March 31, 2008

Predictably irrational, variably dishonest:

Behavioural economist Dan Ariely was the guest on the latest edition of ABC Radio National's All in the Mind where he discusses why we're so bad at predicting what's best for us, and why honesty is a shifty behaviour.

As well as being a researcher, Ariely is also author of a psychology book called Predictably Irrational which is currently riding high in the book charts.

It's worth catching the mp3 version of the programme, as it's slightly extended, and I found the last part, where Ariely talks about honesty, the most interesting.

Using various experimental conditions where participants are given varying degrees of room for dishonesty, Ariely notes that people tend to be dishonest enough to give themselves an advantage, but suggests we're not so dishonest to feel bad about ourselves.

In other words, he's suggesting that honesty is a cognitive dissonance style reasoning process, balancing our desire for personal gain against our willingness to believe in ourselves as a 'good person' - an idea explored further in a forthcoming paper [pdf] by Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely.

If you're interested in a good overview of the psychology of honesty and deception, I've just read a fantastic paper [pdf] by the same pair, which is fascinating as much for its insights into what influences our level of honesty for its recommendations about applying the research to encourage people to be more honest.

It notes that getting people to focus on themselves increases honesty, as does getting them to focus on moral ideas, such as the Ten Commandments.

In their experiment, participants were told to write down either as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember (increased self-awareness of honesty) or the names of ten books that they read in high school (control). They had two minutes for this task before they moved on to an ostensibly separate task: the math test. The task in the math test was to search for number combinations that added up to exactly ten. There were 20 questions, and the duration of the experiment was restricted to five minutes. After the time was up, students were asked to recycle the test form they worked on and indicate on a separate collection slip how many questions they solved correctly. For each correctly solved question, they were paid $.50.

The results showed that students who were made to think about the Ten Commandments claimed to have solved fewer questions than those in the control. Moreover, the reduction of dishonesty in this condition was such that the declared performance was indistinguishable from another group whose responses were checked by an external examiner. This suggests that the higher self-awareness in this case was powerful enough to diminish dishonesty completely.

However, I wonder whether the effect of focusing on the Ten Commandments was due to their moral or supernatural associations.

I am reminded of Eric Schwitzgebel's ongoing project on why ethics professors, who think about moral issues a lot, are no more moral (and perhaps less!) than other people, and a study [pdf] by psychologist Jesse Bering that found that simply telling participants that the lab was haunted increased honesty in a computer task.

Link to Dan Ariely on All in the Mind.
pdf of Mazar and Ariely's paper on the psychology of dishonesty.

—Vaughan.

Twisted thoughts:

This wonderful knitted brain is by artist Sarah Illenberger. Presumably, we're looking down on the brain with the two hemispheres slightly separated.

She has also created other wonderful anatomically correct organs, including the heart and the intestines.

It seems this one might be a possible inductee into the Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art.

Link to Sarah Illenberger's wonderful creations.
Link to Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art.

—Vaughan.

Rock climbing hacks! (now with added speculation):

I'm going to tell you about an experience that I often have rock-climbing and then I'm going to offer you some speculation as to the cognitive neuroscience behind it. If you rock-climb I'm sure you'll find my description familiar. If you're also into cognitive neuroscience perhaps you can tell me if you think my speculation in plausible.

Rock-climbing is a sort of three-dimensional kinaesthetic puzzle. You're on the side of rock-wall, and you have to go up (or down) by looking around you for somewhere to move your hands or feet. If you can't see anything then you're stuck and just have to count the seconds before you run out of strength and fall off. What often happens to me when climbing is that I look as hard as I can for a hold to move my hand up to and I see nothing. Nothing I can easily reach, nothing I can nearly reach and not even anything I might reach if I was just a bit taller or if I jumped. I feel utterly stuck and begin to contemplate the immanent defeat of falling off.

But then I remember to look for new footholds.

Sometimes I've already had a go at this and haven't seen anything promising, but in desperation I move one foot to a new hold, perhaps one that is only an inch or so further up the wall. And this is when something magical happens. Although I am now only able to reach an inch further, I can suddenly see a new hold for my hand, something I'm able to grip firmly and use to pull myself to freedom and triumph (or at least somewhere higher up to get stuck). Even though I looked with all my desperation at the wall above me, this hold remained completely invisible until I moved my foot an inch --- what a difference that inch made.

Psychologists have something they call affordances (Gibson, 1977, 1986), which are features of the environment which seem to 'present themselves' as available for certain actions. Chairs afford being sat on, hammers afford hitting things with. The term captures an observation that there is something very obviously action-orientated about perception. We don't just see the world, we see the world full of possibilities. And this means that the affordances in the environment aren't just there, they are there because we have some potential to act (Stoffregen, 2003). If you are frail and afraid of falling then a handrail will look very different from if you are a skateboarder, or a freerunner. Psychology typically divides the jobs the mind does up into parcels : 'perception', (then) 'decision making', (then) 'action'. But if you take the idea of affordances seriously it gives lie to this neat division. Affordances exist because action (the 'last' stage) affects perception (the 'first' stage). Can we experimentally test this intuition, is there really an effect of action on perception? One good example is Oudejans et al (1996) who asked baseball fielders to judge were a ball would land, either just watching it fall or while running to catch it. A model of the mind that didn't involve affordances might think that it would be easier to judge where a ball would land if you were standing still; after all, it's usually easier to do just one thing rather than two. This, however, would be wrong. The fielders were more accurate in their judgements --- perceptual predictions basically --- when running to catch the ball, in effect when they could use base their judgements on the affordances of the environment produced by their actions, rather than when passively observing the ball.

The connection with my rock-climbing experience is obvious: although I can see the wall ahead, I can only see the holds ahead which are actually within reach. Until I move my foot and bring a hold within range it is effectively invisible to my affordance-biased perception (there's probably some attentional-narrowing occurring due to anxiety about falling off too, (Pijpers et al, 2006); so perhaps if I had a ladder and a gin and tonic I might be better at spotting potential holds which were out of reach).

There's another element which I think is relevant to this story. Recently neuroscientists have discovered that the brain deals differently with perceptions occurring near body parts. They call the area around limbs 'peripersonal space' (for a review see Rizzolatti & Matelli, 2003). {footnote}. Surprisingly, this space is malleable, according to what we can affect --- when we hold tools the area of peripersonal space expands from our hands to encompass the tools too (Maravita et al, 2003). Lots of research has addressed how sensory inputs from different modalities are integrated to construct our brain's sense of peripersonal space. One delightful result showed that paying visual attention to an area of skin enhanced touch-perception there. The interaction between vision and touch was so strong that providing subjects with a magnifying glass improved their touch perception even more! (Kennett et al, 2001; discussed in Mind Hacks, hack #58). I couldn't find any direct evidence that unimodal perceptual accuracy is enhanced in peripersonal space compared to just outside it (if you know of any, please let me know), but how's this for a reasonable speculation --- the same mechanisms which create peripersonal space are those which underlie the perception of affordances in our environment. If peripersonal space is defined as an area of cross-modal integration, and is also malleable according to action-possibilities, it isn't unreasonable to assume that an action-orientated enhancement of perception will occur within this space.

What does this mean for the rock-climber? Well it explains my experience, whereby holds are 'invisible' until they are in reach. This suggests some advice to follow next time you are stuck halfway up a climb: You can't just look with your eyes, you need to 'look' with your whole body; only by putting yourself in different positions will the different possibilities for action become clear.

(references and footnote below the fold)

footnote:
My intuition is that this is the area around which we feel 'an aura' if someone reaches towards us; this is completely unsubstantiated speculation however

References:

Gibson, J.J. The theory of affordances. In R.E. Shaw and J. Bransford,
eds., Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing, Erlbaum Assoc., Hillsdale. N.J., 1977.

Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc, US.

Kennett, S., Taylor-Clarke, M., & Haggard, P. (2001). Noninformative vision improves the spatial resolution of touch in humans, Current Biology, 11(15), 1188-1191.

Maravita, A., Spence, C., & Driver, J. (2003). Multisensory integration and the body schema: close to hand and within reach, Current Biology, 13(13), 531-539.

Oudejans, R. R., Michaels, C. F., Bakker, F. C., & Dolne, M. A. (1996). The relevance of action in perceiving affordances: perception of catchableness of fly balls., J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform, 22(4), 879-91.

Pijpers, J. R. R., Oudejans, R. R. D., Bakker, F. C., & Beek, P. J. (2006). The role of anxiety in perceiving and realizing affordances, Ecological Psychology, 18(3), 131.

Rizzolatti, G., & Matelli, M. (2003). Two different streams form the dorsal visual system: anatomy and functions, Experimental Brain Research, 153(2), 146-157.

Stoffregen, T. A. (2003). Affordances as properties of the animal-environment system, Ecological Psychology, 15(2), 115-134.

—tom.

English Surgeon link:

The English Surgeon is now available on the BBC iPlayer website for 6 days. Enjoy!

—Vaughan.

March 29, 2008

English Surgeon reminder:

Just a reminder for our readers that have access to the BBC TV channel, BBC Two, that the stunning documentary on neurosurgeons Henry Marsh and Igor Kurilets that we featured previously on Mind Hacks will be shown on Sunday 30th March at 10.55pm

British residents will be able to watch it over the net for a week after on BBC's iPlayer, which I'll link to as soon as it appears online.

Everyone else is going to have to wait for a torrent, but I'll keep an eye out and post a link if one appears.

Either way, Henry Marsh was the first guest on BBC Radio 4's Midweek which you can listen to via the programme's webpage.

Link to BBC 2 listing for documentary.
Link to Midweek discussion with Marsh.

—Vaughan.

Lancet and MNI neuroscience podcasts:

I've just discovered a couple of great high class neuroscience podcasts. The first is the Lancet Neurology podcast and the second is series of podcasts and video from the Montreal Neurological Institute.

The Lancet Neurology podcasts are all-too-brief but are really well done. In contrast to the American Academy of Neurology podcasts we featured previously, they're quite accessible even to the non-neurologist.

The MNI is one of the most famous hospitals and neuroscience research centres in the world, and needless to say they have some wonderfully produced podcasts and some great video lectures online. A treasure trove of useful brain listening.

Link to Lancet Neurology podcast.
Link to Montreal Neurological Institute podcasts and video.

—Vaughan.

March 28, 2008

Impact of digital media review hits the wires:

Psychologist Dr Tanya Byron has just released a remarkably sensible review on the effect of digital media on children, commissioned by the UK government.

Tanya Byron is great. She came to prominence as the resident psychologist on several UK TV parenting programmes but used evidence-based interventions, essentially demonstrating what a clinical psychologist would do if your child got referred for behaviour problems.

Most notably, she obviously knew her shit and is widely respected among clinical psychologists. Despite often being described as a 'TV psychologist' she remained working in the NHS at the coal face of clinical work.

She's just published her review on the effects of the internet and computer games on children and has been remarkably level-headed in a time when the media loves 'internet addiction' and 'computer games make killer kids' stories.

BBC News has a video interview with her (skip to 1m20s to avoid the preamble). As well as refusing to soundbite the complexity of the issues, she's not afraid to use uses phrases like "causal models of harm" and "research effects literature" in interviews. Go Tanya!

The full report [pdf] is long, and I've not read it all, but I really recommend reading the summary on pages 3-5. Here's some key points:

4. ...Overall I have found that a search for direct cause and effect in this area is often too simplistic, not least because it would in many cases be unethical to do the necessary research. However, mixed research evidence on the actual harm from video games and use of the internet does not mean that the risks do not exist. To help us measure and manage those risks we need to focus on what the child brings to the technology and use our understanding of children’s development to inform an approach that is based on the ‘probability of risk’ in different circumstances.

5. We need to take into account children’s individual strengths and vulnerabilities, because the factors that can discriminate a ‘beneficial’ from a ‘harmful’ experience online and in video games will often be individual factors in the child. The very same content can be useful to a child at a certain point in their life and development and may be equally damaging to another child. That means focusing on the child, what we know about how children’s brains develop, how they learn and how they change as they grow up. This is not straightforward – while we can try to categorise children by age and gender there are vast individual differences that will impact on a child’s experience when gaming or online, especially the wider context in which they have developed and in which they experience the technology...

Her recommendations focus on the all too pressing point that kids often vastly outclass adults in understanding the technology and that parents are often not competent in being able to guide children as they'd wish.

Needless to say, Byron recommends that parents need support and guidance themselves in being able to regulate their children's use of new technology.

From what I've read so far, it's clear that Byron has understood both the psychological research and the technology. No mean feat in an age where commentators often demonstrate little except the fact that they are a bit baffled by this new fangled interweb thing.

Link to Byron review webpage.
Link to BBC News on the report and interview.

—Vaughan.

2008-03-28 Spike activity:

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

PsychCentral tackles the recent internet addiction nonsense and asks What's That Smell? It turns out it's Internet Addiction Disorder in The News.

BBC Radio 4's excellent history of ideas programme In Our Time has recently had editions on the philosopher Kierkegaard and early computationalist Ada Lovelace.

The BPS Research Digest explains a new study on frustrating tip-of-the-tongue states with bonus bit on how to overcome them.

Psychedelic artist extraordinaire, Alex Grey, is interviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle about his art and tripping (thanks Laurie!)

Dr Petra Boyton looks at international headlines linking anger, mental illness and Britain and notes that they're based on a rather dodgy market research survey.

The limits of certainty in diagnosis and medicine are explored by The New York Times.

Neurophilosophy looks at a comparative study on the possible evolutionary development of a key language pathway in the brain.

Removing brain tumours can be tricky at the best of times, especially when the operation is on a 7-year-old-girl. The New York Times has an article and video on one such procedure.

Scientific American Mind looks at the effects of the surprisingly common occurrence of postpartum (post-pregnancy) depression beyond the individual effect on the mother.

In praise of booze. The New Humanist shings the praises of the world's favourite fight enabler.

The New York Times has a review of the Willard hospital suitcase exhibition we featured the other day.

The application of shoe smell to epileptic seizures. No really. Neurocritic has some fantastic coverage of an upcoming scientific article on the phenomenon.

New Scientist reports that belly fat linked to increased risk for dementia. Not particularly startling, but emphasises the point that one of the best ways of keeping your brain healthy is to look after your cholesterol, blood pressure and cardiovascular fitness.

The six degrees of autism. Discover Magazine has a funky network analysis of schizophrenia, bipolar and autism comorbidity.

Wired reports that Pfizer computers have been hacked to send out, wait for it, v1agra spam.

A thorough debunking of determining personality from handwriting can be found on PsyBlog.

The New York Review of Books has a megareview of several books on happiness.

Sharp Brains has a fantastic article by neuroscientist Shannon Moffett on sleep, Tetris, memory and the brain.

—Vaughan.

March 27, 2008

Ray Kurzweil hacks body, mind, eternity:

Wired has as article on the immortality-seeking inventor and transhumanist Ray 'King Canute' Kurzweil who is attempting to defeat death by bioengineering his body until he can upload his mind on a computer.

Transhumanism is a movement that attempts to extend the limits of human existence through technology, and one of the obvious, if not slightly fanciful, hurdles is to transcend death.

One of the key concepts in transhumanism is the singularity, supposedly the point where computers will 'overtake' the human brain in terms of their processing ability and, hence, intelligence as we know it will become completely transformed.

Accompanying the article about Kurzweil's wide-eyed optimism is another article on the current science of his objectives which nicely illustrates where the conceptual gaps actually lie.

Many computer scientists take it on faith that one day machines will become conscious. Led by futurist Ray Kurzweil, proponents of the so-called strong-AI school believe that a sufficient number of digitally simulated neurons, running at a high enough speed, can awaken into awareness. Once computing speed reaches 10¹⁶ operations per second — roughly by 2020 — the trick will be simply to come up with an algorithm for the mind.

Which is a bit like saying "once we have the technology to travel to another galaxy, all we have to do is get there".

Link to Wired article on Kurzweil.
Link to Wired article on the science of transhumanism.

—Vaughan.

Brain lamp:

Designer Alexander Lervik created this wonderful table lamp based on a 3D reconstruction of his own brain scan.

"MYBrain. The table lamp

A replica of the designer's brain, originated from an MR scan at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

The image was processed through a 3D-printer, and became this unusual lamp shade design. Yes, it is bright."

Although perhaps the coolest, this is not the first brain lamp we've come across.

Indeed, it would make a good accompaniment to the plasma brain lamp we featured back in early 2007.

Link to designer's page for the brain lamp (via BoingBoing).

—Vaughan.

Lost in translation:

ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone recently broadcast a programme that tackled the philosophy of translating between languages - discussing whether particular ideas are just harder to express in certain languages, and whether it is possible ever to tie a word to a definite meaning.

As I've mentioned before, I'm fascinated by words which don't translate across languages, especially when they related to mental states or psychology.

One of my favourites is the Portuguese word saudade, which, as far as I can work out, refers to a type of wistful or sombre yearning for something that you've experienced in the past, with the underlying feeling that the wished for thing might never return and that the feeling is all that you have.

The programme looks at these issues beyond the case of single words, asking whether some sorts of thinking are a product of the language, which possibly allows for concepts to be dealt with in a different manner.

One of the most striking differences lies between analytic philosophy, largely produced by native English speakers that entails legal or scientific style reasoning as applied to concepts, and continental philosophy, which often deals with criticising the concepts of language itself and relies much more on rhetoric and analogy.

The most famous continental philosopher are French (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze etc), so this provides a useful starting point for discussing whether the different approaches to philosophy are just the result of culture, or stem from the tools of language itself.

The second part of the programme deals with W.V. Quine's views on language, which suggest that there is no definite distinction between statements we assume are meaningful by definition (e.g. a bachelor is an unmarried man) and those which are only true with reference to the outside world (e.g. the sun is shining in London).

Interestingly, the programme avoids discussing Wittgenstein, who thought that all philosophical issues were really just difficulties brought about by language.

Anyway, a fascinating discussion of an important topic.

Link to The Philosopher's Zone on the philosophy of language.

—Vaughan.

March 26, 2008

Demanding sex differences:

Language Log has a great post looking at differences in empathy between males and females, and highlights a new study showing race differences as well.

The punchline is that it's actually really hard to say whether either of these results reflect true differences because the samples tend to be unrepresentative of the population, and measures of empathy tend to be influenced by the social situation in which they're taken.

They grab this paragraph from a review article on empathy measurement:

In general, sex differences in empathy were a function of the methods used to assess empathy. There was a large sex difference favoring women when the measure of empathy was self-report scales; moderate differences (favoring females) were found for reflexive crying and self-report measures in laboratory situations; and no sex differences were evident when the measure of empathy was either physiological or unobtrusive observations of nonverbal reactions to another's emotional state.

This article is from way back in '83, but more recent studies have tended to support the main idea that the overall difference between men and women in empathy is fairly negligible when behaviour, rather than self-report, is examined.

These sorts of social influences on experimental findings are known as 'demand characteristics'.

The classic example is an attractive female researcher asking men about penis size, but the effects can be quite subtle and only come to light in subsequent replications of the study (if at all!).

One of my favourite studies in this area looked at the supposed tendency for people who experience 'sensory deprivation' to have hallucinations and suffer severe emotional and cognitive impairment.

In 1964 psychologists Martin Orne and Karl Scheibe compared two groups of participants in a sensory deprivation experiment.

One group of participants was greeted by white coated researchers standing next to emergency equipment, were asked for their medical history and given serious looking tests, were told to report any strange sensory distortions and were informed that if they wanted to stop the experiment, they had to press a panic button.

The other group was greeted informally by researchers in casual clothes, weren't given any medical checks, and were told to report their experiences freely as they occurred. To stop the experiment, they just had to knock on the window.

The actual sensory deprivation procedure was the same for both groups, but the participants given the formal medical introduction reported greater emotional disturbance, unusual experiences and mental distress. Furthermore, they tended to do much worse on the cognitive tests given afterwards.

While this didn't 'disprove' any of the unpleasant effects of sensory deprivation, it did show that they are heavily mediated by expectation which is implicitly inferred from the testing situation.

Needless to say, this can affect any type of study, so scientists are always on the look out to see if it might be responsible for new findings.

Link to Language Log article on empathy, sex and race.
Link to study on demand characteristics and sensory deprivation.

—Vaughan.

Court imitates life in antipsychotic drug battle:

The New York Times has an article which skilfully captures one of the central dilemmas in mental health: deciding whether the benefits of psychiatric drugs outweigh their side-effects for any individual patient.

The story centres on the ongoing court case where the state of Alaska are suing drug company Eli Lilly over claims that the multinational failed to inform professionals and the public about the side-effects of the antipsychotic drug olanzapine (Zyprexa) despite knowing about them for some time.

Olanzapine is a useful and effective drug for managing psychosis and, for some people, the only effective treatment for severe mental illness.

But, like the other newer generation drugs in this class, causes weight gain and significantly increases the risk for heart disease and diabetes. Like all other antipsychotics, it can also leave you feeling groggy and reduce your ability to experience pleasure (owing to the fact it affects the dopamine 'reward' system).

While mental health professionals tend to focus on the benefits of the drug for the person's mental state, patients tend to focus on its negative effects on their health and enjoyment.

This differing focus is partly because the mental health professionals, on the whole, are not the ones who have to take the drugs and experience their side-effects, but also because psychosis often means the person does not realise their thinking has become disturbed, meaning they don't see the point of being prescribed medication in the first place.

This dilemma was rather poignantly mirrored in the Alaska court house. While the Alaska vs Eli Lilly case was going on in one courtroom, in the next was a case concerning whether an obviously disturbed man should be compelled to take olanzapine by his hospital.

The NYT piece covers the two cases, drawing parallels between the individual dilemma and the landmark legal action, and captures the dilemma very succinctly.

Link to NYT article 'One Drug, Two Faces' (via Furious Seasons).
Link to Furious Seasons coverage of the Alaska vs Eli Lilly case.

—Vaughan.

March 25, 2008

Why do some people sleepwalk?:

I just found this short-but-sweet explanation for why sleepwalking occurs by neurologist Antonio Oliviero. It appears in this month's Scientific American Mind:

People can perform a variety of activities while asleep, from simply sitting up in bed to more complex behavior such as housecleaning or driving a car. Individuals in this trancelike state are difficult to rouse, and if awoken they are often confused and unaware of the events that have taken place. Sleepwalking most often occurs during childhood, perhaps because children spend more time in the “deep sleep” phase of slumber. Physical activity only happens during the non–rapid eye movement (NREM) cycle of deep sleep, which precedes the dreaming state of REM sleep.

Recently my team proposed a possible physiological mechanism underlying sleepwalking. During normal sleep the chemical messenger gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) acts as an inhibitor that stifles the activity of the brain’s motor system. In children the neurons that release this neurotransmitter are still developing and have not yet fully established a network of connections to keep motor activity under control. As a result, many kids have insufficient amounts of GABA, leaving their motor neurons capable of commanding the body to move even during sleep. In some, this inhibitory system may remain underdeveloped—or be rendered less effective by environmental factors—and sleepwalking can persist into adulthood.

As a bonus, the page also has an explanation of why we experience the painful 'brain freeze' sensation when we eat ice cream too quickly.

UPDATE: Thanks to Danielle for sending this fascinating snippet:

I used to have a VERY SEVERE sleepwalking problem. This past summer, I researched the use of GABA for mild anxiety. Although there was a great deal of question over whether it could cross the blood-brain barrier, I thought it was worth a try. It didn't work for anxiety at all - but I was surprised to notice that it cured my sleepwalking, which was completely unexpected! Now that I know more about the connection between GABA, slow-wave sleep, & sleepwalking, it makes sense. I think there may be real treatment or research potential there, but I have no idea to whom I should report this. Maybe you can do something with it?

Link to SciAmMind sleepwalking and brain freeze explanations.

—Vaughan.

The Lives They Left Behind:

PsychCentral has alerted me to a wonderful online exhibit based on the lives of several psychiatric patients whose belongings were found in suitcases in an old asylum attic years after they had passed away.

All the individuals were patients at the Willard Asylum, some for as long as 62 years.

Unfortunately, the site is a bit over-Flashed which means it's not the most intuitive to navigate, but it's worth grappling with the menus at the bottom of the screen as the stories are incredibly touching.

The photo on the right is of 'Frank':

On June 7, 1945, Mr. Frank #27967 went into the Virginia Restaurant on Fulton Street in Brooklyn and was served a meal on a broken plate. He became upset and caused a disruption outside the restaurant, yelling and kicking garbage cans. The police were called, and, instead of arresting him, brought him to the psychiatric ward at Kings County Hospital. From there, he was transferred to Brooklyn State Hospital, and on April 9, 1946, he was admitted to Willard, one of a growing number of African American patients transferred to Willard from New York City in the 40s, due to over-crowding...

Mr. Frank # 27967 never escaped the consequences of that day outside the restaurant in 1945. In 1949, he was transferred from Willard to the Veterans Administration hospital in Canandaigua, NY, and in 1954 to the VA hospital in Pittsburgh. He died there 30 years later, having spent more than half his life in an institution.

The site also has a great deal of information about the hospital itself, audio recordings of memories of the institution and more information about the book and touring exhibition which is on the road right now.

In fact, it's currently on show at the Cayuga Museum of History and Art in Auburn, New York.

Link to The Lives They Left Behind online exhibit.

—Vaughan.

Where angels no longer fear to tread:

The Economist has an article which serves as an interesting summary of some of the recent work on the psychology and neuroscience of religious belief.

It's a little bit clumsy in places. For example, it summarises some of the work on the role of the temporal lobes as saying that "religious visions are the result of epileptic seizures that affect this part of the brain".

Certainly, temporal lobe seizures are associated with religious experiences. A recent review reported that about 0.5% to 3% of people with the condition experience them.

But this work suggests that this is only one factor and actually minor functional changes are probably more important in the general population [pdf].

It's also important to note that this sort of neuroscience research typically looks at beliefs and experiences concerning the 'supernatural' elements of religion.

However, the Economist article also discusses some recent psychological research looking at the influence of religion on social reasoning and touches on the possible evolutionary explanations for the widespread and persistent nature of religious ideas.

Link to Economist article 'Where angels no longer fear to tread'.

—Vaughan.

March 24, 2008

Common scents and the psychology of smell:

Nerve has a brief but interesting interview with psychologist Rachel Herz who talks about her research on the sense of smell and how it can influence our mind and behaviour.

I've not encountered Herz's work before but it turns out she's done a great deal of scientific research on the psychology and neuroscience of smell and has just written a book, The Scent of Desire, which seems to present the science of smell in an accessible format.

The interview contains a number of gems, but this particularly caught my eye:

Why do we grow accustomed to odors, but not to something like sound? In other words, why is the stench of garbage outside my apartment nowhere near as distracting as the drilling?

When we experience olfactory adaptation, the receptor literally stops responding to a chemical in the air after about twenty minutes. We adapt to all the sensations that are out there, but when the drilling starts and stops, your attention focuses on it and you're irritated.

Smell is a fascinating area, perhaps because it is relatively unstudied (especially compared to vision).

We previously covered an interesting review article that talked about the fact that the brain has two smell networks - something that came us a complete surprise to me.

Link to Nerve interview with Rachel Herz.
Link to more info on The Scent of Desire book.

—Vaughan.

Seduction of the Innocent and the myth of Wertham:

The New Yorker has a wonderful article on the famous American crackdown on horror comics in the 1950s, a campaign sparked by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.

Wertham wrote the influential book, Seduction of the Innocent, which claimed that the comics of the time caused juvenile delinquency.

He listed themes that supposedly ran through various popular story lines, highlighting homosexual themes (Batman and Robin), bondage (Wonder Woman) and numerous examples of what he considered to be extreme violence.

It became a best-seller and eventually led to a Congressional inquiry into the morality and effect of comic book industry on young people.

Fearing state censorship, the comics book industry imposed their own code which, for years afterwards, virtually eliminated depictions of violence, gore, most supernatural themes, or anything that might be considered to hint at sexuality.

As a side-effect, it did lead to some curious titles that were deliberately intended to be more 'wholesome'. As we discussed previously on Mind Hacks, one of these was the 'Psychoanalysis' series of comics.

The New Yorker article is so interesting because it looks at a new book which suggests that Wertham was not some sort of crazed censorship-fiend, as he's sometimes depicted, and notes that he was actually against the subsequent censorship of comics.

Despite his concerns about delinquency and homosexuality, which seem a little odd in modern light, he had other more laudable aims which seem equally as relevant today and may have been hijacked by others:

He did not want to censor comic books, only to restrict their sale so that kids could not buy them without a parent present. He wanted to give them the equivalent of an R rating. Bart Beaty’s “Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture” ($22, paper; University Press of Mississippi) makes a strong case for the revisionist position. As Beaty points out, Wertham was not a philistine; he was a progressive intellectual. His Harlem clinic was named for Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law. He collected modern art, helped produce an anthology of modernist writers, and opposed censorship. He believed that people’s behavior was partly determined by their environment, in this respect dissenting from orthodox Freudianism, and some of his work, on the psychological effects of segregation on African-Americans, was used in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education.

Wertham thought that representations make a difference—that how people see themselves and others reflected in the media affects the way they think and behave. As Beaty says, racist (particularly concerning Asians) and sexist images and remarks can be found on almost every page of crime and horror comics. What especially strikes a reader today is the fantastic proliferation of images of violence against women, almost always depicted in highly sexualized forms. If one believes that pervasive negative images of black people are harmful, why would one not believe the same thing about images of men beating, torturing, and killing women?

Interestingly, Wertham was not the only mind doctor involved in comics.

Psychologist William Moulton Marston was the creator of Wonder Woman and a lot of his personal and scientific interests appear in the stories.

He lived in a polyamorous relationship with two women (one, Elizabeth Marston, a noted psychologist herself) and was particularly interested in using blood pressure as part of lie detection technology (his ideas are still used in the polygraph test today).

Consequently, William and Elizabeth created Wonder Woman to be a strong, liberated female character who had a Lasso of Truth which would wrap itself around villains and prevent them from lying.

Link to New Yorker article 'The Horror' (via BB).
Link to info on book 'Fredric Wertham And The Critique Of Mass Culture'.

—Vaughan.

Little known, and even less forgiven:

The picture is of the memorial to Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a 17th century treatise on depression and still one of the greatest books in the history of medicine.

It is built into one of the pillars in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, as he was both a vicar in the city and one of the governors of Christ Church college.

While Burton demonstrated his remarkable scholarship in the book, he had more than simply an academic interest in the subject matter.

He suffered severe depression during his life and admitted in the preface to the book (writing under the pen name Democritus Junior), that it served to keep his spirits up by keeping him busy.

His final piece of advice to sufferers of melancholy was "be not solitary, be not idle", which holds equally well today as it did in 1621.

The book was a huge success and was highly regarded among Burton's peers, but he was obviously down on himself until the end, as his monument contains a curious Latin epitaph which he wrote himself. It reads:

Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus,
Hic jacet Democritus junior
Cui vitam dedit et mortem
Melancholia.
Ob. 8 Id. Jan. A. C. MDCXXXIX.

It apparently translates to "Little known, and even less forgiven, here lies Democritus Junior, who gave his life and death to Melancholy. Died 9th January, 1639".

The book is still widely read and can regularly be seen on the shelves of high-street book shops.

Link to Wikipedia article on Burton's book with link to full-text.

—Vaughan.

March 23, 2008

Playing mind games, off the shelf:

PhysOrg has a brief article on the various 'mind reading' headsets that are in the pipeline and could make it onto the gaming market this year.

The article mentions several systems that are apparently close to release and notes some of technology which is intended to allow 'thought control' of games:

Emotiv, a company based in San Francisco, says its mind-control headsets will be on shelves later this year, along with a host of novel "biofeedback" games developed by its partners.

Several other companies - including EmSense in Monterey, California; NeuroSky in San Jose, California; and Hitachi in Tokyo - are also developing technology to detect players´ brainwaves and use them in next-gen video games.

The technology is based on medical technology that has been around for decades. Using a combination of EEGs (which reveal alpha waves that signify calmness), EMGs (which measure muscle movement), and ECGs and GSR (which measure heart rate and sweating), developers hope to create a picture of a player´s mental and physical state. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which monitors changes in blood oxygenation, could also be incorporated since it overcomes some of the interference problems with EEGs.

I'll be intrigued to see how well they work, but I suspect they'll be more of a novelty than a genuinely useful addition for avid gamers, at least at first.

This is largely because the main technology for reading brain activity is EEG.

Even with thousands of pounds worth of kit, neuroscientists get participants to do the same task over and over and then average the results to get a reliable waveform.

This is partly because this technology is a relatively crude measure of the total electrical activity that happens over a large area (so on any one occasion the wave will be influenced by a number of other brain functions going on at the same time), and partly because the electrical activity from something as small as the eye-blink muscles drowns out the signal from the brain.

It's interesting that the article mentions near infrared spectroscopy as another possible way of reading brain function (as used by Natalie Portman).

This involves beaming near-infrared light into the head, where it penetrates the skull and gets absorbed by brain to differing degrees, depending on how much blood is in the area. The amount of light that bounces back can be used to infer blood saturation and, hence, brain activity.

However, changes in blood flow lag behind the activity of the neurons by up to 5 seconds (and interestingly, this varies as we age). This is because blood is 'called in' to replenish the local nutrients that are instantly available but in short supply.

Similarly, systems that measure skin conductance or heart rate (a proxy measure for arousal or stress) have a similar problem with lag.

So gamers wanting to control games at the 'speed of thought' are likely to be disappointed. EEG is too noisy, NIRS is too slow.

What the headsets might do well, however, is something quite different.

The MIT Affective Computing group have spent several years looking at how computers could present information differently depending on the emotional state of the user.

According to Jonathan Moreno's book Mind Wars this is also something that the US Military has great interest in, and you can also see how it would enhance games.

The readings from the headset will probably do a better job of keeping track of the easier to measure and relatively slow moving responses like arousal and stress, and these could be used by game designers to enhance your experience (maybe to slow things down if you're too stressed and under-performing to avoid frustration, or to pump-things up at tense moments).

One of the most interesting possibilities is what might happen when hackers got hold of the systems.

Suddenly, they'll be thousands of people with standard kit for reading physiological responses and, to a certain extent, brain function.

As soon as someone finds a way to reliably read a novel type of brain function, even with this limited technology, everyone will be able to use it.

Furthermore, it might lead to some fascinating home cognitive neuroscience experiments and demonstrations. Imagine having a home NIRS system - rock on!

Link to PhysOrg article on 'Mind Gaming' (via 3QD).

—Vaughan.

March 22, 2008

Normality bites:

BBC Radio 4 has just concluded another run of its fantastic series Am I Normal? which looks at the science of differences in our minds, brains and abilities.

The series has done a remarkably good job in exploring the psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience of common human concerns and how they differ across the population.

This stretches from distinct pathologies and medical disorders at one end, to normal variation at the other - although 'normal variation' itself contains a diverse array of differences.

The latest series looked at shyness and social phobia, dyslexia, maths and selective mathematical difficulties and, finally, insomnia and sleep.

Insomnia is particularly interesting because psychological concerns are known to play a huge role in maintaining the patterns of broken sleep and subsequent anxiety.

For example, a well-replicated finding is that people with insomnia vastly under-estimate the amount of sleep they get during the night, sometimes sleeping several more hours that they think they do (Tom discussed some of this research in on Mind Hacks back in 2004, and the full text of a recent scientific paper on the topic is available online as a pdf).

Evidence also suggests that worry feeds into this biased perception of sleep, and that there is also quite a discrepancy between how people with insomnia perceive the impairments they experience in their waking life, and what neuropsychological tests actually find.

This isn't to suggest that people with insomnia are exaggerators (it's worth noting that they do have genuine sleep difficulties), simply that one of the main difficulties is how they evaluate their sleep and its impact - which tends to prolong or make the problem worse.

This is why psychological and behavioural treatments (such as cognitive therapy or changing the environment or daily routines) are particularly effective in treating sleep difficulties.

Link to BBC Radio 4 Am I Normal? series (via BPSRD).

—Vaughan.

March 21, 2008

Defining brain death and the controversies of existence:

The Boston Globe has an interesting article on the concept of 'brain death'. The criteria for brain death are being contested and it's become a hot issue, partly because the US allows organs from consenting donors to be removed when brain death has been diagnosed.

The 'dead donor rule' stipulates that it's only possible to remove organs in cases where a person has died, and this can either be after cardiac death, where the heart and lungs stop functioning, or after brain death, where the brain suffers irreversible damage which causes coma where the patient is kept alive solely by life support.

Most organs donated from the deceased come from people who have been diagnosed as brain dead. Organs remain viable for only about an hour or two after a person's last heartbeat. Brain dead patients are ideal candidates for organ donation, then, because they are kept on ventilators, which means their heart and lungs continue to work, ensuring that a steady flow of oxygen-rich blood keeps their organs healthy. Surgeons remove the donor's organs, then shut off the ventilator. The patient's heart eventually stops.

Yet a small but vocal minority in the medical community has always insisted that some brain dead patients may not be dead. For instance, one study documented some kind of brain activity in up to 20 percent of people declared brain dead, suggesting to some critics that doctors sometimes misdiagnose the condition. Although some neurologists contend the claim, University of Wisconsin medical ethicist Dr. Norman Fost points to research showing that many "brain dead" patients have a functioning hypothalamus, a structure at the base of the brain that governs certain bodily functions, such as blood pressure and appetite.

It's an challenging that speaks directly to our idea of what divides life and death. There is no question that any of the patients will recover, regardless of any residual activity detected in their brain.

But it prompts the question of what sort of brain activity we consider human enough to constitute life.

Of course, the issue is compounded by the importance of life-saving organ donation operations, for which suitable organs are almost always in short-supply.

Link to Boston Globe article 'Fatal flaw'.

—Vaughan.

Pavlov: the name that rings a bell:

Mental Floss, an emporium of thought-themed merchandise, do this witty Pavlov t-shirt in either a long or short-sleeved version.

Actually, they do quite a few psychology themed t-shirts although they have a distinctly early 19th century feel to them.

For those still on a behaviourist tip, Advances in the History of Psychology have an interesting piece on common errors in psychology textbooks, with one about an oft-repeated legend concerning the bearded Russian dog harasser:

...a wide array of textbooks seem to repeat a version of the story of Pavlov’s mugging in which he laid his wallet beside him on a seat at New York’s Grand Central Station and, upon discovering it missing after an extended intellectual reverie, philosophically mused “one must not put temptation in the way of the needy.”

In fact, according to the contemporary New York Times account of the event, Pavlov and his son were confronted by a three men after having boarded a train and had their money forcibly taken from them.

Link to Mental Floss t-shirts.

—Vaughan.

2008-03-21 Spike activity:

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

Medication is the least effective way of treating children with conduct problems, according to a recent review.

Truth serum art chaos! The Arts Catalyst has a secret psychology art-science project you can participate in on March 29th in Liverpool.

The New York Times has a rather timely election themed article on the psychology of rumours.

"You know, just the other day, on this very blog, I swore I would never read another imaging paper again..." Evidence we are helpless to resist (the colours! the colours!) as Mixing Memory discusses a recent brain imaging study on the influence of language on colour perception.

Child-like intelligence created in Second Life. Surely this isn't news?

Treatment Online examines a study which has found differences in a gene linked to neural connectivity in people with autism spectrum diagnoses.

The New York Times has an article on the popularity of sewing wild oats throughout the animal kingdom.

The key Freudian concept of transference captured in the lab, and reported by Cognitive Daily. See an earlier Mind Hacks post for more on the science of transference.

The Guardian reports that the Pentagon delayed mild brain injury screening in an attempt to prevent medicalisation of psychogenic problems.

Sleepwalking is more likely to occur when people are recovering from sleep deprivation, reports BBC News.

As a nice complement to our recent post on authenticity, Psychology Today's Matthew Hutson discusses the psychology of authenticity in the art world.

Is someone at New Scientist trying to win a bet over how many times they can get the word 'telepathy' into print? This time an article about a possible US military 'telepathic' ray gun' that has nothing to do with telepathy. Sadly.

Imminent gnome attack! Wired report on how World of Warcraft could be used to study terror tactics.

Channel N has a remarkably well-explained video introduction to body dysmorphic disorder.

It is better to give than receive. At least in terms of your happiness, reports Not Exactly Rocket Science.

—Vaughan.

March 20, 2008

Better living through reckless self-experimentation:

Scientific American have just concluded its series on scientists who have experimented on themselves in an effort to better understand the mind, brain and body.

The first piece is about Kevin 'Captain Cyborg' Warwick, who seems mainly to have been experimenting with the media rather than himself.

I've always considered him the poor man's Stelarc to be honest, but then again, Stelarc hasn't had a distinguished research career in robotics so swings and roundabouts I guess.

A further story discusses Olivier Ameisen, a cardiologist who became alcoholic and treated himself with baclofen, a drug then untested for the condition.

There's a couple of people who experimented on their children, which doesn't really count as self-experimentation in my book, but they make for good reads nonetheless.

One covers Deb Roy's recording of the entire first two years of his child's vocalisations and speech to help understand how language develops.

The other describes Jay Giedd's project to brain scan his daughter every three months from the age of four upwards. Interestingly, it got stopped by the ethics committee because she might feel pressured to take part. Surely bribery by Pokemon cards would have solved that problem?

While there are several other scientists discussed, the only other one of psychological interest in the legendary Alexander Shulgin who has spent most of his life synthesising new hallucinogenic drugs and trying them on himself. He's now 83. There's a moral in that story somewhere.

Link to SciAm's self-experimenters series.

—Vaughan.

Will Working Mothers’ Brains Explode?:

A new journal, Neuroethics, has just launched and among the freely available articles is an engaging piece on 'neurosexism', the increasing trend to portray sex differences as 'hard wired' into the brain.

The piece is by psychologist Cordelia Fine who argues that some recent popular science books and articles are simply restating old stereotypes but making them sound more modern with an appeal to neuroscience.

Neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine’s book The Female Brain comes in for particular criticism, as it has in the scientific literature. But despite the fact it seems to play fast and loose with the scientific evidence, it has become an international best-seller.

Then, too, with the buzz-phrase ‘hard-wiring’ comes an extraordinary insistence on locating social pressures in the brain. In The Female Brain, for example, the working mother learns that she is struggling against “the natural wiring of our female brains and biological reality” (p. 161). According to Brizendine, combining motherhood with career gives rise to a neurological “tug-of-war because of overloaded brain circuits” (p. 160). Career circuits and maternal circuits battle it out, leading to “increased stress, increased anxiety, and reduced brainpower for the mother’s work and her children.” (p. 112).

But Brizendine promises her female readers that “understanding our innate biology empowers us to better plan our future.” (p. 159). It may startle some readers to learn that family friendly workplace policies are not the solution to reduced maternal stress and anxiety, and that fathers who do the kindergarten pick-ups, pack the lunch-boxes, stay home when the kids are sick, get up in the night when the baby wakes up, and buy the birthday presents and ring the paediatrician in their lunch hour are not the obvious solution to enhanced maternal ‘brainpower’.

No, it is an appreciation of female brain wiring that will see the working mother through the hard times. (Predictably, Brizendine never even hints that the over-wired working mother consider the simplest antidote to the ill-effects of going against her ‘natural wiring’: namely, giving her partner a giant kick up the neurological backside.)

Fine's argument is not that that sex differences don't exist in the mind and brain. Indeed, there are numerous scientific studies which have reported these.

The problem is that they are often portrayed in the popular literature as being 'hard wired' - an ugly analogy taken from computers that suggests that the difference is an innate and permanent feature.

Apart from ignoring the fact sex differences are typically only stable at the group level (meaning that this difference is not significant in any single male-female comparison) most of these claims about 'hard wiring' are not based on evidence about the innateness of the difference.

Actually, I've never been clear what 'hard-wired' is supposed to mean. Even if we presume that a particular behaviour or feature is coded in the DNA, the brain develops only through interaction with its environment - be this after birth, or in the womb.

In other words, most claims about a human ability being 'hard wired' ignore the history of how these develop through our lives.

The rest of the first issue of Neuroethics also looks fascinating, with article on neuroenhancement of love and lust, nanotech, neuroimaging and understanding others' mind, to name but a few.

pdf or web version of Fine's article 'Will Working Mothers’ Brains Explode?'.
Link to Neuroethics 1st issue table of contents (via Neurophilosophy).

—Vaughan.

March 19, 2008

The northern lights of neural stem cells:

The beautiful image on the right is a collection of neural stem cells stained with fluorescent die, taken from the finalists of the Wellcome Image Awards.

A wonderful image of the bacteria that cause a type of meningitis is another brain-related image in the finalists' gallery.

There are plenty more images of course, but don't miss the audio interviews that accompany each image where the scientist discusses their work.

All of the pictures are quite stunning so well worth a look.

Link to 2008 Wellcome Image Awards gallery.

—Vaughan.

Internet addiction nonsense hits the AJP:

While we've got used to 'internet addiction' popping up in the media from time to time, it has inexplicably been the subject of an editorial in this month's American Journal of Psychiatry arguing it should be included in the DSM-IV - the next version of the diagnostic manual for psychiatry.

The editorial suggests that we should make 'internet addiction' a serious public health issue despite the fact that no-one yet has suggested anything that uniquely distinguishes it from its use as a tool or a source of entertainment.

For example, here are the components that the author, psychiatrist Jerald Block, cites as evidence that someone can become addicted to the internet:

1) excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives, 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible, 3) tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue

Apart from the fact that these and most other supposed criteria make no distinction between using the internet and what the person is using the internet for, it's easy to see that they don't describe anything unique to the net.

For example, here are my criteria for 'sports team addiction':

1) excessive time following games, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives, 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when team news or matches are inaccessible, 3) tolerance, including the need for better match viewing equipment, more news, or more hours of team-related activity, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue

As more people in the world follow sports teams than have access to the internet, surely this is the more serious problem, especially considering the high levels of violence and alcohol abuse associated with this tragic affliction.

You may, of course, substitute whatever interest you want into the criteria to capture people who are the most motivated to pursue their favourite interest, or who are workaholics who rely on the technology (if you want a retro version, substitute the 'postal system' for the internet for a 1908 style communication addiction).

Rather curiously, the editorial mentions the figure that 86% of people with 'internet addiction' have another mental illness. What this suggests is that heavy use of the internet is not the major problem that brings people into treatment.

In fact, 'internet addiction', however it is defined, is associated with depression and anxiety but no-one has ever found this to be a causal connection.

Recent research shows that shy or depressed people use the internet excessively to (surprise, surprise) meet people and manage their shyness.

And in fact, as I mentioned in an earlier article, one of the only longitudinal studies [pdf] on the general population found that internet use is generally associated with positive effects on communication, social involvement, and well-being, although interestingly, those who were already introverts show increased withdrawal.

In other words, the internet is a communication tool and people use it manage their emotional states, like they do with any other technology.

Of course there are some people who are depressed and anxious who use the internet (or follow sports teams, or read books, or watch TV...) to excess, but why we have to describe this as an addiction still completely baffles me.

Link to AJP editorial. Don't click! You're feeding your addiction!
Link to previous post 'Why there is no such thing as internet addiction'.

—Vaughan.

Head transplants and Szymborska's Experiment:

The Nobel prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska wrote one of her most striking poems about a morbid experiment where a dog's head was cut from its body but kept alive by a blood-pumping machine.

The poem serves as a commentary on happiness and anxiety about the purpose of existence, but what many people don't know is that the experiment was genuinely completed, and the black and white film that the poem is based on can be viewed online.

The experiment was executed by Russian scientists and anticipated later work by neurosurgeon Robert White, who attempted transplant the heads of two monkeys, as can be seen in footage from the procedure.

While White thought of it as a possible precursor to human head transplantation, the scientific community reacted with outrage and these days it's generally thought of as a pretty appalling experiment that achieved virtually nothing of consequence.

Neuroscientist Steven Rose gives an interesting video commentary on the experiment, drawing from recent findings in 'embodied cognition' which have suggested that the brain cannot be meaningfully switched because so much of our experience of our minds relies on the body in which it has developed and is embedded.

I've also included Szymborska's poem below the fold if you want to see her literary reflection on watching the original Russian film.

Link to Soviet film on separated dog head.
Link to footage of White's monkey head transplant film.
Link to video with reaction and commentary to White's experiments.

The Experiment
by Wisława Szymborska

As a short subject before the main feature -
in which the actors did their best
to make me cry and even laugh -
we were shown an interesting experiment
involving a head.

The head
a minute earlier was still attached to...
but now it was cut off.
Everyone could see that it didn't have a body.
The tubes dangling from the neck hooked it up to a machine
that kept its blood circulating.
The head
was doing just fine.

Without showing pain or even surprise,
it followed a moving flashlight with its eyes.
It pricked up its ears at the sound of a bell.
Its moist nose could tell
the smell of bacon from odorless oblivion,
and licking its chops with evident relish
it salivated its salute to physiology.

A dog's faithful head,
a dog's friendly head
squinted its eyes when stroked,
convinced that it was still part of a whole
that crooks its back if patted
and wags its tail.

I thought about happiness and was frightened.
For if that's all life is about,
the head
was happy.

—Vaughan.

March 18, 2008

Kiddie psychopaths and the database nation:

Gary Pugh, the director of forensic sciences for the British police has sparked controversy after he suggested that children as young as five who display 'future offending traits' should be placed on a DNA database so they are more likely to be picked up if they commit crime in the future.

Pugh is almost certainly talking about children who have what are known as 'callous-unemotional' traits, described somewhat less politically correctly as 'kiddie psychopathy'.

These have indeed been found to weakly predict future antisocial behaviour, but the picture is more complex than it seems and, as we'll see, they aren't a good basis on which to base future crime fighting efforts.

Psychopathy describes a pattern of shallow emotion, low empathy and the lack of conscience for antisocial acts, with the ability to seem charming on the surface. Callous-unemotional traits describe something similar in children.

A recent study on the prevalence of these traits in children used a fairly typical definition:

1. Makes a good impression at first but people tend to see through him/her after they get to know him/her
2. Shallow or fast-changing emotions.
3. Too full of his/her own abilities.
4. Is not genuinely sorry if s/he has hurt someone or acted badly.
5. Can seem cold-blooded or callous.
6. Doesn't keep promises.
7. Not genuine in his/her expression of emotions.

This traits have been found in much higher levels in children with conduct disorder. CD is a psychiatric diagnosis, but really just describes a pattern of quite severe antisocial behaviour.

These studies have also found that in children already displaying aggressive or antisocial behaviour, callous-unemotional traits are associated with more severe aggressive, antisocial behaviour in the future.

However, recent studies that looked at these traits in the general population found that these traits reliably, but only very weakly, predict antisocial behaviour during the following years

So, if you look at the population as a whole, you could say that these childhood traits are genuinely linked to later antisocial acts, but the overall difference between children with and without these characteristics is small.

In other words, if you put every child with these traits on a DNA database, you're unlikely to see a significant increase in later crime detection as a result and you'll have the DNA of a lot of children who will never get in trouble with the law.

Link to BBC News story 'Police spokesman sparks DNA row'.

—Vaughan.

Encephalon 41 arrives:

The 41st edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just been published online, and this time it's ably hosted by Pure Pedantry.

A couple of my favourites include Providentia on one of A.R. Luria's most fascinating cases and the PodBlack Blog on magical thinking in politicians.

There's plenty more, so have a look through for some of the best mind and brain writing of the last fortnight.

Link to Encephalon 41.

—Vaughan.

March 17, 2008

Faking the biscuit:

They say sincerity is everything, and if you can fake that, you've got it made. Nowhere is this more true than in marketing and Time magazine discusses the seemingly related concept of 'synthetic authenticity' - the feeling that a product is the 'real deal', which is supposedly going to be one of the big commercial trends in the near future.

And how does a cutting edge company make a product seem authentic? Well, it's not really clear from the article, but it seems to involve some sort of emotional attachment to the product which prompts associations with a sense of community and trust.

Two hundred years ago, agrarian Americans decided whether to buy a hoe mainly on the basis of whether it was available and affordable. But in the past 20 years, a school of behavioral economists has emerged to point out the obvious: consumers with higher living standards often make stupid, irrational decisions. We don't simply look at price and quality; we decide how we feel about a refrigerator or even a pair of socks before we buy.

Authenticity is a way of understanding this concept... Gilmore and Pine give a name to this ephemeral dimension of consumer behavior: in addition to the established dimensions of availability, price and quality, we are buying according to authenticity.

In some instances, it seems to be a way of making the commercial relationship between buyer and seller seems less like a commercial relationship and more of an implicit partnership of friends.

In others, it seems to rely on the idea that the consumer is accessing some sort of underlying 'true' experience that cannot be captured by modern technology.

The ideas are based on a recent book by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore who started the 'experience economy' movement ('sell experiences, not products') some years back.

One can't help but wonder whether they were inspired by Philip K Dick's alternative reality novel The Man in the High Castle. One character, Mr Wyndham-Matson, is involved in selling fake antiques to unsuspecting punters.

The thing that makes the object valuable, suggests Wyndham-Matson, is 'historicity' - the perception that the object has been involved in something historically significant.

He notes that if an antique gun has gone through a famous battle "it's the same as if it hadn't, unless you know", with the implication that the feeling of history (and dare we say, authenticity), is as much to do with the smoke and mirrors of persuasion as it is to do with the properties of the product.

Link to Time article 'Synthetic Authenticity'.

—Vaughan.

Beyond belief:

Salon has a provocative article by neurologist Robert Burton who discusses what the neuroscience of belief means for how we understand the world, drawn from his new book, On Being Certain.

We're going to be posting an interview with Burton on Mind Hacks in the near future, but the Salon article should give you a flavour of some of his thoughts the brain and belief.

What's most curious about work on the neuropsychology of belief is that it barely touches upon the memory research where they've had many of these things under the microscope for years.

I'm a huge fan of the work of Israeli psychologist Asher Koriat who has done some absolutely stunning work on the control of memory.

This may seem a relatively dry topic, but think for a minute about how you use your memory.

For example, you've almost certainly had the experience where you know that you know something but can't remember the details, or that you know you recognise something, but can't remember the occasion when you encountered it before.

Also, we seem able to judge when we've remembered something to our satisfaction, but this is quite a remarkable feat in itself. Think about how we could possibly do this.

You could say we know because the memory matches other memories we have in mind, but then these are subject to the same problem - how do we know that we've remembered them correctly?

In other words, there must be another system at work, and one of the primary components of this is what psychologists call the 'feeling of knowing' that communicates between our unconscious pool of stored information and our conscious sense of how successfully our memory is operating.

Koriat discussed these processes in a 2000 paper [pdf] that was a revelation for me when I read it. It convinced me of the importance of these wormhole-like processes that connect the conscious and unconscious mind.

In his article, Burton suggests what social implications arise from the science of belief, suggesting we should be a little more humble when we state what we 'know'.

Link to Salon article 'The certainty epidemic'.
pdf of Koriat's 2001 paper on the 'feeling of knowing'.

—Vaughan.

A stroke of insight:

We've discussed the remarkable neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor before but I've finally got round to watching her engaging TED talk on her experience of having a stroke, which is now available to watch online.

It's a bit poetic in places. You can almost hear the sound of a thousand cognitive scientists gritting their teeth as she describes the supposed functions of each cerebral hemisphere and probably the sound of some of them fainting when she describes the "deep inner peace circuitry" of the right hemisphere.

Neuroanatomists may notice that this is almost exactly the same sound that occurs when psychologists describe something as a 'frontal' function.

The talk is gripping, however, and the highlight is her description of the day she had her stroke which is both insightful and very funny.

Link to video of Jill Bolte Taylor TED talk (thanks Sandra!)
Link to previous post on Jill Bolte Taylor with links to interview.

—Vaughan.

March 16, 2008

Pica: put your money where your mouth is:

An upcoming article in the medical journal Clinical Toxicology reports on a man who suffered lead poisoning owing to his habit of eating roofing plates.

The tendency to eat the inedible is known as 'pica'. It is an established psychiatric diagnosis, is well-reported in the medical literature and has given us some of the more unusual case reports of recent years.

Although there is a specific diagnosis, the term is also used more widely as a general label for any eating behaviour that focuses on inedible objects.

Two of the most striking cases have involved coins. The x-ray on the right is from a case report from the New England Journal of Medicine where doctors discovered five and a half kilograms of coins, necklaces, and needles in a patient's stomach.

In another case report from 1998, a British patient had swallowed £175.32 pounds worth of loose change and had a history of eating a wide range of curious objects:

At different times she has eaten tablets, coins, nuts, wire, plastic, 'purple hearts', Bob Martin's dog conditioning powder and dried flowers. There is much comment made throughout her medical notes detailing vigorous negotiations about the colour, size, number, timing and supply of medication, including a large batch of hand-written letters to her doctor.

The behaviour in the more extreme cases in adults is usually associated with psychosis, as was the case with these two individuals.

It was also the case with one other gentleman, who had suffered lead poisoning after swallowing over 200 live bullets. The case report was rather wittily titled 'Bite the Bullet'.

Normally, however, pica is most commonly seen in children with learning difficulties or autism spectrum diagnoses.

Perhaps giving partial support for the stereotype that pregnancy leads to unusual food cravings, it is known to occur more commonly in pregnant women, particularly from lower income families.

It's not clear why it occurs, but interestingly, it has been linked to iron and zinc deficiencies.

Link to NEJM case report with x-ray.

—Vaughan.

The English Surgeon:

I had the pleasure of watching a screening of a stunning new documentary called The English Surgeon yesterday. It's a film about the work of London-based neurosurgeon Henry Marsh and his colleague Igor Kurilets in the Ukraine.

However, to say the film was just about brain surgery would be vastly under value its significance, and to describe it as a meditation on the humanity of medicine would be to confine it to a cliché.

Although Marsh normally works at St George's, one of London's most established hospitals, he has regularly travelled to the Ukraine for 15 years to assist the development of neurosurgery in this still struggling country.

The contrast itself is striking. One scene sees Marsh and Kurilets looking through street market hardware stalls for screws, rivets and power tools to use in their operations.

One of the most gripping scenes is where the two surgeons open a patient's skull using a Bosch power drill only to find the battery is going flat as they proceed.

The man has been only given local anaesthetic as the Ukrainian hospital doesn't have the facilities to safely put someone under and wake them up after initial part of the procedure.

Some of the most moving moments concern the tension between the shortcoming of medicine and the hope of the patients. There are many profound moments that aren't well captured by brief summaries, and I'm sure each viewer takes something different away from them, so you'll need to experience them for yourselves.

It's probably worth saying that the film is also incredibly funny in places, partly owing to Marsh's phlegmatic personality, but partly owing to the dark humour and comic irony posed by the situations that arise.

Marsh was the subject of another documentary by the same filmmaker created for the BBC as part of their medical series Your Life in Their Hands. Sadly, it's not available online (or anywhere by the looks of it), but let me know if it appears as a torrent and I'll link to it.

If you want to see it on the big screen there are screenings in Norwich, Brighton, London, York, Glasgow and Edinburgh before the end of March, and apparently it will be shown on BBC Two on March 30th.

International readers will have to hope for a torrent as things currently stand.

As an aside, the soundtrack was composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and is fittingly beautiful.

Link to film website (thanks Kat!).

—Vaughan.

March 15, 2008

Medical model behaviour:

Journalist and campaigner Liz Spikol has written an excellent piece for the Philadelphia Weekly on the influence of the 'medical model' on how we understand and treat mental illness.

To simplify a little, the 'medical model' approach involves classifying mental distress or impaired behaviour as cut-and-dry diagnoses and assumes that these disorders are best understood at the level of neurobiological changes in individual patients.

Alternative approaches might consider that mental disorders are not always adequately described as by making a clear dividing line between mental illness and mental health and probably exist as a spectrum of differences (the continuum model), and that you need to understand more than just the brain to understand why people become distressed or disabled (such as social influences).

Needless to say, drug companies have a vested interest in promoting medical model because it implies drugs are the best treatment.

At the other end of the spectrum, some groups completely reject the medical model and any attempt to classify distressing mental states or research the neuroscience of mental disorders, often because they feel it upholds existing social orders or power structures with which they disagree.

What each of these extremes miss, however, is that the 'medical model' is a tool, a conceptual approach. In some situations it will be useful, in others misleading, and most importantly, it can be questioned and revised where necessary and can exist alongside other approaches.

Beware of any group that pushes a conceptual tool as an ideology. They are usually trying to sell you something.

This applies equally for drug companies and pressure groups.

Liz Spikol's article is so good because it evaluates the medical model in context. In this case, in terms of attitudes, advertising and the law concerning mental illness.

Link to Liz Spikol's Philadelphia Weekly article.

—Vaughan.

March 14, 2008

2008-03-14 Spike activity:

Slightly late quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Neurophilosophy posts a 'best of' collection of its many excellent articles online.

The Kinsey Institute for sex research have started their own blog and regular podcast on all matters sexual.

Social networks are like the eye. Edge has a video lecture on an evolutionary take on the development of society.

The New York Times reviews the recent discussion on whether it's wrong for scientists to take cognitive enhancers. Not like it hasn't been happening for four millennia already.

When can children make the distinction between jokes and lies? The BPS Research Digest has a piece on some fascinating new research and the APA Monitor has a past article on research on child humour from the same team.

Skeptic magazine has a great review of some of the key concepts in consciousness research in an article entitled 'consciousness is nothing but a word'.

Psych Central discusses the recent news stories about a possible biological test for mood disorders.

To the bunkers! Simple nanotech experiment will one day lead to swarm of microscopic brain creatures, suggests BBC News article.

BBC News reports on a study that found that breathing engine exhaust fumes alters brain function. Full text available from PubMed entry.

Nominative determinism strikes again. The New York Times looks at the limits of the effects of our name on how we're perceived.

Neuroanthropology has a piece on the anthropology of prisons and prisoners.

The New York Times again on differences in the DNA of identical twins, with the newly discovered copy number variations playing a key role.

The joy of boredom. The Boston Globe looks at the most undirectional of mental states.

The increasingly excellent Treatment Online discusses a recent study on genetic interactions in people with depression.

Jealousy in romantic relationships is associated with the height of partner, according to a study covered by New Scientist.

The excellent Simply Psychology has relaunched with a huge amount of psychology resources online.

The brain of Dionysus. Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield discusses what the Ancient Greek tragedies can tell us about the brain in The Telegraph.

—Vaughan.

March 13, 2008

Following deep brain stimulation:

Wired Science have got a great short film that follows a two people who have deep brain stimulation devices implanted in their brains to treat tremors.

Tremor is a symptom of Parkinson's disease and this was one of the earliest targets for early DBS trials.

The film follows someone who has exactly this difficulty, plus someone who has a different form a tremor disorder, known as essential tremor, through the process of the operation.

While most people assume brain surgery is all pre-planned beforehand, for many treatments for cognitive or behavioural functions, the surgeons need to wake up the patient after they've open their skull to make sure they're targeting the right place (and avoiding damaging essential functions).

In this case, they wake the patients up during neurosurgery so they can test out their movements while stimulating different areas of the brain, in a trial and error style.

Wired Science also has a shorter film online about the post-mortem dissection of a brain of a patient who had Alzheimer's disease that's also well worth having a look at.

Link to video of deep brain stimulation neurosurgery.
Link to video on 'The Brain of an Alzheimer's Patient'.

—Vaughan.

March 12, 2008

A personal note / una nota personal:

I qualify as a clinical psychologist in September and would like to work in Latin America for 6 months to a year afterwards.

If you know anyone in Spanish speaking Latin America who might be interested employing a newly qualified clinical psychologist who speaks passable Spanish (with room for improvement) and has a PhD in cognitive neuropsychiatry, please get in touch.

I can send my CV in Spanish or English and am happy to consider all types of psychology job.

For those not familiar with the world of psychology, Latin American has a long tradition of valuing psychology as an important scientific and clinical pursuit.

The first university course teaching psychology in Latin America started in 1897 and was taught by Prof Ezequiel Chavez in the Preparatory School of Mexico, five years later to become the National University of Mexico.

The first experimental psychology lab opened in 1891 in San Juan in Argentina, with the first university lab opening in 1898 in the Colegio Nacional of Buenos Aires.

In 1907 Latin America's first professional psychology association was launched - the Sociedad de Estudios Psicologicos that gathered psychologists from across the region.

Owing to periods of social and political turmoil, Latin American psychology has traditionally been focused on applied research and practice - aiming to use psychology to improve the health and well-being of the population.

Latin America maintains a leading role in world psychology. As a testament to this, the Internation Neuropsychological Society will be holding their July conference jointly with the Neuropsychology Society of Argentina in Buenos Aires.

So, you can see why I'm keen to work in the region.

pdf of article on the history of Latin American psychology.

—Vaughan.

Inner speech signals, but isn't a psychic telephone:

New Scientist reports on a neck-band technology that allows the wearer's silent thoughts to trigger messages over a phone line.

It sounds impressive, but the video that accompanies the story makes it look like the technology reads your inner thoughts and transmits them as sounds, when it fact it does something far more basic.

Whenever we think to ourselves, rather curiously, the vocal chords get activated very slightly - faintly mirroring what would happen if we were to say the words out loud.

This is known as subvocal speech and can be picked up by EMG sensors on the neck that pick up the tiny electrical signals generated by the weakly activated muscles.

While the technology doesn't exist to turn these signals back into speech, it is possible to train the system to distinguish between a number of different general patterns which can trigger specific computer commands.

Lancet Neurology reported in 2004 that the same team had a basic system running that recognised six words (stop, go, left, right, alpha, omega) and 10 digits, to allow 'silent' control of a machine or a software application.

The team seem to have developed the technology and it can apparently now recognise many more commands, however, it doesn't 'translate' thoughts into their corresponding words.

In the video, the wearer is triggering sound recordings of specific sentences, pre-arranged to provide answers to the rehearsed telephone 'conversation'. Still impressive, but not a genuine conversation in the way we would normally think of it.

As an aside, for more than 20 years now, we've know that subvocal speech accompanies hallucinated voices in people who have been diagnosed with psychosis.

This means people who hear constant hallucinated voices will probably not be able to use the system effectively.

However, we now know that healthy individuals have much higher levels of hallucinations than previously thought, although most people are not bothered or distressed by them.

For example, in a 2004 study Louise Johns and colleagues found that 0.7% of the British population had experienced an auditory hallucination in the last year.

It's interesting to speculate that a significant minority of the population might experience problems with this technology as their hallucinations accidentally trigger commands or send messages on their behalf!

Link to NewSci story 'Nerve-tapping neckband allows 'telepathic' chat'.
Link to video of product presentation.

—Vaughan.

Undercover psychiatry:

An interesting historical snippet from p48 of psychiatrist Giovanni Stanghellini's book on the phenomenology of psychosis, Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies:

The German psychiatrist Karl Willmanns, who would later be director of the Heidelberg Clinic until the rise of the Nazis, published a book [in 1906] on the disenfranchised. He had been following them around at night in the outskirts of town, dressed as one of them, often inviting them into his own home, and 'lending' them money.

In his book, Zur Psychopathologie de Landstreichers, Willmanns sought to show how many of the homeless were schizophrenic. His university post, then the most important in German psychiatry, was taken from him, apparently because he diagnosed a form of hysterical blindness in Adolf Hitler.

The book itself is concerned with exploring psychosis using the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, which attempts to carefully describe and understand the structure of subjective consciousness.

Needless to say, this is particularly important so scientific studies can aim to understand what it is important to try and measure in conscious experience, not just attempt to study what is easily measurable.

However, not everyone believes that our own subjective experience is necessarilly a reliable guide to even the conscious mind.

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel is a particularly strong critic, suggesting that 'naive introspection' is inherently flawed. His debate with psychologist Russell Hurlburt, who disagrees, was recently published as a book.

Link to review of Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies.
Link to details from publisher.

—Vaughan.

March 11, 2008

Exporting psychological treatments, importing wisdom:

A recent 60 country World Health Organisation study found that depression is the most serious chronic illness, worse than angina, arthritis, asthma, and diabetes. Unfortunately, the majority of people who experience depression live in low income countries where help is least likely to be available.

The New York Times has a fascinating article on an ongoing project in Goa, India, that screens every attendee at a local health centre and then uses psychological therapy to help with low mood or anxiety.

It's not a simple case of just using Western techniques in a new environment.

As the NYT article mentions, mental illness carries a significant stigma in many cultures. For example, a diagnosis may not only be stigmatising for the affected person, but it may also mean the person's children are less likely to be thought of as suitable marriage partners, potentially affecting the whole family's future.

Futhermore, depression is known to present quite differently in some non-Western cultures. Studies have found that people are more likely to report 'somatic symptoms' such as diffuse pains or tiredness, rather than low mood or emotional problems.

This is partly due to stigma, but sometimes because certain languages don't have the same, or even such a varied vocabulary for emotions and mental states.

I'm currently working with a Pakistani psychiatrist who often surprises me by pointing out that even what I assume are relatively straightforward words, such as depression or anxiety, might not have a direct translation in some Asian languages.

All of these issues mean that the treatment centre in Goa tackles the issue in a slightly different way:

Most are also apparently wary of visiting a mental hospital. In India, the stigma of mental illness remains strong. To minimize the problem, health workers avoid using the words “mental illness,” “depression” or “anxiety” with patients, relying on more commonly used words like “strain” and “tension.”

The patients “are happy to talk,” Dr. Sudipto Chatterjee, a psychiatrist at Sangath, said, “as long as you stay away from the idea of mental illness.”

I find the issue of having different vocabularies for our mental states fascinating.

The philosopher Wittgenstein noted how difficult it is to agree on common words for internal states because errors are so hard to correct.

If a mother and child see a rabbit and the child says "elephant!", the mother can point to the rabbit and correct the misnomer. But what can a mother, or anyone do, if someone 'misnames' an emotion?

Or to put it another way, as we don't have external things to refer to for internal states, how do we ever agree on a vocabulary that is at all meaningful?

I'm always curious when I come across differences concerning emotion words in other languages. For example, Spanish has the same word (vergüenza) for shame and embarrassment.

From my native language perspective it strikes me as amazing that another language doesn't individually label these two states which seem to have such different personal and social implications.

I'm sure there are many reverse examples and many other emotional vocabulary mismatches across the world's languages.

Link to NYT article 'Psychotherapy for All: An Experiment'.

—Vaughan.

The way to a man's hiccups...:

A case of a man with unstoppable hiccups has just been published online in the medical literature. Rather unusually, it turned out they were caused by early stage Parkinson's disease.

Parkinson's disease is most commonly associated with movement difficulties and the public most associate it with tremor or shaking.

However, it can have a wide range of other effects (more recently, problems with cognitive functions and mental health have been recognised), although this seems to be the first time hiccups have been reported as an early symptom.

The case study is reported in the journal Parkinsonism and Related Disorders:

The patient was a 62-year-old male who had been suffering from intractable hiccups for more than 6 months. The initial intermittent nature of hiccups became continuous over time. When he was quiet, the hiccups were more prominent, although his symptoms tended to decrease when he was speaking.

The hiccups frequently interrupted his speech particularly towards the end of a sentence. The hiccups tended to disappear when he was asleep. Hiccup frequency increased with emotional stress such as anxiety and anger. The patient was depressed and socially isolated due to the embarrassment caused by his continuous hiccups.

It's a curious case, but the paper also contains a fascinating paragraph on the causes of hiccups. One cause can be with (unsurprisingly) the organs in the chest, but another can be disruption to part of the brainstem called the medulla.

The causes of hiccup can be divided into ‘peripheral’ and ‘central’. A wide variety of peripheral conditions can cause hiccup including: gastroesophageal pathologies, renal failure, malignancies, medications, abdominal surgery and even myocardial infarction.

Central causes can result from structural or functional disorders of the medulla or various other supraspinal neural elements such as multiple sclerosis, medulla oblongata cavernoma, brainstem tumors, basilar artery aneurysm, cerebellar hemangioblastoma, dorsal and lateral medullary infarctions...

The antidopaminergic agent chlorpromazine is the only drug approved for the treatment of intractable hiccups.

I never knew there was an approved drug for difficult to control hiccups, let alone chlorpromazine, the first antipsychotic drug to be developed and widely used in the 1950s.

However, stranger treatments have been discussed in the medical literature.

Perhaps some of the finest moments in hiccup medicine have come from the small but determined literature on the use of digital rectal massage (translation: finger up the arse) as a treatment.

The abstract of 1990 article from the Journal of Internal Medicine is fantastic simply for its deadpan delivery. Needless to say, it was honoured with an IgNobel award.

Link to PubMed entry for case study.

—Vaughan.

dothetest.co.uk:

Transport for London have combined two of my favourite things: safety for cyclists and classic Psychology experiments. The website dothetest.co.uk provides a test of awareness that Mind Hacks fans will instantly recognise as an updated (urbanised!) version of Hack #41: "Make Things Invisible Simply by Concentrating (on Something Else)". Fantastic!

Link to the awareness test here

Link to a previous post on mindhacks.com discussing inattentional blindness

—tom.

March 10, 2008

Could you endure such pain, at any hand but hers?:

I finally got round to having a look at the New York Times migraine blog and found it full of fantastic writing and some wonderful artwork that aims to capture the perceptual distortions associated with the mother of all headaches.

There's a particularly good article by Oliver Sacks (his first book was on migraine) who discusses the common geometrical patterns that can occur in the hallucinatory images, known as a form constants.

Interesting, the mathematician Paul Bressloff has suggested [pdf] that these necessarily arise when the firing of neurons in the primary visual cortex is destabilised.

Although Bressloff was particularly addressing certain hallucinations caused by psychedelic drugs, the form constants are, well, constant across conditions, so are likely to arise from a similar process in migraines too.

There are many more articles describing the science, personal stories and art of the head pounding, vision distorting and stomach churning headache. The gallery is particularly good if you're not familiar with the range of visual effects.

However, no one seems to have touched on a poem by Robert Graves where he uses migraine as a metaphor for love (or is it the other way round?) capturing the beauty and pain of both.

Symptoms of Love

Love is universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.

Symptoms of true love
Are leanness, jealousy,
Laggard dawns;

Are omens and nightmares -
Listening for a knock,
Waiting for a sign:

For a touch of her fingers
In a darkened room,
For a searching look.

Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such pain
At any hand but hers?

Link to NYT's Migraine Blog (via Neurophilosophy).

—Vaughan.

Pimping insomnia:

Discover Magazine has an exposé of a recent surge of news stories on insomnia and sleep disorders that stretch from the dull to the frankly unbelievable.

It turns out a fair number seem to be based on press releases from PR firms, some trying to promote hotels, but others coming from the National Sleep Foundation.

The author of the piece looked at the 2005 financial figures from this organisation and discovered that over 80% of its funding came from drug companies and almost three quarters was spent on 'public education' - i.e. advertising the existence of sleep disorders.

Of course, sleep disorders can be distressing, disabling and potentially dangerous but research suggests that particularly for insomnia, the judicious use of drugs should be a last resort (most have the potential for addiction), as behavioural and psychological treatments are safer and more effective for most people.

Unfortunately, these approaches are often not available, meaning 'public awareness' increases diagnosis but leads to drug prescription, partly because people go to doctors and list what symptoms they think they have from the advertising rather than describing their experiences.

The National Sleep Foundation do a lot of excellent work but the article suggests that there seems to be an element of disease mongering and astroturfing to their promotions.

Link to article 'Deflating the Bogus Insomnia “Epidemic”'

—Vaughan.

Possessed :

Film-maker Martin Hampton has created a revealing documentary on four people with different degrees of compulsive hoarding, where individuals incessantly collect household objects, even to the point of not being able to throw out rubbish.

Compulsive hoarding is often linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder, where affected people experience intrusive thoughts or urges to complete certain actions (most commonly 'washing' or 'checking') even though they know how seriously these intrusions are affecting their lives.

Hampton's documentary is a remarkably well made account of people with similar urges, in this case to collect and retain, and just lets the individuals and the images speak for themselves (it is also freely available online as wide screen HD, so looks wonderful).

Apparently the documentary was created as part of a Master's course in visual anthropology, a field I'd not come across before, but which seems to be concerned with documenting the diversity of human experience through film.

Possessed does this admirably and seems to have garnered numerous awards since it's release.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments. An update and a request from the director!

I am the director of this film and am now researching the next stage of the project. I am trying to compile a collection of peoples experiences of OCD and other anxiety based disorders. I have found from experience that although symptoms might be similar, the actual particularities of the obsessions and compulsions are often very varied. For example, one might wash ones hands 30 times a day, but have a very unique self discovered reason for doing so. I would be very grateful to hear of your or any friend / acquaintances experiences / difficulties. Many thanks and I hope you find the film interesting. Please email me at martin@martinhampton.com

Link to Martin Hampton's documentary Possessed (via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

March 08, 2008

Resisting temptation is energy intensive:

Cognitive Daily has just published a great write-up and demonstration of a study that illustrates how self-control is an energy intensive process that puts a big drain on the body's glucose levels.

The article tackles a recent study [pdf] led by psychologist Matthew Gailliot that found that exercising self-control in either conversations or in lab tasks reduces blood glucose levels.

The researchers also found that initial glucose levels can predict how well people do on these tasks and that self-control can be temporarily boosted by giving people a sugary drink.

Cognitive Daily's have recreated one of the lab tasks. Go and check it out, it's an excellent demonstration. It makes the task wonderfully clear but also illustrates how even such simple self-control tasks are so difficult.

This sort of 'self-control' is heavily linked to attention - in part, the ability to focus yourself on one particular thing and not get drawn into perceptual or emotional distractions.

This study doesn't tackle brain function, but another recent paper by Gailliot [pdf] does link these findings to what we know about the neuropsychology of 'self-control'.

This ability is particularly associated with the frontal lobes, which are known to play a key role in inhibiting inappropriate responses.

You can see control break down in interesting ways after frontal lobe damage, which can often lead to a range of impulsive behaviours.

For example, patients with damage to this area might display utilisation behaviour, where they are unable to resist carrying out actions presented by their environment.

The affected person might be unable to walk past a door without trying to open it or sit in front of a coffee cup without sipping it, even when they know it's too hot to drink.

What's interesting, is that as the CogDaily article illustrates, we seem to have a mild form of this when we are low on energy or fatigued.

It's interesting to speculate that the reason we get 'snappy' when tired is because we're less able to control the emotions sparked by small annoyances.

Link to great CogDaily article on self control (try the demo!).

—Vaughan.

March 07, 2008

Decorating inner space:

The New York Times has a fun article on how psychotherapists decorate their office and what this might portray about the inner life of the shrink.

Psychoanalysts (Freudian psychotherapists) in particular are very careful about what sort of impression they project about themselves, preferring, at least initially, to be as insubstantial as possible so the patient can transfer feelings and impressions onto them, allowing relationship patterns and emotional reactions to be uncovered and worked on.

However, many psychotherapists work from home, using rooms in their house as offices. The NYT piece notes that a recent academic paper in the journal Psychoanalytic Psychology caused a storm by questioning the ethics of this practice, as impressions or even people from the therapists family life might interfere in the crucial relationship forming process.

Of course, the office is also a way of making the patient feel comfortable and at ease and so the tension between how the therapist attempts to express this, and how they express themselves, can be quite revealing.

Freud famously had a painting over his psychoanalytic couch of Jean-Martin Charcot (Freud's mentor) presiding over the swooning and almost bare breasted young woman 'Blanche'. No wishful thinking going on there of course.

In the UK, where most psychological treatment happens in the NHS, the rooms are often comfortable but plain outpatient appointment rooms that are shared and booked as necessary.

Occasionally, clinicians will have their own office in which to see patients. In these case, I've noticed that psychotherapists and counsellors have a much better sense of interior decoration (all rugs and soft lighting) than clinical psychologists, who tend to go for books and photocopied papers look.

Link to NYT article on therapists' offices.

—Vaughan.

2008-03-07 Spike activity:

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

Faces in the static. An interesting study looks at brain activation associated with seeing illusory faces in visual noise.

Neuroanthropology discusses recent research looking at the cognitive neuroscience of poverty.

How your name influences your decisions and preferences. The Psychologist has a fascinating article on 'nominative determinism'.

The Phineas Gage Fan Club gives a concise summary of the relatively recently discovered 'grid cells'.

Industrial psychology may have been invented by mistake. Advances in the History of Psychology tracks down the typo.

Carl Zimmer video interviews neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on how discoveries about the brain are challenging our understanding of law.

PsyBlog discusses why psychology is not just common sense.

The Wall Street Journal asks what makes Finnish kids so smart?

Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder and Time magazine investigates the high suicide rate in people diagnosed with the disorder.

Language Log does another fantastic job of debunking dodgy sex difference research.

Pete Mandik is posting entries from his upcoming book 'Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind'. The first is 'emergence'.

Not Quite Rocket Science has one of the most sensible articles you're likely to read on the recent interesting but over-interpreted 'brain scan mind reading' research.

After the series of recent studies on unpublished drug company data, the UK government intends to bring in a mandatory trials data register. In contrast, the USA seems largely unconcerned.

The Thinking Meat Project has been really good recently. Check it out.

Drunk on water. Frontal Cortex finds a great example of the fantastically powerful influence of suggestion.

Wired has an article on Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroscientist who wrote about her own stroke.

The Neurocritic takes the biscuit, sorry, doughnut, with a write-up of a new study on the neuroscience of eating Krispy Kremes.

—Vaughan.

March 06, 2008

Just say no:

Ah, the joys of South East London.

The headline in the latest copy of the South London Press which doesn't seem to have the actual article online.

—Vaughan.

Moses on high article available online:

Thanks to Debbie from the My Mind on Books blog who managed to track down the original academic article from psychologist Benny Shanon who argues that Moses' experiences on Mount Sinai may have been due to a hallucinogenic experience.

Shannon suggests that a mixture prepared from the acacia tree and the bush peganum harmala could have been responsible.

The article is freely available so you can read it in detail for yourself. As well as Shanon's main idea, it also contains a wealth of information about the use of psychedelic plants in the ancient world.

Link to article 'Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative Hypothesis'.

—Vaughan.

Delusional psychiatrists:

Of Two Minds have found a classic video of a vintage Fry and Laurie sketch where a two people meet in a doctor's office, both think they're psychiatrists and the other is delusional.

It's a funny sketch but it's also remarkably clever as much of what passes for psychobabble is actually a satire on psychology and psychiatry for those in the know.

Look out for references to Melanie Klein's (completely wacky) good breast theory, the Bender-Gestalt Test and Lentizol - the trade name for the aged antidepressant drug amitryptyline.

Interestingly, all of these things, and the idea that psychiatrists were mainly interested in psychoanalysis, were most popular in the 1950s and 60s, harking back to a bygone era of psychiatry.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments (thanks Jimmy!):

Fry and Laurie did a similar sketch about linguists, riffing on their stereotype (and that of sesquipedalian types in general) as pedants who take their adoration of language to mind-numbing excess. They pepper the conversation with a number of allusions to specific ideas in linguistics.

Run down [and video] at "Tenser, said the Tensor"

UPDATE 2: I've just discovered another psychiatrist sketch from Fry and Laurie. This one concerns the limits of madness and the practice of putting bread in one's shoes.

Link to Fry and Laurie psychiatrists' sketch.

—Vaughan.

March 05, 2008

We will please pill:

Placebo has its effect through our beliefs and expectations. Because we get many of our assumptions through culture, changing social attitudes could alter how effective it is.

Placebo is sometimes called the 'expectancy effect' and describes the fact that our expectations of what the dummy treatment will do can influence the outcome.

We noted before that the colour of the pill can significantly alter its effect, but it's intriguing to think that we probably get most of these sorts of expectations from our culture.

Bad Science looks at how the strength of the placebo effect has changed over time for different drug trials, suggesting that as our cultural beliefs change, the effectiveness dummy treatments might also change depending on how they're presented.

Similarly, The New York Times have just published a brief article on a new study that found placebos described as costing $2.50 a dose are more effective pain killers than those presented to participants as costing 10 cents a dose.

In other words, if placebo is a form of faith healing, changes in our collective faith will alter the healing potential of a placebo associated with those ideas.

These social effects on placebo are interesting, because we judge the effectiveness of medications by comparing them to placebo. Furthermore, we know the effectiveness of most medications will be partly explained by the placebo effect.

In other words, changes in our cultural attitudes influence the effectiveness of medication.

While we assume that much of medicine objectively definable, much is only comprehensible by making sense of social issues.

For example, drug side-effects are usually talked about as if they are objectively described properties of the chemical.

However, its easy to see that these actually depend on the person, not the drug.

For example, take the drug terazosin. It lowers blood pressure and shrinks the prostate.

If you have high blood pressure but a normal prostate, the side-effect is a reduced prostate. If you have prostate problems but normal blood pressure, the side-effect is reduced blood pressure. If you have both high blood pressure and prostate problems, it's potentially side-effect free.

One man's treatment is another man's side-effect. This is why the sociology of medicine is as important as biology, chemistry or another other bench-based science in understanding illness and treatment.

Link to Bad Science on placebo.
Link to NYT on price of placebo study.

—Vaughan.

Moses high on more than Mount Sinai:

An Israeli psychologist is asking whether Moses may have been tripping when he saw God on Mount Sinai, suggesting that many of our traditional ideas about the Abrahamic God may have been inspired by hallucinogenic drugs.

Professor Benny Shannon's apparently cites historical evidence that the religious ceremonies of the Israelites included hallucinogenic plants and further bases his speculation on his own experiences with the reportedly similar psychedelic plant ayahuasca.

Of course, the idea is bound to ruffle a few feathers but as it's so speculative it's unlikely to make much of a mark on modern theology.

However, it is not the first nor the wackiest attempt to explain religion as arising from hallucinogenic drugs.

Biblical scholar John Allegro wrote an astounding 1970 book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross where he argued that Jesus was actually an hallucinogenic mushroom.

Bear with me on this one.

Allegro suggests that the word 'Jesus' was actually a code word for amanita muscaria, the red and white speckled mushroom often featured in fairy tales.

Amanita muscaria, otherwise known as Fly Agaric, genuinely exists and can cause quite intense hallucinations, owing to its effect on GABA receptors in the brain.

According to the theory, a religious sect were using these mushrooms for spiritual purposes, and their visions resulted in the Christian religion.

The Bible contains many words which have since been misinterpreted but with enough (of Allegro's) linguistic detective work, they can be seen to explain the mushroom cult, rather than the later orthodox Christian interpretation.

To recoin a cliché: you don't need drugs to enjoy the book, but it helps.

As an aside, the article in Haaretz says Shannon's theory is published in a philosophy journal called 'Time and Mind', but I'm damned (excuse the pun) if I can find it.

Links to the original article gratefully received.

Link to article on Shannon's theory about Moses.
Link to 1970 Time article on Allegro's book.
Link to full text of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

—Vaughan.

March 04, 2008

5-MeO-DMT in the Pharmaecopia:

Heavy metal noiseniks Mudvayne have a song called 'Pharmaecopia' where they list off a load of drugs in a possibly ironic, possibly celebratory way. It's a bit of a confused list with serotonin and "dopeamine" listed among a rather odd list of street drugs, hallucinogenic plants and commercial pharmaceuticals.

Curiously though, they mention 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, a drug also known as 5-MeO-DMT that was originally synthesised by legendary psychedelics researcher Alexander Shulgin.

Halcium and morphine,
5-methoxy-n, n-dimethyltryptamine,
Psilocybin, mescaline, aspirin, histomine,
Brushite, darvaset, valium, caffeine, cannabis, and LSD,
Ayahuasca, harmine, give it all to me, I want it

Looking at what's happened to your hair thus far, it's probably best not eh?

Presumably, this is the first and only time the full chemical name of a hallucinogenic drug has made it into a song lyric.

Link to audio of song (no, I can't make out the words either).
Link to lyrics.
Link to Shulgin's notes on 5-MeO-DMT.

—Vaughan.

Are animals autistic savants?:

Animal behavourist Temple Grandin has a theory that animals are like autistic savants, they think in images and have highly specialised cognitive skills.

Grandin's theory has been influential partly owing to her expertise in animal behaviour and cognition, and partly because she has Asperger's syndrome herself, a condition on the autism spectrum.

This month's edition of PLoS Biology has an essay which argues against the theory, suggesting that the apparent similarity with autism is doesn't account for the neuropsychological findings in both humans and animals:

Autistic savants show extraordinary skills, particularly in music, mathematics, and drawing. Do animals sometimes show forms of extreme (though, of course, different) cognitive skills confined to particular domains that resemble those shown by autistic savants? We argue that the extraordinary cognitive feats shown by some animal species can be better understood as adaptive specialisations that bear little, if any, relationship to the unusual skills shown by savants.

It has also been argued that autistic savants “think in detail”, and that this is the key to their extraordinary skills. Do animals have privileged access to lower level sensory information before it is packaged into concepts, as has been argued for autistic humans, or do they process sensory inputs according to rules that pre-empt or filter what is perceived even at the lowest levels of sensory processing? We argue that animals, like nonautistic humans, process sensory information according to rules, and that this manner of processing is a specialised feature of the left hemisphere of the brain in both humans and nonhuman animals. Hence, we disagree with the claim that animals are similar to autistic savants. However, we discuss the possibility that manipulations that suppress activity of the left hemisphere and enhance control by the right hemisphere shift attention to the details of individual stimuli, as opposed to categories and higher-level concepts, and can thereby make performance more savant-like in both humans and animals.

It's probably worth noting that one of the authors is neuroscientist Allan Snyder and the article essentially argues that the similarity is unlikely because it doesn't fit with Snyder's own theory on savant abilities.

Snyder has a bold but still evidence lite theory that savant-like skills can be created in normal people by reducing the function of the left fronto-temporal lobe.

He argues that this reduces the competition with the equivalent area on the right. The right fronto-temporal is apparently specialised for dealing with sensory details so when it is unopposed by the area of the left, details-based savant like skills emerge.

Unfortunately, neither side of the debate has enough evidence to make a definitive case, but it makes for a fascinating discussion about different forms of thought and perception.

If you want to know more about Grandin's theory, it's described in her book Animals in Translation and it's covered by a documentary about her that's available to view online.

The PLoS essay also contains a commentary by Grandin herself.

Link to PLoS Biology essay 'Are Animals Autistic Savants?'.
Link to documentary 'The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow'.

—Vaughan.

Laughter and the return of RadioLab:

RadioLab, one of the most wonderfully produced radio shows around, has just started a new series with a fantastic edition on the psychology and neuroscience of laughter.

Tuning in to RadioLab is like listening to the enthusiastic daydreams of some slightly stoned but fantastically well informed scientists.

This edition looks at laughter, the behaviour that Aristotle thought was one of the few that were uniquely human.

Most interesting, the programme looks at the social uses of laughter and how it signals dominance and superiority, and how we use it to make others feel safe. But there much more than that, including laughing rats and laughing hysteria.

Another great edition and a pleasure to listen to.

Link to RadioLab on laughter (with streamed and mp3 audio).

—Vaughan.

March 03, 2008

Are you experienced? Does it matter?:

Time magazine has an article on the counter-intuitive psychology of expertise and experience. It turns out simple experience might not add anything to our competency, it's how we use our time in attempting to master a skill that counts.

The article notes that research has typically failed to show that experience, on its own, predicts task performance. In other words, old hands often do no better than novices.

Unfortunately for us, it seems the secret to expertise lies within the well-known saying that 'genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration'.

Research suggests that it is experience of practising the most difficult and laborious aspects of a skill that are key.

Ericsson's primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion "deliberate practice," by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair-pulling and fist-pounding. You like the Tuesday New York Times crossword? You have to tackle the Saturday one to be really good.

Take figure-skating. For the 2003 book Expert Performance in Sports, researchers Janice Deakin and Stephen Cobley observed 24 figure skaters as they practiced. Deakin and Cobley asked the skaters to complete diaries about their practice habits. The researchers found that élite skaters spent 68% of their sessions practicing jumps — one of the riskiest and most demanding parts of figure-skating routines. Skaters in a second tier, who were just as experienced in terms of years, spent only 48% of their time on jumps, and they rested more often. As Deakin and her colleagues write in the Cambridge Handbook, "All skaters spent considerably more time practicing jumps that already existed in their repertoire and less time on jumps they were attempting to learn." In other words, we like to practice what we know, stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity rather than stretching our skills. Those who overcome that tendency are the real high performers.

Link to Time article 'The Science of Experience'.

—Vaughan.

Blue Brain Rising:

Seed Magazine has a fantastic article on the 'Blue Brain' project that aims to eventually create a biologically accurate simulation of the human brain on a supercomputer.

So far, they've only managed to simulate a cortical column but this in itself is quite impressive as many thought it could never be done.

The project is currently simulating about 10,000 neurons and a total of about 30 million synaptic connections.

If you've heard about artificial neural networks before this might not sound very impressive, but the difference between this project and most others is that it attempts digitally simulate the biological processes of each individual cell.

In contrast, most neural networks are made up of individual elements that are usually little more than metaphors of how neurons actually work.

A huge boost is that the project has shown that their software cortical column spontaneously acts like its biological equivalent when its switched on and stimulated.

It didn't take long before the model reacted. After only a few electrical jolts, the artificial neural circuit began to act just like a real neural circuit. Clusters of connected neurons began to fire in close synchrony: the cells were wiring themselves together. Different cell types obeyed their genetic instructions. The scientists could see the cellular looms flash and then fade as the cells wove themselves into meaningful patterns. Dendrites reached out to each other, like branches looking for light. "This all happened on its own," Markram says. "It was entirely spontaneous." For the Blue Brain team, it was a thrilling breakthrough. After years of hard work, they were finally able to watch their make-believe brain develop, synapse by synapse. The microchips were turning themselves into a mind.

It's an engrossing article that captures both the science behind the project and some of the personalities involved.

Link to Seed article 'Out of the Blue'.

—Vaughan.

Encephalon 40:

Welcome to the 40th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival.

This edition covers some of the best of the last fortnight's mind and brain writing from around the net, so kick back, relax and see what fires you up.

We start with an announcement of a birth. The neuroscience blogs OmniBrain and Retrospectacle are gone but not forgotten because the two authors have combined forces to jointly write for their new project Of Two Minds which launches today!

While we're enjoying the nostalgia and looking toward to the future what better time to remind ourselves that the history of the cognitive sciences is an essential method for understanding the past, present and the road ahead.

Advances in the History of Psychology has recently had a series examining the limits of what we should include in the history of our collective discipline. A Wikipedia user recently added a huge amount of material on medieval Islamic scientists to the history of psychology entry, inspiring an article and a remarkably thoughtful discussion from historians about what counts as 'our history'.

In a similar vein, Lehrer's recent book, 'Proust was a Neuroscientist', sparked an analysis on whether he's 'doing history', if we can easily say what it means to do history at all.

In an exploration of the more recent past, Channel N hosts a video lecture by Dr. Claudia Wassmann on the history of neuroimaging from the nineteenth century to the present, and its applications in psychiatric research.

Perhaps thinking more about preserving our personal history, Sharp Brains sifts fact from fiction from the recent media hype surrounding cognitive training for the ageing brain with a guest article from Josh Steinerman.

From the same source comes an article on one of the key concepts in understanding how the brain changes and adapts, namely brain plasticity. Remaining mentally flexible is also thought to be important to cognitive fitness and a final article looks at the importance of breaking our mental routines as part of a brain health programme.

While these articles tackle cognitive decline through normal ageing Brain Blogger describes a journey of recovery from brain injury and the process of dealing with the subsequent deficits in a six part series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) that tackles everything from detection to techniques for managing the difficulties.

Remaining in the clinical world, The Mouse Trap tackles some new science surrounding the historical connections between schizophrenia and autism, suggesting that they are opposite disorders of the social brain. Looking this time at addiction, a further post discusses the famous 'rat park' experiment on possible environmental factors in addiction.

Finally, the Mouse Trap looks at the effect of colour labels in Russian on colour perception suggesting a possible re-birth of the hypothesis that language shapes our world.

On a lighter note (excuse the pun) World of Psychology finds a webcomic that touches on the use of light therapy to treat mood disorders and uses the opportunity to discuss some of the scientific research behind this little known but effective treatment.

From sight to scent as The Neurocritic covers a study that used fMRI to investigate the effect of perfume on the brain and its links to sexual arousal. The experiment used the iconic perfume Chanel No. 5, one of the most well-known brands in the world, and in a subsequent post, The Neurocritic tackles the use and abuse of cognitive neuroscience in 'neuromarketing'.

Staying within the corporate realm, Ionian Enchantment takes a critical look at recent attempts to explain corporate behaviour with the principles of evolutionary psychology and concludes that when you have a hammer, everything seems like a nail, even when you might be better off with another tool altogether.

Perhaps more informative might be a study covered by Not Exactly Rocket Science where similar brain activation was found in a brain scanning study of both humans and chimps during vocal communication, suggesting our speech areas might not be quite so unique after all.

On a completely different note, Adam Kolber (who you may know from the Neuroethics and Law blog) has written a couple of guest articles on the psychology of punishing crime. The first looks at whether we should take into account the subjective experience of the punishment on the convicted. For example, should a someone who is claustrophobic be given a shorter prison sentence because it would be additionally unpleasant? The second article discusses what implication follows from the recognition that the same punishment might not be equal for all.

Finally, the mighty Cognitive Daily looks at a whether children are better than adults in their ability to recognise faces from other races. The findings give an interesting twist to the 7 Seconds lyric "And when a child is born into this world, it has no concept of the tone of skin it's living in".

J'assume les raisons qui nous poussent de changer tout,
J'aimerais qu'on oublie leur couleur pour qu'ils esperent.

The next edition of Encephalon will be at Pure Pedantry on March 17th.

—Vaughan.

March 02, 2008

Dr Ginger Campbell's Brain Science Podcasts:

I've been listening to some of Dr Ginger Campbell's brain science podcasts recently and am thoroughly enjoying them.

Campbell has been broadcasting for a fair while now (she's just put her 31st podcast online) but these latest editions are particularly good.

I caught a few of the early ones and found them a little rough around the edges to be honest. I have only recently revisited to discover I've been missing out on some great discussions.

Not tied down by the dictates of a radio schedule, the programmes are often wonderfully satisfying and in-depth. She doesn't like Chomsky's theories very much though as you'll discover in a recent edition on the evolution of language!

Campbell has obviously also put a lot of hard work into getting neuroscientists on the show to be interviewed, which make for some of the most interesting exchanges.

Link to Dr Ginger Campbell's Brain Science podcast.

—Vaughan.

March 01, 2008

Maths and the numbers game in the brain:

Frontal Cortex has alerted me to a wonderful article in The New Yorker about Stanislas Dehaene's work on understanding the neuropsychology of number sense.

Like written and spoken language, human numerical abilities are quite astonishing for how they are organised in the brain.

After brain injury, various maths or numerical abilities can be shown to 'doubly dissociate', meaning that parts of the ability can be independently damaged and so it can be inferred that they rely on independent (but, of course, interacting) brain systems.

The surprise comes from the fact that as a species, abilities like complex language, writing and maths are relatively recent cultural innovations.

While some of the core abilities may be inherited, there must be some aspects of the more complex skills which become tied up with the development of brain structure as we grow to account for the way in which they break down in very selective ways after brain damage.

Dehaene is one of the key researchers in understanding the neuropsychology of numerical ability and what he calls 'number sense' - a more general intuitive perception of quantity and number.

It has been suggested that this is also linked to other ways of perceiving the world, as can be seen from some strange interactions between number and space that can be seen in experiments:

But the brain is the product of evolution—a messy, random process—and though the number sense may be lodged in a particular bit of the cerebral cortex, its circuitry seems to be intermingled with the wiring for other mental functions. A few years ago, while analyzing an experiment on number comparisons, Dehaene noticed that subjects performed better with large numbers if they held the response key in their right hand but did better with small numbers if they held the response key in their left hand.

Strangely, if the subjects were made to cross their hands, the effect was reversed. The actual hand used to make the response was, it seemed, irrelevant; it was space itself that the subjects unconsciously associated with larger or smaller numbers. Dehaene hypothesizes that the neural circuitry for number and the circuitry for location overlap. He even suspects that this may be why travellers get disoriented entering Terminal 2 of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, where small-numbered gates are on the right and large-numbered gates are on the left. “It’s become a whole industry now to see how we associate number to space and space to number,” Dehaene said. “And we’re finding the association goes very, very deep in the brain.”

The article is a great read and a useful introduction to some of the key findings in the field, as well as containing a whole load of eye-opening findings about number and the brain.

Link to New Yorker article 'Numbers Guy'.

—Vaughan.