November 28, 2008

2008-11-28 Spike activity:

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

Excellent coverage of a fascinating study from both Neurophilosophy and Not Exactly Rocket Science: visual magnification of a painful hand can increase felt pain and swelling in the hand, using a lens to make it look smaller does the reverse.

Edge has an article by Chris Badcock on the autism and schizophrenia as flip-side genetic conditions.

A women with hypermnesic super-memory is interviewed by Spiegel magazine.

BBC News reports that world's only dedicated 'video game addiction' clinic finally comes to their senses and suggests most the problems are social difficulties.

Respected neuropsychologist Sergio Della Salla says 'brain exercises a waste of time' in The Guardian, although it doesn't make clear that he seems to be specifically talking about the Brain Gym nonsense.

AP News has a story on TV-themed paranoid delusions. I get the 'calm down, calm down' quote at the end.

Medicating away drug cravings and the application of neuroscience to treating addicted ex-convicts is discussed by Dana's Cerebrum magazine.

Developing Intelligence looks at some novel and unacknowledged confounds in cognitive psychology in a typically thorough article.

How did a nonstory about bully neuroscience based on an iffy study end up in a New York Times blog? ask Slate.

Newsweek discusses the alarming suicide rate among young black men in light of the recent 'internet suicide'.

A large dictionary of drug slang is archived on argot.com.

Scientific American discusses the psychology of what they call patternicity - aka apophenia, pareidolia, or perceiving meaningful information in random noise.

We're better at spotting fake smiles when we're feeling rejected, reports the BPS Research Digest.

Inside one teenager's struggle with prescription pill addiction with a personal story in Newsweek.

Wired reports that one of the US military's controversial 'human terrain' team of battlefield social scientists has been charged with murder.

A discussion of the pro-ana groups on Facebook hits Newsweek.

Why do men buy sex? asks Scientific American in a somewhat polarised article. Paging Dr Petra...

Science After Sunclipse discusses mathematical models that have attempted to simulate a certain form of hallucination called a form constant.

To the bunkers! Scientific American has video of Israeli soldier robots.

The Rocky Mountain News reports that Denver police are being tested for bias with brain scans. Nothing like alpha-testing techniques that haven't been fully validated yet (thanks Stephanie!).

Eric Schwitzgebel comments on the recent research on how much we dream in colour or black and white on The Splintered Mind.

—Vaughan.

November 27, 2008

Don't get high on your own supply - enflurane edition:

Another in our occasional series of articles on the importance of the motto "don't get high on your own supply". This edition concerns the case of an anaesthetist who was testing some of his own anaesthetics while driving.

From a case report from Forensic Science International:

A 42-year-old anaesthetist firstly was observed sitting in a parked automobile under a bridge, secondly 100 m further. Both times he was holding a handkerchief under his nose. Then he drove on and crashed into a lorry at a red traffic light.

After that an odd behaviour was noticed. The markedly affected physician put something trickle out of a small brown bottle in the handkerchief and inhaled the fumes. During the time interval until the arrival of the police he went asleep and could not be waked up without difficulties.

At first he did not take any notice of the police. Later he was extremly unsure, trembled from head to foot, staggered and swayed from site to site and clutched his car not to fall down. The handkerchief in his car smelled of the content of the brown bottle with the label Ethrane®

Enflurane is a type of ether, of which diethyl ether was an early inhaled anaesthetic.

It was one of the great discoveries of surgery although could be lethal in overdose, or if it caught fire - as it is highly flammable.

Needless to say, it has been replaced by rather safer alternatives, when used correctly, of course.

Link to PubMed entry for case study.

—Vaughan.

Hallucinating Lilliput:

Lilliputian hallucinations are where small figures of animals or people appear as visions, often in the bottom half of the visual field, sometimes as dancing, playful creatures. Last year the German Journal of Psychiatry published a fascinating English-language article about these curious perceptual distortions.

They can appear in a number of conditions, including psychosis and schizophrenia, during alcohol withdrawal-induced delirium tremens, or when part of the retina starts to degrade in macular degeneration.

The article has three case studies that give a flavour of these often surprising hallucinations and goes on to discuss what we know about their cause.

Here's an excerpt from one of the case studies of an alcohol dependent man (who was drinking about 50 units a day!) who suddenly cut-down on his drinking and started experiencing striking withdrawal effects as a result:

Following this, his sleep had markedly reduced and he started seeing little people all over the house. They were about a foot high, with funny colorful dresses, weird faces, big eyes and mouths. Some of them were also wearing spectacles. They would follow him all around the house and he could hear their footsteps. Patient would also see them drinking his blood (did not elaborate further) and complained of physical weakness as a result. Initially, patient attributed his experiences to some evil spirits present in the house and changed the house. But the experience continued.

Perhaps one of the most surprising causes of these hallucinations is macular degeneration, sometimes diagnosed as Charles Bonnet syndrome, owing to the fact that simple damage to the retina can lead to complex hallucinations that seem to take on a life of their own.

Link to 'Lilliputian Hallucinations. Understanding a strange Phenomenon'.

—Vaughan.

Walking the line: the danger of sinus neurosurgery :

I've just found this gripping article from The Guardian by photojournalist Tom Bible who was diagnosed with a rare and life threatening brain tumour and had an equally rare and life threatening operation to remove it.

The tumour was located in the superior sagittal sinus, one of the major veins that drains blood from the brain.

Operating on it is very dangerous because it is incredibly difficult to stem the bleeding once it's damaged. As the author mentions in this passage, it's so dangerous that the operation needs to be carried out while the patient's heart is stopped:

I now had a challenge: to find a neurosurgeon who was both willing and able to remove my tumour. Dr Thomas recommended two vascular neurosurgeons in the UK. I arranged an appointment with the first one, who subsequently cancelled, saying that it was not the type of operation he would perform. I visited the second neurosurgeon at the National Hospital in London - the leading UK neurosurgery hospital (and one of the most highly rated in the world). He said he had only heard of one of these before. They had had to remove it by resorting to a practice called the 'cardiac standstill'. In this, they stop the patient's heart, drain the blood from the body and reconstruct the tumour-infested sinus area, pump the blood back into the body and kick-start the heart again.

Blimey.

The author eventually had the operation in the US, and gives a compelling description of the process from first symptoms to the extended procedure that eventually also needs the radiation-based gamma knife treatment.

Link to Guardian article 'Brain storm'.

—Vaughan.

November 26, 2008

Inner space at the final frontier:

The Psychologist has a truly fantastic article on astronaut psychology, treating off-world mental health problems, and the interpersonal dynamics of the space mission.

It is thoroughly fascinating, exceptionally well-written and even contains an interview with astronaut Dr Jay Buckley "a crew member with STS-90, Space Shuttle Columbia’s 16-day Neurolab mission in 1998. The seven-member crew conducted life science experiments focusing on the effects of microgravity on the brain and nervous system."

I think I've just wet myself.

One of my favourite bits is where it discusses what measures they take to maintain the astronauts' mental health.

This is no small problem and the article notes that psychological problems have been the leading medical cause of long-duration mission terminations.

Depression is apparently a key problem. The article ominously notes that no-one has yet had to use the on-board antidepressant medication, but it does describe a computerised psychological treatment for depression as part of the on-board software package the 'Virtual Space Station'.

The Virtual Space Station's depression module will follow the problem-solving treatment (PST) approach to therapy. James Cartreine, the principal investigator on the Virtual Space Station project, says his team chose this form of intervention because it is empirically supported and has high face validity – in other words, it’s immediately apparent to users of the Virtual Space Station how the interactive programme is going to help them.

‘The active ingredient of PST is behavioral activation,’ says Cartreine, ‘getting people with depression to do something – and helping them to feel good about their efforts, whether or not their efforts were successful.’

Because of its focus on identifying problems and working out possible solutions, PST can help combat feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, which is particularly appropriate for people isolated in space in a confined environment. The fact that it’s tangible – it’s geared towards solving observable problems as opposed to cognitive problems – also makes it suitable for astronauts, who have proven to be accepting of the intervention. ‘Astronauts are physical scientists, engineers and programmers – they’re not necessarily used to thinking about their thought processes,’ says

If you're interested in how the same topic looked in 1959, we discussed some unintentionally hilarious articles from a special issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry on a rather Freudian 'space psychiatry' from that very same year.

Link to Psychologist article 'New horizons'.

Full disclosure: I'm an unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist and I've always wanted to be an astronaut.

—Vaughan.

When I get that feeling, I need sociosexual healing:

New Scientist has an article on the psychology and biology on sleeping around - which has been given the wonderfully gentle and inviting name of 'sociosexuality' in the research literature.

Rather predictably, the article contains the rather tired 'men spread their seed, women look for long term partners' evolutionary psychology explanation, but also does a good job of countering this with some interesting and sometimes surprising studies from the sex research literature.

One of the most interesting bits is where it notes that foetal testosterone exposure is correlated in men with masculine facial features and number of sexual partners in adulthood, and exactly the the same holds for women:

Another factor with strong links to sociosexuality is masculinity. Boothroyd found men with more masculine-looking faces scored higher on sociosexuality, and it seems to be the same story for women. Sarah Mikach and Michael Bailey of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, examined how women's sociosexuality related to the degree to which they looked, felt or behaved in a masculine way. They found that heterosexual women who had high numbers of sexual partners were more likely to show higher levels of masculinity.

The researchers argued that these women behave in a way that is more typically male and this could be due to early - probably prenatal - exposure to androgens, such as testosterone, that organise typically "male" brains differently from typically "female" brains (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 20, p 141). Supporting this idea, Andrew Clark of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, found a higher rate of sociosexuality in women with a smaller ratio of index to ring finger length - which some researchers believe corresponds to higher prenatal androgen exposure (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 25, p 113).

If you want to rate your own sociosexuality, they've also put the questionnaire online.

Unusually for the normally rather coy New Scientist, the article is open-access. Is this a sign that New Scientist are realising that science is like love - it's better when it's free, or are they just using sex as a way of getting short-term affection?

We'll see how we feel in the morning.

Link to NewSci on 'The dizzying diversity of human sexual strategies'.

—Vaughan.

November 25, 2008

Awesome multi-slice brain puzzle:

The photos are of a mysterious and inventive brain puzzle that seems to have popped up on various places on the web.

It allows you to 3D slice an MRI brain scan in multiple ways, and unlike other puzzles, it needs to be assembled with the picture on the inside.

Curiously, the various web pages which discuss it don't say where it's from, so we don't know whether it's just someone's one-off brilliant idea, or whether it's a commercially available product.

Like all great puzzles, it's conceptually very simple - just a brain scan printed out in slices and cut to fit the the surfaces on the relevant section of blocks - but it looks devilishly difficult to complete.

And once it's done, you have a genuinely useful 3D scan model to play with.

If you don't get it right away, have a look at some of the other photos and it will all become clear.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments (thanks prlwytzkofsky).

It was made by Neil Fraser, a software engineer at Google. See
here and here. Cool stuff indeed!

Link to photos (thanks Sandra!)
Link to more photos and more links!

—Vaughan.

Mental illness in children: medical issue or fig leaf?:

Dana's online mind and brain magazine Cerebrum has a critical and thought-provoking article arguing that mental illnesses like ADHD and child bipolar disorder are too often being used as fig leaves for social problems that we prefer to think of as blame-free genetic disorders that can be treated with simple-solution medications.

The piece is by distinguished psychologist Jerome Kagan, considered one of the founders of developmental psychology, who discusses the various social changes that have encouraged differences and misbehaviour to be medically diagnosed and treated - particularly during the last two decades.

The article is timely, owing to it coinciding with recent revelations from an ongoing trial where parents are suing drug makers over the use of antipsychotic medication in children.

The documents show that pharmaceutical company Johnson and Johnson aimed to carry out research on child bipolar disorder with a specific intention of boosting sales of their medication, as well as countering unfavourable coverage from the media and spinning 'no result' studies on the drug.

We usually think of 'social factors' as increasing risk for mental illness in the individual, but we also need to remember that there are strong social factors that affect how we think about disorders in terms of their causes, effects and treatments.

One of the strongest social factors is financial pressure, and, as covered by Wired, drug companies are notorious for 'cooking the books' in an attempt to bury negative data and spin positive findings in the best possible light.

This has just been reported in yet another damning study on drug company data handling published in the most recent edition of PLoS Medicine.

Link to Dana article 'The Meaning of Psychological Abnormality'.
Link to PLoS Medicine study on bias in drug trials submitted to the FDA.

—Vaughan.

The myth of urban loneliness:

New York Magazine has an extensive and interesting piece arguing that 'urban loneliness' - the idea that people in densely populated cities are more lonely than people in the country, may be a myth.

The article looks at recent concerns, partly driven by popular books, that single living and hence loneliness is massively increasing in America.

However, the article also examines more recent research that has suggested that this may not be the case, and that while single living is increasing, social isolation is not, owing to the fact that earlier studies used measures of social participation based on the norms of society a generation ago.

The article covers research suggesting that the structure of urban society is changing, so city-dwellers make connections in different ways and at different stages in life. There is little evidence, however, for a great social crisis or that we're simply becoming less social.

It's a fascinating article that explores some intriguing social research that rarely gets widely discussed.

The writer largely riffs on a new book by neuroscientist John Cacioppo and writer William Patrick on the science of loneliness which also has a rather spiffy website.

Link to NYMag article 'Alone Together'.
Link to Loneliness book website.

—Vaughan.

November 24, 2008

The enchanting Encephalon 59:

The 59th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just appeared online on the wonderfully named Ionian Enchantment and has all the latest in the last fortnight's mind and brain writing.

A couple of my favourites include an interesting piece on the development of dance classes for people with Parkinson's disease from the new Dana Press Blog and a great piece on recent research looking at the cognitive neuroscience of poverty from The Mouse Trap.

I've not discovered the Dana Press blog before but it looks really promising with some great posts and offers to review new mind and brain books before they're released.

Anyway, more of the new and interesting in this month's Encephalon.

Link to Encephalon 59.

—Vaughan.

Not connecting with faces in the street and in the brain:

Not Exactly Rocket Science has a great write-up of a recent study that may explain why some people are born without the ability to recognise faces - a condition known as congenital prosopagnosia.

Face recognition is particularly associated with a part of the temporal lobe called the fusiform gyrus. Although it's controversial whether this area is specifically for faces, or is more generally specialised for perceptual expertise of which faces are just the most important example, it's clear that it is key for understanding faces.

Cibu Thomas from Carnegie Mellon University discovered the problem by focusing on two major white matter tracts that link the fusiform area to other parts of the brain. Both have names that positively trip off the tongue - the inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) and the inferior fronto-occipito fasciculus (IFOF). Thomas studied the tracts using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which measures the flow of water along their length.

The flowing water revealed severe problems with the structural integrity of both white matter tracts in the brains of prosopagnosics. Normal individuals didn't show any problems, nor did areas of white matter in the prosopagnosics that connected areas completely unrelated to face processing.

In other words, the fibres that connect important perceptual areas in the brain may be much thinner in people who have problems recognising faces.

The image on the left shows the connections between the temporal and the occipital lobes in the participants with the condition and the controls.

As usual, the Not Exactly Rocket Science write-up is clear, concise and engaging, and if you'd like to know a bit more what it's like to live without recognising faces The Guardian recently published a personal account of day-to-day life from someone with prosopagnosia who can't even recognise himself in the mirror.

Link to 'Faulty connections responsible for inherited face-blindness'.
Link to Guardian article 'I don't recognise my own face'.

—Vaughan.

Grounding the helicopter parents:

The New Yorker has an extended review and discussion of various new books critical of the increasing trend for parents to be overinvolved in their children's lives owing to the trend for 'intelligence boosting' products and activities.

It's a nicely balanced article that highlights some of the worst trends in 'overparenting' while also pointing out some of the flaws with the recent wave of criticism.

To get some perspective, look at “Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood” (2004), by Steven Mintz, a professor of history at Columbia. Mintz’s story begins with the beginning of the United States, and therefore he describes children with troubles greater than overparenting: boys dispatched to coal mines, and girls to textile mills, at age nine or ten.

As for the current outbreak of worry over the young, Mintz reminds us that America has seen such panics before—for example, in the nineteen-fifties, with the outcry over hot rods, teen sex, and rock and roll. The fifties even had its own campaign against overparenting, or overmothering—Momism, as it was called. This was thought to turn boys into homosexuals. For the past three decades, Mintz writes, discussions of child-rearing in the United States have been dominated by a “discourse of crisis,” and yet America’s youth are now, on average, “bigger, richer, better educated, and healthier than at any other time in history.”

There have been some losses. Middle-class white boys from the suburbs have fallen behind their predecessors, but middle-class girls and minority children are far better off. Mintz thinks that we worry too much, or about the wrong things. Despite general prosperity—at least until recently—the percentage of poor children in America is greater today than it was thirty years ago. One in six children lives below the poverty line. If you want an emergency, Mintz says, there’s one

Over-involvement is certainly a risk, however, and this can be seen even in the very beginning of infancy. One of the key skills psychologists talk about in early life is the ability to self-soothe - in other words, learning to independently manage discomfort and strong emotions.

This begins when babies are getting into sleep routines in the months after being born. There is a temptation to attend to the baby and soothe it as soon as it cries but this can have the opposite effect and the child actually sleeps worse because they don't have the opportunity to learn to settle themselves.

A recent large study helped to confirm this and found that parents that encouraged independence and self-soothing by not attending to their baby at every cry reported that their child had extended and more consolidated sleep.

Link to New Yorker 'The Child Trap' article.

—Vaughan.

November 23, 2008

Making Sense of Bastards:

A 2005 article from business psychology journal Organization Studies discusses the psychology of being a bastard. It has a serious point, but is just hilarious for the contrast between the academic language and the subject matter.

The serious point behind the article, written by psychologist David Sims, is to look at how people in business organisations make narratives or stories about someone being a 'bastard' to demonize them and persuade others of the fact.

This can be to discount someone else opinion, undermine their status, or to create a dragon against which they can valiantly fight for their own glory.

However, because of the subject matter, it's frequently funny as it analyses the varied types of company bastards as they're constructed within organisations. Just some of the section headings are pure genius:

Narrative 1: Clever Bastard
Narrative 2: Bastard ex Machina
Narrative 3: Devious Bastard
A Narrative Understanding of Bastards
Making Sense of Bastards

Link to 'You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations' (thanks Olwyn!).
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

The perils of not realising scaffolding is a metaphor:

Life magazine have recently put their entire photo archive on Google Images and the Too Many Interests blog has picked out some of the most surprising psychology images.

The image on the right is my favourite, and probably results from psychologists trying to answer the question 'how many babies does it take to change a lightbulb?'

The answer is, of course, just one, but as long as the baby has the appropriate scaffolding.

Yes, I'm making Jerome Bruner jokes.

Yes, I really should get out more.

Yes, I know I've promised that before.

Link to selection of psychology images from Life (via AHP).
Link to all Life psychology images on Google.

—Vaughan.

November 22, 2008

Adultery for heroin users:

A list of ingredients found by chemical analysis that have been used to cut street heroin sold in New York City from 1991 to 1996.

As reported in a 2000 review paper on trends in NYC heroin adulterants:

Acetaminophen (Analgesic)
Aminopyrine (Anti-inflammatory)
Amitryptaline (Anti-depressant)
Antipyrine (Body water measurement)
Benzoczine (Anesthetic)
Caffeine (Stimulant)
Cocaine (Stimulant)
d-metamphetamine (Stimulant)
Diphenhydramine (Anti-histamine)
Doxepin (Anesthetic)
Ephedrine (Stimulant)
Lidocaine (Anesthetic)
Hydroxyzine (Anxiety medication)
Methylparben (Chemical preservative)
Methocarbamol (Muscle relaxant)
Nabumetone (Arthritis treatment)
Nicotinamide (Coenzyme)
Phenylbutazone (Anti-inflammant)
Phenylpropanlamine (Dexatrim / caffeine)
Potassiumchloride (Potassium supplement
Rocaine (Local anesthetic)
Propoxyphene (Analgesic - Darvon)
Sodium Bicarbonate (Acid indigestion)
Quinine (Malaria treatment)
Theophylline (Bronchial dialator)
Thiamine (Dietary supplement)
Thiopental (Barbiturate)
Thioridazine (Nausea medication)
Tripolidine (Allergy medication)
Disodium ethylenediame tetraacetic (Chelating agent for metals)

The study notes that the most common non-dope ingredients in street heroin are lactose, milk sugar, sucrose, cellulose, mannitol and other inert ingredients, but there is an increasing trend for heroin to contain psychoactive chemicals or additional substances to alter its effect through changing how it is absorbed into the body.

Interestingly, the paper also notes that professional heroin cutters are expensive, charging up to $20,000 for a kilo of heroin. This is likely due to the skill and knowledge needed to select ingredients that will have certain effects, which can be different for 'smokers', 'snorters' and 'injectors'.

Ingredients that affect the vaporisation point of heroin will be more important for smokers, while adulterants that increase absorption through the nasal passages will obviously be more important for snorters.

For injectors, cutters need to be able to select ingredients that aren't going to gum up needles or cause too much damage to the users' veins.

Additionally, some ingredients are added purely for their psychoactive effect to give a different experience and 'brand' the dope.

However, owing to the cost of a professional cutter, some dealers just cut it themselves with whatever they think is reasonable, meaning all kinds of potentially fatal ingredients end up in the average bag of smack.

Link to closed-access paper 'The Re-Engineering of Heroin'.

—Vaughan.

New RadioLab on the psychology of choice:

The excellent RadioLab has returned with a new series and the first is a programme on the psychology of how we make choices, and what can go wrong when brain damage prevents us from making decisions.

The RadioLab team talk to psychologist Barry Schwartz, author of the 'Paradox of Choice' on why more choice means people tend to be less happy with their decision, to neuropsychologist Antoine Bechara on how a famous case of frontal lobe damage helped us understand why emotion plays a role in even the most mundane of choices, and to the ubiquitous Malcom Gladwell on the role of the unconscious.

As usual, it sounds beautiful and discusses some great research (the cake and working memory study is one of my favourites).

Interestingly, the programme lets slip that science-writer Jonah Lehrer's fortchoming book is on choice and perhaps it's no accident that Lehrer is a contributor to the programme so perhaps we can consider this a preview of some of the material he'll cover.

Let's hope so as it's another great edition of RadioLab.

Link to programme webpage with streaming audio and mp3.

—Vaughan.

November 21, 2008

2008-11-21 Spike activity:

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

The Situationist has a fantastic video example of a classic experimental philosophy set-up.

The TSA's 'behavior detection' is wrong more than 99 percent of the time, reports USA Today. Maybe that's because it's based on some rather dodgy techniques, as we reported in August last year.

Science Daily reports on an elegant experiment allows who said what to whom to be worked out from the brain scan data. Only from very limited stimuli, but an intriguing study none-the-less.

Can everyone be an Einstein? No, is the short answer, but The Times has a longer one in a nicely balanced article on brain improvement techniques.

Neuroskeptic says Freddie Starr ate my hamster, sorry, it should be Prozac made my cells spiky.

To the bunkers! BBC News reports IBM to build computers that work like brains. Although I'd be more impressed if we could get Microsoft to build software that works like software.

New Scientist reports that coping-with-stress related brain changes occur during menstruation.

Atypical antipsychotics no better than older antipsychotics. We should be used to this headline by now, but this time, it's a study in kids reported by The Psychiatric Times.

BBC News reports heavy drinkers lie to their doctors about how much they drink. Pope still Catholic (and probably still claiming he doesn't masturbate).

There's an excellent interview with Mary Roach, one of my favourite science writers, over at Neuronarrative.

Oprah Magazine has an OK article about neuroscience. Yes, Oprah Magazine. That's it, we're mainstream. Neuroscience is over. What else is cool?

Does involving parents really help students learn? Depends on how they're involved, reports Cognitive Daily.

Science News reports that the brain reorganizes to make room for maths. Which is lucky, because in my brain the space has always been occupied by Batman.

Fred Goodwin, one of the world's leading bipolar researchers has his radio show pulled over undisclosed payments from drug companies, reports Furious Seasons

Not Exactly Rocket Science has an excellent piece on evidence that graffiti and litter strewn environments encourage crime.

A video lecture on the brain's visual system is featured by Channel N.

An interpretative dance inspired by the cerebral activation patterns induced by the inflection of regular and irregular verbs, found by the wonderfully eclectic Frontal Cortex. With video of said dance.

The Guardian has an excellent excerpt from Malcom Gladwell's new book.

—Vaughan.

November 20, 2008

The excellent Cognition and Culture blog:

Cognition and Culture is a fantastic new group blog by a distinguished group of writers who include some of the leading figures in neuroscience, psychology and anthropology.

It's from the International Cognition and Culture Institute and contains articles on everything from whether 'cold' and 'warm' are universal metaphors for relationships to the unexpected impact of pop-cognitive science on British schoolgirls (isn't that just a Carry On film waiting to happen?).

There's also plenty of great neuroscience coverage and it's updated regularly. Good stuff.

Link to Cognition and Culture blog.

—Vaughan.

All together now:

If there were prizes for sheer genius, this would get the top spot. Psychologist Alan Reifman teaches psychology and he also writes song lyrics. When he sees something psychological that particularly inspires him, he writes a song about it to the tune of a popular hit and posts it on his social psychology lyrics blog. The results are sheer joy.

In honor of a talk I attended at UCLA on May 15 by Jean Twenge, on changes in college students' personality traits and attitudes over time, I've written the following song....

Dr. Jean Twenge
(May be sung to the tune of "Eleanor Rigby," Lennon/McCartney)

Dr. Jean Twenge, spends her time looking at journals and computer screens,
What are the means?
Temporal contrasts, how are today's youth different from three decades ago?
Are they high or low?

Look at all the samples,
That used the same measure,
The data are ample,
Historical treasure,

Starting with gender, she noted patterns in females' masculine scores,
Found that they've soared,
So many more traits, so many statistics, reside on libraries' shelves,
Into which she delves,

Look at all the samples,
That used the same measure,
The data are ample,
Historical treasure...

And there's plenty more where that came from.

If you want the best in social psychology research distilled into the musical magic of the last century's pop (and I know you do), you need look no further.

Link to SocialPsych Lyrics blog.

—Vaughan.

How synaesthesia grows in childhood, and dies out:

Synaesthesia is well studied in adults and is thought to be a result of unusual connections created during brain development, but it has been hardly studied in children - until now.

A new study published online in Brain searched for letter-colour synaesthetes in 6-8 year old children and found not only are they relatively common, but that the condition changes as the children grow.

Synaesthesia is where the senses are crossed, so perceiving something in one sense triggers a perception in one of the other senses. The type targeted by this study was letter-colour synaesthesia where people perceive colours when they see certain letters.

Synaesthesia is known to be partly inherited and there is brain imaging evidence that people with the letter-colour type have greater number of white matter connections between brain areas known to be involved in word and colour perception.

A popular theory is that synaesthesia results from an unusual form of brain development where certain connections in the brain are not 'cut' or 'pruned' during the early months of life.

However, letter-colour synaesthesia requires that the person can read and understand letters, which usually doesn't happen until much latter, so it is likely that there is something going on throughout the critical learning period when children begin to learn to read.

This new study, led by psychologist Julia Simner, tested over six hundred six to seven year-old children with a computerised test that showed them letters and numbers and asked them to select a colour which best fitted the character on screen.

After 10 seconds, the test was repeated. One of the hallmarks of people with letter-colour synaesthesia is that their associations remain constant, so this helped pick out who was the most consistent.

Children who did better than average on this were tested again with a surprise test at 12 months, and those who were more consistent at 12 months than the average child at 10 seconds were classified as having synaesthesia.

Using this, admittedly strict, criteria 1.3% of children had letter-colour synaesthesia and the total number of children with any form of synaesthesia is likely to be greater owing to the fact that the researchers only tested one for one type.

The study also allowed the researchers to see how synaesthesia had developed over the year. Interestingly, the synaesthetic children showed an average of 10.5 stable letter-colour associations aged 6-7 years, but 16.9 aged 7-8, suggesting that the condition is developing and growing over time.

Although not able to confirm it statistically, the study hinted that some people may actually lose synaesthesia over time.

The researchers note that in anecdotal reports adults have described synaesthesia in childhood that died out, while the reverse pattern - synaesthesia spontaneously appearing in adulthood that didn't exist in childhood, is not reported. A further hint is that in the study, the number of children who had synaesthesia at ages six and seven outnumbered those who had it at ages seven and eight by 2.5 to 1.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

November 19, 2008

Shaking the foundations of the hidden bias test:

The New York Times takes a look at the ongoing controversy over one of the newest and most popular tests in psychology that claims to be able to detect hidden 'implicit' biases.

The test is the Implicit Association Test or IAT and we've discussed in it more detail before but it essentially relies on the fact that if you have a pre-existing association between two concepts, say, the concepts 'blonde' and 'stupid', making similar associations, by categorising words or pictures for example, will be faster than associating 'blonde' and 'clever' - because you're going to be quicker doing whichever classification best matches associations you already have.

The test has famously found that automatic negative associations with minority groups are rife in society, even among people of those groups themselves.

However, a recent study looked at the real world effect of this and found something quite curious:

The doctors who scored higher on the bias test were less likely than the other doctors to give clot-busting drugs to the black patients, according to the researchers, who suggested addressing the problem by encouraging doctors to test themselves for unconscious bias. The results were hailed by other psychologists as some of the strongest evidence that unconscious bias leads to harmful discrimination.

But then two other researchers, Neal Dawson and Hal Arkes, pointed out a curious pattern in the data. Even though most of the doctors registered some antiblack bias, as defined by the researchers, on the whole doctors ended up prescribing the clot-busting drugs to blacks just as often as to whites. The doctors scoring low on bias had a pronounced preference for giving the drugs to blacks, while high-scoring doctors had a relatively small preference for giving the drugs to whites — meaning that the more “biased” doctors actually treated blacks and whites more equally.

This has been one part of an ongoing debate that has suggested that the IAT is not all it's cracked up to be, while the originators of the test have fired back with the heavyweight review [pdf] of over 100 studies, defending their position and the IAT's credentials.

The debate is important because the IAT has become one of psychology's central tools for separating conscious and unconscious associations and has been applied to pretty much everything from racism to diagnosing psychopaths.

Link to NYT article 'In Bias Test, Shades of Gray'.

—Vaughan.

Still on the move :

Scientific American has a fantastic gallery of visual illusions images created both by artists and scientists that produce dramatic false motion from still images.

There's 12 images, but the one pictured is my favourite which is simply described like so: "This illusion is a contemporary variation on the Ouchi pattern, by Kitaoka".

As with many illusory motion images, they are sometimes more striking if you move your eyes around the images to look at different parts.

Link to illusory motion image gallery (via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

An epidemic of depression?:

Psychiatric News has a thought-provoking article criticising the current definition of major depression, suggesting that it has lead to normal sadness being diagnosed as a serious mental illness.

The authors give an abbreviated version of the argument they make in their book The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Misery Into Depressive Disorder.

They argue that the diagnosis contains no qualifications about whether the reaction is appropriate in the context of the person's life, meaning that people who have suffered unemployment, relationship break up or other forms of personal tragedy are considered equally as 'mentally ill' as people who have similar mood disturbances but without a specific trigger.

Ample scientific evidence—ranging from infant and primate studies to cross-cultural studies of emotion—suggests that intense sadness in response to a variety of situations is a normal, biologically designed human response. Recent epidemiological analysis suggests that the consequences of stressors can be either normal or abnormal, similar to those for bereavement.1 In its quest for reliability via symptom-based definitions that minimized concern with the context in which the symptoms appeared, DSM unintentionally abandoned the well-recognized, scientifically supported, indeed commonsensical distinction between normal sadness and depressive disorder.

The blurring of the distinction between normal intense sadness and depressive disorder has arguably had some salutary effects. For example, it has reduced the stigma of depression and created a cultural climate that is more accepting of seeking treatment for mental illness. Many people with normal sadness might benefit from medication that ameliorates their symptoms. However, the usefulness of medication for normal sadness, and especially the trade-off between symptom reduction and adverse effects, has not been carefully studied—partly because the necessary distinctions do not exist within the current diagnostic system.

One of the most worrying effects of this trend has been a boom in the prescription of antidepressant medication and quotes the worrying figures that "Roughly 10% of women and 4% of men in the United States take antidepressant medication at any time. By 2000, antidepressants were the best-selling prescription drugs of any type".

The debate over whether depression is being over-diagnosed hit the pages of the British Medical Journal last year with the both pro and anti positions being argued with full force.

Link to PsychiatricTimes article 'An epidemic of depression'.

—Vaughan.

November 18, 2008

The eternal quest for the cut-and-dry brain injury:

The annual Society for Neuroscience conference is currently underway in Washington DC and Technology Review has a couple of article that reports on some of the highlights.

One piece is particularly interesting as it focuses on the use diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a type of MRI scan that identifies the white matter nerve pathways in the brain, to detect otherwise undetectable brain damage.

These white matter pathways are like cabling that runs through the brain and in some forms of head injury they can get twisted, pulled or suffer sheering injuries which may not be easily visible on standard MRI scans.

A minority of people who suffer head injury with no detectable injury on standard MRIs will suffer emotion and behaviour disturbance, memory difficulties, diffuse headaches and problems with concentration.

This is sometimes diagnosed as post concussion syndrome and the researchers hope that DTI scans will find that people with these sorts of complaints will be found to have clear white matter disturbance.

Actually, this is one of the oldest debates in head injury and stretches back to the time when soldiers were first returning from the First World War with 'shell shock'.

One of the theories, largely championed by Maudsley psychiatrist Frederick Mott, was that the shock waves from the shells disturbed the brains of the individuals causing microscopic brain damage.

However, it soon became clear that some soldiers who had 'shell shock' had never been near a shell explosion, while others had genuine brain injury but had similar sorts of problems which weren't easily explained by the physical damage they'd endured.

One of the key lessons from this time was that our expectations, beliefs, emotions and interpretation of experiences and injuries contributed as much to the actual symptoms and disability as the physical damage.

Interestingly, similar sorts of problems have been reported in soldiers returned from Iraq and, as echoed in the TechReview article, there is a big push to clearly separate cases of 'genuine brain injury' from 'emotional trauma'.

History tells us that attempting a clear separation is likely to be futile, because the same symptoms can be produced by either one, or a combination, and knowing that one definitely plays a part doesn't rule out the other.

So it's interesting to hear the people quoted in the article suggest that DTI imaging could help assess who is cognitively able or not, who has a 'real injury or is faking', or whether someone should be sent back to the battlefield, because it relies on a cut-and-dry distinction between 'brain injury' and 'psychological problem' which doesn't exist in the real world.

As an aside, white matter isn't invisible on MRI or CT scans, as suggested in the article, although some white matter injuries might be.

And if you're still hungry for more SfN news, TechReview has another bulletin with several highlights.

Link to article 'Detecting Subtle Brain Injuries'.
Link to latest SfN brain research write-up.

—Vaughan.

Mirror's Edge as proprioception hack:

Mirror's Edge is a first person computer game in which you play an urban free-runner, leaping, sliding, and generally acting fly across the roofs of a dystopian city (see the trailer here). It looks good. In fact, it looks amazing. But, reportedly, to actually play it is even better, sickeningly better.

Clive Thompson, writing for wired.com, suggests that the total interactivity of the environment (if you can see something, you can jump on it, or off it) along with the visual cues about what your character's arms and legs are doing (they appear in shot as you run and jump) makes the game a convincing proprioception hack. In other words, it remaps your body schema so that you feel more fully that you are the character in the game. When your character runs fast, you feel it is you running fast. When you character jumps across between two buildings and look down, you feel a moment of sickening vertigo.

Research into illusions of proprioception --- your sense of where you body is in space --- has shown that our body map is surprisingly flexible. It is possible to mislocate your hand, for example, coming to believe that it is directly in front of you when in fact out at the side, or behind you (see video here). Jaron Lanier has reported on an early virtual reality experience he had that made him feel like he had the body of a lobster, with 6 extra limbs. The important feature of all these illusions is that they rely on precisely timed visual feedback. Although visual input can reprogramme our body image, it only does so when there is a tight coupling between what we see and feel. The importance is not the level of detail in what we see, but in the fluidity of the interaction. If Mirror's Edge makes you feel like you are really are doing Parkour then it is because it has the correct kind of visual feedback (your limbs, in a fully interactive world) with the correct timing.

A final thought: if a computer game really is immersive for something as visceral as free-running, isn't that kind of surprising, given how complex free running is physically, and how simple the commands used to control a computer game are? Perhaps what this is because when we automatise an action such as a run, a jump or a roll part of the process of making it automatic is losing the experience of the component parts. So, when a computer game feels like real, it is because real feels like nothing -- we just ask our brains 'jump' and the motor system sorts out the details without our any deep experience of how the jump is performed.

link Clive Thompson's report on playing Mirror's Edge
link YouTube trailer for the game

—tom.

November 17, 2008

Jumping Brain:

The Jumping Brain is a limited edition toy created by artist Emilio Garcia that is a detailed plastic model of the brain, with, erm... webbed feat.

It comes in traditional lab demo gray, as well as red, green and blue and even has its own MySpace page.

The development of the project is even documented online, so you can see how the curious idea went from drawing board to webbed wonder.

Link to Jumping Brain website.

—Vaughan.

Ganzfeld hallucinations:

The cognitive science journal Cortex has just released a special issue on the neuropsychology of paranormal experiences and belief, and contains a fantastic article on hallucinations induced by the Ganzfeld procedure.

The Ganzfeld procedure exposes the participant to 'unstructured' sensations usually by placing half ping-pong balls over the eyes so they can only see diffuse white light and by playing white noise through headphones.

It is probably best known for its uses in parapsychology experiments, but it is also used to induce hallucinations and sensory distortions which are much more likely to occur in the absence of clearly defined sensory experiences.

The article reviews the sorts of hallucinations reported in during these experiments and discusses what electrophysiology (EEG or 'brain wave') studies tell us about what happens in the cortex when these perceptual distortions kick off.

Some of the descriptions of hallucinations are really quite striking:

“For quite a long time, there was nothing except a green-greyish fog. It was really boring, I thought, ‘ah, what a non-sense experiment!’ Then, for an indefinite period of time, I was ‘off’, like completely absent-minded. Then, all of sudden, I saw a hand holding a piece of chalk and writing on a black-board something like a mathematical formula. The vision was very clear, but it stayed only for few seconds and disappeared again. The image did not fill up the entire visual field, it was just like a ‘window’ into that foggy stuff.”

“an urban scenery, like an empty avenue after a rain, large areas covered with water, and the city sky-line reflected in the water surface like in a mirror.”

“a clearing in a forest [Lichtung], a place bathed in bright sun-shine, and the trunks of trees around. A feeling of a tranquile summer afternoon in a forest, so quiet, so peaceful. And then, suddenly, a young woman passed by on a bicycle, very fast, she crossed the visual field from the right to the left, with her blond long hair waving in the air. The image of the entire scene was very clear, with many details, and yes, the colours were very vivid.”

“I can see his face, still, it's very expressive… [I could see] only the horse that comes as if out of clouds. A white horse that jumped over me.”

“A friend of mine and I, we were inside a cave. We made a fire. There was a creek flowing under our feet, and we were on a stone. She had fallen into the creek, and she had to wait to have her things dried. Then she said to me: ‘Hey, move on, we should go now’.”

“It was like running a bob sleigh on an uneven runway right down… [There] was snow or maybe water running down… I could hear music, there was music coming from the left side below.”

“In the right side of the visual field, a manikin suddenly appeared. He was all in black, had a long narrow head, fairly broad shoulders, very long arms and a relatively small trunk…. He approached me, stretching out his hands, very long, very big, like a bowl, and he stayed so for a while, and then he went back to where he came from, slowly.”

You can simulate the Ganzfeld procedure in your own home by taping two half ping-pong balls over your eyes and listing to the radio tuned to static in an evenly lighted room.

The other articles in the special issue are also fascinating, and range from a study finding greater body asymmetry is related to higher levels of unusual beliefs - likely reflecting asymmetrical brain development, to an experiment looking at the cognitive psychology of people who believe they've been abducted by aliens.

Needless to say, there's many more fascinating studies and Cortex has the advantage of not only being a leading neuropsychology journal but also making its material freely available as open-access articles. Enjoy!

Link to Cortex special issue.

—Vaughan.

New psychiatric diagnoses developed in secret:

The LA Times has an op-ed piece on the current arguments over whether the new version of the DSM, the influential diagnostic manual of mental illness, should be developed transparently or whether decisions should continue to be made in secret as is currently the case.

The DSM-V is due out in May 2012, and all mental illness and proposals for the classifications of new mental illness are currently under review by the DSM-V committee.

While the manual tends only to be used clinically in North and South America (Europe uses the World Health Organisation's ICD-10 manual), it has a far greater reach because psychiatric research all over the world has a tendency to use DSM diagnoses for consistency.

However, it will have a particularly strong impact in the United States, owing to the health insurance-based health care system that tends only to recognise 'official' diagnoses as worthy of funding.

Needless to say, both the pharmaceutical industry and pressure groups have a vested interest in getting specific disorders recognised and there is apparently a great pressure on the committees to include certain concepts.

One of the psychiatrists (former editor Robert Spitzer) wanted transparency; several others, including the president of the American Psychiatric Assn. and the man charged with overseeing the revisions (Darrel Regier), held out for secrecy. Hanging in the balance is whether, four years from now, a set of questionable behaviors with names such as "Apathy Disorder," "Parental Alienation Syndrome," "Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder," "Compulsive Buying Disorder," "Internet Addiction" and "Relational Disorder" will be considered full-fledged psychiatric illnesses.

Spitzer, a key figure in the development of the current diagnostic system, is pushing for transparency so everyone can see the minutes and correspondence to keep an eye on the potential pressures brought to bear on the members.

Indeed, one of the criticisms of the past committees has been that large numbers of the central decision-makers have had financial ties to the drug industry, a trend which is apparently not much different for the DSM-V committee.

There's also a good commentary over at Furious Seasons if you're interested in some more background to the controversy.

Link to LA Times article.
Link to Furious Seasons follow-up.

—Vaughan.

November 16, 2008

An unusual and poignant brain injury:

Sometimes, medical case studies are powerful as much because of what they leave out as what they contain, as in an uncomfortably moving 1935 case report of a young lady who attempted suicide with a hand gun.

It's available online as a pdf and the point of the article is to report the remarkable fact that she survived and was apparently neurologically normal afterwards, despite losing a considerable amount of blood and brain tissue.

Scientifically, this is indeed remarkable, but perhaps more striking is the photo, ostensibly of the wound, but haunting because of the what it captures of the young woman.

Her photo is painfully personal, showing a bleak, listless expression and suggesting a difficult life undescribed. It's a stark contrast to the stripped clean case study that contains only one line of personal detail:

On July 25, 1934, at 1pm, Mrs A., age about 30, attempted suicide at her home in Truckee, California, by shooting herself through the head with a 32-caliber automatic revolver.

Presumably the case report was published before the days when it became customary to anonymise patient photos to protect personal privacy. But these images remind us that this requirement protects the reader as much as it protects the patient, because while tragedy is important to understand in the abstract, it remains difficult to absorb in the personal.

Being able to abstract the data from the tragedy is one of the most important skills of working with people facing difficult situations, but it is barely mentioned in textbooks or training programmes. It's just something people are expected to develop and discuss if they find challenging.

Occasionally, even the most seasoned professional is caught off-guard, where the full impact of unchecked emotional engagement outflanks the abstraction process.

This 1930s case study reflects that same experience, where the medical facts are drowned out by the immediacy of the human emotion.

pdf of case study 'An Unusual Brain Injury'.
Link to PubMed Central entry for same.

—Vaughan.

The dance of consciousness:

Edge has a fascinating video interview with philosopher Alva Noë who discusses his work on the philosophy of consciousness, arguing that we will be led astray if we think of consciousness solely as a brain process that happens within us without reference to how we act in the world.

Noë is primarily arguing for a form of embodied cognition which argues that the mind and brain can only be understood as situated in the world in which we interact. The function of the mind is inherently connected to the sorts of tasks we need to do to survive on a day-to-day basis.

This view has been bolstered by experimental work which has shown that we perceive the world differently depending on the task we are doing or how we intend to act.

For example, in one of my favourite studies, psychologist Dennis Proffitt and his colleagues found that we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand, but only when we intend to use it.

Noë uses the fantastic analogy of dance to highlight how we can only understand this practice by considering the dancers, the world and the mind together. Dance does not exist solely between our ears.

Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.

A much better image is that of the dancer. A dancer is locked into an environment, responsive to music, responsive to a partner. The idea that the dance is a state of us, inside of us, or something that happens in us is crazy. Our ability to dance depends on all sorts of things going on inside of us, but that we are dancing is fundamentally an attunement to the world around us.

And this idea that human consciousness is something we enact or achieve, in motion, as a way of being part of a larger process, is the focus of my work.

Experience is something that is temporarily extended and active. Perceptual consciousness is a style of access to the world around us. I can touch something, and when I touch something I make use of an understanding of the way in which my own movements help me secure access to that which is before me. The point is not that merely that I learn about or achieve access to the world by touching. The point is that the thing shows up for me as something in a space of movement-oriented possibilities.

Noë goes on to talk about how perception represents meaning, how we can be led astray in neuroscience if we artificially separate action and perception, and how our definition of 'life' can help us understand consciousness.

Link to video interview and transcript of Alva Noë interview.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on embodied cognition.

—Vaughan.

November 14, 2008

She Blinded Me with Science:

It's an age old story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy is psychoanalysed, psychologically tested, strapped into a brain machine and plays the girl like a giant cello before escaping on a motorbike and throwing the wheelchair-bound doctor into the river.

Yes, it's the video for Thomas Dolby's 1982 synth-pop hit She Blinded Me with Science, which presumably doesn't refer to the psychoanalysis part.

The mad scientist featured in the video was actually real life British scientist Magnus Pyke, who was best known for educating the UK public about science during the 80s and 90s.

Thomas Dolby is an eccentric synth-pop pioneer who seemed to have a bit of a thing about beautiful Japanese women, psychology and barely comprehensible videos.

Link to She Blinded Me with Science video.

—Vaughan.

2008-11-14 Spike activity:

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

Do women get bitchier as they get older? Only if they’re faced with research like this, says Dr Petra.

Cognitive Daily ask another one of their compelling questions: can a blind person whose vision is restored understand what she sees?

Temporarily open-access special issue of Criminal Justice and Behaviour discusses pseudoscientific policing practices and beliefs.

Wired asks what Facebook and steroid use have in common. I thought it was acne but apparently it's social networks.

What makes the human mind asks Harvard Magazine. At Harvard, about $10,000 a term I would say.

BBC News reports on a new analysis of UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson's speeches suggesting that Alzheimer's had started to take effect before his shock resignation.

Can we have consciousness without attention? Asks philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel.

Psyblog reports on gift-giving experiments that suggest women react more positively than men to rubbish gifts - at least at first.

At addiction centres longer treatment programs are proving key to ending the relapse-rehab cycle, reports the LA Times.

USA Today reports on new research suggest that being physically punished as a child may lead to sexual problems later, although I'm not sure I'd classify a preference for S&M as a problem alongside coercion and risky sexual behaviour.

Does religion make you nice? asks Slate who consider friendly atheist Scandinavians.

Neurophilosophy finds a beautiful image of the brain from St Paul's Cathedral architect Sir Christopher Wren.

I think this is a working torrent of The English Surgeon possibly the greatest brain documentary ever made.

The Wall Street Journal discusses new research which highlights the importance of forgetting. The French Foreign Legion have advertised this for years of course.

Stanley Fish for the New York Times blog discusses why it took US psychologists so long to ban participation in torture.

Frontal Cortex discusses new research finding that a bad night's sleep can increase the chance of false memories.

The excellent Somatosphere discusses the culture changes that have meant social anxiety disorder is now more widely diagnosed in France.

Boo Yaa! Karl Friston drops some Bayes-heavy block-rocking maths in an article for PLoS Computational Biology on hierarchical models in the brain.

Speed daters shallow, reports New Scientist.

The BPS Research Digest discusses research on the negative effect of pregnancy on memory for future events.

Late stage Huntingdon's disease includes better auditory signal detection, according to research covered by The Neurocritic.

—Vaughan.

November 13, 2008

Neuroscience In Our Time:

BBC Radio 4's excellent discussion programme In Our Time just had an interesting edition on neuroscience - what it does, how it does it, and what it's telling us about the function of the mind and brain.

It's generally a very interesting discussion, although does get a bit confused towards the end during a discussion of conscious - largely due to a misunderstanding of a famous study.

The discussion touches on neuroscientist Adrian Owen's study where they wanted to find out whether a patient in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) was conscious by asking them to imagine things and then using fMRI to see if the relevant parts of the brain were active - in other words, if the person was able to consciously hear, understand and carry out the request.

Famously, the patient could - demonstrating that it is possible to be diagnosed with PVS and still be conscious.

However, the guests on the programme discuss the study as if the patient was unconscious and was in a coma, and suggest that this shows the brain can do remarkable things when someone is unconscious which is exactly what it didn't show.

Otherwise, a fascinating discussion as we'd expect from In Our Time.

Link to programme webpage and audio.

—Vaughan.

Online psychosis:

The New York Times has an article about the interaction between the internet and psychosis that explored online communities that may be focused on delusional beliefs or comprised almost entirely of people who are having psychotic experiences.

If this seems slightly familiar, it's because it's partly based on a social network analysis study I did in 2006 with some UK colleagues (which we covered previously).

In a nutshell, the study specifically selected a set of websites describing personal experiences of mind control that were independently assessed by three psychiatrists as describing delusional experiences. Using social network analysis, the study demonstrated that these people were part of a social network just like other online and offline communities.

This is interesting because the diagnostic criteria for a delusion excludes any belief that is "not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture", whereas these individuals have formed an online community based around their delusional belief, creating a paradox.

Perhaps the most sensible comment in the article in the closing paragraph which quotes psychiatrist Ken Duckworth:

Psychiatrists and researchers say it is too soon to say whether communication on the Internet among people who may be psychotic will negatively effect their illnesses.” This is a very complex little corner,” said Dr. Ken Duckworth, the medical director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group. “Some people may find it’s healing, but these are really hard questions. The Internet isn’t a cause of mental illness, it’s a complicating new variable.”

Actually, I'm misquoted in a very minor way at the end, where I'm described as saying that research on 'alien abductees' has suggested they have severe memory problems.

In fact, we know from the work of psychologist Susan Clancy that the memory problems are definitely there but are actually quite subtle.

Link to NYT article.
Link to text of social network analysis study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

November 12, 2008

Chick sent me high e:

Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi is best known for his research on 'flow'. Sometimes known as being 'in the zone', it's where people lose themselves in their particular talent. His talk to the TED conference has just been put online where he describes how he's being trying to capture this particular form of peak experience.

The Hungarian psychologist was one of the pioneers of positive psychology, that aims to understand our most valuable attributes and experiences, before it was even thought of as a separate specialism.

Csíkszentmihályi is apparently pronounced 'chick sent me high e' which always sounds to me like it should be the title of an Oasis song.

Link to TED video lecture on flow.

—Vaughan.

November 11, 2008

Gladwell on Outliers:

New York Magazine profiles prolific mind-focused science writer Malcom Gladwell and previews his upcoming book on the unpredictable factors that propel the super-successful to the top.

Gladwell writes incredibly compelling books about psychology and culture that have been wildly popular. The article mentions a multi-million dollar advance for his forthcoming book Outliers.

I have to say, I read his last book, Blink and enjoyed every page but didn't quite get the punchline. It seemed to be saying sometimes instant judgements can be better than considered judgements, and other times not, but I wanted to know when they are better.

However, Gladwell's books are as enjoyable as much for their eclecticism as his gripping narrative, and even as a collection of stories about interesting studies I found them eye-opening.

The New York Magazine discusses Gladwell and his work, and it's probably true to say that he's one of the most influential people in the public understanding of psychology, so he is always worth keeping tabs on.

Link to New York Magazine article 'Geek Pop Star'.

—Vaughan.

Purple brain death:

In 1964 the journal Medicine, Science and the Law published an article entitled 'Unusual Cases 2 - The Purple Brain Death'.

Sadly, the journal is no longer in print and the article isn't available so I have absolutely no idea what it was about, but it sounds intriguing doesn't it?

If anyone ever does find out what made this case so unusual, and what a purple brain death is exactly, do get in touch.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the BBC's standard brain picture which always has a strangely purple tinge.

Link to PubMed entry.

—Vaughan.

Parental gene fight theory of mental illness:

The New York Times discusses a new theory on the link between schizophrenia and autism that suggests that each may depend on the outcome of a battle between the genetic information we inherit from each parent. According to the theory - more genes from the father increases the chance of autistic traits, while more from the mother increases the tendency to experience psychotic experiences.

The theory is proposed by sociologist Christopher Badcock and biologist Bernard Crespi who recently wrote an opinion piece in Nature outlining their idea a few months ago (we discussed it here).

There idea is based on a known effect called genomic imprinting, where the same genes inherited from one parent can have a different effect when compared to when they're inherited from the other parent.

However, they're not the first to suggest that autism and schizophrenia may be different sides of the same coin.

Neuropsychologist Chris Frith wrote an influential 1992 book with the snappy title of The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia where he suggested that the core problem in both schizophrenia and autism was an impairment in 'metarepresentation' - that is, the ability of the mind to monitor and represent mental states in both ourselves and other people.

Frith argued that schizophrenia is where a working metarepresentation system goes wrong, so affected people lose a sense of ownership of their own thoughts and make impaired inferences about the intentions of others. He further suggested that autism is where the metarepresentation never develops properly, so affected people barely develop the ability to understand the perspective of other people.

Interestingly, the word 'autism' itself was first used to describe an aspect of schizophrenia. Eugen Bleuler coined it to capture the introverted withdrawn behaviour seen in some people diagnosed with schizophrenia, and it was later adopted by Hans Asperger to describe the withdrawn introverted behaviour of a group of children he was studying who would now likely be diagnosed with autism of Asperger syndrome.

Link to NYT article on Crespi and Baddock theory.

—Vaughan.

November 10, 2008

The not very near death experience:

I've just discovered this fantastic 1990 study from The Lancet that investigated near death experiences reported by patients. However, it did something quite different from most other studies - it actually checked to see whether the patients were actually near death or not - and many of them weren't.

The study looked at the experiences of 58 people who believed they were about to die during a medical procedure and had subsequently reported a 'near death experience' - often the classic 'light at the end of the tunnel' experience, the feeling of the consciousness had left the body like an outside observer, enhanced clarity of thought and the flashback of life's memories.

The researchers then looked through the medical records of each person to see whether they had really been 'near death'. Of the 58 in the study, 30 patients were never in danger of dying, despite their belief at the time.

The study then went on to compare whether certain experiences were more likely to appear in those patients who were genuinely near death.

The experiences were largely the same across both groups, but those who were really at risk of dying were more likely to experience an intense light and enhanced mental clarity.

The authors say they're not sure why this might be. The explanation that is usually thrown around is that 'restricted oxygen to the brain causes light sensations' but I've no idea whether this is anything more than a convenient hypothesis and has any scientific data to back it up.

Link to study paper.
Link to PubMed entry.

—Vaughan.

BBC All in the Mind kicks off with race, law and suicide:

A new season of BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind has just started and begins with a discussion of a fantastic study that used a version of the popular children's game Guess Who? to investigate the social niceties of discussing race.

The programme also tackles the UK's new mental health act and the alarmingly high rate of suicide in older women in Britain's South Asian communities.

Despite being presented by the brilliant Claudia Hammond, it's still not quite as good as its Australian namesake and still has a slightly parochial feel to it.

However, it is also known for flashes of brilliance and there should be a few of those in the coming weeks as the new season progresses.

Link to first in the new season of BBC All in the Mind.
Link to programme webpage.

—Vaughan.

Encephalon 58 gets Highlighted:

The 58th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just appeared online, this time hosted by health and science site Highlight Health.

A couple of my favourites include an excellent piece on Combining Cognits on what we know about the development of pain perception in unborn children and an article from Ouroboros on sex and the ageing brain.

This edition has a number of new blogs featured, so it's a great opportunity to what's new and notable on the neuroscience internet. Bit too much alliteration in that last sentence but I think you get the idea. Go check it out.

Link to Encephalon 58.

—Vaughan.

November 09, 2008

Holy hypnosis sent to baffle materialists:

In a recent discussion of news that creationist-allied campaigners are suggesting neuroscience implies a non-materialist (e.g. soul-based) human existence, I mentioned this was old news as Nobel-prize winning physiologist John Eccles had argued much the same in the early 20th century.

However, I recently got back to reading The Discovery of the Unconscious, Ellenberger's huge book and remarkably thorough history of psychodynamic psychiatry, and discovered this gem on p161 that mentions a similar view from 1846.

It discusses the church's view of hypnotism, then called magnetism, and how one notable French priest was arguing that its effects were so startling that it must have been sent by God to piss off scientists.

...in 1846, the celebrated Dominican preacher Father Lacordaire declared in one of his sermons in Notre Dame Cathedral that he believed in magnetism, which, he felt consisted of "natural but irregular forces which cannot be reduced to scientific formulas and which are being used by God in order to confound contemporary materialism".

The Catholic church has traditionally had an ambivalent relationship with hypnosis, and banned its members from the practice from the 1880s until 1955, as we discussed previously.

Link to more about The Discovery of the Unconscious.
Link to previous post on LSD, hypnosis and the church.

—Vaughan.

The art of digital synaesthesia:

Artist and researcher Mitchell Whitelaw wrote an interesting and in-depth article on the links between audio-visual fusion art and synaesthesia for the Senses and Society journal. Whitelaw has just put the piece online, has illustrated it with embedded videos of some of the stunning pieces he references, but also discusses the neuroscience of synaesthesia with considerable care and insight.

In the age of ubiquitous digital media, synesthesia is everywhere. In human, neurological form, it is rare: for perhaps three in a hundred people, a stimulus in one sensory modality automatically induces a sensation in another. Auditory-to-visual synesthesia, or “colored hearing” is much rarer still. Yet now this phenomenon is realised, apparently, inside every digital music player, on VJ screens in every club, in robot lightshows. On these screens sound is transformed into visual pattern and form instantly and automatically; an exotic perceptual phenomenon becomes a technically mediated commonplace...

Synesthesia is widely used as an analogy around this work. The analogy provides a mapping that aligns subjective sensation with audiovisual signals; it maps perceptual or even neurological structures onto technical structures. The analogy also plays another role, foregrounding sensation in the reception of the artworks; proposing to operate, for the subject, at the level of direct sensation...

This paper’s main aim is to test this analogy, and the related historical drive that Strick suggests; to consider if, and how, such practice can be thought of as synesthetic, and examine structural parallels between synesthesia as a perceptual and neurological phenomenon, and the automatic or transcoded linking of audio and visual media...

The article is quite dense in places but well worth the effort as it carefully picks out whether these digital artworks tell us anything about synaesthesia or are just dropping neurological buzz words to sound cutting-edge.

BTW, the image is a still from a fantastic piece by artist Robert Hodgin which is embedded in the article, but which you can also view here.

Link to 'Synesthesia and Cross-Modality in Contemporary Audiovisuals' (thanks Alex!).

—Vaughan.

November 08, 2008

The War of the War of the Worlds:

RadioLab make the most beautiful, compelling programmes. They recently broadcast a truly excellent edition on the War of the Worlds radio dramatisation, which has sparked mass panics, not once, not twice, but three times, over a period of more than two decades.

The most famous adaptation of H.G. Well's novel was created by Orson Wells in 1938 and the RadioLab team do a fantastic job of taking us through the original radio play and putting exactly in context how it was broadcast and what buttons it pushed in the society of the time to explain exactly why it had such an immediate impact.

One of the most interesting bits is where they read out transcripts of listener interviews where some claim to gave actually seen or smelt the smoke from the battle with aliens, or even seen the alien spaceships themselves. One fascinating bit suggests some listeners thought they were being invaded by Germans.

The stunt was repeated twice, each causing listeners to panic to different degrees. One broadcast in Ecuador caused mass rioting and several deaths.

It's a completely gripping programme and wonderfully produced, so take some time, listen on some headphones or good speakers, sit back and enjoy.

Apparently a new RadioLab series starts in two weeks, and we'll keep you updated when it hits the wires.

Link to RadioLab on War of the Worlds.

—Vaughan.

Mystery callers and lost in space:

Neurophilosophy has recently published two excellent articles that discuss the recent discovery of very selective psychological problems: one person can't recognise people by their voice, the other can't navigate through streets.

In themselves, these sorts of disorders are not that surprising, but they help us understand how the brain develops.

Actually, scratch that last sentence. If you're familiar with the brain injury literature, these sorts of disorders are not that surprising, but if you're not, they're completely mind blowing.

Take prosopagnosia for example. Sometimes rather inaccurately called 'face blindness' (people see faces, they just don't seem distinctive) it was first identified in a patient with a bullet wound to the head who lost the ability to recognise faces but could still recognise other objects.

If you think about it, this is incredible. When we look out onto the world, faces don't seem different from the rest of the things we look at, but damage to a specific area of the brain (most commonly the right fusiform gyrus) can selectively damage our ability to see faces, suggesting that there are brain functions specialised for this task. How specialised, whether only for faces, is a matter of ongoing debate, but the fact that they are specialised at all is incredible enough.

The explanation for these selective impairments goes something like this: our brain functions are shaped by a combination of the broad outline of genetics and the fine tuning of experience during growth. When we reach adulthood they are fairly fixed. Damaged can knock out these fairly fixed pathways leading to selective impairments.

What has become clear over the last decade is that some people can have selective impairments without suffering brain injury. They seem to have them from birth.

This is the case with the two people discussed by Neurophilosophy. An inability to recognise people by just their voice or an inability to navigate streets after brain damage is interesting but not earth shattering. These sorts of cases have been reported before.

But the fact that these are developmental disorders is an interesting and important twist, not least for what they suggest about how much certain functions might be 'set' in the brain early on, but also for what they suggest about the 'life history' or our cognitive skills.

The two case studies discussed by Neurophilosophy are both fascinating as life stories of people with atypical difficulties but also scientifically compelling because they help us understand complex dance of brain growth and development.

Link to piece on developmental topographagnosia.
Link to piece on developmental phonagnosia.

—Vaughan.

November 07, 2008

2008-11-07 Spike activity:

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

Neurophilosophy has a fantastic '60 Minutes' documentary on brain computer interfaces.

Dana's Cerebrum magazine has an excellent article on 'connectomics' or the neuroscience of tracing the 'wiring' of the brain.

PsychCentral has an excellent piece on the psychological research on 'friends with benefits', less politely known as fuck buddies.

Japanese researchers make brain tissue from stem cells, reports Yahoo News.

Antipsychotic aripiprazol has recently been licensed for depression but previous trials suggest it is more likely to cause akathisia than treat mood problems reports Furious Seasons. As an aside, aripiprazol was nicknamed akathisiol in one hospital I worked in.

PsyBlog discusses recent research that suggests, contrary to popular belief, weather has little effect on mood.

My Mind on Books has a video debate on AI entitled 'Dreaming of an artificial intelligence'.

Eye misalignment may suggest a raised risk for mental illness later in life, reports Reuters.

The excellent Not Exactly Rocket Science notes a recent study which has found that the same gene mechanism underlies two language disorders.

Cognitive Daily reports on a poetic study that found that being excluded from a social group makes you feel cold - literally.

The increasingly impressive Neuronarrative has an interview with brain specialising science writer Rita Carter.

Left-handed people are more inhibited, reports open-access shy New Scientist.

The BPS Research Digest discusses research finding rare, intense positive events won't make you happy, but lots of little ones will.

—Vaughan.

November 06, 2008

Encultured drug cravings and dopamine:

Scientific American Mind's Mind Matters blog has a great interview with neuroanthropologist Daniel Lende who discusses why we need an understanding of both culture and neuroscience to get a fully integrated account of human thought and behaviour.

Lende discusses his work on integrating cultural factors and the neuroscience of the dopamine reward system in a study of addiction in Colombian teenagers.

A common approach in neuroscience is to take experiences labelled by everyday words and try and find what changes in the brain when someone says they are having the experience.

The problem is that the definitions of the labelling words may be indistinct ('love'), incoherent ('belief') or understood differently in different cultures ('anxiety').

The approach Lende advocates is to take an anthropological approach to the problem. In other words, attempting to understand what a concept or label means in a particular culture so the neuroscience can be integrated in full knowledge of the diversity of the experience.

This predicament is where neuroanthropology can be so helpful. In order to draw connections between neuroscience and real world situations, I went out and talked to people to understand craving and addiction from their point of view. This type of real-world data can both challenge and inform ideas based on animal models and neuroimaging studies.

In translating the dopamine research, my work with adolescents proved crucial. They knew what they experienced far better than I did. Using systematic interviews across a range of involvement with drugs (hard-core users to having never tried drugs), I saw three areas of overlap between research on dopamine and compulsive involvement with addictive substances.

First was the emphasis that researchers placed on “wanting.” I was lucky in Colombia; addicted adolescents often described their experiences as “querer más y más,” to want more and more. Second, dopamine affects shifts in attention, which meant that some adolescents couldn’t focus on anything else when they knew an opportunity to consume was about to come along. Third, adolescents described a sense of being pushed toward something—an urge that rose up without conscious desire.

You may recognise Lende from the excellent Neuroanthropology blog and he also discusses some of the work of his co-bloggers in the interview, including some fascinating work looking on how people learn balance.

However, if you're interested in more details about the study on Colombian teenagers, he's recently posted some more information including links to the full text of the papers.

Link to SciAmMind Mind Matters interview.
Link to Neuroanthropology post on Colombia study.
Link to follow-up and more information.

—Vaughan.

A passive aptitude of soul:

I've just got round to listening to a September edition of ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone on Frankenstein, science and philosophy in the Romantic period. Tragically, the mp3 is no longer available, but one of the people on the programme read out a fantastic Benjamin Franklin quote on Mesmerism.

Franklin was charged by the King of France to investigate the scientific basis of Mesmerism. We now think of mesmerism as hypnosis but at the time Franz Anton Mesmer believed that the effects were because he had discovered a way of manipulating a powerful invisible fluid that permeated the universe.

One of the interviewees on the programme read out Franklin's conclusion to the his 1784 report to Louis XIV on the scientific basis of Mesmerism, and it's both profound and beautiful:

It is perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, that is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists and does not seem to require so much an active energy as a passive aptitude of soul, in order to encounter it.

But error is endlessly diversified. It has no reality but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field, the soul has room enough to expand herself to display all her boundless faculties and all of her beautiful and interesting extravagances and absurdities.

Obviously this was before the days when it was traditional to finish a scientific report by sitting on the fence and suggesting further research.

Link to Philosopher's Zone edition, sans mp3, avec transcript.

—Vaughan.

Beautiful visual illusion pendants:

Tania Hennessy is a scientist who sells beautiful visual illusion necklaces over the internet under the name Aroha Silhouettes.

The one pictured is a Penrose rectangle, a type of impossible shape of which the Penrose triangle is the most famous (and you can buy one of those too!).

However, there are many other impossible objects you can get as necklaces or earrings, all designed as striking silhouettes.

And if it's not for you, you could always buy one for the girl in your life.

How often will you ever have the opportunity to use the line "No honey, I wasn't staring at your breasts, I was marvelling at how a relatively simple collection of edges can demonstrate the conflicting constraints of the visual perceptual system".

Obviously, make sure she's wearing the pendant at the time. It's not an all purpose excuse.

Link to Aroha Silhouettes (via Microservios).

—Vaughan.

November 05, 2008

Why are people reluctant to exchange lottery tickets?:

I've just found this wonderful study that investigated why people are reluctant to exchange lottery tickets before the draw - when each is equally as likely to win the jackpot.

It seems that swapping the ticket sparks images of it winning the lottery. This tends to make us think it's more likely to occur because the possibility becomes more vivid and hence holds more weight in our minds when we're trying to judge likelihood - a cognitive bias known as the availability heuristic.

I found the paper on psychologist Jane Risen's website, whose work on 'one shot illusory correlations' and minority stereotyping we featured the other day.

Another look at why people are reluctant to exchange lottery tickets.

J Pers Soc Psychol. 2007 Jul;93(1):12-22.

Risen JL, Gilovich T.

People are reluctant to exchange lottery tickets, a result that previous investigators have attributed to anticipated regret. The authors suggest that people's subjective likelihood judgments also make them disinclined to switch. Four studies examined likelihood judgments with respect to exchanged and retained lottery tickets and found that (a) exchanged tickets are judged more likely to win a lottery than are retained tickets and (b) exchanged tickets are judged more likely to win the more aversive it would be if the ticket did win. The authors provide evidence that this effect occurs because the act of imagining an exchanged ticket winning the lottery increases the belief that such an event is likely to occur.

I love studies on the quirks of human psychology. While they often have wider implications and help us understand more general principals of our thought and behaviour, in this case - the role of imagination in fuelling cognitive biases, they are also wonderful windows into the curiosities everyday reasoning.

By the way, psychologist Thomas Gilovich is a co-author on both of these studies. He's also the author of one of the best books on cognitive biases, called How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (ISBN 0029117062) which I highly recommend.

Link to paper.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

Dreaming of demons:

The Boston Globe has a brief interview with dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley who has just written a book on the history of dreaming in the world's religions.

Bulkeley notes in the interview that his book attempts to look at common themes from various dreams described in the religious literature, and draws out how they might reflect common aspects of human experience.

It sounds like an historical anthropology of dreaming with a view to understanding the significance of dreams for some of the most influential movements in our culture.

You argue that modern science can learn about dreaming from religion. Do you have a favorite example that you use when talking to scientists?

BULKELEY: Well, consider this particular kind of nightmare dream that recurs again and again in religious texts. In the Christian tradition they talk about the incubus, or the demons of the night. In Newfoundland, it's the old hag and so on. But what all these various religions agree on is that there's a type of nightmare that's very intense and involves the constriction of breathing or paralysis. Now we know, thanks to modern science, that this is a real class of dream called night terrors and they're very different from ordinary nightmares. So all these texts that talk about night terrors, they're actually describing a real element of human experience.

One of my favourite books on dream themes is somewhat less serious. I Dream of Madonna is a beautifully illustrated book that collects women's dream about the Material Girl.

Link to Kelly Bulkeley interview (via Frontal Cortex).
Link to more info about the book.

—Vaughan.

Doubting lie detectors and blushing beauties:

Today's New Scientist has an interesting follow-up letter to a recent article on whether brain scan lie-detection could ever be reliable court evidence. The article noted that the traditional and flawed lie polygraph lie-detector test had been questioned in the past, and the letter notes an earlier example of the test being criticised in an insightful short story:

Doubts about the use of polygraphs have been around for much longer than you report (4 October, p 8). In G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown story The Mistake of the Machine, published in 1914, a polygraph detects stress in a prisoner accused of murdering Lord Falconroy. The reason isn't guilt: the prisoner is in fact Lord Falconroy, in disguise and anxious to stay undiscovered.

Chesterton wrote that polygraph scientists "must be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman is in love with him if she blushes. That's a test from the circulation of the blood, discovered by the immortal Harvey; and a jolly rotten test, too."

If you're not sure quite how unreliable polygraph lie-detector tests are, I recommend an earlier article on Mind Hacks that is worth reading solely for the story of the falsely convicted Floyd 'Buzz' Fay, who trained 20 fellow inmates to fool the lie detector test to help prove his innocence. All while behind bars.

You gotta respect that.

Link to letter.
Link to Mind Hacks on polygraph hacking.

—Vaughan.

November 04, 2008

Through the eyes of the psychopath:

The New Yorker has an engaging article about psychopaths and what psychologists are starting to learn about the psychology and neuroscience of people who are thought to lack empathy.

Psychopathy doesn't necessarily imply violence. The most commonly used modern definition, based on the work of psychologist Robert Hare, suggests that psychopathy includes things like a lack of conscience, manipulative behaviour, impulsiveness and an anti-social lifestyle.

The condition was first described clinically in 1801, by the French surgeon Philippe Pinel. He called it “mania without delirium.” In the early nineteenth century, the American surgeon Benjamin Rush wrote about a type of “moral derangement” in which the sufferer was neither delusional nor psychotic but nevertheless engaged in profoundly antisocial behavior, including horrifying acts of violence. Rush noted that the condition appeared early in life. The term “moral insanity” became popular in the mid-nineteenth century, and was widely used in the U.S. and in England to describe incorrigible criminals. The word “psychopath” (literally, “suffering soul”) was coined in Germany in the eighteen-eighties. By the nineteen-twenties, “constitutional psychopathic inferiority” had become the catchall phrase psychiatrists used for a general mixture of violent and antisocial characteristics found in irredeemable criminals, who appeared to lack a conscience.

In the late nineteen-thirties, an American psychiatrist named Hervey Cleckley began collecting data on a certain kind of patient he encountered in the course of his work in a psychiatric hospital in Augusta, Georgia. These people were from varied social and family backgrounds. Some were poor, but others were sons of Augusta’s most prosperous and respected families. Cleckley set about sharpening the vague construct of constitutional psychopathic inferiority, and distinguishing it from other forms of mental illness. He eventually isolated sixteen traits exhibited by patients he called “primary” psychopaths; these included being charming and intelligent, unreliable, dishonest, irresponsible, self-centered, emotionally shallow, and lacking in empathy and insight.

However, the article focuses on the work of psychologist Kent Kiehl who has completed a great deal of recent brain imaging research on criminal psychopaths, and argues that the core problem is a dysfunction of the paralimbic system.

This includes areas such as the orbital frontal cortex, anterior cingulate and amygdala, that are known to be involved in emotional reactions and often thought to be involved particularly in social interaction and empathy.

However, as the article recounts, getting inmates at maximum security prisons involved in cognitive science research has its own special challenges. Although this seem to have been somewhat mitigated by Kiehl's use of a portable fMRI machine.

To be honest, the article focuses a little too much on the personalities, particularly when the science is so interesting, but it does cover the bases well and does make for an engaging read.

Link to New Yorker article 'Suffering Souls'.

—Vaughan.

What's driving voter decison-making:

The Association for Psychological Science magazine Observer has an interesting article that tackles what cognitive science has told us about how voters choose their candidate.

It reiterates the common finding that emotional feelings toward a particular candidate or party has more sway that more factual information.

In 2005, Emory University political psychologist Drew Westen and his colleagues published a study in which they correctly predicted people’s views on political issues based solely on their emotions. When the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in March 1998, the psychologists quizzed participants to gauge their knowledge of Clinton and the details of the scandal. Then they asked emotion-based questions about how participants felt about Clinton as a person, how they felt about the Democratic and Republican parties, and how they felt about infidelity in general. Months later, before the Congressional impeachment trial began in December, they called the participants back and asked them a series of questions along the lines of “Do you think what the president has been accused of doing meets the standard set forth in the Constitution for an impeachable offense?”

Using only what they knew about the respondents’ emotions, the researchers were able to correctly predict their views on impeachment 85 percent of the time. Knowledge meant little: When they factored in what the respondents actually knew about the situation and the Constitutional requirements for impeachment, they only improved the accuracy of their predictions by three percent.

Interestingly, the article suggests that economic issues - probably the most important concern in the current US election - are the ones that are least likely to be affected by emotion.

Emotion still plays a big part even in economic reasoning though, and I've always been curious to know more about how fact-based versus emotion-based reasoning interacts. For example, how much are emotions just a summary 'opinion' formed by individuals after considering the facts.

Unfortunately, unlike the one mentioned above, most studies in this area are of cross-sections and so don't say much about how these two forms of reasons interact over time.

However, one source of reasoning not mention in this piece is superstition. Luckily, Psychology Today has a short piece that has picked out some sources of magical thinking from the current presidential race.

Link to article 'This is Your Brain on Politics' (via BPSRD).
Link to piece on 'Election Superstitions'.

—Vaughan.

November 03, 2008

Sine-wave speech:

Tom and Matt wrote about the remarkable phenomenon of 'sine-wave speech' in the Mind Hacks book (Hack #49) but I was just reminded of it recently (thanks Alex!) and I am always struck about what a great effect it is.

If you're not familiar with it, I recommend psychologist Matt Davis' webpage that explains the effect and has some fantastic examples.

Essentially, what initially sounds like random whistling sounds comes together as coherent speech when you know what you're listening out for.

It's a striking effect and is a wonderful demonstration of how prior knowledge and expectations can affect perception.

Link to Matt Davis' sine-wave speech page.

—Vaughan.

Trans children - trapped in a body, mind or society?:

The Atlantic magazine has an excellent article about the heated issues raised by children who want to be the opposite sex. It's an excellent piece that captures both the dilemmas of parents and mental health professionals sparked by potentially transgendered children.

I sometimes jokingly suggest that clinical child psychology would be better described as clinical parent psychology, owing to the fact that it almost always involves working as much with the parents' anxieties as the child's.

This is particularly important when it comes to behaviours which are not considered, in themselves, to be physically or mentally damaging, but which are socially unacceptable or stigmatised, because the pressure often takes the form of others wishing the child would conform to social norms.

The Atlantic article gives some vivid examples of some of the pressures, as the child, mother, father, professionals, peers and campaigning groups each have different opinions on how to manage a young child that dresses and acts like a child of the opposite sex.

As we discussed in a post about an NPR programme that covered the same territory, one of the big controversies is whether to try and treat the child to identify with their birth sex, or whether to help them cope with the stresses of adjusting to life as a transgendered child.

This is complicated by the fact that follow-up studies have shown that not all children who have cross-gender desires when young maintain them through puberty. However, hormone treatment exists which can delay puberty so it makes it easier for a child to pass as the opposite sex if this is thought the best course of action.

The Atlantic piece is a remarkably well-researched piece that covers a great deal of the mental health debate about the practice and ethics of treating what are known as 'gender dysphoric' children, but also gives us a revealing insight into some of the family and social dynamics that affect the individuals.

A compelling and thought-provoking insight into this contested area.

Link to Atlantic article 'A Boy's Life'.
Link to previous Mind Hacks piece on 'gender identity disorder'.

—Vaughan.

Lesbians - unicyle and be counted:

A single instance of unusual behaviour by a minority group may be enough for us to stereotype the whole group according to recent research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Led by psychologist Jane Risen, the researchers ran four experiments that suggest that the reason we tend to think a single notable behaviour is typical of a minority group but not a majority group is because of our inbuilt cognitive biases in how we process anomalous information.

During the study participants were shown a series of sentences that described a group and a behaviour. The researchers found that just one report of a seemingly odd behaviour by a minority group member was focused on for longer and was more memorable.

Furthermore, participants were more likely to think that group membership was more like to be an explanation for the odd behaviour for minorities than in more representative groups.

In a final experiment, participants watched a video interview of either a white or Asian student where, rather unusually, they persistently asked to use the camera in a pushy manner.

Afterwards, the participants were shown a picture of another person, again either white or Asian. In one part the person was holding up words with missing letters than the participants had to fill in to complete the word.

For example, the prompt could have been "D E _ _ N D", which can equally well be completed as "DEPEND" or "DEMAND".

This sort of technique is often used in psychology because things that are already active in the mind, such as emotions, concepts or stereotypes, will unconsciously influence the participant to complete the word in one of the two ways.

DEPEND is a positive word, whereas DEMAND is related to pushiness, so if a video of a pushy Asian student only affects word completion presented by another unrelated Asian person and not when presented by a white person, you can see the behaviour has activated a race specific bias.

This is exactly what happened. The researchers confirmed the effect by a follow-up task where participants were asked to select interview questions for an unrelated white or Asian person, where they tended to select questions that enquired about how brazen the interviewee might be for the minority group.

This study was published in 2007 and I've only just discovered it. I'm surprised I've not heard of it before as it strikes me as an incredibly important study on the psychology of stereotype formation.

The researchers call it 'one shot illusory correlation' and I wonder if it also explains the 'my bad holiday' effect where people say they "don't like the British [or whoever], because I went on holiday there once and someone was rude to me".

Obviously, the person was not a minority in their country, but was in the context of the visitor's life.

By the way, the paper is also very well written and the introduction is well worth reading solely for it's engaging introduction to the area.

Link to study article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.