October 31, 2008

Brain scans and buyer beware:

Jonah Lehrer reviews new popular neuromarketing book Buy-ology in the Washington Post and notes that the book itself is a shining example of marketing but without a good grasp of what the neuroscience studies actually show.

If one of the greatest ironies of public relations is that it has an image problem, one of the greatest achievements of neuromarketing has been the self-promotion without having demonstrating any material benefit to the approach.

That's not to say there's some respectable science being undertaken to understand the neural basis of commercial reasoning and buyer decision-making, but so far, no-one has demonstrated that any of these approaches actually provide a more effective way of marketing.

In other words, we're still waiting for a single study that shows that any measure of neural activity predicts actual purchases or sales better than existing methods.

It's quite amazing to think that there are now numerous multi-million dollar 'neuromarketing' companies that are providing services without having any evidence for their effectiveness.

Their success is likely because, as we know from recent studies, attaching bogus references to the brain or irrelevant images of brain scans, make explanation of behaviour seem more credible to non-neuroscientists.

One irony is that commercial neuromarketing has been a marketing success story, but not on the basis of the neuroscience which is largely just used as another form of traditional branding.

In fact, it's just a form of marketing first developed by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Freud, back in the 1920s. The secret, Bernays said, was not to appeal to what people need, but to what they desire - in this case, to seem cutting edge.

UPDATE: I really recommend reading the two comments below in full, but this snippet from Neuroskeptic is a particular gem:

"One irony is that commercial neuromarketing has been a marketing success story, but not on the basis of the neuroscience which is largely just used as another form of traditional branding."

It's not just ironic, it's fascinating. It shows that marketing people - who you might expect to be "immune to their poison" - are vulnerable to marketing gimmicks too.

Link to WashPost review of 'Buy-ology'.

—Vaughan.

2008-10-31 Spike activity:

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

Mind Apples is a site that aims to share and develop ways of maintaining mental health in innovative ways. A community-based knowledge sharing community focused on mental well-being. Yay!

To the bunkers! Scientific America has a piece on how one research team are trying to personify evil in an AI programme.

Technology Review has some beautiful diffusion spectrum imaging pictures of the brain that illustrates the white matter tracts in glorious technicolor.

Men were better than women at judging infidelity, but are more likely to guess at cheating when there is none, according to research reported by New Scientist. The old high sensitivity, low specificity problem.

The New York Times follows up with an interesting piece asking whether these sorts of studies that rely on people honestly reporting their infidelities are reliable and looking at the changing rates of infidelity.

Guest blogger Becca Trabin writes an interesting piece about body dysmorphic disorder on The Trouble With Spikol.

The BPS Research Digest has a thought-provoking piece questioning whether brain-injured patients who confabulate, who seemingly produce false memories without intending to deliberately lie, are actually attempting to remember at all.

A brief tour through the comedic history of the US military's attempts to create an 'amnesia beam' is provided by Wired.

Neuroanthropology has an interesting piece on the influence of psychologists on the political messages of the belligerents in the US presidential election.

The recent study on the cognitive neuroscience of hate is dryly dissected by The Neurocritic.

The Boston Globe has an interesting piece on the neuroscience of self-control and describes the cool 4-year-olds and marshmallows experiment.

"Eunoia is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels - and it means "beautiful thinking". It is also the title of Canadian poet Christian Bok's book of fiction in which each chapter uses only one vowel." BBC Radio 4 has a sample of each chapter. Reminds me of Gadsby, a whole novel written without the letter e.

Psychology Today bloggers are asked which psychological tests they'd give the US presidential candidates. Strangely, no one mentioned the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Another good BPS Research Digest piece on research showing older people are less optimistic but more realistic.

—Vaughan.

October 30, 2008

Neuropod focuses on the autistic spectrum:

I'm not sure if Nature's Neuroscience podcast Neuropod is slightly irregularly timed or I am, but either way the October edition is available online and covers cyber-monkeys, steroids, Alzheimer's disease and autism.

The stand-out feature is the piece on autism where researchers, including the well-known Temple Grandin, are interviewed.

One of the most interesting bits is where Neuropod talks to clinical psychologist Kathrin Hippler about her research where she followed up some of the children who Hans Asperger observed during the development of the syndrome diagnosis.

Asperger's Syndrome wasn't so named until some time later, and at the time, the children were diagnosed as 'autistic psychopaths'. Psychopath didn't mean violent or dangerous in this context, it just implied emotionally disconnected.

Hippler's study analysed the case records of 'autistic psychopaths' diagnosed by Hans Asperger and his team at the University Children's Hospital, Vienna.

In a more recent study (which doesn't seem to have been published yet) she followed up the children to see how they're doing not, and it turns out that they're actually doing pretty well.

She mentions about half are in relationships and many are in jobs that matched the 'special interests' they had as children.

If you're interesting in reading more about contemporary kids with on the spectrum The New York Times had an excellent piece on the experiences of autistic teenagers.

Link to Neuropod homepage with streamed audio.
mp3 of October edition.

—Vaughan.

A slight return, again:

I've just found another curious case report of complex movements in a brain dead patient, following on from our recent piece on the Lazurus Sign.

These reports are fascinating and bizarre in equal measure, not least when you try and imagine what was happening in the room at the time.

Uncommon reflex automatisms after brain death

Rev Neurol (Paris). 1995 Oct;151(10):586-8.

Awada A.

Two cases of unusual complex movements observed in brain dead patients are described. Rapid and sustained flexion of the neck induced slow abduction of the arms with flexion of the elbows, wrists and fingers over 5 to 10 seconds. These movements have been rarely described and although they have similar clinical patterns, they are pathophysiologically different from the Lazarus sign which is observed few minutes after respiratory support cessation. While Lazarus sign is supposed to be due to an agonal discharge of anoxic spinal neurons, the movements described in this article result probably from complex reflexes generated in a disinhibited spinal cord. It is however surprising that they have never been described in patients with high cervical spinal injuries.

For those of you not familiar with the medical terms for movement, I shall briefly translate. When the doctors rocked the dead person's head side to side forward in a 'rapid and sustained' fashion, the body extended its arms to the side and waved them about.

I have two thoughts.

Firstly, isn't it fascinating that such complex movements can be triggered solely by the spinal cord?

Secondly, what the bloody hell were they doing with that dead body?

Normally, these reports are of spontaneous movements in isolated brain dead patients, but on this occasion the medical team seem to have been rather more involved.

Unfortunately, the full text of the article is in French, so the exact turn of events (e.g. "hey looks what happens when I do this!") shall have to remain a mystery.

UPDATE: Neuroshrink has added a fantastic correction and comment to this post that suggests what might have been happening and recounts his own experience of observing the Lazurus sign.

Link to PubMed entry for article.
Link to Mind Hacks on the Lazurus Sign.
Link to another Mind Hacks article on the moving dead.

—Vaughan.

October 29, 2008

Drug addiction and factory pharming :

Scientific American has a slide show of classic photos from converted prison in 1950s Kentucky which was used as a massive addiction rehabilitation and research centre.

The pictures have a slightly surreal B-movie quality to them and I can't help thinking of Philip K. Dick's book A Scanner Darkly.

If that reference makes no sense to you, check out the book, or see the film, and you can see the sort of institution pictured by SciAm could have inspired the... well, you'll just have to see.

According to the blurb the building "was a temporary home for thousands, including Sonny Rollins, Peter Lorre and William S. Burroughs as well as a lab for addiction treatments such as LSD". The set even includes a picture of a jazz band consisting of patients.

Owing to the popularity of heroin in the 1950s jazz scene, it was probably a fairly impressive line-up.

Link to SciAm 1950s narcotics farm slide show.

—Vaughan.

In the age of paranoia, my MTV wants me:

Psychotic delusions change with the times and a new study looking back over almost 120 years of hospital records has found that it's possible to track how cultural upheavals are reflected in the themes of madness. Changes in politics, technology and psychiatry all seem to colour the preoccupations of the deluded as reported in the patient records.

A Slovenian research team, led by psychiatrist Borut Skodlar, discovered that the Ljubljana psychiatric hospital had patient records going as far back as 1881. They randomly selected 10 records from every 10 year period to see how delusions matched up to the society of the time.

One key finding was that paranoid and persecutory delusions seem much more common now, with a big jump after the 1960s, in line with other studies that have found that paranoia is much more common in the modern age.

Another interesting finding concerned the widespread availability of radio and television:

A very interesting finding was a significant increase in outside influence and control delusions with technical themes following the spread of radio and television in Slovenia. To the best of our knowledge, no such studies exist with which to compare our results.

Both of these new technical devices, which served as a means to powerfully and quickly disseminate information, apparently became appropriate for 'serving' as a means of influence and control in the eyes of schizophrenia patients.

We found this change much more expressed in the case of television, where the increase of delusions of outside influence and control was dramatic. Perhaps an accumulation of both television together stimulated the increase. Or perhaps the two-dimensional auditory and visual nature of television opened up more opportunities to perceive it as a possible source of influence.

One aspect of the study looked not at how wider cultural changes altered the theme of delusions, but how changes in the culture of psychiatry did the same.

Psychiatrist Kurt Schneider listed a number of symptoms which he argued were characteristic of schizophrenia and still form the basis of modern schizophrenia diagnoses.

They include audible thoughts, hearing voices arguing, voices commenting on your actions, feeling that your body, mind or emotions are being controlled by outside forces, thought insertion and withdrawal, thought broadcasting, or delusional interpretations of everyday perceptions.

Interestingly, these 'first rank symptoms' were reported much more commonly after they had become widely known in the psychiatric community.

This is one of the key issues in the epidemiology of psychiatry: when the rate of reported symptoms changes over time, is it because they're just being noticed more, because psychiatrists have moved the goalposts, because patients are learning to report symptoms in the language that doctors use, or that the experiences are more common in the population with all things being equal.

Of course, it can be a mixture of all or some of the above, as culture is one of the key influences on how we experience and express our distress - both physical and psychological.

Link to paper on cultural influences on delusions.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

Money on the brain:

Tim Harford, who blogs as the Undercover Economist, presents a rollercoaster ride through the field of neuroeconomics, for Radio 4. The documentary is available via Radio 4's Listen Again site for the next week, and reportedly via a podcast (which I unfortunately can't find). This whistle-stop tour covers neuromarketing, behavioural economics and the possible effects of hormone levels on risk tasking among stockmarket brokers. The programme features great interviews with some top researchers, such as Paul Glimcher and, Glimcher aside, many of these researchers have an almost relgious optimism about the potential for fMRI-scanning, believing it will eventually tell us how economic decisions are made, why we follow crowds, what we're thinking at any point in time, what age we should be able to vote and how much we value things like clean air. Admist this heady atmosphere the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer brings us back to earth again: "You can't read the mind. We understand quite little about the brain." he begins. And then,

A former chairman of the Harvard Psychology deptartment once asked me "Gerd, do you know why they love those pictures [the fMRI activity maps]? It is because they are like women: they are beautiful, they are expensive and you don't understand them"

If you read a classical article on neuroeconomics what you will find is mostly results which have been already known and recycled, and very little new insight.

Boom!

Link to Radio 4 documentary 'Money on the Brain'
Also on Mindhacks.com The fMRI smackdown cometh
Also on Mindhacks.com Don't believe the neurohype
Also on Mindhacks.com Is Banking on Neuroscience a false economy?

—tom.

October 28, 2008

Online opium museum:

The Opium Museum is a fascinating website by the author of a book called The Art of Opium Antiques that tracks the forgotten history of a hugely popular recreational drug of the early 1900s.

It has images of some remarkably intricate opium smoking paraphenalia, but probably the most interesting part is the sections with photos of opium smokers from the late 1800s to early 1900s.

It was a habit largely associated with the Orient and also prevalent among immigrant communities around the world.

The collection illustrates that opium smoking was common in all classes of society and until the crackdowns in the 1930s onwards, it was not considered to be necessarily seedy or degenerate.

It's an interesting contrast to a photo collection on the current Afghan Drug War, also over opium, although the Afghan crops are largely destined for the heroin trade. Opium wars have been a traditional pastime of the British, and this is the most recent in one of many.

The Afghan photo collection is by photographer Aaron Huey, but are hidden behind some god awful Flash wrapping meaning you can't link to it directly. So you'll need to go to the website, click on 'Features 1' and then on 'Afghanistan Drug War'.

Link to the Opium Museum.
Link to photographer website (via BoingBoing).

—Vaughan.

October 27, 2008

Encephalon 57 on Mind Hacks:

Welcome to the 57th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival, where we have the honour of hosting the best in the last fortnight's mind and brain writing, here on Mind Hacks.

We start off with two great interviews. The first is a video interview with pioneering neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás, known for his radical ideas on consciousness, picked up by Channel N. One of the great names in cognitive science makes an appearance on Sharp Brains as Michael Posner is the subject of a recent interview.

One of Posner's great achievements, along with Marcus Raichle was to invent the subtraction method for the analysis of brain imaging data to allow us to make inferences about how the mind is working. The Neurocritic has an excellent piece on some of the state-of-the-art work which is attempting to advance this technology, almost 30 years after the original breakthrough, by looking at links between electrical activity in the cortex and spontaneous fluctuations in signals from fMRI scanner.

Also on a neuroimaging tip, Pure Pedantry covers a recent study on the neuroscience of hypothesis generation, or how we think up possible explanations to explain causality in our booming, buzzing confusion of a world.

The masters of making sense of out of confusion are, of course, children, and a couple of great articles look at some of the latest research showing how the developing brain seems to work its magic. Looking at the remarkable development of language, the consistently excellent Cognitive Daily discuss a child's use of gesture to communicate and whether it slows language learning. Songs from the Wood has a great piece on infantile amnesia - that curiosity of development where we typically cannot remember anything that happened before the age of 3-4 years.

But if you want to learn more about what makes memories stick, Physiology Physics looks at long-term potentiation - one of the most important neuroscience discoveries in the last fifty years and one of the cornerstones of remembering.

If you're interested in where all this childhood experience ends up, one destination is our personality or personal style of interacting with each other and the world. The Mouse Trap looks at some of the most influential of these theories in three great posts that discuss character traits, emotional maturity and emotional intelligence.

Obviously, if you've been reading the same dodgy research that Dr Shock has, you'll know that one part of emotional maturity is saying no to computer games because THEY BURN YOUR SOUL. Or, maybe they don't and the researchers are trying to spin a positive result into a negative one to get their unsupported point across. Ah, the joys of science.

Entering more unusual territories, Brain Blogger has a brief guide to the syndrome where people lose control of their hands after brain injury, carious known as anarchic or alien hand syndrome. PodBlack stays with the uncanny in a post about sex differences in superstitions and paranormal beliefs. It's actually the last part of the four part series looking at superstitions and all are well worth a read.

Equally mysterious and no less controversial is the placebo effect and Brain Health Hacks has an interesting piece on what the the science of placebo might tell us about the neuroscience of hope. I'm sure there's an election joke in their somewhere but I'll leave that as a exercise for the reader.

Talking of culture in a more general sense, the newly launched Culture and Cognition blog has an interesting piece that discusses a recent Nature paper on culture and the brain and another on what can only be described as culture hacking.

From culture hacking to baseball hacking as sports psychology blog 80 Percent Mental looks at the cognitive science of baseball including some illustrative videos and perfect timing for the World Series.

From the best in baseball, to the best in online writing about Bipolar Disorder (calling Liz Spikol...) as PsychCentral ranks its Top 10 Bipolar Blogs for 2008. Keeping with the positivity, Brain Blogger looks at tetrabenazine, a drug which shows promise in treating Huntingdon's disease.

Finally, we finish with some articles about our animal friends. The always thought-provoking Neuroanthropology which provides two posts with video footage of cooperative hunting in chimpanzees. As they say - "The videos raise questions about our own animal nature, as well as what is the dividing line between our own minds and the minds of some of our closest relatives."

Obviously, none of those chimpanzees have robotic cyber-implants, unlike the monkey discussed in a Pure Pendantry piece on a recent Nature Neuroscience article. But it's not just cyber-monkeys, it's also radioactive mice! Neurotopia has the low-down on the effects of exercise on hippocampal cell proliferation in irradiated mice. I'm sure there's a Marvel comic that starts like that but I dread to think which one.

Along the same lines of a science-fiction plotline become reality, Neurophilosophy looks at recent research on how individual memories were erased in mice. And if your hero needs a daring getaway, there's more from the same source on staggering escape mechanism of the crayfish.

—Vaughan.

October 26, 2008

Synaesthesia induced by hypnosis:

Wired Science has an interesting preview of an upcoming study that used hypnosis to induce colour-number synaesthesia in highly hypnotisable participants.

Synaesthesia is where the senses merge, and in colour-number synaesthesia, the affected people experience colours associated with specific numbers.

This new study used hypnosis to induce exactly this experience in people who didn't have it before:

The researchers, led by Roi Kadosh of University College, London and Luis Fuentes of Spain's University of Murcia, put three women and one man under hypnosis, then instructed them to perceive digits in color: one as red, two as yellow, three as green, and so on.

Upon waking, the subjects found it difficult to find numbers printed in black ink against correspondingly colored backgrounds. The numbers seemed to blend in — a telltale sign of synesthesia. When the hypnosis was removed, the ability vanished.

How the synesthesia formed so suddenly isn't clear, but the researchers said that new neural connections are probably not responsible. "Such new anatomical connections could not arise, become functional, and suddenly degenerate in the short time scale provided by the current experiment," they wrote.

Instead they suggest that hypnosis broke down neurological barriers between sensory regions. Marks agreed, but cautioned against extrapolating the findings too broadly: Many different varieties of synesthesia exist, from seeing emotions to tasting sounds, and may have different neurological and psychological origins.

Hypnosis has been studied before for it's ability to induce anomalous colour experiences.

In a study published in 2000, the researchers used hypnosis to induce the experience of colour when the participants were viewing a black and white image, as well as the reverse.

What was most fascinating about this particular study was that it was run in a PET scanner and the researchers discovered that the colour-based focused hypnotic suggestions actually altered the function the colour perception areas in the visual cortex, which is known to be involved in the perception of colour.

In other words, it is likely that hypnosis was not simply leading the people to make false claims, but was actually affecting what they perceived.

Link to 'Hypnosis Lets Regular People See Numbers as Colors'.
Link to PubMed entry for colour study (with full-text link).

—Vaughan.

October 25, 2008

I am a committee, chaired by a hedonist:

Psychologist Paul Bloom has written a wonderfully eclectic article for The Atlantic magazine about the psychology of pleasure and why it suggests that we have multiple situation-specific selves.

The piece is a little disjointed in places but it is packed full of information and if nothing else you get a good sense of the enthusiasm for this developing field.

One area of pleasure research not mentioned in Bloom's piece is the fascinating work of Michel Cabanac, who has a theory that pleasure is the decision-making currency of the brain.

New Scientist had an excellent article on Cabanac's work which you can read online, and makes an excellent complement to The Atlantic piece.

However, Bloom is more concerned with how we resist the temptation of pleasure using 'self-binding' - in other words, doing things that will reduce the chances of us succumbing to temptation later on. Like getting someone to hide your cigarettes if you're trying to give up.

For adult humans, though, the problem is that the self you are trying to bind has resources of its own. Fighting your Bad Self is serious business; whole sections of bookstores are devoted to it. We bribe and threaten and cajole, just as if we were dealing with an addicted friend. Vague commitments like “I promise to drink only on special occasions” often fail, because the Bad Self can weasel out of them, rationalizing that it’s always a special occasion. Bright-line rules like “I will never play video games again” are also vulnerable, because the Bad Self can argue that these are unreasonable—and, worse, once you slip, it can argue that the plan is unworkable.

For every argument made by the dieting self—“This diet is really working” or “I really need to lose weight”—the cake eater can respond with another—“This will never work” or “I’m too vain” or “You only live once.” Your long-term self reads voraciously about the benefits of regular exercise and healthy eating; the cake eater prefers articles showing that obesity isn’t really such a problem. It’s not that the flesh is weak; sometimes the flesh is pretty damn smart.

Link to Atlantic article 'First Person Plural'.
Link to NewSci piece 'The Pleasure Seekers'.

—Vaughan.

October 24, 2008

Milgram's culture shock :

ABC Radio National's Radio Eye has one of the best documentaries on Milgram's conformity experiments that I've ever heard. It follows up several of the people who took part in the original experiment and weaves their stories into the audio from the original and chilling tapes of the actual sessions.

You'll have to be quick because the audio is only online for another week or two and it's a 50-minute must-listen programme that is wonderfully produced.

The tapes of the actual sessions are remarkable and you can feel the psychological tension as the study progresses.

As well as being a detailed guide to the study, it's a fascinating look at the experience of taking part in a process that had as much impact for the ethical changes that it triggered as for the implications for what we know about conformity and social pressure.

Link to Radio Eye 'Beyond the Shock Machine' (via AITM Blog).

—Vaughan.

Creationists unaware of past, doomed to repeat it:

New Scientist has an article on a group of creationists who are attempting to argue that we have a soul based on the difficulty of reducing mental events to neurobiology. The article makes out that this is a new front on the 'war on science' but I wouldn't be manning the barricades quite yet, as the issue has been around as long as neuroscience itself.

The creationist-affiliated researchers suggest that the 'mind-body problem' - the difficulty in explaining subjective mind states in terms of objective biological processes - means that the mind must be partly non-material and, therefore, have some spiritual aspect to it (i.e. the soul).

What's interesting in this debate as many scientists respond by simply denying there is a problem and suggesting that this is just a issue of progress and eventually we will be able to explain every mind state in terms of brain function.

This is unlikely, however, owing to the fact that the mind and brain are described with different properties and so cannot be entirely equivalent. Therefore, one will never be completely reduced to the other.

This does not imply that there must be a soul or non-material mind at work. If this doesn't seem obvious to you, try this example.

Why does Elvis not want you to step on his blue suede shoes? You buy a copy of the track on CD but analysing the physics of the sound waves in the song will not fully answer your question.

You might find out that the volume or pitch increases at specific points to highlight certain key phrases, but you can't fully understand why Elvis is so protective of his new shoes through physics alone.

In other words, you can't explain everything about the song through objective scientific methods. This does not mean your CD, or the sound waves, have a soul.

The same goes for the mind and brain. There are some things we talk about in terms of experience, mental events and thoughts that will not be adequately explained at the level of objective biological measures. Similarly, this does not imply the existence of a soul.

Importantly, it doesn't disprove the existence of a soul either, because unless you make specific falsifiable statements about what a soul actually does in the brain in an empirically testable way, science can't test it one way or another. It can only make inferences.

On the basis of the fact that no proposed 'soul effect' has ever been detected, most neuroscientists think that a non-material aspects to the mind doesn't exist. The mind, like Elvis songs, are just part of the world, even if we need to use different levels of meaning to fully explain them.

However, some neuroscientists think different, and have done for as long as neuroscience has been around, and this is why this 'new' development is unlikely to be a big threat.

In fact, Nobel-prize winning neuroscientist Sir John Eccles believed until his dying day that there was a non-material aspect to the mind. Dana Magazine has a great article on Eccles' dualism which is well worth reading if you want a summary of his views.

But this just illustrates the point that the recent claims by creationist-affiliated researchers are neither new nor particularly threatening. Neuroscience has not come crashing to the ground, and science seems remarkably untroubled.

UPDATE: The Neurologica Blog also has some great coverage of the NewSci piece and has more of an in-depth analysis.

Link to NewSci piece 'Creationists declare war over the brain'.
Link to Dana article on Eccles' dualism.

—Vaughan.

2008-10-24 Spike activity:

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

Being altruistic makes you hot, finds new research covered by Medical News Today.

Neuronarrative is a high-quality new mind and brain blog. Highly recommended.

The San Franciso Chronicle has an excellent piece on the place of brain scans in the courtroom.

In light of the recent controversy over a murder conviction in India where 'brain scan lie detection' was admitted as evidence, Wired covers the aftermath and the protest of Indian scientists.

BBC News has a video on research looking at the link between dancing style, attractiveness and 'fitness' as a potential mate.

Hypnosis, memory and amnesia are discussed by one of the leading hypnosis research groups in the Scientific American Mind Matters blog. This see post for our own coverage of the this fascinating study.

BBC News covers new research that finds mentally demanding jobs may protect against Alzheimer's. More evidence that staying active keeps the brain healthy.

Creationist 'fossilised brain' ridiculousness is covered by Pharyngula. Looks more like a cauliflower to me.

But wait, brain found inside watermelon. The final nail in the coffin for evolutionary theory.

Alternet has an extended article on the Johns Hopkins research into the medical benefits of the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin (thanks Sandy!).

Neuroanthropology previews an upcoming conference on the 'encultured brain'.

The Top 10 Bipolar Blogs of 2008 are presented by PsychCentral.

Being a daddy makes you kinder and smarter, reports the Times. Presumably, this helps make up for the sleep deprivation.

New Scientist reports that a computer circuit has been built from brain cells. NetBSD port to follow shortly.

Paul Bloom is interviewed by The Boston Globe about the psychology of believing in the soul. Presumably it refers to the eternal soul rather than Marvin Gaye.

The BPS Research Digest covers an interesting study on social norm violations in fans queuing for a U2 gig.

A funky guide to all things dopamine is provided by Neurotopia.

—Vaughan.

October 23, 2008

Submit your entries for Encephalon, this Monday:

The next edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival will be hosted here on Monday 27th October, so submit your best mind and brain writing from the last fortnight if you'd like it featured.

You can email me directly via this web form or you can email your links to encephalon.host [at sign] gmail.com.

Please put the word 'Encephalon' in the subject line. I look forward to reading all the submissions!

—Vaughan.

False advertising statistics effective, say 9 out of 10 cats:

Ars Technica has a fantastic article on a recent study that found that numerical specifications in adverts have a huge effect on our choices, even when they're meaningless.

The numbers can be ratings, technical details, supposed representations of quality - it doesn't seem to matter. In general, bigger is better and the study found that we tend to be swayed by the numbers even when it directly contradicts our experience.

The first test involved megapixels. The authors took a single image, and used Photoshop to create a sharper version, and one with more vivid colors; they told the students that the two versions came from different cameras. When told nothing about the cameras, about 25 percent of the students chose the one that had made the sharper image. But providing a specification reversed that. When told that the other model captured more pixels using a figure based on the diagonal of the sensor, more than half now picked it. When it comes to specs, bigger is better, too, even if the underlying property is the same. Given the value in terms of the total number of pixels captured, the preference for the supposedly high-resolution camera shot up to 75 percent.

The researchers thought this might be a problem with the fact that not everyone is technically minded, so they tried various other experiments with everything from scented oil to ice-cream - all with the same effect.

To quote the researchers "even when consumers can directly experience the relevant products and the specifications carry little or no new information, their preference is still influenced by specifications, including specifications that are self-generated and by definition spurious and specifications that the respondents themselves deem uninformative."

Link to Ars Technica write-up of study.
Link to study paper.
Link to DOI.

—Vaughan.

Pentagon requests robot packs to hunt humans:

New Scientist reports on a new Pentagon request to develop a pack of robots "to search for and detect a non-cooperative human".

I am a strong believer in the fact that everyone who takes a course in artificial intelligence should be made to watch post-apocalyptic film The Terminator as a stark warning, in the same way that everyone who works with MRI scanners is made to watch serious videos about 'what can go tragically wrong and how you can prevent it'.

I also suspect though, that the students who come out of those lectures rooting for the robots are recruited into military research teams.

From the Pentagon document:

Typical robots for this type of activity are expected to weigh less than 100 Kg and the team would have three to five robots.

PHASE I: Develop the system design and determine the required capabilities of the platforms and sensors. Perform initial feasibility experiments, either in simulation or with existing hardware. Documentation of design tradeoffs and feasibility analysis shall be required in the final report.

PHASE II: Implement the software and hardware into a sensor package, integrate the package with a generic mobile robot, and demonstrate the system’s performance in a suitable indoor environment. Deliverables shall include the prototype system and a final report, which shall contain documentation of all activities in this project and a user's guide and technical specifications for the prototype system.

PHASE III: Robots that can intelligently and autonomously search for objects have potential commercialization within search and rescue, fire fighting, reconnaissance, and automated biological, chemical and radiation sensing with mobile platforms.

PHASE IV: Die puny humans die!

PHASE V: To the bunkers! Run for your lives! Arggghhhhh!

PHASE VI: Sarah Connor, we're going to send you back in time to make a movie to warn everybody about the coming annihilation of the human race. Recruit a political leader so people will take it seriously - like Governor Schwarzenegger, for example.

Earlier this year, Israel announced that they want to develop an AI-controlled missile system that "could take over completely" from humans. If you're still chucking, the UK military satellite system is called Skynet.

Link to NewSci on Pentagon opening Pandora's box.
Link to Pentagon solicitation request.

—Vaughan.

Towards a neuropsychology of religion:

This week's Nature has a fascinating essay by anthropologist Pascal Boyer discussing the quirks of spiritual belief and how they may result from the evolution of our mind and brain.

Boyer is best known for his book Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought where he argued that religion can be understood as where the cognitive abilities we've developed through evolution are applied to things like group identity, ritual, or the explanation of otherwise mysterious things, such as weather or disease.

Essentially, Boyer argues that there are cognitive restraints on religious practice and belief, which he illustrates by pointing out some interesting inconsistencies in our intuitive ideas about spiritual agents. According to Boyer, this suggests that our mental capacities define what are supposed to be all-powerful or all-knowing entities.

This clip of Boyer being interview by Jonathan Miller is fascinating because he points out, contrary to popular belief, what most religions are concerned with. He notes most religions do not concern themselves with the creation of the world or the afterlife, while the presence of unseen agents is almost universal.

There is now a growing interest in the cognitive science of religion and one of my favourite articles is by psychiatrist Quinton Deeley who discusses how different form of religious ritual may influence specific cognitive functions to pass on religious teachings and commitments (full disclosure: Deeley is a friend and research collaborator).

Deeley argues that the well-known distinction between 'doctrinal' rituals which are frequent and low intensity (such as everyday prayers or practices), and 'imagistic' high-intensity, less-frequent rituals (such as exuberant religious celebrations) serve different psychological purposes.

'Doctrinal' rituals help create semantic memories of key concepts and emotional response through associative learning, while 'imagistic' rituals help create episodic memories of specific situations that may involve altered states of consciousness and the experience of other realities.

Deeley also did a fascinating talk on 'Ritual, Possession Trance, and Amnesia' where he discusses some of the neuropsycholgical mechanisms that might underlie trance and possessions states.

Link to Boyer's Nature essay 'Religion: Bound to believe?'.
Link to brief interview with Boyer on religion.
Link to Deeley's article 'The Religious Brain'.
Link to video of talk 'Ritual, Possession Trance, and Amnesia'.

—Vaughan.

Neuropsychiatry in Venezuela:

Apologies for the lack of posts, but I've just arrived in Punto Fijo in Venezuela, as I've kindly been invited to be a guest of the Venezuelan Psychiatric Society at their annual conference, where I shall be talking about the cognitive neuropsychiatry of psychosis later in the week.

Unfortunately it's dark and I've been travelling since yesterday, so all I know about Punto Fijo is that it is supposed to be remarkably beautiful and it's incredibly humid.

However, I spent a fantastic day in Caracas with Jorge, a superb colleague from Medellín, and Jose and Claudia, a Venezuelan psychiatrist and psychologist couple who graciously toured us through the city and showed two weary travellers some warm Venezuelan Hospitality.

Updates to follow shortly (after some well deserved sleep).

—Vaughan.

October 20, 2008

Monochrome dreaming:

Watching black and white television as a child may explain why older people are less likely to dream in colour than younger people, according to new study reported in New Scientist.

The study is from psychologist Ewa Murzyn, who was interested in how early experience could affect our dream life.

She first asked 60 subjects – half of whom were under 25 and half of whom were over 55 – to answer a questionnaire on the colour of their dreams and their childhood exposure to film and TV. The subjects then recorded different aspects of their dreams in a diary every morning.

Murzyn found there was no significant difference between results drawn from the questionnaires and the dream diaries – suggesting that the previous studies were comparable.

She then analysed her own data to find out whether an early exposure to black-and-white TV could still have a lasting effect on her subjects dreams, 40 years later.

Only 4.4% of the under-25s' dreams were black and white. The over-55s who'd had access to colour TV and film during their childhood also reported a very low proportion of just 7.3%.

But the over-55s who had only had access to black-and-white media reported dreaming in black and white roughly a quarter of the time.

It's an interesting study because, as we recently discussed, philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel argued that exposure to TV was an unlikely explanation for the effect where we've tended to report more coloured dreams in modern times and suggested this actually showed we're not very good at introspecting into our own minds.

This study provides some evidences that the effect may be more reliable than we think.

However, I'm still puzzled by why television would seem to have such a big influence so many years later when most of the visual experience the person would have received as a child, even if a heavy TV watcher, would be from the 'real' coloured world.

Curious.

Link to NewSci on black and white dreams study (thanks Laurie!).
Link to scientific paper.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

Colombian Congress of Psychiatry report:

I recently got back from the Colombian Congress of Psychiatry and was incredibly impressed both by the high standard of scientific work and the wonderfully welcoming people I met.

I have to say, I didn't see quite as much of the conference as I normally would owing to the rather relentless pace of partying that seems to occur in Bogotá (things I haven't seen at UK psychiatry conferences: the president of the national psychiatric association stood atop a table getting everyone to wave their hands in the air like they just don't care).

For me, one of the academic highlights was actually from a Spaniard, Julio Sanjuán, who talked about some innovative research he's doing on auditory hallucinations.

In one elegant study, Sanjuán and his team decided to look at what sort of brain activation is triggered by neutral and emotional words in patients with schizophrenia who hear voices.

It's remarkably how many studies in schizophrenia have been done of changes in visual perception when one of the major problems for many people with the diagnosis is that they hear intrusive and unpleasant hallucinated voices.

Sanjuán came up with the idea of simply looking at how the brains of people with schizophrenia react to hearing emotional words (such as swear words) compared to neutral words - matched for word type and frequency.

The image on the right shows the remarkable difference, whereby emotional words cause a much larger response in the brain. In fact, they found they triggered much greater frontal lobe, temporal cortex, insula, cingulate, and amygdala activity, largely on the right.

It's a 'why didn't I think of that' study that might help explain why people with schizophrenia often find their voices so disabling when other people in the population can hear voices and remain undisturbed.

In terms of drug company ridiculousness that often appears as part of the 'educational effort' in European Conferences (i.e. models on bikes), it was remarkably muted in comparison.

However, one particular lowlight was finding out the session I was speaking at was being used by Janssen to advertise their 'new' antipsychotic paliperidone - which is actually little more than a repackaged risperidone.

Did I mention risperidone has just gone out of patent and can now be produced much more cheaply by other drug companies? Obviously nothing at all to do with Janssen having a newly patented drug to sell I'm sure.

Wave your hands in the air like you just don't care.

Link to Sanjuán study on emotional word reactivity.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

October 19, 2008

There she goes again, racing through my brain:

The opening verse from The La's 1988 indie hit There She Goes:

There she goes
There she goes again
Racing through my brain
And I just can't contain
This feeling that remains

Link to The La's playing There She Goes.

—Vaughan.

October 18, 2008

The sexual distractions of cheese crumbs:

Another fantastic quote from Bonk, a book about sex research by science writer Mary Roach, this time about the effects of distraction on female sexual arousal (from p251):

A thousand images can play on a woman's mind: work, kids, problems with Ultrasuede. One nonpharmaceutical solution is to teach women to redirect their focus and pay more attention to physical sensations - a practice called mindfulness.

A pilot study - meaning it's a preliminary investigation with no control group - by Lori Brotto and two colleagues at the University of British Colombia had promising results. Eighteen women with complaints about their ability to become aroused participated in mindfulness training. Afterward, there was a significant jump in their ratings of how aroused they'd been feeling during sexual encounters.

If it's any solace, even female rats have trouble focusing. I give you a sentence, my favourite sentence in the entire oeuvre of Alfred Kinsey, from Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female: "Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male".

Full disclosure: I was sent a free copy of the book by the publishers about six months ago but I've only just got round to reading it.

Link to Mary Roach's website.
Link to previous Mind Hacks review of Bonk.

—Vaughan.

Looking for the mind in a haystack of words:

The New York Times has an article on the simple but effective idea that a statistical analysis of word frequency in written text can be a guide to the psychological state of the author. It's a technique that's been pioneered by psychologist James Pennebaker who has conducted a considerable amount of intriguing research to back up his technique.

In fact, he's completed a huge number of studies looking at word frequency in everything from bereavement to suicidal and non-suicidal poets.

However, some of his most impressive work has focused on the benefits of getting distressed or ill people to write, finding that it benefits recovery from trauma, but perhaps more surprisingly seems also to boost immune system function in HIV patients.

The evidence and theory behind the work was described in a great 2003 review article which notes that the importance lies not so much in the subject or action words, but in the 'bitty' parts of speech, such as the use of pronouns (I, you, we and so on).

These seem to relate to the focus of the thoughts and Pennebaker was asked by the FBI to apply the technique to the communications of Al Queda:

Take Dr. Pennebaker’s recent study of Al Qaeda communications — videotapes, interviews, letters. At the request of the F.B.I., he tallied the number of words in various categories — pronouns, articles and adjectives, among others.

He found, for example, that Osama bin Laden’s use of first-person pronouns (I, me, my, mine) remained fairly constant over several years. By contrast, his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, used such words more and more often.

“This dramatic increase suggests greater insecurity, feelings of threat, and perhaps a shift in his relationship with bin Laden,” Dr. Pennebaker wrote in his report [pdf], which was published in The Content Analysis Reader (Sage Publications, July 2008).

Interestingly, the FBI have their own in-house text analysis technique but I'm damned if I can remember the name or find it on the net. Answers on an encrypted telegram please...

Link to NYT piece 'He Counts Your Words (Even Those Pronouns)'.
Link to review article 'Psychological aspects of natural language'.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

October 17, 2008

Ice age:

ABC Radio National's All in the Mind recently had an excellent programme on amphetamine, discussing its varying uses from its original selling point as a widely abused nasal decongestant to its modern popularity as a kiddie behavioural control agent in the age of methylphenidate (Ritalin).

One of the most fascinating parts is where the guest, history of science professor Nicolas Rasmussen, discusses how after amphetamine was discovered in the 1930s the drug companies desperately tried to find an illness which it could be prescribed for.

Smith, Kline & French wanted to find a big market and so they looked at common diseases that you know might plausibly be treated by an adrenaline derivative and they tried it out on a huge range of conditions. Menstrual cramps, bed wetting, you name it -- it turns out actually to work for bed wetting if you give it to little kids who have that problem, probably by making them sleep shallower -- but also in psychiatry for depression, and that's what really caught on.

They tried it for an enormous range of conditions through medical experts and the clinical trials where the drug didn't work out well weren't published, because that was already the arrangement then, when a drug company funded a trial unless it fit their marketing needs the results wouldn't be published.

Great to see the spirit of the 1930s is still with us today.

The programme also discusses how the subculture use of the drug interacted with its 'official' uses in the mind of the public and policy makers to give speed the image it has today.

It seems the programme is based on a new book by Rasmussen called On Speed and I love the link at the bottom of the book's website which says 'Purchase On Speed'. I've drunk a lot of coffee. Will that do?

If you're interested in a book on the science of amphetamines, Leslie Iverson's book Speed, Ecstasy, Ritalin is simply wonderful and just so much fun to read, as I noted in an enthusiastic review last year.

The AITM programme is a fantastic introduction to the fascinating story of amphetamine, so a great place to begin.

Link to 'Wakey Wakey! The many lives of amphetamine'.

—Vaughan.

2008-10-17 Spike activity:

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

The Waves of Mu art project is reviewed by The Neurocritic. Looks as beautiful as it sounds.

BBC News says internet use 'good for the brain'? The scientific article has not yet appeared and the guy has a book out on, er, how good the internet is for your brain. I remain suspicious until I see the hard data.

Fantastic Neurophilosophy piece discusses a new study where a man with a surgically re-attached hand shows brain re-organisation to its pre-amputation state.

The New York Times has another one of its great features on the personal experience of mental illness - this with stories of men and women with eating disorders.

Another fascinating study on the effect of death salience (reminding people of their mortality) finds it can influence environmental concerns - in either direction, according to the BPS Research Digest.

M'Lady, PsyBlog has a short but sweet piece on a study that has found romantic thoughts increase male chivalry.

A conversation between BBC News and a robot - who happens to be the winner of the 2008 Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence. You can have a conversation with the same robot yourself.

H+ Magazine launches for the transhumanist in your life. Full of slightly unrealistic but commendable neuroscience speculation.

Robert Burton, neurologist and author of 'Being Certain', is interviewed by SciAm Mind Matters.

Neuroanthropology has a video segment on what archaeology can tell us about early behaviour (sometimes called 'cognitive archaeology').

A patient left in the coma-like persistent vegetative state after a car crash recovers some function after magnetic brain stimulation, reports BBC News.

My Mind on Books previews an interesting looking tome called 'Obsession: A History'.

The ever-excellent Cognitive Daily tackles whether love and sexual desire are the same.

—Vaughan.

October 16, 2008

Memory, brainwashing and the Cold War:

I've just watched part two of Adam Curtis' series on the relationship between memory and the history of the 20th century where he explores the link between brain washing, the emergence of cognitive science and the politics of the cold war.

Curtis is a documentary maker who is particularly interested in the link between psychology and history and creates gripping programmes that are always thought-provoking even if you don't agree with all of his analysis.

He has a gift for finding archive material and this programme is no exception where he finds film footage from previously secret research programmes.

The programme is actually from his 1995 series The Living Dead which tackles the relationship between memory and the political manipulation of history.

The first part is about how the 'official' memory of the Second World War was created - a process psychologists call 'social remembering'. Essentially, the social psychology of how we construct history, either on the scale of cultures, subcultures or families.

However, the second part focuses specifically on the rise of cognitive science and how theories of memory during the 50s and 60s were key to some of the Cold War efforts to research and create 'brain washing' and other mind manipulation techniques.

Curtis is probably best known to psychologists for his remarkably 2002 series Century of the Self where he tracked the Freudian idea of the self as one of the major social influences of the 20th century.

Virtually all of Curtis' programmes are available on Google Video and they're fantastic viewing. One of the few people who can genuinely said to be making powerful intellectual arguments on psychology through the medium of video.

Link to part two of The Living Dead.

—Vaughan.

The Lazarus sign: a slight return:

Occasionally, brain-dead patients make movements, owing to the fact that the spinal reflexes are still intact. The most complex, and presumably the most terrifying, is called the Lazarus Sign. It is where the brain-dead patient extends their arms and crosses them over their chest - Egyptian mummy style.

About 20% to 40% of brain dead patients can show spontaneous movements particularly when the body is pricked with sharp objects.

While these movements are usually brief twitches, occasionally the movements can be in an extended sequence, as reported in this 1992 Journal of Neurosurgery case study about a 67-year-old lady who died from a brain haemorrhage.

At 11:15 am on February 20, brain death was declared and consent for final respirator removal was obtained from the patient's family. The possibility of the appearance of Lazarus' sign was explained to the family, and a video recording was made.

Five minutes after respirator removal, respiratory-like movements occurred three times; both shoulders adducted and slow cough like movements were identified. Lazarus' sign immediately followed these respiratory-like movements. The forearms were pronated and the wrist joints extended bilaterally. Fingers on the left hand were extended, but those on the right were flexed as if grasping. Subsequently, flexion and extension in the knee and foot joints were repeatedly observed. Slow supination of both feet occurred. Finally, the left forearm was adducted to the side of the body, and the right hand pronated.

The movements continued for about 3.5 minutes, during which time blood pressure was 46/35 mm Hg and pulse rate was about 90 beats/min with a regular sinus rhythm. Cardiac arrest occurred at 11:35 am.

Link to PubMed entry for case study.
Link to brief popular article on Lazarus sign.

—Vaughan.

Myths of the sleep deprived:

New Scientist has an interesting piece by sleep psychologist Jim Horne who sets about busting the myth that modern society causes large scale sleep deprivation.

It's full of fascinating facts and uses the phrase "to eke out the very last quantum of sleepiness" which is just lovely.

Until recently, people living above the Arctic circle slept much longer in winter than in summer. There are reports from the 1950s of Inuit sleeping up to 14 hours a day during the darkest months compared with only 6 in the summertime. Given the opportunity, we can all learn to significantly increase daily sleep on a more or less permanent basis. When it is cut back to normal we are sleepy for a few days, and then the sleepiness disappears.

Far from our being chronically sleep-deprived, things have never been better. Compare today's sleeping conditions with those of a typical worker of 150 years ago, who toiled for 14 hours a day, six days a week, then went home to an impoverished, cold, damp, noisy house and shared a bed not only with the rest of the family but with bedbugs and fleas.

What of the risk of a sleep shortage causing obesity? Several studies have found a link, including the Nurses' Health Study, which tracked 68,000 women for 16 years (American Journal of Epidemiology, vol 164, p 947).

The hazard, though real, is hardly anything to worry about. It only becomes apparent when habitual sleep is below 5 hours a day, which applies to only 5 per cent of the population, and even then the problem is minimal. Somebody sleeping 5 hours every night would only gain a kilogram or so of fat per year. To put it in perspective, you could lose weight at the same rate by reducing your food intake by about 30 calories per day, equivalent to about one bite of a muffin, or by exercising gently for 30 minutes a week.

One of the lessons from sleep research is that we're actually pretty bad at judging how much sleep we need and even how much we actually get.

This seems to be particularly the case for people with insomnia who tend to underestimate the amount they sleep and overestimate the time it takes them to drop off.

The article is great guide to sleep myths and how they're addressed by the scientific research and surprisingly for New Scientist, the article is open-access.

NewSci staffer having sleepless nights over their closed-access policy or just someone asleep at the wheel? Answers on a night cap please...

Link to NewSci piece 'Time to wake up to the facts about sleep'.

—Vaughan.

October 15, 2008

Encephalon 56 springs into life:

The latest edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just hit the wires, if you interpret 'just' as meaning three days ago (sorry about that, I can only connect to the internet when sitting in the bathroom for reasons of signal unusualness). However, it's being hosted by the excellent Combining Cognits and is ready for action.

A couple of my favourites include a post from The Neurocritic on a recent study on cortisol and anti-social behaviour and a piece from Sports are 80% mental on psychological momentum and winning streaks in sport.

There's plenty more mind and brain writing, and good to see a few new authors in the latest run-down.

Link to Encephalon 56.

—Vaughan.

Test your moral radar :

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel and psychologist Fiery Cushman have designed a 'Moral Sense Test' that asks respondents for their takes on various moral dilemmas so they can compare the responses of philosophers and non-philosophers.

You may recognise Schwitzgebel's name as he writes The Splintered Mind blog that we often link to, owing to his talent for great ideas and explaining philosophy of mind in a compelling and eye-catching manner.

He's been involved in project comparing the intuitions of philosophers and non-philosophers for a while now, and he's now asking that you take part in the research.

The test takes about 15-20 minutes and has a number of interesting moral dilemmas for you to ponder.

Link to the 'Moral Sense Test'.

—Vaughan.

Psychedelic Brittanica:

Today's Nature has an interesting review of a new book, called Albion Dreaming, on the history of LSD in the UK. The book also has a slightly ramshackle but wonderfully engrossing website which is full of fascinating information on LSD.

The site has a great collection of quotes by famous Britons where they describe their experiences with LSD. One of the most eloquent is by the actor, writer and general all round good chap, Stephen Fry, where he writes in his autobiography:

I don’t know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing open wide. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake that only makes sense when there is some LSD swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you know what it is taken to mean.

LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is one of LSD's most distressing and least endearing side-effects.

The review notes that Albion Dreaming discusses how the UK played quite a significant role in the LSD revolution of the 1960s.

In fact, at one point, half the world's LSD was produced in the UK before the production was smashed by Operation Julie. The BBC has a fantastic website about the history of Op Julie that talks to some of the key figures and discusses the legendary trip-impeding police operation.

Link to Nature review of Albion Dreaming.
Link to Albion Dreaming website.
Link to BBC website on Operation Julie.

—Vaughan.

October 14, 2008

Escaping down an electrode:

Esquire magazine (of all places) has an excellent neuroscience article that discusses the case of Erik Ramsey, a young man with locked-in syndrome whose only hope for communicating with the outside world is a prototype brain computer interface that needs to be implanted directly into his cortex.

Locked-in syndrome is a condition that can occur after certain forms of brain stem stroke. The brain stem acts as the relay station to the peripheral nerves of the body, and hence the control of muscles.

The syndrome is where the person is mentally fine but are physically unable to move any muscle in the body, usually except muscles associated with eyes.

Current methods of communicating typically involve having someone hold up a board with the letters of the alphabet on it. The assistant starts reading off the letters and the locked-in person moves their eye when they arrive at the right letter, and through this method, they slowly spell out sentences.

Famously, Jean-Dominique Bauby created one of the most incredible books ever written, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, using this method after becoming locked-in.

There is currently a great hope for 'brain computer interfaces' that, with a bit of training, might allow locked-in people to communicate through a computer system that translates specific types of neural activity into letters or words.

This is usually described as translating 'thoughts into words' but most systems simply link specific patterns of brain activation to specific computer outputs, so as long as they can reliably distinguish between different types of brain activity and reliably produce specific responses the job is done.

In other words, if thinking of sea lions reliably produces an 'A' and thinking of a scratch-my-nose action reliably produces a 'B' (and so on) this is enough, but the leap between the content of thoughts and the output is not at the level of meaning (where thinking of sea lions would produce 'sea lions' as an output).

Interestingly, the training method most of these systems use largely relies on operant conditioning (a type of trial and error learning). We know that we can be conditioned to have certain responses unconsciously, so it may be the case that people using the system don't 'feel' like their thinking about something specific for any particular response. Eventually it just 'happens', like driving a car.

The researcher behind the system described in the Esquire article is neuroscientist Phillip Kennedy who was recently featured in an excellent article from the Dana Foundation on his work.

Link to Esquire 'The Unspeakable Odyssey of the Motionless Boy' (via FC).
Link to Dana 'Neural Implant Aims to Restore Speech to the Paralyzed'.

—Vaughan.

Channelling Colonel Saunders:

Shirley Ghostman is a TV psychic whose guests are completely unaware that he's a spoof and his over-the-top antics are just the creation of comedian Marc Wootton.

In one episode he goes up against well-known psychologist and skeptic Chris French whose dry responses turn out to be funnier than Ghostman's camp send-up.

French is head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmith's College in London, which studies the psychological attributes that lead people to believe in the paranormal.

Some of the unit's publications are online in their archive although you'll have to wait for one of the best, "The 'Haunt' Project: An attempt to build a 'haunted' room by manipulating complex electromagnetic fields and infrasound", as it's soon to be published in a special edition of the neuropsychology journal Cortex.

Link to Shirtley Ghostman vs a wonderfully sarcastic Chris French.

—Vaughan.

October 12, 2008

A bolt from the Blue Brain:

Seed Magazine has got video of a great talk by Henry Markham, the director of the Blue Brain Project which is developing the world's largest simulation of networks of individual neurons in an attempt to understand the large scale dynamics of the brain.

Their ambition is to be able to run a simulation on the scale of the whole human brain within a decade.

If you want a good summary of where the ambitious project is at, Seed recently had an excellent Jonah Lehrer piece on the research that we featured earlier this year.

Markham's talk is interesting not solely for his take on the project and its aims, but also for the fantastic visualisation he uses to illustrate what it's doing.

Link to video of 'Designing the Human Mind' talk.

—Vaughan.

Banjo brain surgery:

Surely this must be the greatest headline for a BBC News story ever: Banjo Used in Brain Surgery.

Although the banjo wasn't in the hands of the surgeons it was still an essential part of the operation. It was played by legendary Blue Grass musician Eddie Adcock who was having surgery to install a deep brain stimulation device to treat an essential tremor that had been affecting his playing.

The BBC News story has a video of the neurosurgery and the banjo playing, and it is pure genius. Probably the best thing you'll see all year.

Essential tremor is a condition where there is a continuing deterioration in areas of the brain that control movement. This causes a tremor that usually appears when the person tries to act or move, although can lead to a 'resting tremor' that's also present at other times.

Essential tremor is not Parkinson's disease, which, while also associated with tremor, is a much more serious and disabling condition in many ways. There does seem to be a link though, as people with essential tremor are more likely to develop Parkinson's, although this still only happens in the minority of cases.

However, deep brain stimulation can be used to treat the movement difficulties of both Parkinson's and essential tremor. It involves sinking an electrode into the thalamus, a deep brain area that is part of the motor loop - a circuit that helps co-ordinate movement.

In fact, there are two parts to the motor loop - the direct and indirect pathway - an each play a complementary part in directing movement, and each of which needs to be balanced with itself and with each other. When damage to these circuits affects this balance, the result is that it causes too much activity one way, which causes a compensatory response the other, and so on.

Imagine two people, completely unaware of each other, trying to balance an uneven seesaw. The oscillations in the control system cause oscillations in movement, and this is what you can see in tremor.

DBS works by sending electrical impulses at a certain frequency into the thalamus to dampen down the oscillations. However, the oscillatory push-push cycle is not the same for everyone, and the best spot in the motor loop itself will also differ.

To get the best result the surgeons tweak the electrical pulse settings and try different areas.

To make sure it's having the desired effect, the patient is awake and they ask them to move. When they see that they've hit the sweet spot and the pulses are in time, they know their job is done.

One of Eddie Adcock's impairments is that he has tremor, but the main impact on his life is that it affects his banjo playing. So the most sensible thing to do is to tweak the system while he's playing the banjo to optimise the effect for the thing that's most important to him.

And that's why a banjo was used in brain surgery.

Link to BBC video of 'Banjo Used in Brain Surgery'.

—Vaughan.

October 10, 2008

2008-10-10 Spike activity:

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

Pfizer have been caught manipulating studies. Again. This time for the drug Neurontin. The New York Times has the full story.

Neurophilosophy discusses a new way of understanding the neurobiology of hallucinations.

An excellent Carl Zimmer article on the genetics of intelligence is available from Scientific American.

Neurotopia examines a case of a phantom erectile penis after sex reassignment surgery.

A wonderful quote from Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist Charles Sherrington starts an excellent piece on calcium imaging from Neurophilosophy.

The BPS Research Digest asks what is it about eye wiggling that helps people recover from trauma in an article on EMDR therapy.

Psychoanalytic Therapy Wins Backing. The New York Times reports on the recent meta-analysis that found that one year or more psychoanalytic therapy helps complex psychiatric patients.

NPR Radio has a short piece on research suggesting we may not be as good at multi-tasking as we think.

A new study [pdf] finding that 44% of children diagnosed with child bipolar disorder go on to have adult bipolar disorder is critiqued by Furious Seasons.

Advances in the History of Psychology has a short but interesting piece asking whatever happened to the male menopause?

A study that used electrodes implanted in the brain to record neural function during remembering is covered by PsyBlog.

—Vaughan.

October 09, 2008

Bogotá bound:

I'm off to Bogotá to attend the annual conference of the Association of Colombian Psychiatry, so apologies if updates are a little erratic, but I shall try and report back with the highlights here.

I've been kindly invited to give a talk in a symposium on psychosis where I'll look forward to getting a distinctly Colombian perspective on my interest in the neuropsychology of delusions.

—Vaughan.

Web therapy:

Web Therapy is an incredibly funny and wonderfully made web series about a psychologist who does chaotic three-minute therapy sessions via webcam. It stars Lisa Kudrow, who plays the over-involved Fiona Wallace who can't quite keep her personal issues out of the sessions.

It's a really simple premise but is a very well observed satire on therapy and has some sublimely funny moments as Wallace tries to use the therapy sessions to justify her bad behaviour.

To be honest, the thought of Lisa Kudrow playing a psychologist kind of put me off, owing to a hang-over from Friends, but she plays quite a different character and does a fantastic job .

Link to Web Therapy (via BoingBoing).

—Vaughan.

The science of shrinking human heads:

I've just found a wonderful article on how the Jivaro-Shuar, an indigenous people from the upper Amazon basin, shrink human heads after killing their enemies in battle. It's from the medical journal Neurosurgery but it's most fascinating for what it reveals about the complex customs and social relations that surround the practice.

The actual head shrinking is the end point in a raid on an enemies camp which apparently happens periodically, as they are almost always in revenge for being the victim of an earlier raid.

The victim of the revenge raid is not necessarily the perpetrator of the last attack. The new target is picked out by the shaman while under the influence of a hallucinogenic beverage called natéma (apparently a type of ayahuasca).

The significance of this vengeance cycle is remarkably similar to the one described by Jared Diamond in a New Yorker article on violence in the Handa people of New Guinea that we covered earlier this year.

The article does explain the process of shrinking heads, if ever you find yourself with a spare one, as well as the complex ritual and ceremonies that accompany the process and seem to pervade the whole life and identity of the Jivaro-Shuar.

Anyway, on to the head shrinking. After carefully removing the skin from and discarding the skull, a ritual pot is used to heat water.

As the water begins to grow warm, with a command, the headman leads the warriors in the rite: he seizes what remains of the head by its hair and, with the warriors’ hands laid upon his hand grasping the victim’s head, he dips the head three times in the water. As he does this, he intones, “I dip the head in the boa’s water.” The warriors in turn respond, “He is boiling the head.” The skin of the head is then placed in the vessel and allowed to steep for 15 to 20 minutes as the participants watch in silence. When the water reaches a boil, the vessel is removed from the fire, and the skin is recovered from the water with a stick and hung up on the tip of a spear to dry....

They retrieve the skin from its place on the spear and bind the hair on its scalp. Eyelet holes are pierced through the base of the neck, transforming the skin into a sort of pouch. The mouth is sewn shut with darts from below as the participants intone: “He is sewing.” The eyelids are sutured closed in a similar manner.

With the enemy’s skin now a pouch with a single mouth, the base of the neck, the skin is dried with heated sand and stones. The sand is heated on a round, hollow plate. The senior member of the party leads the warriors involved in the kill in scooping up the sand with a vessel and pouring it into the head, then shaking the head to drive the sand as far into the pouch as possible. This is repeated for hours as the participants repeat the chant, “I am pouring sand.” A large flat stone is likewise heated in the fire and used, held with the help of a leaf folded for the purpose, on the outside layer of the skin. The head is then complete.

Interestingly, once made, the heads are usually discarded as the significance lies in the process rather than the product.

It's a completely fascinating article and really worth reading in full.

Link to article 'The science of shrinking human heads'.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

The beauty algorithm and coding for the brain:

The New York Times has a fascinating piece on some new software that automatically tweaks pictures of human faces to make them more attractive by reducing the concept of facial beauty to simple vector-based algorithms.

The image on the right is a 'before and after' picture of the software at work, and the researchers have a page for the project with many more examples and the full-text of the academic paper.

The researchers asked participants to rate the attractiveness of a series of faces and they then used software to calculate distances and directions between key facial landmarks.

By combining the attractiveness ratings and the landmark vectors they created a statistical model of which general facial attributes are most attractive. Their software allows new faces to be subtly altered to more closely approximate the general model of attractiveness.

I'm fascinated by the fact that software advances are increasingly taking advantage of the quirks of our mind and brain.

The MP3 format is perhaps the most well known, which allows audio files to be compressed because it takes advantage of a psychological effect called auditory masking where, when two sounds of certain frequencies are present, we can only perceive one.

The MP3 encoding algorithm simply scans sound files for times when auditory masking would eliminate the perception of one sound, and then actually eliminates the data from the file, thereby making it smaller.

Another wonderful idea is chroma subsampling used in jpg and digital video compression. It's based on the finding that our visual system is less accurate at pinpointing colour differences than brightness differences.

Chroma subsampling takes advantage of this by storing colour information at a lower resolution than brightness information. For example, rather than storing separate colour information for every pixel, it will store it for every four. When we see the image, we often can't tell the difference.

This is particularly true for moving images, and you'll notice sometimes when you stop YouTube videos the colours seem to be fuzzy and bleed from where they're supposed to be (have a look at this YouTube still I used on a recent post ) even though you hardly notice this when the video is playing.

These software advances wouldn't have happened without the psychology research to find the bugs / features in human perception and it's curious to think that these new developments build on both the digital and neural platforms.

What will be most interesting is if software starts to take advantage of cognitive features found only in certain members of the population (for example, some women have four types of colour receptor in the retina, rather than the usual three).

In other words, we might find that some important software advance will only work on some people (or rather, will be developed with only some people in mind), and so these people might be preferentially hired to work with certain applications.

If these applications become particularly high value (usually due to their use in the military or intelligence services), people might starting attempting to engineer themselves or others to have the uncommon attribute.

Sci-fi writers, start your engines.

Link to NYT piece 'The Sum of Your Facial Parts'.
Link to researcher's page with photos and full-text.

—Vaughan.

October 08, 2008

Ladies and gentlemen we're floating in space:

I just came across these two beautiful images in a paper by neuroscientist Marek Kubicki and colleagues on diffusion tensor imaging studies in schizophrenia.

DTI is a technique that using MRI scans to track how water moves throughout the brain. As water tends to move in one particular direction when its trapped inside nerve fibres, a technique called MRI tractography can be used to map out all the white matter 'cabling', separate from the rest of the brain.

I think the technique produces some of the most beautiful images in neuroscience. You get to see the brain's connections, disconnected, and suspended in space.

Link to full-text of paper (see page 27 for images).
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to more DTI tractography images.

—Vaughan.

The museum of criminal brains:

Today's Nature has a fascinating one page article on the Turin anatomy museums that have the archives of the controversial founder of criminal psychology, Cesare Lombroso, who thought that deviant behaviour was imprinted in the face and brain from birth.

Lombroso had the theory that criminals were biologically defective, and that these defects - and hence criminality - could be found by measuring the body. This practice of interpreting someone's character from their physical features is known as physiognomy and was in full swing before Lombroso started his studies but he was the first to apply it to criminology.

Unfortunately for the physiognomists, it's impossible to reliably judge a person's character from their physical appearance (although subtle statistical differences can be found when comparing the average of many people - such as with an iris patterning and personality study we reported on last year).

During his studies, however, Lombroso made a huge collection of brains, skulls, death masks, life masks, photos, measurements and even tattoos to try and prove his theory.

His other unshakeable theory held, ironically, that genius and madness were two sides of the same degenerate coin. In 1897, at the height of his fame, Lombroso travelled to Leo Tolstoy's village in Russia to gather living proof of the theory — but the undisputed genius disappointed him by lacking the physical characteristics that Lombroso associated with madness. In turn, Tolstoy dismissed his visitor as "ingenuous and limited", and later described Lombroso's theories as a "misery of thought, of concept and of sensibility" (see Nature 409, 983; 2001). The great French novelist Émile Zola levelled that Lombroso gathered proof selectively: "like all men with preconceived theses."

The irrepressible Lombroso also had plenty of opponents back home in Turin — most notably the neuroanatomist Carlo Giacomini, head of the University of Turin's anatomy museum. In the 1880s, Giacomini had developed a 'dry' method for preserving brains based on mummification, which he put to lavish use. At least 950 of the resulting specimens are displayed in the Museum of Human Anatomy of the University of Turin, which reopened last year after renovation, having been closed for more than a century. Giacomini was a thorough, systematic scientist interested in individual variability in the gross anatomy of the brain. His analysis of the crevices, or sulci, of human brains suggested that there is sufficient variability among normal people to negate Lombroso's theory that the size and shape of a brain dictate character. Typically, Lombroso ignored the data.

And, if I'm not mistaken, this page has a picture of Lombroso's face, preserved in a jar. Can't be sure though, as it's in Italian, however, it does have loads of fascinating photos of the archive.

The article also notes that the another nearby museum has the collection of Luigi Rolando, a proto-neuropsychologist who attempted to related nervous system structure both to its biological function and partly to mind and behaviour.

One of the major landmarks in the brain is the central sulcus, which has the alternate name of 'the Rolandic fissure' or the 'fissure of Rolando' in his honour. Rather peculiarly, the Nature article uses a jarring mix of old and new and names it the 'Rolando sulcus' which seems to be virtually non-existent in the literature.

The only reference to this term in PubMed is from an obviously awkwardly translated French study which appeared earlier this year.

Anyway, a fascinating article and they look like some wonderful museums to visit if ever you're in the beautiful Italian town of Turin.

Link to article.
Link to DOI entry.
Link to page in Italian with loads of photos.
Link to website for Cesare Lombroso Criminal Anthropology Museum.
Link to website of Luigi Rolando Human Anatomy Museum.

—Vaughan.

Everything I know about psychiatry, I learnt from heavy metal:

If mental illness doesn't exist, how come the dark forces of heavy metal know so much about it? Almost the whole range of psychopathology can be found on the cover of heavy metal albums.

You may never need buy a psychiatry textbook again.

Are you listening Thomaz Szasz?

Are you?

Mood disorders

While the DSM defines major depressive disorder as a low mood or a loss of ability to experience pleasure for at least two weeks which interferes with normal occupational function, Forgotten Tomb's album Springtime Depression depicts the feeling in a more metaphorical way, like the feeling of being stuck in a spooky house in the middle of a forest.

The classic album Wizard of the Lost Kingdom by metal outfit Mania shames the extensive psychiatric literature by reminding us of the largely undiscussed role of winking dwarves in the elevated mood, racing thoughts and boundless energy that accompanies a manic episode.

Anxiety disorders

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a problem where people have birds nesting in their eyes, their skin goes green and their teeth disappear. No wait, that's something else. But if these thoughts kept intruding into the mind and the person found them objectionable and anxiety provoking, those could be obsessions, and if they felt they had to repetitively perform a certain action to help control the anxiety (like stroking your green cheeks with both hands, for example), there's your compulsion.

A phobia is quite clearly an explosion of colourful organic wiring and the textbooks have got it wrong. Metal 1 Psychiatry 0.

Trauma can often lead to anxiety difficulties that would now be likely diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. However, the band Trauma are obviously paying tribute to earlier systems of descriptive psychopathology where the emotional effect of life-threatening situation might be diagnosed as a trauma neurosis. We're gonna party like it's 1899.

Schizophrenia

Brazilian metallers Sepultura have clearly got the right idea, as all forms of schizophrenia are known to involve a pair of purple eyes floating in the sky. However, not everyone diagnosed with schizophrenia has a bandanna, red skin and a fetching floor length raincoat, so be careful not to over generalise from their diagnostic criteria.

Addictive disorders

You're swinging upside down by your feet and some passing psychiatrist has quickly sketched you onto a nearby block of concrete. In the process, he notices that you have blood coming from your legs and guessing that you may be injecting drugs into the reticular vein, perhaps because persistent needle use has made it impossible to inject into veins in the arm. Or, perhaps you are really addicted to swinging upside down by your feet, but then again, those behavioural addictions are so controversial.

Eating disorders

Anorexia Nervosa. What a name for a metal band. It's not entirely clear from their music whether they represent the Restrictive Eating subtype or the Binge-Purge subtype, but as one of the criteria for the diagnosis is low body weight, I suspect from their band photos (warning - MySpace link) they may have been misdiagnosed. They do look kinda pale though. However, it's clear they've been adversely influence by Size 0 models, so we can safely blame the media.

Somatoform and dissociative disorders

Although more classically defined as the presentation of neurological symptoms without evidence of neurological impairment in the absence of the intent to deceive or conscious control of the deficit, hysteria can also present as a big blue dragon smoking a pipe. Of course, Freudians would argue that all hysteria originally comes from sexual dysfunction so we wonder whether the pipe is really just a pipe?

—Vaughan.

October 07, 2008

I have a hunch, but I'm just working out when to use it:

The Boston Globe has an interesting piece on differing decision-making styles and how cognitive science is increasingly recognising the role of emotion in making choices.

It's shoehorned into a slightly dubious Obama vs McCain premise, but it covers the important relationship between more conscious reflective forms of problem analysis, and more intuitive forms of approach.

Some of the most interesting research in this area has looked at how these systems interfere with each other.

One of my favourite studies used the Iowa Gambling Task, a card game where participants pick from four decks of cards that can either give them wins and losses. There are various version but a common variant is where two decks give a slight overall gain, while the other two give a slight overall loss.

It's really hard to work out rationally, because there are just too many numbers to keep in your head, but after a while people tend to get an intuitive grasp of which are the best decks to stick with.

One particular study [full text], led by psychologist Cathryn Evans, found that people with a university education actually did worse on this task than people without one, presumably because they tended to over-apply futile rationalist strategies.

In terms of discussing the problem and ways of tackling it, a classic study by Jonathan Schooler found that getting people to talking about their problem-solving strategy actually made people worse at solving problems, particularly for 'insight problems' where the solution lies in your ability to reframe the whole scenario - often in a counter-intuitive way.

Of course, some problems need a measured, thoughtful, analytical approach, whereas in some situations this interferes with the outcome. However, these are largely findings from lab tasks designed to isolate these types of problems whereas in the real world, problems come as a chaotic mix of both elements.

Knowing which strategy to apply is key, but then again, solving this problem is often equally as complex as solving the problem itself.

Link to Boston Globe article 'The next decider'.

—Vaughan.

Viral brain cancer theory comes of age:

The San Francisco Chronicle has a great article about Dr Charles Cobbs, a neurosurgeon who had the seemingly wacky idea that malignant brain tumours called gliomas might be caused by a viral infection. Initially dismissed, there is now growing evidence for his idea and how it might lead to better prevention and treatment for these usually fatal forms of brain cancer.

Gliomas are tumour that form from glial cells - non-neuronal brain cells that provide support, nutrition protection and some just-recognised roles in signalling.

As you might expect, they are an essential part of almost every part the brain and a malignant tumour which grows from glial cells can be fatal (without treatment, within about 3 months) as they are very difficult to remove and treat.

Cobbs had observed that his patients diagnosed with malignant glioma - an aggressive brain cancer that leaves victims with a two-year life expectancy - were mostly older, well-educated and from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Their "hyper-hygienic" lifestyles had possibly left their immune systems susceptible to more common viruses, such as the human cytomegalovirus, or CMV, a herpes virus so ubiquitous that it infects 4 of 5 Americans.

During off-hours, and without formal research funding, Cobbs and a lab partner analyzed dozens of brain tumor samples: All of them were riddled with CMV. In 2002, the doctor published his novel finding in a leading medical journal Cancer Research where it was quickly dismissed by many of his peers. "I was left with a lot of self doubt," said Cobbs, now 45. "My fear was that we'd done something incorrect. But now, my confidence is growing."

In February, brain cancer researchers at Duke University Medical Center published the first peer-reviewed report that confirmed Cobbs' discovery, followed by two reports from independent labs at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at University of Texas in Houston and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. And this month, the National Brain Tumor Society is sponsoring a first-of-its-kind gathering in Boston of the world's top virologists and glioma experts to examine the possible link between CMV and the deadly brain tumors that are diagnosed in 10,000 Americans every year.

The photos accompanying the piece are excellent by the way. The image I've used to illustrate this post is particularly impressive - click on it to see the full-size version which you need to get the full effect.

Nature also ran a piece about Cobbs last month owing to the publication of one of his studies in the same issue where he discovered one of key receptors on which the CMV virus has its action.

Unfortunately, I can't read either as Nature's Athens login system is currently broken [insert your own rant about open-access publishing here].

Link to SFChronicle article 'Surgeon changes study of brain tumors'.

—Vaughan.

October 06, 2008

Deep brain optimism:

A list of things that deep brain stimulation has been used to treat. DBS involves surgically implanting an electrode into the brain which is stimulated with a 'pacemaker' like device.

I've just been looking over the DBS literature and I was quite surprised to see that it has been used to try and treat just about anything you can think of.

Maybe someone should try it for over-optimistic repetitive surgery syndrome? Anyway, here's the one's I've found, if you know of any others, do send them in or add them to the comments.

Obesity

Writer's cramp

Tremor

Depression

Parkinson's disease

Epilepsy

Huntingdon's disease

Addiction

Self-mutilation

Cluster headache

Tourette's syndrome.

OCD

Early onset pantothenate kinase-associated neurodegeneration

Dystonia

Meige syndrome

Facial pain

—Vaughan.

An intuitive sense of humour:

I've just discovered a delightful article by English comedian Stewart Lee on why British people don´t get German humour. He argues that the English language is full of ambiguities and that many jokes rely on resolving these in ways which are much less possible in the German language owing to the sentence structure.

It reminded me of a more recent article by another English comedian, Simon Pegg, on why Americans sometimes miss the irony in British humour. He argues that it's not that they don't understand irony, as the stereotype suggests, but that British people use it in situations which Americans are not familiar with, making it harder to understand as intentional humour.

Neither are scientific and both are really just opinion pieces, but it struck me that there are interesting parallels with the recent series of articles where professional magicians have collaborated with cognitive scientists to understand the consciousness and attention.

The gist was that stage magicians have developed a keen intuitive sense of how the human attentional system works in order to fool it, and cognitive scientists can benefit from this knowledge as it is eminently useful in designing experiments.

As far as I know, no similar collaboration has happened with professional comedians and cognitive scientists studying the psychology of humour, despite the fact that both the articles mentioned above seem to demonstrate an intuitive sense of the what makes things funny.

Richard Herring (a one-time comedic partner of Stewart Lee in a past double act) recently wrote a shorter piece on honing jokes that seemed also to capture some of this intuitive knowledge.

A beautifully chosen, unexpected adjective can transform a comedy routine into poetry, while the banal repetition of a common place noun can make that word, and consequently all language, suddenly appear ridiculous.

If you are a stand-up you can hone your material over successive performances, based on the audience response. Changing a single word or altering the pace or emphasis can make a previously failed witticism work.

You might be saying too much. Let the audience discover the consequences of a comedic notion themselves. A pause can be as effective as a paragraph of exposition.

Finally, remember that you will learn the most through trial and error.

Link to 'Lost in translation' on humour and the German language.
Link to article 'What are you laughing at?' on Americans and irony.
Link to article on honing a joke.

—Vaughan.

October 05, 2008

The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex:

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex is a hugely entertaining book on sex research that is chaotic, delightful and utterly compelling.

The book is by science writer Mary Roach, whose past book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is one of my favourite science books of all time and when the publishers offered to send me a free copy of her new book I jumped at the chance.

Roach does something different to most other science writers - she writes about the research itself and not just about the findings. This means you get a fascinating insight into how people go about researching sex, what motivates them, and often most surprisingly, what exactly they've chosen to investigate.

One of the joys of the book is its asides and footnotes which make it a bit like getting a bit drunk with a knowledgeable and slightly overenthusiastic friend. Take this section on spinal cord injury and orgasm:

It's strange to think of orgasm as a reflex, something dependably triggered, like a knee jerk. [Sex researcher] Sipski assures me that psychological factors also hold sway. Just as emotion affect heart rate and digestion, they also influence sexual response. Sipski identifies orgasm as a reflex of the autonomic nervous system that can be either facilitated or inhibited by cerebral input (thoughts and feelings).

The sacral reflex definition fits nicely with something I stumbled upon in the United States Patent Office web site: Patent 3,941,136, a method for "artificially inducing urination, defecation of sexual excitation" by applying electrodes to "the sacral region on opposites sides of the spine." The patent holder intended the to help not only people with spinal cord injuries but those with erectile dysfunction or constipation.

The author also takes part in several studies herself, describing the slightly surreal situations that arise from bringing the personal into the lab, and doesn't lapse into nods and winks when the gritty detail is needed.

Like, Jeff Warren's excellent The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness it's sort of an educational travelogue through the world of science, where we encounter the people associated with sex research and the research itself. It's both completely fascinating and very funny in places.

Link to more details about the book.
Link or mp3 to Salon interview with Roach on the book.
Link to review from the International Herald Tribune.
Link to interview on NPR radio.

—Vaughan.

Medellín at last:

After several sleep-defying flights from the UK, I'm pleased to say I've arrived in Medellín and look forward to working with some of the many talented cognitive scientists and clinicians they have here in Colombia.

I've been kindly looked after by Jorge and his wife Claudia who are both local psychiatrists and in addition to looking out for sleep-deprived psychologists, teach and treat patients in the city.

I'm particularly indebted to Jorge who is largely responsible for my being here in Colombia and has been enthusiastic and helpful in equal measure.

I should have a permanent internet connection in the near future (I'm currently working off a dialup) so hopefully normal Mind Hacks service should resume shortly.

—Vaughan.

October 03, 2008

2008-10-03 Spike activity:

A belated and backdated round-up of quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

SciAm Mind Matters has an excellent piece on 'Metaphors of the Mind: Why Loneliness Feels Cold and Sins Feel Dirty'.

Socially isolated people feel physically colder, according to a new study covered by BBC News.

Seed Magazine discusses the recently famous photo of an "uncontacted" isolated tribe in the Amazon and finds they're not quite as they're portrayed.

IQ zealot and author of controversial book the 'Bell Curve' is the subject of a revealing piece by Frontal Cortex.

American Scientist has a good review of a new book entitled 'On Deep History of the Brain'.

Under fire psychiatry researcher Charles Nemeroff resigns after revelations about failures to report industry cash-ins, reports Furious Seasons. Not a moment after the NYT finds more financial irregularities.

Not Exactly Rocket Science has an excellent piece on toxoplasma, the brain parasite that has curious character - and maybe culture - changing psychological effects.

Do we all have some synaesthetic ability? asks New Scientist on the basis of a genuinely fascinating new study that suggests we have.

I've got a list of links as long as my arm from the ever excellent Neurophilosophy which I'll get round to waxing lyrical about soon, but in the meantime if you haven't checked it out recently you're missing out.

Trouble With Spikol on the legal changes that means America has made mental health care legally equivalent to other medical treatments and enters the 21st century (OK, the 20th, but it's still a welcome move). Kinda ironically, it's been tagged onto the recent US bill designed to bailout the banks and prevent a global depression.

Projection, fear, sex, Freud and evolutionary psychology (all vices I note) are covered in a heady post from Cognitive Daily.

New Scientist suggests Francis Crick was right about a possible 'vision filter' in the brain.

The 'BBC Prison study', a project based on Zimbardo's famous Stanford Prison Experiment has a information rich new website.

Neuroanthropology has an interesting aside on 'neuroprospecting'.

A new study on the genetics of dyslexia is covered by Science News.

—Vaughan.

October 02, 2008

Feeling out of control sparks magical thinking:

Psychology Today journalist Matthew Hutson covers some fascinating experiments just published in this week's Science that found that reducing participants' control increase the tendency for magical thinking and the perception of illusory meaning in random or patternless visual scenes.

Hutson covers all six experiments, but here's a sample from his article which should give you the general idea:

In the fourth study, people who recalled a situation where they lacked control were more likely to see nonexistent images in snowy pictures and were also more likely to suspect conspiracies in ambiguous vignettes. (In one story, three local construction companies raise their prices after their owners all spend the same weekend at one bed and breakfast. In another, the protagonist was denied a promotion right after his boss and a workmate exchanged a flurry of emails.)

The fifth experiment showed that describing the stock market as volatile (versus stable) renders people more likely to spot false correlations in reports on company financials—and then make stock investments based on their unfounded conclusions.

Finally, the sixth study showed that feeling good about yourself reduces the frantic grasping for straws. There were three groups. One group recalled not having control, another recalled not having control and then performed a self-affirmation task, and a third group did neither. The first group saw more figures in snowy pictures and perceived more conspiracies than the other groups did. Apparently, increasing self-esteem fosters a sense of control over one's life and reduces the need to seek additional stability in random noise.

Two of the 'snowy pictures' are shown on the right. The one on the top is completely random, the other has an embedded picture.

This is particularly interesting to me, because one of my own studies I completed with some colleagues in Cardiff also involved getting participants to perceive images in random visual patterns.

We did something a little different though, in that we didn't have any hidden images, so every time someone saw something we knew it was illusory.

However, we also managed to alter how often people saw the images, but we used electromagnets (a technique called TMS) to alter the function of the temporal lobes which have been previously thought to be involved in the magical thinking spectrum - from everyday examples to diagnosable psychosis.

This study was inspired by an earlier study by neuroscientist Peter Brugger, who found that people who professed a belief in ESP ('telepathy') were more likely to see meaningful patterns in visual noise than those that didn't.

Both the new study and our study are interesting because they show how this type of magical thinking can be manipulated.

However, this new study takes it to a whole new level because it involves a whole range of magical thinking tests (not just the 'snowy patterns') and shows how a number they are subject to the tides of emotion and feelings of being in control.

Link to Hutson's excellent write-up.
Link to study in Science.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

SciAmMind tackles implants, scans, death and terror:

The latest edition of Scientific American Mind has just arrived on the shelves and the online articles are one of the best selections I've seen in a very long time - with pieces on brain-computer interfaces, five ways in which brain scans mislead us, toddlers and their temper tantrums, the science of gossip, why we can't imagine death and why metaphors are shaping the 'war on terror'.

The article on the psychology of death is from the always interesting Jesse Bering and has been inspired by an evolutionary view of death concepts:

The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence...

Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.

This is reflected in the many studies which have show that we reason what might be thought as rather oddly about death - we have a tendency to attribute mental states to dead people.

Even if you believe in an immortal soul, it is unlikely that the mind continues in any way which we could conceive, and yet we tend to implicitly assume that certain abilities and attributes continue after death.

The other freely available articles are also fantastic. It's one of the best issues in ages, so well worth having a look at.

Link to October SciAmMind.

—Vaughan.

October 01, 2008

Neuropod on depression, theatre, speech and credit:

The September edition of the Nature Neuroscience podcast Neuropod recently appeared online and covers the treatment of depression, how deaf people retain their ability to speak, a psychoanalytic contribution to the understanding of stock market instability, and a feature on the London play Reminiscence (in which I make a brief appearance).

The discussion on depression is particularly interesting as it's based on a recent review article by Robert DeRubeis that looked at the neural effects of antidepressants and cognitive therapy as they help treat depression.

The piece on the psychoanalytic study of financial markets struck me as completely left-field but is also very interesting, as psychologist David Tucket argues that fund managers have too much information and so internalise models or rules of thumb that are as equally affected by emotion and concerns about their job as hard evidence, meaning that as a population, the whims of the human psyche can cause large economic effects.

The rest is very interesting too, and the interview with myself and Michael and Effy from the Reminiscence team is a lovely conclusion to a hugely enjoyable project.

Link to Neuropod homepage with streamed audio archive.
mp3 of September edition.

—Vaughan.

Autism in 100 words:

A micro explanation of autism by Simon Baron-Cohen from this month's British Journal of Psychiatry as part of their monthly feature which tries to explain a key concept in psychiatry in 100 words.

Autism - in 100 words

Simon Baron-Cohen

Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) occur in 1% of the population, are strongly heritable, and result from atypical neurodevelopment. Classic autism and Asperger Syndrome (AS) share difficulties in social functioning, communication and coping with change, alongside unusually narrow interests. IQ is average or above in AS with average or even precocious age of language onset. Many areas within the `social brain' are atypical in ASC. ASC has a profile of impaired empathy alongside strong `systemising'. Hence, ASC involves disability (when empathy is required) and talent (when strong systemising would be advantageous). Psychological interventions that target empathy by harnessing systemising may help.

Link to piece in BJP.

—Vaughan.

The action potential, through the medium of dance:

Dana Kotler and Joy Gibson are two dancers and medical students at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine who decided they'd like to illustrate the neuronal action potential through the medium of modern dance. It's a rather unique interpretation and one that will likely stay with me for a while.

And if that doesn't interest you, just think of girls in leotards throwing salt at each other in the service of a scientifically accurate dance spectacular. And from what I can make out, they've illustrated potassium flow with bananas.

Even better, they even go on to illustrate how the action potential breaks down during demyelenating diseases.

And if you still have your dancing shoes on, Scientific America has a brief but interesting article discussing why we might enjoy dance at all.

Link to Action Potential - the performance.
Link to SciAm on 'Why do we like to dance?'

—Vaughan.