous scientific data: The New York Times on the renewed debate over drug side-effects in light of latest school shooting.

In some very limited circumstances a laser could be used to transmit sound to the ear with a recently uncovered military technology, reports Wired.

Artists create a humanoid robot which uses brainwave activity recorded during sleep to playback an interpretation of your dreams.

Powell's has an in-depth review of 'The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder'.

The end of the Flynn effect? The BPS Research Digest on a study that found a decline in IQs when measured in 2004.

Cognitive Daily looks at a study which asks whether music preferences are a guide to personality.

—Vaughan.

February 21, 2008

An Unquiet Lecture:

Someone's uploaded a video to YouTube of the fantastic Kay Redfield Jamison discussing her own experiences with bipolar disorder.

Jamison is a psychologist and one of the world's leading experts on the science of the condition that's often called manic depression.

She was known for her groundbreaking work on the disorder for many years before she 'came out of the closet' and described her own experience in her powerful and lyrical autobiography An Unquiet Mind.

Having attempted suicide and become quite psychotic at times, she has experienced the most extreme edges of the condition.

In this lecture, rather than presenting any of her considerable scientific research, she discusses the subjective experience of the highs, lows and distortions of thought that can occur in this mood disorder.

Link to Kay Redfield Jamison lecture (via AHP/WoP).

—Vaughan.

Child's play is a tough problem:

Children's play has long fascinated psychologists. The post-Freudians saw it as a direct expression of the human unconscious and its often been seen an essential, if not slightly mysterious, element of a healthy childhood.

The New York Times has a wonderfully in-depth article on the latest scientific discoveries on the role of play in development, most of which attempts to answer the question 'if play is so energy consuming and dangerous, why do almost all mammals engage in it when young?'.

One fascinating bit discusses 'play signals', body postures that are specifically used by humans and other mammals to advertise the fact that they're playing, and so none of the rough-and-tumble is mistaken for aggression:

Social play has its own vocabulary. Dogs have a particular body posture called the ‘‘play bow’’ — forelegs extended, rump in the air — that they use as both invitation and punctuation. A dog will perform a play bow at the beginning of a bout, and he will crouch back into it if he accidentally nips too hard and wants to assure the other dog: ‘‘Don’t worry! Still playing!’’

Other species have play signals, too. Chimps put on a ‘‘play face,’’ an open-mouthed expression that is almost like a face of aggression except that the muscles are relaxed into something like a smile. Baboons bend over and peer between their legs as an invitation to play, beavers roll around, goats gambol in a characteristic ‘‘play gait.’’ In fact, most species have from 10 to 100 distinct play signals that they use to solicit play or to reassure one another during play-fighting that it’s still all just in fun. In humans, the analogue to the chimp’s play face is a child’s smile, an open expression that indicates there is no real anger involved even in gestures that can look like a fight.

...[in humans] Brown could detect some typical gestures that these 2- and 3-year-olds were using instinctively to let one another know they were playing. ‘‘Play movement is curvilinear,’’ he said. ‘‘If that boy was reaching for something in a nonplay situation, his body would be all straight lines. But using the body language of play, he curves and embraces.’’

The article also looks at the possible benefits of play for brain development, and what role play takes in the learning of social roles and moral behaviour.

Link to NYT article 'Taking Play Seriously'.

—Vaughan.

The science of 'voodoo death':

Can you die from a voodoo curse? Physiologist Walter Cannon was better known for his work on emotion but was fascinated by the idea that someone could die from fright - something he nicknamed 'voodoo death'.

He collected anecdotes from around the world of people who had died after being cursed in a now classic 1942 article.

But rather than simply recount the tales as curiosities, he speculated on the medical basis of how someone might die of fright - triggering a whole line of research into neurocardiology, the study of how the brain and heart work together.

Cannon's ideas were recently revisited by physician Esther Sternberg who looked at whether scientific developments since 1942 have made us any the wiser to this intriguing phenomenon.

While there is no clear idea on whether the belief in a curse directly kills many people, it seems Connon's ideas on fear's effect on the body had remarkable foresight and preceded many later discoveries about body-brain connections.

If you're interested in hearing more, psychiatrist Stuart Brown gave one of the prestigious 2006 'TED' talks on play, which is available to view on the National Institute of Play's website.

Link to Cannon's 1942 "Voodoo" Death article.
Link to Sternberg's 2002 update.

—Vaughan.

February 20, 2008

Three impossible things before breakfast:

The Guardian has a insightful piece by journalist Rik Hemsley describing his personal experiences with Alice in Wonderland syndrome, where the 'body image' or 'body map' becomes distorted, leading the affected person to feel like particular parts of the body, or the whole of it, have changed size or shape.

It doesn't usually involve direct visual hallucinations, but can lead to the sensation that the world around you has grown to an enormous size, or that you have shrunk.

It was first described by psychiatrist John Todd in a 1955 article that you can read freely online, which I discovered when writing an previous post on the neurology of Alice in Wonderland.

It's usually associated with epilepsy or migraine although is actually quite common, although not always in such an intense form as The Guardian article describes.

Children often experience it but grow out of it as they reach adulthood (both of which happened to me).

Link to Guardian article 'I have Alice In Wonderland syndrome' (via BB).
Link to full-text of Todd's original article.

—Vaughan.

Five auditory illusions:

In one of its rare fits of generosity, New Scientist has put a feature online that demonstrates five cool auditory illusions.

Possibly the freakiest, is psychologist Diana Deutsch's illusion called 'Phantom Words'. For me at least, I began by a hearing certain phrase, only to hear it transform over time into something else.

The 'temporal induction of speech' illusion is a wonderful example of how our brain fills in missing information better when there's sound rather than silence in the way.

All of them are well-worth checking out and accompany this week's special issue on the psychology and neuroscience of music, all of which is sadly behind a pay wall.

Link to NewSci 'five great auditory illusions'.
Link to music special issue table of contents.

—Vaughan.

February 19, 2008

Personality plagiarism rife on internet dating sites:

When you present yourself to potential suitors in an online dating profile, you are, in the terminology of psychology, 'constructing the self'. Perhaps it's not surprising then, that the most attractive profiles are being ripped off and plagiarised by lazy daters wanting to freeload on the most creative members' personalities.

The Wall Street Journal has an article which looks on how this practice has developed and uncovers several cases where romantic lines, funny descriptions and personal reflections are copied over and over again.

Psychologist Sherry Turkle's ground-breaking book Life on the Screen looked at the online construction of the self during the days of text based communication, MOOs and MUDs.

As we become increasingly tied to our online profiles, owing to the popularity of sites like MySpace, Facebook and numerous dating services, it's not surprising that they become more intimately associated with our own ideas about who we are.

They are also more easily copied than offline ways of expressing ourselves, leading to the situation where daters wanting to get lucky can just remix other people's personalities to maximise their chances of success.

Link to WSJ article 'The Cut-and-Paste Personality'.

—Vaughan.

A bait and switch trick on torture and psychologists?:

A poster on Metafilter has collected together news reports on the growing number of psychologists leaving the American Psychological Association in protest at their failure to condemn members who take part in the 'War on Terror' interrogations.

One of the most surprising aspects is from a contributor who suggests that the APA released a different text to the one approved by a 2006 committee vote that was intended to condemn abusive practices by psychologists.

The campaign group Coalition for an Ethical Psychology released a report [pdf] claiming that the original statement reviewed by the committee defined torture in terms of the United Nations criteria, but the published resolution had been changed to refer to the US Constitution, providing a definition of torture that is being used to allow abusive interrogations.

Strong public protests over the PENS Report [which condoned psychologists participating in interrogations, without mentioning torture or other abuse] prompted the APA Divisions for Social Justice and others to craft a new resolution prohibiting psychologists from participating in abusive detainee interrogations. In August 2006, after much discussion and debate, the APA’S Council of Representatives passed a Resolution Against Torture, Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment.

However, the version published by the APA differed from the version discussed and passed by the Council, in at least one significant respect: in the document reviewed by Council, psychologists were instructed to look to the United Nations Principles of Medical Ethics and international instruments for definitions of unethical behavior and "torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment." In the published document, the definition of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment instead was taken from the 5th, 8th and 14th amendments to the US Constitution, precisely the same definitions that had been used by the CIA, the DoD and the Bush Administration to assert that the abusive interrogation techniques in use at Guantánamo, CIA black sites, and elsewhere were not "torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

The more recent August 2007 resolution refers to both the United Nations and the US Constitution criteria, presumably making for a much stricter definition, although still fails to define some key definitions concerning distress.

However, the fact that an earlier version was 'switched' is quite concerning as it has become clear that psychologists are an incredibly valuable part of interrogation or 'Behavioral Science Consultation Teams' (aka 'biscuit teams').

In contrast, psychologists' colleagues in both the American medical and psychiatric associations have outright banned their members from participation.

In practice, this hasn't stopped some physicians becoming complicit in these interrogations, but many US psychologists are embarrassed by their parent organisations unwillingness to take the equivalent ethical line when the profession is increasingly seeking equal status to doctors.

Link to MeFi on psychologists leaving the APA (via BoingBoing).

—Vaughan.

Diagnostic handshake:

Mark Gurrieri was diagnosed with a brain tumour after shaking a doctor's hand. BBC News has an interesting piece on the incident, where the doctor noticed that Gurrieri's hand was spongy and swollen, suggesting a growth hormone problem that can be caused by a tumour on the brain's pituitary gland.

Mr Gurrieri underwent tests and was found to have acromegaly - caused by a tumour in the pituitary gland which leads to excess growth hormone.

The condition is seen in just three people per million, and can have serious effects if left undiagnosed.

It causes problems with vision and can lead to diabetes and blood pressure problems.

If untreated acromegaly can also cause premature death.

Mr Gurrieri thought his hands were getting bigger because of too much DIY and working in his restaurant kitchen.

Link to BBC News article 'Handshake diagnosed brain tumour'.

—Vaughan.

February 18, 2008

Encephalon: the new dawn:

If you've been wondering what happened to the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival, it's been on a brief hiatus while its management has been passed on to new hands.

It was previously managed by Mo at Neurophilosophy, whose time has now been largely captured as a neuroscience postgrad.

Luckily, the ever capable Alvaro Fernandez from Sharp Brains has taken the helm and just published the first edition of its return.

Fittingly, it's a bumper issue, and contains articles on everything from Renaissance brain look-alikes to whether robots can feel emotions.

The next edition will be hosted on Mind Hacks on March 3rd so if you want to submit an article, just email a link to

encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com

and we'll feature it.

Link to new Encephalon.

—Vaughan.

Push my brain button:

You can promote almost anything with a few words about the brain because it sounds like science. This week's Bad Science column takes a close look at 'Brain Gym', a scheme introduced into large numbers of UK schools that attempts to boost brain function by getting the kids to do, well, complete nonsense.

For example, a "back and forward movement of the head" apparently "increases the circulation to the frontal lobe for greater comprehension and rational thinking". According to this wisdom, a good clip around the ear has remarkable brain boosting properties.

One of my favourite examples of nonsense neuroscience is the use of the 'explanation' that an activity is pleasurable because it 'boosts endorphins' or 'releases opioids' in the brain.

Here's a great example from the widely distributed and widely discarded London newspaper The Metro which managed to give a cod brain science explanation in a (NSFW but remarkably dull) article on bondage and whipping.

Apparently:

The person getting the flogging (the bottom) gets pleasure from natural opiates generated in the brain and the person doing the flogging (the top) gets pleasure watching their partner... Even a runner's high after exercise is nothing compared with the boost of natural opiates that can be released in a flogging.

Apart from the fact that they don't know the difference between opiates (derivatives of the opium poppy) and opioids (any substance that binds to opioid receptors, including the brain's naturally produced chemicals) this really explains nothing about why being flogged is supposed to be pleasurable.

Opioids are definitely part of the experience of pleasure, but they're also part of the experience of pretty much everything else.

Experiencing pain is one thing that definitely causes increased opioid activity, but if pleasure were that simple, we'd find fighting so much fun that Planet Earth would be be like Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a laugh track.

These attempts at an explanation are really nothing more than placebos that still don't tell us how we experience pleasure as a result of the activity, or what role opioids play in this process.

Even if pleasure was purely opioid release, the trick with an explanation is to explain how and why this occurs, not just say that it does.

It's not that these simple links aren't important, but they're not explanations in themselves, even though they're often presented as such.

My other pet hate is when something pleasurable is described as having the same effect on the brain as one of the four dopamen of the neurocalypse: 'drugs', 'sex', 'gambling' and 'chocolate'.

Almost any one is used to explain the effect of the others, and if you're really lucky, all four will be invoked to make for an exciting-sounding but often scientifically empty article.

This is another example where the crucial information is how these activities have their effect on the dopamine system, not the fact that they do.

So, as with the faux science that supposedly supports 'Brain Gym', always ask yourself how it occurs, rather than relying on the illusion of brain magic.

Link to Bad Science article on why we fall for brain-based promotions.

—Vaughan.

A history of Freudian fiction:

The changing fortunes of psychoanalysis have been reflected in some of the greatest novels of the last hundred years, a literary history recounted in an article for The Guardian.

The piece is by historian Lisa Appignanesi, author of the highly regarded new book Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800.

The article notes that two recent novels (Kureishi's Something to Tell You and Vickers' The Other Side of You) have reversed the recent tradition of portraying psychoanalysts as somehow deviant, unethical or intellectually bankrupt.

The low-point for the creative depiction of Freudian mind doctors was probably Nabakov's novel Lolita, which is presented as a faux psychiatric case study of a paedophile.

You might think that someone who wrote a widely-read novel about a middle-aged man who desired under-aged girls had good reasons to dislike any theory which attempted to uncover unconscious motivations, but Nabakov was famously and venomously anti-Freudian even before he began writing his masterpiece.

He first started knocking psychoanalysis in his second novel, The Defense, and he often referred to Freud as the 'Viennese Quack' and his theories as 'voodooism' for the rest of life his.

This negative portrayal is not universal though, and many novels contain sympathetic and even highly complementary depictions. For example, Appignanesi notes that in Plath's semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, Dr Nolan is "something of a guardian angel amid the horror of asylum life".

Interestingly, the more recent positive portrayals of psychoanalysts mirror some positive results in the scientific literature.

Two recent randomised controlled trials have found that psychoanalytically-inspired treatments can be effective.

A recent trial on treatments for 'personality disorder' found it effective, as did a recent trial on using it as a treatment for panic disorder.

Unfortunately, these are still a drop in the ocean compared to the evidence for some other psychological treatments, but hopefully this is a sign that psychoanalysis is beginning to adopt a more scientific approach to its theories and practice and we'll be better able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Link to Guardian article on psychoanalysis and literature (thanks Kat!).

—Vaughan.

February 17, 2008

Furry neurons:

Retrospectacle has discovered the ultimate bedtime accessory for the sleepy neuroscientist - a neuron-shaped teddy.

The next step might be a white matter inspired sleeping bag, although I do wonder how they'll prevent the draft getting in through the nodes of Ranvier.

And obviously, the next step will be an oligodendrocyte pillow.

Link to Retrospectacle on plush neurons.

—Vaughan.

February 15, 2008

Them and Us:

I remember a recently admitted patient, nose-to-nose with his psychiatrist, screaming at her "you don't know what I'm going through - how the fuck do you know what it's like little missy?".

The psychiatrist finished the discussion, saying she'd come back to him later, and after a brief pause to collect herself, moved on to the next patient in the ward round.

It is still an incredibly vivid memory for me, partly because everyone else in the room knew that the psychiatrist had been a patient herself, as she had a lifetime's worth of experience dealing with her own mental health issues.

Study after study has shown that psychiatrists have higher rates of mental illness than the general population.

Research published in 2001 revealed that 56% of female psychiatrists have a family history of mental illness, and just over 40% have experienced one themselves - almost twice the rate of other doctors. Undoubtedly as a consequence, psychiatrists have double the rate of suicide of the general population.

Psychiatry is certainly a stressful job, but research has also found that there are higher rates of mental disorder in future psychiatrists, suggesting many go into the profession precisely because of their experiences.

Other mental health professionals are much less studied, but from my own experience, I suspect the histories and motivations of mental health nurses, psychologists and social workers and so on are are likely to be similar.

The reason I mention this is because Phil Dawdy has just written a powerful article on responses to a recent murder of a psychologist in New York.

Several people wrote comments to his original notice saying that the murderer was likely on a whole bunch of meds that were making him crazy; and, mental health workers hurt patients all the time, so they get what they deserve.

It is quite apparent that unlike in other areas of medicine, the mental health system has a 'them and us' attitude.

Ironically, it is the single area of medicine where 'them' are most like to be 'us', regardless of whether you're a patient or a professional.

Link to Phil Dawdy on murder of a New York psychologist and reaction.

—Vaughan.

2008-02-15 Spike activity:

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

Psychiatrists and the fashion for corduroy suits - Fronter Psychiatrist says don't do it kids!

Sharp Brains looks at the benefits of teaching kids mindfulness meditation in schools.

Language Log has found the headline of the year. Genius!

Campaigners want to put health warnings about cannabis on Rizla papers. Presumably, we should also put health warnings about crack on Coke cans.

The New York Times on an interesting study that found that girls' self-perception of popularity predicted later weight gain.

An article in the The New York Times discusses the art of persuasion and the psychological research behind it.

Some thoughts really do require language. Cognitive Daily covers a study that tackles the controversial issue of whether thought and language are dependent upon each other.

Yes darling, you're unique. Just like everyone else. Another article on the psychology and speed dating suggests it's a maverick scientific approach when it's already been used many times. This week, Nature joins the list of suitors.

If you're still waiting for PBS's The Lobotomist to appear online, it's become available as a torrent for the impatient.

Deric Bownd's examines a study that developed a computer-based face recognition system with 100% accuracy.

New study attempts to answer why orgasms are better when you love your lover.

More in orgasm news: Frontal Cortex looks at a real-life orgasmatron.

The wonderful Felice Frankel thinks about how to represent ideas visually in American Scientist.

Acceptance, not distraction, is the way to deal with pain. The BPS Research Digest has a fantastic complement to Lehrer's article on the psychology and neuroscience of pain.

Eric Schwitzgebel has more reflections on his fantastic project that asks why don't ethics professors behave better?

Psychoanalysts on love. Treatment Online captures some of their insights.

—Vaughan.

February 14, 2008

Neurology podcasts - the shocking truth:

The American Academy of Neurology are now doing fortnightly super-geeky podcasts that feature discussions about studies published in their journal.

If you're not familiar with the arcane language of neurology - tough luck, as they make no effort to explain anything to the uninitiated.

They're not quite as bad as the American Journal of Psychiatry podcasts (which I previously described as an 'excessively thorough lecture given by a voice synthesiser' although I'm actually finding the fembot voice rather sexy - is that wrong?) and include some discussion rather than just spoken summaries.

Occasionally, they throw a curve ball and include poetry, or a quick hint or tip for the clinician, but mainly they're neurologists doing what neurologists do best - talking about brain disorders in lots and lots of detail.

Also, I challenge you not to shout out "Space. The Final Frontier!" when you hear the opening fanfare.

I keep mentioning them, but the Royal College of Psychiatrist's podcasts are excellent - dealing with the nitty gritty of the science but also explaining the concepts and debating the controversial points. They really should be a model for others to follow.

And as an aside, Nature's NeuroPod seems to be missing in action again.

Mind Hacks. The Perez Hilton of academic neuroscience podcast gossip.

—Vaughan.

The operation of the skulls: a trepanation video:

Neurophilosophy has found a gory but completely astonishing film of a Kisi medicine man in Tanzania performing a trepanation operation. A young lady endures the seven hour procedure that puts a hole in her skull without any anaesthetic.

Mo has been doing some fantastic work on the history of trepanation and his illustrated article on the topic is a must read if you want an overview of this ancient procedure.

This film emphasises the importance of the operation in some cultures and highlights quite what a remarkable, if not, somewhat hazardous procedure trepanation really is.

And by the way, if you saw our recent rather whimsical post on 'brain hats', the end of the video gives a whole new meaning to the phrase.

Link to video of Kisi trepanation.
Link to illustrated history of trepanation.

—Vaughan.

Love blossoms in the lab:

Love is the most exalted and sublime of human emotions. It has inspired breathtaking works of art, journeys through continents and even the tragedies of war. Given its powerful hold on humanity it's surprising that it's been traditionally neglected by the brain sciences. In spite of this, a new dawn in romance research has begun to bud in recent years, and love has finally blossomed in the lab.

While romantic love has always been an obsession of the psychoanalysts, they were often creating little more than a new poetry of emotion, often beautiful, often bizarre, but rarely explaining more than their own metaphors.

Always a little late to the game, it wasn't until the end of the 1990s that neuroscience fell head over heals for love. The first to become inspired by this new passion was, as if we needed to ask, an Italian.

Psychiatrist Donatella Marazziti and her colleagues measured levels of a protein that transports the neurotransmitter serotonin in the blood of 20 people who had recently fallen madly in love, 20 people with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and 20 healthy comparison participants.

People with OCD experience intrusive, obsessive thoughts and are often described as having an 'over-valued idea' - an almost semi-delusional state where a particular thought becomes the focus of attention.

Marazziti, already an established OCD researcher, knew that serotonin had previously been linked both to obsessional thoughts and to sexual attraction, and wondered whether something similar might be going on in the early stages of romance.

She found that the group of patients with OCD and the recently love-struck were no different in terms of the serotonin transporter protein, suggesting the brain began to function markedly differently as love blossomed.

Although measuring the blood is a fairly crude way of looking at how the brain works, the researchers were struck by the similarities between these two states:

This aspect we believe underlies the obsessive pre-occupation so characteristic of the early stage of love (which, in rare instances, might persist for a lifetime of abstract idealization that leads to poetry and music dedicated to the love object). As far as we are aware, this is the first report of changes in the 5-HT [serotonin] transporter during a physiological state; it would suggest that being in love literally induces a state which is not normal - as indeed suggested by a variety of colloquial expressions used throughout the ages in different countries, all of which refer generally to falling 'insanely' in love or to being 'lovesick'

Since this initial flirtation, love has become a hot topic in the neurosciences, with whole conferences dedicated to it and numerous scientific studies being published every year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the traditional connection between love and madness has not been dispelled by these recent studies.

In fact, a 2007 study that looked at new love in adolescents found so many striking similarities between the intensity of teenage romance and hypomania, a symptom of manic-depression, that the authors warned researchers to look out for the love-struck when conducting research with young people, so as not to bias their results.

Link to abstract of study of the serotonin transporter and romantic love.
Link to abstract of study on hypomania and adolescent love.

—Vaughan.

February 13, 2008

Faking a labour of love:

I've just found an interesting page on Wikipedia that discusses the concept of 'emotional labour': where employees are expected to regulate their outward emotional reactions so they are consistent with the company's goals, regardless of their internal feelings.

A classic 'emotional labour' worker would be a shop assistant or a waitress, where the employee has to control their emotions and maintain a pleasant demeanour even when customers are being difficult, annoying or even abusive.

This concept was apparently first devised by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in the book The Managed Heart.

However, a distinction is made between 'surface acting', where the display doesn't need to match internal feelings at all (as when waitressing), and 'deep acting' where the employee is expected to genuinely feel the emotions (like in nursing).

Apparently, 'surface acting' jobs are associated with stress, feeling inauthentic and depression, while 'deep acting' jobs are associated with increased job satisfaction.

How well this is supported by empirical evidence is anyone's guess, but it's an interesting concept.

Link to Wikipedia page on 'emotional labour'.

—Vaughan.

Will the PTSD diagnosis disappear?:

Psychiatrist Gerald Rosen argues that the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) should be abandoned because it just re-describes emotional reactions that would otherwise be diagnosed as depression or anxiety, and is increasingly used where there was never any clear trauma in the first place.

He's made his case in an editorial for the British Journal of Psychiatry and debates his ideas in an engaging discussion in a BJP podcast.

PTSD is the only psychiatric diagnosis where a clear cause forms part of the diagnosis. The person must have experienced a life-threatening event to themself or others, and must have experienced intense fear, helplessness, or horror at the time.

If this is followed by intrusive memories of the event, increased arousal (feeling 'on edge'), avoidance of any reminders and these are long-lasting and they interfere with everyday life, the disorder can be diagnosed.

The trouble is, all of these can be found in people who have not experienced classical 'trauma'. Some people, including Rosen, are arguing that many of the normal reactions to negative events are now being described in terms of mental illness and the concept of PTSD is becoming meaningless:

Peer-reviewed articles have even discussed the possibility of developing PTSD from watching traumatic events on television. It has been suggested that rude comments heard in the workplace can lead to PTSD because a victim might worry about future boundary transgressions: the conceptual equivalent of pre-traumatic stress disorder. New diagnostic categories modeled on PTSD have been proposed, including prolonged duress stress disorder, post-traumatic grief disorder, post-traumatic relationship syndrome, post-traumatic dental care anxiety, and post-traumatic abortion syndrome. Most recently, a new disorder appeared in the professional literature to diagnose individuals impaired by insulting or humiliating events – post-traumatic embitterment disorder. Even expected and understandable reactions after extreme events, such as anxiety and anger, are now referred to as 'symptoms'.

This does not mean that anyone who becomes disturbed after a negative experience shouldn't be helped, just that PTSD is not a useful way of guiding the treatment. Critics argue that the existing categories of depression and anxiety are more than adequate.

In the podcast, Rosen discusses the possibility that PTSD may be 'popular' as a diagnosis because it's perfectly suited to the legal system.

It defines a cause and an effect, a compensation lawyer's dream. This is more important for the American health care system where mental health treatment is often only reimbursed by the insurance companies if a doctor can make a diagnosis.

PTSD might be the only way for a doctor to get insurance companies to pay for treating someone who is having difficulty adjusting to a bad experience.

Interestingly, the diagnosis of PTSD was largely accepted into the diagnostic manuals due to pressure from campaigners wanting the US government to treat Vietnam veterans' mental health needs on their return from the conflict.

A recent study checked the service records of Vietnam veterans who were being treated for PTSD and found only 41% had been exposed to combat, despite their being no difference in the symptoms between 'combat' and 'no combat' troops.

This isn't to suggest that some veterans were 'faking', just that there isn't always a clear connection between a traumatic event and the symptoms of PTSD.

With these points in mind, Rosen makes for an interesting guest on a diagnosis that we now tend to take for granted.

Link to BJP podcast 'Problems with the PTSD diagnosis'.
Link to PubMed entry for editorial.

—Vaughan.

February 12, 2008

Better living through caffeine:

Developing Intelligence has a fantastic post on what pharmacology and neuropsychology has told us about getting optimally wired on caffeine.

In small amounts, caffeine boosts mental function, and the article looks at scientific studies that have told us which are the optimal doses, which psychological abilities are most affected and what you can take with caffeine to modulate its effect.

Obviously, caffeine has its health risks. Psychologically speaking, even everyday doses run the risk of withdrawal symptoms and have the tendency to increase anxiety, so as with any drug, it's important to educate yourself so you can judge the risks for yourself.

The Wikipedia page on caffeine is wonderful, so it's a great complement to the fantastic round-up of stimulation-related tips from Developing Intelligence.

Link to article 'A User's Guide to Getting Optimally Wired' (via BadScience).
Link to Wikipedia page on caffeine.

—Vaughan.

Hats off to you sir:

It's not often you find yourself thinking 'you know, I really need a brain hat, but I just can't decide which one to buy'.

The pictured head piece is undoubtedly for the discerning customer, revealing a large section of the upper cortex with added plastic blood. Nice.

However, there's also an alien brain hat for babies, a brain cap for keeping the sun out of your eyes, or even a high fashion wooly brain hat by a top designer.

Importantly though, friends don't let friends wear brain golf visors.

—Vaughan.

Implicit associations:

You might have prejudices you won't admit to, or, don't even know about. The Implicit Attribution Test claims to measure these hidden associations and it's been one of the most important psychological developments during the last decade.

Edge has a video interview with two of its creators, psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, and an online version of the IAT which allows you to test your unconscious associations in relation to the US presidential candidates.

The IAT is a computer task that measures the strength of automatic, implicit or unconscious associations between concepts.

Let's say we're interested in whether black or white faces are more linked to positive or negative associations.

Faces of black or white people, and either pleasant or unpleasant words are flashed up on screen, one at a time. Participants are asked to press one key if the face is black or the word is pleasant, and other if the face is white or the word is unpleasant.

In other words, you're asked to classify both black faces and pleasant words using the same response, and white faces and unpleasant words using the same response.

Next, you're asked to do the same thing, but with the reverse associations: so you're asked to classify black faces and unpleasant words together, and white faces and pleasant words together.

The idea is that you're going to be quicker doing whichever classification best matches associations you already have.

So, if you already have unconscious associations between white and pleasant, and black and unpleasant, you're going to be quicker when these two responses are grouped.

Importantly, the idea is that these associations are different from our conscious attitudes. Someone who is definitely not racist might still have negative associations with black people, perhaps because of exposure to social stereotypes.

Most studies have more than just the two conditions, to control for order, practice and other effects and if you're interested, you can take part in this exact experiment online.

It was originally thought that the test could uncover people's implicit or hidden attitudes (indeed, it was originally called the Implicit Attitude Test) but it's now generally thought of just in terms of associations, because, in effect, it measures how closely two things are linked, and implicit attitude sounds more like a sort of evaluation or stance on something.

The value in this sort of test is not only in that it can pick out associations we might have but don't admit to or aren't aware of, but it can also map out how various things influence the unconscious structure of meanings in the mind and brain.

Needless to say, it's been researched intensively since it was first uncovered, with research suggesting it can even pick up on hidden violent associations in psychopathic murderers.

Link to video interview and presidential IAT at Edge.
Link to previous WashPost article on the IAT.

—Vaughan.

February 11, 2008

Orgasm and the brain: body, soul and sensory nerves:

How does the brain generate orgasm? It's one of the most under-investigated human experiences but two articles, one in the LA Times and another in The Psychologist, discuss some of the key developments of recent years.

The LA Times article is a good description of some of the most interesting neuroscience studies in this developing field, but is a little uncritical in places.

Apparently "About 43% of women and 31% of men in the U.S. between ages 18 and 60 meet criteria for sexual dysfunctions, according to a 1999 report on the sexual behavior of more than 3,000 U.S. adults".

This report was a research study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that classified sexual dysfunction as reporting any one of the following during the last 12 months:

(1) lacking desire for sex; (2) arousal difficulties (ie, erection problems in men, lubrication difficulties in women); (3) inability achieving climax or ejaculation; (4) anxiety about sexual performance; (5) climaxing or ejaculating too rapidly; (6) physical pain during intercourse; and (7) not finding sex pleasurable

Almost all of which fall within the normal range of a year's worth of regular sexual experiences, which probably explains why a third to almost half of people surveyed experienced at least one - but hardly a marker of a serious medical problem in itself.

There's a much better article on orgasm in this month's The Psychologist by Barry Komisaruk, Carlos Beyer and Beverly Whipple, authors of a recent book on 'The Science of Orgasm'.

It looks at the research on the roles of neurotransmitters in orgasm, as well as what the brain scanning literature tells us about brain activity during sexual arousal and release.

Most interestingly, it has a good discussion of non-genital orgasm:

As reviewed in Komisaruk et al. (2006), there are published reports of orgasms elicited by stimulation also of lips, hand, knee and anus occurring during dreaming sleep, of phantom limbs, from electrical or chemical stimulation of the septum, amygdala or thalamus of the brain and of the spinal cord.

Orgasms have also been described by men and women when they suffer epileptic seizures that are triggered by specific activity (e.g. brushing the teeth: Chuang et al., 2004), or that occur spontaneously. While these epileptic orgasms are in some cases described as ‘unwelcome’ (Reading & Will, 1997), others describe them as pleasurable, one woman refusing anti-epileptic medication for that reason (Janszky et al., 2004)

We have measured autonomic and brain activity during orgasms that women have produced by thought alone. During the thought orgasms, the magnitude of the increases in heart rate, blood pressure, pain threshold, pupil diameter, and brain regions are similar to those that we observe during vaginal or cervical self-stimulation-induced orgasms (Whipple et al., 1992). It is not surprising that in those cases of thought-induced orgasms, the specific genital sensory thalamic and cortical, and specific limb-motoric regions, are not activated.

The article notes that a number of different nerve pathways may serve to communicate sensual stimulation to the brain, which may account for why different sites of stimulation can produce orgasm.

Link to LA Times article 'Science of the orgasm'
Link the The Psychologist article on orgasm.

Full discloser: I'm an unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist.

—Vaughan.

Tieing knots with booze:

An excerpt from Knots, a book of poetry by the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, that attempted to capture some of the traps, maladaptive thinking patterns and emotional bonds that we find ourselves in, usually in relationships with others.

Some of the poems describe simple but powerful vicious circles, others are complex and almost algorithmic labyrinths of self-justification and denial.

She has started to drink
  As a way to cope
  that makes her less able to cope

the more she drinks
the more frightened she is of becoming a drunkard

the more drunk
the less frightened of being drunk

Apparently, the book was made into a film, although I know very little else about the screen version. Luckily though, most of the poems are now available online.

Perhaps some of Laing's insight was due to the fact that he was not without his own troubles. He suffered from depression and drinking problems during his life - infamously appearing on Ireland's Late Late Show drunk and incoherent.

Link to poems from Knots by R.D. Laing.

—Vaughan.

Psychological torture: a CIA history:

Advances in the History of Psychology has alerted me to a gripping video lecture on the development of CIA psychological torture techniques from the Cold War to War on Terror.

It was an invited lecture at the University of California by historian Prof Alfred McCoy who has long specialised in the history of the US secret services.

He argues that the results of CIA research into psychological torture can be clearly seen in both the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo bay and images of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

By contrast when I looked at those photos, I did not see snapshots of simple brutality or a breakdown in military discipline. For example, that most iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi with fake electrical wires hanging from his extended arms shows not the sadism of a few 'creeps', but instead, the two key trademarks of the CIA's psychological torture: the hood was for sensory disorientation and the arms extended for self-inflicted pain.

McCoy discusses how these techniques were researched and developed by some of the most distinguished cognitive scientists of the time and were reflected in now uncovered CIA documents, including the 1961 'Manipulation of Human Behavior' research summary, the 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, and the 1983 'Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual'.

He notes that these techniques have been developed and legitimised by a legal framework that was deliberately designed not to outlaw existing techniques, despite the fact there is no strong basis for their effectiveness and evidence suggests that psychological torture has a similar long-term impact to physical torture.

Interestingly, he suggests that Guantanamo is both being used as a centre for gathering intelligence, as well as a sort of 'lab' for testing and developing new methods.

McCoy is the author of the recent book 'A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror' on which this talk is based, in which he also argues that the work on Donald Hebb and Stanley Milgram were partly funded by the CIA to help understand how to break through people's psychological defences.

The lecture has a long introduction by one of the University's dignitaries, so you can skip to 11:30 when it really starts in earnest.

Advances in the History of psychology has also been keeping track of recent discussion about the book and recent findings about the role of the CIA in funding American psychology research in the 50s and 60s.

Link to YouTube video of McCoy lecture.

—Vaughan.

February 10, 2008

Sealed with a reminisce:

The Neuroscience for Kids website has created an online exhibition of neuroscience-themed stamps that depict everything from drugs to brain scans.

They also include the wonderful Swedish set displayed on the left that include a series of impossible shapes.

Unfortunately, the stamps aren't dated. Rather surprisingly, Portugal put Egas Moniz, inventor of the frontal lobotomy, on their stamps, and it would be interesting to know when they were in circulation.

To be fair, he did win the Nobel Prize, although these days the mention of his award tends to make people shuffle their feet and mutter things like "well, of course, it wouldn't happen in this day and age..."

Link to neuroscience stamp exhibition.

—Vaughan.

February 09, 2008

Researching the sublime:

Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust was a Neuroscientist, is a guest on this week's All in the Mind, where he discusses why he thinks the arts are an essential complement to the sciences in the attempt to understand human experience.

Lehrer argues that some artists aim to explore, capture or communicate aspects of our subjective experience that are otherwise indefinable.

Perhaps most controversially, he suggests that through these explorations some artists have glimpsed the functional organisation of the brain - even though we've only come to realise this in more recent lab work.

Nevertheless, Lehrer argues that art is more than just a reconnaissanc