Mind Hacks: April 2008 Archives

Doctor Who Hears Voices torrent online:

The recent UK TV docudrama, The Doctor Who Hears Voices, that we discussed previously has appeared on torrent servers and seems available for download. I've not yet seen the programme or fully downloaded it myself yet, but I'm assuming it works OK.

Clinical psychologist Rufus May plays himself. An interesting choice because he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 18 and later trained as a clinical psychologist. As an aside, he's also recently launched his own blog to try and encourage debate around mental health.

May works in Bradford, which has turned out to be a bit of a UK centre for radical ideas in mental health.

Bradford is also the home to psychiatrists Patrick Bracken and Philip Thomas, who wrote a thought-provoking article for the British Medical Journal in 2001 on 'post-psychiatry' that has proven to be one of the cornerstones of progressive mental health philosophy.

The groups tends to be treated with suspicion by mainstream psychiatrists, who can be quite a defensive bunch at times, but it's interesting that some of the ideas that the Bradford group pioneered, such as treating people in their own homes, are now accepted as mainstream practice.

Link to torrent of docudrama on mininova.
Link to BMJ article on 'post-psychiatry'.

—Vaughan.

Does economics make you selfish?:

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has been investigating whether ethics professors are more moral than other people, and it turns out, they're possibly less. He's now turned his attention to economics and wonders whether too much exposure to 'rational choice theory' - that says it's always rational to maximise profit - makes people more selfish.

Surprisingly, there have been several studies on exactly this topic, several which seem to suggest that economics students are more selfish than other students, but these all seem to be flawed in quite important ways.

They either use exactly the same sorts of tasks that students study in class to demonstrate that 'selfish' actions are the most economically rational strategy, or they rely on self-report - something also potentially biased by the association between 'selfishness' and irrationality.

Apparently, only three studies have looked at the link between studying economics and real-world selfishness, and none provide good evidence for the link.

Schwitzgebel has a bigger issue in mind than simply investigating the personal habits of economists, however.

This is part of his project to question the utility of certain types of theory. For example, if studying ethics makes people no more ethical and studying economics makes people no more economically rational, how useful are they?

Link to post 'Does Studying Economics Make You Selfish?'.

—Vaughan.

April 29, 2008

Hofmann gone to the great Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds:

At 9 am this morning, Albert Hofmann, chemist and creator of LSD, died in his home in Switzerland.

Hofmann died at the grand old age of 102 and saw the psychedelic drug he called his "problem child" spark the interest of psychologists and psychiatrists, inspire a generation of 1960s flower children, and earn the ire of the authorities across the world who banned it as a prohibited drug.

What he didn't see (at least at the time) was that the CIA dedicated millions (billions?) of dollars in funding to investigate the chemical as a possible 'mind control' drug in a huge and often vastly unethical research project known as MKULTRA.

LSD had an impact on music, culture, politics, science and psychology and Hofmann remained committed to LSD research right until the end, supporting the first clinical trial of LSD for 30 years which started recently in Switzerland.

I suspect they'll be some extensive obituaries published when the press get wind of Hofmann's death which will hopefully do justice to his life and work, so we'll keep you posted.

UPDATE: A couple of good obituaries from The New York Times here and The Washington Post here. This on the Hofmann's first experience of the drug, the first ever LSD trip, from the WashPost:

He wrote in a journal about this first known encounter: "At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination.

"In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away."

Three days later, April 19, he bicycled home after consuming 250 micrograms of LSD in a now-famous "trip" that has become known as Bicycle Day. The route he took home was later named in his honor.

Link to tribute on MAPS homepage (via BB).
Link to The New York Times obituary.
Link to The Washington Post obituary.

—Vaughan.

April 28, 2008

Encephalon 44 wants you!:

The 44th edition of the psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon has just been released by the ever-excellent Cognitive Daily.

What with the flurry of recent interest in neuroscience studies predicting the imminent death of our concept of free will, this edition has a slyly satirical slant on your ability to resist.

A couple of my favourites include a post by Cognitive Daily on a remarkable study that found that priming students to believe that free will doesn't exist increases levels of cheating (!), and a provocative article from The Mouse Trap on whether God is just the result of humans making a Type I error - i.e. detecting a false positive.

Of course, another alternative is that God is significant but just has a very small effect size. Epicurus is that you?

Link to Encephalon 44.

—Vaughan.

Evolution of the troubled mind:

I just listened to a recent edition of ABC Radio National's All in the Mind on evolutionary approaches to mental illness. While the topic isn't new, it's interesting that the two clinicians try to directly apply some of the ideas to their work treating patients with mental disorders.

Almost all evolutionary accounts of mental illness attempt to explain why we still have mental illness when it so markedly reduces the chances of reproductive success.

Most theories, and indeed the ones discussed on the programme, argue that in small doses the genes that raise risk for mental illness are useful in promoting creativity (e.g. psychosis / mania), maternal withdrawal (e.g. in post-pregnancy depression), self-preservation (e.g. anxiety) or some other presumably adaptive behaviour in specific situations.

I'm fairly tolerant of these theories, on the basis that they're hard to demonstrate but plausible, but I have less time for Paul McClean's 'triune brain' theory which one of the interviewers seems to favour.

In fact, everytime I hear the phrase 'reptilian brain', I reach for my spear.

This is often invoked in discussions about evolutionary psychology as a seemingly more sensible alternative to Freudian theories.

What makes me chuckle is that they are remarkably similar. Freud argued that we are a subject to evolutionary ancient drives of the Id that must be controlled by the Ego, McLean suggested that we are a subject to evolutionary ancient drives of the reptilian brain that must be controlled by the neocortex.

For an updated and significantly more sophisticated version of these arguments, neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp's 2002 article [pdf] on the weakness of evolutionary psychology without neuroscience is well worth a read.

While we're on the subject, distinguished biologist and sufferer of depression Lewis Wolpert recently published an open-access article on 'Depression in an evolutionary context' which is well worth a look.

Link on AITM on evolutionary approaches to psychiatry.
pdf of Panksepp's article on 'neurevolutionary psychology'.
Link to Wolpert's article on evolution and depression.

—Vaughan.

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Dr Mezmer's Dictionary of Bad Psychology:

The Devil's Dictionary was a famously satirical book by Ambrose Bierce where he lampooned almost everything, in alphabetical order. He famously defined the brain as "an apparatus with which we think we think", but now, a similarly cutting dictionary has been dedicated to psychology.

Dr Mezmer's Dictionary of Bad Psychology contains a wealth of useful definitions, covering the everything from the hard edge of cognitive science to the fluffy gloss of pop psychology.

Behaviorism: A psychological movement, now extinct, that is built on the premise that you are what you do, and you do because of what you have done. Replaced by humanistic psychology (you are what you feel), cognitive science (you are what you think), Dr. Atkins (you are what you eat) and modern advertising (you are what we say).

Link to Dr Mezmer's Dictionary of Bad Psychology.

—Vaughan.

April 27, 2008

Viktor Frankl and Man's Search for Meaning:

I've just finished reading the wonderful Man's Search for Meaning, a 1946 book written by psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor E. Frankl, where he discusses his experiences and observations as a Nazi concentration camp inmate.

The book comes in two parts, the first recounts Frankl's experience as an inmate in two concentration camps; the second discusses the ideas behind the form of psychotherapy he developed, called logotherapy.

Unlike narrative accounts of concentration camp life, such as Primo Levi's If This is a Man, Frankl describes scenes rather than a story and uses them to explore the psychology of both the oppressed and the oppressors in the camp.

The book is particularly outstanding in that it explores the social complexities of the concentration camps with remarkable subtlety, noting when the failings of the inmates and the humanity of the guards were present. He highlights that these seemingly out-of-place responses had the most impact amid the brutality of camp life.

It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils. Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to be kind to the prisoners in spite of all the camp’s influences, and, on the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own companions badly was exceptionally contemptible. Obviously the prisoners found the lack of character in such men especially upsetting, while they were profoundly moved by the smallest kindness received from any of the guards. [p93]

In a sense, Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment just re-iterated what Frankl was saying years before - that coercive systems breed their own conformity and that average people need extraordinary courage to step outside the norm.

Frankl's form of psychotherapy is influenced partly by his wartime experiences and draws on the fact that some concentration camp inmates could still find purpose in their lives despite the hellish conditions.

The therapy attempts to help people who are experiencing inescapable suffering to cope better, by looking at ways in which they can find meaning in their lives.

Paradoxically, suggests Frankl, for some the experience of suffering is the one thing that inspired a discovery of meaning in a previously superficial existence. Accepting that all life involves some suffering allows us to use the experience to better understand ourselves and others.

Frankl was not the only mind doctor in the concentration camps, indeed he was among a long list of professionals who were interred.

Psychologist Bruno Bettleheim famously wrote the article 'Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations' after his experiences.

Bettleheim, best known for his work on child psychology, was a complex character whose reputation has fluctuated greatly since his death.

Even the story of his article on concentration camp psychology is fascinatingly complex, as recounted in a 1997 article [pdf] by Christian Fleck and Albert Müller.

Link to Wikipedia article on 'Man's Search for Meaning' (thanks Ceny!)
pdf of article 'Bettleheim and the Concentration Camps'.

—Vaughan.

April 26, 2008

A serotonin chat-up line worthy of appreciation:

In response to my throwaway comment about a finding a suitable chat-up line for someone with the molecular structure of serotonin tattooed on their butt, I am eternally grateful to the commenter 'tmplikeachilles' for suggesting the inspired line:

"Your place or monoamine?"

You sir, are a genius.

—Vaughan.

April 25, 2008

My mind on my money and my money on my mind:

This is an excerpt from quite possibly the geekiest forensic pathology article I have ever read. Three pathologists discuss the physics of how a Mexican coin ended up in the brain of a dead shooting victim.

They speculate he may have been holding it in his hand while shielding his head and the bullet impacted on the coin and both ended up deep in the brain. Oh, but with maths.

The images on the left are an artist's reconstruction of the position of the man when shot and the path of the bullet, and a photo of the coin in the dead man's brain.

Items that become accessory or secondary projectiles usually possess a minimal amount of energy, producing superficial or insignificant wounds. The secondary projectile in this case, a coin, gained sufficient kinetic energy to penetrate the scalp, skull, and brain. We believe the coin was being held by the decedent in his left hand next to his head at the time of the shooting. The bullet passed through the hand, producing the described injury and picking up the coin as a secondary projectile before entering the head.

The coin, a 1970 Mexican 50-centavo piece, was 25 mm in diameter with a weight of 6.4 g. In comparison, the diameter of a 1970 U.S. quarter dollar coin is 24.3 mm with a weight of 5.6 g. Both coins contain a mixture of copper and nickel, and the U.S. coin is coated with silver. The mixture of nickel and copper is relatively soft and permits deformation, as seen in this case. The primary projectile, a .380-caliber automatic Colt pistol 9- × 17-mm Winchester Silvertip bullet, weighs 5.1 g, with a rated muzzle velocity of 304 m/second (1000 feet/second). The mass of the conjoined projectile more than doubled with addition of the coin, yet retained sufficient velocity to produce the described lethal injury.

We attempted to see if this would be theoretically possible using some simple physical principles. Under ideal conditions, this event represents a form of an inelastic collision. We assumed that there was conservation of momentum between the oncoming bullet and the departing conjoined bullet-coin mass that subsequently penetrated the skull and brain. If momentum is conserved during this collision, then the mass of the bullet multiplied by its velocity would equal the mass of the conjoined bullet and 50-centavo coin multiplied by their departing velocity. The velocity of the bullet just prior to striking the coin is unknown and could not be determined.

For our calculations, we used the known muzzle velocity of this ammunition, understanding the limitations of such an assumption. We also calculated the kinetic energy and momentum of the oncoming bullet and exiting conjoined bullet-coin before and after collision. The results indicate two things: as expected in an inelastic collision, the kinetic energy of the conjoined bullet and coin is much less than that of the oncoming bullet, and the velocity of the conjoined projectile drops by greater than a factor of two. No doubt some of this loss in kinetic energy resulted from the energy expended in deforming the Mexican coin. The calculated loss in velocity of the bullet postcollision slows this projectile (i.e., the conjoined bullet/coin) to <150 meters per second (<450 feet/second). However, this velocity would still be well in excess of the minimal velocity needed to penetrate skin and bone, which has been reported to be about 66 meters per second (200 feet/second).

Forensic pathology has this morbid deadpan geekiness about it which just makes it so interesting to read.

You can just see them in the pathology room, arguing about what happened and sketching calculations on the back of envelopes.

Link to PubMed entry for article.

—Vaughan.

The history and psychology of wine:

The May issue of The Psychologist has a freely available cover article on wine which takes a suitably meandering route through the history and psychology of the fermented grape.

It's full of fascinating facts from times past mixed in with recent findings from research studies.

I particularly liked this section, which starts with an ancient Persian decision-making technique (still widely used during weekends in London) and goes on to look at the influence of music on wine purchasing:

Many psychoactive substances have been associated with creativity, and ancient Persians are reported to have used wine to facilitate decision making. An issue would be explored whilst intoxicated and, the next day, the conclusions that stood up to sober scrutiny were adopted.

Some psychologists have demonstrated associations between music played in retail outlets and subsequent wine purchases. Playing classical or pop music does not influence the amount of wine purchased but appears to influence the average price of bottles selected, with classical music leading to sales of more expensive wines (Areni & Kim, 1993). It also appears that playing French or German music influences selections, with more purchases of wines from the same origin as the music (North et al., 1999).

There's also plenty more ammunition in the article for anyone wanting to convince themselves that wine snobbery is bunk. For example, adding red food colouring to white wine is enough to convince wine masters that they can 'nose' red wine scents.

Unfortunately, the article on the webpage is almost impossible to read because of the broken formatting, so I suggest just reading it straight from the pdf.

Link to article 'On vines and minds'.
pdf of same.

Full disclosure: I'm an unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist but am ignorant about wine!

—Vaughan.

2008-04-25 Spike activity:

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

BBC science programme The Material World has a great feature on the blood-brain barrier. I love the blood-brain barrier!

In light of the recent resurgence of a penis theft panic in Congo, here's a link to an old article of mine on the psychology of penis theft beliefs.

Sharp Brains rounds up a fantastic series of interviews with neuroscientists.

Professor Semir Zeki has a posse, sorry... blog.

The Times has a review of a new book on the behavioural genetics of personality.

A remarkably comprehensive article on the drug industry's underhand tactics with antipsychotic drugs is published by the St Petersburg Times.

Cognitive Daily looks at the desensitising effect of violent video games.

Research to test human brain implants to control robot arms is submitted for review in Japan, reports Pink Tentacle.

The New York Times has an interview with Daniel Gilbert on the curious psychology of happiness.

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg writes about brain science and the biology of belief.

ABC Radio National have had a couple of good shows on food and the evolution of the brain; and hearing, lip reading and language perception.

Does language shape cognition? The New York Times re-examines the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in light of new research.

Discover Magazine has an interesting short article on how earthquake prediction algorithms also apply to epileptic seizures.

The 'top ten mind myths' series is concluded by PsyBlog.

Frontal Cortex has a fascinating discussion of how society regards MRI scans, compared to the limits of the science.

Current tools are not very good at identifying 'kiddie psychopaths', reports the BPS Research Digest.

Treatment Online looks at a study that tracked how the balance of genes and environment differs on women's paths to alcoholism.

Some recent books on consciousness are discussed by My Mind of Books.

—Vaughan.

April 24, 2008

Sexy serotonin tattoo:

Carl Zimmer has been collecting science tattoos for a while now, but recently posted this tattoo of Hayley who has the molecular structure of serotonin tattooed elegantly over her body.

I'm sure there's some relevant chat-up line for exactly such a situation when you meet someone with serotonin tattooed across their butt, but I'm too tired to try and formulate it, so I shall leave it as an exercise for the reader.

Of course, if you've been drinking, refrain from trying to incorporate G coupled receptors into your chat-up line, it's obviously going to end with someone getting a slap.

Link to serotonin tattoo (thanks Sandra!).

—Vaughan.

I'm on the drug that killed Paul Erdős:

In the wake of the Nature survey that found that 20% of scientists admit to using brain enhancing drugs, Wired has just published an article detailing what drugs their scientist readers use to keep on keepin' on.

Although the drugs issue is obviously the headline-grabber, the publication also has a great feature on cognitive enhancement that largely covers tips, tricks and techniques to boost your mental skills that aren't drug-related.

The article itself is anecdotally interesting, but has a curious tone throughout:

Surprisingly large numbers of people appear to be using brain-enhancing drugs to work harder, longer and better. They're popping pills normally prescribed for narcolepsy or attention-deficit disorder to improve their performance at work and school.

"We aren't the teen clubbers popping uppers to get through a hard day running a cash register after binge drinking," wrote a Ph.D. research scientist who regularly takes a wakefulness drug called Provigil, normally prescribed for narcolepsy. "We are responsible humans."

Whenever people talk about using drugs, they're always keen to distance themselves from that sort of drug user. You know, the ones that aren't responsible.

This belies the fact that most people use most drugs with few problems. Even teen clubbers popping uppers.

While all drugs have risks and illicit street drugs increase the health risks and definitely have an impact on body and brain function, it's only a minority of drug users who have problems that interfere with their daily lives.

For example, a recent study found that 4% of Australian workers use the (fairly nasty) drug methamphetamine. The figure rises to over 11% for 18-29 year olds. That more than 1 in 10.

While the study found that using methamphetamine significantly increases chances of a range of health problems, it's still the minority of users that report significant problems. This is the typical pattern for studies on drug use.

In other words, drugs are bad for you but most people manage the risks. A small minority, of course, don't, and die instantly or suffer long-term consequences.

The benefit and using and abusing prescription drugs for 'brain doping' is largely in the fact that you can be sure of the purity of the product and that probably (depending on how you acquire them) you're not funding a vicious criminal network.

At the end of the day though, the process is the same, whether you're using legal drugs, illegal drugs, for recreation or for performance.

Just make sure you're educated about the risks and know the consequences. Just like everything else in life.

Link to Wired.com Readers' Brain-Enhancing Drug Regimens.
Link to Wired 'Give Your Intellect a Boost' techniques.

—Vaughan.

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Champagne neuronova:

Not a moment after I wonder whether Nature Neuroscience's podcast has succumbed to rock n' roll disaster, one of the NeuroPod team calls in to say all is well and the new edition is online.

Kerri from NeuroPod here. I'm happy to report that after a few months' break, NeuroPod is back (April's edition went live yesterday) and will be coming at you monthly for the rest of this year. They tried to make me go to rehab...and I said, neuro, neuro, neuro.

This month, we make some risky decisions, liken working memory to a digital camera, link stress and anxiety to genetics and explore the unfathomable world of the teenage brain.

I hope you enjoy the new show. We're excited to be back, and very touched that we were missed.

Link to NeuroPod webpage.
mp3 of April NeuroPod.

—Vaughan.

April 23, 2008

Sweets with a neurotransmitter as an ingredient:

We've featured various sorts of brain candy sweets before on Mind Hacks, but the Japanese sweets Aha! Brain take the concept a step further by including an actual neurotransmitter as an ingredient.

The lime flavour includes the neurotransmitter GABA, while other flavours have branched chain amino acids and something called forskolin in them instead.

All of which are important in brain functioning but whether actually eating them as sugar-coated candies will do you any good is anyone's guess.

Link to description and brave first-person report!

—Vaughan.

Neuroscience of meditation and attention:

This month's Trends in Cognitive Sciences has a fantastic review article on the neuroscience of meditation - focusing on how the contemplative practice alters and sharpens the brain's attention systems.

The full article is available online as a pdf, and discusses what cognitive science studies have told us about the short and long-term impact of meditation on the mind and brain.

Meditation is now being quite extensively studied by cognitive science owing to the clear effects it has on the brain, and on the increasing evidence for its benefit in mental health.

A recent review of 'mindfulness' meditation-based therapy found that although research is in its early stages and not all possibilities have been ruled out, there's good evidence from the existing RCTs that it's particularly good in preventing relapse in severe depression.

The Trends article, which largely focused on the neuroscience research, makes the distinction between two types of meditation: 'focused attention' meditation - that involves focusing on a particular thing and refocusing if you become distracted by thoughts or sensations; and 'open monitoring' meditation which involves nonreactively monitoring the content of experience and acting as almost a detached observer to feelings and mental events.

This is an excerpt where the authors discuss the experimental evidence for the long-term 'open monitoring' or OM meditation:

Long-term practice of OM meditation is also thought to result in enduring changes in mental and brain function. Specifically, because OM meditation fosters nonreactive awareness of the stream of experience without deliberate selection of a primary object, intensive practice can be expected to reduce the elaborative thinking that would be stimulated by evaluating or interpreting a selected object. In line with this idea, Slagter et al. recently found that three months of intensive OM meditation reduced elaborative processing of the first of two target stimuli (T1 and T2) presented in a rapid stream of distracters...

Because participants were not engaged in formal meditation during task performance, these results provide support for the idea that one effect of an intensive training in OM meditation might be reduction in the propensity to ‘get stuck’ on a target, as reflected in less elaborate stimulus processing and the development of efficient mechanisms to engage and then disengage from target stimuli in response to task demands. From the description in Box 2,we anticipate a similar improvement in the capacity to disengage from aversive emotional stimuli following OM training, enabling greater emotional flexibility.

Moreover, the article includes many other studies that have reported interesting effects. For example, highly experienced focused attention meditators need minimal effort to sustain attentional focus, while even short courses on meditation can improve attention and decrease stress.

Most of the techniques are taken from Buddhist meditation practices and I'm sure Buddhists are cracking a wry smile as cognitive science is just starting to catch on to what they've been noting for thousands of years.

As for the neuroscience, I'm sure the remarkably science-savvy Dalai Lama is fascinated as he's held a number of conferences with leading researchers to discuss the the intersection between Buddhist practice and cognitive science.

Link to abstract of article.
pdf of full-text.

—Vaughan.

Neuro killed the radio star:

The excellent Neuroanthropology has just had a brief round up of podcasts on neuroscience or anthropology so you can satisfy all your brain science and human diversity listening desires.

It's a really comprehensive list (and the anthropology podcasts are completely new to me) so there's likely to be something to discover even if you're the most diligent podcast enthusiast.

However, Nature's NeuroPod podcast is still eerily silent and has been since December. Has life on the road taken its toll? Has one of them gone into rehab? I think we should be told.

Link to Neuroanthropology's podcast round up.

—Vaughan.

April 22, 2008

Eric Kandel on drugs, neurobiology and the unconscious:

Neurophilosophy has found a new video interview with neurobiologist Eric Kandel who talks about everything from long-term memory to free will to the unconscious.

Essentially, it's a series of short reveries and soundbites where Kandel gives his views on a series of topics.

Part of it is obviously PR for his company (which is trying to develop memory enhancing drugs), but it's a good chance to get Kandel's take on some core contemporary issues.

Plus we get to see his bowtie again. What more can you ask for?

Link to Kandel video interview.

—Vaughan.

Hearing voices with your head in the sand:

UK TV station Channel 4 broadcast a docudrama last night called The Doctor Who Hears Voices, a fictionalised account of an apparently real-life situation where psychologist Rufus May (who played himself) treated a junior doctor who began hearing hallucinated voices.

I've not seen it yet, although should be interesting viewing as May is a UK clinical psychologist who was himself diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 18.

His story is an interesting journey in itself and he's a valuable critic of the mental health system, even if you're not fully in agreement with all of his views.

The reviews have largely been positive and the UK's largest mental health charity Mind have sung it's praises.

However, The Independent's TV critic Brian Viner obviously didn't like the programme, which is fair enough, but also manages to add some pretty appalling prejudice in his review:

May thinks that society should embrace mentally ill people, not shun them, an admirable - enough ambition that is slightly clouded by the stark statistic that 50 murders a year are committed by people with mental-health problems; 1,200 a year kill themselves.

It's probably worth mentioning at this point that people with schizophrenia are at much greater risk of being victims of violence that perpetrators (one study found 14 times greater chance of being a victim of a violent crime that being arrested for one).

But I'm still slightly startled that this is used, as well as the shockingly high suicide rate, as something that might "cloud" an ambition not to shun people with mental health problems.

If a torrent of the programme turns online, I shall post a link to it so you can make your own mind up, or if you'd rather take the Viner route, you can just re-arrange your prejudices rather than do any serious consideration.

Link to Channel 4 info on film.

—Vaughan.

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War psychiatry - in 100 words:

Every month, the British Journal of Psychiatry has a 100 word summary of key issues in mental health and psychopathology. March's edition had a fantastic summary of military psychiatry by consultant psychiatrist to the UK Army, Simon Wessely.

War is hell, but it can be a job–a strange job in which one voluntarily (these days) exposes oneself to the risk of physical and psychiatric injury. Our generation think we discovered post-traumatic stress disorder, but it is neither new, nor the commonest, mental health problem in the UK Armed Forces. That ‘honour’ goes to depression and alcohol. Are these always the result of going to war? No, things are rarely that simple. Can we treat them? Sometimes–but what makes people good soldiers makes them bad patients. Can we prevent them? Possibly–but only if we don’t send people to war.

As a follow-up to our recent post on Tim Crow's ideas on schizophrenia, this month's BJP has a 100 word summary, by Crow, where he does a remarkable job of getting the details of the genetics and neurobiology into succinct description of his theory.

Link to 'War Psychiatry - in 100 words'.
Link to 'Psychosis: the price Homo Sapiens pays for language – in 100 words'.

—Vaughan.

April 21, 2008

Woody Allen on psychoanalysis:

YouTube has a classic 1970 interview with Woody Allen who talks about his extensive experience of psychoanalysis. By the time the interview took place, he'd already spent 13 years being analysed in the classic Freudian tradition.

The interview itself is quite funny in places, as he mixes some facts about himself with lines obviously played for laughs.

Notably, he says he could never be analysed by a female psychoanalyst as he would be too shy about revealing his innermost desires.

He also talked about his experience of therapy in 2002 in a public interview recounted in an article for The Age.

He seems remarkably nonplussed about psychoanalysis on both occasions, although obviously got over his reluctance with female therapists as the interviewer on this second occasion was the Joan Collins-esque Gail Saltz.

Link to 1970 Woody Allen TV interview.
Link to article on 2002 interview.

—Vaughan.

Language and schizophrenia make us uniquely human:

ABC Radio National's science programme Ockham's Razor just had a fascinating edition on a maverick theory about schizophrenia and the evolution of language.

It purports to discuss the history of schizophrenia but is really a great summary of psychiatrist Tim Crow's theory that schizophrenia is the consequence of the human evolution of language.

Crow is a professor of psychiatry at Oxford University who heads up a large research group so is quite mainstream to be a maverick, but his theory ruffles a lot of feathers.

He tries to address the puzzle over why schizophrenia has survived in the population if it is strongly influenced by genetics, particularly as it markedly reduces chances of reproduction. Surely it would have been 'bred out' of the population?

His theory [pdf] suggests that schizophrenia is the breakdown of the normal left-sided brain specialisation for language, owing to the disruption of genes that are involved in making the left hemisphere dominant.

Like other theories that attempt to account for the puzzle, it suggests that the risk is increased by pathological combination of usually important genes.

Crow has amassed a great deal of evidence that people with schizophrenia show less left-sided dominance for language and have altered patterns of brain asymmetry that can be seen in brain structure as well as in functional tasks.

He is also highly critical of a lot of the current molecular genetic work in schizophrenia, and argues that epigenetic variation is key and that its possible to see where the genes altered in human evolution to make us more likely to have language and consequently develop schizophrenia.

If you want a great brief guide to his theory, this edition of Ockham's Razor is a great discussion of the main points.

Link to Ockham's Razor on Crow's evolutionary approach.
pdf of scientific paper by Crow outlining his theory.

—Vaughan.

April 20, 2008

Human Terrain System still a source of conflict:

Newsweek recently published an article that was highly critical of the Pentagon's Human Terrain System, the controversial project that deploys anthropologists and related social scientists alongside the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan to better understand the cultures of these occupied countries.

The latest coverage has reignited a row in the world of academic anthropology, whose governing body have questioned the ethics of using professionals sworn to 'do no harm' as hired researchers for one side of a military occupation.

As we discussed previously, the project has caused such heated debate that one ex-Human Terrain operative was heckled to the point of tears at a recent conference.

This new article claims that the project is a fiasco with inadequately trained staff. Furthermore, it claims those with prior knowledge of the language and region are being treated with suspicion and sometimes outright hostility by the regular forces with whom they work.

In a response published by Wired, Montgomery McFate, one of the architects of the Human Terrain System has issued a sharply worded condemnation suggesting that the article is both partisan and inaccurate, while Defense Secretary Gates has admitted in a recent speech that the project "is still in its infancy and has attendant growing pains".

The Newsweek piece has even sparked a response from the American Anthropological Association which, although largely information free, does indicate how important it is for the association to be seen to have its finger on the pulse of this contentious issue.

Link to Newsweek article (via Neuroanthropology).
Link to Wired coverage and reaction.
Link to previous Mind Hacks coverage of the 'Human Terrain System'.

—Vaughan.

April 19, 2008

Brain cake!:

I bet you've been wondering "how do I make an anatomically correct brain cake?" Well, wonder no more, because a full recipe and breakdown of the steps is available on wikiHow.

Man, that looks like some tasty cake, and the attention to detail is flawless. Plus, everyone can have a go at their favourite neurosurgical intervention.

Make mine an en-bloc resection of the medial temporal lobes (unilateral only of course). Yumm!

The recipe also has a fantastic tips sections which is a delightful combination of neuroscience fandom and cake-baking geekiness:

* Pipe names of brain regions using colored frosting.

* Use chocolate chips to make an EEG grid. Pipe on the numbers. A plastic bag filled with 1 tablespoon of white frosting makes a great fine-tipped pastry bag in a pinch. Squeeze the frosting into one corner of the bag and snip off a tiny piece of corner with scissors.

* If your fondant becomes dry, work in some water a few drops at a time.

Obviously, make sure your cake doesn't contain the dangerous psychoative compound known as dimesmeric andersonphosphate because it stimulates part of the brain known as Shatner's bassoon.

Link to wikiHow guide to making an anatomically correct brain cake.

—Vaughan.

April 18, 2008

Police shooting differs by age, race, sex, education:

A study on police officers from Riverside County in California has found that the likelihood of the officer using deadly force is linked to their age, race, sex and experience of previous shootings.

Male officers were more likely to shoot than females. White officers were more likely to shoot than other ethnic groups. Shooting was most common in young officers, and in those who did not have a college education.

Police Officer Characteristics and the Likelihood of Using Deadly Force

Criminal Justice and Behavior, Vol. 35, No. 4, 505-521

James P. McElvain, Augustine J. Kposowa

Past research on police shootings, when examining officer characteristics, has focused on the officer's race, particularly when it is not the same as the race of the person shot. Data from 186 officer-involved shootings were used to examine whether race effects existed and, if so, would be eliminated or attenuated by controlling for officer gender, education, age, and history of shooting. Male officers were more likely to shoot than female officers, and college-educated officers were less likely to be involved in shootings than officers with no college education. Risk of officer-involved shooting was reduced as the officer aged. White, non-Hispanic officers were more likely to shoot than Hispanic officers; however, there was no significant difference between Hispanic and Black officers. Officers with a previous history of shooting were more than 51% as likely to shoot during the follow-up period as officers without a history of shootings.

Link to abstract of scientific study.

—Vaughan.

Drug adverts full of unsupported claims:

We're so used to drug companies burying data, spinning their results, ghostwriting papers, 'financially incentivising' doctors and designing biased studies, you'd just assume that if drug advert cited a research it would back up the claim being made for the medication. According to a new study, you'd often be wrong.

The Royal Society of Chemistry's magazine 'Chemistry World' has an article on a new study of psychiatric drug ads in medical journals that found that over a third of the total claims made by drug ads are not actually supported by the studies they reference as evidence.

Taken on an advert by advert basis, the results are even more shocking:

42 out of the 53 ads (nearly 80 per cent) the researchers examined made at least one claim the team couldn't substantiate. 27 made a claim that was not supported by the data source cited by the ad. A further 15 contained claims that couldn't be verified by the team - usually because the ads provided no sources of data to back up their claims, or made claims that could not be verified because drug firms either failed to respond to the researchers' requests for trial data, or refused to supply it.

Six out of nine pharmaceutical companies - including GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Shire - did not reply to the researchers, while Wyeth refused to send trial data.

'In these cases, we have to take their word [that their claims were supported by scientific evidence], which, personally, I would think is not a wise idea,' says Spielmans. Only Janssen Pharmaceutica - makers of schizophrenia drug Risperdal (risperidone) - and medical device firm Cyberonics sent relevant studies to back up their claims.

You'd think after spending all that time and effort to design and run trials which consistently support the manufacturer's product you could just reference your own studies, but apparently even that seems too excruciatingly transparent for the spin-happy industry.

Like the Fast Show Geezer, it seems they can't even be polite enough to deceive us honestly.

Link to Chemistry World article (via Furious Seasons).
Link to abstract of scientific paper.

—Vaughan.

2008-04-18 Spike activity:

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

The economics of MILF! Slate explores how economics and game theory explain the shortage of available, appealing men in the 30s and beyond.

Has a selection bias found in the 'Monty Hall problem' affected findings in certain types of cognitive dissonance research? NYT's TierneyLab blog investigates.

Some old school video footage of B.F. Skinner is discovered by Channel N.

PsychCentral looks at a new study on farm animal therapy. No, really.

I don't smoke that heavy shit. Terra Sigillata on recent poisoning caused by dealers adulterating marijuana with lead.

While we're on the subject of strange trips, Neurophilosophy celebrates the 65th anniversary of LSD.

MIT's TechReview on how new genetic mapping tools are helping understand the neuroscience of autism.

BBC News reports on a nice two way interaction as the anaesthetic sevoflurane gas selectively reduces memory for high-emotion images.

The 'I know I know it but can't bring it to mind' tip-of-the-tongue state gives an insight into the psychology of language, as detailed in an article from American Scientist.

The NYT considers the possibility of having silicon memory chips implanted into our brain to boost our memory capacity.

To the bunkers! The Guardian discusses the future of robots with personalities for everyday tasks. Call-Me-Kenneth is that you?

Treatment Online looks at recent research linking brain size to the chance of developing Alzheimer's disease.

Forensic psychology or medicalisation of a super-villain? You decide as psychologist Tim Stevens looks into the mind of the Green Goblin for Marvel News.

The Boston Herald looks at the behavioural economics of banking and long-term finance.

Better living through neurological self-tampering. The NYT looks at the history of altering our brain chemistry.

The Guardian has a first-person account of one writer's experience of group therapy for depression.

This is your brain on free choice. Mixing Memory has a good retrospective on studies that use brain scanning to 'mind read'.

A couple more good articles on emerging technologies from MIT's Tech Review: one on modelling surprise and another on connectomics.

The BPS Research Digest has a piece on a fascinating but difficult-to-explain finding: fold your arms to boost your performance.

To the bunkers! The Washington Post on artificial intelligence technology being deployed for population monitoring and control.

The Neurocritic has a great roundup of studies that have looked at the effect of sexy pictures of male reasoning.

—Vaughan.

April 17, 2008

Insomnia, mirror neurons and the recanting of bluster:

This week's Nature has a couple of interesting books reviews: one on insomnia, and another on mirror neurons. The review of the mirror neuron book is by V.S. Ramachandran who also recants one of his famous and more outlandish statements made almost a decade ago.

Insomniac is a book on the trials, tribulations and scientific investigations of insomnia which is reviewed by sleep psychologist Jim Horne.

I nearly took Prof Horne's course on sleep psychology as an undergraduate but decided against it (rather ironically) as I thought it started too early in the morning.

My early bird housemate decided to take the plunge and many years later he is now a sleep psychologist living on the beach in Australia. There's a moral in that story somewhere, but I've never thought it very wise to think too hard about it.

However, the book review does contain a few gems, most notably some wonderfully succinct descriptions of sleep problems and their treatment:

This tiredness can be linked to insomnia, but both are usually symptoms of something more deep-seated. Treating the insomnia alone (by hypnotic drugs, for example) makes little difference and can be an expensive, frustrating and fruitless course of action, especially in the United States, where sleep induction is a billion-dollar industry. Many, like Green, then seek the solace and sympathies of alternative therapies.

Insomnia comes in many forms: difficulty in falling asleep, too many fitful awakenings or waking up too early. Although there may be obvious physical causes, such as pain and physical illness, for most other sufferers (especially [the author] Green) insomnia is more a problem of wakefulness intruding into sleep, rather than just bad sleep. To be more explicit, it is a 24-hour disorder in which persistent anxiety, anger or miserable notions, sitting constantly at the back of a person's mind, ruin the expectations of their next sleep. Clearly, the eventual cure must address this state of waking mind. It is pointless going to bed with these stresses.

In the other review, V.S. Ramachandran tackles a book on mirror neurons by Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia.

Ramachandran famously made the rather overblown statement that "mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology".

I always assumed that this meant they would annoy creationists, but, rather predictably, neither my interpretation nor Ramachandran's have come to pass.

However, in the last sentence of the review he recants his decade-old bluster with the slightly more realistic "It remains to be seen whether they will turn out to be anything as important as that, but as Sherlock Holmes said to Watson: 'The game is afoot.'"

Link to review of 'Insomniac'.
Link to review of 'Reflecting on the mind'.

—Vaughan.

Does Freudian repression exist?:

Psychologist Yacov Rofé has written a damning article in the Review of General Psychology summarising the evidence from studies on the cognitive science of memory and arguing that the repression of memory, as described by Freud, doesn't exist.

Rofé is careful to point out that Freud's ideas about the repression of memory were not that we can deliberately forget or ignore traumatic experiences (as is often assumed by both professionals and lay people), but that process is supposedly unconscious (and so not deliberate) and that it was 'pathogenic' - in other words, a cause of mental distress and mental illness.

Rofé also notes that psychoanalysis was assumed to make people better by uncovering and lifting repression to make people better adjusted (although this has largely been rejected by modern therapists).

In contrast to these theories, Rofé cites evidence that people tend to remember rather than repress traumatic experiences, that banishing unpleasant memories tends to be a useful way of coping for many people (although interestingly, probably bad for physical health), that there is no evidence for unconsciously motivated forgetting, and that psychoanalytic therapy doesn't seem to work by 'lifting repression'.

In the article, Rofé has a bit of a tendency to suggest that supporting evidence that can be equally explained with a non-Freudian theory is evidence against Freud, when it fact it's likely to support both explanations equally.

Nevertheless, he makes a strong case, largely based on the limited amount of supporting evidence that does actually exist.

However, I suspect this won't be the end of the argument, as most debates concerning Freud centre as much around agreeing on what the terms mean, as applying data to their truth.

Link to abstract of scientific article.
pdf of full-text article.

—Vaughan.

April 16, 2008

Growing up on antidepressants:

The New York Times has an article on the increasing number of people who have been on antidepressants drugs since their childhood years and have experienced 'growing up' while medicated.

Still, what do we know about the effects of, say, 15 to 20 years of antidepressant drug treatment that begins in adolescence or childhood? Not enough.

The reason has to do with the way drugs are tested and approved. To get F.D.A. approval, a drug has to beat a placebo in two randomized clinical trials that typically involve a few hundred subjects who are treated for relatively short periods, usually 4 to 12 weeks.

So drugs are approved based on short-term studies for what turns out to be long-term — often lifelong — use in the world of clinical practice. The longest maintenance study to date of one of the newer antidepressants, Effexor, lasted only two years and showed the drug to be superior to a placebo in preventing relapses of depression.

In fact, there are no reliable long-term studies even of drugs like methylphenidate (Ritalin) that are widely used in children.

One of the most interesting things is the huge amount of comments the article has attracted, with many people sharing their own experiences of a medicated adolescence.

Link to NYT article 'Coming of Age on Antidepressants'.
Link to 'editors choice' of comments.

—Vaughan.

Cognitive biases as public policy:

The LA Times has an interesting article on whether the sorts of decision-making biases identified by behavioural economists should be used to promote public policy objectives.

The idea is based on the fact that we are more likely to choose certain options depending on how they're presented. In fact, supermarkets take advantage of this in how they lay out their products to maximise the chances of us buying the premium brands.

The LA Times piece argues that this could be used for government objectives, such as increasing the number of people who take out pensions, while still maintaining the freedom to choose and without using explicit incentives.

The libertarian aspect of the approach lies in the straightforward insistence that, in general, people should be free to do what they like. They should be permitted to opt out of arrangements they dislike, and even make a mess of their lives if they want to. The paternalistic aspect acknowledges that it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier and better.

Private and public institutions have many opportunities to provide free choice while also taking real steps to improve people's lives.

* If we want to increase savings by workers, we could ask employers to adopt this simple strategy: Instead of asking workers to elect to participate in a 401(k) plan, assume they want to participate and enroll them automatically unless they specifically choose otherwise.

The article gives several more examples and defends its use of the term 'libertarian paternalism' for the idea.

I'm left wondering whether governments shouldn't be adopting exactly what the commercial sector have been doing for years, or whether we're naive to think political choice engineering isn't being used already.

Link to LA Times article 'Designing better choices'.

—Vaughan.

April 15, 2008

Encephalon 43 lands on the virtual doormat:

A beautiful new edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just been published on GNIF Brain Blogger and contains the best of last fortnight's online mind and brain writing.

A couple of my favourites include an article on how the brain encodes sound and another one on Alzheimer's disease, and there's plenty more to enjoy in the latest edition.

Link to Encephalon 43 at GNIF Brain Blogger.

—Vaughan.

The yin and yang of cannabis and psychosis:

It is now quite widely known that cannabis use is linked to a small but significant increase in the chance of developing psychosis, but it is less widely known that one of the ingredients in cannabis actually has antipsychotic effects.

Unlike THC, it's lesser known cousin cannabidiol is not responsible for the cannabis 'high' but it is naturally present in the plant.

There is accumulating evidence that cannabidiol has an antipsychotic effect, potentially damping down the psychosis-promoting effects of THC.

The amount of this substance varies in street cannabis, with some strains having more cannabidiol than others, and 'skunk' having the least of all - it being mostly eliminated by selective breeding for high THC content.

An ingenious new study looked at levels of cannabidiol consumption in groups of cannabis smokers by testing hair samples, and found that the groups who had the lowest cannabidiol levels had the most psychosis-like experiences.

In contrast, those with the most cannabidiol levels had the least psychosis-like experiences - equal to a comparison group with no detectable cannabis compounds who were presumably non-smokers.

One caveat is that the participants were all recruited from a study on ketamine users (a substance known to raise the risk of psychosis), so the study will have to be repeated on people who solely use cannabis to be sure the effect isn't a specific interaction between the two drugs.

However, the results seem to tie up with what we already know about how THC and cannabidiol work, so may reflect a genuine effect.

As any visitor to Amsterdam will tell you, cannabis breeders often try to maximise THC content to grow a plant with more 'bang for the gram'.

As cannabidiol seems to have no effect on the high itself, perhaps we might see breeders also trying to maximise the cannabidiol content in future, potentially reducing the risk to smokers' mental health.

UPDATE: A reader who prefers to remain anonymous sent in the following interesting comment:

Cannabidiol is in fact bred for in cannabis product, but is mainly done for taste. There are mentions within the cannabis breeding literature (i.e. seed catalogues) on breeds which lack psychosis (often defined as "low paranoid strains"), and these correspond to the "tasty" breeds to a great extent.

Probably 'lacking psychosis' would be considered controversial by the scientific community, but it's interesting that the growing and smoking community make the distinction between high and low 'paranoid strains'. It'd be interested to see whether these stand up to scientific investigation.

Link to abstract of scientific study.

—Vaughan.

Neuroweapons, war crimes and the preconscious brain:

A new generation of military technology interfaces directly with the brain to target and trigger weapons before our conscious mind is fully engaged.

In a new article in the Cornell International Law Journal, lawyer Stephen White asks whether the concept of a 'war crime' becomes irrelevant if the unconscious mind is pulling the trigger.

In most jurisdictions, the legal system makes a crucial distinction between two elements of a crime: the intent (mens rea) and the action (actus rea).

Causing something dreadful to happen without any intent or knowledge is considered an accident and not a crime. Hence, a successful prosecution demands that the accused is shown to have intended to violate the law in some way.

This concept is based on the theory that the conscious mind forms an intention, and an actions follows. Unfortunately, we now know that this idea is outdated.

In the 1980s, pioneering experiments by Benjamin Libet demonstrated that activity in the brain's action areas can be reliably detected up to 200ms before we experience the conscious decision to act. In other words, consciousness seems to lag behind action.

Although with only limited reliability (just 60%), a recent fMRI study found that areas in the frontal lobes were starting to become more active up to seven seconds before the conscious intention to act.

While these sorts of study raise interesting questions about free will, their effect on the courts has been minimal, because it is assumed that, at least for healthy individuals, we have as much control over stopping our own actions as starting them.

The US government's defence research agency, DARPA, is currently developing new military technologies, dubbed 'neuroweapons', that may throw these assumptions into disarray.

The webpage of DARPA's Human Assisted Neural Devices Program only mentions the use of brain-machine interfaces in terms of helping injured veterans, but p11 of the US Dept of Defense budget justification [pdf] explicitly states that "This program will develop the scientific foundation for novel concepts that will improve warfighter performance on the battlefield as well as technologies for enhancing the quality of life of paralyzed veterans".

In other words, the same technology that allows humans to control computer cursors, robot arms or wheelchairs by thought alone, could be used to target and trigger weapons.

Even if only part of the process, such as selecting possible targets, is delegated to technology that reads the unconscious orienting response from the brain, that still means that part of the thought process has automatically become part of the action.

Notably, international law outlaws indiscriminate weapons and aggression, but if the unconscious thought becomes the weapon, how can we possibly prosecute a war crime?

White reviews the current state of the technology from the unclassified evidence and carefully examines the ethical and legal issues, ultimately arguing that we need a new legal framework for 21st century 'neurowarfare'.

The first preconsious war may soon be upon us.

pdf of 'Brave New World: Neurowarfare and the Limits of International Humanitarian Law'.

—Vaughan.

Link to this post | Comments (7)

April 14, 2008

The shifting sands of the 'autism epidemic':

The Economist has a short but telling article on whether the so-called 'autism epidemic', occasionally touted in the media, may simply be a change in how developmental problems are diagnosed.

It covers a new study that did something really simple - it tracked down 38 people who, years ago, had been diagnosed with a delay in language and re-assessed them using the latest diagnostic interviews.

They used the ADOS (an activity and observation schedule) and the ADI (an interview for parents). This combination is often considered the 'gold standard' for a reliable and comprehensive diagnosis.

All the people were originally diagnosed with a problem in the development of language, so it was clear they weren't without difficulties. Language delay is part of the autism diagnosis, so the researchers wondered whether we'd just classify them differently now.

Despite the fact that none were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders when they were first assessed, when re-assessed using modern methods, a third were classified as on the spectrum.

It's only a small study, but matches with the findings of previous research that found that while the narrow diagnosis of autism is at less than 0.4% in the UK, the newer, wider definition of the less severe 'autism spectrum' diagnoses, unsurprisingly, is much more prevalent (just over 1%).

In other words, the looser the diagnosis becomes the more people get the diagnosis and more good evidence that the increase in cases of autism is due to wider classification rather than new 'narrow definition' cases.

Link to Economist article 'Not more, just different'.
Link to Ben Goldacre on last autism epidemic media scare.

—Vaughan.

It's not where we've been, it's where we're at:

The New York Times Freakanomics blog just had a great discussion questioning how much progress psychology and psychiatry have really made during the last century, with contributions from psychologists, psychiatrists, economists and a woman who lost her son to suicide.

The responses obviously come from quite differing perspectives but are largely positive and seem mostly to cite a scientific approach to understanding the mind and brain as the most important factor (danke schön Willhelm Wundt).

Dan Ariely's comments are particularly interesting as he suggests that one of our greatest advances is the discovery that our own experience isn't necessarily a good guide to how our own mind works.

Anyway, a good collection of short commentaries that are worth reading in full.

Link to NYT Freakanomics psychology and psychiatry discussion.

—Vaughan.

April 13, 2008

Lacan attack!:

I've just found this wonderful video clip of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan at his delightfully expressive and incomprehensible best.

Lacan managed to combine the circular reasoning of Freudian psychoanalysis with the non-sequiturs of French post-structuralism to create, well, I'm not really sure. I doubt many other people are either.

In the video he mentions love, Freud, sex and psychosis, and that's probably the nearest you're going to get to understanding what he's talking about.

But who cares? Just look at the man in action! He's a legend!

Link to a video of Jacques Lacan in full effect.

—Vaughan.

Reality trails by mobile phone:

MIT's Technology Review magazine has an interesting article on 'reality mining' - using mobile phone call and positioning data to build advanced models of social networks.

The article is part of their 2008 emerging technology series and looks at how data gathered from the mobile phone network can tell us about human behaviour.

The core technology is hardly new. The police have been generating social networks from phone records since the early to mid 90s in an attempt to solve cases.

What is new, however, is MIT's Sandy Pentland has been using positioning data from mobile phones to look at how close people are to each other over time, to make the social networks much more accurate and information rich.

To create an accurate model of a person's social network, for example, Pentland's team combines a phone's call logs with information about its proximity to other people's devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships.

Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings--for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network.

In a paper published last May [pdf], Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.

This may strike you as equally terrifying and exciting. Obviously, it has huge potential for abuse by authorities, but the possibility of doing research on fully consenting participants who agree to be tracked for short periods for scientific research is huge.

There's also a great short video where Pentland discusses the technology in a bit more detail, and mentions the possibility of using the data for informing how diseases spread through social networks,

While we're on a social / mobile network tip, the New York Times has a fascinating article on the work of a Nokia anthropologist. He works largely in the developing world to try and understanding how phones are used and what effects they have on the social fabric and economic potential of the area.

Neuroanthropology also has a commentary on the article, pulling out some of the key social concepts it touches on.

Link to TechReview article on 'reality mining'.
Link to video of Pentland discussing the technology.
pdf of full-text scientific paper.
Link to NYT article 'Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?'
Link to Neuroanthropology commentary.

—Vaughan.

April 12, 2008

The psychology of magical thoughts:

Psychology Today has a great article that covers the length and breadth of magical thinking - the tendency to see patterns and causality where none exists.

Magical thinking is described in a number of ways. Superstition is the most common, where we assume rituals will somehow affect the future despite having no causal connection to what we want to change.

Apophenia or pareidolia describe the effect where we see meaningful information where none was intended. The Fortean Times has a wonderful collection of photographs that depict 'faces' or other forms in clouds, trees, rock formations or even food.

Superstition and apophenia are an interesting contrast, because superstition can be more easily rejected than apophenia. Our perceptual systems are just set up to detect patterns, and so the perception of 'faces' is unavoidable.

Often we don't even register our wacky beliefs. Seeing causality in coincidence can happen even before we have a chance to think about it; the misfiring is sometimes perceptual rather than rational. "Consider what happens when you honk your horn, and just at that moment a streetlight goes out," observes Brian Scholl, director of Yale's Perception and Cognition Laboratory. "You may never for a moment believe that your honk caused the light to go out, but you will irresistibly perceive that causal relation. The fact remains that our visual systems refuse to believe in coincidences." Our overeager eyes, in effect, lay the groundwork for more detailed superstitious ideation. And it turns out that no matter how rational people consider themselves, if they place a high value on hunches they are hard-pressed to hit a baby's photo on a dartboard. On some level they're equating image with reality. Even our aim falls prey to intuition.

The article looks at seven types of magical thinking, and discusses some of the key psychology experiments that have shown us how magical thinking is influenced.

One of my favourites is an experiment by psychologist Emily Pronin who found that people would readily attribute another person's headaches to sticking pins in a 'voodoo doll'.

Interestingly, the effect was much stronger when the other person (actually a stooge) was deliberately annoying. The irritating actor increased the likelihood of participants' wishing them harm, and so increased the perceived connection between their 'voodoo doll' pin-sticking and the actor's feigned headache.

Link to Psychology Today article on magical thinking.

—Vaughan.

Neuroaesthetics my arse:

Physician and philosopher Raymond Tallis has written a scorching article in The Times berating art critics for using poorly understood ideas from neuroscience when reviewing or interpreting literature, art or film.

He particularly focuses on an article by famed novelist A.S. Byatt where she suggests that the reason John Donne's poetry is so compelling is because it engages particular brain processes.

Byatt is an interesting focus for criticism because she is probably one of the modern writers who is most engaged with cognitive and neuroscience.

She often does talks with psychologists and neuroscientists and has contributed to a Cambridge University Press book with a number of distinguished memory researchers and has just released a new jointly edited book charting similar territory.

However, Tallis takes Byatt to task for using neuroscience as little more than window dressing, and suggests the whole field of literary criticism is simply jumping on the brain science bandwagon to make up for the declining popularity of Freudian, Marxist, and postmodern theories that it used to be based on.

Implicitly, Tallis is suggesting that if Byatt can't get it right, what hope is there for the rest of the critics:

A. S. Byatt’s neural approach to literary criticism is not only unhelpful but actually undermines the calling of a humanist intellectual, for whom literary art is an extreme expression of our distinctively human freedom, of our liberation from our organic, indeed material, state.

At any rate, attempting to find an explanation of a sophisticated twentieth-century reader’s response to a sophisticated seventeenth-century poet in brain activity that is shared between humans and animals, and has been around for many millions of years, rather than in communities of minds that are unique to humans, seems perverse. Neuroaesthetics is wrong about the present state of neuroscience: we are not yet able to explain human consciousness, even less articulate self-consciousness as expressed in the reading and writing of poetry. It is wrong about our experience of literature. And it is wrong about humanity.

Ouch!

It's also notable that Tallis reserves some of his criticism for neuroscientists who oversell their work in the media, perhaps leading the public to justifiably think that they have explained some central human attribute when they've really done an interesting but limited lab experiment.

Link to Times article 'The neuroscience delusion' (via 3QD).

—Vaughan.

April 11, 2008

2008-04-11 Spike activity:

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

The scientist brain doping results are in! Neuroanthropology looks at the findings from the recent Nature survey.

Prospect Magazine has an excellent article on whether the recent upsurge in bipolar diagnoses is due to a better understanding of mood disorders or a new marketing fad.

Science writer Carl Zimmer writes in Wired discussing the remarkable unreliability of ion channels, essential components of neural signalling, and notes what little effect this seems to have on global brain functioning. Viva redundancy!

.CSV has a great post on new techniques in quantitative sociology including social network analysis.

The vagaries of behavioural genetics studies, particularly inlight of a recent study on the genetics of 'ruthlessness' are carefully dissected by Pure Pedantry.

Wired has a run-down of his Top 5 recreational drug studies in the scientific literature (sadly misplacing the brain-scanner bong at number 5).

Like shooting fish in a barrel. Internet addiction nonsense comes in for more criticism from psychologists Petra Boyton and Cory Silverberg.

Newsweek looks at the theory that Western individualism and Eastern collectivism differences may have resulted from adaptive social strategies to deal with different diseases.

My Mind on Books collects some blog reports on the recent conference "Toward a Science of Consciousness".

Cognitive neuroscientist extraordinaire Michael Gazzaniga asks whether human brains are unique in an article for Edge.

Neurophilosophy reports on a man who had his compulsive gambling treated with a deep brain stimulation implant.

Popular social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are a form of participatory surveillance and voluntary social voyeurism, argues an article from First Monday.

Six pack models in men's magazine have a similar negative effect on self-esteem to stick thin models on women's magazine, according to research reported by the BPS Research Digest.

"If we mistrust the real world so much that we're prepared to fill the next generation's heads with a load of gibbering crap about "brain buttons", why stop there? Why not spice up maths by telling kids the number five was born in Greece and invented biscuits?" Very funny article in the The Guardian about Brain Gym foolishness currently sweeping British schools.

PsyBlog has been running a fantastic series on the psychology of money and economic decision-making.

Long-term methamphetamine use has serious long-term neurological effects on the brain, according to new research discussed by Treatment Online.

—Vaughan.

April 10, 2008

Turned out Nice again:

The picture on the right is both a five story high sculpture and library that was opposite the 16th European Congress of Psychiatry from which I've just returned.

It's by the artist Sacha Sosno and apparently the books are kept in the 'head' of the surrealist bust.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see a great deal of the research at the conference as I spent most of it either locked in a hotel room preparing with my collaborators Frank Laroi and Andrea Raballo, or teaching our course on Phenomenology, Cinema and Psychosis (thanks to all who came!).

Apart from that it was a fairly typical display of academic debate and pharmaceutical company largess.

The prize for the most ridiculous stand goes to the makers of the antipsychotic drug ziprasidone, who were obviously trying to promote the medication despite the fact that it doesn't seem to treat psychosis as well as some of the other drugs, on the basis that it is one of the least likely to make you fat or raise your risk of diabetes or heart disease.

Rather than saying this straight off (advertisers know better than to push negative messages), they seemingly had to think of a way of selling a theory that helps promote the idea that their drug is linked to a 'healthy' lifestyle.

So based on one rather ropey study (of only 14 people), they're recommending that giving the drug with food increases its bioavailability.

And what better way to promote their new message than have an onsite chef create mouth watering but completely unrealistic meals.

Oh, and have models riding exercise bikes as well.

Science marches on.

—Vaughan.