August 30, 2008

Through a lab darkly:

Cognitive scientists should be explorers of the mind, forging a path through the chaotic world of everyday life before even thinking of retreating to the lab, according to a critical article in the latest edition of the British Journal of Psychology.

Cognitive science often works like this: researchers notice something interesting in the world, they create a lab-based experiment in an attempt to control everything except what they think is the core mental process, they then test the data to see if it predicts real-world performance.

A new approach, proposed by psychologist Alan Kingstone and colleagues, suggests this is fundamentally wrong-headed and we need to completely rethink how we study the human mind to make it relevant to the real world.

The authors suggest that the standard approach relies on a flawed assumption - that mental processes are like off-the-shelf tools that do the same job, but are just assembled by the mind in different ways depending on the situation.

But imagine if this isn't the case and mental processes are, in fact, much more fluid and adapt to fit the environment and situation. Not only would we have to change our psychological theories, we would have to change how we study the mind itself because the assumption that we can isolate and test the same mental process in different environments justifies the whole tradition of lab-based research.

The authors suggest an alternative they call 'cognitive ethology' and it focuses the efforts of cognitive scientists on a different part of the research process.

Let's just revisit our potted example of what most cognitive scientists do: they notice something in the world, they create a lab-based experiment, they test to see if it predicts real-world performance.

The first part of this process (noticing -> lab-experiment) is often based on subjective judgements and rough descriptions and isn't validated until the lab-based experiment is tested.

Kingston and his colleagues argue that scientists should be applying the techniques of science to the first stage - measuring and describing behaviour as it happens in the real world - and only then taking to the lab to see what happens when conditions change.

They give an example of this approach in an interesting driving study:

A Nature publication by Land and Lee (1994) provides a good illustration of a research approach that is grounded in the principle of first examining performance as it naturally occurs. These investigators were interested in understanding where people look when they are steering a car around a corner. This simple issue had obvious implications for human attention and action, as well as for matters as diverse as human performance modelling, vehicle engineering, and road design.

To study this issue, Land and Lee monitored eye, head, steering wheel position, and car speed, as drivers navigated a particularly tortuous section of road. Their study revealed the new and important finding that drivers rely on a ‘tangent point’ on the inside of each curve, seeking out this point 1–2 seconds before each bend and returning to it reliably.

Later, other researchers used a lab-based driving simulator study to systematically alter how much of this 'tangent point' was available to see what caused abnormal driving.

The authors also make the point that this approach is much better at helping us understand why something happens the way it does, because it ties it to the real world and helps us integrate it with the our knowledge of personal meaning.

It's an interesting approach and meshes nicely with a recent article on cultural cognitive neuroscience in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. It looked at a number of fascinating studies on cultural influences on mind and brain function and discusses how we can go about understanding the interaction between culture and the brain.

If you want to skip the theoretical parts, Box 1 is worth looking at just for a brief summary of some intriguing cultural differences in the way we think.

The piece was also rather expertly covered by Neuroanthropology who cover the main punchlines and discuss some of the claims.

Link to 'cognitive ethology' article.
Link to PubMed entry for 'cognitive ethology' article.
Link to 'cultural neuroscience' article.
Link to PubMed entry for 'cultural neuroscience' article.

—Vaughan.

August 29, 2008

Computers cause abnormal brain growth - proof!:

I have discovered shocking evidence that computers are affecting the brain. After extensive research, I have discovered the problem is remarkably specific and I have isolated it to an individual brain area affected by one particular application. Microsoft Word is causing abnormal growth in the frontal lobes.

The cingulate cortex is a part of the frontal lobe that is known to be involved with conflict monitoring, pain and emotion, while Microsoft Word is a clumsy but ubiquitous word processing package that has an annoying habit of auto-correcting things you don't want to be auto-corrected.

For example, try typing the words 'cingulate cortex' into Word and see what happens. It changes it to 'cingulated cortex', adding an annoying 'd' onto the end of the first word.

Whenever I'm writing a neuropsychology article, I now have the habit of doing a search and replace before I finish to sweep up any of these auto-errors. So I was wondering whether anyone else had suffered the same problem and searched the scientific literature.

Now, it could be that people have just been making standard typos throughout history, as adding a rogue 'd' is not uncommon, even when we're writing with a pen, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

While the use of the term 'cingulate cortex' stretches back to at least the beginning of the 20th century, the term 'cingulated cortex' barely appears, until Microsoft Word's autocorrection tool arrives on the scene.

There are 15 uses of the phrase "cingulated cortex" from 1900 to 2000. There are 1,740 uses from 2000 to now.

Microsoft Word, it seems, is slowly changing the brain.

Without further ado, I have named the disorder Bell's Frontal Nomenclature Hypertrophy Syndrome and demand that it be included in the diagnostic manuals.

Thousands of disturbed people will not get the help they need without this essential recognition, although in the mean time I will be offering private treatment at special rates.

Of course, I strongly encourage further research and welcome offers of interviews from the press, radio or television.

I am also available for weddings, funerals and Bar Mitzvahs.

—Vaughan.

Minds and myths:

The September issue of The Psychologist has two excellent and freely available articles that smash the popular myths of scientific psychology.

The first examines the widely mythologised story of hole-in-the head celebrity Phineas Gage, and the other tackles commonly repeated stories of famous studies that don't stand up to scrutiny.

Gage, whose skull is pictured on the front cover, is legendary, but, as the article makes clear, there's actually a great deal we don't know about his life and the information that typically accompanies his story is based on only a very few sources.

The article on other myths in psychology focuses on some of the most widely incidents and studies in the field: the murder of Kitty Genovese, Asch's conformity experiments, Little Albert and the Hawthorne Effect.

Particularly interesting is a discussion of the role of myths in science and what benefit they bring to the study of the human mind:

Other sciences certainly do have their own myths – just think of the story of Newton and the falling apple or Archimedes leaping out of the bath following his Eureka insight. Perhaps myths just seem more prominent in psychology because we tend to talk and write about our science in terms of studies rather than facts. Certainly the work of Mary Smyth at Lancaster University would appear to be consistent with this view – she has compared psychology and biology textbooks and found that psychology appears to have comparatively few taken-for-granted facts. Instead, numerous experiments are described in detail, lending scientific credence to any factual claims being made.

Related to this, there’s no doubt that the actual subject matter of psychology plays a part too – there’s that ever-present pressure to demonstrate that psychological findings are more than mere common sense. Benjamin Harris says that historians have described psychology as putting a scientific gloss on the accepted social wisdom of the day. ‘Psychology is always going to have a strong social component,’ he explains. ‘With psychological theories speaking to the human condition, there’s always going to be an appeal to myths that resonate more with experience than something coming out of the lab that’s sterile and ultra scientific.’

Another role that myths play is to reinforce the empirical legitimacy of psychology and to create a sense of a shared knowledge base. ‘In this way, tales such as of Kitty Genovese or Little Albert are rather like origin myths, pushing the creation of psychology, or a particular approach within psychology back in time, thus giving an air of greater authority,’ says Harris. Hobbs agrees: ‘It’s nice to have something that you can take for granted,’ he says. ‘In the case of the Hawthorne effect and other myths, you shouldn’t take it for granted, but it’s comforting to be able to say “Oh, this could be the Hawthorne effect” and for others to nod and say “Ah yes, that’s right”.’

Link to article 'Phineas Gage – Unravelling the myth'.
Link to article 'Foundations of sand?'.

Full disclosure: I'm an unpaid associate editor for The Psychologist.

—Vaughan.

2008-08-29 Spike activity:

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

Choreography and Cognition is a project examining the cognitive science of dance. Try this for some experimental data. Get down.

The myth of undecided voters is tackled head on by Frontal Cortex.

Gin, Television and Cognitive Surplus. No, not a traditional English weekend, an Edge article by Clay Shirky on the internet and mental aggregators.

PsychCentral's Sandra lists her Top 10 online psychology experiments.

ABC Radio National's Life Matters explores out relationship to colour.

Corpus Callosum has an interesting role reversal art project where a psychiatrist has painted his emotional impression of patients.

Epigenetics or the 'Ghost in Your Genes' is a new TV programme and is linked to and discussed by Neuroanthropology.

The Smart Set review a book on loneliness.

The Guardian's examination of the supposedly mandatory but widely ignored drug company gift registers for UK doctors, shows (can we guess) widespread soul selling.

Be sure to check ABC Radio National's All in the Mind blog for extended comments and extra audio from the recent programme on the mind, markets and morality.

Wired Sciece on why early stone tools suggest Neanderthals were equally as intelligent as early humans, contrary to popular belief. Researchers now exploring lack of style, poor personal hygiene as reason for extinction.

The rubber hand illusion is accompanied by a drop in temperature of the 'displaced' hand. Another from Wired Science.

The BPS Research Digest reports a interesting study that finds we tend to overestimate the size of our own heads, but not those of others.

The three critical techniques for stage magic discussed in the recent paper on the cognitive science of magic are summarised by PsyBlog.

Harvard Magazine has an article on 'A Work in Progress: The Teen Brain'. Due to be completed shortly after Duke Nukem Forever.

July's Neuropod appeared and we didn't even notice. Still, the programme has been eerily quiet since then.

The Times reports that more sex by braver soldiers suggests an evolutionary explanation for rhubarb, hat stands, pink elephants, blah blah blah...

Why Are 'Mama' and 'Dada' a Baby's First Words? Sounds obvious but it's actually an interesting study into developmental phonetics.

BBC News reports that the drug rasagiline may may actually slow down Parkinson's disease according to an early study.

Cool photo on Flickr appropriately called 'applied radiology'.

Cannabis use went down in the UK after it was reclassified as a 'softer' drug, reports of The Guardian. Buckets of urine at the ready to be flung into the wind when government shortly re-reclassifies it as a 'harder' drug.

Interesting experimental philosophy paper makes it into the top 10 philosophy papers of the year.

Furious Seasons catches two interesting antipsychotic news nuggets: Nature Neuroscience editorial says credibility lacking in child psychiatry after recent payments scandal / BMJ reports antipsychotics really, really bad in older folks.

—Vaughan.

August 28, 2008

Count 'em:

Wikipedia has a short but fascinating page listing animals by the number of neurons they have. There's only about a dozen entries on there, but most interesting is that there is an animal with no nerve cells at all.

It's called Trichoplax and apparently is a "a simple balloon-like marine animal with a body cavity filled with pressurized fluid".

Apparently humans don't come top of the pile, as both elephants and whales have more neurons.

However, it's not the best referenced article in the world, to say the least, so I'm taking this last claim with a pinch of salt for the time being.

If you know better, do update the article with some more reliable sources.

Link to 'List of animals by number of neurons'.

—Vaughan.

Wilder Penfield - charting the brain's unknown territory:

Neurophilosophy has a stimulating article on Wilder Penfield, the legendary Canadian neurosurgeon who pionered neuropsychological studies on the awake patient during brain surgery.

Penfield is most famous for his experiments where he electrically stimulated the brain of patients who had part of their skull removed during surgery to record what thoughts, behaviours and sensations arose from the excitation of specific parts of the cortex.

This research is still being done in modern times. My favourite is a 1991 study on electrical stimulation of the supplementary motor area SMA) by (no laughing now) Fried and colleagues.

What is most fascinating is that they found electrical stimulation could trigger the urge to movement or the expactation that a movement might occur, without triggering any movement itself. This stretched from quite vague feelings such as the "need to do something with right
hand" to very specific movement intentions such as the "urge to move right thumb and index finger".

The gripping and typically well-researched Neurophilosophy article takes us right into the middle of one of these experiments performed by Penfield, and goes on to explain how his work became so influential in science and medicine.

Penfield was a pupil of Harvey Cushing, considered the founder of scientific neurosurgery, who was featured only last week on the same excellent blog.

Unlike Cushing though, who was reknowned for being a bit spiky, Penfield was widely considered to be a warm and friendly individual.

It's probably the best article on Penfield you're likely to find on the net, so well worth taking the opportunity of learning more about this key figure in our understanding of the brain.

Link to article 'Wilder Penfield, Neural Cartographer'.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on Wilder's operation on his sister.

—Vaughan.

Unreality TV and the culture of delusions:

Today's New York Times has an interesting article on the tug-of-war over the cultural influence on paranoid delusions and whether contemporary-themed psychosis is a new form of mental illness or just a modern colouring of an old disorder.

The article focuses on the recent interest in the 'Truman Show delusion', splashed over the media by two Canadian psychiatrists.

It's quite hard to judge what they're aiming to do as they've not published a scientific paper, and the article suggests they're writing a book (is that the sounds of alarm bells I hear?), so I'm solely going on secondary sources.

But if they're saying that delusions specifically about being in the Truman Show are somehow new and interesting, then they're right in a way. Popular culture often turns up in paranoid beliefs - I worked with a gentleman once who believed he was in The Matrix - but its not earth shattering. It happens all the time.

If they're saying that the general experience of The Truman Show - feeling that the world is being controlled, is unexplainably altered, or is uncannily mysterious - is somehow new, then they're wrong by a good 100 years.

This was described by the German psychiatrist Karl Jaspers in the early part of the 20th century who called it Wahnstimmung, which is translated in the modern English literature as delusional mood or delusional atmosphere.

This is the description from Andrew Sims' book on descriptive psychopathology Symptoms in the Mind:

"For the patient experiencing delusional atmosphere, his world has been subtly altered 'Something funny is going on'; 'I have been offered a whole new world of meaning'. He experiences everything around him as sinister, portentous, uncanny, peculiar in an undefinable way. He knows that he is personally involved but cannot tell how. He has the feeling of anticipation, sometimes even of excitement, that soon all the separate parts of his experience will to reveal something immensely significant."

Actually, the article has a quote from me, although miscasts my view a little. I'm quoted as saying:

“Cultural influences don’t tell us anything fundamental about delusion,” said Vaughan Bell, a psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College in London, who has studied Internet delusion.

“We can look at the influence of television, computer games, rock ’n’ roll, but these things don’t tell us about new forms of being mentally ill,” said Dr. Bell, who said he had also treated patients who believed they were part of a reality television show.

Actually, I do think that cultural influences are fundamental in understanding delusions, but not in themselves. [Squiggly sound of tape rewinding] It seems the crucial qualification "in themselves" was missed off the quote.

In fact, in the paper I wrote on delusions about the internet I concluded by saying "The extent of influence may not be equal for all aspects of society and culture, although the fact that there is an influence at all, suggests that psychosis is only fully understandable in light of the wider social context."

To quote John Donne, "no man is an island" and we can only fully understand or thoughts and behaviour, either everyday or pathological, with reference to the cultures we live in. But this doesn't mean that each aspect of cultural influences us equally on all levels.

Link to NYT article 'Look Closely, Doctor: See the Camera?'.

—Vaughan.

August 27, 2008

The music's too loud and you can't hear the lyrics:

Today's Nature has a teeth-grittingly bitchy review of psychologist Daniel Levitin's new music and psychology book The World In Six Songs that would be entertaining were it not so surprisingly vitriolic.

I've not read the book, but when someone is criticising the author's musical taste as immature, not once, but twice, in the world's leading science publication, you know the review has gone beyond the point of healthy knock-about into the zone of below-the-belt punches.

What is it about Nature book reviews? We covered one in 2007 where the reviewer got stuck in despite not seeming to have read the book.

Actually, no one does a good book barney like the philosophers, who at least have the good grace to wrap their barbs in dry wit and satire rather than just spitting venom at each other (although they do that too).

If you want to get an idea of Levitin's basic premise, New Scientist has an online article on the book. It seems to be applying the 'basic plots' idea to music.

This is widely discussed in literature where many people have claimed to have identified the seven, eight, twenty, thirty six (you get the idea) basic plots in stories, literature and plays throughout history.

Link to hatchet job in Nature.
Link to NewSci on The World In Six Songs.

—Vaughan.

Who needs sleep? The evolutionary slumber party:

PLoS Biology has a cozy essay entitled "Is Sleep Essential?" that addresses the mystery of the purpose of sleep.

The article looks at sleep across the whole of the animal kingdom to examine how different species sleep and whether there are any animals that don't sleep at all.

There are no convincing cases of sleepless animals it seems, and the authors, neuroscientists Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi, argue that sleep is therefore likely to be an essential function of living creatures.

The three corollaries of the null hypothesis ['sleep is not required'] do not seem to square well with the available evidence: there is no convincing case of a species that does not sleep, no clear instance of an animal that forgoes sleep without some compensatory mechanism, and no indication that one can truly go without sleep without paying a high price. What many concluded long ago still seems to hold: the case is strong for sleep serving one or more essential functions. But which ones?

The article goes on to examine the hypotheses that sleep is important for regulating the body's core functions, the brain, individual cells and that it is common to all species and must involve something that cannot be provided by quiet wakefulness.

More interesting is the question of whether all animals dream - and perhaps most intriguing, if so, how they might dream.

Indeed, it would be interesting to discover whether dreaming is a necessary function of sleep, or whether it is specifically linked to certain neurocognitive processes or even particular creatures.

Link to PLoS Biology article 'Is Sleep Essential?' (via Wired Science).

—Vaughan.

Extracting the stone of madness:

Art-science blog Bioemphemera has an excellent piece on how Renaissance artists depicted madness as involving a stone in the head. Numerous paintings from the 16th and 17th century show operations to remove the stone and presumably cure the insane of their 'folly'.

Despite the widespread depiction of this procedure, many examples of which are wonderfully illustrated in the Bioemphemera post, it's not clear whether these paintings were documenting widespread practices of medical fakery, or whether they were entirely metaphorical.

Perhaps owing to this element of mystery, and to the striking artworks, the topic is often featured in science and medical journals.

A 1999 article in Trends in Neurosciences is probably the most comprehensive treatment, and makes an excellent complement to the Bioephemera piece.

Link to Bioephemera post 'The Stone of Madness'.
Link to TINS article 'Psychosurgery in Renaissance art'.
Link to PubMed entry for article.

—Vaughan.

August 26, 2008

Somatosphere:

Somatosphere is an excellent new blog on medical anthropology, the study of how culture influences our understanding of health, illness and medicine.

While we tend to think of illnesses as specific encapsualted 'things' that happen to the body, it turns out that our culture and psychology has a huge influence on not just what we think of illness, but how we actually become ill.

Culture also shapes what we think of as 'healthy' and 'unhealthy', 'normal' and 'abnormal' and this is one of the main driving forces behind how we express physical or psychological distress and expect it to be treated.

Of course, in the West, drug companies are persistently trying to shape our cultural understanding of what constitutes illness to better promote their product.

The picture is taken from an interesting Somatosphere post on methylphenidate (Ritalin) and ADHD. It's a 1960s advert for the drug showing it was marketed as an antidepressant before ADHD was ever talked about.

The blog is written by several professional medical anthropologists and let's hope it continues as it's started as I'm throughly enjoying reading it.

Link to Somatosphere (via Neuroanthropology).
Link to Somatosphere post on Ritalin.

—Vaughan.

Book review: Sight Unseen:

I cannot recommend strongly enough Goodale & Milner's book on vision 'Sight Unseen'. The title refers to the idea they pursue throughout the book that our everyday conception of vision is thoroughly misleading. Rather than vision just being 'what we experience', it is, in fact, a collection of specific eye-behaviour links ('visuomotor functions') of which our conscious perception of the world is only an evolutionary-recent addition. Goodale & Milner have spent their careers investigating this area and base their narrative around a selection of seminal experiments and case-studies of patients with selective brain injuries. Almost no background knowledge is assumed yet the book takes the reader into the intricacies of the psychology of vision. The triumph of the book is that it gives a flavour of how research proceeds while also managing to provide an intuition-shaking overview of the whole topic. I will never think about seeing in the same way again. This is a rare book which is accessible but will also be of interest to those working in the field. If you have any interest in how a research field develops or in the psychology of vision then you should read it.

Goodale, M. & Milner, D. (2004). Sight Unseen: An Exploration of Conscious and Unconscious Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press

(Full disclosure: I did not get asked to do this review, nor did I receive payment or a free book. I did it because I liked the book. I am actively engaged in research in this area)

—tom.

Reminiscence rising:

I had the pleasure of seeing the initial run-through of the upcoming London play Reminiscence on Friday and was completely blown away.

Inspired by a case study by world-renowned neurologist, Oliver Sacks (from his book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat), Reminiscence is the story of Mrs O’Connor who, in a bizarre neurological twist is transported, via evocative music, to the surreal world of her memories.

As her condition becomes increasingly difficult to fathom, Mrs O’Connor and her doctor go on a journey of discovery to the limits of science’s ability to fully account for what happens in our minds, and to the limits of our mind’s ability to fully recapture the past.

Reminiscence is a stunning piece of total theatre using live music (originally composed and inspired by the folk melodies of Eastern Europe) and spectacular visuals to take the audience on a fantastical, poignant and ultimately moving journey through the mind.

It's going to be running from 9 – 20th September in Jackson's Lane Theatre in Highgate, and from what I've seen, it should be fantastic.

Effy, one of the composers, has managed to sort out some '2 for 1' ticket offers, and says "you can contact the theatre and request two tickets for the price of one on 9 and 10th September (evening performances) and 17th September (matinee performance) but you must quote 'epilepsy action' when calling at the box office (020 8341 4421) to obtain this offer."

I've been involved with the play for the last year or so, discussing the dilemmas of neuropsychology with the director, actors and composers.

After meeting the team I knew it was going to be good, but I was quite unprepared for how incredibly inventive and touching it is.

The piece literally plays with the fabric of reality and the original music is woven wonderfully throughout the piece.

By the way, I'm not financially involved in the play in any way, but can't wait to see the final version as it should be emotionally, visually and musically stunning.

They'll also be a free panel discussion after the show on the 14th and matinee on the 17th with some of the creative team, myself, and professionals from Headway and Epilepsy Action, all discussing the issues raised by the play - personal, ethical and scientific.

Link to Reminiscence website and details.

—Vaughan.

August 25, 2008

Kanizsa kiwi:

A brilliant illustration of the Kanizsa triangle made out of kiwi fruit by Flickr user Yves Moreaux.

The Kanizsa triangle is often used to argue that a purely 'bottom-up' approach to understanding vision - that says we generate our perception solely from building up from the small details of what we see - is flawed.

In this case, it seems we fill in the outline of the triangle partly based on our prior expectations, because if we follow the contours in the image, there isn't actually a triangle there.

The triangle illusion is named after the Italian psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa.

Kanizsa was also an accomplished artist who created numerous paintings that played with the concepts of perception.

Link to Yves Moreaux's brilliant Kanizsa kiwi.
Link to online exchibition of Kanizsa's paintings.

—Vaughan.

The alpha and omega of Crick and consciousness:

I just found a touching tribute to Francis Crick published in PLoS Biology in 2004 that also describes some little know aspects of his life during his study of consciousness.

One fascinating part of the article discusses his meeting with David Marr, a brilliant young neuroscientist who was fated both to revolutionise our understanding of the brain and die of leukaemia at the age of 35.

The two scientists worked together for only a month, but their meeting obviously last a lasting impression on them both, as they feature in each other's work and particularly influenced Crick's thinking on the conscious mind.

David Marr was a young mathematician and physiologist whose doctoral thesis on a theory of mammalian brain function at Cambridge had brought him into some contact with Brenner and Francis. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he began working with Tomasio Poggio of the Max Plank Institute in Tübingen on a computational theory of neuroscience. Following an invitation from Francis, Poggio and Marr spent the month of April, 1979 extending their intense examination of the core problems of visual perception.

They spent hours sitting at the most western end of the Salk Institute, at the cafeteria or in Francis's office, gazing into the Pacific Ocean with all its daily changes, discussing not only architecture of visual cortex and visual perception, but the ramifications of a good theory of brain function. We know of these conversations, as the probing of Marr by Francis is captured in the final chapter of Marr's now classic book “Vision” (Marr 1982). (Although Marr speaks of a three-way conversation, judging from our own experiences as Francis's younger colleagues, the interlocutor simply seems to be Francis.)

Marr had been diagnosed with acute leukemia in the winter of 1978 (Marr and Vaina 1991). The one-month visit to the Salk Institute was an intellectual gift, for eighteen months later, Marr died. Francis had simultaneously lost a young friend and colleague who had brought an “incisive mind and creative energy” (Crick 1994, p. 77) and his best new ideas of a theoretical neurology to the brain (Marr 1969, 1970). And he saw the tragedy of Marr being cut off from solving the big problems for which he was so clearly destined.

During those early years, Francis must have thought that consciousness was tractable—if only the right way of thinking was brought to bear on it. Francis's brain was capable of collecting and filing away many disparate data, which he could then combine uniquely and imaginatively, leading to that “dramatic moment of sudden enlightenment that floods the minds when the right idea clicks into place” (Crick 1990, p. 141). Whatever his initial thoughts about the nature of the problem, Francis soon came to realize that the problem of consciousness was even tougher than he imagined, that the “click” was not happening with consciousness. In 1988, he wrote, “I have yet to produce any theory that is both novel and also explains many disconnected facts in a convincing way” (Crick 1990, p. 162).

Ironically, for a man who wrote a book called Vision, there seems to be no pictures of David Marr on the internet.

Of course, there are many of Crick, and the PLoS Biology article is an excellent tribute to the multi-talented researcher.

Link to article 'Francis Crick's Legacy for Neuroscience'.

—Vaughan.

August 24, 2008

Great history of brain surgery programme online:

The BBC has just begun broadcasting a fantastic series called Blood and Guts on the history of surgery with the first episode on neurosurgery. If you live in the UK you can watch it again on the BBC iPlayer for a few days more, or otherwise, it has appeared online as a torrent.

It's not the most coherent trip through the history of neurosurgery, more a collection of highlights (or, in some cases, lowlights), but it's very well made and has some fantastic historical footage and interviews with modern neurosurgeons.

It covers Harvey Cushing, Phineas Gage, José Delgado, Walter Freeman and the frontal lobotomy, transcranial magnetic stimulation, deep brain stimulation and the cutting edge of brain surgery today. There's a particularly interesting bit where lobotomy survivor Howard Dully has a brain scan and you can see the effect of his operation.

If you're still hungry for more, BBC News website has an article and video clip of neurosurgery while the patient is conscious, and you can even buy the book of the series.

Link to BBC iPlayer archive (for 7 days).
Link to torrent of Blood and Guts brain surgery episode.

—Vaughan.

August 23, 2008

The genius of Harvey Cushing:

Neurophilosophy has a beautifully illustrated and carefully researched article on Harvey Cushing one of the greatest neurosurgeons of the 20th century and a pioneer in treating previously inoperable brain tumours.

The article has loads of fantastic photos of Cushing at work, and also includes the one of his remarkably detailed drawings, illustrated in the image on the right.

Cushing is particularly famous for his work on the surgical removal of tumours, and for identifying what is now called Cushing's syndrome, a disorder caused by high levels of cortisol in the blood, sometimes caused by a tumour in the pituitary gland. The tumour can be removed, curing this debilitating hormone disorder.

Neurophilosophy notes that Cushing removed more than 2,000 tumours during his lifetime. As we noted in an earlier article, one of these operations was to remove a brain tumour from the sister of Wilder Penfield, who was one of Cushing's most famous pupils.

The Neurophilosophy article also has links to loads more photos and even a video of one of Cushing's last operations.

Link to excellent Neurophilosophy piece on 'Harvey Cushing photo journal'.

—Vaughan.

Strip Club Hunter, or the attractions of anatomy:

It's hard to start a paragraph with "I was strolling through London's red light district the other evening..." without seeming a little dubious, but it's the truth, so I shall have to begin by sounding suspect.

If your suspicions have already been raised, I doubt that if I say that I became interested in one of London's biggest strip clubs for its importance in the history of neuroanatomy that I will seem at all convincing. But it was also the case, so I shall I have to also begin by sounding a little implausible.

The photo on the left depicts the neon drenched Windmill Theatre, the first venue in London to have risqué shows displaying the naked bodies of young women to breathless crowds of young men.

In the 1930s the owners realised there was a loophole in the law, and that if the naked girls stood still, they weren't acting and so weren't subject to legislation banning nude actors. Decades of titillating 'living statue' shows followed, using increasingly inventive ways of presenting the spectacle of the unclothed and unmoving girl.

The theatre and the Windmill Girls, like the one on the right, became legendary, even being the subject of a recent Hollywood movie. Time could not stand still, however, and with changing morals, inevitably, the law changed, and along with it, the theatre. It now operates as a standard lap dancing club in the centre of Soho.

While the Windmill Theatre advertises its pedigree in large strips of red neon, the seemingly nondescript building to the right has nothing but a modest blue plaque to mark its heritage, but it drew similarly excited crowds wanting to glimpse the anatomy of the naked.

The plaque reads "Hunter, William. This was the home and museum of Dr William Hunter, Anatomist (1718-1783)". While the plaque and the association with one of history's great anatomists gives it an air of respectability that the gleaming Windmill lacks, it was no less salacious in its day.

For over a thousand years, medical men had used the 2nd century Greek physician Galen as their guide to the structure of the human body. The trouble was, Galen was often wrong and his work had only recently been challenged owing to a taboo over dissecting the dead.

Two local men decided that Galen would have to go, and thankfully for us, they were riotously successful. William Hunter, to whom the Soho plaque is dedicated, is now famed for his contribution to anatomy, and his brother, John Hunter is considered the first scientific surgeon - the founder of modern surgery.

The Hunter brothers were living in a time when the taboo over cutting up corpses was slowly being broken, but dissections were still considered seedy. A kind of edgy horrorshow for the strong of stomach and certainly not for the ladies.

To compound the air of disgust, bodies were acquired on a 'no questions asked' basis, and many were rumoured to be from the murdered poor, or from bodies stolen from graves.

On one horrific occasion in 1784, the physician John Sheldon, proprietor of the Blenheim Street School of Anatomy, was presented with his recently deceased sister by one of the school's regular 'suppliers'.

But the first of these independent school's of anatomy was opened by William and John Hunter, on Great Windmill Street, where the famous strip club now stands. William Hunter (shown on the left) actually lived on the same site, with his brother living round the corner, in Golden Square, before moving to a large house in the prestigious Leicester Square where his bust can still be seen.

One of the school's star pupils was Sir Charles Bell, the noted physician who revolutionised the understanding of the nervous system through his careful anatomical dissections and clinical studies, and whose name still resides in our bodies through numerous eponymous labels and disorders that scatter the neurology textbooks.

The Hunter brothers did more than just tutor, however, they catalogued - virtually every new discovery, anatomical oddity and grotesque pathology they found.

This systematic study led to many new discoveries, particularly in comparative anatomy and the understanding of the nervous system. In fact, you can still visit the Hunter's collection, at the Royal College of Surgeon's Hunterian Museum, which, as I've noted before, is full of neuroanatomical curiosities.

Great Windmill Street has hosted anatomists, professional and pornographic, for centuries, and still continues its proud tradition, although not necessarily in the form that the Hunters would have imagined.

So that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

—Vaughan.

August 22, 2008

Experienced drivers perceive the road differently:

Experienced drivers are not only better skilled at the actions of driving, but learn to perceive and attend to the road in a different way

We found that novices eye-movements were different from those of the more experienced drivers in several ways, though the extent of scanning on a particular section of dual carriageway was particularly limited. We have since examined this effect in the laboratory using video-based stimuli replicating the same impoverished scanning in novice drivers (e.g. Underwood, Chapman, Bowden, & Crundall, 2002).

We have also further explored why this might be the case, examining the possibility of whether this was due to the novice drivers having a deficient mental model or whether they were simply overloaded by the requirement to control the car (a process which requires less attention with increased experience), and found that even when car-control demands were eliminated, the effect persisted (Underwood et al., 2002).

Another aspect that appears to be important in understanding this effect is the extent of the inexperienced drivers' peripheral attention (Crundall, Underwood, & Chapman, 1999, 2002). We found that the less experienced drivers have a smaller field of peripheral vision, and are more likely to miss even abrupt onsets. This is especially the case when they are focusing on something that is potentially dangerous.

For example if the car ahead brakes suddenly, a novice driver will focus so much attention on that car that they may miss the errant cyclist emerging from the side road. More experienced drivers have a wider spread of peripheral attention however, and this appears to be linked to their spread of search.

The paragraph is an excerpt from a commentary on an interesting article on the relevance of lab studies to the real world from the latest edition of the British Journal of Psychology. I'll post more about the main article shortly, but this snippet just caught my attention, if you'll excuse the pun.

Link to PubMed entry for commentary paper.

—Vaughan.

2008-08-22 Spike activity:

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

If you're after a level-headed discussion of the 'contraceptive pill makes girls go for Mr Wrong' story, Dr Petra has a great review.

SciAm Mind Matters has a great article by the Cognitive Daily duo on how tone deafness and bad singing may not go hand in hand.

A gentleman with extensive frontal lobe damage 'loses' his memory and identity, leading to a curious medical mystery - covered by Frontal Cortex.

ABC Radio National's Health Report has a fantastic programme and video report on the ongoing problem of adolescent PTSD after the Bosnian conflict.

PsyBlog finds some vintage 'candid camera' TV footage illustrating social conformity with a too-good-to-be-true ending.

The burgeoning research on the use of psychedelic drugs in the treatment of medical conditions is covered by The Guardian - with brief podcast discussion.

Facial Frontier - sounds like the title of a porn movie but actually an article on the psychology of facial expression from The National Post.

The Guardian has a great podcast about music and the brain.

A number of new doom and gloom books about the effect of the internet on relationships, mind and brain and due out, report Wired. I predict many words, no hard evidence.

Live Science on a new study on how the 'visual cortex' is used in hearing and sound processing.

Another cool example of 'hijacking intelligence' is covered by the Boston Globe that discusses the innovative use of CAPTCHs to solve difficult OCR problems.

We look at faces differently depending on our cultural background, according to new research covered by Wired Science. Full text of study in PLoS One.

The Times has a video of creepily lifelike avatar face animation which apparently 'heralds new era for computer games'

Cool interactive brain games and learning suite from McGill University.

Science News on how dopamine has been a 'forgotten' neurotransmitter for sleep regulation. Forgotten? Huh? Amphetamine?

Levels of aggression can be partly predicted from face structure in ice hockey players, reports New Scientist.

MSN Lifestyle has a spectacularly bad and clichéd article that is full of scientific misappropriation - rather ironically titled 'The Male Brain, Explained'.

—Vaughan.

August 21, 2008

Colic psychology:

I've just found a surprisingly psychological New Yorker article on colic, the persistent and mysterious episodes of crying that affects some newborn babies.

I always thoughts that colic was just discomfort caused by trapped wind but apparently this is just one theory and the cause of colic is still medically unexplained.

The crying tends to stop after a few months and although thought to be physically harmless it can cause a great deal of discomfort to both baby and parents.

The New Yorker article, written by the talented physician and writer Jermone Groopman, notes that some of the most important discoveries about colic have not focused on the biology of the babies digestive system but on the psychology of parenting and carer-child interaction.

Lester believes that some infants who suffer from colic are “hypersensitive to normal stimuli”: they perceive and react to changes in their bodies (such as hunger or gas pangs) or in their environment (such as loud noises or the experience of being touched) more acutely than do other babies. In the mid-nineties, he studied forty-five children between the ages of three and eight who had had colic as infants (and had been seen at his clinic). He found that thirty-four of them—about seventy-five per cent—suffered from behavioral problems, including a limited attention span, tantrums, and irritation after being touched or coming in contact with particular fabrics or tags in their clothing. “Some of the kids would get very annoyed and refuse to put on a hat,” he told me. The children apparently objected to the sensation of having fabric on their head.

Lester speculates that many colicky infants are so sensitive to stimuli that physical contact with their parents is unlikely to soothe them, a theory that may be supported by data from societies in which babies are held continuously. Ronald Barr, the co-author of the 1997 study on infant cries, has analyzed data gathered by Harvard researchers between 1969 and 1971, during a study of the !Kung San, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Botswana who practice a version of attachment parenting. “We found that the !Kung San carry their babies upright, have skin-to-skin contact day and night, breast-feed every 13.69 minutes for the first one to two years of life, and respond within fifteen seconds to any fret or whimper,” Barr, who now teaches at the University of British Columbia, told me. “The duration of the crying is fifty per cent less among the !Kung San compared with Western babies, but the !Kung San still have what we call colic, with episodes of inconsolable crying.”

A great deal of clinical psychology work concerned with difficult behaviour in children focuses on how people respond to certain behaviours. It is often the case that our natural reactions inadvertently reinforce and maintain the problem.

This can be the case even with severe difficulties like self-harm. Imagine that the parents of a child go through a period where they are so caught up in work they don't have much time for the child no matter what he or she does.

The child accidentally harms themselves and suddenly gets a great deal of attention because the parents, who are not 'bad parents', just massively overworked, want to make sure their child is OK.

The child works out that harming themselves gets them attention but this causes resentment, so the parents act more negatively towards the child he or she does not harm themselves, meaning that caring attention is all the more attractive.

Although this type of cycle is most likely to crop up with children with learning disabilities, you can see how less severe versions (replace self-harm with tantrums) could easily occur. Or perhaps how the same cycle could occur in a child with learning disabilities in a specialised care environment (replace parents with staff).

Similar sorts of response-reaction cycles seem to occur in colic and Groopman's article recounts how for even the youngest babies, social relationships are of prime importance.

Link to New Yorker article 'Colic Conundrum'.

—Vaughan.

August 20, 2008

Francis Crick inadvertently raises criminal robot army:

Scientific American's Mind Matters blog covers an interesting study that found that altering people's belief in free will also altered the likelihood of participants being dishonest in a test of mental ability.

To achieve this, the study used part of Francis Crick's book The Astonishing Hypothesis that argues against the everyday concept of free will on the basis of neurobiology.

Half of the participants got a passage saying that there is no such thing as free will. The passage begins as follows: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

The passage then goes on to talk about the neural basis of decisions and claims that “...although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.” The other participants got a passage that was similarly scientific-sounding, but it was about the importance of studying consciousness, with no mention of free will.

After reading the passages, all participants completed a survey on their belief in free will. Then comes the inspired part of the experiment. Participants were told to complete 20 arithmetic problems that would appear on the computer screen. But they were also told that when the question appeared, they needed to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer appear on the screen, too. The participants were told that no one would know whether they pushed the space bar, but they were asked not to cheat.

The results were clear: those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often! (That is, they pressed the space bar less often than the other participants.) Moreover, the researchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected free will in their survey responses.

I wonder how specific this is to a general belief in us lacking free will, or whether it's more specifically to do with a similar belief but which is particularly tied up with the mechanistic concept that Crick discusses - i.e. we're all just the function of lots of little parts.

The reason I'm wondering this is because the twelve-step approach to addiction recovery has two free-will reducing principles at its core - namely an admission that you are not in control of your addiction and the belief that you have to give yourself up to a 'higher power'.

The Mind Matters article goes on to discuss the various interpretations of the study and how it fits with our understanding of the philosophy of free will.

Link to Mind Matters on 'Free Will vs. the Programmed Brain' (via fc).
pdf of full text of study.

—Vaughan.

Placebo - interactive ingredients:

BBC Radio 4 has just broadcast the first part of a fantastic two part series on placebo, the most effective evidence-based treatment known to science.

It's written and presented by Bad Science's Ben Goldacre and is a wonderful trip through the history and science of what we know about this most psychological of treatments.

One of the most interesting recent placebo findings has been that children show a greater placebo response than adults as demonstrated in a systematic analysis of epilepsy treatment trials.

This matches up with the fact that children and generally more hypnotically suggestible than adults.

Various studies in the 1960s and 70s tracked hypnotisability through childhood and found that susceptibility to suggestion varies as a function of age. This summary is from p120 of the excellent academic book The Highly Hypnotizable Person:

Around the age of 7 children show measurable hypnotic ability, which appear to increase until around the age of 12, where it seems to peak. If then appears to plateau for about two years, decreases moderately during adolescence, and then remains stable during early and middle adulthood.

While both placebo and hypnotisability involve the general concept of 'suggestion' it's not been clear whether they reflect the same things at work.

However, recent work by psychologist Amir Raz has suggesting that both hypnosis and placebo may both work through the manipulation of attention, essentially influencing the focus of processing within the brain to alter how it regulates the body and mind.

Link to Placebo programme webpage and audio archive.
Link to full text of placebo in children paper.
Link to Amir Raz paper on placebo, hypnotizability and attention.

—Vaughan.

August 19, 2008

Judging trustworthiness in the face:

The Boston Globe has a fantastic article on the psychology of trustworthiness judgements and how they can be taken advantage of by con-men.

The article explores studies which have looked at various influences on our judgements of trust. One of the most interesting parts is where they cover research that has systematically altered pictures until the researchers generated faces that seem the least trustworthy (picture of the left) and most trustworthy (picture of the right).

According to recent work by Nikolaas Oosterhof and Alexander Todorov of Princeton's psychology department, we form our first opinions of someone's trustworthiness through a quick physiognomic snapshot. By studying people's reactions to a range of artificially-generated faces, Oosterhof and Todorov were able to identify a set of features that seemed to engender trust. Working from those findings, they were able to create a continuum: faces with high inner eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones struck people as trustworthy, faces with low inner eyebrows and shallow cheekbones untrustworthy.

In a paper [pdf] published in June, they suggested that our unconscious bias is a byproduct of more adaptive instincts: the features that make a face strike us as trustworthy, if exaggerated, make a face look happy - with arching inner eyebrows and upturned mouths - and an exaggerated "untrustworthy" face looks angry - with a furrowed brow and frown. In this argument, people with "trustworthy" faces simply have, by the luck of the genetic draw, faces that look a little more cheerful to us.

Just as in other cognitive shorthands, we make these judgments quickly and unconsciously - and as a result, Oosterhof and Todorov point out, we can severely and immediately misjudge people. In reality, of course, cheekbone shape and eyebrow arc have no relationship with honesty.

There's plenty more fascinating studies discussed in the article, including an amazing study found that people are more likely to take the advice of someone who has bought the same volume of paint as them compared with someone who buys a different volume of paint!

Link to Boston Globe article 'Confidence game'.
pdf of study of facial structure and trustworthiness.

—Vaughan.

The best jobs in life are free:

The BPS Research Digest covers a recent study finding that volunteers are actually more committed than paid staff in an organisation, in line with studies showing that payment tends to reduce people's productivity and enjoyment for the same work compared to when it's done for free.

A recent study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics tested this by asking students to complete 'IQ test' style questions for varying amounts of money, or by 'incentivising' some students on a charity collection day while others collected for free.

In this paper we have provided quantitatively precise evidence, in a controlled environment, of the effect of the introduction of monetary compensation on performance, which includes a precise comparison of the cases in which the reward was given in different quantities or not given at all. The result has been that the usual prediction of higher performance with higher compensation, when one is offered, has been confirmed: but the performance may be lower because of the introduction of the compensation.

In other words, those who were paid more worked harder than those who were paid less, but the hardest work was done by those not paid anything at all.

Link to BPSRD on the commitment of volunteers.
Link to summary of payment and productivity paper.
pdf of full-text.

—Vaughan.

August 18, 2008

Neurowar report online:

After some exploring of links, the 'neurowar' report we mentioned the other day is freely available online, albeit in a non-portable format that doesn't seem to be displayed very reliably.

Some pages don't seem to load and I assumed this was to restrict the online version but it turns out it's just a bit badly set up. However, with a bit of patience and a few page reloads it's quite readable.

The report makes links between emerging areas of cognitive science and the 'Potential Intelligence and Military Applications of Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies'.

If you want a slightly briefer summary, a pdf of the executive summary is also available online.

Why they just can't release the whole thing as a PDF is still, however, a mystery.

Or just in pill form. They can do that, can't they?

Link to online report.
pdf of executive summary.

—Vaughan.

Encephalon 52 raises its hand:

The 52nd edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just arrived, this time hosted by the excellent Ouroboros.

A couple of my favourites include a post on the latest science of 'grandmother cells' at the combining cognits blog (the new name for the excellent 'Memoirs of a Postgrad') and another on neuroimaging and social attachment style on the new-to-me but engaging Neurotic Physiology.

There's plenty more article in this fortnight's edition, so have a look and see what sparks your curiosity.

Link to Encephalon 52.

—Vaughan.

Tweaking with Sherlock Holmes:

I just found this fascinating aside on Sherlock Holmes in a 1973 paper on amphetamine psychosis, suggesting that the cocaine-using Holmes displayed the classic repetitive behaviour often seen in frequent users of dopamine-acting stimulants.

The paper discusses what was known about the pharmacology of amphetamine in the early 1970s and how it relates to psychosis, but starts with an excellent description of the effects of chronic speed use.

One of these constellations involves an intense feeling of curiosity, often manifested by repetitious, stereotyped examining, searching, and sorting behaviors. This repetitious activity has been variously called “punding”, “hung-up activity”, “obsessive-compulsive tendencies”, and “knick-knacking” (by inhabitants of the Haight-Ashbury scene).

Its characteristic feature is engagement in tasks that primarily involve small bits or minutiae and a marked enhancement of perceptual acuity directed toward these minute objects. At times there are perceptuo-motor compulsions, manifested as repetitious stringing of beads or as acts of arranging, sorting, and lining up pebbles, rocks, or other small objects. Most of the so-called “speed art” is replete with complicated syntheses of a multitude of minute details, often depicting universal themes or mandalas. Speed users are frequently observed taking apart such objects as television sets, watches, radios, and phonographs.

Subsequently, the parts may be analyzed, arranged, sorted, filed, and cataloged and, rarely, put back together. Many patients report a sense of satisfaction associated with this compulsive-like conduct. Perhaps the best-known example of searching and examining behavior is that of Sherlock Holmes, whose cocaine habit was described by Dr. Watson:

Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction. Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance...

“It is cocaine,” he [Holmes] said, “a seven-per-cent solution... I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment...

“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world...

“To the trained eye there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of a bird’s-eye as there is between a cabbage and a potato.” “You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae,” I [Watson] remarked (The Sign of the Four, pp. 610-612).

Holmes’s description of his “grooving on” puzzles and cryptograms and his penchant for magnificent synthesis of details to solve a given case are quite analogous to the amphetamine addict’s intense curiosity and preoccupation with minutiae. Even at a low point in the drug-use cycle, these persons will seek out stimulating mechanical or intellectual puzzles. This compulsion for analysis is widely recognized in the “speed scene.”

Of course, cocaine wasn't the only drug Holmes dabbled in, as he was also a user of opium and tabacco, but it's interesting that the author of the paper makes a link between Holmes' cocaine use, and both his investigative style and 'knick-knacking' between cases.

Link to full text of paper.
Link to PubMed entry.

—Vaughan.

August 16, 2008

Psycho killer - Qu'est-ce que c'est?:

Bad Science has an excellent article about the almost unreported news that homicides by people with mental illness have dropped dramatically in England and Wales, despite the fact that murders by people without mental illness have increased.

Right now I’m looking at a press release on a story which seems pretty important to me: people with serious mental illnesses are committing fewer murders than ever before, by a truly enormous margin. Homicides in this group increased from around 40 a year in the 1950s to 100 a year in the 1970s, in line with a similar increase in the general population. But while murders by people like you have continued to increase, and roughly trebled (0.6 per 100,000 of population in the 1950s, and almost 2 per 100,000 now), murders by people with serious mental illnesses, despite the hype and the fear, the public pronouncements and the headlines, have come down massively since the 1970s, to fewer than 20 a year today.

Ben laments the fact that even a hint of a connection between mental illness and murder makes front page news, stigmatising those with mental disorders and unnecessarily increasing prejudice, while news based on thorough research showing that these fears are unreasonable and unfounded barely raises a byline.

Indeed, it's rare that positive mental illness news is made 'sexy' by the media. The nearest we get is when celebrities admit that they've suffered depression. Eating and anxiety disorders are occasionally discussed but it's rare that psychosis is ever discussed in terms of recovery and by celebrities who have experienced it.

By the way, the picture is of bluesman and ex-Fleetwood Mac guitarist Peter Green who spent some tough years in psychiatric hospital, apparently diagnosed with schizophrenia, but is still as rock n' roll as ever - recording and touring with some of his best material.

Link to Bad Science on 'The news you didn’t read'.
Link to full-text of study.

—Vaughan.

August 15, 2008

Neurowar of words:

Wired Science covers a recent US military report on military threats from the latest developments in neuroscience as well as how brain research could be 'weaponised' to enhance soldiers' capabilities or disable enemy fighters.

It's a bit difficult to judge the quality of the report, as unlike the recent in-depth report from the JASON Pentagon advisory panel, they're charging people to download it.

From the Wired summary, it seems to cover similar ground although is perhaps a little more wide-ranging and focuses on policy and foresight rather than the nuts and bolts of brain science.

It apparently covers four main areas: mind reading; cognitive enhancement; mind control and brain-machine interfaces. As you can probably tell from the list, there's likely to be a fair amount of speculation going on there.

It's also interesting that the US military are really promoting their 'military neuroscience' angle, which is not to say that it is not a research priority. Whole wings of military research are now devoted to 'human research', as illustrated by the extensive science portfolio of the US Army's Research Lab.

Nevertheless, the discussions about drug-based enhancements have so far been largely reiterating what soldiers have already done for millennia - using drugs to reduce fatigue, increase confidence and cope with trauma.

Drugs have been used for soldiering as long as there have been wars and the low-tech still prevails - from the use of coca leaves by Inca warriors to the use of the khat by modern-day Sudanese militias.

If anyone does happen to stumble across an unrestricted copy of the report online, do let me know as it'd be great to be able to link to the original.

Link to Wired Science article 'Uncle Sam Wants Your Brain'.
Link to online shop for report.

—Vaughan.

Knitting delusions from thoughts:

An insightful excerpt from psychologist Peter Chadwick's chapter from an excellent new academic book on the science of persecutory delusions. Chadwick is a clinical psychologist and leading psychosis researcher who has experienced madness first hand.

When looking at Hopper's forlorn paintings one has the feeling that no moment in life need be wasted. Hopper captures a barman putting a glass or cup on a shelf; a women looking at her nails, another woman lost in thought in a cafe. Little things, things one wouldn't normally notice or think about, let alone render on canvas, are there to be appreciated.

Some of the experiential moments which built the network of emotionally charged ideas that mediated my own psychosis were trivial in themselves. A remark from my mother; an insult from a bully at school; a strange expression on a shop assistant's face. But all were eventually collected up, knitted together and turned into a delusional web of thoughts and feelings that in the end drove me to multiple suicide attempts that very nearly succeeded in killing me.

In madness, no moment of one's existence seems to be wasted; it is if one's whole life, and the depths of one's very being in selective perspective, have been made magically clear in their awful and portentous significance. One's past comes hauntingly back, in a kind of near-death experience while one is physically fully alive. 'This is what's it's all been leading up to!' I remember often thinking in the blazing hot, mad hot summer of 1979.

Chadwick also wrote a powerful 2006 article that recounted his experience of madness - weaving his insights as a scientifically inclined psychologist and his considerable literary powers into a piece that stands out as unusually powerful amid the typically arid academic literature.

Link to more details on the book.
Link to article 'Schizophrenia From the Inside'.

—Vaughan.

2008-08-15 Spike activity:

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

Sharp Brains has a thoughtful piece on the hoped-for demise of dementia.

Peter Donnelly gives an excellent TED talk on how juries are fooled by statistics.

Channel N finds an interesting video lecture on the conditioned fear response and combat resilience in the armed forces.

Apparently we're a 'Top 100' Mental Health and Psychology Blog.

The Frontal Cortex has an interesting summary of a study on basketball pros and the mirror system. A nice complement to a study on ballet dancers and capoeira experts.

Is being gay in your biology? All in the Mind investigates.

The Situationist has an interesting piece on "The Psychology of Barack Obama as the Antichrist". Cor blimey!

An interesting project to visualise sound to help deaf people interact with sound is covered by BBC News - with video of it in action.

Wired Science picks up on a new study that finds that placebos work better in children.

Cool! Artwork that displays separate images under different lighting conditions - with videos.

Furious Seasons has an excellent investigative piece on the fact that the FDA seem to be validating new psychiatric diagnoses off their own backs.

The most conceptually confused headline of the year? "Nature Or Nurture: Are You Who Your Brain Chemistry Says You Are?" Actually a study on addiction.

Is psychoanalysis equivalent to a spiritual practice? A commonly made link between psychoanalysis and religion is explored rather deftly in an article for The Immanent Frame.

The BPS Research Digest has an interesting piece on disaster psychology and why so many people perish needlessly in emergencies.

More from the Hot Spanish Psychologist. ¡Vaya chica!

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers a fascinating study showing that referees have a tendency to award more points to competitors wearing red.

—Vaughan.

August 14, 2008

YouTribe:

Anthropologist Michael Wesch gave a thoughtful and engaging talk on 'An anthropological introduction to YouTube' to the Library of Congress earlier this year and, rather appropriately, it's available online as a video on the popular video sharing site.

Wesh runs a digital ethnography project which looks at how cultures form and operate on the net.

The project's blog is also full of fascinating insights and is well worth checking out if you thought anthropology was only ever about people who don't have electricity.

Link to talk 'An anthropological introduction to YouTube'.

—Vaughan.

'Anti-torture' candidate to run for APA presidency:

Despite the American Psychological Association revising their ethics policy twice in the debate over American psychologists' participation in war-on-terror interrogations, significant unrest still remains over the fact the APA has yet to actually enforce its reluctantly implemented ban.

The Boston Globe has an op-ed article by psychologist and APA critic Stephen Soldz who notes that an anti-torture candidate has been put forward for the APA presidency in an attempt to force the Association's hand.

The new candidate is psychologist Steven Reisner who even has a campaign website - an innovation for presidential elections which are usually wildly underwhelming.

According to the Globe piece, Reisner received the most votes of the five candidates in the nomination phase. If the momentum carries forward, APA's careful tiptoeing to avoid offending the US military may backfire if the most political president for years takes the helm.

Interestingly, both Soldz and Reisner are psychoanalysts, a group who have been leading the campaign against psychologists' role in US military interrogations and who have consistently opposed the 'war-on-terror' since it began.

Freud himself was particularly interested in the tension between individual drives and governmental control. In Civilization and its Discontents he suggested government was an inevitable result of the need to control the unacceptable desires we all have.

He was particularly interested in how common individual neuroses get expressed socially as we project our own fears onto specific groups deemed to be 'outsiders', often with barbarous and disastrous consequences.

Link to Boston Globe op-ed.

—Vaughan.

August 13, 2008

Hypnosis addiction: the scourge of the Victorian lady:

I'm currently reading the wonderful but very long book The Discovery of the Unconscious which I shall post more about later.

However, I noticed this little gem about hypnosis in the late 1800s which just smacks of the current hand-wringing over the non-existent (or rather can't-existent) 'internet addiction'.

The problems described are so obviously not addiction, and, in fact, like the internet, there's no specific activity to be addicted to that is defined by the term 'hypnosis'. After all hypnosis is just where you concentrate and someone makes suggestions - can you be addicted to concentration and listening? Obviously not.

Nevertheless, the concerns got framed in the language of addiction as a placemarker for a fear of the unknown and as a fig leaf for other social problems (from p118):

Deleuze and the early mesmerists also described the evils resulting from too frequent or too prolonged hypnotic sessions. Such subjects gradually became addicted to hypnosis: not only did their need for frequent hypnotization increase, but they became dependent on their particular magnetizer, and this dependency could often take on a sexual slant. This well-known fact was rediscovered by Charcot, who gave an account of a woman who had been hypnotized five times within three weeks and who could think of nothing but her hypnotist, until she ran away from her home to live with him. Her husband took her back, but she fell into severe hysterical disturbances that necessitated her admission to a hospital.

Link to Wikipedia page on The Discovery of the Unconscious.

—Vaughan.

Interrupting Napoleon on the genetics of mental illness:

Today's Nature has got an interesting letter on psychiatric genetics suggesting an interesting approach to studying the genetics of mental illness.

It's from neuroscientists John McGrath and Jean-Paul Selten and comments on an earlier Nature article which we discussed previously.

Napoleon Bonaparte advised: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." Those of us who assess the contribution of non-heritable risk factors to neuropsychiatric illness would like to politely interrupt this battle to remind opponents that environmental risk factors have now overtaken genetic factors with respect to both effect size and the proportion of the population that is affected.

For schizophrenia, for example, factors relating to urban birth, cannabis use and migrant status are well replicated and have relatively large effects — in contrast to the scant evidence that remains after decades of genetics research. Although the 'heritability index' for schizophrenia is large (about 85%), this metric encompasses the neglected contribution of gene–environment interactions, as well as the high-profile genetic component. This key point is largely forgotten in the heat of the battle.

It has been convincingly argued (A. Caspi and T. E. Moffitt Nature Rev. Neurosci. 7, 583–590; 2006) that the power to detect genuine genetic-susceptibility loci would be substantially increased if we could stratify samples according to environmental risk factors. Let's have more funding to help fine-map the wide range of non-heritable risk factors associated with disabling disorders such as schizophrenia and depression, and discover how they act. These clues are too valuable to overlook.

It's an interesting point and is relevant to the fact that heritability must be one of the most misinterpreted statistics in genetics.

If a study reports that schizophrenia has a heritability of 85%, many people interpret it to mean that 85% of the risk of developing schizophrenia comes from genetics and this is something to do with the condition itself.

In fact, what it shows is that 85% of the risk of schizophrenia in the samples taken so far is estimated to come from genetics, but crucially this estimate is dependent on the environment in quite subtle ways.

The letter above mentions gene-environment interactions: where exactly the same genes can produce different heritability depending on the environment.

Imagine that everyone lived in a virtually identical environment and we all had almost exactly the same life experiences. The only possible difference in the prevalence of mental disorder would have to come from genetics, because the environment is virtually the same for everyone. In this case, heritability would be close to 100%.

Alternatively, if the environment was widely different for everyone, much more of the difference would come from experience and so the heritability estimate would be less.

In other words, the estimate of heritability depends partly on the variability in the environment experienced by the people being studied.

I was told by a genetics researcher that studies on the genetics of intelligence in school children tend to show that IQ is more heritable in the UK than the US, because in the UK we have a National Curriculum - a specified education programme that every child follows.

This means that UK children have a more similar learning environment, whereas in the US the curriculum is decided state-by-state meaning there's much more variability in experience. Hence, IQ is less heritable in US school children.

I've not found the the studies on IQ in school children, so I'm not sure how it stands at the moment, but it serves as a good illustration of how heritability estimates can be environment dependent.

Actually, this week's Nature has two other letters on the same topic, and additional feature articles on autism and neural synchrony, as well as a couple brain-relevant book reviews.

Link to contents of this week's Nature.
pdf of Nature Reviews Genetics paper on twin studies and heritability.

—Vaughan.

FBI's Most Wanted neuroscientist on imitation:

Aafia Siddiqui was the FBI's Most Wanted Woman for several years and is currently in US custody in New York, awaiting trial on charges that she is a terrorist and member of Al-Qaeda.

She is also a neuroscientist and co-authored a scientific paper in 2005 on the cognitive science of imitation learning.

Before her recent capture, which some sources claim may have actually happened five years ago in Pakistan, Siddiqui completed a PhD entitled 'Separating the components of imitation' at Brandeis University in the US.

Before that, she completed a Masters degree in neuroscience, also on imitation learning, and her 2005 paper is based on her work for this degree.

The paper describes three experiments that attempt to understand how our learning of seen actions is affected by delays, memory interference and visual interference.

Each experiment involved a pale red disc that followed an 'invisible track' on a computer monitor. The sort of track is illustrated in the diagram of the left, although in the actual experiment the participants just saw the disc.

In Siddiqui's experiment, one group of participants used a trackpad to ensure that the cursor was within the disc at all times (a classic pursuit-tracking task), while another group had to wait until the disc had followed the route before trying to reproduce it from memory.

To look at the effect of complexity on imitation learning, some routes had only three straight lines, while others had up to seven.

Furthermore, some routes were repeated, while others appeared only once. This allowed the researchers to compare learning for identical routes (specific learning) with learning for the general task (skill learning).

The results showed that, unsurprisingly, participants were better at reproducing the simpler routes. What was more surprisingly though, was that practice-related improvement was only seen when participants watched the whole movement before starting, and then only on routes that were repeated.

Intriguingly, when interviewed after the experiment, the participants had no idea some routes were presented more than once, suggesting that this learning occurred without any conscious involvement.

A further experiment showed that delays of up to 6 seconds barely affected performance and that interfering with short-term memory by getting participants to do maths problems only made them a little worse.

Finally, the researchers ran an experiment where the disc appeared only at the beginning and end of each straight line, or when it was turning a corner. This had virtually no impact on performance. Participants were almost equally as good with much less information.

The research helps us understand the limits of learning when we need to copy a certain action sequence, be this tying shoelaces, swinging a golf club or learning tai chi.

The study suggests that for short action sequences we may be better off waiting until we watch the whole thing before attempting it ourselves.

Link to PubMed entry for paper.
Link to library record for Siddiqui's PhD thesis.

—Vaughan.

August 12, 2008

The common language of pride and shame:

Wired Science covers an elegant study that suggests that spontaneous expressions of pride and shame are innate behaviours that are not significantly influenced by culture.

The researchers came up with the ingenious idea of comparing how judo wrestlers from the 2004 Olympics and blind judo wrestlers from the 2004 Paralympics celebrated and commiserated their matches.

This allowed a cross cultural comparison, but it also allowed a comparison with blind athletes who have never seen another person in the same position to copy their behaviour.

The new research, however, distilled from high-resolution, high-speed photographic sequences of sighted and blind judo competitors at the 2004 Olympics and Paralympics, suggests that most nonverbal responses to wins and losses are almost universal.

No cultural differences were observed among competitors from different countries and, aside from the shaking of the fists after a loss, sighted and blind athletes displayed remarkably similar nonverbal behavior.

In other words, it made virtually no difference what culture each individual came from, or even whether the person had seen another wrestler at the end of a match or not - the expression of pride was indistinguishable, suggesting that this may be a common expression that we all share.

There was a slight effect of culture on the expression of shame - as the researchers note "it was less pronounced among individuals from highly individualistic, self-expression-valuing cultures, primarily in North America and West Eurasia".

However, as there was no difference within cultures between sighted and blind individuals, they further suggest that both pride and shame are likely to be innate, but that shame display may be intentionally inhibited by some sighted individuals in accordance with cultural norms.

Link to Wired Science on elegant study.
Link to full text of paper.

—Vaughan.

George Lakoff and the linguistics wars:

George Lakoff is famous for being one of the founding fathers of cognitive linguistics, for battling Noam Chomsky, and for arguing that using the right metaphors is the key to winning a political debate.

He's profiled in an article for the Chronical Review which serves as a fantastic introduction to the man, his work and his controversial foray into politics.

Lakoff is particularly interesting because he advised the US Democratic party on the use of language and in 'framing' debates - meaning they are described with metaphors that automatically conjure up positive ideas and concepts that are favourable to the policy under discussion.

Whether you share Lakoff's politics or not, the story of how he became prized by the party and then embroiled in a backlash over whether this was just gloss and glitter rather than anything of political substance is interesting.

The roots of the cognitive revolution in the social sciences are numerous and wide-ranging, but Lakoff traces his own story to Berkeley in 1975, when he attended a series of lectures that prompted him to embrace a theory of the mind that is fully embodied. Lakoff came to believe that reason is shaped by the sensory-motor system of the brain and the body. That idea ran counter to the longstanding belief — Lakoff traces it back 2,500 years to Plato — that reason is disembodied and that one can make a meaningful distinction between mind and body.

One of the most influential lectures Lakoff heard that summer was delivered by Charles J. Fillmore, now an emeritus professor of linguistics at the university, who was developing the idea of "frame semantics" — the theory that words automatically bring to mind bundles of ideas, narratives, emotions, and images. He called those related concepts "frames," and he posited that they are strengthened when certain words and phrases are repeated. That suggested that language arises from neural circuitry linking many distinct areas of the brain. In other words, language can't be studied independently of the brain and body. Lakoff concluded that linguistics must take into account cognitive science.

The field of cognitive linguistics was born, and Lakoff became one of its most prominent champions. But it wasn't until the mid-1990s that he began thinking through some of the political implications of framing. Startled by the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994, Lakoff set about looking for conceptual coherence in what he saw as the seemingly arbitrary positions that defined modern conservatism. What thread connected a pro-life stance with opposition to many social programs, or a hostility toward taxes with support of the death penalty? Lakoff concluded that conservatives and liberals are divided by distinct worldviews based on the metaphor of the nation as a family.

The fact that throughout Lakoff was trying to apply the cognitive science of language to a practical problem makes for an interesting tension between science, speculation and ambition.

Link to article 'Who Framed George Lakoff?'.

—Vaughan.

Mainlining the active ingredients of cannabis:

I've uploaded a fascinating video clip where a TV presenter is intravenously injected with the active ingredients of cannabis as part of the BBC documentary Should I Smoke Dope?

It's part of an experiment to compare the effects of intravenous THC and cannabidiol combined, with intravenous THC on its own. The mix of both gives the presenter a pleasant giggly high while THC on its own causes her to become desolate and paranoid.

Both are these are known to be key psychoactive ingredients in cannabis but the video is interesting as it is a reflection of the fact that THC has been most linked to an increased risk of developing psychosis while cannabidiol seems to have an antipsychotic effect.

As we discussed earlier this year, one study found that cannabis smokers who had higher levels of cannabidiol in hair samples had the lowest levels of psychosis-like experiences.

Another study we covered reported that, at least in the UK, 'skunk' has virtually no cannabidiol, while hash, although variable, was more likely to contain high cannabidiol levels.

And if you're after a more balanced view on the link between cannabis and psychosis than you normally get in the media, I've also uploaded a clip from the same programme where psychiatrist and leading cannabis researcher Robin Murray discusses the findings from the latest research.

If you want to check out the whole documentary, where BBC reporter Nicky Taylor gets stoned for 30 days in a row while investigating the science, culture and legal status of cannabis, it's available as a torrent or in six parts on YouTube (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

Link to video of IV cannabidiol and THC experiment.
Link to video of psychiatrist Robin Murray on cannabis and psychosis.

—Vaughan.

August 11, 2008

Parapsychology in a nutshell:

Today's featured article on Wikipedia is a rather splendid article on parapsychology - the scientific study of the supposed paranormal phenomena of the mind.

Academic parapsychology is notable for the exceptional quality of the experiments it conducts and the inconclusive nature of its findings - at least to mainstream science.

Large reviews of many studies (meta-analyses) tend to find that 'psi' effects are statistically significant but of small effect. The disagreement comes in over whether this small effect is a genuine reflection of paranormal ability or just an artefact of research - such as negative findings being published less often.

The history and process are fascinating though, with some of the great luminaries of psychology, such as William James, having been interested in experimental studies of psychic powers.

Link to Wikipedia page on 'parapsychology'.

—Vaughan.

Cannibalism, prions and encephalopathy (oh my!):

Cannabalism gave Western medicine its first understanding of prion diseases as an epidemic of the neurological disorder swept the South Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea. Neurophilosophy has written a remarkably lucid article on the history and neuroscience of how prion diseases, of which 'mad cow disease' is one, affect the brain.

The piece starts with some archive footage of a tribe member with the devastating disorder and continues to describe how this class of diseases are probably caused by misfolded proteins that can trigger the same misfolding in other proteins leading to a chain reaction of neural damage.

The Fore tribe had a tradition of ritually consuming the brain and body of deceased relatives, which likely lead to the outbreak.

The word kuru means "shaking death" in the Fore language, and describes the characteristic symptoms of the disease. Because it affects mainly the cerebellum, a part of the brain involved in the co-ordination of movement, the first symptoms to manifest themselves in those infected with the disease would typically be an unsteady gait and tremors. As the disease progresses, victims become unable to stand or eat, and eventually die between 6-12 months after the symptoms first appear.

Kuru belongs to a class of progressive neurodegenerative diseases called the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), which also includes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, more popularly known as "Mad Cow Disease"). TSEs are fatal and infectious; in humans, they are relatively rare, and can arise sporadically, by infection, or because of genetic mutations. They are unusual in that the infectious agent which transmits the diseases is believed to a misfolded protein. (Hence, the TSEs are also referred to as the prion diseases, "prion" being a shortened form of the term "proteinaceous infectious particle").

Prion diseases are a complicated area and you probably won't find a better written introduction that captures both the science and the intrigue of these relatively new disorders.

Link to article 'Cannibalism and the shaking death'.

—Vaughan.

The best is yet to come: reward prediction in the brain:

Jonah Lehrer has written an excellent piece for the latest issue of Seed Magazine on the work of neuroscientist Read Montague who's been discovering the essential function of dopamine in predicting rewards.

Reward prediction is the process where dopamine neurons fire when a reward is expected and also seem to code the amount of error between the prediction and what actually happens. Importantly, the process seems to be accurately described by an algorithm that was already used in computer science.

This has been an area of intense interest over the last decade as it ties together neurobiology, learning, motivation, mathematics and can be demonstrated in a variety of simple lab-based tasks. The fact that dopamine has been linked to numerous disorders in the past makes it a popular paradigm in which to understand psychiatric symptoms.

The Seed article looks at the work of Read Montague who has been studying the process and has been using ingenious methods to look at the role of this system in social reasoning.

In recent years Montague has shown how this basic computational mechanism is a fundamental feature of the human mind. Consider a paper on the neural foundations of trust, recently published in Science. The experiment was born out of Montague’s frustration with the limitations of conventional fMRI. “The most unrealistic element [of fMRI experiments] is that we could only study the brain by itself,” Montague says. “But when are brains ever by themselves?” And so Montague pioneered a technique known as hyper-scanning, allowing subjects in different fMRI machines to interact in real time. His experiment revolved around a simple economic game in which getting the maximum reward required the strangers to trust one another. However, if one of the players grew especially selfish, he or she could always steal from the pot and erase the tenuous bond of trust. By monitoring the players’ brains, Montague was able to predict whether or not someone would steal money several seconds before the theft actually occurred. The secret was a cortical area known as the caudate nucleus, which closely tracked the payouts from the other player. Montague noticed that whenever the caudate exhibited reduced activity, trust tended to break down.

One thing I notice a little of in the quotes from Montague, which is incredibly common in discussion of dopamine and reward, is a kind of 'reward system dogma'.

Reward is usually linked to the function of the striatum and nucleus accumbens and the dogma goes something like this: "no matter what is happening when the nucleus accumbens or striatum is activated, something about the activity is rewarding".

I was interesting to read a recent study comparing brain activation in people with 'normal' and 'complicated' (i.e. extreme) grief in response to viewing pictures of their deceased relative.

The study found additional nucleus accumbens activation in people with complicated grief and suggested that this reflects the fact they find the thoughts of them more rewarding. This is despite the fact that the nucleus accumbens has also been found to also represent salience - i.e. how likely something is to grab our attention.

It's probably also worth mentioning that there may be some serious problems with the elegant reward prediction theory of dopamine which are were outline in a 2006 paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience and summarised by the excellent Developing Intelligence.

The Seed is generally an excellent read though and covers an important finding and some innovative new ideas. I especially like the fMRI machines linked in parallel, like multi-player arcade machines.

Link to Seed article 'A New State of Mind'.

—Vaughan.

August 10, 2008

Digital drugs emergency - paging Dr. Beat:

USA Today has an unintentionally hilarious article on the dangers of 'digital drugs' that can supposedly mimic the effects of alcohol, marijuana, LSD, crack, heroin, sex, heaven and hell.

Woohoo! I hear you shout, before realising the article is actually a woefully misinformed piece about binaural beats, a fascinating but harmless phenomenon when two pure tones of close but differing frequencies are played, one in each ear.

This can produce a perception of a pulse or a 'beat' which isn't actually present in the sound but is a result of our brain making sense of the tones.

You need headphones to get the effect properly and there's a couple of examples on the Wikipedia page (ignore the 'hypothetical effects on brain function' section though, it's currently full of drivel and miscited experiments).

The fact that it causes a 'pulsing' in the brain has led to lots of websites suggesting it can 'synchronise your brain waves' - and whenever 'synchronising brain waves' is mentioned you can be sure they'll be lots of nonsense about ascending to higher states of consciousness, super mind power and legal LSD being mentioned.

Actually, there are a minority of people who can have their state of consciousness altered by flashes of light at certain frequencies.

In fact, it may trigger full blown seizures in some (photosensitive epilepsy) but also causes minor and subtle seizure activity in others and in some can stimulate memories or images, or perhaps just cause an 'odd' feeling.

This was the basis of the original 'dream machine' and subsequent electronic versions which flash lights in your eyes. The history and neuroscience of this discovery was retold in the excellent book Chapel of Extreme Experience if you're interested.

Some preliminary research has shown that binaural beat audio can decrease anxiety or boost mood, but the studies are small and inconclusive and some are published in what we might tactfully refer to as 'non-mainstream' journals.

In the vast majority of people though, flashing lights or auditory pulses of whatever type do bugger all on their own, despite what various New Age websites and YouTube videos try and convince you (infinite bliss anyone?).

The USA Today piece manages to swallow this hook, line and sinker to fantastic comic effect:

Different types of digital drugs

Some sites provide binaural beats that have innocuous effects. For example, some claim to help you develop extrasensory powers like telepathy and psychokinesis.

Other sites offer therapeutic binaural beats. They help you relax or meditate. Some allegedly help you overcome addiction or anxiety. Others purport to help you lose weight or eliminate gray hair.

However, most sites are more sinister. They sell audio files ("doses") that supposedly mimic the effects of alcohol and marijuana.

But it doesn't end there. You'll find doses that purportedly mimic the effects of LSD, crack, heroin and other hard drugs. There are also doses of a sexual nature. I even found ones that supposedly simulate heaven and hell.

There's plenty more great entertainment in the article. Life imitates Chris Morris, again.

Hey, I'm having a comedown from my infinite bliss.

I want my money back.

Link to 'Web delivers new worry for parents: Digital drugs' (via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

August 08, 2008

Preminiscence:

Over the past year, I've had the pleasure of working with a fantastic theatre company and some amazingly talented composers to help develop a play called Reminiscence about a woman who hallucinates music after developing temporal lobe epilepsy.

The play premiers in London on September 9th and will be accompanied by talks discussing the neuroscience of hallucinations, music and the ethics of treating personally meaningful neurological symptoms.

It's based on one of Oliver Sacks' case studies (Mrs O'C) that he featured in both The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia but has been updated and expanded to explore how neuropsychology and medicine deal with the situation when pathology and personal meaning collide. The piece is wonderfully engaging and combines music, visual and theatre to powerful effect.

The idea originated from composers Effy and Litha Efthymiou who were inspired by the musical aspect of Sacks' case and who began working with the theatre daCapo company to develop a production.

I was honoured to be asked to advise on the neuroscience, and have spent an immensely enjoyable year working with the company. Needless to say, I'm incredibly excited to see it in its final stages and can't wait until in premiers in the Jacksons Lane theatre in Highgate.

I'll be posting more on the production nearer the time, but all the when, where and hows are currently on the Theatre DaCapo website.

Link to details of Reminiscence play.

—Vaughan.

Recreational drug preference linked to medical speciality:

Following our piece on several cases of drug addiction in anaesthetists, I just found some interesting studies on how recreational drug preference varies between medical specialities. It seems working in psychiatry and emergency medicine is linked to the highest rates of drug use, with surgeons having some of the lowest levels.

This study seems to be the most comprehensive on doctors of all levels of seniority:

Emergency medicine physicians used more illicit drugs. Psychiatrists used more benzodiazepines. Comparatively, pediatricians had overall low rates of use, as did surgeons, except for tobacco smoking. Anesthesiologists had higher use only for major opiates. Self-reported substance abuse and dependence were at highest levels among psychiatrists and emergency physicians, and lowest among surgeons. With evidence from studies such as this one, a specialty can organize prevention programs to address patterns of substance use specific to that specialty, the specialty characteristics of its members, and their unique practice environments that may contribute risk of substance abuse and dependence.

A 1992 study looked at exactly the same thing in junior doctors, and again found similar results - psychiatrists and emergency doctors tended to be more likely to use drugs, while surgeons were among the least likely:

Emergency medicine and psychiatry residents showed higher rates of substance use than residents in other specialties. Emergency medicine residents reported more current use of cocaine and marijuana, and psychiatry residents reported more current use of benzodiazepines and marijuana. Contrary to recent concerns, anesthesiology residents did not have high rates of substance use. Family/general practice, internal medicine, and obstetrics/gynecology were not among the higher or lower use groups for most substances. Surgeons had lower rates of substance use except for alcohol. Pediatric and pathology residents were least likely to be substance users.

A similar study on nurses was conducted by the same team a couple of years earlier and found similar results:

As hypothesized, rates varied greatly by speciality. Oncology nurses reported the highest past-year prevalence for all substances combined (42%), followed by psychiatry (40%) and emergency and adult critical care (both 38%).

Emergency and pediatric critical care nurses had the highest prevalence of marijuana / cocaine use (7%), followed by adult critical care nurses (6%). Prescription-type drug use was less varied across specialties: those with the highest prevalence of use were oncology, rehabilitation, and psychiatry. For cigarette smoking, psychiatry had the highest prevalence (23%), followed by emergency and gerontology (both 18%). Pediatric critical care nurses were least likely to smoke (8%). Binge drinking was high among oncology, emergency, and adult critical care nurses.

Link to abstract of recreational drug preference in doctors study.
Link to full text of drugs in junior doctors study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to full text of study on nurses.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

2008-08-08 Spike activity:

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

Language Log has an excellent piece on another reason why the amphetamine methylphenidate (Ritalin) may be popular as a study drug - apart from its boost to wakefulness it might actually improve some forms of learning.

Genes for schizophrenia uncovered. Again!

Scientific American reports on how our moral decision-making can be altered by distraction and additional cognitive effort.

Neurologist Robert Burton has a good piece in Salon on the placebo effect in conventional medicine.

Can cholesterol-lowering drugs reduce the risk of dementia? Newsweek examines evidence from a new study.

Furious Seasons on reports of people faking schizophrenia to get sleep-inducing antipsychotic drug quetiapine (Seroquel). God knows why.

US psychiatrists are deserting psychotherapy in favour of a sole focus on medication management, reports AP News. Original study here.

Edge presents A Short Course in Behavioural Economics. Scroll down past the chummy restaurant photos to get to the interesting bit.

Human brains have evolved a particularly strong capacity to detect what neuroscientists call “errors”. A sentence from a dreadful article on the 'neuroscience' 'of' 'leadership'.

The New York Times discusses the benefits of boredom.

Researchers develop robots that learn to move themselves, reports BBC News. But the video shows they're not just moving, they're break dancing! Hey You The Robot Steady Crew, show em what you do, make a break, make a move.

Neuroanthropology has an excellent article on the sex differences and the 'maths gap'.

Daniel Dennett publishes an extract from his autobiography. No mention of inspiration for Santa-like beard yet.

Scientific American has an article on the neurological basis of genius.

The 'torture debate' among US psychologists rumbles on and is covered by PsychCentral.

NPR Radio has an excellent piece on novelist Virginia Woolf and the psychology of the self, inspired by Jonah Lehrer's recent book. Wonderfully produced in the unique RadioLab style.

Neuroscientist Shitij Kapur does the warm up for Gladys Knight with a lecture on dopamine and psychosis. No really. Channel N has the scoop.

—Vaughan.

August 07, 2008

Rolling thunder:

Neurophilosophy covers the discovery of a new type of synaesthesia - where movement is experienced as sound. In fact, the researchers have put the test online so you can test yourself.

Synaesthesia is where the senses are 'crossed' so people might experience visual figures, such as letters, as tastes. This is one type, but letter to colour, sound to colour or number to space are most common.

This new study was initiated when the researchers were testing people with other forms who synaesthesia who happened to mention that they could 'hear' a moving pattern on a computer monitor.

Neurophilosophy picks up the story where the researchers sought to confirm this with an elegant experiment:

Saenz and Koch devised a task which could be used to objectively confirm the reports of the 4 participants, a task on which they would out-perform non-synaesthetes who do not experience the "extra" sensation. The task involved judging rhythmic patterns - in each trial, the participants were presented with pairs of sequences of either visual flashes or auditory beeps, and then asked if the two were the same.

Typically, non-synaesthetes are much better at judging auditory than visual sequences. But the hearing-motion synaesthetes should be at an advantage when presented with sequences of visual flashes, because they can hear, as well as see, the pattern. This is exactly what was found: the 4 synaesthetes and the 10 non-synaesthete controls performed equally well in the trials of sound sequences, with an accuracy of around 85%. But in the trials with sequences of visual flashes, the synaesthetes remained accurate, with a score of about 75%, whereas the performance of the controls fell to 50%, which is what would be expected by chance.

Link to Neurophilosophy on study.
Link to full text of study.

—Vaughan.

August 06, 2008

Attending van Gogh and his asylum art:

This month's British Journal of Psychiatry includes a letter that gives an interesting insight into the relationship between the legendary Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, the three doctors that variously treated him for his epilepsy and insanity, and some of his most famous paintings.

Three medical doctors were involved with the treatment of van Gough: Dr Felix Rey (1867–1932), who diagnosed van Gogh’s epilepsy; Dr Théophile Zacharie Auguste Peyron (1827–95) of Saint-Remy asylum who also diagnosed ‘a type of epilepsy’ – he was a very understanding physician who arranged facilities within the asylum for van Gogh’s paintings and artwork; and Dr Paul Gachet (1828–1909) who treated van Gogh during his last 10 weeks of life.

van Gogh painted two portraits and an etching of Dr Gachet, one of which (Portrait of Doctor Gachet, June 1890) was auctioned in 1990 for an astounding sum of US$ 82.5 million. Young intern Dr Rey probably maintained distance because he saw van Gogh during his psychotic state, shortly after the ear mutilation episode. He failed to value the artist’s creativity and thus was not possessive of the gift presented to him, which he described afterwards:

"Vincent was above all a miserable, wretched man,... he would talk to me about complementary colours. But I really could not understand why red should not be red, and green not green!... When I saw that he outlined my head entirely in green (he had only two main colours, red and green), that he painted my hair and my mustache – I really did not have red hair – in a blazing red on a biting green background, I was simply horrified. What should I do with this present?"

Dr Gachet was very supportive of van Gogh and valued his creative instinct. Vincent had found a ‘true friend’ in him. It is a matter of pride for the medical fraternity that Dr Gachet was highly admired by van Gogh and that he tried his best to keep van Gogh’s tormented soul at peace and allow his creativity to flourish in the village atmosphere of Auvers. van Gogh created a series of paintings, at least 14, illustrating the Saint-Remy asylum. Any of them may be appropriate for the Journal to focus on with regard to his creativity of the use of colour and space to astonishing effect. Those paintings are carrying the historical value of mental health perspectives so far as the asylum culture of his time is concerned.

The picture on the left is The Starry Night, one of his most famous, which he draw looking out of his window while a resident in the Saint-Remy asylum.

Link to letter in BJP (closed access for some unknown reason).

—Vaughan.

Trapped: Mental Illness in America's Prisons:

Photographer Jenn Ackerman has created a stunning and extensive video essay on Kentucky's correctional facility for prisoners with mental illness, interviewing the inmates, staff and clinicians who form part of America's biggest provider of residential psychiatry - the prison system.

Of course, the prisons were never designed to be providers of mental health care, but as a recent Time article noted, they have become the default treatment facility for the many people who fall through the cracks.

Ackerman has created a introductory film and also has put several prisoner interviews online, where we meet people in various states of distress and recovery. There's also a fantastic film on 'inmate watchers' who have the responsibility to checking on vulnerable, volatile or suicidal inmates.

The films are sometimes disturbing, bleak in places and occasionally sublime, but are immensely revealing and show remarkable sensitivity in their construction.

From Ackerman's written essay that accompanies the piece, I suspect that we only get to see the least affected people as those who are most ill are unlikely to be able to consent to being interviewed, meaning that even this bleak portrayal is likely to be a relatively positive depiction.

A man has been singing songs at the top of his lungs for the last two days, while another, hunched on his bed, wails from under a blanket. In a cell across the hall, a man shakes as he yells to his wife he has not seen in five years and to the thug down the street. In reaction to the noise, another man bangs endlessly on his cell door until an officer comes by and asks him to stop. He smiles and says he just wanted someone to talk to.

"We are the surrogate mental hospitals now," says Larry Chandler, warden at the Kentucky State Reformatory in La Grange, Ky. With the rising number of mentally ill, the reformatory was forced to rebuild a system that was designed for security. Never intended as mental health facility, treatment has quickly become one of their primary goals.

Unfortunately, this situation is not unique to Kentucky. The continuous withdrawal of mental health funding has turned jails and prisons across the US into the default mental health facilities.

A 2006 report by the U.S. Department of Justice shows that the number of Americans with mental illnesses incarcerated in the nation’s prisons and jails is disproportionately high. Almost 555,000 people with mental illness are incarcerated while fewer than 55,000 are being treated in designated mental health hospitals.

Ackerman also has a gallery of still photographs and says she intends to make a feature length film which, if it has the impact of her online work, is likely to be profoundly moving.

Link to Trapped: Mental Illness in America's Prisons.

—Vaughan.

Imagining missing limbs helps pain, reorganises brain:

Neurology journal Brain has just published an elegant open-access study on how just six weeks of mental imagery training can help reduce phantom limb pain as well as reorganising the sensory and motor maps in the brain.

Phantom limbs are when amputees feel sensations that seem to be coming from the missing limb. Sometimes this can include pain which can either be constant or transitory.

Sensations from the nonexistent limb are thought to be due to the brain reorganising the areas which represent the body.

In the case of a phantom arm, for example, the area is no longer receiving sensations from the limb and so stops being so carefully defined. Areas serving other body areas (like the face) start to creep in and facial stimulation can be felt in the missing arm due to the fuzzy neurological boundaries.

This new study, led by neuroscientist Kate McIver, decided to test whether mental imagery can help keep these areas active and prevent the fuzziness creeping in, potentially reducing the phantom pain.

This is based on extensive research to show that imagining something activates similar brain areas to actually perceiving the sensation or executing the action. For example, imagining the sensation of a cool breeze across your arm actually increases activity in the brain areas responsible for arm sensations, while imaging picking something up activates arm-related motor areas.

The research team asked participants to rate their phantom limb pain and used fMRI to look at which brain areas were most active during some movement-related tasks. While in the scanner, the participants were asked to imagine actions with either the existing or phantom hand, to move the existing hand or were asked to purse (push together) their lips.

This last action tends to activate what was previously the hand area in the brain in people with phantom limbs, but doesn't in people with intact limbs. Indeed, this is exactly what the initial brain scans reported, indicating that their brains had reorganised sensory boundaries.

The researchers then invited each participant for six weekly sessions that involved a mental 'body scan' technique that involved imagining free and comfortable movement in their phantom limb such as they could "stretch away the pain" and "allow the fingers, hand and arm to rest in a comfortable position". Participants also practised in their own time.

After six weeks, pain ratings were taken again and the brain scanning was re-run. The painful sensations had significantly reduced and lip pursing no longer activated the hand area.

The mental imagery seemed to have 'simulated' arm actions and sensations well enough so that the neurological boundaries remained sharp and cross-area fuzziness didn't encourage phantom pain.

Link to full text article in Brain.
Link to PubMed entry.

—Vaughan.

August 05, 2008

Don't get high on your own supply:

An article from Forensic Sciences International investigated evidence for addiction in anaesthetists by analysing hair samples.

The paper reports on four court cases where anaesthetists were suspended for suspected addiction to the drugs they use to put people to sleep or kill pain during operations.

Each case involved hair analysis to gather evidence, owing to the fact that many drugs will leave traces in the hair as it grows, leaving a timeline of drug use.

Chemical dependency is a disease that can affect all professions. Among the health care professionals, anesthesiologists represent a specific group. Numerous factors have been proposed to explain the high incidence of drug abuse among anesthesiologists. These include: easy access to potent drugs, particularly narcotics, highly addictive potential of agents with which they are in contact, and easy diversion of these agents since only small doses will initially provide an effect desired by the abuser.

Opioids are the drugs of choice for anesthesiologists, and among them fentanyl and sufentanil are the most commonly used. Alcohol is mostly abused by older anesthesiologists. Propofol, ketamine, thiopental and midazolam are also abused. In fact, all but quaternary ammonium drugs can be observed. Signs and symptoms of addiction in the hospital workplace include: unusual changes in behavior, desire to work alone, refusal of lunch relief or breaks, volunteer for extra cases, call, come in early and leave late, frequent restroom breaks, weight loss and pale skin, malpractice, behind on charts ....

Toxicological investigations are difficult, as the drugs of interest are difficult to test for. In most cases, half-lives of the compounds are short, and the circulating concentrations weak. It is, therefore, necessary to develop tandem mass spectrometry procedures to satisfy the criteria of identification and quantitation. In most cases, blood and/or urine analyses are not useful to document impairment, as these specimens are collected at inadequate moments. Hair analysis appears, therefore, as the unique choice to evidence chronic exposure.

Depending the length of the hair shaft, it is possible to establish an historical record, associated to the pattern of drug use, considering a growth rate of about 1cm/month. An original procedure was developed to test for fentanyl derivatives. After decontamination with methylene chloride, drugs are extracted from the hair by liquid/liquid extraction after incubation in pH 8.4 phosphate buffer. Fentanyl derivatives are analyzed by GC-MS/MS. The following cases are included in this paper:

Case 1: 50-year-old anesthetist, positive for fentanyl (644 pg/mg); Case 2: 42-year-old anesthetist, positive for fentanyl (101 pg/mg) and sufentanil (2 pg/mg); Case 3: 40-year-old anesthetist, positive for codeine (210 pg/mg), alfentanil (30 pg/mg) and midazolam (160 pg/mg); Case 4: 46-year-old nurse, found dead, positive for alfentanil (2 pg/mg) and fentanyl (8 pg/mg). In these cases, the combination of an alternative specimen (hair) and hyphenated analytical techniques (tandem mass spectrometry) appears to be a pre-requisite.

A recent review article noted that while doctors were generally healthier than the general popular, addiction remains a particular risk for physicians, stating "addiction impairs more physicians than any other disorder or disease. Though alcohol use, abuse, and dependence are no more prevalent among physicians than other professionals, physicians display higher rates of prescription drug abuse and dependence than the general population."

Link to abstract of study on hair analysis.
Link to abstract of study on prescription drug abuse among physicians.

—Vaughan.

Magic in mind:

Interest in the cognitive science of magic is really hotting up with Nature Neuroscience having just published a review article jointly authored by some leading cognitive scientists and stage illusionists. They argue that by studying magic, neuroscientists can learn powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness in the laboratory which could give insights into the neural basis of consciousness itself.

The neuroscientists involved are Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, while the magicians are Mac King, James Randi, Apollo Robbins, Teller from Penn and Teller, and John Thompson.

If this collection of names sounds familiar, it's because this time last year the same group presented a symposium at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness on 'The Magic of Consciousness'.

The new article rounds up the conference discussion and The Boston Globe has a piece looking at some of the highlights.

This is not the only cognitive science article that explores what neuroscience can learn from the mystic arts. In a forthcoming article [pdf] for Trends in Cognitive Sciences psychologist Gustav Kuhn.

Kuhn has done some fantastic experimental studies looking at eye movements and attention of people watching magic tricks.

It's not only an academic interest as Kuhn is apparently an illusionist himself and he's one of a number of psychologists who also happen to be stage magicians. Just off the top of my head psychologists Richard Wiseman and Robert Moverman are also ex-professional conjurers. I've come across several others and so its perhaps not so surprising that these new articles have been published, but more that they took so long.

Both articles look at some common and no so common magic tricks and explain the cognitive science behind how they work:

Persistence of vision is an effect in which an image seems to persist for longer than its presentation time12, 13, 14. Thus, an object that has been removed from the visual field will still seem to be visible for a short period of time. The Great Tomsoni's (J.T.) Coloured Dress trick, in which the magician's assistant's white dress instantaneously changes to a red dress, illustrates an application of this illusion to magic. At first the colour change seems to be due (trivially) to the onset of red illumination of the woman. But after the red light is turned off and a white light is turned on, the woman is revealed to be actually wearing a red dress. Here is how it works: when the red light shuts off there is a short period of darkness in which the audience is left with a brief positive after-image of the red-dressed (actually white-dressed but red-lit) woman. This short after-image persists for enough time to allow the white dress to be rapidly removed while the room is still dark. When the white lights come back, the red dress that the assistant was always wearing below the white dress is now visible.

Link to Nature Neuroscience article (via BB).
pdf of Trends in Cognitive Science article.
Link to Boston Globe write-up.

—Vaughan.

August 04, 2008

Encephalon 51 arrives with a flourish:

The rather poetic 51st edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just been published online and is graciously hosted by The Mouse Trap.

It has a distinctly poetic theme on this occasion, with a set of cognitive science haikus enlivening proceedings.

A couple of my favourite posts include one on the continuing mirror neuron hype and another on the cultural feedback loop between psychiatry and our expression of mental distress.

Link to Encephalon 51.

—Vaughan.

On the edge of truth:

Discover Magazine has a brief but interesting interview with ex-NSA psychologist Eric Haseltine, who directed research into interrogation and lie detection.

He discusses the use of new technologies that measure body and brain function - i.e. the still not-yet-very-good 'brain scan lie detectors' - but also talks about the skills humans need to be able to pick up when someone is trying to deceive them.

Interestingly, he cites the development of human skills as where the biggest advances are likely to be made in the future:

What is the hottest area today in deception detection?

Human lie detectors. I think the low-tech training of humans to be better interpreters of information is where the most productive work is going to be. The reason being that you can either train a human to do it or train a computer to do it, and human brains are still much better computers than computers are.

Link to Discover Magazine interview with Haseltine.
Link to New Yorker article on the shortcomings of 'brain scan lie detection'.
Link to past interview with Haseltine on US national security.

—Vaughan.

Interview with self-trepanner, Heather Perry:

Neurophilosophy has a fantastic interview with Heather Perry, a 37-year old British woman who organised a modern-day trepanation to insert a hole in her skull in an attempt to alter her state of consciousness.

Perry gives a lucid insight into her motivations and describes the rather ad-hoc operation in rather gory detail:

How exactly did you perform the trepanation?

I used a hand trepan initially, but that wasn't proving to be terribly successful. Then there was a problem with the people who owned the property we were staying in, so we decided we'd have to just leave it. I wrapped my head up in a towel and we got out of there. A couple of days later, we had another go. We abandoned the hand trepan and got an electric drill instead. I injected myself with a local anaesthetic and then slashed a big T-shaped incision in my scalp, right down to the bone. I was sat there in the bathroom feeling quite relaxed and they started with the drill. It didn't take that long at all, probably about 20 minutes. Eventually I could feel a lot of fluid moving around. Apparently, there was a bit too much fluid shifting around, because they'd gone a little bit too far and I was leaking some through the hole, but this wasn't especially dangerous as there are three layer of meninges before you get to the brain.

It's an interesting read not least because Perry is rather circumspect when discussing the procedure.

You might expect that someone who had arranged for a hole to be drilled in her skull to be completely convinced about the rather far-out claims for trepanation.

While she does mention some claimed effects and findings, she seems quite measured in her assessment and largely seems to have tried the procedure as an exploration rather than a 'cure' in any specific sense.

Link to Neurophilosophy interview with Heather Perry.

—Vaughan.

August 03, 2008

On the brains of the assassins of Presidents:

This is a wonderfully written summary that tells the story of how two father-and-son doctors were involved post-mortem brain examinations of the assassins of the US Presidents James Garfield and William McKinley.

The article is by neuroanatomist Duane Haines although unfortunately, I haven't read or even got access to the full paper. Luckily, the abstract is just a joy to read in itself. A curious slice of neurological history in 300 words.

Spitzka and Spitzka on the brains of the assassins of presidents.

J Hist Neurosci. 1995 Sep-Dec;4(3-4):236-66.

Haines DE.

Although four American Presidents have been assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy), only the assassins of Garfield (Charles Julius Guiteau) and McKinley (Leon Franz Czolgosz) were tried, convicted, and executed for their crime. In 1882 Edward Charles Spitzka, a young New York neurologist with a growing reputation as an alienist, testified at the trial of Guiteau.

He was the only expert witness who was asked, based on his personal examination of the prisoner, a direct question concerning the mental state of Guiteau. Spitzka maintained the unpopular view that Guiteau was insane. In spite of aggressive and spirited testimony on Spitzka's part, Guiteau was convicted and hanged. However, even before the execution it was acknowledged, by some experts, that Spitzka was undoubtedly right.

About 20 years later, in 1901, Edward Anthony Spitzka, the son of Edward Charles Spitzka, was invited to conduct the autopsy on Czologsz, the assassin of McKinley. At the time Spitzka the younger, who had just published a detailed series of papers on the human brain, was in the fourth year of his medical training. It was an unusual series of fortuitous events that presumably led to Edward A. Spitzka conducting the autopsy on the assassin of the President of the United States while still a medical student. This, in light of the fact that other experts were available.

Each Spitzka went on to a career of note and each made a number of contributions in their respective fields. It is however, their participation in the 'neurology', as broadly defined, of the assassins of Presidents Garfield and McKinley that remains unique in neuroscience history. Not only were father and son participants in these important events, but these were the only times that assassins of US Presidents were tried and executed.

Edward Spitzka was also known as one of the main proponents of the idea that masturbation caused madness, and wrote an 1887 article outlining 12 cases of 'masturbatic insanity'.

Link to PubMed entry.

—Vaughan.

August 02, 2008

Constraining the ancient mind:

As part of Seed Magazine's on innovative thinkers in science, they published a podcast interview with archaeologist Lambros Malafouris who is pioneering the study of ancient cultural artefacts as a way of constraining theories in evolutionary psychology.

One of the criticisms of some evolutionary psychology is that it too often involves over-interpretation and 'just so' stories - explanations of why we have certain psychological attributes that are stories rather than hypotheses that can be easily tested.

Malafouris has taken the novel approach of using the findings from archaeology to systematically generate and test theories of the evolution of the mind. He seems particularly interested in embodied cognition, the idea that the mind can only be understood in relation to how it interacts with the world through body and action.

The mainstream approach to cognition holds that it happens in the mind and that material culture is nothing more than an outgrowth of our mental capacities. Archaeologist Lambros Malafouris is challenging this deep-seated idea with a radical new notion: the hypothesis of extended mind, which posits that material culture is not a reflection of the human mind but an actual part of it. Take, for instance, a blind man's stick. "Where does the blind man end and the rest of the world begin?" he says. "You might see the stick as something external, but it plays a very important role in the perceptual system of this person. It extends the boundaries of this human—the stick becomes an integral part of the cognitive architecture."

If material culture is an extension of human cognition, our engagement with it has actively shaped the evolution of human intelligence, Malafouris argues. For example, ancient clay tablets that allowed people to actually write down records were not mere objects, he says. Instead, they became integral adjuncts of the human memory system. The invention of such a technology "changes the structure of the human mind," says Malafouris, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge. Rather than happening wholly in the head, he argues, cognition develops and evolves through the interplay between intelligence and material culture.

In fact, there's an increasing focus on related ideas. Some of my favourite studies have been done by psychologist Dennis Proffitt who has found numerous effects of tool use on thinking and perception.

One of my favourite studies is where he found that we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand, but only when we intend to use it.

Malafouris is using these ideas and adds to the relatively new but exciting field of cognitive archaeology.

Link to Seed interview with Lambros Malafouris.

—Vaughan.

August 01, 2008

Avalance of new SciAmMind articles:

The new edition of Scientific American Mind has just appeared with a whole host of new freely-available articles available online covering the psychology of storytelling, gifted children, genius, animal intelligence, scent, smell and learning through error.

My favourite is the article on the psychology of storytelling and narrative, and why it could intricately bound up in the cognitive abilities we've developed to navigate the social world.

The article is quite wide ranging, dipping into anthropology, cognitive and evolutionary psychology to explore why stories are so central to cultures across the world.

Perhaps because theory of mind is so vital to social living, once we possess it we tend to imagine minds everywhere, making stories out of everything. A classic 1944 study by Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel, then at Smith College, elegantly demonstrated this tendency. The psychologists showed people an animation of a pair of triangles and a circle moving around a square and asked the participants what was happening. The subjects described the scene as if the shapes had intentions and motivations—for example, “The circle is chasing the triangles.” Many studies since then have confirmed the human predilection to make characters and narratives out of whatever we see in the world around us.

But what could be the evolutionary advantage of being so prone to fantasy? “One might have expected natural selection to have weeded out any inclination to engage in imaginary worlds rather than the real one,” writes Steven Pinker, a Harvard University evolutionary psychologist, in the April 2007 issue of Philosophy and Literature. Pinker goes on to argue against this claim, positing that stories are an important tool for learning and for developing relationships with others in one’s social group. And most scientists are starting to agree: stories have such a powerful and universal appeal that the neurological roots of both telling tales and enjoying them are probably tied to crucial parts of our social cognition.

Link to August 2008 SciAmMind.

—Vaughan.

Cognitive restructuring and the fist bump terrorists:

The recently satirical New Yorker cover depicting Obama and his wife as fist-bumping Islamic terrorists comes under fire in an article for The Chronicle by psychologist Mahzarin Banaji who argues that it irresponsibly creates an implicit association between "Obama and Osama". Banaji is almost certainly right, but neglects higher levels of cognition which can make this ineffectual.

Banaji is most known for her extensive work on the implicit association test (IAT), which we discussed only the other day. What this and other work has shown is that despite our conscious thoughts ("hair colour has no association with intelligence") we still might have an unconscious bias that associates certain concepts ('blonde' and 'dim').

Along these lines, Banaji suggests that the artist, Barry Blitt, who created the picture has harmed the political debate by unintentionally strengthening an inappropriate link:

The brain, Blitt would be advised to understand, is a complex machine whose operating principles we know something about. When presented with A and B in close spatial or temporal proximity, the mind naturally and effortlessly associates the two. Obama=Osama is an easy association to produce via simple transmogrification. Flag burning=unpatriotic=un-American=un-Christian=Muslim is child's play for the cortex. Learning by association is so basic a mechanism that living beings are jam-packed with it — ask any dog the next time you see it salivating to a tone of a bell. There is no getting around the fact that the very association Blitt helplessly confessed he didn't intend to create was made indelibly for us, by him.

It is not unreasonable, given the inquiring minds that read The New Yorker, to expect that an obvious caricature would be viewed as such. In fact, our conscious minds can, in theory, accomplish such a feat. But that doesn't mean that the manifest association (Obama=Osama lover) doesn't do its share of the work. To some part of the cognitive apparatus, that association is for real. Once made, it has a life of its own because of a simple rule of much ordinary thinking: Seeing is believing. Based on the research of my colleague, the psychologist Daniel Gilbert, on mental systems, one might say that the mind first believes, and only if it is relaxing in an Adirondack chair doing nothing better, does it question and refute. There is a power to all things we see and hear — exactly as they are presented to us.

It strikes me that Banaji is perhaps being a little disingenuous here. Certainly the advert does strengthen that unconscious association, but, as as the intention of most satire, it attempts to include another association into the mix - that of absurdity.

In other words, the idea of the cartoon is presumably to trigger the association Obama = terrorist, but also include another so it becomes Obama = terrorist = absurd. It's the humourists equivalent of the reductio ad absurdum argument.

Of course, this can rely as much on the same implicit associations as Banaji mentions, but it can be also seen to work very effectively through a process of reinterpretation that alters the impact of automatic connections through changing their meaning.

In fact, this process so can be so powerful that it is used to treat psychiatric problems.

In clinical work it is called 'cognitive restructuring'. For example, in panic disorder, people begin to interpret normal bodily reactions (increased heart rate, temperature etc) as a sign of impending heart attack or other danger, which leads to more anxiety, further interpretations and a spiral of terrifying anxiety.

Cognitive restructuring teaches people that these bodily changes and worried thoughts aren't signs of an impending heart attack, they're normal reactions, and the spiral of anxiety is not a risk to your health, just a pattern you've got into. In other words, they begin to believe something different about the significance of the link.

Humour also relies on a process of reinterpretation. Most theories of humour stress that it usually requires the reframing of a previously held association.

However, the key to good satire is that this reframing should be obvious and we might speculate that the reframing effect should be more powerful than the effect of simply reviving the old association.

We can perhaps wonder then, whether the controversy over the New Yorker cover is not that it made an association between Obama and terrorism, but that it was not effective enough in making it obviously absurd.

I suspect one of the difficulties is that the cartoon was actually attempting to satirise not Obama, but the media discussion of him. This is always a risky strategy because it requires so much cognitive abstraction that the automatic association is far more apparent.

Link to Banaji's article in The Chronicle.

—Vaughan.

2008-08-01 Spike activity:

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

Awesome Developing Intelligence post gives a remarkably concise review of cognitive science and discusses what this tells us about the best targets for cognitive enhancement.

BookForum looks at two memoirs that recount the psychological and physical intricacies of illness of the body and brain.

The mighty Language Log has a great analysis looking at the fallacies of yet another popular piece on sex differences in mind and brain.

The Economist has an article on the science of cognitive nutrition.

The ideas behind 'critical neuroscience' are discussed by Neuroanthropology.

Eric Schwitzgebel on the Wittgensteinian puzzle of whether philosophy solves problems with language or problems with the world.

ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone has an interesting discussion on the philosophy of moral dilemmas.

While we're on the subject of morality the NYT Freakanomics blog has two guest posts on moral hypocrisy.

Sharp Brains has a special on mind and brain haikus.

ABC Radio National's In Conversation looks at the anthropology of sisters, mothering and motherhood across the world's cultures.

Dr Petra has the most sensible post you'll read about the recent news reports on Viagra supposedly increasing sexual function in women who take antidepressants.

Advances in object recognition around age 2 may herald symbolic thought, reports Science News.

Pure Pedantry has an interesting commentary on the merits of postponing your alcoholism.

Perpetually falling woman learns to balance with her tongue. The Telegraph has a story about a woman who has lost her sense of balance owing to brain injury.

The Primary Visual Cortex is an excellent new blog on vision science and perception.

A robot that "resembles the love child of a monkey and an iMac". The Times has an excellent piece on robots designed to emotionally interface with humans.

Not Quite Rocket Science looks at a new study on language evolution in the lab and Wired Science has some further in-depth analysis.

A new book called 'Brain Research for Policy Wonks' is reviewed by Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

New Scientist has a special article and video report on the somewhat recursively titled 'Seven Reasons Why People Hate Reason'.

The psychology of motivation - when passionate interest becomes a business - is discussed by The Washington Post.

The New York times examines the methods and motivations of web trolls.

An eye-tracking study that compared how individuals with Williams syndrome ("hyper social") and autism ("hypo social") view pictures of social scenes is covered by The Neurocritic.

—Vaughan.