July 31, 2008

It is scientists who seek to get heaven in their heads:

The wonderful image is an original drawing by the artist Masonic Boom, aka Kate St.Claire, as part of her series of psychological self portraits.

The quote in the image is from the author and philosopher G.K. Chesterton.

He was once asked by The Times to write an article on 'What is wrong with the world?' and send the following piece:

Dear Sirs,

Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton

Thanks to Katie for allowing us to feature the image and it's really worth seeing full size at the link below.

Link to full size image on Flickr.
Link to Masonic Boom collection.

—Vaughan.

The theatre of hysteria:

I'm currently reading Elaine Showalter's book Hystories, a cultural history of the concept of 'hysteria', a term which has variously described the supposed effects of a 'wandering womb', unexplained neurological symptoms, panic, nervousness or just 'making a fuss'.

She describes where medicine and media have collided, and highlights how popular interest in the condition has driven a long-standing tradition of fictional interpretations that have developed alongside medical understanding.

Showalter has a feminist angle although is generally even handed with the evidence and is not shy in highlighting the excesses of some past feminist writing on the subject.

One particularly interesting part is where she discusses how theatre was interpreted the work of 19th century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot as it was happening.

Charcot is perhaps most famous for his work on hysteria and held regular Tuesday lectures at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris where he would theatrically demonstrate the symptoms of hysteria in favourite female patients who apparently 'performed' with an equal flourish.

As we mentioned previously, one of the reasons Charcot's work was so widely known is because he used the newly developed technology of photography to create striking and sometimes pseudo-erotic portraits documenting the bodily contortions of his (largely) female patients. The picture on the right is of Augustine, one of his 'star patients'.

These have been the inspiration for numerous contemporary plays, ballets, exhibitions and novels.

What I didn't know was that these are not a modern phenomena, shows based on Charcot's work work were popular since Charcot first began publishing his work and giving lectures (from p100):

As Charcot's clinic achieved celebrity in the 1890s, images of hysteria cross over to theatre and cabaret. At the Chat Noir and Folies Bergère, performers, singers, and mimes who called themselves the "Harengs Saurs Épileptiques" (The Epileptic Sour Herrings) or "Hydropathes" mimicked the jerky, zigzag movements of the hysterical seizure...

The poses of grande hystérie enacted at the Friday spectacles of the Salpêtrière closely resembled the stylized movements of French classical acting. Indeed, hysterical women at the clinic and fallen women in melodrama were virtually indistinguishable; the theatre critic Elin Diamond comments that both displayed "eye rolling, facial grimaces, gnashing teeth, heavy sighs, fainting, shrieking and choking; 'hysterical laughter' was a frequent stage direction as well as a common occurrence in medical asylums"...

Arthur Symons regarded the Moulin Rouge dancer Jane Avril as the embodiment of the age's "pathological choreography." These resemblances were not coincidental: writers, actresses cabaret performers and dancers like Avril attended Charcot's matinees and then worked the Salpêtrière style into their own performances.

An interesting twist is that Avril was actually treated by Charcot as a young girl after she ran away from an abusive mother and was admitted to the Salpêtrière for 'insanity'.

Link to details of Showalter's book Hystories.
Link to first chapter.

—Vaughan.

July 30, 2008

The Maudsley cat:

The not very good photo is of Coco, the Maudsley Hospital cat and one in a long line of felines who reside in psychiatric hospitals. Not all psychiatric hospitals have cats, but they're not uncommon and exist as a sort of informal tradition of live-in feline therapy.

They're very popular with both staff and patients, but their presence tends to drive managers up the wall, which just makes them all the more endearing. I've worked in three hospitals that have cats and almost invariably they live in the older adults ward, keeping the older folks company (and vice versa, of course).

The older adults ward at the Maudsley is called the Felix Post unit, after the distinguished psychiatrist of the same name. Coco's predecessor was naturally called Felix, leading to occasional confusion where people assumed the ward was named after the cat.

As I hadn't seen Coco all summer I enquired and it turns out he's "gone to Liverpool", which I'm assured isn't a euphemism to protect those of fragile mood, but a genuine change in his location as the ward manager moved with Coco in tow. So for the first time in decades, the Maudsley is without a hospital cat.

—Vaughan.

Promising Alzheimer's drug announced:

The results of a moderate sized trial on a new Alzheimer's drug have just been announced and the results, if reliable, may suggest that the treatment is one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the century.

Alzheimer's disease is a type of dementia, a degenerative disorder of where the brain starts to degrade more quickly than would be expected through normal ageing.

One of the common features of Alzheimer's disease is the accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles in the brain. These are clumps of tau protein that accumulate inside dying neurons. There have been debates about whether these cause the problems or are just the result, but most researchers are now coming round to the idea that tau protein tangles are the main problem.

The drug has been given the tradename 'remben' and was initially thought to be useful as it dissolved tangles in the test tube. It has just been tested in a Phase II trial which have been announced at an Alzheimer's research conference.

The results of the first announced trial has not been published but there are details on the conference press release which I've included below the fold.

What's most impressive from the preliminary details, is that the drug seemed to both slow or even stop cognitive decline in some cases, as well as eliminating the decline in blood flow in the areas usually most affected by the disease suggesting that it is halting the spread of tangles.

Interestingly, the company behind the drug, TauRx, have just launched their website today to catch the wave of publicity.

However, I'm wondering whether there's more to it than meets the eye because, if I've got it right, the drug isn't actually new.

Its chemical name is methylthioninium chloride but it's also known as methylene blue and was synthesised way back in 1876. It was shown to be active against malaria by Paul Ehrlich in 1891 and later as a useful antibacterial drug (have a look at this fascinating NYT article from 1910).

In the late 1980s it was tried as a treatment for manic-depressive disorder and found to be useful.

Is this seems surprising, you may be interested to know that methylene blue was the basic compound from which the first antipsychotic drug chlorpromazine or Thorazine was made (in case you're wondering, this family of antipsychotics can also work as anti-bacterial drugs, but have not been used due to other drugs having less side-effects).

If this is really just methylene blue, what this means in financial terms is that the drug can't be patented.

In other words, anyone can make the drug which means its much harder to make money on it as pricing becomes competitive. In contrast, a patent gives you a time-limited monopoly - albeit one that can earn billions.

A widely available cheap generic drug that treats a major disease is actually a fantastic thing for society, but developing them is not typical behaviour for pharmaceutical companies who tend to shun unpatentable drugs.

Also, it's probably true to say that the history of drug development shows a typical three stage process:

1. We've found a miracle cure!
2. We've found a miracle cure, but it can kill people.
3. It's not a miracle cure, it can kill people, but it's worth the risk in many cases.

So, time will tell how useful it is in the real world, but pretty much everyone has their fingers crossed that it will work out as a useful treatment.

Link to write-up from The Telegraph.

A Phase IIb Trial of a Tau Aggregation Inhibitor Therapy

[ Press Release from Alzheimer's Association International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease 2008. Original here ]

As an alternative to anti-amyloid therapies for Alzheimer's, researchers continue to examine a variety of treatments and targets with the potential to curb the disease. This includes presenting data supporting the viability of therapies targeting tau protein and its aggregation into the "tangles" originally discovered by Alois Alzheimer.

Previous research has shown that the buildup of brain lesions known as neurofibrillary tangles, which are composed of a short fragment of a protein called tau, is correlated with increasing levels of dementia symptoms. And, these tangles first appear in the brain long before symptoms of the disease become clinically apparent. Methylthioninium chloride (MTC, or brand name remberTM) has been shown in the test tube to dissolve tau tangle filaments and prevent aggregation of tau into tangles. MTC has also been shown to block the toxic effects of aggregated tau in cells. In animal models, MTC has demonstrated cognitive and behavioral benefits in line with reduced tau pathology.

In research reported at ICAD 2008, Claude M. Wischik, Professor in Mental Health, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom and Chairman, TauRx Therapeutics, Singapore, and colleagues conducted a 24-week, double-blind, randomized, dose-ranging, parallel design trial of MTC monotherapy in 321 people with Alzheimer's at 17 centers in the United Kingdom and Singapore, followed by a 60-week, blinded, active treatment extension. The control group received placebo for the initial 24 weeks and then a minimal efficacy dose subsequently. The primary objective was to investigate the effects of oral MTC at 30, 60 and 100 mg doses three times per day, compared with placebo, over 24 weeks on cognitive function as measured by the ADAS-cog in patients with mild or moderate Alzheimer's, stratified by stage of the disease. Another objective was to determine MTC's potential to modify the course of Alzheimer's over 19 months. Imaging results from SPECT and PET scans were collected at baseline and after 24 weeks of treatment.

The researchers found that, at 24 weeks, MTC produced a significant improvement relative to placebo of -5.5 ADAS-cog units in moderate subjects at the 60 mg dose (p = 0.0208). There was no placebo decline in people with mild Alzheimer's in the control group over the first 24 weeks preventing initial efficacy analysis, although efficacy was demonstrated in mild Alzheimer's by SPECT-scan outcomes over the same period. MTC stabilized the progression of Alzheimer's over 50 weeks in both mild and moderate Alzheimer's. The overall effect size was -6.8 ADAS-cog units vs. decline of 7.8 units in the control arm (p < 0.0001), with significant efficacy demonstrated separately in mild and moderate subgroups.

According to the researchers, as a first approximation to supporting disease modifying efficacy, treatment with MTC at the 60mg dose produced a significantly larger effect size at 50 weeks than at 24 weeks implying an effect on the rate of cognitive decline (p = 0.0014). This was confirmed in a mixed effects slope analysis, showing an 81 percent reduction of long run rate of progression of decline over 50 weeks (p < 0.0001). The final 84-week analysis confirmed the long term effect of the 60mg dose in subjects remaining on treatment, with apparent decline still not significantly different from baseline at the final assessment, whereas there was significant decline in the other study arms.

The researchers added that brain imaging using SPECT and PET confirmed the clinical trial results. SPECT measures regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) which is closely related to brain cell activity. The study showed that treatment with MTC at the 60mg dose eliminated the rCBF decline that was seen in control subjects. The effect was greatest in brain regions that had the most severe tau aggregation pathology, namely the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex, which are regions affected early and most severely in Alzheimer's.

"This is the first instance of a disease-modifying Alzheimer's therapy that has attained its primary, pre-specified cognitive efficacy target in a clinical trial," said Wischik. "This trial therefore provides the first clinical trial evidence that an Alzheimer's therapy aimed at blocking tau aggregation may be a viable disease-modifying treatment. We now need to confirm this in a larger Phase III trial."

"Our results appear to meet the draft EMEA clinical guidelines for disease-modifying therapy, supported by SPECT and PET evidence of efficacy in brain regions heavily affected by tau pathology," Wischik added.

—Vaughan.

July 29, 2008

Is the cinematograph making us stupid?:

I've just found an eye-opening 2003 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the work on 19th century neurologists George Beard and Silas Weir Mitchell, who thought the pace of life and the effect of new technology was harming the mind and brain of citizens in 1800s America - echoing similar concerns we still hear today.

The two physicians were influential in pushing the idea that these effects resulted in 'neurasthenia', a kind of fuzzy catch-all diagnosis for mental or emotional malaise.

What's interesting is we're experiencing something almost identical over 100 years later.

As we've noted several times, leading scientists or commentators can make international headlines by simply suggesting that new technology is harming the mind, brain and relationships of the modern citizen, despite a general lack of evidence or flat out evidence to the contrary.

The JAMA article notes how neurasthenia was associated with the cultural concerns of the time:

Families migrated from the countryside to the city, men left traditional jobs as tradesmen and farmers to join the growing ranks of businessmen and office workers, women went from being mothers and daughters to also being university students and physicians, and technological developments such as telegraphs, telephones, and railroads became increasingly common parts of everyday life. As a diagnosis, neurasthenia commanded an intuitive legitimacy because it incorporated the anxieties that arose from these changes into the way people thought of their health. It could attribute a bank manager's headaches to his hectic schedule and the obsession for detail his job demanded.

Similarly, a young woman's depression could be understood as neurasthenia brought on by the mental drain of attending a newly founded coeducational university, where she competed for grades. In many cases, diagnoses of neurasthenia attached themselves to traditional ideals, such as the restorative virtues of farming vis-à-vis the fast-paced stress of modern business or the Victorian belief in women's disposition for motherhood rather than scholarship. For Beard and Mitchell, neurasthenic patients were casualties of modern society whose bodies and minds simply could not keep up with the seemingly accelerated lifestyles of men and women in the latter part of the 19th century.

It's a lovely illustration of the fact that since the dawn of popular medicine, our cultural concerns about changes in society are likely to be expressed in the language of illness and disease.

The article also notes that then, like now, the concerns are accompanied by an encouragement to return to the traditional ways of doing things (in this day and age - encouraging kids to 'play proper games' or have 'genuine relationships') rather than highlighting ways of healthy adaptation to the new technology.

This is not to say that all fears about new technologies are unfounded, but its clear that they are quickly medicalised and get far more prominence than the evidence supports, both in the 19th century and in the 21st.

Link to JAMA article 'Neurasthenia and a Modernizing America'.

—Vaughan.

A party game that goes down like a red balloon:

I just found this clever advert for The Economist which has an immediate impact but kinda becomes a bit awkward if you think about it for too long.

Presumably, it's meant to convey the idea that the magazine is 'mind expanding'. But as we mentioned in an earlier post, we tend to ascribe different sorts of properties to the mind and brain.

One key difference is that we don't ascribe physical properties to the mind, which is a bit of a pain when you're trying to create a visual advert. So the designers went for a brain.

But 'brain expanding' is just kind of awkward. It makes me think of hydrocephalus - a condition where faulty fluid drainage causes internal pressure which literally balloons the brain.

In young children with soft skulls this causes skull deformation, in adults it just tends to squash the brain against the side of the skull. Either way, it usually needs surgical intervention to insert a shunt valve to treat the drainage problem, else brain damage and death follow in a high proportion of cases.

Nevertheless, if you can get your hands on any of these balloons you've instantly got yourself a neurosurgery party game for kids. The first kid to fashion a shunt out of a drinking straw gets a special John Holter prize.

Yes, I know I should get out more.

Link to Economist advert.

—Vaughan.

Juggling can change brain structure within 7 days:

A new study just published in PLoS One reports that learning to juggle alters the structure of motion detection areas in the brain within as little as 7 days.

Led by neuroscientist Joenna Driemeyer, the study builds on a previous research that also found juggling could alter brain structure, although this previous study waited three months before the brain was checked for alterations using high resolution structural MRI scans.

This new study also took 20 non-jugglers and asked them to learn to juggle, but scanned them after 7, 14 and 35 days.

After only 7 days, a motion specialised part of the occipital lobe known as V5 had increased in density. In both studies, the changes were maintained over the subsequent weeks of practice, but these areas returned to their pre-learning state after several weeks without juggling.

This is an interesting example of rapid 'neuroplasticity', the ability of the brain to adapt structurally to new situations.

However, the authors are careful to note that they can't tell whether the brains of the participants had generated more neurons, or whether existing cells grew in size, or additional glial cells were developed, or maybe there were just changes in how much blood or other brain fluids packed the area.

Also, the fact that changes seemed to occur at the beginning of the learning cycle but that further practice maintained but didn't cause additional changes led the researchers to speculate that learning a variety of new things, rather than simply practising old skills, may be most effective in terms of brain structure alterations.

Link to 'Changes in Gray Matter Induced by Learning — Revisited'.
Link to PubMed entry for paper.

Full disclosure: I'm an unpaid member of the PLoS One editorial board.

—Vaughan.

July 28, 2008

Detecting suicidal intent in the unconscious mind:

The Situationist has just alerted me to a fantastic article in the Boston Globe on the development a cognitive test for suicidal thoughts that doesn't rely solely on the conscious mind.

The test is a variant of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that has been used to look at our automatic associations between different concepts, based on how quickly we can categorise them.

We've discussed in it more detail previously but it essentially relies on the fact that if you have an pre-existing association between two concepts, say, the concepts 'blonde' and 'stupid', making similar associations will be faster than associating 'blonde' and 'clever' because you're going to be quicker doing whichever classification best matches associations you already have.

Most of the research has been done on implicit social biases, finding that even people who have no explicit prejudices against blondes, foreigners, men or whomever, might find they automatically associate certain negative concepts with these groups.

However, as the test purely measures associations between concepts, it can be used to look for other implicit biases. In fact, the researchers featured in the Globe piece have used it to test for implicit associations between the concept of self and suicide.

Most suicidal patients will admit they are at risk of harming themselves. Contrary to popular belief, suicidal patients don't necessarily want to die, they just want the pain to stop and will be upfront if they think professionals can help.

Some, however, may have decided that death is the only relief, or they may be unable to see clear alternatives owing to the effects of mental illness on thinking.

Suicide risk is assessed on the basis of people's actions and what they say, so a completely determined person can talk their way through a risk assessment.

This new research is testing the IAT as a way of assessing suicide risk, even if the person is denying they are suicidal.

The study, led by Dr. Matthew Nock, an associate professor in the psychology department at Harvard University, is called the Suicide Implicit Association Test...

But critics question whether the test is actually practical, and up until now no one has tried to apply it to suicide prevention. As part of his training, Nock worked extensively with adolescent self-injurers - self-injury, such as cutting and burning, is an important coping method for those who engage in it, though they are often unlikely to acknowledge it. Nock thought that the IAT could serve as a behavioral measure of who is a self-injurer and whether such a person was in danger of continuing the behavior, even after treatment.

In their first major study, Nock and Banaji asserted that the IAT could be adapted to show who was inclined to be self-injurious and who was not. And more important, they said, the test could reveal who was in danger of future self-injury.

It's an interesting idea and the early results look intriguing, although as the article notes, the proof will be how well it actually works in practice.

One difficulty with risk assessment in psychiatry is its almost impossible to do 'ideal' outcome studies because of the ethical implications.

For example, lets say your new risk measure predicts someone will kill themselves. From a statistical point of view, you'd want to wait and see if they do, so you can compare these positive predictions with the negative predictions and get an accuracy measure.

But from a purely humane point of view, you're going to intervene and try and help the person, meaning risk assessments are not always based on 'ideal' statistical information.

The article has an excellent discussion of some of the wider ethical and practical issues involved, drawing on the writers own experience of his brother's suicide.

Link to Boston Globe article 'On the Edge' (via The Situationist).

—Vaughan.

Waterfalls, adaptation and light:

Firstly, you'll have to excuse the somewhat 'in house' nature of this post, as it's me writing about Christian writing about Tom. It's an account of Tom giving an address to the Association for the Teaching of Psychology where he conducted a fantastic demonstration of how you can test out whether your brain adapts to certain visual conditions 'locally' on an eye-by-eye basis, or 'centrally' in eye independent perceptual brain areas.

Moments into the keynote talk, the teachers and I found ourselves blinded by darkness. As our eyes adjusted, we were told to cover one eye with our hands before the lights were raised again. A little wait for our open eyes to become light-adjusted and then the lights re-dimmed. What would happen to our vision this time? The answer depends on whether adaptation to light levels occurs centrally, in the brain, or locally in each eye. The audience tested this, looking through each eye one at a time and discovering the strange experience of having one eye adapted to the light and one to the dark, thus showing that light adaptation occurs locally. Both eyes open led to a strange, grey, grainy, effect. “Whoever said psychology isn't useful is wrong,” Stafford said. “You now have the perfect strategy for visiting the toilet in the night and finding your way back to your bed in the dark.”

Light adaptation may well occur locally, but what about adaptation to motion? A huge video of a waterfall filled the screen. After a minute staring at the cascading water, the video was stopped and the audience experienced the well-known illusion of the water appearing to flow upwards. But what if the flowing water was watched with just one eye (with the other covered), with the paused video then observed through the previously covered eye? The illusion was still experienced, thus showing that in this case, adaptation to motion had occurred centrally, in the brain.

If you don't have a waterfall handy, you may be interested to know it's a form of 'motion after effect' illusion and there's a similar demonstration online that you can try. If you go to that link, click 'detach' and resize the window to get a bigger version.

You'll need to supply the room and light yourself though. The hall full of teachers is optional.

Link to BPSRD on visual adaptation.
Link to motion after effect example.

—Vaughan.

Silence, but for the clouds moving across the sky:

Lee Tracy is an artist who creates poems out of brain scans.

The image is from a 2006 exhibition called Negative to Positive that was shown in the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago.

Each image is an CT scan of the artist's brain, mounted in a light box and etched with a statement of the profound to the whimsical.

If you're a neuroscientist and your lab needs more poetry or you're an artist and your studio needs more neuroscience, you can purchase the pieces from the artist through Etsy.

Link to Lee Tracy's poetic CT scans on Etsy (thanks Sandra!).
Link to Time Out review of 'Negative to Positive'.

—Vaughan.

July 27, 2008

Six impossible things before breakfast:

An unintentionally funny headline from a University College London press release. Statement of scientific findings or the effect of too many parties?

Our grip on reality is slim, says UCL scientist

—Vaughan.

July 26, 2008

Whatever happened to symptom substitution? :

Symptom substitution is at the core of Freudian psychology but according to a new article in Clinical Psychology Review there is virtually no evidence for its existence and the concept should be abandoned.

The idea is that if you treat a symptom, say a phobia of social situations, without addressing the underlying conflict, another symptom will just appear because the core problem is unchanged. It is based on the Freudian theory that all symptoms of mental illness are simply a reflection of an underlying unconscious conflict.

Freud was inspired by the first law of thermodynamics that says that energy cannot be created or destroyed just turned into another form. His psychology, and much Freudian-inspired psychodynamic psychotherapy that follows, applies a similar idea to emotions.

In this model, a conflict is caused by a forbidden unconscious impulse being held back by our conscious ego. Supposedly, we want to banish them from our conscious mind to maintain a positive self-image, so we repress them into our unconscious. But because they can't just disappear they are expressed in other ways - i.e. as neurotic symptoms.

However, this model also plays an important symbolic role in the politics of mental health. It suggests that psychoanalysis is the only truly effective treatment, because it supposedly deals with the 'root cause', while drugs, behaviour therapy and CBT just alleviate symptoms and leave the patient open to further suffering.

Rather unusually for a Freudian idea, it leads to a directly testable hypothesis. Psychoanalytic treatment should lead to a better long-term prognosis, whereas we should see other other symptoms appear after treatment with other approaches.

Psychologist Warren Tryon decided to look at the medical literature to see whether other approaches were more likely to result in the appearance of other symptoms, and found no evidence from relevant empirical studies.

In fact, Tryon found only two cases studies that claimed to provide direct evidence for symptom substitution and one of them didn't even fulfil the definition, it just reported that the same symptoms came back - therefore describing a relapse rather than a substitution.

Despite their being a lack of evidence so far, he does note that not many studies have directly addressed the issue, but proposes a direct test:

The following experimental design could identify genuine psychoanalytic symptoms. Form two groups of demographically matched patients displaying a hypothesized symptom. Provide psychoanalytic treatment to one group and symptomatic treatment to the other group. The hypothesized symptom can be considered to be a bone fide psychoanalytic symptom if patients receiving psychoanalytic therapy get better and symptom substitution occurs in patients receiving symptom oriented therapy. Helping these patients to get better by providing psychoanalytic therapy would provide additional supportive evidence and be ethically responsible. The literature review reported above indicates that the presence of bona fide psychoanalytic symptoms has yet to be demonstrated.

Link to 'Whatever happened to symptom substitution?' (thanks Karel!).
Link to PubMed entry for article.

—Vaughan.

July 25, 2008

Strippers for taxation reform:

Frontal Cortex has an excellent post on the near futility of election coverage and why people tend to vote with what they feel, rather than what they know.

The piece reviews a whole range of studies that have highlighted possible non-issue influences on people's voting preferences, from the weather to the facial expressions of news presenters.

One other line of research has found that facial structure can predict leadership, allowing people to reliably pick out business leaders or political winners just from a photo of their face.

Advertisers have long known that marketing products on the basis of facts is a lot less effective than marketing on the basis of appeals to emotion, desire and self-image.

While this is often labelled 'sex sells', 'you-can-be-sexy sells' is just as widely used.

Traditionally, this avenue has not been open to political candidates since it leaves the candidate open to the emotional counter-attack of accusations of impropriety.

After seeing the popularity of the 'Obama Girl' video, it struck me that the internet opens up this avenue, as supporters not officially associated with a candidate can now make their own wide-coverage sex sells promotions without 'sullying' the name of the official party machine.

As Frontal Cortex notes:

The problem, as political scientist Larry Bartels notes, is that people aren't rational: we're rationalizers. Our brain prefers a certain candidate or party for a really complicated set of subterranean reasons and then, after the preference has been unconsciously established, we invent rational sounding reasons to justify our preferences.

Link to Frontal Cortex on 'Rational Voters?'.

—Vaughan.

Is banking on neuroscience a false economy?:

The Economist has a great article taking a wide-angle view of neuroeconomics, asking whether it actually contributes anything useful to our understanding of economic systems or whether its just a personal psychology of gains and losses that won't actually scale.

The fiercest attack on neuroeconomics, and indeed behavioural economics, has come from two economists at Princeton University, Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer. In an article in 2005, “The Case for Mindless Economics” [pdf], they argued that neuroscience could not transform economics because what goes on inside the brain is irrelevant to the discipline. What matters are the decisions people take—in the jargon, their “revealed preferences”—not the process by which they reach them. For the purposes of understanding how society copes with the consequences of those decisions, the assumption of rational utility-maximisation works just fine.

But today’s neuroeconomists are not the first dismal scientists to dream of peering inside the human brain. In 1881, a few years after William Jevons argued that the functioning of the brain’s black box would not be known, Francis Edgeworth proposed the creation of a “hedonimeter”, which would measure the utility that each individual gained from his decisions. “From moment to moment the hedonimeter varies; the delicate index now flickering with the flutter of the passions, now steadied by intellectual activity, low sunk whole hours in the neighbourhood of zero, or momentarily springing up towards infinity,” he wrote, poetically for an economist.

Part of the scepticism seems to originate from more general reservations about the results of brain scanning studies being over-interpreted, echoing wider concerns in cognitive neuroscience.

What's interesting though is that the article mentions that neuroeconomics researchers are turning to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) - a technique that alters brain function for a few hundred milliseconds while people are actively completing tasks.

Because TMS alters brain function, it's not just showing you a correlation like brain scans do. If task performance changes when you've altered that brain area you can infer that the particularly part of the cortex you've targeted is causally involved in the psychology of the task.

Along these lines, one recent high-profile study [pdf] managed to alter participants' fairness behaviour in the Ultimatum Game (a common experimental task) when the function of the upper outside surface of the right frontal lobe was disrupted.

Link to The Economist article 'Do economists need brains?'.
pdf of 'The Case for Mindless Economics'.
pdf of TMS study on fairness in the Ultimatum Game.

—Vaughan.

2008-07-25 Spike activity:

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

Neurophilosophy has a beautiful quote from the great Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal.

The miseries of losing one's sense of smell are covered by an interesting Slate article on this neglected sense.

Cognitive Daily looks at a study which attempts to answer the question 'Why do more Asians have perfect pitch?'.

Two novels on identity theft are touched on by My Mind on Books.

The New York Times has an excellent multimedia feature on 'The Voices of Bipolar Disorder' where people affected by the condition discuss their experiences.

Delusions reflect Hollywood movie 'The Truman Show'.

Nature reviews the latest Disney animated feature about an artificially intelligent robot Wall-E.

The Female Brain or one female's perspective? Neuroanthropology reports from a recent 'critical neuroscience' conference and a discussion about popular books on sex difference.

Scientific American on why anecdotal evidence can undermine scientific findings for most people.

SciAm's Mind Matters blog on the neural energy drain of decision-making.

The BPS Research Digest looks at a study that reports novelty seekers have a right-sided spatial bias.

The neuroscience of insight is discussed in a tantalising excerpt from a New Yorker by The Frontal Cortex.

Psych Central has an interview with the insightful psychiatrist Daniel Carlat.

BooYaa! Straight-talking judge has some hard words for Eli Lilly in the ongoing court case over antipsychotic olanzapine (Zyprexa).

—Vaughan.

July 24, 2008

Misdirected magic:

Just one more on the magic. I just got this email from Mind Hacks readers Stefano suggesting that stage magicians that use psychological language actually pollute the public's understanding of science. He also gives a much better, and, I'm guessing, more accurate explanation of the hand-raising trick in Keith Barry's TED performance.

As a psychologist, I have to say I dislike the new sort of mentalism that we're seeing nowadays. Derren Brown (an incredibly talented performer, as you said) tries to portray his show as something more than old-fashioned magic by introducing psychological terms and studies, somewhat erratically. I understand that his use of scientific terminology might be part of the misdirection, but it really makes me cringe to see he perform ridiculous feats and justify it by citing things like the Milgram study, concentration abilities or persuasion techniques. Almost every time he mentions a psychological concept, he either misrepresents it or uses it to explain absurd stuff that he did with stooges or simply old magic tricks.

I didn't know Keith Barry, but I have to say his TED lecture made me put him on the same category as Derren Brown: old mentalist tricks disguised as "persuasion and psychological techniques". He even managed to fool you, it seems: the trick that you attributed to hypnosis has nothing to do with it, being achieved simply by the performer applying pressure on the feet of the subject instead of his hand. Notice how he never says where the pressure will be, and his left leg is covered by the table. His other live tricks are equally simple, and have nothing do with psychology, except for the fact that everything you do to an audience - even cheating/fooling them - is part of it.

Stefano makes an interesting point that these acts rely, in part, on misinforming people about psychology. Derren Brown is a classic example where he often gives explanations after the trick so the viewer feels they are being let in on the secret, but which are obviously misleading and so are part of the more general misdirection that the feats are achieved through the 'power of the mind'.

In terms of the hand raising trick that Stefano mentions, looking back at the video, this seems a much more likely explanation. In which case, this is a 'theory of mind' illusion, where we are fooled into attributing a different mental state to the person picked from the audience than they actually have.

I hope you don't mind me publishing part of your email Stefano, I did try and email and ask but unfortunately the address wasn't valid. Do get in touch if you have a website or blog and I'll happily link to it and many thanks for your interesting commentary.

—Vaughan.

Dennett on magic and misdirection:

While musing over yesterday's post on the use of psychological language as a form of a magician's misdirection, I remembered Dennett's 2003 article [pdf] on consciousness where he uses exactly this as a metaphor for why consciousness doesn't exist as some scientists think it does.

Dennett argues that the 'hard problem' is a red herring - the whole question of how conscious first person experience arises from the biological function of the brain assumes that consciousness is a single thing that needs explaining.

He suggests that there isn't a single thing that is consciousness, just a collection of mental components, but the fact we've named it as a single thing fools us.

In his article Explaining the "Magic" of Consciousness, he gives a great analogy of how the use of the word 'the' was used in a card trick to make it seem completely mysterious even to fellow professional magicians.

The tempting idea that there is a Hard Problem is simply a mistake. I cannot prove this. Or, better, even if I can prove this, my proof will surely fall on deaf ears, since CHALMERS, for instance, has already acknowledged that arguments against his convictions on this score are powerless to dislodge his intuition, which is beyond rational support. So I will not make the tactical error of trying to dislodge with rational argument a conviction that is beyond reason. That would be wasting everybody's time, apparently. Instead, I will offer up what I hope is a disturbing parallel from the world of card magic: The Tuned Deck.

For many years, Mr. Ralph Hull, the famous card wizard from Crooksville, Ohio, has completely bewildered not only the general public, but also amateur conjurors, card connoisseurs and professional magicians with the series of card tricks which he is pleased to call "The Tuned Deck"...

Ralph Hull's trick looks and sounds roughly like this:

Boys, I have a new trick to show you. It's called 'The Tuned Deck'. This deck of cards is magically tuned [Hull holds the deck to his ear and riffles the cards, listening carefully to the buzz of the cards]. By their finely tuned vibrations, I can hear and feel the location of any card. Pick a card, any card... [The deck is then fanned or otherwise offered for the audience, and a card is taken by a spectator, noted, and returned to the deck by one route or another.] Now I listen to the Tuned Deck, and what does it tell me? I hear the telltale vibrations, ... [buzz, buzz, the cards are riffled by Hull's ear and various manipulations and rituals are enacted, after which, with a flourish, the spectator's card is presented].

Hull would perform the trick over and over for the benefit of his select audience of fellow magicians, challenging them to figure it out. Nobody ever did. Magicians offered to buy the trick from him but he would not sell it. Late in his life he gave his account to his friend, HILLIARD, who published the account in his privately printed book. Here is what Hull had to say about his trick:

For years I have performed this effect and have shown it to magicians and amateurs by the hundred and, to the very best of my knowledge, not one of them ever figured out the secret. ...the boys have all looked for something too hard [my italics, DCD].

Like much great magic, the trick is over before you even realize the trick has begun. The trick, in its entirety, is in the name of the trick, "The Tuned Deck", and more specifically, in one word "The"! As soon as Hull had announced his new trick and given its name to his eager audience, the trick was over. Having set up his audience in this simple way, and having passed the time with some obviously phony and misdirecting chatter about vibrations and buzz-buzz-buzz, Hull would do a relatively simple and familiar card presentation trick of type A (at this point I will draw the traditional curtain of secrecy; the further mechanical details of legerdemain, as you will see, do not matter).

His audience, savvy magicians, would see that he might possibly be performing a type A trick, a hypothesis they could test by being stubborn and uncooperative spectators in a way that would thwart any attempt at a type A trick. When they then adopted the appropriate recalcitrance to test the hypothesis, Hull would 'repeat' the trick, this time executing a type B card presentation trick. The spectators would then huddle and compare notes: might he be doing a type B trick? They test that hypothesis by adopting the recalcitrance appropriate to preventing a type B trick and still he does "the" trick - using method C, of course. When they test the hypothesis that he's pulling a type C trick on them, he switches to method D - or perhaps he goes back to method A or B, since his audience has 'refuted' the hypothesis that he's using method A or B.

And so it would go, for dozens of repetitions, with Hull staying one step ahead of his hypothesis-testers, exploiting his realization that he could always do some trick or other from the pool of tricks they all knew, and concealing the fact that he was doing a grab bag of different tricks by the simple expedient of the definite article: The Tuned Deck.

pdf of article Explaining the "Magic" of Consciousness.

—Vaughan.

July 23, 2008

Sleight of mind:

I've just watched a video of an immensley entertaining TED presentation by 'brain magician' Keith Barry who does an act with various 'mind control' or 'mind reading tricks'.

It reminded me of an early book by Derren Brown, an English magician who has a similar pitch. Brown is better known for his more recent TV shows and books, but some of his early publications are fascinating because they not only discuss his approach, but also shed light on our increasingly psychology-focused culture.

Keith Barry's TED presentation contains part suggestion that would be well-known to hypnotists (in fact, the arm raising and lowering is used in standard hypnotisability measures) and part stage magic, all wrapped up in the language of psychology.

He starts the presentation by noting that the redirection of attention is an important part of magic and gives an example of our tendency to follow the magician's gaze.

In fact, this is preceded by a clasping trick which surely demonstrates this, where the audience's attention, and rather unfairly for the internet viewer - the camera, are diverted away from him reclasping his hands in a different manner.

I'm not going to pretend that all of the tricks in Barry or Brown's shows are obvious, as some leave me completely baffled and in awe. I suspect only poor magicians will allow their tricks to be apparent even to the most curious of psychologists.

However, in Brown's now sadly out-of-print book Pure Effect he makes the fascinating point that the narrative itself is part of the redirection, and describes how framing magic tricks in psychological language leads to certain expectations which, of course, make certain redirections more easily achievable.

This classic presentational ploy that Banachek calls 'psychological direction' allows for the illusion of enormous skill, as long as you let the participants figure out for themselves that you are employing such methods. I believe I earn their respect by denouncing psychic 'psychic power' as woolly guff and I challenge those lobotomised flower fairies who believe in such nonsense, appealing to their intelligence and belief in themselves as sceptical creatures. The other advantage of this angle is that is allows the effect to sit comfortably with a magic routine that suggests that similar ploys are at work.

The two sets become connected by a seductive undercurrent of apparently deft manipulation of the participant's minds. At first, these techniques are being employed to produce wonderful, artistic and mystical effects. Then the tone darkens, and the performer, almost with an air of reluctance, sensing the correct rapport in the group, casts aside his props and amusements and begins to rely entirely on his knowledge of human nature to delve into the thought processes of the group. The spectators sense this intensifying of the situation, and adjust their interpretation of the event accordingly. What we are seeing is no longer trickery.

Such an approach uses our cultural familiarity and belief in psychological explanations to redirect our thinking to one place, while the magician is working the 'magic' below our level of awareness. In other words, most of the magic is done before the trick even starts.

This is what most impresses me about professional magicians. The slight of hand and the perceptual tricks are cool, but its the cognitive magic, the shaping of expectancies through narrative, that makes them seem so wondrous.

UPDATE: I just noticed this rather well-timed article on Wired Science entitled 'Magic Tricks Reveal Inner Workings of the Brain' that expands on the topic. Enjoy!

Link to Keith Barry TED 'brain magic' presentation.

—Vaughan.

Head in a vice:

Scientific American has an article on migraines that takes a comprehensive look at the science of this painful and hallucinatory disorder.

The piece updates the science on migraines from the traditional but oversimplified 'constricted blood vessels' explanation to explore the interplay between nerves, neurotransmitters and lifestyle.

A crucial process seems to be cortical spreading depression that may be responsible, at least in part, for both the intense pain and the aura:

Aura appears to stem from cortical spreading depression—a kind of “brainstorm” anticipated as the cause of migraine in the writings of 19th-century physician Edward Lieving. Although biologist Aristides Leão first reported the phenomenon in animals in 1944, it was experimentally linked to migraine only recently. In more technical terms, cortical spreading depression is a wave of intense nerve cell activity that spreads through an unusually large swath of the cortex (the furrowed, outer layer of the brain), especially the areas that control vision. This hyperexcitable phase is followed by a wave of widespread, and relatively prolonged, neuronal inhibition. During this inhibitory phase, the neurons are in a state of “suspended animation,” during which they cannot be excited.

Neuronal activity is controlled by a carefully synchronized flow of sodium, potassium and calcium ions across the nerve cell membrane through channels and pumps. The pumps keep resting cells high in potassium and low in sodium and calcium. A neuron “fires,” releasing neurotransmitters, when the inward flow of sodium and calcium through opened channels depolarizes the membrane—that is, when the inside of the cell becomes positively charged relative to the outside. Normally, cells then briefly hyperpolarize: they become strongly negative on the inside relative to the outside by allowing potassium ions to rush out. Hyperpolarization closes the sodium and calcium channels and returns the neurons to their resting state soon after firing. But neurons can remain excessively hyperpolarized, or inhibited, for a long time following intense stimulations.

The article is remarkably comprehensive, probably as it's written by neurologists David Dodick and John Gargus.

Link to SciAm article 'Why Migraines Strike' (via 3Q).

—Vaughan.

July 22, 2008

Through the looking glass:

The New York Times has a great article on the psychology of mirrors that shows that they're both cognitively challenging and have the power to change our social behaviour.

As a kid I spent hours puzzling over the fact that mirrors seemed to swap left and right but not up and down and it seems that there's much about mirrors that we just don't get very easily - such as judging how big our reflection will be. As it turns out, it's always half our size.

Another curious aspect is that simply the presence of a mirror in a room changes our social behaviour because it seems to make us more self-aware.

Other researchers have determined that mirrors can subtly affect human behavior, often in surprisingly positive ways. Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in nonmirrored settings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V. Bodenhausen and Alan B. Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion.

“When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing,” Dr. Bodenhausen said. “A byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.” Physical self-reflection, in other words, encourages philosophical self-reflection, a crash course in the Socratic notion that you cannot know or appreciate others until you know yourself.

Unfortunately, the article misses out one of the most fascinating scientific findings - the fact that our understanding of mirrors can be selectively impaired after brain injury.

It's called mirror agnosia and is a condition where people lose their sense of reflection.

In these cases, the patient still has intact knowledge about mirrors, they can describe what they do and how they work, but they can't seem to put it into practice.

For example, the patient stands in front of a mirror and the researcher holds a pen over the patient's shoulder and asks him to reach for it. Most people would reach backwards, people with mirror agnosia reach forwards and bang their hand into the glass.

In this study, the researchers noted that "all four patients kept complaining that the object was 'in the mirror', 'outside my reach' or 'behind the mirror'. Thus, even the patients' ability to make simple logical inferences about mirrors has been selectively warped to accommodate the strange new sensory world that they now inhabit".

Even more curious are cases of mirrored-self misidentification, a delusional variant where patients look into the mirror, see themselves, and believe it is another person.

Here's a case description from a 2001 study of a patient with the condition:

TH described his reflection as a person who was a 'dead ringer' for himself. TH frequently attempted to talk to the person, and said that as the person never replied he could only assume he had something wrong with his voice or tongue. When asked what he thought the person's personality was like, TH replied that the person had not given him any reason to be suspicious. Asked where the person lived, TH said he lived in an apartment adjoining TH's own apartment (although there was no other apartment on that block of land).

Link to NYT article 'Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes'

—Vaughan.

Five minutes with psychedelics researcher Bill Richards:

Psychologist Bill Richards studies the medical potential of the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin, the active ingredient in 'magic mushrooms'.

He's part of the research team at the respected Johns Hopkins Medical School who are studying whether psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy can help people with cancer cope with the psychological impact of their condition.

The project is a hot topic at the moment, partly because the research team are looking for volunteers with a diagnosis of cancer to take part in the pioneering study, and also because several of their recent findings have made headlines.

These have included the widely-reported results from their recent studies where participants reported that some of the psilocybin experiences remained deeply and personally meaningful, even after a year.

Bill has been a clinical psychedelics researcher since the 1960s and so has a wealth of experience with these curious compounds, and he's also kindly agreed to talk to Mind Hacks about the current pioneering research project.
 

Can you say a little about the study that's running at the moment and what sort of volunteers you need?

Following up on our first studies with healthy volunteers, we are reactivating research into the promising application of brief counseling assisted by psilocybin for persons with a diagnosis of cancer. Studies in the 1960’s and early 1970’s suggested that this intervention could decrease anxiety, depression, interpersonal isolation, fear of death, and preoccupation with pain, thus enabling persons to live whatever time remained more fully.

Volunteers for the present study need to be between the ages of 21 and 70, without personal or family histories of schizophrenia or severe mental illness, and experiencing some degree of psychological distress. Persons may be terminally ill, or in earlier stages of coping with cancer, though if there is no recent disease progression, one year since initial diagnosis is required.

More detailed information is available at www.cancer-insight.org. All participants receive medical screening and, if accepted, work with skilled professional who provides preparation, guidance during two 6-hour psilocybin sessions and assistance in the initial integration of the experiences that occur.

Clinical research with hallucinogenic drugs was effectively outlawed for many years since the 1960s. What had to happen before research like this could start again?

Before the recent rebirth of this type of research, studies continued at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center until 1977 when they became dormant due to administrative changes and different priorities. It wasn’t really “outlawed”; financial and institutional support on the State and local levels ceased.

Following a “think tank” sponsored by the Council on Spiritual Practices in 1999, Roland Griffiths, Robert Jesse, Una McCann and I designed a study with psilocybin and submitted it to an FDA committee for approval. It was approved, presumably on the basis of its scientific merits, both by the FDA and the Johns Hopkins Institutional Review Board and we began our first study in 2000.

A recent study by your research group found that some psilocybin experiences were still considered deeply significant, even spiritual, after a year. Do you think this sort of research can help us understand the neuroscience of mystical experience?

We have demonstrated that mystical experiences indistinguishable from those recorded in the history of religions can be occasioned with the skilled and respectful use of psilocybin. This now opens up a fascinating research frontier, not only into possible neurochemical correlates in brain activity, but also into correlations between the phenomenology of different states of consciousness and subsequent alterations of mental health, creativity and spirituality. Many research projects await design and implementation in the years ahead, some of which may help us better understand the mysteries of our own being.

Which other hallucinogens do you think might have therapeutic potential?

There are many molecules that appear to trigger changes in human consciousness, some that have been synthesized and catalogued by Alexander Shulgin, and in all probability many yet to be discovered. In time each needs to be carefully investigated in terms of efficacy and safety.

We have focused on one substance, psilocybin, which has been used in religious and healing rituals by indigenous people for some two thousand years and which appears to be reasonably safe when used in medical research in accordance with the guidelines we have published.

Name three under-rated things.

1. Human consciousness — that there is “something, not nothing” (Schelling)

2. The beauty of everyday sense perception (without psychedelics).

3. The power of individual acts of compassion

—Vaughan.

July 21, 2008

Oliver Sacks' Rage for Order:

Oliver Sacks' fantastic 1996 autism documentary Rage for Order is now available on Google Video, where he meets some completely remarkable people and explains some of the more curious features of the syndrome.

The programme explores the sort of interests, behaviours and talents that are associated with autism through Sacks' irresistible interest in the human condition.

It includes the artist Jessica Park, who creates the most stunningly colourful paintings of buildings with perfectly accurate star constellations in the background (that's one of her pictures on the left).

It's a really wonderful piece of television and was part of a six-part series that Sacks' made called Mind Traveller.

Sadly, the other parts of the series seem to be lost to the internet, but do get in touch if you have a copy as I would to see them.

Link to 'Rage for Order' on Google Video.

—Vaughan.

Encephalon turns gold at 50:

The 50th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has arrived, with the best of the last fortnight's mind and brain writing ably hosted by the excellent Sharp Brains.

Alvaro stars with a tongue-in-cheek request to remind people of the benefits of participating and hosting Encephalon at your blog.

If there's a particular post your proud of and want to spread the word, or you're interesting in getting exposure for your blog by hosting the high traffic festivities, just drop an email to encephalon dot host at gmail dot com.

A couple of my favourites from this edition include a completely fascinating post on the compulsive collecting of televisions reported in the medical literature, and another on the function of fearful faces.

The next edition will be hosted on the primed and ready Mouse Trap.

Link to Encephalon 50.

—Vaughan.

Values, taste perception and psychological blind spots:

An ingenious study just published in the Journal of Consumer Research has provided a striking demonstration that taste perceptions and product preferences are strongly influenced by our personal values - to the point where people who believe in the importance of social authority perceived a sausage roll labelled as vegetarian as far inferior to a 'meat' version, even though they ate the same sausage roll on both occasions.

The same result appeared whether the participants actually ate meat or vegetarian sausage rolls, and the participants couldn't reliably distinguish the two in any condition.

The study, led by psychologist Michael Allen, is a neat demonstration of how our product preferences are influenced by an interaction of our personal values, the cultural meaning of the product and its physical properties, along the lines of an earlier study that found that wine described as more expensive tastes better, even when it was no different from the same wine described as being cheaper.

Of relevance to this study is that fact that red meat has been consistently associated with social power while grains, fruits and vegetables with social equality. What this new study suggests is that these social meanings interact with our own values to affect our perception.

If you think this effect might be specific to sausages, the study conducted a similar experiment with brands of cola, finding that people who endorsed the values linked to Pepsi (excitement, enjoyment, social power and recognition) perceived a cola labelled as Pepsi as tasting better, regardless of whether it actually was the genuine article, or whether it was a budget supermarket brand.

As we've discussed previously, perhaps what's most interesting is that most consumers tend to think that they select products primarily on the basis of physical properties, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

This is the 'psychological blind spot' which most marketing is targeted at. Indeed, I've always suspected that it's the people who say "advertising doesn't affect me" who are the marketers' dream consumer, largely because they lack insight into the inescapable effects of marketing.

The study is well worth reading in full, or failing that, just the first few pages, as the introduction is a fascinating review of the psychology of product symbolism and how it affects decisions and preferences.

This research suggests that products have important social meanings that much product preference is driven by a need to manage our social appearance and identity.

It's not that people who strongly identify with the importance of social power and eat red meat, or people who identify with excitement and drink Pepsi, just say they taste better.

The taste is genuinely different for them, but only when they think they are consuming these products. Assuming the products are similar to a certain degree, a significant slice of our perception is actually driven by what we want to be the case because of the values we already hold.

Link to write-up from Medical News Today.
Link to full text of study.

—Vaughan.

July 20, 2008

Psychopharmaparenting:

Neuroanthropology has found a highly amusing video clip from the satirical US comedy show The Colbert Report on the increasing use of psychiatric drugs in children, something he dubs 'psychopharmaparenting'.

Colbert riffs on 2006 article from The New York Times that reported a five-fold increase in children being prescribed antipsychotics.

These drugs are typically not prescribed because a child is experiencing psychosis (for reasons that no-one is entirely sure of, children only rarely become psychotic) but because of behavioural problems.

One antipsychotic drug (risperidone) has been approved in some countries for children with autism who are aggressive, self-injure or have severe tantrums, but the concern is that these sorts of drugs are being used more widely to simply pacify difficult to manage children.

Methylphenidate (Ritalin) is another drug which has caused similar concerns as parents and teachers pressure doctors to prescribe the drug even for what used to be considered relatively mild problems of inattention and hyperactivity.

The official line is that these drugs are the last resort, because behavioural interventions - specific programmes that teach parents to manage children's behaviour in a more effective way - are remarkably effective with a large evidence base to back them up.

Unfortunately, despite not meddling with the brain's dopamine system to who-knows what long-term effect, they're not as well-known, not always available and require effort and learning.

Any decision to give medication involves weighing up and advantages and disadvantages, but there is always an interplay between the influence of the scientific evidence, and what has become socially acceptable.

The fact Colbert is able joke about psychopharmaparenting is a sign of how widespread the practice has become.

Link to psychopharmaparenting clip.

—Vaughan.

July 19, 2008

Cogito ergo t-shirt:

Indie t-shirt designers 410BC are channelling Descartes in their spring collection, with a brain emblazoned t-shirt that declares 'I think therefore I am'.

Not a bad shirt for $15 dollars I think you'll agree, especially if you're hip to 17th century French philosophers.

The phrase "I think therefore I am" originated because Descartes wanted to know about what sort of things existed in the world, but realised he couldn't trust his senses because they could be fooled.

He imagined the most extreme example he could think of, where an evil demon was keeping him in a Matrix-style universe in which everything he perceived was an illusion. He asked the question, if he couldn't trust his senses, what could he truly know.

Descartes came to the conclusion that he could doubt everything except the fact he was doubting and therefore concluded that his ability to doubt, and consequently his thought, was proof of his existence - summed up in has famous phrase "I think therefore I am".

In part, this also led him to believe that thought was not part of the physical universe, and that thought and matter were separate entities. In fact, he believed thoughts were part of the soul but interacted with the body through the pineal gland - a small structure which occupies a central position in the brain.

Descartes' proposal that thought and matter (or mind and brain) are separate entities is known as as Cartesian dualism and is now much derided.

One difficulty is that while few people deny that both mind and brain exist in the physical world, it's difficult, and some would say impossible, to talk about them in the same way.

For example, it's easy to answer the question 'what colour are your neurons?' but impossible to answer the question 'what colour are your thoughts?'

This causes all sorts of merry hell for cognitive scientists and leads to the rather bizarre tendency for people to think that every explanation that includes the mind needs to be reduced to brain function for it to be valid.

Philosophers, who tend to be much more able to think about these things without panicking, tend to favour what's called property dualism, which says that while we accept everything happens in the physical world, we can't always match every aspect of one level of description to another, even if both are both completely coherent on their own level.

I'm hoping that the 410BC autumn collection will have a similar t-shirt that says "I think, but that doesn't mean I believe that properties that I ascribe to my thoughts on level of mental description will necessarily be reducible to the theories of neurobiology, although I agree that the scientific endeavour to discover which properties have reliable neural correlates will be an important part of any complete theory of the human mind, bearing in mind that reduction is not an answer in itself and will have to be complemented by theories that span all levels of explanation".

However, I also think they might need a few more attractive blonde models to boost sales on that one.

Link to 410BC 'Cogito ergo sum' t-shirt (via Hide Your Arms).

—Vaughan.

On the brink of a social psychology revolution:

The Times has a brief article noting the growing influence of social psychology in government thinking and economic policy, mirroring the popular interest in a slew of new books on behavioural economics.

It's interesting that the article lists various ways in those close to the British political establishment are increasingly bringing ideas drawn from empirical social sciences in their thinking, mirroring the murmurings about the Obama team's interest in behavioural economics.

And, as we've noted here, there's now an increasing interest, causing an ongoing controversy, about the use of social scientists in the occupying military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We hear a great deal about interest and initiatives in these areas, but very little about outcome studies (although its possible that the military keep theirs secret) so I wonder whether the success of these approaches will depend on the maturity of the science in terms of how well it actually predicts changes in the real world.

Link to Times article on the 'social psychology revolution'.

—Vaughan.

July 18, 2008

2008-07-18 Spike activity:

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

One I missed before - The New York Review of Books has an extended and thoughtful review of a stack of cognitive science books and Neurophilosophy has a great commentary.

The New York Times reports on the challenges of $600-a-session patients. Interesting to note it's all described in terms of psychoanalysis - a therapy strangely ghettoed among the well-to-do.

TV producer creates a video documentary about his brain surgery for Parkinson's disease.

Neuroanthropology discusses the best way of going about studying neuroanthropology and the problems you might face from other researchers worried about this crazy new mix of neuroscience and culture.

The history of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test is covered by Advances in the History of Psychology.

Wired notes that victims of 'mind control' are to gather in Connecticut for a annual conference.

Fluoxetine for Fido. The New York Times examines the growing trend for using psychiatric drugs on pets.

To the bunkers! Channel N has a video on neurorobotics.

The BPS Research Digest finds a video discussion between psychologist Jonathan Haidt and political scientist Will Wilkinson on the psychology of morality.

Research finding memory 'chunking' in infants is covered by the excellent Not Quite Rocket Science.

SharpBrains has one of its bi-weekly round-ups of its interviews and all that's new in the world of cognitive enhancement.

More from The New York Times, this time on the commercial release of the Emotiv Systems 'brain reading' gamer's headset.

Cognitive Daily report on how playing video games can improve visual acuity.

Wall-E and and the evolution of emotion expression is discussed by Frontal Cortex.

—Vaughan.

July 17, 2008

One step beyond:

Neurophilosophy has found a fascinating black and white TV documentary on Mexican hallucinogenic mushrooms from 1961, where the presenter samples some of the psilocybin-containing fungus and reports the effects during the trip.

In the January 4th, 1961 episode of One Step Beyond, director and presenter John Newland ingests psilocybin under laboratory conditions, to investigate whether or not the hallucinogenic mushroom can enhance his abilities of extra-sensory perception.

The programme was apparently inspired by a 1959 book called The Sacred Mushroom, by parapsychologist Andrija Puharich, who is known for taking the spoon-bending fraudster Uri Geller to the United States for investigation.

As Neurophilosophy notes, this was before the dawn of the psychedelic age, and so it was unlikely that this would have been connected to drug culture as we might do today, but was likely to be viewed as a documentary on the strange ways of 'them overseas'.

It has some interesting parallels to a 1955 BBC documentary on mescaline, where the Labour MP Christopher Mayhew took a fairly stiff dose and narrated the effects ("Tubby is disappearing in time...").

The magic mushroom documentary also has some wonderfully stilted dialogue in places, and mentions that they could be used to treat mental disorder - an area which is being researched once more.

We'll have some more on this research shortly, so look out for a forthcoming interview.

Link to Neurophilosopy with documentary video.

—Vaughan.

Audio rising high illusion:

I've just found this fantastic auditory illusion after browsing through Tom's blog. It's a YouTube video but the visuals are just text, all you need to do is listen and replay.

It's like the audio equivalent of a moving spiral. It always seems to be moving up but you realise after a while it can't possibly be going anywhere. It's remarkably compelling though.

I'm afraid I don't know much about how it works, but I suspect it's a form of Shepard tone.

The Shepard tone link above is a Wikipedia page, and if you scroll down through the page there's a nice example of a continuous tone which seems to have the same effect.

The article also mentions that the effect has been used in the Muse song 'Ruled by Secrecy'.

Link to rising tone illusion (via Idiolect).
Link to Wikipedia page on the Shepard tone.

—Vaughan.

July 16, 2008

Crumbling cuckoo's nests:

Time reports that Oregon State Hospital, the psychiatric hospital used to film the Oscar-winning movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is being demolished.

It's not the hospital that Kesey based his play on, but it's interesting that even the demolition of the hospital which was the background for the movie makes big news.

The book, film and play have fascinated me for years, not least because they are still where most people get their mental images from when they think of a psychiatric hospital. Needless to say, the images are usually pretty stark.

The other image people seem to have, which I call the '12 Monkeys' scenario, is where lots of wacked out patients wearing pyjamas acts as if they're in a world of their own, while a TV set shows old cartoons in the corner.

Needless to say, modern hospital care bears little resemblance to these stereotypes and tends to go from what I call 'airport departure wards' at the worst (full of bored people, sitting around, waiting to leave) to comfortable and relaxing environments with constructive activities available and a good medical team at the best.

However, there is generally a move away from monolithic psychiatric hospitals to having psychiatric wards as part of general hospitals.

As we noted earlier this year, the sometimes beautiful buildings of these older hospitals are rapidly disappearing, often because people are uncomfortable with either the troubled past of the hospital, or with the idea of madness in general.

On a similar note, ABC Radio National's All in the Mind has just started a 3-part series, exploring the oral history of one of Australia's biggest and oldest hospitals, built in 1865.

Link to Time article 'Cuckoo's Nest Hospital to be Torn Down' (via BB).
Link to AITM on the history of Goodna Mental Hospital.

—Vaughan.

Tom Wolfe on a decade of neuroscience:

I've just got round to watching the Seed Salon discussion between novelist Tom Wolfe and neuropsychologist Michael Gazzaniga where they debate free will, criminal responsibility and the similarities in the creative processes of writers and scientists.

Wolfe is best known as the author of 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' and 'The Bonfire of the Vanities', but wrote a highly influential 1996 article for Forbes magazine titled 'Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died'.

The piece is worth re-reading now because its a look ahead to the forthcoming neuroscience revolution written 12 years ago, when the 'Decade of the Brain' initiative was only just past the half way point.

It's revealing because it describes a society still quite resistant to what we consider relatively banal in 2008 - the fact that there may be neurobiological or genetic factors to behavioural differences.

It also fortells our concerns over widespread use of methylphenidate (Ritalin) in children and the interest in a psychology of happiness, but does have a curious paragraph about the 'IQ Cap' which could apparently predict IQ to within half a standard deviation based on an EEG reading.

As far as I know, it's never been heard of since and seems to have been lost in history, presumably as it sounds a bit far fetched and probably never worked as advertised.

Link to Wolfe and Gazzaniga discussion.
Link to 'Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died'.

—Vaughan.

The future is nonlinear:

There have been some excellent articles recently on the psychology of time but one of the most fascinating is from Developing Intelligence who look at a new study that suggests our concept of time becomes nonlinear as we look into the future - in other words, not all futures are equal.

The research, led by psychologist Gal Zauberman, riffs on an effect called 'hyperbolic discounting', where immediate rewards seem more valuable than rewards in the future.

Studies have offered people, for example, £5 now, or more money in the future. Despite the fact that in economic terms they're better off waiting even for a small amount more, people tend to want considerably more money in the future to make the wait 'worth it'.

As the DevIntell article notes, this has largely been explained by impulsivity in the past, but a new study considers a radical alternative.

What if the effect is not because we're impulsive, but because our concept of time is non-linear? In other words, we are reasoning rationally but not on the basis of how much additional time there actually is, but how much longer the wait seems.

These are quite different concepts - for example, we know logically that waiting four weeks is exactly four times as long as waiting a week, but it might not feel exactly four times as bad.

The study asked participants how much extra they'd have to be paid to receive a $75 gift voucher, either in 3 months, 1 year or 3 years. They also had to mark a line to indicate how long each wait seemed, from 'Very Short' at one end to 'Very Long' at the other.

When compared against the actual time, participants seemed to show hyperbolic discounting, but when compared against the subjective judgement the discounting effect disappeared.

The study goes on to test the effect in different ways, but also added another intriguing angle - when participants were asked to estimate the duration of how long various activities would take, essentially better calibrating their subjective time with actual time, the discounting effect was reduced.

I also really recommend another recent DevIntell post on time perception, discussing how cognitive science theories are attempting to explain how we can perceive something that doesn't have any 'sensation' attached to it.

Any if you're still hungry for more time, science writer Carl Zimmer has an article in Discover Magazine about how the brain keeps track of time.

Link to DevIntell on distortions in future time perception.
pdf of full-text of study.
Link to DevIntell on time perception and time 'sensation'.
Link to Carl Zimmer's article on neuroscience of time.

—Vaughan.

July 15, 2008

Neuroscience recordings:

If the words Neuroscience Recordings make you think of depth electrodes, you may be surprised to hear its also the name of a record label specialising in techno and trance.

I am rather taken by this track, although even if techno isn't your thing, they do have this rather catching range of t-shirts.

Now if only someone would name their record label 'cognitive neuropsychology' I'd have a great excuse for wearing a geeky cognitive science t-shirt without having to admit that I'm wearing a geeky cognitive science t-shirt.

No ladies, it's not an anorak, it's a light-weight sports jacket.

Link to Neuroscience Recordings.

—Vaughan.

Visual cliff hanger:

Vimeo has some video of what looks like footage from Gibson and Walk's original 1960 'visual cliff' experiment where they tested whether infants had depth perception by attempting to get them to walk over glass plates suspended above a drop.

Unfortunately, the video doesn't fully describe the experiment, which is a pity as it was a fantastic idea.

The researchers wanted to find out whether 6 to 14 month-old infants could perceive depth. Babies are not the best conversationalists, but they do have a natural sense of danger, so the experiment is based on the idea that the babies will avoid perceived danger, even if it's completely safe.

The study put the infants, one at a time, in the middle of a table, with one side replaced by glass so you could see the 'drop'.

Their mothers would try and tempt them over both sides, and if the kids had no depth perception, the glass 'drop' wouldn't seem scary and they'd just walk straight over. Those who could see the 'drop' would avoid it.

Pretty much none of the infants wanted to walk across the 'visual cliff', suggesting that even kids of 6 months old could perceive depth.

Children younger than that generally can't crawl though, so it makes it a bit harder finding out at what age depth perception develops.

In 1973, a study by psychologist Andrew Schwartz placed five and nine-month olds on each side of the 'visual cliff' and measured their heart rate.

When placed over the glass 'drop', the five month olds typically showed no increase in heart rate, suggesting there was no danger response. This suggests depth perception probably kicks in between about five and six months old.

More recent research has shown it's a more complex picture than this, as depth perception has many parts which don't all seem to develop at the same rate, but the 'visual cliff' experiment is still widely used in psychology.

Link to video of 'visual cliff' experiment.
Link to text of original study.

—Vaughan.

July 14, 2008

Bonkersfest! strikes this Saturday:

Bonkersfest! South East London's fantastic festival of mirth and madness, kicks off this Saturday with its biggest ever event. It's also finally getting the recognition it deserves with a fantastic article in The Times and another in the New Statesman covering the upcoming celebrations.

In fact, it was also recently name dropped in a Guardian article and a story in The New York Times, although I can proudly say that we covered the mayhem back when it first started in 2006, when it was launched by the Mayor of Southwark firing a banana laden cannon.

From The Times:

So Dolly Sen, 37, an artist and writer, will spend the day trying to screw a light bulb into the sky because “the world is dark enough as it is”. There will also be a moving padded cell, a de-normalisation programme, and performance art by Bobby Baker featuring seven adults dressed as frozen peas.

Does it sound a bit crazy? Well, that’s the point. “There’s a history of many artists and writers being diagnosed with mental illness,” says Baker. “People who were unusual and different used to be more celebrated and accommodated, but now there’s a tremendous amount of fear. I feel people like me have a sensitivity and creativity that is very valuable, as well as an enormous sense of humour about the whole thing.”

The irreverent tone and celebration of all things outside the norm make it quite different from your average mental health event - even if the rock bands, circus performers and techno DJs are also a giveaway.

Bonkersfest! has just got better each time and always seems to be blessed by wonderful weather and great performers (although, I have to say, I did almost evaporate waiting for John Hegley to come on stage in a rather warm marquee last year).

It's organised by Creative Routes, a grass roots arts association for people with mental health difficulties, who are one of the gems of South London.

It happens on Camberwell Green (not the site of the original Bedlam Hospital, as the NYT seemed to think) but still only two minutes walk from the Maudsley Hospital - the spiritual home of British psychiatry.

The Times article also features Liz Spikol, whose name I'm sure you'll recognise if you're a regular visitor to Mind Hacks.

Also, one of the organisers of Bonkersfest! changed her name by deed poll to Sarah Tonin, and you gotta respect that.

Link to Bonkersfest! website.
Link to article in The Times.
Link to article in the New Statesman.

—Vaughan.

Facebook ate my psychiatrist:

Sometimes I just despair. I almost understand it when the media gets its knickers in a twist about 'internet addiction' and similar nonsense, because most outlets never been great at separating the wheat from the chaff. But it beggars beliefs why otherwise respectable professionals can spout similar drivel when they're supposed to be trained to deal with the evidence.

Case in point. At the recent Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Dr Himanshu Tyagi gave a widely reported talk where he said social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace could damage young people's relationships and make them more susceptible to suicide, despite the evidence suggesting exactly the opposite.

On this occasion, the icing on the cake was provided by the Royal College, who for some reason decided to press release this scandalous scaremongering.

I shall reproduce the critical paragraph below, because it pushes so many media panic buttons you'd think it was from one of the UK tabloids:

”This is the age group involved with the Bridgend suicides and what many of these young people had in common was their use of Internet to communicate. It's a world where everything moves fast and changes all the time, where relationships are quickly disposed at the click of a mouse, where you can delete your profile if you don't like it and swap an unacceptable identity in the blink of an eye for one that is more acceptable,” said Dr Tyagi. “People used to the quick pace of online social networking may soon find the real world boring and unstimulating, potentially leading to more extreme behaviour to get that sense.

”It may be possible that young people who have no experience of a world without online societies put less value on their real world identities and can therefore be at risk in their real lives, perhaps more vulnerable to impulsive behaviour or even suicide. This is definitely a line of reasoning that warrants more investigation and research.”

So what evidence is there that Facebook damages social relationships? None. In fact, less than none because the little amount of existing research suggests it actually encourages social cohesion.

One recent study published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication found exactly this and noted that "students reporting low satisfaction and low self-esteem appeared to gain in bridging social capital if they used Facebook more intensely".

Another study found that students use Facebook to enhance relationships they already formed in real life. One study did find that using such sites could lower self-esteem, but only when (wait for it) users got negative feedback from others, it boosted self-esteem when they got positive feedback.

Furthermore, the fact that Tyagi and the Royal College are allowing a link to be made with a spate of suicides in Bridgend is in really bad taste.

Bridgend is a county in South Wales that has suffered a number of suicides of young people during the last year, and the UK tabloids initially ran scare stories about 'internet suicide cults' because almost all of them used social networking sites.

I'm sure you've already picked up on the flawed logic here, and, indeed, this theory was quickly dismissed by the authorities (presumably alongside the 'eats crisps' and 'wears jeans' suicide cult theories).

So goodness knows why the Royal College are promoting this tasteless insinuation alongside a load of evidence-free and frankly sensationalist drivel.

Oh, did I mention that Tyagi is a partner in a large online medical education website for doctors?

Link to Facebook study.

—Vaughan.

Psychiatrists' association faces drug funding probe:

After a number of investigations into the under-disclosure of drug industry earnings by top psychiatry researchers, The New York Times reports that US Senator Charles Grassley is aiming at the mothership of American psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association.

Grassley is a Republican senator who has been pushing for transparency in the drug industry for some time and has particularly focused on drug payments to researchers and clinicians in recent months.

He's been behind some recent high profile investigations which have indicated that some of America's most influential psychiatrists have been receiving millions of dollars in undisclosed payments.

Grassley has recently focussed his attention on the APA itself, which, according to the NYT piece got about $20 million from the drug industry in 2006. These 2006 figures are the most recent, however, as the full details of the association's funding are not made public.

The issue is not solely one about funding large organisations or the high flying opinion-leaders though.

Soft money is awash throughout the profession with drug company bonuses being routinely paid to individual psychiatrists who agree to talk on behalf of the company, while those that don't take hard cash are likely to be taken out for expensive meals, given all expenses trips to plush conferences and given other barely-concealed incentives.

However, it is clear that this is not solely a problem with psychiatrists, as patient groups are often heavily funded by the drug industry, to the point where they've been described as being "perilously close to becoming extensions of pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments".

Link to NYT article on scrutiny of APA funding (via Furious Seasons).

—Vaughan.

July 13, 2008

Punk rock pogo robots:

In early July, London's Institute of Contemporary Arts hosted three nights of punk rock chaos with a difference, some of the audience were artificially intelligent robots designed to pogo when they recognised punk music being played.

The project was led by artist Fiddian Warman who created the headlining band, Neurotic and the PVC's for the event, while collaborating on the robot design with computational biologist Peter McOwan and neurologist Barry Gibb.

Actually, this is not the first time we've had to resist making a Bee Gees joke about Dr Gibb, as we covered some of the media (over)excitement about a bit in his book The Rough Guide to the Brain last year.

The website for the project is fantastic and has lots of details about the project including a bit about the design of the neural network built and trained to recognise punk rock.

BBC News has some great video of the gigs, and the band even has its own MySpace page with some of the tracks ready for listening (which are actually pretty good).

Link to Neurotic and the pogoing robots website.
Link to BBC News story and video.
Link to Neurotic band MySpace page.

—Vaughan.

July 11, 2008

2008-07-11 Spike activity:

Some slightly belated links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Ben Goldacre's Bad Science follows up the piece on the 'mobile network causes suicide' nonsense, plus an interesting additional section on the plausibility effect.

Not Quite Rocket Science discusses the 'Lady Macbeth effect' and how physical cleanliness moral cleanliness are linked.

The recent study on mapping the brain's white matter network is discussed in a short video by Scientific American.

The Boston Globe has an article about the recovery of child psychologist Seymour Papert, who suffered a serious brain injury 18 months ago.

My Mind on Books lists some forthcoming cognitive psychology books for 2008.

A career in forensic psychology is discussed by US psychologist Stephen Diamond.

The science of how melody and harmony combine to produce music is covered by Seed Magazine.

The New York Times reviews the debut novel of medic Rivka Galchen which seems to be about the Capgras delusion.

Better golfers see bigger holes according to research covered by PsyBlog.

Neuroanthropology looks at the work of anthropologist Felicitas Goodman on the connection between trance states and body posture which has some interesting parallels between work on hypnotisability and body posture.

Genes implicated in learning may also be linked to autism, reports Scientific American.

The Situationist has a video of Sam Gosling discussing his new book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.

Call-Me-Kenneth prototype the Care-o-Bot is profiled by the AI and Robots blog.

The Neurocritic discovers the newly launched photoshopped 'Journal of Speed Dating Studies'. No, really. No, not at all it seems!

—Vaughan.

July 10, 2008

United States of Analgesia:

DrugMonkey has alerted to me an interactive map of the USA which displays rates of prescription drug abuse across all 50 states.

You can select the year up the top, the drug of abuse on the left-hand side, and point the mouse at a particular state to get the details.

It's part of an investigation by the paper into why so many of these drugs are being used illicitly, and why Nevada, the state in which Las Vegas resides, seems to have one of the highest rates of abuse.

All the drugs are opioids and the maps on the right show the rates of consumption for oxycodone, a drug nicknamed 'hillbilly heroin'.

You can see how the 2000 map clearly shows the highest rates of consumption in the 'hillbilly' areas across the Appalachian Mountains, although by 2006 the West Coast has caught up and most of the rest of the country seem to have got into the painkiller habit.

Link to interactive drug map.
Link to Las Vegas Sun series on prescription drug abuse.

—Vaughan.

Cat psychology (no, really):

I just found this curious empirical study, published last year in the academic journal Psychological Reports, on the personality structure of domestic cats.

The study analysed owner ratings and found four underlying components of cat personality.

Personality in domestic cats.

Psychol Rep. 2007 Feb;100(1):27-9.

Lee CM, Ryan JJ, Kreiner DS.

Personality ratings of 196 cats were made by their owners using a 5-point Likert scale anchored by 1: not at all and 5: a great deal with 12 items: timid, friendly, curious, sociable, obedient, clever, protective, active, independent, aggressive, bad-tempered, and emotional. A principal components analysis with varimax rotation identified three intepretable components. Component I had high loadings by active, clever, curious, and sociable. Component II had high loadings by emotional, friendly, and protective, Component III by aggressive and bad-tempered, and Component IV by timid. Sex was not associated with any component, but age showed a weak negative correlation with Component I. Older animals were rated less social and curious than younger animals.

How long before we start having 'personality disorder' for domestic cats I wonder. Cat psychiatrists, start your engines.

Link to PubMed entry for paper.

—Vaughan.

July 09, 2008

Mental illness: in with the intron crowd:

Today's Nature has an excellent feature article on the heated scientific debates over why its so hard to link genes to specific mental illnesses.

Genetics is a complex business, but psychiatric genetics even more so, because it attempts to find links between two completely different levels of description.

Genes are defined on the neurobiological level, while psychiatric diagnoses are defined on the phenomenological level - in other words, verbal descriptions of behaviour, or verbal descriptions of what it is like to have certain mental states.

There is no guarantee, and in many people's opinion, probably no likelihood, that these 'what it is like' descriptions actually clearly demarcate distinct processes at the biological level.

It's a bit like classifying people as heavy metal fans if they have five or more heavy metal albums.

By definition, there's a biological difference between people who like heavy metal and those who don't, but it could be a whole number of distinct differences at the level of brain function which are all just recognised as 'being a heavy metal fan' in day-to-day life.

Actually, psychiatric diagnosis has an additional problem, in that for some diagnoses, the same classification can be made when the people don't share any symptoms. For example, two people could be classified as having schizophrenia / being a heavy metal fan, when they have no symptoms / albums in common.

Some psychiatric geneticists just argue that we don't have enough data yet, because it seems that when connecting genes to psychology each gene contributes very little and the effect is when the influence of many small effect genes add up and interact.

Others argue that we should look for effects on 'endophenotypes' - the cognitive building blocks of more complex mental life. So instead of trying to connect genes to a collection of 'what it is like' experiences, we look at how genes influence neuropsychological processes - such as the mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex that control attention.

Increasingly, some researchers are starting to suggest that the genetic results show that existing psychiatric classifications are invalid, and that we should rethink them as new data comes in.

One thing psychiatry has traditionally been very bad at though, is refining diagnoses on the basis of lab studies.

Definitions are often revised to make them statistically more reliable (i.e. so people can reliably agree what is and what isn't a particular diagnosis), but this is not the same as having something which is a good basis for scientific enquiry.

Unfortunately, psychiatry is (ironically) a bit too emotionally attached to the traditional diagnostic categories because diagnosis is such a core part of what psychiatrists do.

Anyway, the Nature piece is an excellent guide to the debate on whether we should be attempting to link genes to the neuropsychology of mental disorder.

Link to article 'Psychiatric genetics: The brains of the family'.

—Vaughan.

Imagine all the people:

The BPS Research Digest covers an intriguing study that found that imagining friends, parents, and romantic partners differently affected how we rate ourselves on personality measures.

The study suggests that being primed with certain sorts of relationship seems to alter either our personality, or how we perceive our personal characteristics.

Dozens of female university students were led to believe they were participating in an investigation into the effect of visualisation on heart rate, with the appropriate medical paraphernalia in place to make the story more convincing.

The students were asked to visualise a range of fairly mundane items or experiences and then at the end they were asked to visualise in detail either one of their parents, a recent romantic partner, or a friend. Afterwards they completed a range of personality and self-esteem tests. Post-experimental debriefing confirmed they hadn't guessed the true purpose of the study.

Students who visualised a parent subsequently rated themselves as less sensual, adventurous, dominant, extraverted and industrious, than did students asked to visualise a friend or romantic partner, consistent with the idea that people revert to a more submissive "child role" with their parents.

The paper itself doesn't mention it, but the study has some striking relevance to rather confusingly named 'object relations theory', which could be much more clearly named 'human relations theory'.

It's a development of a Freudian idea, but instead of suggesting that sex and aggression are the core drives which shape our psychological landscape, it suggests, rather more sensibly, that relationships are the main factor that influence who we are.

In fact, it suggests that the 'self' is malleable and tends to be defined in terms of the people we interact with.

One of the genuinely useful legacies of psychoanalytically-inspired psychology has been the focus on the emotional interaction between people as an important shaping force in how we think and behave.

Most of Freud's original (lets be polite and say) 'kookiness' has been stripped away, which leaves us with an approach that is often both empirically testable and supported by scientific studies.

For example, psychologist Susan Anderson has done a huge amount of experimental research on 'transference', where feelings from one relationship affect another because the two people are perceived as similar in some way.

Link to BPSRD article 'Mind who you think of'.

—Vaughan.

Interrupting the final curtain:

One of the myths of suicide is that if a person wants to kill themselves, they'll always find a way. While this can occur in some cases, evidence that making methods of self-harm less accessible can reduce the suicide rate suggests that deaths can be prevented with simple safety measures.

The New York Times has a thought-provoking article on exactly this topic looking at how, particularly impulsive suicides, can be prevented.

What makes looking at jumping suicides potentially instructive is that it is a method associated with a very high degree of impulsivity, and its victims often display few of the classic warning signs associated with suicidal behavior. In fact, jumpers have a lower history of prior suicide attempts, diagnosed mental illness (with the exception of schizophrenia) or drug and alcohol abuse than is found among those who die by less lethal methods, like taking pills or poison. Instead, many who choose this method seem to be drawn by a set of environmental cues that, together, offer three crucial ingredients: ease, speed and the certainty of death.

The NYT article focuses on jumping and firearms and how erecting barriers and storing guns in locked boxes are effective preventative measures.

However, if you want a flavour of really how simple the safety measures need to be to make a difference to suicide rate, research has found that putting pills in blister packs reduces lethal overdoses.

It's amazing if you think about it, simply making it necessary to pop each pill out of its plastic packaging rather than tipping them out of a bottle means less people kill themselves.

The difference is likely a matter of minutes, but it gives time for brief impulsive urges to pass, and every popped pill requires a single deliberate action towards suicide that gives a chance for the distressed person to reconsider. Obviously, many do.

The article merits a read in full, and Liz Spikol has an interesting video commentary on the piece that's also well-worth checking out.

Link to NYT article 'The Urge to End It All'.
Link to Liz Spikol on 'Is Suicide Preventable?'.

—Vaughan.

July 08, 2008

Neurowarfare and the modern Rogue Trooper:

Wired has picked up on a US military report that warns of the threat posed by neuro-enhanced enemy soldiers, just released by the "Pentagon's most prestigious scientific advisory panel".

The full report is available online as a pdf file, and covers how pharmaceuticals and brain-computer interfaces could be used by enemies of the US to create hordes of sleep-resistant super-intelligent neurosoldiers who can kill at the speed of thought.

Obviously, I paraphrase, but it's interesting that the report is not your usual blue-sky speculation. It actually covers the science in considerable detail.

It also discusses cultural attitudes to cognitive and brain enhancements of various sorts, and how this might affect how and why they might be used.

Non-medical applications of the advances of neuroscience research and medical technology also pose the potential for use by adversaries. In this context, we must consider the possibility that uses that we would consider unacceptable could be developed or applied either by a state-adversary, or by less-easily identified terrorist groups. In the following, we consider first the issues of what types of human performance modification might alter a military balance, and how those issues can be evaluated. We then address two broad areas where there are significant, and highly publicized, advances in human performance modification. These are the areas of brain plasticity (permanently changing the function of an individual’s brain, either by training or by pharmaceuticals), and the area of brain-computer interface (augmenting normal performance via an external device directly linked to the nervous system).

Link to Wired write-up.
pdf of report.

—Vaughan.

The ambiguous gift of sign names:

BBC Ouch! magazine has a completely fascinating article on sign names in the deaf community. They are like mandatory formal nicknames decided by a consensus of your peers that reflect something distinctive about you.

The article describes how assigning and accepting one can be a tricky social negotiation with some having to mount campaigns against unwanted sign names.

Sign names are a weird and wonderful thing, where your average hearing names like Matt, Jack or Jane look positively plain.

But before you get too excited about the possibility of throwing your dull, former identity away, let me point something out: you don’t get to choose your sign name. You don’t even get power of veto on it. It is given to you.

It makes sense. If deaf people could choose their name, you'd get loads of guys wandering around calling themselves Stud, Beer Belly or Jackie Chan's Lovechild. Women would probably call themselves Lip Gloss, Model or Soft Hair. I'm generalising, and stereotyping, but you get my point.

When a sign name is given to you, it's special. A bit like losing your deaf virginity. It’s thought up after an intense period of observation, when people have worked out firstly whether they like you enough to give you one (a sign name, that is), and they've taken all your habits and mannerisms into account to find a name that best sums you up.

I have to say, I find watching sign language completely enthralling. It always seems like a wonderful form of cognitive ballet to me.

Obviously, it has its practical uses to, as demonstrated by this video tutorial on how to flirt using sign language.

Link to article on the social complexities of sign names (via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

July 07, 2008

Encephalon 49 evolves:

The 49th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just appeared online, this time hosted by Neuroscientifically Challenged - a blog that's new to me but looks very good.

A couple of my favourites include a sceptical look at gene therapy in psychiatry and an interesting overview of a theory of how the brain and culture co-evolved.

There's much more where that came from so check it out for the last fortnight's highlights.

Link to Encephalon 49.

—Vaughan.

Lisa Appignanesi on Women and the Mind Doctors:

Bookslut has a fantastic interview with writer and historian Lisa Appignanesi who wrote the recently published and well-received history of women and madness Mad, Bad, and Sad.

The book has been praised for being a remarkably balanced account in a field which tends toward the polemical, and for carefully examining the interaction between culture and our experience of mental distress.

...it became quite clear for me that there are rather strict rules about how to behave when you're crazy in any given epoch, as Ian Hacking has so pithily put it. There are ways in which the cultural understanding of mind and body at any given time plays into the nature of diagnoses, along with historical and sociocultural forces. The way in which we express our discomforts, dissatisfactions, excesses, madnesses is through those particular understandings. So symptoms will feed into diagnoses, diagnoses will feed back on symptoms. Institutional forms, media, and everything else all comes into play, and you end up having a model, or "most-expressed" disease for any given period.

So, for example, towards the late part of the nineteenth century, many explanations had to do with nerves, and you had a disease called neurasthenia, which actually covers a great gamut of problems and disorders. Following on that you have hysteria, that very interesting set of ways of behaving which actually shows women suffering from anesthesia -- they can't feel their skin -- and various forms of paralyses and mutisms. In a way, all of these reflect the kinds of things that are wanted of women in that period, and also the kinds of prompts fed to them as they live their condition. And so once a particular kind of liberty for women comes into play, hysteria begins to alter, to change into other things.

Today we have one of the dominant ways for women to express discomfort with who they are is to develop a body illness such as anorexia or bulimia. Many things come into play, but one of them is that we live in an increasingly virtual age, where the body itself is problematic. Body disorders are one way of expressing our misery. So, yes, there's a cultural expression to symptoms and indeed diagnoses.

The interview is also interesting for a brief outburst of resentment stemming from the current state of UK mental health politics.

The UK government is in the process of spending £300 million on making psychological therapies widely available on the National Health Service. Not unsurprisingly, it has focused its money on therapies which have been proven to be effective through randomised controlled trials.

As cognitive behavioural therapy has the most evidence for its effectiveness most (although not all) of the money is going to fund CBT. Needless to say, this has caused all sorts of hell from the tribes of mental health.

This month's British Journal of Psychiatry has an article entitled "Wake-up call for British psychiatry" where some of Britain's leading psychiatrists argue that this money is being spent to the detriment of medical services.

I think this is a valid point. It's an argument over which evidence-based treatments the government should spend its money on. However, some of the strongest attacks have come from other schools of therapy, especially those evidence-shy Freudians.

Appignanesi, chair of the trustees of the Freud Museum, manages a wonderfully misinformed put down. Apparently CBT is being touted as:

a cure-all for everything. And of course it's not. It's merely a form of self-control over the mind. It obviously helps adolescents to order their lives in some ways, but may not help much more than that, and to think of it as a cure-all is not going to help many people. It may make an intervention in the first instance but it won't work over the longer term

In fact, it's being funded to treat conditions in adults for which there is evidence for its effectiveness, and there is good evidence that it has lasting long-term beneficial effects, particularly for depression.

In the same vein, Mick Cooper, a leading existential psychotherapist, recently issued a widely reported statement saying the idea that CBT is more effective is a 'myth' because that while there had been more studies on CBT, but that did not necessarily mean it was more effective than other types of therapy.

Unfortunately, it seems he can't distinguish between 'more evidence for its effectiveness' and 'more effective', which, of course, are quite different.

To get any particular therapy funded, it just needs research to show its effectiveness. It's a fairly straightforward 'put up or shut up' situation.

Of course, the issue of who funds the research is another matter, but as psychoanalysis largely survives through the private patronage of the upper middle classes and aristocracy in the UK (I kid you not), you would think it shouldn't be too hard to get someone to fund the studies.

Link to Lisa Appignanesi interview.

—Vaughan.

July 06, 2008

The economics of a prisoner of war camp:

R.A. Radford was an economist taken prisoner during World War Two who later wrote about the complex cigarette-based economy that thrived in the POW camps in a fascinating 1945 article.

You can also read it online as a pdf if you want to see it in its original type-print glory, which I have to say, does rather add to the atmosphere it so wonderfully evokes.

It's a vivid insight into the social organisation of the camps, and just the descriptions of the market pressures are quite interesting in themselves.

For example, the standard currency was a cigarette, but heavy air raids meant people would smoke more, presumably owing to stress, thereby altering the value of the currency through scarcity.

The camp residents imposed trade regulations, had trading areas, and some even developed businesses:

Around D-Day, food and cigarettes were plentiful, business was brisk and the camp in an optimistic mood. Consequently the Entertainments Committee felt the moment opportune to launch a restaurant, where food and hot drinks were sold while a band and variety turns performed. Earlier experiments, both public and private, had pointed the way, and the scheme was a great success.

Food was bought at market prices to provide the meals and the small profits were devoted to a reserve fund and used to bribe Germans to provide grease-paints and other necessities for the camp theatre. Originally meals were sold for cigarettes but this meant that the whole scheme was vulnerable to the deflationary waves, and furthermore heavy smokers were unlikely to attend much. The whole success of the scheme depended on an adequate amount of food being offered for sale in the normal manner.

To increase and facilitate trade, and to stimulate supplies and customers therefore and secondarily to avoid the worst effects of deflation when it should come, a paper currency was organised by the Restaurant and the Shop.

It's completely readable even if you're not familiar with economics and is a captivating window into POW camp society as seen through the eyes of a monetary expert.

Link to article (via MeFi).
pdf of article.

—Vaughan.

July 05, 2008

Our time is up:

Writer director Rob Pearlstein created a completely endearing 15 minute short film called Our Time is Up about a therapist who discovers he has six weeks to live. It's wonderfully produced and even got nominated for an Oscar in 2006.

To be fair, it's initially a bit reliant on some rather tired clichés about patients and therapists, but despite itself, it's disarmingly warm and funny.

The writing is excellent, wrapping up what could have been a series of short sketches into a gently poignant and thought-provoking story.

Link to 'Our Time is Up' on YouTube.
Link to the film's website.

—Vaughan.

July 04, 2008

Selling the 'battle of the sexes':

Slate has just finished an excellent five-part series on two recent books which have attempted to paint men and women as vastly different in mind, brain and behaviour by exaggerating the science of sex difference.

The books in question are Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain and Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox.

Both have been influential because the authors write from an explicitly feminist angle, and both claim to be drawing on the latest neuroscience, suggesting that they're overthrowing the mushy political correctness of "everyone is the same".

The Slate series pulls no punches though, saying "Ultimately, the evangelists aren't really daring to be politically incorrect. They're peddling one-sidedness, sprinkled with scientific hyperbole."

Of course, there are cognitive differences between men and women, but the punchline of almost all sex difference research is that the extent of the difference between any two individuals, be they male or female, tends to vastly outweigh the average difference between the sexes.

Furthermore, while some of these books suggest the differences are innate many studies have found the differences change markedly over time and are influenced by cultural or social factors.

The series is well-researched, easy to digest and looks at the areas of communication, empathy, maths ability and development during childhood. It's also accompanied by a three-part video discussion, which tackles similar issues.

Slate have been doing a great job of getting some accessible, level-headed neuroscience out there recently, and this is another great example. Good work science writer Amanda Schaffer.

Link to Slate series on 'The Sex Difference Evangelists'.

—Vaughan.

Brain twister:

In 1941, brain specialist Russell Brain published an article about the brain in the brain science journal Brain. Owing to Brain's extensive work on the brain, he later became editor of Brain. His work treating brain disorders and his editorship of Brain were some of the reasons he was made Baron Brain, in 1962.

Last year, Brain published a tribute to Brain's brain article in Brain, owing to its massive impact on our understanding of the brain.

It was written by Alastair Compston.

—Vaughan.

2008-07-04 Spike activity:

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

Scientific American looks at the neuroscience of dance, and includes one of my favourite studies on ballet dancers and capoeira artists.

War on Drugs bulletin: a World Health Organisation study finds the USA leads the world, by quite a wide margin, in per capita consumption of illegal drugs. Globally, there seems no relation between drug consumption and legal restriction. $500 billion well spent then.

Sharp Brains rounds up some of their recent brain enhancement articles by the SB team and guest scientists.

Separated at birth: celebrity psychologists Linda Papadopoulos and Robi Ludwig. That's just spooky isn't it?

A 2005 paper in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis reports on a man with phantom limb who finds it involuntarily responds to hypnotic suggestions.

The Neurocritic finds the 'watermelon works like viagra' nonsense is, well, nonsense.

The NYT Freakanomics blog has a fascinating piece on why people lie on social welfare applications, in the opposite direction than you'd think.

From deceiving others to a great piece on self-deception, in the International Herald Tribune.

Mixing Memory is doing an excellent in-depth review of Lakoff's new book 'The Political Mind'. Just check the blog and look for the past pieces and forthcoming updates.

Cypress Hill vindicated! Cognitive Daily reports on a study finding that high-pitched voices are generally rated as more attractive.

The BPS Research Digest tracks down a fascinating book on the history and philosophy of jokes.

Enhancing your cognitive ability with electricity makes a comeback. Technology Review looks at transcranial direct current stimulation.

Developing Intelligence has another fascinating piece - this time on how the cognitive benefits of meditation are likely to be available to everyone.

The excellent Advances in the History of Psychology finds a interesting paper on a seemingly apocryphal 1868 dust-up between Paul Broca and John Hughlings Jackson.

—Vaughan.

July 03, 2008

Push the button: Milgram rides again:

The New York Times has a good article on some recent replications of Milgram's infamous conformity experiment where he ordered participants to give what they thought were potentially lethal shocks to an actor pretending to scream in pain.

They're not quite replications, because Milgram's experiment as it was actually run is considered unethical, but they're pretty close and the results are frighteningly similar.

There's also an interesting twist in one of the studies, that suggests people who go on to give the more dangerous shocks think about responsibility differently, assuming they are not responsible because they're being 'ordered'.

In the other paper, due out in the journal American Psychologist, a professor at Santa Clara University replicates part of the Milgram studies — stopping at 150 volts, the critical juncture at which the subject cries out to stop — to see whether people today would still obey. Ethics committees bar researchers from pushing subjects through to an imaginary 450 volts, as Milgram did.

The answer was yes. Once again, more than half the participants agreed to proceed with the experiment past the 150-volt mark. Jerry M. Burger, the author, interviewed the participants afterward and found that those who stopped generally believed themselves to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to hold the experimenter accountable. That is, the Milgram work also demonstrated individual differences in perceptions of accountability — of who’s on the hook for what.

I recommend the picture on Jerry Burger's webpage. I swear he must of practised that movie villain grin especially for the Milgram replications.

Link to NYT article 'Would I Pull That Switch?'

—Vaughan.

July 02, 2008

Impossible experiments:

Psychology Today have asked a group of leading thinkers to discuss their 'impossible experiment', if the impractical, unethical or unattainable was not an obstacle to the ultimate mind and brain study.

Presumably riffing on the BPS Research Digests' search for the 'most important psychology experiment that's never been done', they've gathered proposals that involve everything from brain swapping to behavioural mega-economics.

My favourite is from psychologist Bella DePaulo who has come up with a cunning way of studying the psychological effects of marriage:

I'd like to take couples who are living together and randomly assign half of them to marry and the others to stay unmarried. Then we could really know something about the implications of co-habitation vs. marriage. More outrageously, take people who are not in a serious romantic relationship, and assign half of them, at random, to marry. Single people are randomly assigned to a spouse who is chosen at random, or to a spouse who fits their description of their perfect partner, or to stay single. Who do you think would end up the happiest a decade later? Same for divorce. If married parents are already at each other's throats, is it better for the children if they divorce, or stay together? Randomly assign half of them to divorce, and half to stay together; then we'll see. Now take married couples who say they are happy and are not considering divorce. Randomly assign half of them to divorce! Now who will be happier ten years hence?

There's plenty more blue sky thinking, and a curious video involving a mannequin.

Link to 'Impossible Experiments'.

—Vaughan.

What is it like to drill a hole in your head?:

Neurophilosophy has secured an interview Heather Perry, a lady who has drilled a hole through her own skull as part of a self-treppaning ritual, and is asking readers to suggest questions.

Treppaning is an ancient art but for obvious reasons, it's rarely done these days except during brain surgery.

Nevertheless, a dedicated band of devotees argue it has spiritual and psychological benefits.

I have to admit, I'm more than a little sceptical of these benefits, but I'd be fascinated to hear from anyone whose had it done.

So if you've got any burning questions, head on over to Neurophilosophy and Mo will select the best ones from the comments to put to Heather.

Link to Neurophilosophy call for trepanning questions.

—Vaughan.

Connected to the highways of the brain:

A fantastic new study which looked at the 'connectedness' of the human brain has identified which aspects of the underlying network are the most important routes of communication.

The research was led by neuroscientist Patric Hagmann and combines brain imaging with network mathematics to not only visualise the brain's network but also to understand which are the most important hubs and connections.

The study used diffusion spectrum imaging or DSI to map out the white matter wiring of the brain in five healthy individuals.

It's a type of diffusion MRI that identifies water molecules and tracks how they move. In a glass of water, water molecules will move randomly, but when trapped inside nerve fibres, they move along the length of the fibre, allowing maps to be created from the average paths of the moving molecules.

The researchers then took the maps of fibres, as illustrated by the top image, divided the brain up into sections, and created a simplified network map, shown in the bottom image, which allowed them to mathematically test how connected the different areas were.

They used network theory, more typically used in social network analysis, which allows mathematical measures of network properties.

The researchers calculated which areas were the most connected to the rest of the network in terms of connections going directly in and out of the area, but also which areas were the most strategically important 'hubs'.

This meant the researchers could identify areas of the cortex that are the most highly connected and highly important, forming a structural core of the human brain.

You can see two of the maps on the right. The one in red illustrates which brain areas are the most highly connected. You can see it's the area at the top and back of the brain. As you can see better on the original image, its very centrally located, like a neural mohawk.

The image in blue on the right shows the network 'backbone', the information highways of the brain.

What's perhaps most interesting it that the most connected brain areas are many of those which are more active when we're at rest, compared to when we're engaged in a mental task that requires concentration and effort.

This has been dubbed the 'default network' in the scientific literature, and, rather annoyingly, the 'daydreaming network' by the popular press.

It's not entirely clear what the network is for, with some studies directly linked it to 'stimulus independent thought' (yes, daydreaming), while others more explicitly define it as internally focused, rather than externally focused thought and cognition.

Unfortunately, most cognitive neuroscience experiments work by measuring the effect of tasks on brain function, so a brain network which seems to be switched off by any sort of task is quite hard to study. A recent study found that even the noise of the brain scanner affects it.

Link to PLoS Biology article on brain connectivity.
Link to write-up from The New York Times.
Link to write-up from Neurophilosophy.
Link to write-up from Science News.

—Vaughan.

July 01, 2008

Clutter press:

For those wanting an update on the 'phone network causes suicide' nonsense that inexplicably made it onto the front page on a national newspaper, Ben Goldacre over at Bad Science contacted the person behind the story who apparently claims to have 'lost' the data behind the nonsensical claims.

I contacted Dr Coghill, since his work is now a matter of great public concern, and it is vital his evidence can be properly assessed. He was unable to give me the data. No paper has been published. He himself would not describe the work as a “study”. There are no statistics presented on it, and I cannot see the raw figures. In fact Dr Coghill tells me he has lost the figures. Despite its potentially massive public health importance, Dr Coghill is sadly unable to make his material assessable.

The claims didn't even make sense as they were reported, and the fact this sort of rubbish managed to get on the front page of a paper is quite shocking.

Bad Science does a great job of picking up on all the bizarre angles of this 'funny if it wasn't so influential' piece of headline scaremongering.

Link to Bad Science on Coghill nonsense.

—Vaughan.

Intuitions about phenomenal consciousness:

Illustrating how this 'experimental philosophy' idea has really struck a chord, Scientific American Mind has an article on our intuitions about whether things can have mental states, whether that be animals, humans, machines or corporations.

The piece is by philosopher Joshua Kobe and contains lots of fascinating examples of how we tend to be comfortable attributing mental states likes 'beliefs' to corporations, but not emotions.

The same goes for robots, it turns out, but one key factor seems to be not what we think about its thinking 'machinery' but how human the body seems.

In one of Huebner’s studies [pdf], for example, subjects were told about a robot who acted exactly like a human being and asked what mental states that robot might be capable of having. Strikingly, the study revealed exactly the same asymmetry we saw above in the case of corporations.

Subjects were willing to say:
• It believes that triangles have three sides.
But they were not willing to say:
• It feels happy when it gets what it wants.

Here again, we see a willingness to ascribe certain kinds of mental states, but not to ascribe states that require phenomenal consciousness. Interestingly enough, this tendency does not seem to be due entirely to the fact that a CPU, instead of an ordinary human brain, controls the robot. Even controlling in the experiment for whether the creature had a CPU or a brain, subjects were more likely to ascribe phenomenal consciousness when the creature had a body that made it look like a human being.

Link to 'Can a Robot, an Insect or God Be Aware?'
pdf of draft Huebner paper.

—Vaughan.

Dan Gilbert on the importance of social psychology:

Dan Gilbert has a brief interview in this month's (paywalled) Psychologist magazine. From which the following nugget of wisdom:

Psychologists have a penchant for irrational exuberances, and whenever we discover something new we feel the need to discard everything old. Social psychology is the exception. We kept cognition alive during the behaviourist revolution that denied it, we kept emotion alive during the cognitive revolution that ignored it, and today we are keeping behaviour alive as the neuroscience revolution steams on and threatens to make it irrelevant. But psychological revolutions inevitably collapse under their own weight and psychologists start hunting for all the babies they tossed out with the bathwater. Social psychology is where they typically go to find them. So the challenge for social psychologists watching yet another revolution that promises to leave them in the dustbin of history is to remember that we’ve outlived every revolutionary who has ever pronounced us obsolete.

Link Gilbert Lab
Link Psychologist Magazine (sorry, subscribers only, but you can browse issues older than six months for free)

—tom.