March 18, 2010

Scanning for murder raps:

Nature has a freely available feature article that discusses recent debates about how functional brain scans should be used in court cases concerning people charged with murder and classified as psychopaths.

Brain scans that show an estimate of brain activity, such as fMRI, are widely used in forensic and medical research to understand whether offenders and psychopaths differ in how their brain processes information.

These studies usually rely on group differences, showing that, on average, brain activity occurs differently in offenders compared to non-offenders, patients compared to non-patients and so on.

Court cases, of course, attempt to decided whether a single individual is criminally responsible for his or her actions. Inferring individual differences from broad group averages is difficult, some say impossible but despite this, functional neuroimaging is being increasingly used in court.

The Nature article discusses the recent Jeanine Nicarico murder case where Brian Dugan was being charged (and later confessed to) with the young girl's murder.

Controversially, and for the first time in the US, the court was permitted to see evidence from functional brain scans from neuroscientist Kent Kiehl related to Dugan's diagnosis of psychopathy.

On 29 October, Kiehl participated in a 'Frye hearing' for Dugan's case. Based on a 1923 ruling, the hearing determines whether scientific evidence is robust enough to be admitted. Joseph Birkett, the lead prosecutor in the Dugan case, argued that allowing the scans — the bright colours and statistical parameters of which are chosen by the researchers — might bias the jury. Some studies, prosecutors argued, have shown that neuroscientific explanations can be particularly seductive to the layperson.

The judge ultimately "cut the baby in half", says Birkett. He ruled that the jury would not be allowed to see Dugan's actual brain scans, but that Kiehl could describe them and how he interpreted them based on his research.

According to the article, the scans had a significant influence on the case and it has raised a heated debated about whether such evidence is possibly interpretable in legal terms.

Neuroscientists are typically harshly critical about lawyers' enthusiasm for wanting to use less-than-clear cut technologies like 'brain scan lie detectors' in court.

However an article recently published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences was very critical of this attitude, noting that the court's requirements were often different from science's, and than even suggestive evidence could help fill out the overall picture, and hence it was up to the court to decide whether such evidence should be admissible, not scientists.

Nevertheless, these sorts of arguments raise the hackles of many researchers and neuroscientist Helen Mayberg is quoted in the Nature piece as saying "It is a dangerous distortion of science that sets dangerous precedents for the field".

The article is great coverage of the particular case and an interesting look into how neuroscience research is being uncomfortably integrated into the legal system.

Link Nature article 'Science in court: Head case' (via @mocost).

—Vaughan.

March 08, 2010

The disembodied tic:

There are numerous forms of body distortions and out-of-body experiences reported in the neurological literature but this is the first case I've found of someone who experienced tics that seemed to occur in external objects.

The report was published in the journal Neurology in 1997 and concerns a man with Tourette's syndrome, a condition of persistent tics.

These more commonly appear as almost irresistible repetitive movements that the person feels compelled to complete, but occasionally they can appear as what are known as 'sensory tics' which are repetitive sensations such as feelings of pressure, tickle, warmth, cold, or other abnormal sensation in skin, bones, muscles, and joints.

In this case, however, the sensations felt as if they were appearing in external objects:

A 34-year-old man dated the onset of his symptoms to age 5 when he developed a compulsion to bite down on cups and glasses. The drive was so irresistible that he once shattered a glass in his mouth. He later began having painful repetitive neck extension and shoulder shrugging. During childhood, he first noticed itchy or pressure sensations, usually deep in a joint, but sometimes on the skin, in his hands, feet, and arms. The sensations eventually spread. For a period of time, the inside of his knees and ankles were particularly affected and the sensation could only be relieved by banging his ankles together. Noises including grunts, sniffs, and loud shouts began during early adolescence. A period of coprolalia was present briefly. The tics came to involve the entire body. He had associated difficulty concentrating, compulsions, and obsessions. He was given a trial of clonidine without relief. He was never tried on other medications.

The patient characterizes his motor tics as voluntary movements performed in response to the “itchy” feeling. Although he can partially suppress tics in any given location, suppression enhances the feeling that he must move another body area. He frequently has the urge to repeat what others say to him but can usually suppress it. Beginning during childhood and persisting through adulthood, the patient noticed that the itchy sensations preceding motor tics could arise in other people or in objects.

The extracorporeal sensations are associated with the need to scratch or touch the itchy item in a particular way. External sensations most frequently arise in angles, corners, and points of objects such as elbows, the edges of tables, or the edge of his computer screen. Out-of-body sensations are more likely if the patient is touching an object but can also arise without direct contact. When younger, the patient would act on the accompanying urge and would scratch his sister’s elbow. He is able to resist touching other people.

Disembodied sensations are not uncommon after neurological difficulties (for example, a recent case study of a person with epilepsy reported a feeling of complete disembodiment) and can even be induced in you and me, as the 'rubber hand illusion' demonstrates.

In this case, however, it isn't clear exactly how the Tourette's syndrome is triggering the feeling that the sensations appear in other objects, although it does suggest that our self-other boundary is not as iron-clad as we sometimes like to believe.

Link to PubMed entry for case study.

—Vaughan.

February 27, 2010

Subliminal cigarette marketing:

The Tobacco Documents Library is an online database of millions of tobacco industry documents made public through court cases. Included are letters written to cigarette companies including several where the public have complained about 'subliminal messages' hidden in adverts.

Quite frankly, they are a joy to read, and this is my favourite among many hidden gems. It's a letter from an organisation called Morality in Marketing to the makers of Camel cigarettes:

Dear Mr. Johnston

While at first we were enchanted with your popular new advertising campaign featuring head-shots of a "cool camel,' in the course of an in-depth analysis by our media researchers the subliminal message inherent in your ads was cracked. Consequently, we must withdraw our agency's support of this ad and include Camel Cigarettes on our hit-list of "Prurient Products" to boycott.

Your subtle ploy to titillate your audience with pornographic imagery of male genitalia disguised as harmless camel heads has not gone undetected. You can only imagine the extreme sense of anxiety, frustration and embarrassment I now feel when I am continually exposed to this graphic homosexual depiction of penile putrescence.

We have a bone to pick with you: where do you get off on displaying this root of all sin to hype your cigarettes? How long will you continue to promote your product by flashing gigantic sex glands on bill-boards throughout this country? As an up and coming organization dedicated to educating the American pubic about decency in advertising, we do not advocate censorship. However, while our desire is not to be too hard on you, we, as chaste Christian consumers, strongly urge you to cut off this media deluge of frontal nudity.

Additionally, could you please send to me a list of promotional materials offered to your customers and their children in conjunction with this extended marketing gimmick . We would be particularly interested, for obvious reasons, in any products which might involve oral contact (ex. mugs, glasses) or fondling (ex . stuffed replicas of the camel).

A prompt reply to this inquiry would be greatly appreciated. Thank you and God Bless You.

Firm in Our Faith,
Reverend Peter Manale
President

Interestingly, most of the other letters complaining about subliminal messages are a bit fixated on hidden representations of the 'male genitalia', probably fuelled in part by a similar urban myth.

I couldn't find anything in the tobacco documents database to suggest that the industry was particularly interested in subliminal advertising, although there are several documents about subliminal flavours in cigarettes.

In fact, an academic paper [pdf] was written on exactly this topic, finding that the industry had done research to show that adding consciously undetectable amounts of menthol flavour to regular cigarettes caused "altered perception of tobacco smoke and its constituents via cooling, smoothing, and anesthetic effects; increased impact through stimulation of trigeminal receptors; interaction with nicotine controlling its perception, delivery, and uptake; and increased respiratory irritation and toxic effects".

I heard a rumour that if you smoked cigarettes backwards you could hear Judas Priest songs but it never worked for me.

Link to subliminal complaints letters in tobacco docs database.

—Vaughan.

February 24, 2010

The birth of a visual artist, after blindness:

Psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum's Sensory Superpowers blog covers the remarkable story of blind artist John Bramblitt who creates the most strikingly vivid images but didn’t start painting until he lost his sight.

To judge colour Bramblitt feels the small differences in the thickness and texture of the paint and the piece discusses how such fine touch distinction become more possible after sight loss owing to what is known as cross-modal plasticity:

For color, Bramblitt uses oil paint, which has proven critical to the process. While oil paint is messier, more pungent, and dries much slower than acrylics, it offers something that no other paint can: idiosyncratic viscosity. According to Bramblitt, “White feels thicker on my fingers, almost like toothpaste, and black feels slicker and thinner. To mix a gray, I’ll try to get the paint to have a feel of medium viscosity”. In fact, he has learned to recognize and mix all the colors he uses by his sense of touch. And the colors are the first thing one notices about Bramblitt’s work (www.Bramblitt.net). While the subjects of his paintings are immediately recognizable, proportioned, and smartly stylized, the colors are supremely vibrant, and nearly psychedelic in their rendering.

John Bramblitt has developed his touch skills in particularly impressive ways. But the enhancement of the touch sense is known to generally occur for blind individuals. Research has shown that regardless of training in Braille, the blind have better touch skills than the sighted, especially when it comes to touching complex spatial patterns. This cross-modal plasticity is thought to be a result of the blind’s visual cortex being reassigned to other senses. Brain imaging shows that when touching complex patterns, the visual cortex of blind, but not sighted individuals is activated in systematic ways. Moreover, inducing a transient brain lesion (using transcranial magnetic stimulation) in visual cortex will disrupt some of the tactile skills of blind, but not sighted subjects.

The author of the article researches cross-modal plasticity and followers of his blog will be aware that he often comes up with striking examples of the effect in action.

We covered another one of his posts, about blind mountain bikers who make clicks as a form of human 'echolocation', back in July.

If want to see more of Bramblitt's artwork, there's plenty more over at his website.

Link to 'Painting by Touch' article.
Link to John Bramblitt's website.

—Vaughan.

February 22, 2010

A study on dream smoking:

If you've given up smoking for good, where else can you have a secret cigarette except in your dreams? A 1991 study looked at how often recently ex-smokers dreamed of smoking, and found that even after a year of abstinence the dream world was often a common refuge for an imaginary nicotine hit.

Dream of absent-minded transgression: an empirical study of a cognitive withdrawal symptom.

J Abnorm Psychol. 1991 Nov;100(4):487-91.

Hajek P, Belcher M.

Among 293 smokers abstinent for between 1 and 4 weeks, 33% reported having at least 1 dream about smoking. In most dreams, subjects caught themselves smoking and felt strong negative emotions, such as panic and guilt. Dreams about smoking were the result of tobacco withdrawal, as 97% of subjects did not have them while smoking, and their occurrence was significantly related to the duration of abstinence. They were rated as more vivid than the usual dreams and were as common as most major tobacco withdrawal symptoms. In subjects abstinent for 1 year, 63% recalled having dreams about smoking. They had on average 5 of them, and about a quarter occurred after the 6th month of abstinence. Having dreams about smoking was prospectively positively related to maintenance of abstinence. An explanation of this finding based on the association of smoking in dreams with aversive emotions is offered.

It's an interesting finding in light of Freud's theory that dreams are a form of wish-fulfilment. Importantly though, he suggested that psychological conflicts would be hidden from the conscious mind and would therefore appear in a symbolic form during dreaming.

The fact that ex-smokers seem to light up so blatantly in dreams suggests that this isn't the case.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

—Vaughan.

February 11, 2010

Broken hearted:

The Wall Street Journal has an article on a curious medical condition called 'broken heart syndrome' where grief or strong emotion seems mimic a heart attack.

The piece starts with a case description of a lady who had just experience the death of her husband from a heart attack and her reaction which seemed to also be a heart attack:

When doctors performed an X-ray angiogram expecting to find and treat a blood clot that had caused Mrs. Lee's symptoms, they were surprised: There wasn't any evidence of a heart attack. Her coronary arteries were completely clear.

Doctors eventually determined that Mrs. Lee had suffered from broken-heart syndrome, a name given by doctors who observed that it seemed to especially affect patients who had recently lost a spouse or other family member. The mysterious malady mimics heart attacks, but appears to have little connection with coronary artery disease. Instead, it is typically triggered by acute emotion or physical trauma that releases a surge of adrenaline that overwhelms the heart. The effect is to freeze much of the left ventricle, the heart's main pumping chamber, disrupting its ability to contract and effectively pump blood.

The condition is also known as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy and it's probably worth saying that the idea that the condition is caused by a spike of adrenaline is still under debate although the WSJ article does a good job of looking at alternatives further down the piece.

Link to WSJ on 'broken heart syndrome' (via @dreamingspires)

—Vaughan.

February 09, 2010

A varied diet:

A 1964 article from the Archives of Surgery discusses how to treat psychotic patients who may have ingested inedible objects.

It reports on one remarkable case where the following list of objects was found in one patient's stomach. They also helpfully provided a photo of all the objects laid out on a table.

Nickels (173), Pennies (161), Quarters (3), Dimes (26), Military buttons (22), Insignia clasps (5), Nails (50), Staples (5), Screws (16), Metal bolt (1), Metal nuts (4), Overall buckles (19), Metal cap top with keys (8), Lock key (1), Crucifix (2), Bottle caps (2), Knife handle (1), Fork handle (1), Spoon handle (1), Complete fork (bent double) (1), Dessert spoon (1), Rifle shell (unexploded) (1), Pieces of lead (14), Brass ball (1), Pieces of brass (3), Pins and needles (27), Watch parts (22), Broken earring (1), Rings with chain (2), Pieces of wire (7), Nondescript pieces of metal (16), Empty cigarette package (with tinfoil) (1), Official War Department letter (wrapped in cellophane) (1), Piece of glass (1), Streetcar tokens (2), Several small packages of cancelled postage stamps wrapped in cellophane.

Rifle shell? Blimey.

The persistent eating of inedible objects is known as pica although rarely does it occur in such as spectacular fashion.

Link to PubMed entry for 1964 study.

—Vaughan.

One Hundred Years of Memory Loss:

Neurology journal Brain has a fantastic article on the close parallels between the effects of semantic dementia, a degenerative brain disease that causes the loss of memory for the meaning of words and objects, and the novel A Hundred years of Solitude where a magical disease affects villagers' memory for 'the name and notion of things'.

The novel is by the Nobel-prize winning Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and is famous for founding the magical realism style of fiction where fantastical things seem to happen in an otherwise ordinary world.

What is interesting about One Hundred Years of Solitude is that while the memory loss closely resembles the effects of semantic dementia, it was written before the condition was recognised by neurology.

Unfortunately, the article isn't available online but this an excerpt from the article which captures the main themes:

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez created a literary depiction of collective semantic dementia before the syndrome was recognized in neurology. The memory plague section of the novel also provides an inspiring and human account of one town's fight against ‘the quicksand of forgetfulness’.

Why does García Márquez envision a world in which people lose their ability to communicate the names of everyday things? He gives some insight into his use of magical realism in the opening lines of the novel, in which he describes the village of Macondo in its earliest days: ‘the world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point’. With this description, García Márquez implies that the ability to assign a name to an everyday object is a defining human achievement that has developed over time. In this light, the insomnia plague forces Macondo villagers into a primitive state by robbing them of their ability to remember ‘the name and notion of things’.

Remarkably, García Márquez's probing investigation of the power of words and everyday names leads him to a striking literary enactment of the clinical syndrome of SD [semantic dementia] and the problems faced by SD patients. His fictional characters, just like the SD patients discussed here, are acutely aware of the ‘infinite possibilities of a loss of memory’. Both patients and characters attempt to preserve semantic meaning in more permanent forms that are free from the devastating effects of a neurodegenerative process and a fantastical plague. As such, García Márquez achieves a masterful portrayal of SD not just in his description of the plague's ravaging effects on semantic knowledge, but even more vividly in his account of the affected people's ability to maintain hope through various coping strategies—to preserve their fragile self-identity in the pages of word lists and pocketbook diaries.

Link to PubMed entry for article.

—Vaughan.

February 03, 2010

The internet, depression and drinking a glass of water:

A new study has made headlines around the world that claim that internet use is linked to depression despite better evidence from previous studies that there is no substantial link.

The study itself is a fairly straightforward online survey with the key finding that out of 1,319 people who completed the questionnaires, 18 were identified as 'addicted' by Kimberly Young's Internet Addiction Questionnaire and these people were more likely to score highly on the BDI - a standard questionnaire to measure depression.

The study itself was well conducted although it is not a surprising finding because Young's Internet Addiction Questionnaire (which you can read online here) asks lots of questions about emotional distress, so it's hardly surprising that people who say they're distressed on one questionnaire will say they're distressed on the other.

I have criticised the concept of internet addiction on the basis that the whole concept doesn't make sense, but research has also shown that these 'diagnostic' questionnaires are not particularly reliable, meaning they not a good guide even to what they claim they're doing.

But perhaps the most important point, is that this study is just one in a long line of studies that have looked at whether internet use is linked to changes in mood.

Recently, a type of study called a meta-analysis was published that looked at all of these previous studies to see what the overall effect was - in essence, a mathematical aggregation of all the reported findings to get at the big picture.

This meta-analysis found that there was a statistically reliable link between internet use and depression, but one so small as to be insignificant. In fact, it found that internet was responsible for between 0.02% and 0.03% of total changes in mood (stats geeks: the variance was not reported directly but I calculated it from the r by the coefficient of determination).

In other words, internet use explains so little of a person's depression that it's irrelevant. It's like knowing that hypothermia is a serious medical condition and that drinking a glass of water reliably lowers body temperature, but by such a small amount as to be medically unimportant.

Interestingly, I am quoted in some of the news stories about the study. Actually, I was contacted by a BBC journalist and some other stories have seemingly just nicked the quotes (often wrongly describing me as a psychiatrist).

What's curious is that I sent the BBC journalist a link to the meta-analysis, even explained what it found and what a meta-analysis is, and included comments about why the study doesn't change the general conclusion.

Instead of focusing on the existing evidence, I am quoted as being a naysayer. I have not been misquoted but the most important scientific point is omitted at the expense of presenting my words. This seems to be a common pattern where news stories often privilege opinion over data, when science privileges data over opinion.

In fact, the motto of the Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific society, translates as "on the words on no-one", but news stories often turn the hierarchy of evidence on its head, giving a skewed impression of the most fundamental way in which science works.

In this case, to suggest that science has established that internet use is strongly linked to depression when we know that it isn't.

Link to PubMed entry for latest study.
Link to PubMed entry for meta-analysis.

—Vaughan.

February 02, 2010

Injecting heroin with a doctor:

Slate has two articles on an innovative but controversial service in Vancouver, Canada, that provides injecting drug users with a place to safely inject drugs with clean equipment and medical staff on hand.

The project, 'Insite', is based on a 'harm reduction' approach which is driven by the idea that users should be encouraged to take drugs in the safest way possible.

This is partly an admission that addiction treatment is not very successful on its own, but partly a public health measure in that injecting drug users have much higher rates of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis and are more likely to pass them on to other people.

It is also the case that one of the biggest dangers from injecting drugs is the actual practice of injecting, as unsanitary conditions, ad-hoc 'cooking up' and unpredictable street dope as become much more risky when the final product is injected into the bloodstream.

These services can be controversial in some places as they can be seen to be condoning drug use, although some countries are now going further and actually prescribing heroin to addicts.

One of the biggest impacts on society is not the fact that a tiny minority of people are damaging themselves with smack, but that they tend to commit crimes to feed their habit and support a violent criminal network of dealers.

Methadone is a heroin substitute that has been prescribed for years and we know that it can stabilise the lives of users and increase their chance of kicking the habit.

But it is often not what users want. It stops the withdrawals, as it's another form of opioid drug, but it doesn't feel the same and still has the danger of overdose. One common problem is known euphemistically in the medical literature 'methadone diversion' where users sell their methadone to buy street drugs.

Several countries have trialled the prescription of heroin itself, with, it turns out, a great deal of success - including better health, a reduction in criminal activity and a higher chance of actually kicking the habit.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but one of the advantages of these projects is that the user is constantly in contact with health professionals who can provide addiction treatment.

The political and local opposition to harm reduction services is usually immense, however. Politicians want to be seen to be 'tough on drugs' and no-one, and I mean no-one, wants one of these clinics near where they live.

The Slate articles looks into the day-to-day running and talks to some of the clients of the Vancouver programme, and provides an insight into the challenges such services face. There's also a gallery of photos that captures the project in action.

Link to Slate article 'Welcome to Insite'.
Link to Slate article 'Upstairs, Downstairs'.
Link to photos of the Insite project.

—Vaughan.

January 30, 2010

The rise and fall of antidepressants:

Newsweek has an excellent article that charts the rise and fall of antidepressants from their status as a wonder drug that made people 'better than well' to the recent evidence that suggests for many people, they're not much better than placebo.

The piece particularly follows the work of psychologist Irving Kirsch who was the first to conduct a meta-analysis of the effects of anti-depressants back in 1998.

Titled "Listening to Prozac but hearing placebo" it suggested that the drugs were hardly more effective than placebo and, for many, marked Kirsch out as a biased and dangerous 'anti-psychiatrist'.

However, later studies in a similar vein by both Kirsch and others have supported his original findings and many countries have now changed their treatment recommendations as a result.

The Newsweek article tracks this story but also picks up on many important subtitles in the story, notably that the research doesn't suggest that antidepressants are useless - quite the opposite - just that their effect is only in part due to their direct chemical effect; and that many patients in trials work out that they're not taking placebo because of the side-effects and this realisation can trigger a stronger placebo effect.

It also integrates evidence from the recent STAR*D study, one of the most complete on the best methods to treat depression.

If you want a good overview of the debate on the effectiveness of these iconic drugs, this is a good place to start.

Additionally, if you're interested in a good analysis of the most recent study in this area, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Neuroskeptic blog has a great write-up and analysis of what this means for the concept of depression itself.

Link to Newsweek piece on antidepressants (via @DrDavidBallard).
Link to write-up of JAMA study at Neuroskeptic.

—Vaughan.

January 29, 2010

Can you actually be frightened to death?:

Science isn't sure whether fear can kill but several courts have been convinced and have convicted people for murder on the basis that they caused death through fright. An article just published in the American Journal of Cardiology summarises the eight murder trials.

The cases are not, as I first suspected, where someone had deliberately tried to kill someone else using fright as a 'weapon' (like in the infamous scene in Belgian serial killer mockumentary Man Bites Dog - clip here - warning: not pleasant).

Instead, they typically describe where someone has died of a heart attack in the midst of an armed robbery or assault, despite not being mortally wounded.

In a similar case, State v. Edwards,10 the defendant and his accomplices entered a bar in Tucson, Arizona and committed a robbery at gunpoint. Shortly after the robbers had fled, the proprietor experienced a heart attack and died. The defendant argued that the victim's death was accidental and unintended and could not constitute murder. Moreover, the defendant maintained that the evidence was insufficient to prove that the robbery actually caused the victim's death.

The court disagreed on both counts, finding first that accidental, unintended consequences could form the basis of a murder conviction. Second, the court pointed to the testimony of a pathologist that the death was caused by anxiety resulting from the robbery at gunpoint. The court held that this provided adequate evidence to support causation.

However, this is not the only area where supposedly being 'frightened to death' has caught the interest of psychologists. There is a small psychological literature on 'psychogenic death' that attempts to explore reports of death after curses, spells or violation of cultural taboos.

This is from an excellent brief article from 2003, published in the journal Mental Health, Religion & Culture:

Landy (1977, p. 327) describes the phenomenon as follows: ‘a process is set in motion, usually by a supposed religious or social transgression that results in the transgressor being marked out for death by a sorcerer acting on behalf of society through a ritual of accusation and condemnation; then death occurs within a brief span, usually 24 to 48 hours’. Ellenberger (1965) distinguishes acute from slow psychogenic death. In some cases, the death can be rapid, in other cases the process occurs over several weeks where the patient sickens and dies. There has been some doubt expressed as to whether voodoo death is part of ‘colonial folklore’ only based on anecdotal reports (Williams, 1928).

Lewis (1977, p. 11) asks, ‘Is it really the case that healthy people have died in a day or three days because they know they were victims of sorcery? Who has seen this happen with his own eyes? Is there no explanation for it but sorcery?’ Yap (1977) calls for concrete findings from anthropologists and medical field workers that can be appraised critically. Questions have arisen as to whether or not these victims had pre-existent pathological conditions predisposing them to death. There is however some direct evidence for its occurrence.

The evidence is not people just dropping dead, but from several documented cases where perfectly healthy people rapidly give up eating and drinking after being 'cursed' and dehydration leads to death.

Link to PubMed entry for 'Homicide by fright' article.
Link to DOI entry and summary for 'psychogenic death' article.

—Vaughan.

January 23, 2010

The soporific boogaloo:

The Guardian has a short piece and gallery on what couple's sleeping positions say about their relationship. The article is based on a humorous book called The Secret Language Of Sleep and it's not quite clear that the writer has picked up on the fact its not meant to be taken too seriously.

The idea that sleep position is linked to personality is surprisingly popular but largely untested. Only poorly controlled study has ever tried to investigate the issue. It chose only 6 out of 14 sleep position recorded from 51 females and concluded that "Sleep positions, particularly the full fetal position, appear to be related to CPI [California Psychological Inventory] variables of Sociability, Sense of Well Being, Achievement by Conformance, Femininity, and Social Maturity".

The general idea, however, has quite an interesting history. It was originally suggested in passing by the early psychoanalysts and fits well into Freud's theory of dreaming.

He suggested that when we sleep we are left alone with our unconscious which may contain lots of unpleasant or unwanted desires we don't want to think about. If we did, we might become so emotionally disturbed as to wake up, therefore, according to Freud, dreams serve to hide our unconscious desires from us by presenting them to us in a more acceptable symbolic form.

From this perspective, dreams serve to keep us asleep and Freud's big idea was that we can analyse the dream's 'manifest' or obvious content to give us an insight into the 'latent' or unconscious meaning. This is why Freud famously wrote that dreams are a "royal road to the unconscious".

According to Freudian theory, our personalities are largely a reflection of how we manage and 'defend' against out our unconscious desires. As our dreaming life occasionally breaks through into movement or speech when we sleep, it's not a big leap to link sleep position with personality.

This link was made explicitly in a 1979 book called Sleep Positions: The Night Language of the Body by the psychoanalytically inclined psychiatrist Samuel Dunkell. In the book, Dunkell readily admits there is no research to back up his ideas but links personality with sleep position on the basis of individual cases and anecdotes from his own practice, as psychoanalysts have a tendency to do.

Despite being based almost entirely on one man's opinion, the book has been remarkably influential in pop culture and there has been a steady trickle of media interest ever since that has repeated the main ideas.

In fact, the Huffington Post, which has become an unintentional champion of dodgy science, ran a piece only last week that claimed to explain 'What Your Sleep Position Says About You' based almost entirely on Dunkell's book.

There was a brief media splash in 2003 when sleep psychologist Chris Idzikowski claimed almost exactly the same based on a 'new study' but it never appeared and was presumably a PR piece for the private sleep clinic he worked for.

So we don't really know if sleep position is linked to personality, and certain can't 'read' anything about you from your night-time body position.

But the theory is so popular that even a satirical book can apparently be misinterpreted as supporting the idea.

Link to Guardian piece 'The politics of sharing a bed'.

—Vaughan.

January 19, 2010

The dream life of children:

While we may have an elaborate dream life as adults, it seems we develop the ability to have rich and vivid dreams as we grow - children start off having relatively simple dreams that become more complex throughout childhood.

Below is an excerpt from a scientific review article on 'dreaming and the brain', shortly to be published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, that addresses how our dream life changes and develops during our early years.

One of the criticisms of these findings might be that dreams seem less complex in younger children because their language isn't rich enough to describe them fully. However, there is good evidence against this idea - the complexity of dreams is not strongly related to verbal ability, although it is to the vividness of the child's mental imagery.

When do children start dreaming, and what kind of dreams do they have? Given that children often show signs of emotion in sleep, many assume that they dream a great deal. However, a series of studies by David Foulkes showed that children under the age of 7 reported dreaming only 20% of the time when awakened from REM sleep, compared with 80–90% in adults.

Preschoolers’ dreams are often static and plain, such as seeing an animal or thinking about eating. There are no characters that move, no social interactions, little feeling, and they do not include the dreamer as an active character. There are also no autobiographic, episodic memories, perhaps because children have trouble with conscious episodic recollection in general, as suggested by the phenomenon of infantile amnesia.

Preschoolers do not report fear in dreams, and there are few aggressions, misfortunes and negative emotions. Children who have night terrors, in which they awaken early during the night from SWS [slow-wave sleep] and display intense fear and agitation, are probably terrorized by disorientation owing to incomplete awakening rather than by a dream. Thus, although children of age 2–5 years can see and speak of everyday people, objects and events, they apparently cannot dream of them.

Between the ages of 5–7 years, dream reports become longer, although they are still infrequent. Dreams might contain sequences of events in which characters move about and interact, but narratives are not well developed. At around 7 years of age, dream reports become longer and more frequent, contain thoughts and feelings, the child's self becomes an actual participant in the dream, and dreams begin to acquire a narrative structure and to reflect autobiographic, episodic memories.

It could be argued that perhaps all children dream, but some do not yet realize that they are dreaming, do not remember their dreams, or cannot report them because of poor verbal skills. Contrary to these intuitive suggestions, dream recall was found to correlate best with abilities of mental imagery rather than with language proficiency... Put simply, it is children with the most developed mental imagery and visuo-spatial skills (rather than verbal or memory capabilities) that report the most dreams, suggesting a real difference in dream experience.

I've removed the numeric references for ease of reading, but you can find the full research sources in the original article.

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

—Vaughan.

Hard as nails:

Tom alerted me to this fantastic brief case published in the British Medical Journal where a builder is admitted to hospital in great pain after a nail penetrated all the way through his boot. But it turned out that the pain was entirely psychological, as the nail had missed his foot by sliding between his toes.

A builder aged 29 came to the accident and emergency department having jumped down on to a 15 cm nail. As the smallest movement of the nail was painful he was sedated with fentanyl and midazolam. The nail was then pulled out from below. When his boot was removed a miraculous cure appeared to have taken place. Despite entering proximal to the steel toecap the nail had penetrated between the toes: the foot was entirely uninjured.

As Tom mentioned "One of the things I love about it is that the builder had no incentive to 'fake'. He knew he should have acted tough so we know that the pain he felt wasn't over-acting. It was imaginary pain, but it was real imaginary pain!"

This isn't really the nocebo effect, where 'side-effects' appear after having taken nothing but a placebo, but more similar to what doctors might describe in its persistent form as somatisation disorder where physical symptoms appear that aren't explained by tissue damage.

However, both are similar in that real pain arises from beliefs, expectations and perceptions. We now know that all pain has a significant mental component and, consequently, psychological therapy is an effective treatment for chronic pain.

It's no coincidence that Tom picked up this snippet in a talk by psychologist Stuart Derbyshire who has done some fantastic studies on the neural basis of psychologically controlled and induced pain by using hypnosis in fMRI scanners.

Link to brief piece in the BMJ.

—Vaughan.

January 15, 2010

Beyond crossed senses in synaesthesia:

Cognitive Daily covers a super-elegant study that helps us understand whether synaesthesia is really just a case of 'crossed senses' or whether the perceptual blending effect requires the person to have processed some of the meaning of the triggering experience.

The traditional explanation of most types of synaesthesia is that the brain's sensory areas are overly connected, so activation of one sense triggers activity in another area which causes the experience. However, there has been some recent evidence that synaesthesia doesn't work purely at this basic sensory level.

For example, a recent study by neuropsychologist Jamie Ward and colleagues reported that letter-colour synaesthetes needed to be concentrating on the letters to trigger colours - seeing them 'out of the corner of the eye' didn't work - suggesting there must be some involvement of focus and concentration and not just a reliance on incoming sensory information.

To test the idea further, it would be ideal to be able to separate out experiences where we process just sensory information and experiences where we also understand meaning but as we tend to deal with both at once, this is not easy to do.

But this new study managed to do exactly this in people with colour-speech synaesthesia, where affected people experience colours when they hear specific words, using a perceptual illusion called the McGurk effect.

It's an intriguing effect that you can see in action on the Cognitive Daily page, but essentially, it shows that seeing someone mouth a word affects what we hear, so if we are played the syllable 'gah', but see someone mouthing 'bah', the brain makes a compromise and we experience hearing the syllable 'dah'.

So the effect is a perfect tool to separate out sensory information and meaning, because the researchers can play exactly the same sound but change what word the participants hear simply by showing clips of people mouthing different words.

If colour-speech synaesthesia works only through crossed-senses then the McGurk effect should make no difference to the colours because the exact same sound is played each time, but if this form of synaesthesia is triggered by meaning, the colours should differ because the McGurk effect changes which words are perceived and understood, despite the identical sound.

This is exactly what the researchers found, providing additional evidence that synaesthesia is not just a sensory confusion, it is based in how the brain understands meaning.

It's an incredibly elegant study and the Cognitive Daily piece covers it equally as elegantly.

Link to CogDaily on 'Synesthesia and the McGurk effect'.
Link to PubMed entry for study.
pdf of study full text.

—Vaughan.

The museum of narcoculture:

The Washington Post has an absolutely astounding gallery that looks inside Mexico's 'Museum of Drugs' that is only open to government and army officials and chronicles the ongoing narcowar.

It's not only a museum of drugs samples and smuggling methods, it also captures some of the culture of the narcotraffickers - including captured diamond encrusted guns and items from branded clothing created by cartels for their members.

Around the corner, the exhibits show how drugs are smuggled, and here human ingenuity is on full display. There is dope hidden inside picture frames, logs, gas tanks, clay pots, tamales, concrete blocks, truck tires, soda cans, car bumpers, shoes, stuffed armadillos and a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

There is a kind of James Bond or Dr. Evil quality to some exhibits. An attache case confiscated from an outlaw surveillance team holds computer boards and other gadgetry to monitor cellphone calls. The cartels now employ their own fleets of semi-submersible submarines. On display is a large sea buoy with a coded beacon device the traffickers attach to huge payloads of drugs they can dump into the sea and pick up later.

Also, apparently, the narcos now have their own line of clothes. There are dark blue polo shirts sporting a kind of family crest for the Zetas, a notorious cartel founded by former special forces soldiers that controls vast swaths along the Gulf of Mexico from Brownsville, Tex., to Cancun. The shirts, which appear to be 100 percent cotton, are emblazoned with a Z and the words: "Cartel del Golfo."

One of the most fascinating pictures is of a shrine to the unofficial saint Jesús Malverde, literally worshipped by the drug trafficker subculture to bring good luck. It turns out there are a great deal of Malverde videos on YouTube, some of which are tribute videos, others are clips of films or songs about him.

The museum is clearly curated with a great deal of care and consideration and has an slightly uncanny kitsch style that belies its morbid undertones.

Link to WashPost gallery of Mexico's drug museum.
Link to WashPost article on a visit to the museum (via BoingBoing).

—Vaughan.

January 12, 2010

Animal mind reading:

RadioLab has a fantastic programme on what animals can understand about the minds of humans, their own species, and other creatures.

When we gaze into the eyes of our beloved pets, can we ever really know what they’re thinking? Is it naive to assume they might be experiencing something close to the emotions we feel? Or, on the contrary, is it ridiculous to assume that they AREN’T feeling anything back? In this hour of Radiolab, we explore what science can say about what goes on in the minds of animals.

Wonderfully put together, fantasti... oh you know the rest.

Link to RadioLab 'Animal Minds' episode.

—Vaughan.

The hazards of injecting toad venom:

The Journal of Forensic Sciences has an interesting, if not tragic, case of a death after the injection of toad extract. The injector apparently though he was injecting MDMA ('escstasy') but the substance he was sold turned out to contain lethal levels of bufotenine, a toad venom, which is occasionally used as a hallucinogenic drug.

From the case study:

A 24-year-old male was observed to collapse and die soon after an intravenous injection of 35–40 ml of what was thought to be ‘ecstasy’ (methylenedioxy-methamphetamine or MDMA). A friend had injected a smaller volume (20 ml) and had vomited but survived. The decedent was a known intravenous amphetamine user but was not known to abuse any other illicit drugs. The body was transferred to FSSA for autopsy along with a plastic bag containing the injected material and the empty syringe...

The basic extract was also found to contain paracetamol, promethazine and diclofenac, in addition to bufotenine...

Bufotenine (dimethylserotonin) is a tryptamine derivative alkaloid related to the neurotransmitter serotonin. It is found naturally in certain plants and in the secretions of various toads. Resibufogenin, cinobufagin and bufalin, known collectively as bufadienolides, are nitrogen-free steroidal lactones that are also found in toad venom. They may be cardiotoxic, having a similar effect to digoxin [an extract of the foxglove plant]. Toad secretions have also been dried and smoked as bufotenine has hallucinogenic effects, resulting in classification as a prohibited substance in Australia.

Link to PubMed entry for case study.

—Vaughan.

January 11, 2010

The temperance pill:

New Scientist has an excellent article looking at current attempts to develop a pill that will treat alcoholism or help people reduce their cravings for booze.

It's a really well-rounded piece that captures the problems with the 'cure in a pill' method as well as the neuroscience behind attempts to alter the chemistry of craving and addiction.

Apart from drugs to treat associated mental illnesses, one of the few widely used treatments at the moment, naltrexone, is designed to make booze less pleasurable by blocking opioid receptors, but it is far from effective for everyone:

Naltrexone's biggest stumbling block, however, is that it fails to treat some of the more painful aspects of abstinence. Drinking dampens the brain's response to stress - indeed, many heavy drinkers become hooked on alcohol for this reason alone. The result is that going cold turkey without also calming the brain's stress pathways can be a distressing experience. "People feel just terrible," says George Koob, a specialist in the neurobiology of addiction at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. "These individuals are miserable. They have panic attacks."

Targeting these drink-hijacked stress pathways - often without even touching the brain's pleasure circuits - is now the hottest area in alcoholism research.

And several of the new drugs outlined in the article are designed to do exactly this.

It's probably worth mentioning that, apart from naltrexone, probably the only other widely used medication is disulfiram, which, rather than change the cravings, just makes the patient unpleasantly ill if they do drink alcohol as a form of chemical dissuasion.

Of course, if the patient is determined to continue drinking, they'll just stop taking the drug, a problem with all chemical treatments, and so comprehensive addiction treatment needs to be more than just medication.

Link to NewSci on 'Could popping a pill stop you hitting the bottle?'

—Vaughan.

January 08, 2010

The Year in Robotics:

MIT's online magazine Technology Review has a good short article reviewing the year in robotics, giving the highlights of the latest developments from 2009.

The piece has loads of links so you can read up, and sometimes see, the robots in action and it looks like giving robots 'social skills' to interact with humans has been a big area of progress:

The socialization of robots was an important area of research this year. Many researchers believe that giving robots social skills will make them better at assisting people in homes, schools, offices, and hospitals. Andrea Thomaz, a TR35 innovator for 2009, created robots that can learn simple grasping tasks from human instructors who use social cues, such as verbal instructions, gestures, and expressions.

Another robot, made by a group at Carnegie Mellon University, guides conversations by making "eye contact" to suggest that it's time to speak ("Making Robots Give the Right Glances"). Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, created a machine-learning program that lets a robotic head develop better facial expressions. By looking in a mirror, the robot can analyze the way its motors move different parts of the face, and create new expressions ("A Robot that's Learning to Smile"). And a virtual robot mimicked sneakiness, hiding in virtual shadows and darting between obstacles to remain undetected ("Modeling Sneaky Robots").

Link to Tech Review Year in Robotics.

—Vaughan.

January 07, 2010

The evolution of projectile weapons:

American Scientist has a fascinating podcast on the evolution of the human capacity for killing at a distance - in other words, the cultural evolution of projectile weapons.

The talk is by anthropologist Steven Churchill who looks at what motivated the development of projectile weapons - initially rocks, slings and spears and - and what effect these developments had on the culture of ancient peoples.

He starts as far back as the time when neanderthals and modern humans were both in existence and discusses how the development of these weapons may have influence the competition between the two species.

He also discusses how these weapons may have affected human evolution and notes that these weapons make group attacks easier, meaning that it was probably easier for societies to police themselves and so leading to selection against aggressive individuals.

A thoroughly fascinating discussion, where Churchill talks about historical evidence as well as his own studies where he's asked people to test the limits of using ancient weapons.

Link to 'The Evolution of the Human Capacity for Killing at a Distance'.

—Vaughan.

January 05, 2010

Psychiatric drug combining on the rise:

A study just released in the Archives of General Psychiatry has found that the prescription of multiple psychiatric drugs to individual patients has increased greatly in recent years despite their being little hard evidence about the benefits and risks of combining medication.

The practice of prescribing multiple drugs is called 'polypharmacy' and usually occurs because a single medication doesn't treat the symptoms adequately or quickly enough.

This situation is common in psychiatry partly due to what is euphemistically known as 'treatment resistance'. This phrase is often used as if the patient has an especially tough case of the disorder (e.g. they have 'treatment resistant schizophrenia') or if it is a biological trait of the person (the patient is 'treatment resistant') but it could equally well describe the fact that the drugs don't work very well - or rather, they don't work very well for everyone.

This is common enough that in schizophrenia, about a third of patients show little or no response to common antipsychotic drugs and many of the rest don't have their symptoms completely controlled. There are similar numbers in people with depression.

It may also be the case that a patient has other symptoms, severe anxiety for example, and in any of these cases the psychiatrist will often add medications on top of each other, attempting to improve the outcome.

However, there is very little research on medication combinations. We have some studies that show that adding one drug to another ('augmenting' in the jargon) can improve outcome with some drugs and in some conditions, but these are few and far between.

There is virtually no good quality evidence on the effects of three or more drugs, but this is exactly where the rates of prescribing have risen, as shown by the most recent study which looked at how common this was in US office-based (rather than on hospital ward) consultations with a psychiatrist:

Between 1996 and 2006, there was a substantial increase in the proportion of patient visits in which 2 or more psychotropic medications were prescribed. During this period, the proportion of visits in which 3 or more psychotropic medications were prescribed increased from fewer than 1 in 5 to nearly 1 in 3.

One of the reasons there are so few trials of medication combinations is that drug companies are reluctant to fund them, given that they would rarely include two in-patent medications from the same company, meaning they could use the results to promote their products.

This has meant that we have had to wait until quite recently for, for example, the results of the US government funded STAR*D study on depression treatment to find out whether some combinations actually help.

Link to study on increase in polypharmacy in psychiatry.

—Vaughan.

January 04, 2010

Nuthin' but a G thang:

Dr Petra has an excellent write-up of the new study which has been widely reported as showing there is 'no genetic evidence for the g spot', but in fact indicates that there is 'no genetic evidence for thinking you have a g spot', which is quite a different thing and doesn't bear particularly well on whether this famed point of sexual ecstasy really exists.

The research is a twin study, which looks at the differences in how human traits vary between identical twins, who are genetically identical, and regular twins who share, on average, only 50% of their genetic information. The differences between how the trait varies between the two types of twins indicates how closely controlled the trait is by genetics in that sample.

The rationale behind the research is that if the g spot is a genuine fixed anatomical feature, then it should be more likely to be influenced by genetics, as other such features are.

However, this study didn't measure anything anatomical, it just asked the women whether they thought they had a g spot or not with a single question: “Do you believe you have a so called G spot, a small areas the size of a 20p coin on the front wall of your vagina that is sensitive to deep pressure?”.

This is a bit of an odd strategy because we're not necessarily the best guides to our own internal anatomy.

This was demonstrated in 1998 when a study by surgeon Helen O'Connell and colleagues dissected several dead bodies and found that the clitoris was much larger than had been thought for thousands of years and in fact had nerves and blood vessels that extend deep within the body.

Crucially, the sexual experiences of women throughout history had not provided a reliable guide to the anatomy of the clitoris and it took a detailed look at the body's structures to work this out. This suggests that asking people whether they think they have a particular feature may not be a reliable guide to whether they do.

Dr Petra's write-up gives an excellent account of the history of 'g spot' concept and discusses how this study fits into the bigger picture.

Link to 'Where have all the g spots gone?'

—Vaughan.

January 03, 2010

The death row inmate:

A summary of an eye-opening 2002 article on the psychological characteristics of prisoners on 'death row' in the United States, published in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law.

Death row inmate characteristics, adjustment, and confinement: a critical review of the literature

Behav Sci Law. 2002;20(1-2):191-210.

Cunningham MD, Vigen MP.

This article reviews and summarizes research on death row inmates. The contributions and weaknesses of death row demographic data, clinical studies, and research based on institutional records are critiqued. Our analysis shows that death row inmates are overwhelmingly male and disproportionately Southern. Racial representation remains controversial.

Frequently death row inmates are intellectually limited and academically deficient. Histories of significant neurological insult are common, as are developmental histories of trauma, family disruption, and substance abuse. Rates of psychological disorder among death row inmates are high, with conditions of confinement appearing to precipitate or aggravate these disorders. Contrary to expectation, the extant research indicates that the majority of death row inmates do not exhibit violence in prison even in more open institutional settings.

These findings have implications for forensic mental health sentencing evaluations, competent attorney representation, provision of mental health services, racial disparity in death sentences, death row security and confinement policies, and moral culpability considerations. Future research directions on death row populations are suggested.

It's a fascinating, if not slightly morbid article, and the full text is available online as a pdf if you want a full breakdown of the research.

Link to PubMed entry for study.
pdf of full text of the article.

—Vaughan.

January 02, 2010

The psychology of 'super-human strength':

Scientific American has an interesting short piece on whether people can really demonstrate super-human strength in emergency situations. The typical story is where someone is trapped under a car after an accident and a friend or relative manages to lift a seemingly impossible weight to free them.

This common tale has all the hallmarks of an urban myth, but it turns out to be partially plausible. Fear seems to increase our available muscle strength - but not by super-human amounts - only by a fraction of our normal lifting power.

Vladimir Zatsiorsky, a professor of kinesiology at Penn State who has extensively studied the biomechanics of weightlifting, draws the distinction between the force that our muscles are able to theoretically apply, which he calls "absolute strength," and the maximum force that they can generate through the conscious exertion of will, which he calls "maximal strength." An ordinary person, he has found, can only summon about 65 percent of their absolute power in a training session, while a trained weightlifter can exceed 80 percent...

But there's a limit to how fast and how strong fear can make us. We've all heard stories about panicked mothers lifting cars off their trapped babies. They've been circulating for so long that many of us assume that they must be true. Zatsiorsky's work, however, suggests that while fear can indeed motivate us to approach more closely to our absolute power level than even the fiercest competition, there's no way to exceed it. A woman who can lift 100 pounds at the gym might, according to Zatsiorsky, be able to lift 135 pounds in a frenzy of maternal fear. But she's not going to suddenly be able to lift a 3,000-pound car.

The SciAm article is apparently an excerpt from a new book entitled Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger.

Link to SciAm excerpt on 'super-human strength'
Link to book website.

—Vaughan.

December 22, 2009

Sampling from the stream of consciousness:

The New York Times has a fascinating article revisiting a classic problem in psychology of whether our accounts of our individual 'streams of consciousness' have any useful role in the scientific understanding the mind.

Many of the early studies in psychology relied on people simply reporting 'what they thought' and got a bad reputation due to the rather haphazard ways in which studies were conducted.

In part, this led to a swing in the other direction, where the extremes of behaviourism suggested that not only were these methods useless but that the 'stream of consciousness' played no causal role in our behaviour - in effect, it was seen as uninteresting mental fluff.

Thankfully, mainstream psychology has moved on and now often tries to integrate conscious experience with objective observational data, but this isn't always the easiest of tasks either practically or theoretically (indeed, the difficulty is the basis of the 'hard problem' of consciousness).

Recently, psychologists have developed the experience sampling method to try and make sample the stream of consciousness a little more systematic. It involves giving someone a device that beeps randomly and when it sounds, they have to record exactly what they were thinking about or have to rate a certain aspect of the current psychological state.

The resulting mental freeze-frames are remarkably diverse.

On the third day of Melanie’s experiment, as her boyfriend was asking her a question about insurance, she was trying to remember the word “periodontist.” On the fourth day, she was having a strong urge to go scuba diving. On the sixth day, she was picking flower petals from the sink while hearing echoes of the phrase “nice long time” in her head.

These dispatches from the front lines of consciousness might be useful to a novelist seeking authentic material. But can they contribute to a scientific understanding of the mind?

...Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher at the University of California, Riverside, says after-the-fact interviews should be treated with caution: one cannot assume the subjects will be honest, or that they are not twisting their answers to conform with their own biases, or telling the experimenter what they think he wants to hear, or simply filling in details they forgot.

The article is riffing on the recent book by Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel called Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic and a recent article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies where the debate was opened out to a range of cognitive scientists for their views.

Link to NYT piece 'Taking Mental Snapshots to Plumb Our Inner Selves'.

—Vaughan.

December 04, 2009

Clown therapy: trick or treat:

If you're wondering how effective your average clown is, wonder no more. I've found a randomised controlled trial that tested the effectiveness of clowns in treating children's anxiety before an operation, in comparison to midazolam, an anti-anxiety drug.

It turned out, clowns worked the best, but wow, doesn't the study summary read weirdly.

Clowns for the prevention of preoperative anxiety in children: a randomized controlled trial.

Paediatr Anaesth. 2009 Mar;19(3):262-6.

Golan G, Tighe P, Dobija N, Perel A, Keidan I.

OBJECTIVE: To determine if specially trained professional clowns allayed preoperative anxiety and resulted in a smooth anesthetic induction compared to the use of midazolam or no intervention.

METHODS: This was a randomized, controlled, and blinded study conducted with children 3-8 years of age undergoing general anesthesia and elective outpatient surgery. Patients were assigned to one of three groups: Group 1 did not receive midazolam or clown presence; group 2 received 0.5 mg x kg(-1) oral midazolam 30 min before surgery up to a maximum of 15 mg; and group 3 had two specially trained clowns present upon arrival to the preoperative holding area and throughout operating room (OR) entrance and mask application for inhalation induction of anesthesia. The children were videotaped for later grading.

RESULTS: The clown group had a statistically significant lower modified-Yale Preoperative Anxiety Scale score in the preoperative holding area compared to the control and midazolam group. The clowns' effect on anxiety reduction continued when the children entered the OR but was equal at this point to the midazolam group. Upon application of the anesthesia mask no significant differences were detected between the groups.

CONCLUSIONS: This study found that the use of preoperative medically trained clowns for children undergoing surgery can significantly alleviate preoperative anxiety. However, clowns do not have any effect once the anesthesia mask is introduced.

The use of 'clown doctors' is actually pretty common in Children's hospitals and, as far as I know, the practice was invented by the American physician Patch Adams.

As for adverse reactions, despite the popular belief in 'clown phobia', variously called ballatrophobia, coulrophobia or my favourite - bozophobia, I could only find one case report of this particular anxiety disorder. Interestingly, it was discovered by a clown doctor who got a powerful negative reaction from an adult patient.

However, there is a video of a woman undergoing psychological treatment for clown phobia on that font of medical knowledge, YouTube.

Link to PubMed entry for clown trial.

—Vaughan.

November 19, 2009

Time-space fusion:

Neurophilosophy has an excellent piece on 'time-space' synaesthesia where affected individuals experience units of time - such as hours, days, or months - as occupying specific locations in space relative to their own body.

The image on the right is taken from a BBC News article on time-space synaesthesia and was drawn by one lady to illustrate how days of the week appear to her.

However, Neurophilosophy piece covers two new studies, one on a person with synaesthesia who experiences months in the space around her body in the form of a '7' shape:

Michelle Jarick of the Synaesthesia Research Group at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and her colleagues describe the case of an individual whose time-space synaesthesia has a previously undescribed feature. Like other time-space synaesthetes, the 21-year-old individual, known as L, experiences the time of day and the months of the year as being represented in the space around her body. She experiences the hours of the day in the form of a large "clock face", and her mental calender consists of a giant number "7", which extends for approximately 1 meter around her waist, and on which the months of the year are arranged.

Both of the studies covered in the article demonstrate a crucial technique in synaesthesia research - in part, a demonstration that the effect is a genuine cross-over of the senses.

The general technique is the same no matter what form of synaesthesia you're testing. It involves finding a task which will be changed by the triggered sense but not (or not so much) by the original perception.

For example, with the lady who drew the layout of her months in the image above, October appears on her right and July appears on her left.

So if you did a reaction task that involved indicating what side a word appeared on, you'd expect someone with this form of synaesthesia to do worse when October appeared on the left and July appeared on the right, owing to the confusion caused by the unfamiliar associations, or better when they appeared on the expected sides.

This form of study, where synaesthesia can be shown to improve or worsen performance on other tasks related mostly to the triggered perception is the basis of much research in this area, and the Neurophilosophy piece outlines how these two new studies have shown how time-space fusion is associated with better abilities in understanding time and space.

Link to Neurophilosophy on 'The cognitive benefits of time-space synaesthesia'.
Link to BBC News on time-space synaesthesia.

—Vaughan.

November 18, 2009

As I walk through the uncanny valley:

Seed Magazine has an interesting piece on the 'uncanny valley' effect, where humanoid figures become increasingly more attractive until they're 'a bit too lifelike' and start seeming uncomfortably eerie.

It's a fantastic piece because it discusses the development of the concept of 'uncanniness' - from the initial explanations by Freud to some tentative experimental studies that attempts to explain why some androids feel a bit creepy.

Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the particular occurrences of the uncanny, in which humans are bothered by interaction with human-like models, began as a psychological curiosity. But as our ability to design artificial life has increased—along with our dependence on it—getting to the heart of why people respond negatively to realistic models of themselves has taken on a new importance. Attempts to understand the origins of this reaction, known since the 1970s as the “uncanny valley response,” have drawn on everything from repressed fears of castration to an evolutionary mechanism for mate selection, but there has been little empirical evidence to assess the validity of these ideas.

I've always wondered whether people with robot fetishes, who get sexually aroused by android-like sex partners, are less susceptible to the uncanny valley effect.

Best of luck getting funding for that research project, I think to myself.

Link to Seed article 'Into the Uncanny Valley'.

—Vaughan.

November 16, 2009

Like the colours of the prism:

Havelock Ellis is better known as a pioneering sexologist but I've just found this account of a young man with striking synaesthesia from a 1904 edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry

Ellis is apparently recounting a case from a Dr. Ulrich of the 'Asylum for Epileptics at Zurich', which I suspect is because he is summarising the original French report for the readers of the BJP.

The patient is described as acquiring epilepsy after catching measles at the age of three and having experiencing ongoing neurological impairment as a result, particularly with memory problems.

However, he does have a striking form of synaesthesia, where the senses become crossed, and the description is appropriately vivid:

From his earliest years voices have had colours to him, and he can hear nothing without a definite colour impression. The colours are very delicate, and transparent, like the colours of the prism; he does not actually see them before his eyes, but seems to hear them at the same time as he sees them. The vowel sounds have the most intense colours, which are here fully described, as well as the colours of musical instruments, cries of animals, etc. Colour hearing is, however, by no means the only form of synaesthesia presented by this subject. All the senses are affected. There is optical synaesthesia, whereby geometrical forms, etc., are coloured, and whereby also colours have faintly marked tastes.

There is, again, olfactory synaesthesia, by which odours produce colours; gustatory synaesthesia, by which tastes produce colours; and similarly tactile synaesthesia, and synaesthesia produced by painful impressions. There is finally a reciprocity of synaesthesia, by which colours recall the sensations with which they are associated. Among the points to be noted are that pains produce sensations of taste and also of temperature, while heat sensations produce sensations of vision and also of taste, and olfactory stimuli produce both visual and taste sensations...

The phenomena are most vivid after a quick succession of fits, and at such times it occasionally happens that there is some slight mental disturbance, and the patient fancies he is bewitched by the colours. Ulrich believes that all the synaesthesias so far known are combined in the person of his subject.

Although Ellis is one of the founders of sexology, he admitted in his autiobiography that he was impotent until the age of 60.

Link to entry in the British Journal of Psychiatry archive.

—Vaughan.

November 11, 2009

The Madame Butterfly Effect:

I've just found a curious study on whether opera fans are more accepting of suicide in the case of dishonor to one's family in real life, in light of the fact that this is a common theme in several well known stage masterpieces.

It turns out that they are, and the researchers label the phenomenon the 'Madame Butterfly effect' after the famous opera of the same name where one of the lead characters kills themselves to avoid dishonour.

Opera subculture and suicide for honor.

Death Studies. 2002 Jun;26(5):431-7.

Stack S.

The influence of music-based subcultures on suicidality has been the subject of much debate but little scholarly research. While previous work has documented that suicide is a remarkably frequent cause of death in opera, it has not explored the related consequences on opera's audience. In particular, the possible influence of the opera subculture on suicide acceptability has been largely unexplored. Suicide in the case of life without honor, the "Madame Butterfly Effect," is a theme in opera. Persons who are drawn into and/or influenced by the opera subculture of honor are hypothesized to be more accepting of suicide in the case of dishonor to one's family. Data are from the national general social surveys (N = 845). A multivariate logistic regression analysis finds that opera fans are 2.37 times more accepting of suicide because of dishonor than nonfans. Only two variables, religiosity and education, are more closely related to suicide acceptability than opera fanship. These are the first empirical results on the subject of opera and suicide acceptability.

Link to PubMed entry for opera and attitudes to suicide study.

—Vaughan.

Terrorism, society and psychology:

The latest edition of Monitor on Psychology has an excellent article on the psychology of terrorism, looking at both what motivates people to join terrorist organisations and what influences attitudes to terrorist groups.

Being an article in the publication of the American Psychological Association, it's a round-up of American research on terrorism, however, there are two findings on terrorism which perhaps suggest one of the political challenges in dealing with the problem.

One of those is from terror management theory, in which making people temporarily conscious of a risk to their life or their impending mortality affects how people think about a range of issues, including response to terrorism:

To test whether the theory applies to the conflict between the Middle East and the West, Pyszczynski's team conducted a set of studies in the United States, Iran and Israel. In all three countries, people who were subtly reminded of their mortality—and thus primed to cling more strongly to their group identities—were more likely to support violence against the out group. Iranians were more likely to support suicide bombing against Westerners. Americans were more likely to advocate military force to battle Islamic extremists, even if it meant killing thousands of civilians. Israelis were more likely to condone violence against Palestinians.

So discussing mortal threat increases people's desire for violent responses to perceived terrorism.

However, the article makes clear that radicalisation is potentially increased by violent responses and that successful deredicalisation programmes take a supportive rather than a punitive approach:

In preliminary research, Kruglanski and colleagues note that many of these programs share:

• An intellectual component, often involving moderate Muslim clerics who hold dialogues with imprisoned detainees about the Qu'ran's true teachings on violence and jihad.

• An emotional component that defuses detainees' anger and frustration by showing authentic concern for their families, through means such as funding their children's education or offering professional training for their wives. This aspect also capitalizes on the fact that detainees are weary from their lifestyles and imprisonment.

• A social component that addresses the reality that detainees often re-enter societies that may rekindle their radical beliefs. A program in Indonesia, for instance, uses former militants who are now law-abiding citizens to convince former terrorists that violence against civilians compromises the image of Islam.

So the political dilemma seems to be that simply discussing the threat of terrorism makes people less likely to support the most effective counter-terrorist programmes, owing to the effect of mortality awareness increasing the desire for violent responses, which, if carried out, could increase support for terrorism in the target population.

Answers on a postcard please...

Link to article 'Understanding terrorism'.

—Vaughan.

November 10, 2009

Orchids, dandelions and cognitive genetics:

The Atlantic has an excellent article on how our assumptions about genetic vulnerability to mental illness may be misplaced, as many studies have missed out how the same genetic factors may cause people to thrive but only in quite specific circumstances.

One of the difficulties with psychiatry research is that it often has a sample bias, a blind spot if you will, as it typically studies people who turn up in front of mental health professionals because they're a problem to themselves or others.

It finds social, psychological or biological factors associated with the problem and then speculates that these might be involved in causing the problem.

Many times throughout history, however, it has later been discovered that perfectly functional people have the same traits but they weren't specifically looked for and so weren't included when the theories were devised.

In this case, the article tackles how genes originally identified as 'risk factors' for mental illness, could, in fact, be equally well conceived of as 'sensitivity factors' that heighten response to all situations.

When these situations include tragedy, abuse, or what in the medical literature are euphemistically called 'life events' (essentially, the shit in 'shit happens') the result may be an increased chance of mental illness, but when the situations are positive, life-enhancing opportunities, this extra sensitivity may lead to better outcomes.

Though this hypothesis is new to modern biological psychiatry, it can be found in folk wisdom, as the University of Arizona developmental psychologist Bruce Ellis and the University of British Columbia developmental pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce pointed out last year in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The Swedes, Ellis and Boyce noted in an essay titled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.

At first glance, this idea, which I’ll call the orchid hypothesis, may seem a simple amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis. It merely adds that environment and experience can steer a person up instead of down. Yet it’s actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness.

Link to Atlantic article 'The Science of Success'.

—Vaughan.

November 09, 2009

Alien hands in fiction:

Alien or anarchic hand syndrome is where you lose conscious control of one of your hands after brain damage, to the point where it seems to have a 'will of its own'. There's a great short article in this month's Cortex examining how this curious phenomenon has appeared in fiction.

Famously, something similar appears in the film Dr Strangelove to the point where the disorder is sometimes called the 'Dr Strangelove syndrome'.

But it turns out that self-directed hands have also appeared in numerous other works of fiction. I was particularly taken by this plot device:

The phenomenon is usually accounted for as resulting from lesions to the contralateral Supplementary Motor Area (SMA). However, it has also been associated to the severance of the Corpus Callosum and William Boyd, in his short story, ‘‘Bizarre Situations’’, from the collection ‘‘On the Yankee Station’’, embraced this anatomical interpretation of the syndrome. The main character of this novel, who underwent a callosotomy, does not know whether or not his left hand shot his best friend’s wife dead.

The Cortex article is by neuropsychologist Sergio Della Salla who has done a great deal of the research on this condition himself and who also wrote a great article on the condition for The Psychologist back in 2005.

However, it misses out one of the most famous depictions of a hand with a 'mind of its own' - from the film The Evil Dead II - where Ash's hand becomes possessed and he ends up having to chainsaw it off. There's a clip of the scene here, which is a bit icky if you're not into that sort of thing.

Link to 'Dr Strangelove syndrome' in literature.

—Vaughan.

October 28, 2009

An illusory interlude:

I just found a some curious case reports on two people who had hallucinations in everyday life owing to unrecognised narcolepsy, but not realising it, they assumed their hallucinated episodes had genuinely occurred.

Unlike in psychosis, where affected people often believe that their hallucinations are real, people who have narcolepsy and have hallucinations are usually able to realise they were triggered by the condition.

In this case, the people were unaware that they had a tendency to hallucinate and so the boundaries between hallucination and reality began to blur.

The 45-year-old technical manager had a multi-year history of daytime sleepiness... He frequently had curious experiences during the day – the neighbour throwing litter into the patient's bin; his wife throwing precious objects away. Sometimes he saw himself trying to clean dirt on the side of a ditch. These memories and experiences were confusing. They gave rise to a surprised and suspicious state of mind.

Improbable and incomprehensible things happened, leaving him in doubt. Sometimes he gave sensitive-paranoid interpretations to the events, he also denounced the neighbour for filling his bin. His paranoidity drove his psychiatrist to the diagnostic conclusion of a delusional psychosis.

Recently he had a severe conflict with his chief on account of a vivid experience of having had sexual intercourse with the chief's wife, which he mentioned to colleagues. Remembering every detail, he was convinced that his story was true, but the reactions of those around him gradually convinced him that this experience could be a hallucination.

The man was eventually referred to a sleep clinic, diagnosed with narcolepsy and successfully treated.

The other case is of a young woman who hallucinated that she had been sexually assaulted on a bus - an experience so vivid that she reported it to the police with numerous details of the offender.

She later realised that that she could have been wrong and as part of the court case for making a false police report she was medically assessed and also diagnosed with narcolepsy after a sleep lab assessment.

Link to PubMed entry for case reports.

—Vaughan.

Tracked with pain:

Today's Nature has an excellent piece about an increasing and currently not well-researched trend for fMRI brain scan 'neurofeedback' treatments, where the patient is shown a visual representation of the activity of a certain brain area in the hope of learning to control it.

In this case, the big idea is that a patient with chronic pain is shown real-time activity in their anterior cingulate cortex, an area in the frontal lobe associated with the 'unpleasantness' of pain (rather than just its physical sensation), and they can see when they doing something to successfully reduce the activity and can try and learn to do it reliably.

The article looks at the work of Sean Mackey who researches the area but is appropriately skeptical about a number of companies who have recently sprung up offering this as a treatment, despite the lack of firm evidence.

As you may recall, this premature commercialisation is a bit of a pattern with fMRI research, as you can also buy the services of companies offering 'lie detection' and 'neuromarketing' despite a similar lack of evidence for their usefulness.

However, the piece also looks more generally at the neuroscience of pain which is, if you'll excuse the pun, becoming a hot area, both as the understanding of pain moves away from the idea that it happens 'in the body' to the idea that it is handled by numerous brain circuits, each which may be involved if different aspects of the experience and our behavioural reaction to it.

In some of his other work, Mackey's laboratory has used fMRI to explore these connections between pain processing and cognitive processes. Fear of pain, for example, can increase the pain itself, and Mackey's group studied some of the brain regions involved in this anticipation. In another study he showed that watching someone else in pain activates brain areas that are fairly distinct from those active during one's own pain. And in unpublished work he has found that romantic love can lessen the experience of pain. Mackey says these connections demonstrate how strong an influence conscious thought may have over pain processing.

Link to Nature article 'Shooting pain'.

—Vaughan.

October 22, 2009

Time is of the essence:

New Scientist has an excellent article on how the brain makes sense of time and looks at why certain intense experiences seem to trigger the perception that time has slowed down.

It covers David Eagleman's well-known study where he dropped people 30 metres into a safety net and while falling, asked them to read off numbers that were flashing by too fast for normal perception.

The idea was that if time really did 'slow down', or rather, if the brain became 'over-clocked' and the resolution of time perception genuinely became more fine-grained, the participants could read off some of the digits that they couldn't normally make sense of. As it happened, they couldn't, suggesting that time slowing effect is an illusion and not an effect of the brain going into overdrive.

The piece also has an interesting discussion of how cognitive scientists are using the wagon wheel effect to study time perception in the brain. This is where after a certain speed, spokes on a wheel seem to starting moving backward.

This has been used to work out the brain's 'refresh rate', but it turns out that this is unlikely to be a global process because when looking at two such objects moving at exactly the same rate, only one of them might be subject to the effect.

This suggests that the brain might have many clocks, perhaps each assigned to a different task:

The case for discrete perception is far from closed, however. When Eagleman showed subjects a pair of overlapping patterns, both moving at the same rate, they often saw one pattern reverse independently of the other. "If you were taking frames of the world, then everything would have to reverse at the same time," says Eagleman.

VanRullen has an alternative explanation. The brain processes different objects within the visual field independently of one another, even if they overlap in space, he suggests. So the RPL [right inferior parietal lobe] may well be taking the "snapshots" of the two moving patterns at separate instances - and possibly at slightly different rates - making it plausible that the illusions could happen independently for each object.

This implies that there is not a single "film roll" in the brain, but many separate streams, each recording a separate piece of information. What's more, this way of dealing with incoming information may not apply solely to motion perception. Other brain processes, such as object or sound recognition, might also be processed as discrete packets.

Link to NewSci piece 'Timewarp'.

—Vaughan.

October 20, 2009

The birth of the 'psychic energizer':

With uncanny echoes of the modern interest in 'cognitive enhancers', a 1958 edition of Popular Science hails a new drug that "tunes up the brain" allowing us "to perform at peak efficiency all the time".

The drug is iproniazid, marketed then as Marsilid. It was the first ever antidepressant, but the concept of an 'antidepressant' had yet to be created by the pharmaceutical companies and instead it is described as 'psychic energizer'.

It was originally used a treatment for tuberculosis, as it stops the bacterial infection, but it was noticed that patients treated with iproniazid seemed to have a lift in mood at low doses and risked becoming confused and psychotic at higher doses.

At the time, the only widely used psychiatric drugs were tranquilisers, and the idea that a drug might be an 'anti-tranquiliser' was quite puzzling. It was trialled on some patients with diagnoses of mental illness patients and then marketed as a 'psychic energizer'.

According to David Healy's book (p66) on the history of drug treatments for depression, The Antidepressant Era, this label came from the discoverers trying to interpret its effects in Freudian terms - in which 'psychic' is used broadly to mean 'psychological':

Kline and Ostow speculated that as psychic conflicts all involved the binding of psychic energy in various different ways and as a great deal of ego energy went into binding instinctual (or id) energy down to produce a range of inhibited states, it was conceivable that a drug that took energy away from the ego might lead to liberation of instinctual energy - it might be a psychic energizer.

However, the drug was rapidly taken off the market as it was found to damage the liver to the point where a number of patients died of hepatitis.

The Popular Science article is interesting because it is remarkably similar to modern day articles on cognitive enhancers - relating it's effects to improving performance rather than treating an illness and musing over whether healthy people should take drugs to make them 'better than well'.

Therefore, let's imagine that a few years from now there is a psychic energizer known to be completely harmless. And suppose its effect on body chemistry is perfectly normal and natural. In that case, what about the healthy person who just want more vim and vigor to go dancing?

"Well", Dr Kline answers, "why not?" After all, nobody sees anything wrong about a dentist working to give perfect teeth. Why shouldn't a doctor try to give perfect metabolism?

Or perfect tits, as the comparison more commonly goes in the 21st century.

It's an interesting insight into how the drug companies were trying to find a place in the market for their puzzling new compounds in the 1950s and another demonstration of how concerns about 'cognitive enhancers' are as old as drugs themselves.

Link to Popular Science article 'New Drugs to Tune Up Our Brains'.

—Vaughan.

October 19, 2009

Hallucinations in sensory deprivation after 15 minutes:

Sensory deprivation lasting only 15 minutes is enough to trigger hallucinations in healthy members of the public, according to a new study published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

The researchers were interested in resurrecting the somewhat uncontrolled research done in the 50s and 60s where participants were dunked into dark, silent, body temperature float tanks where they subsequently reported various unusual perceptions.

In this study the researchers screening a large number of healthy participants using a questionnaire that asks about hallucinatory experiences in everyday life. On the basis of this, they recruited two groups: one of 'high' hallucinators and another of 'low' hallucinators.

They then put the participants, one by one, in a dark anechoic chamber which shields all incoming sounds and deadens any noise made by the participant. The room had a 'panic button' to stop the experiment but apparently no-one needed to use it.

They asked participants to sit in the chamber for 15 minutes and then, immediately after, used a standard assessment to see whether they'd had an unusual experiences.

After a twenty minute break, they were asked again about perceptual distortions to see if there were any difference when normal sensation was restored.

Hallucinations, paranoid thoughts and low mood were reported more often after sensory deprivation for both groups but, interestingly, people already who had a tendency to have hallucinations in everyday life had a much greater level of perceptual distortion after leaving the chamber than the others.

This study complements research published in 2004 that found that visual hallucinations could be induced in healthy participants just by getting them to wear a blindfold for 96 hours.

However, my attention was grabbed by the researchers use of a 'panic button'. The effect of having a panic button in sensory deprivation experiments was specifically studied in 1964 by psychologists Martin Orne and Karl Scheibe. They also asked about hallucinations and compared two groups of people.

One group was met by researchers in white coats, given a medical examination and told to press a 'panic button' if they wanted out. The other was met by researchers in causal clothes, weren't given medical checks, and told to knock on the window if they wanted the experiment to stop.

The actual sensory deprivation part was the same, but the group with the panic button reported many more hallucinations, likely owing to 'demand characteristics', or, in other words, their expectations of what might happen.

We also know that an increase in anxiety also increases the likelihood of hallucinations, and having a 'panic button' during an experiment, I suspect, is likely put most people a little more on edge.

So we can't be sure that the effect was purely due to sensory deprivation, but it does chime with various other studies showing that when we reduce our normal sensations, the brain has a tendency to 'fill in' with hallucinations.

Link to PubMed entry for sensory deprivation study.

—Vaughan.

October 15, 2009

Tea intoxication:

An interesting case study from a 2002 edition of The Lancet of a man who suffered paralysis from drinking too much Earl Grey tea owing to the toxic effects of huge doses of bergamot oil - taken from orange rind and used as flavour:

A 44-year-old man presented in May, 2001, with muscle cramps. He had no medical history of note, but volunteered the fact that he had been drinking up to 4 L of black tea per day over the past 25 years. His preferred brand was GoldTeefix (Tekanne, Salzburg, Austria). Since this type of tea had given him occasional gastric pain, he changed to Earl Grey (Twinings & Company, London, UK), which he thought would be less harmful to his stomach. 1 week after the change, he noticed repeated muscle cramps for some seconds in his right foot. The longer he drank Earl Grey tea, the more intense the muscle cramps became. After 3 weeks, they also occurred in the left foot...

Earl Grey tea is composed of black tea and the essence of bergamot oil, an extract from the rind of bergamot orange (Citrus aurantium ssp bergamia), which has a pleasant, refreshing scent. Bergamot oil contains bergapten (5-methoxypsoralen), bergamottin (5-geranyloxypsoralen), and citropten (5,7-dimethoxycoumarin), which can be found in grapefruit juice, celery, parsnips, and Seville orange juice. Bergamot oil is a well-known UVA-induced photosensitiser with a strong phototoxic effect, and is used therapeutically in psoriasis, vitiligo, mycosis fungoides, and cutaneous lymphoma. Because of this side-effect, bergamot oil has been widely banned as an ingredient in cosmetics and tanning products. Bergamot oil also has a hepatotoxic effect and may cause contact-allergy. The adverse effects of bergamot oil in this patient are explained by the effect of bergapten as a largely selective axolemmal potassium channel blocker, reducing potassium permeability at the nodes of Ranvier in a time-dependent manner. This may lead to hyperexcitability of the axonal membrane and phasic alterations of potassium currents, causing fasciculations and muscle cramps.

In other words, it disrupts the way chemical flow through the membrane of the nerve fibre, causing the neurons that connect to the muscles to malfunction.

Link to DOI entry for the case study.

—Vaughan.

A brain signature for literacy:

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers a fantastic study on how the structure of the brain changes as illiterate adults learn to read and write. The research was conducted on rather a novel group of participants. Most were ex-members of guerilla forces in Colombia that had recently put down their weapons to re-integrate in society.

Colombia has a sizeable program to rehabilitate ex-paramilitary 'reinsertados' that includes social support and education, as many have never attended school. As the researchers note, this sets up an interesting natural experiment:

After decades spent fighting, members of the guerrilla forces have begun re-integrating into mainstream Colombian society, introducing a sizeable population of illiterate adults who have no formal education. Upon putting down their weapons and returning to society, some had the opportunity to learn to read for the first time in their early twenties, providing the perfect natural situation for experiments investigating structural brain differences associated with the acquisition of literacy in the absence of other types of schooling or maturational development.

The researchers, led by neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras, recruited a group of ex-paramilitaries who could read less than five simple words on a Spanish reading and writing test, and compared them to a similar group who learnt to read and write from an early age.

The research team use MRI scans to compare differences in brain structure between the two groups to allow an insight into how brain anatomy changes to accommodate reading and writing.

While it is possible to do this with children, it is almost impossible to separate out which are the brain changes due specifically to acquiring literacy and which are just part of the massive changes that constantly take place as children develop.

The images above show the areas of the brain (in orange) where the structure was significantly different between literate and illiterate adults.

Rather neatly, these are also areas that have been identified in brain activation studies of reading and writing, and are known to be associated with visual perception, processing word sounds and dealing with the meaning of words.

Subsequent analyses showed that pathways the angular gyrus, a key language area, across each hemisphere were less developed in illiterate adults and were less active when the participants were asked to name objects.

A brilliantly innovative study, a good write-up from Not Exactly Rocket Science and perfectly timed for my arrival in Colombia.

Link to NERS on guerilla reading.
Link to summary of scientific paper.

—Vaughan.

October 08, 2009

Feeling the body in a new light:

There are a couple of excellent posts on Neurophilosophy covering recent studies that demonstrate the powerful effect of vision on the perception of physical sensations in our body.

The first covers an interesting study that found that looking directly at your hand reduces laser-induced pain compared to a condition where you are only looking at a visual substitute created with a mirror reflection of the other hand (akin to a mirror box set up).

The second post discusses the possibilities of taking advantage of the 'rubber hand illusion' to allow us to feel like we're physically inhabiting virtual bodies.

Numerous experiments have shown that we look at a rubber hand being touched simultaneously and in the same way as our real hand, the sensation seems to be located in the fake.

This new experiment attempted something similar but in virtual reality, demonstrating that a synchronised 'touch' could be perceived as arising from an avatar hand in a 3D computer generated environment.

While the same research team had demonstrated this effect before this new study showed how the effect could transfer, albeit more weakly, to a virtual arm controlled by a brain-computer interface driven solely from EEG readings.

Both of these studies demonstrate how vision is integrated with tactile information from the body to create our sense of body image, ownership and sensation and both get a great write-up from Neurophilosophy.

Link to Neurophilosophy post visual pain reduction.
Link to Neurophilosophy on the 'virtual hand illusion'.

—Vaughan.

October 07, 2009

Strange journeys of the mind:

New Scientist has a fantastic issue on 'strange journeys of the mind' that has three great articles on the twilight zone of sleep, simulating psychopathology with hypnosis and laboratory-induced out-of-body experiences.

The piece on the hypnotic simulation of brain disturbances is fantastic, not least because it features two researchers I work with, Peter Halligan and David Oakley, who have done some of the seminal work in the area.

Essentially, the approach views hypnosis as a tool that allows researchers, with the co-operation of the participant, to temporarily alter mental states in a completely safe and reversible way.

Importantly, these alterations, such as blindness or paralysis, seem like they're happening 'on their own' - which helps us understand conditions like conversion disorder, where these sorts of symptoms appear without any neurological damage but without the patient seeming to have any control over them.

The other article which blew me away was on recent studies suggesting that sleep and alertness are not two distinct states of consciousness and in some people with a dementia-like brain disorder the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness completely break down.

That this can happen contradicts the way we usually think about sleep, but it came as no surprise to Mark Mahowald, medical director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, who has long contested the dogma that sleep and wakefulness are discrete and distinct states. "There is now overwhelming evidence that the primary states of being are not mutually exclusive," he says. The blurring of sleep and wakefulness is very clear in status dissociatus, but he believes it can happen to us all. If he is right, we will have to rethink our understanding of what sleep is and what it is for. Maybe wakefulness is not the all-or-nothing phenomenon we thought it was either.

Finally, the piece on out of body experiences covers the work of Swiss researchers who have been studying these states in people with brain disorder, and managing to induce them in volunteers in a number of inventive ways.

Three awesome articles, all worth your time, all open-access. Three cheers New Scientist.

Link to article on sleep states.
Link to article on hypnotic simulations.
Link to article on out-of-body experiences.

—Vaughan.

October 06, 2009

Strung out on lasers:

In what sounds like a plot from an animated sci-fi film, I've just found a remarkable study where Japanese researchers put a Yoga Master in a brain scanner and fired lasers at him because he claimed not to be able to feel pain while meditating.

It turns out that he showed significantly less brain activity in areas typically activated by pain when meditating.

Intracerebral pain processing in a Yoga Master who claims not to feel pain during meditation.

Eur J Pain. 2005 Oct;9(5):581-9.

Kakigi R, Nakata H, Inui K, Hiroe N, Nagata O, Honda M, Tanaka S, Sadato N, Kawakami M.

We recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) following noxious laser stimulation in a Yoga Master who claims not to feel pain when meditating. As for background MEG activity, the power of alpha frequency bands peaking at around 10 Hz was much increased during meditation over occipital, parietal and temporal regions, when compared with the non-meditative state, which might mean the subject was very relaxed, though he did not fall asleep, during meditation.

Primary pain-related cortical activities recorded from primary (SI) and secondary somatosensory cortices (SII) by MEG were very weak or absent during meditation. As for fMRI recording, there were remarkable changes in levels of activity in the thalamus, SII-insula (mainly the insula) and cingulate cortex between meditation and non-meditation. Activities in all three regions were increased during non-meditation, similar to results in normal subjects. In contrast, activities in all three regions were weaker during meditation, and the level was lower than the baseline in the thalamus.

Recent neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies have clarified that the emotional aspect of pain perception mainly involves the insula and cingulate cortex. Though we cannot clearly explain this unusual condition in the Yoga Master, a change of multiple regions relating to pain perception could be responsible, since pain is a complex sensory and emotional experience.

I have an image of scientists shielding their eyes as lasers fail to penetrate the force field of the Yoga Master who serenely hovers a few inches above the ground, although I suspect that's because I've read too many manga comics

Link to PubMed entry for study,

—Vaughan.

October 05, 2009

Night terrors and night terrorists:

Earlier this year we covered a study on REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) where normal sleep paralysis breaks down and sleepers act out their dreams. The Journal of Forensic Science has just published a study on the dark side of the disorder, where affected sleepers experience nightmares and can unknowingly damage themselves or their partners in fits of dream world violence.

The researchers examined all the published cases on violence in REM sleep behaviour disorder with potential for a lethal outcome and found they fall into three groups: choking or headlock attacks, throwing someone or throwing yourself through a window, and diving from the bed.

Some of the descriptions are pretty intense:

A 63-year-old man with RBD and delayed-onset Shy-Drager Syndrome reported "a progressive 10-year history of abnormal behavior during sleep. He would at various times choke, kick, punch, and spit on his wife while he was asleep. In addition, complex behaviors such as getting out of bed and running into walls while asleep were reported by family members. This behavior occurred while the patient was dreaming, usually of being attacked.

A 67-year-old man had a 3-year history of progressive stiffness and slowing of his left side. Five years before the onset of these symptoms, he began having vivid dreams together with violent movements during sleep. Once he dreamed of being trapped in a house on fire, and he almost jumped out of the window, if not for his wife awakening and restraining him.

A 25-year-old woman with multiple sclerosis "presented with a 6-month history of sudden awakenings from fearful, often vivid…dreams and with terrified screams or violent behavior such as kicking, running to the door or to the window, crying and falling out of bed. If awakened, she always recalled a fighting dream. Once she repetitively banged her head against the floor, inducing a large facial hematoma. On that occasion, she was dreaming that a man was knocking her against the wall.

The idea that someone could be violent during sleep without any awareness was initially treated with suspicion but it has since been confirmed in sleep labs where patient are video-taped and wired up to an EEG to confirm they are in REM sleep.

There have now been numerous legal cases where 'sleepwalking violence' has been used as a defence for murders or attempted murders, and at least one case where it led to a successful acquittal.

Link to summary of RBD lethal violence study.

—Vaughan.

October 04, 2009

Rubbish in the margin:

One of the most influential and controversial papers in psychiatry was from a 1976 study published in The Lancet that found that people with schizophrenia had larger fluid filled ventricles in the brain.

Yesterday, I looked up the original paper in London's Institute of Psychiatry library and was amazed to see that the controversy seems ingrained into the paper copy, which has been ripped, repaired, damaged and defaced.

In the early days of scientific psychiatry, during the 1800s, many famous German psychiatrists expended a great deal of effort examining the post-mortem brains of patients with schizophrenia (also known at that time as dementia praecox) attempting to demonstrate Wilhelm Griesinger's theory that "all mental illness is disease of the brain."

Despite numerous studies, they were unable to replicate the success of studies on dementia, which they linked to specific changes in the brain. So for generations, schizophrenia came to be defined as a condition in which the brain was structurally normal.

This fact was often highlighted by the antipsychiatry movement to suggest that 'mental illness' was nothing more than a difference in human experience and there was no medical evidence supporting the work of psychiatrists.

But the fact was also cited by many psychiatrists resistant to the relatively new wave of medications that had appeared on the scene. The drugs were claimed to 'fix' the brain with the assumption that the discovery of clear evidence for brain differences would just be a matter of time.

Enter Eve Johnstone and her colleagues at Northwick Park Hospital in London, who, in the midst of this politically charged environment, completed a study that compared CAT brain scans of 18 patients with schizophrenia to a group of healthy control participants. Alongside the scans, the researchers also tested the participants' mental abilities with psychological tests.

The results were striking. They found the size of the ventricles, the fluid filled spaces in the brain, was, on average, larger in patients with schizophrenia and that it was correlated with the degree of difficulty with tests of memory, concentration and problem solving.

This caused enormous interest and controversy at the time. The paper copy from London's Institute of Psychiatry library clearly reflects this, as it has been read so many times (and possibly ripped out) that it is virtually in tatters and has been reattached with sticky tape in an otherwise pristine copy of the journal.

There are a few annotations on the page, including the word "Rubbish" written in the margin!

Although seminal, the study has been rightly criticised and one of the major difficulties with these sorts of studies is that because patients are normally taking antipsychotic medication, it's hard to distinguish where the effect is linked to schizophrenia or the treatment.

While some medication is thought to also thought to affect brain structure, a study on patients that have never taken medication seem to suggest some differences in ventricle size, on average, are still apparent.

The 'on average' bit is important though, as these differences are not present in everyone with the diagnosis. They're just an average difference when you compare a group of people with and without schizophrenia. Furthermore, we're still not quite sure of its significance.

So the topic is still as controversial as when Johnstone's study first appeared in 1976, although the argument has shifted from whether differences in the structure of the brain are associated with schizophrenia, to whether they are telling us anything useful.

Link to scan of article from Institute of Psychiatry library.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

September 30, 2009

Side-effects from placebos can be drug specific:

A fascinating study just published in the medical journal Pain examined the side-effects reported by patients taking placebos in clinical trials to test migraine drugs. It found that side-effects from placebo were almost as common as from the actual drug, but most interestingly, were specific to side-effects you would expected from the comparison medication.

In other words, the side-effects you get from a sugar pill in a study on anticonvulsant drugs closely resemble side-effects you get from anticonvulsants and are different from the side-effects you get from a sugar pill in a study on pain killers, which more closely resemble pain killer side-effects.

The researchers, led by neuroscientist Martina Amanzio, looked at trials for three type of migraine drugs: NSAIDs (like aspirin), triptans that work on the serotonin system, and anticonvulsant drugs more often used to treat epilepsy.

Side-effects from placebo are known as the nocebo effect and just the combined list of side-effects from the placebo groups in this study is surprising enough:

abdominal pain, anorexia or/and weight loss, attention difficulties, burning or/and flushing, chest discomfort, chills, diarrhea, dizziness, dry mouth, dyspepsia, fatigue, heaviness, injection side reaction, insomnia, language difficulties, memory difficulties, nasal signs and symptoms, nausea, numbness, paresthesia or/and tingling, pharyngitis, somnolence or/and drowsiness, stinging or/and pressure sensation, taste disturbance, tinnitus, upper respiratory tract infection, vomiting, weakness

It turns out that when placebo was being compared to an anticonvulsant, side-effects more common in these drugs - like fatigue, reduced appetite, sleepiness and tingling sensations - were more common in the placebo. In contrast, stomach upsets and dry mouth were more common in the placebo group when the comparison was with NSAID painkillers, which more often cause these symptoms themselves.

One explanation may be that before taking part in a clinical trial, patients are informed of the possible side-effects that the active drug may cause, regardless of whether they are going to be given placebo or the actual medication.

Information on the possible side-effects will be specific to the real medication, and, as we know that expectation plays a big part in the placebo effect, it is probably also shaping the nocebo effect and leading to the production of symptoms through expectancy.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

—Vaughan.

September 22, 2009

Going under:

I've just found a curious historical article discussing the early debates over whether anaesthesia could trigger sexual dreams in patients. As this was Britain in the 1800s, much of the fuss was centred on whether the Victorian lady was actually capable of such things:

In January, 1849, a discussion of “Chloroform in Midwifery” occurred during a meeting of the Westminster Medical Society in England. One of the physicians, Dr. G. T. Gream (Obstetrician, Queen Charlotte’s Lying-In Hospital, London, England) enumerated several reasons why he did not think that chloroform was appropriate for obstetric use, and in so doing, he “alluded to several cases in which women had, under the influence of chloroform, made use of obscene and disgusting language. This latter fact alone he considered sufficient to prevent the use of chloroform in English women”...

In a subsequent issue of The Lancet, notes from the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh of February 7, 1849, were published. Sir James Young Simpson (Obstetrician, Edinburgh, Scotland, developer of chloroform anesthesia, and President of the Royal College of Physicians in 1849; 1811–1870) stated that after 15 months of use in thousands of cases, “he had never seen, nor had he ever heard of any other person having seen, any manifestation of sexual excitement result from the exhibition of chloroform…. The excitement, he was inclined to think, existed not in the individuals anesthetized, but was the result of impressions harbored in the minds of the practitioners, not in the minds of the chloroformed.”

Of course, there are some cases of criminal clinicians who have used sedation to attack their patients, but we now know that some modern anaesthetics, particularly midazolam and propofol, really do seem to be involved in causing sexual hallucinations and imagery in patients.

As far as I know, the reason why certain anaesthetics spark sexual imagery is still a mystery.

As we discussed earlier this year, the introduction of anaesthesia was controversial, partly because of the belief that pain was useful in keeping people alive and partly because experiencing pain was considered morally virtuous.

Link to PubMed entry for paper.

—Vaughan.

September 21, 2009

Rebel without a couch:

I've just discovered that the classic James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause was inspired by a true life account of a psychiatrist's analysis of a young 'psychopath'.

According to this 1944 article from Time magazine, the book, called Rebel Without A Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath, was written by psychiatrist Mitchell Lindner and gave the public "one of the few play-by-play accounts of a psychoanalytic treatment ever published".

Lindner's subject is Harold, 21, serving a long term for a serious, unnamed crime. Harold, the son of a bull-tempered Polish laborer who speaks no English, has been in trouble with the police, mostly for pilfering, since the age of twelve. His most conspicuous psychopathic symptom was a constant blinking of his eyes.

Lindner began in orthodox analytic fashion by having the boy lie on a couch and encouraging him to talk freely. (Lindner got his transcript via a microphone concealed in the couch. Told about this at the end of the analysis, Harold himself urged the analyst to publish the record.) Without much hesitation, Harold gave the details of a hair-raising career of gun-toting, stealing, vandalism, fornication. Like all psychopaths, Harold was "a rebel without a cause, a revolutionary without a program," a grownup infant with no self-restraint and a craving for instant satisfactions.

If you're puzzled by the term 'hypnoanalysis' in the title, it was a form of Freudian psychoanalysis but where the patient was put into a hypnotic trance supposedly to encourage free association and facilitate access to the unconscious.

The idea was that it was a type of cranked up psychoanalysis that could give quicker results but, as the article notes, it was considered rather suspect by the forever orthodox Freudians.

An alternative juiced up version was 'narcoanalysis' that typically used barbiturate drugs for the same reason. This was the origin of the truth drug as it was wrongly thought that people hiding the truth might let it slip through if their unconscious was 'loosened' somewhat.

The connection between the book and the film seems to be fairly cursory though, as while the movie shares the title and is also about an antisocial young man, it's otherwise quite different.

Link to 1994 Time article on the book.

—Vaughan.

September 09, 2009

Fragging rights:

The Economist covers an interesting twist on the Turing test for artificial intelligence. Instead of software attempting to fool human judges into thinking they're chatting to another person, it needs to fool gamers into thinking their playing against a human opponent.

In Turing's original proposal, human judges would have a text-based conversation with a human and a machine, and the machine would be judged to be artificially intelligent if the judges couldn't reliably determine who was human.

This is the same principal applied to first person shooter games like Doom, Quake and Call of Duty, where human players need to judge whether their opposite number is a fellow human or just a collection of cold hard data:

Computers can, of course, be programmed to shoot as quickly and accurately as you like. To err, however, is human, so too much accuracy does tend to give the game away. According to Chris Pelling, a student at the Australian National University in Canberra who was one of last year’s finalists and will compete again this year, a successeful bot must be smart enough to navigate the three-dimensional environment of the game, avoid obstacles, recognise the enemy, choose appropriate weapons and engage its quarry. But it must also have enough flaws to make it appear human. As Jeremy Cothran, a software developer from Columbia, South Carolina, who is another veteran of last year’s competition, puts it, “it is kind of like artificial stupidity”.

The competition is called the 2K BotPrize and is currently being held in Milan, Italy.

Link to The Economist on 'Fighting it out'.
Link to 2K BotPrize website.

—Vaughan.

September 03, 2009

Hallucinating sanity in the middle ages:

I'm just reading a thought-provoking book called Hallucinations and Their Impact on Art. Unfortunately, it's a little dry so isn't the most gripping of reads but it has this fascinating bit about how hallucinations weren't considered to be part of madness in the middle ages.

While it is widely accepted in modern times that you can 'hear voices' without being mentally ill, the experience of hallucinations is thought to be part and parcel of most forms of madness, whereas this was apparently not the case in medieval times:

From p7:

What is more curious to the contemporary man is that the medieval description of insanity does not include hallucinations; and the experience of possession (passivity phenomena) is not described as occurring concurrently with or as part of a visionary state.

In Western Europe from AD 500-1500, people who heard voices or saw visions considered themselves, and were considered buy their contemporaries, to have had an actual perceptual experience of either divine or satanic inspiration. They were not considered mad and were not treated as such. Hallucinations (fantasmata) were only considered mad when combined with trickery (prestigiae).

Unfortunately, the book is out of print but it contains many such gems among the rather dull academic prose.

—Vaughan.

September 01, 2009

Seeing the results of surgery improves outcome:

A newly published study has demonstrated the remarkable influence of beliefs on our experience of illness by showing that patients undergoing surgery to correct painful spinal tears report greater improvement if they've been shown the fragments of the removed disc.

The researchers, a surgical team from St George's Hospital in London, were aware that anxiety and depression had a major influence on recovery after surgery for a type of spinal disc tear, commonly but inaccurately known as a 'slipped disc'.

They decided to try a simple measure to help patients feel less anxious and bolster their belief that a good job had been done: the surgeons presented randomly selected patients with the removed fragments from their back.

This simple technique had a remarkable effect. Patients given a 'souvenir' of their operation reported greater improvement in sciatic nerve pain, lower back pain, less pins and needles sensations, less leg weakness and a reduced use of pain killers.

This study adds to the increasing evidence that beliefs have a marked impact on how the symptoms of an illness manifest themselves.

We know this is particularly the case for pain, and different beliefs about what is causing the pain and the effect it has, regardless of what the reality might be, can have a significant impact on the duration and the intensity of the pain itself.

Link to PubMed entry for surgery study (via @bengoldacre).

—Vaughan.

August 29, 2009

To the scent side:

The New York Times covers an interesting study finding that if you smell different odours in each nostril the brain doesn't blend the scents, instead, your experience of smell alternates between the two.

This nostril rivalry, as the researchers describe it in a paper in Current Biology, is similar to what happens when the eyes are presented with different images, or the ears with different tones.

The researchers experimented with 12 people using two chemicals, one that has an odor like a marker pen, the other that smells like a rose. All 12 experienced switching between the two odors, with no pattern as to when and how often they switched.

And as with hearing and vision, smell sensitivity is related to the general tendency for left or right hemisphere activation in the brain.

Because this general tendency is also related to a bias for magical thinking and unusual perceptual experiences, we know that differences in nostril sensitivity can be found between people who have high numbers of paranormal-like experiences and those who don't.

Link to NYT piece 'How the Nose Copes With Nostril Rivalry'.
Link to PubMed entry for study.

—Vaughan.

August 25, 2009

Multi media, we don't need it do we?:

People who spend lots of time monitoring multiple sources of information are worse at switching between tasks and are less able to focus exclusively on single sources according to a new study published in the Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences.

It's a well designed, rigorous study of the type that we are sorely missing in the debate over the psychological effects of media which, sadly, often amounts to little more than hot air.

It's also been picked up by hundreds of news sources, almost all of which miss the subtlety of what it's actually telling us.

Here are some of the headlines that miss the point: Hi-tech addicts scrambling their brains; Multi-media use muddles the mind; and my favourite Electronic Multitaskers Not Really ‘Information Gods’ (damn you Microsoft, fooled again!)

The experiment compared groups of people who frequently monitor multiple media sources compared to those who do it rarely. Big media has picked up on the 'multi media' angle and has focused solely on digital technology but the study was much broader than this.

It divided groups into high and low 'media multitaskers' but 'media' included a whole bunch of sources, including:

print media, television, computer-based video (such as YouTube or online television episodes), music, nonmusic audio, video or computer games, telephone and mobile phone voice calls, instant messaging, SMS (text messaging), email, web surfing, and other computer-based applications (such as word processing).

In other words, listening to music while reading a book counts as 'media multitasking', as does chatting on the telephone while watching television, none of which need digital technology. In fact, you could have multitasked five out of the twelve activities (print, TV, music, nonmusic audio, phone calls) in the 1950s.

This is actually one of the study's major advantages. It makes sense to look at how people monitor multiple sources in the real world rather restrict ourselves to the computer technology, because there is nothing necessarily distinctive about 'digital media'. A digital radio is not psychologically different to an analogue one in terms of its output.

So the researchers compared the high and low multitaskers on several tasks looking at whether peripheral information affected performance on visual and memory monitoring tasks, and on a task-switching experiment.

High media multitaskers were generally more affected by peripheral information but this is not a bad thing in itself. You could interpret it as them being more distractable, or simply that they have a wider net of attention and are more able to pick up peripheral information. They might be open to noticing more stuff.

But the task-switching experiment was quite striking. Participants were presented with a letter and number combination, like "a6" or "i7" and were asked to do one of two tasks: one was to hit the left button if they saw an odd number and the right for an even; the other was to press the left for a vowel the right for a consonant.

They were warned before each letter-number combination appeared what the task was to be, but high multi-taskers responded on average half a second more slowly when the task was switched.

In reaction time terms, half a second is a very long time. Bruce Lee could have made mincemeat of you by then.

Of course, what we can't tell from this study is whether heavy parallel media monitoring causes these effects, or whether people who are less able to exclusively focus and switch prefer more media concurrently. Maybe they're actually absorbing more of it in total. We don't know from this study.

Despite big media going off half-cocked, this is a valuable study because we need to start understanding how information technology affects us in our day-to-day life.

We have precious few of these studies and we need more.

Link to paper.
Link to DOI entry for same.
Link to great write-up from Not Exactly Rocket Science who beat me to the punch.

—Vaughan.

Learning reality in the first few months of life:

RadioLab has just released an excellent brief podcast on how babies' experience of the world is quite different during the first months of life due to some startling differences in brain function that they rapidly lose.

It's a discussion with developmental psychologist Charles Fernyhough who has pieced together the perceptual world of young children from studies on newborns.

It's full of fascinating insights, like the fact that the lenses in the eyes of newborns have yet to acquired the yellow tint of adults which filters out blue light - so children see a much brighter whiter world.

One of the most surprising bits is about a phenomenon I'd never heard of before - something called sticky fixation - where babies lose control of their vision at about two months old and seem to lose the ability to look away from interesting things.

This seems to be due to the fact that vision is initially controlled by subcortical brain systems but about two months the control shifts to the cortex. During the 'changeover' the competition between the two systems seems to lead to the stalemate of sticky fixation.

It's a really fascinating way to spend 10 minutes and I think virtually everything featured was quite new to me.

And if you're wanting more about the fascinating science of baby development Edge has an interesting discussion with psychologist Alison Gopnik.

One interesting thing to note here is how Bayesian statistical models are now appearing everywhere in cognitive science as models of thought and behaviour.

Influential neuroscientist Karl Friston has been championing them as a 'theory of everything' for the brain for a couple of years now and they're starting to be more widely accepted as you can see by the way Gopnik riffs about them with regards to infant psychology.

Link to RadioLab short 'After Birth'.
Link to Edge on 'Amazing Babies' with Alison Gopnik.

—Vaughan.

August 24, 2009

Weight affects our perceptions of importance:

We often use weight as a metaphor for importance, describing something as a 'weighty issue' or dismissing an argument as 'not holding much weight' but a new study suggests that this is not just a figure of speech.

A research team found that they could alter people's judgement of importance just by getting them to answer questions using a heavier clipboard.

In a series of short elegant experiments, a research team led by psychologist Nils Jostmann found that people holding a heavy clipboard would, for example, value foreign currencies more highly than those using a lighter clipboard.

Of course, this might be because of the simple association that larger amounts of money weigh more, so they looked at whether more abstract judgements about value could be affected by weight.

Subsequent studies showed that heavier clipboards led to participants placing more importance on the university listening to student opinions, and that participants were more likely to link their opinion of whether Amsterdam was a great city to the competence of the mayor.

A final study found that visitors who were stopped in the street and asked their opinion on a controversial subway were more confident in their opinion and were more likely to agree with strong arguments for the plan.

The researchers link these findings with the growing field of embodied cognition that suggests that much of our experience of the world is actually mediated through how we interact with it.

Much of this research shows that altering the physical condition of the body affects how we perceive and understand, even for concepts that we think are nothing but metaphors.

Link to summary of 'Weight as an Embodiment of Importance'.

—Vaughan.

August 18, 2009

The chill of the bass:

I've just found this wonderful short paper on emotional peaks and 'chills down the spine' in response to music. I didn't realise the area had been investigated and apparently there is a small literature on these most sublime of experiences.

The paper is brief, accessible and is available online as a pdf but the abstract gives a great summary:

Chills as an indicator of individual emotional peaks

Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2009 Jul;1169:351-4.

Grewe O, Kopiez R, Altenmüller E.

Chills (goose bumps) have been repeatedly associated with positive emotional peaks. Chills seem to be related to distinct musical structures and the reward system in the brain. A new approach that uses chills as indicators of individual emotional peaks is discussed. Chill reactions of 95 participants in response to seven music pieces were recorded. Subjective intensity as well as physiological arousal (skin conductance response, heart rate) revealed peaks during chill episodes. This review suggests that chills are a reliable indicator of individual emotional peaks, combining reports of subjective feelings with physiological arousal.

Right, where's that Miley Cyrus CD.

pdf of scientific paper.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

August 17, 2009

Time to face the muzak:

Newsweek has an interesting article about the science behind the infuriating muzak that plays while you're on hold in a telephone queue.

The article made me realise what probably should have been obvious, that telephone queuing systems are a multi-million dollar industry and psychologists have been employed to research the best way to stop you hanging up.

When of the most interesting bit is where the article touches on the use of music to alter customers' perception of passing time.

Kellaris says that while musical distraction often causes time to feel like it's passing more quickly, particularly dull, or overly familiar, music can actually make the wait feel longer. Familiar music may act as a sort of "Zip file," says Kellaris, referring to the common format computers use to compress large volumes of data into a smaller package.

"If you hear an excerpt of a familiar piece of music, it might cue recall of the entire piece." Kellaris also cautions that numerous factors, including mindset and setting—and in one of his studies, even gender—determine the effect that background music has on us. "Time on hold seemed shortest for women exposed to alternative rock and for men exposed to classical music," he says.

And there are apparently a number of studies which have tested exactly this, including two intriguing ones I found after my interest was sparked.

The article also notes that a major factor in keeping people in a queue is the perception that they are progressing by giving customers' feedback on their position on time to destination.

Link to Newsweek article 'On Hold And In Hell'.

—Vaughan.

August 10, 2009

Redheads more sensitive to pain:

The New York Times Well blog covers the growing amount of research on how the same genes that give rise to red hair also make red heads more sensitive to pain.

This has knock-on effects for doctors and dentists in that greater levels of pain killers are needed for red haired patients:

Researchers believe redheads are more sensitive to pain because of a mutation in a gene that affects hair color. In people with brown, black and blond hair, the gene, for the melanocortin-1 receptor, produces melanin. But a mutation in the MC1R gene results in the production of a substance called pheomelanin that results in red hair and fair skin.

The MC1R gene belongs to a family of receptors that include pain receptors in the brain, and as a result, a mutation in the gene appears to influence the body’s sensitivity to pain. A 2004 study showed that redheads require, on average, about 20 percent more general anesthesia than people with dark hair or blond coloring. And in 2005, researchers found that redheads are more resistant to the effects of local anesthesia, such as the numbing drugs used by dentists.

Link to NYT Well Blog on 'The Pain of Being a Redhead'.

—Vaughan.

Yawning radiators:

There are two intriguing cases studies in the latest edition of the journal Sleep and Breathing of people with persistent yawning.

Normally, recurrent yawning might be put down to tiredness, but in these cases, both women slept well. They could, however, reduce their yawning by cooling themselves - suggesting that yawning and heat regulation may be linked.

Both of their symptoms are very similar. Each complains of unpredictable and uncontrolled yawning attacks lasting from 5 to 45 min. During these excessive yawning episodes, they experience deep, recurrent, overwhelming yawns that cause their eyes to water and nose to run. Occurring one to 15 times a day, these attacks are very aversive and debilitating, and both patients report feeling ill and exhausted following an attack. The most common diagnosis is a sleep disorder, although neither patient reports sleep problems.

These cases include features consistent with a diagnosis of thermoregulatory dysfunction. Both patients report that nasal breathing and/or applying cool cloths to the forehead can provide temporary relief and/or postpone the onset of an attack...

Taking a cold shower or swimming in cold water after the onset of an attack produces complete remission of symptoms for the South African woman. Both patients report feeling cold during or after an attack and experience goose bumps and shivering which may be a consequence of overcompensation by cooling mechanisms activated during thermoregulatory dysfunction.

Although it is still not well understood why we yawn, this gels with some growing evidence that heat regulation may be at least part of the story.

In one intriguing study [pdf], nasal breathing and forehead cooling reduced 'contagious yawning' where yawns are more likely to be triggered when we see other people doing the same.

Link to PubMed entry for yawning case studies.

—Vaughan.

August 06, 2009

How long is a severed head conscious for?:

In 1905 a French doctor wanted to see how long consciousness remained in a severed head and so did a rather morbid experiment at the execution of a beheaded prisoner. The remarkable report is linked from the Wikipedia page on the guillotine.

The observations were apparently made by a Dr Beaurieux who watched the execution of a prisoner named Henri Languille and immediately tried to get the attention of the severed head to see how it would react.

Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. This phenomenon has been remarked by all those finding themselves in the same conditions as myself for observing what happens after the severing of the neck...

I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased. [...] It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: 'Languille!' I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions – I insist advisedly on this peculiarity – but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts.

Next Languille's eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. After several seconds, the eyelids closed again[...].

It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement – and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.

Apparently, this was also discussed in a brief article in a 1939 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association but I can't read it because my institution's subscription seems to be broken (off with their heads!).

The famous French chemist Antoine Lavoisier is often said to have arranged an experiment before his execution where he would try and blink as many times as possible before his head finally died, but the story is apparently a myth.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mind Hacks reader jata for a link to the complete 1939 JAMA piece on decaptitation and consciousness which is available here.

Link to full copy of the report.
Link to Wikipedia page on the guillotine.

—Vaughan.

Sleep freeze:

The August edition of The Psychologist has a fascinating article on the awareness during sleep paralysis, a state where we wake but can't move and sometimes experience intense hallucinations.

This form of awake sleep paralysis is remarkably common and has been explained throughout the world with a diverse and colourful range of cultural explanations.

In Newfoundland it's called the 'old hag', in Hong Kong 'ghost oppression', in Japan 'kanashibari' - the result of magic from a Buddhist spirit and famously, in Europe of the middle ages, the effect of the succubus demon. A recent study looked at the phenomenon among Mexican teens and found it was explained as 'a dead body climbed on top of me'.

The article also tackles science of this curious state and one of the most interesting bits is where it discusses the evidence for sleep paralysis being the intrusion of the rapid eye-movement (REM) stage of sleep into wakefulness.

It turns out that there are some people who experience REM almost immediately after falling asleep and they are much more likely to experience awareness during sleep paralysis:

This research strongly suggests that sleep paralysis is related to REM sleep, and in particular REM sleep that occurs at sleep onset. Shiftwork, jetlag, irregular sleep habits, overtiredness and sleep deprivation are all considered to be predisposing factors to sleep paralysis (American Sleep Disorders Association, 1997); this may be because such events disrupt the sleep–wake cycle, which can then cause SOREMPs [sleep-onset REM periods].

Of course, episodes of sleep paralysis occurring as people emerge from sleep cannot be explained in terms of SOREMPs, but it seems reasonable to argue that such episodes may well involve a similar state of consciousness, mixing aspects of both normal wakeful consciousness and REM consciousness. Needless to say, for practical reasons such episodes are inherently more difficult to study in psychophysiological terms as there is currently no known way to induce their occurrence.

Link to The Psychologist article 'Terror in the night'.

Full disclosure: I'm an occasional columnist and unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist. I have experienced sleep paralysis once and interpreted it as sleep paralysis.

—Vaughan.

July 28, 2009

Autism 'treated' with LSD:

I've just found an intriguing article on how LSD was used as an experimental treatment for children with autism during the 1960s. When I first heard about these studies I did a double take, but there were a surprising number conducted at the time.

Flashback to the 1960s: LSD in the treatment of autism.

Dev Neurorehabil. 2007 Jan-Mar;10(1):75-81.

Between 1959 and 1974, several groups of researchers issued reports on the use of d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) in the treatment of children with autism. This paper reviews that literature to consider how the authors justified these studies, as well as their methods, results, and conclusions. The justification for using LSD was often based on the default logic that other treatment efforts had failed. Several positive outcomes were reported with the use of LSD, but most of these studies lacked proper experimental controls and presented largely narrative/descriptive data. Today there is renewed interest in the use of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic purposes. While this resurgence of research has not yet included children with autism, this review of the LSD studies from the 1960s and 1970s offers important lessons for future efforts to evaluate new or controversial treatments for children with autism.

Sadly I don't have access to the full text of the paper, but I've discovered that the Neurodiversity website has created a list of many of the original studies and has archived the full text of most of them online.

The studies are a morbidly fascinating read and it's interesting how some studies seem to exclusively report beneficial effects with remarkably flowery language ("They seek positive contacts with adults, approaching them with face uplifted and bright eyes...") while others report mixed or quite unpleasant reactions ("mood swings which were sharp and rapid from extreme elation to extreme depression or anxiety").

Link to PubMed abstract of LSD and autism paper.
Link to Neurodiversity paper archive.

—Vaughan.

Sensing destruction:

The New York Times has an interesting article on the role of 'hunches' in how soldiers detect roadside bombs.

The article is a little bit cobbled together, alternating anecdote with some indirectly related studies that seem to be included on the basis of speculation, but it does mention one 'in progress' study which seems particularly interesting.

In the past two years, an Army researcher, Steven Burnett, has overseen a study into human perception and bomb detection involving about 800 military men and women. Researchers have conducted exhaustive interviews with experienced fighters. They have administered personality tests and measured depth perception, vigilance and related abilities. The troops have competed to find bombs in photographs, videos, virtual reality simulations and on the ground in mock exercises...

The men and women who performed best in the Army’s I.E.D. detection study had the sort of knowledge gained through experience, according to a preliminary analysis of the results; but many also had superb depth perception and a keen ability to sustain intense focus for long periods. The ability to pick odd shapes masked in complex backgrounds — a “Where’s Waldo” type of skill that some call anomaly detection — also predicted performance on some of the roadside bomb simulations.

If you want more details about the study there are good descriptions here and here seemingly taken from military news coverage of the research.

Link to NYT piece on bombs and hunches.

—Vaughan.

July 23, 2009

Headphone fruit:

Music video director duo Terri Timely have created a beautifully shot and kaleidoscopic short film about synaesthesia.

It's a visually striking piece that attempts to represent the effect of crossed senses conceptually, rather the the common approach of interpreting sounds as abstract visual impressions (probably best done in the video for Coldcut's Music 4 No Musicians).

I also just like the idea. Music video directors are professional synaesthetes in many ways, so it's interesting getting their take on the experience.

To see it in its full glory, I recommend the hi-definition QuickTime version.

Link to embedded YouTube version (via @willyumlu)
Link to hi-def QuickTime version.

—Vaughan.

July 21, 2009

Human echolocation and blind mountain biking:

Psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum has written an excellent short article about a remarkable group of blind mountain bikers who apparently use echolocation to avoid obstacles by making loud click sounds as they ride.

Rosenblum has studied human echolocation in the lab and has shown that we all have some ability to get an idea of the spatial layout of our environment from sound reflection.

But one of the most interesting bits is where he discusses the fact that while echolocation uses sound, we don't always process it as a conscious hearing experience. It can seem to just be a 'sense' of where objects are.

To get a sense of how echolocation works, try this. Hold your hand up about one foot in front of your face with your palm facing your mouth. Put your front teeth together, open your lips, and make a continuous shhhhhh sound. As you make this sound, slowly bring your hand toward your mouth. You will hear the shhhh sound change. What you’re hearing is the sound reflecting from your hand colliding with the sound leaving your mouth. This interference turns out to be one of the most important types of sound dimensions we use to echolocate objects at close distances.

But this demonstration is exaggerated. The interference patterns used for echolocation are usually too subtle to be consciously heard. This highlights one of the most amazing aspects of echolocation: It’s rarely experienced as sound. Try using your shhhh sounds to walk slowly toward a wall with your eyes closed. As you come close to the wall, you’ll experience its presence as more of a feeling than a change in sound. It may feel as if there are air pressure changes on your face, an experience also reported by the blind (echolocation was once called “facial vision”). Echolocation is truly one of your implicit perceptual skills: It allows you to detect aspects of your environment without even knowing which sensory system you’re using.

Link to post of echolocation and blind mountain bikers.
pdf of Rosenblum study on human echolocation.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

July 20, 2009

Hypnosis and criminal mind control in 1890s France:

The 19th century French neurologist Georges Gilles de la Tourette is best known for Tourette's Syndrome, but a fascinating article in European Neurology traces his interest in the criminal uses of hypnosis.

It is full of surprising facts, like that he was shot in the head by a delusional patient who believed that she had been hypnotised against her will, and that he eventually died in a Swiss asylum after developing psychosis caused by syphilis.

We now know that hypnosis cannot be used to make people do things against their will, but at the time it was widely believed that women could be hypnotised to be easy prey to sexual predators, and even that otherwise innocent people could be hypnotised to be killers against their will. Sort of like a 19th century Manchurian Candidate.

The murder of a public notary by Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard in 1889, in which Bompard said she was hypnotised to be a murderer, made headlines around the world (you can still read The New York Times coverage online) and also served as a public battle over whether hypnosis could be used for criminal ends.

France was the centre of hypnosis research at the time and many experiments were carried out where hypnotised people were asked to 'kill' people with prop weapons to test their compliance. Neurologists Gilles de la Tourette and Jean-Martin Charcot were famous for their work on hypnosis and hysteria and weighed into the heated legal debate.

The patient who shot Gilles de la Tourette was not hypnotised, however, although was delusional and believed that she was. Hypnosis is a common theme of psychosis even today and your average inpatient psychiatric ward may well contain a patient or two who believe they are being 'controlled' or 'mesmerised' by hypnosis.

In Gilles de la Tourette's case, the incident is notable not least because he suffered a bullet in the brain, had it yanked out, and was writing to his friend about the experience later in the day.

...he was shot - for real - at his home in Paris by Rose Kamper-Lecoq, a 29-year-old former patient from La Salpêtrière and Sainte-Anne who later claimed that she had been hypnotized from a distance...

Rose asked him for some money, claiming that she was without resources because her hypnotism sessions had altered her will, and shot him when he refused. There were three shots, with only the first one reaching its target. Fortunately for Gilles de la Tourette, it resulted in only a superficial occipital wound, and he was even able to write to Montorgueil about the event the same evening.

The article has a copy of the letter with the description "The writing is uneasy, but Gilles de la Tourette reassures Montorgueil and explains that the bullet has been removed, ending the letter with the comment 'What a strange story' ('Quelle drôle d'histoire')".

Anyway, a fascinating article, freely available, and full of fantastic images and illustrations from newspapers of the time.

Link to full-text of article (scroll down).
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

July 19, 2009

AI predicts poker bets to three decimals places:

Poker is considered one of the most skillful of betting games, but a new study published in the Journal of Gambling Studies reports on an artificial neural network that predicts gambler's bets to three decimals places.

The system was built by researcher Victor Chan who created a relatively simply backpropogation neural network to predict future plays.

Backprop networks take a bunch of inputs, feed them through layers of loose mathematical simulations of neurons which then make a guess at an output.

Crucially, the network is initially given a set of training data on which it can modify its 'guesses' based on how wrong its initial estimation was. The amount of error is fed back through the network and each 'neuron' adjusts the strengths of its connections to other neurons to minimise the error next time round.

Chan used the playing patterns of six online Texas Hold 'em players each of whom played more than 100 games each. He entered just an initial series of games for each player to train the network and then asked it to predict how the following plays would go.

...it was to the author’s surprise that the neural network for M1 upon training turned out to be able to predict a gambler’s bet amounts in successive games accurately to more than three decimal places of the dollar on average for each of the six gamblers in our data sample across the board.

More importantly, the neural network for M2 upon training was also able to track the temporal trajectory of a gambler’s cumulative winnings/losses, i.e., successively predict the gambler’s cumulative winnings/losses, with a similar accuracy again for each of the six gamblers in our data sample across the board.

...the influence of a gambler’s skills, strategies, and personality on his/her cumulative winnings/losses is almost totally reflected by the pattern(s) of his/her cumulative winnings/losses in the several immediately preceding games.

In other words, from a sample of initial plays, each gambler's behaviour was almost completely mathematically predictable in the same way across all six people.

Now, if they could only get a neural network to predict plays in strip poker, I think they'd be onto something.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

July 16, 2009

Chocolate cravings and the menstrual cycle:

I've just found a remarkable study on how female chocolate cravings vary throughout the hormone cycle and drop off after menopause. While the cravings are not solely explained by hormone changes, some of the effect does seem to be linked.

Perimenstrual Chocolate Craving: What Happens after Menopause?

Appetite. 2009 Jul 9. [Epub ahead of print]

Hormes JM, Rozin P.

About half of American women crave chocolate, and approximately half of the cravers crave it specifically around the onset of menstruation. This study examines whether the primary cause of this "perimenstrual" craving is a direct effect of hormonal changes around the perimenstrum, or rather if the craving is a general response in some individuals to stress or other notable events. Insofar as there is a direct hormonal effect, one would predict a substantial decrease of 38% in total chocolate craving in women post-menopause, corresponding to the proportion of women pre-menopause who report craving chocolate exclusively perimenstrually. Based on a survey of pre- and postmenopausal alumnae of the same University, we report a significant but small decrease in prevalence of chocolate cravings post-menopause. The decrease is only 13.4% and thereby much smaller than a 38% drop predicted by a purely hormonal explanation, suggesting that female reproductive hormones are not the principal cause of perimenstrual chocolate craving.

Last time I posted something about the menstrual cycle, with reference to the effect on race bias, the post attracted some remarkably acerbic comments.

The comment on racism being a "typical British trait" was pure comedy gold, but one asked the question "Why are hormone fluctuations in men not studied as closely or publicized as widely?".

I did have a look, but as far as I know, men don't have hormone cycles. If you know different, do let us know as I'd love to know if there is any good evidence for them.

However, the point was that these studies often focus on stereotypes of female behaviour. So this post is offered as food for thought.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

—Vaughan.

July 13, 2009

The neuroscience of an unwanted limb:

ABC Catalyst has a completely astounding video on someone with 'body integrity identity disorder' who deliberately caused a leg amputation to feel satisfied with their body. It goes on to explore the neuroscience of body image and explores some of the best known body swap experiments.

The voice over is a bit cheesy in places but otherwise it's brilliantly explained, linking an unusual condition with the experimental lab science.

People described as having BIID feel as if a perfectly healthy limb is not really part of them. Like Robert Vickers, the man featured in the documentary, they can sometimes take extreme measures to get it amputated.

Preliminary evidence suggests that it might arise from a distortion of our neurally mapped body image and recent studies using the rubber hand illusion or the body swap illusion have been thought to tap the same sort of body image distorting effects.

One of the most compelling parts of the documentary is when the gentleman with BIID actually takes part in all the experiments.

After he takes part in the rubber hand illusion the presenter asks a really interesting question: "Is this anything like you experienced with your leg?", "No" he answers, giving her a look like she's a bit crazy.

This is the sort of question that is almost never asked by cognitive scientists. We create what we think is something similar in the lab, and then study it to death, but rarely do we actually get people with similar distortions to try it out and ask them what they make of it.

Vickers also recently recorded a programme for ABC Radio National's Ockham's Razor where he talks incredibly eloquently about the experience of his body, the turmoil of having an unwanted healthy limb and gives a remarkably good review of the scientific literature.

Both are highly recommended.

Link to amazing Catalyst programme on BIID.
Link to Robert Vickers on Ockham's Razor.

—Vaughan.

July 08, 2009

Pain? What pain?:

Pain research often involves investigating the link between the subjective experience of what's hurting compared to brain activation, mental state or situation. While past research has reported gender differences in pain thresholds, a new study casts a hazy light across the field by finding that men consistently report less pain when talking to female researchers.

The experiment included men and women as participants, as well as male and female experimenters, allowing the researchers to compare each combination of the sexes during their research.

Participants had a safe but painful heat applied to their arm and they were asked to report how painful and how unpleasant it was. They also had heart rate and skin conductance monitors to check how the body reacted.

Women reported the same things to male and female experimenters but men consistently said the pain was less when talking to female staff. Importantly though, their bodily responses were no different, suggesting that the physical sensation was probably the same, they just minimised it when talking to women.

The fact that men report less pain when talking to women has been found before, but the fact the body's reaction was no different is new and tells us that the presence of women was unlikely to have actually reduced the amount of physical suffering.

In other words, pain research that has relied just on self-report may have been affected by men trying to look macho in the lab.

Link to DOI entry and summary of study (via @researchdigest).

—Vaughan.

July 06, 2009

A kava panorama:

ABC Radio National's Bush Telegraph has a special programme on a psychoactive plant called kava that has been used ceremonially by Pacific Islanders for generations and has recently been researched as a treatment for depression and anxiety.

The effects of kava are usually compared to alcohol as it has a sedating and relaxing effect, although it produces far less thinking impairment than booze so the drinker has much more mental clarity.

The programme explores the history and traditional preparation of this tranquillising plant as well as discussing recent scientific research on its use as a psychiatric treatment.

This is particularly in light of a recent study by psychiatrist Jerome Sarris and colleagues where it performed remarkably well as both an anti-anxiety and anxidepressant drug.

In the interview, Sarris describes how kava affects the brain as well as suggesting that its ban in many countries, based on concerns about liver damage, may be due to low quality preparations of the compound which aren't found in traditional methods.

Link to Bush Telegraph on 'Kava, bliss and angst'.

—Vaughan.

June 24, 2009

Race bias and the menstrual cycle:

I've just found this surprising study in Psychological Science that found a link between the point in the menstrual cycle of 77 white women and various measures of race bias.

Race Bias Tracks Conception Risk Across the Menstrual Cycle.

Psychol Sci. 2009 May 4. [Epub ahead of print]

Navarrete CD, Fessler DM, Fleischman DS, Geyer J.

Although a considerable body of research explores alterations in women's mating-relevant preferences across the menstrual cycle, investigators have yet to examine the potential for the menstrual cycle to influence intergroup attitudes. We examined the effects of changes in conception risk across the menstrual cycle on intergroup bias and found that increased conception risk was positively associated with several measures of race bias. This association was particularly strong when perceived vulnerability to sexual coercion was high. Our findings highlight the potential for hypotheses informed by an evolutionary perspective to generate new knowledge about current social problems-an avenue that may lead to new predictions in the study of intergroup relations.

The research paper is online as a pdf if you want the full details.

The authors explain the findings as suggesting that women show a preference to their 'in group', those who more closely match their own background and lifestyle, when most fertile.

Menstrual cycle has been found to influence numerous preferences in women in earlier studies, including dressing attractively, preference for the type of fanciable person, including a preference for more 'masculine' features.

Indeed, cycles in oestrogen are known to alter dopamine function in the striatum, a deep brain structure.

pdf of menstrual cycle and race bias study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

Pressed for time perception:

Edge has an interesting article by neuroscientist David Eagleman on the perception of time that describes how we can experience temporal illusions just like we experience visual illusions.

I have to say, the piece is a little wordy, so it needs a bit of concentration, but it is well worth the effort.

This section has an interesting way of fooling ourselves into perceiving an event before you seem to have triggered it:

It has been shown that the brain constantly recalibrates its expectations about arrival times. And it does so by starting with a single, simple assumption: if it sends out a motor act (such as a clap of the hands), all the feedback should be assumed to be simultaneous and any delays should be adjusted until simultaneity is perceived.

In other words, the best way to predict the expected relative timing of incoming signals is to interact with the world: each time you kick or touch or knock on something, your brain makes the assumption that the sound, sight, and touch are simultaneous.

While this is a normally adaptive mechanism, we have discovered a strange consequence of it: Imagine that every time you press a key, you cause a brief flash of light. Now imagine we sneakily inject a tiny delay (say, two hundred milliseconds) between your key-press and the subsequent flash. You may not even be aware of the small, extra delay.

However, if we suddenly remove the delay, you will now believe that the flash occurred before your key-press, an illusory reversal of action and sensation. Your brain tells you this, of course, because it has adjusted to the timing of the delay.

If you're wanting more on time perception, TED have just released an interesting lecture by Philip Zimbardo on how we reason about time.

And rather coincidentally, Eagleman is interviewed on ABC Radio National's All in the Mind this week, about his synaesthesia research and fiction writing.

Link to Edge article on time perception.
Link to TED on reasoning about time (thanks Patricio!).
Link to AITM interview with David Eagleman.

—Vaughan.

June 23, 2009

Advance of the seven veils:

I've discovered there is a small scientific literature on the cognitive science of belly dancing. Yes, I know I should be doing something else with my time, but it's too late now and it's too good not to share.

A group of movement researchers studied which fundamental action abilities were the best predictors of belly dancing skills in 1st-4th grade students and, in another study, in 5th and 6th grade students. Rhythmic coordination seems to be a key skill across most age groups.

Belly dancer's myclonus is a condition where damage to the parts of the nervous system that control muscle coordination cause an involuntary stomach rippling effect that belly dancers strive to achieve. It is thought to be a problem with neural systems called 'central pattern generators' (CPGs) that create rhythmic pulses.

Jimmy Or is a robotics researcher who used what we know about the neuroscience of central pattern generators to create a belly dancing humanoid robot with a flexible spine. You can see it in action on his website.

—Vaughan.

June 22, 2009

Stalkers and assassins of the US President:

I've just found this fascinating 2006 article by a consultant psychiatrist to the US Secret Service that classifies the types of stalkers and assassins that have troubled the President of the United States.

The piece, by psychiatry professor Robert Phillips, reviews past classifications of presidential harassers and cases from the literature to produce a list of main types.

In my work as consultant to the U.S. Secret Service on protective intelligence cases, it is my clinical assessment that aids in their ultimate determination of who poses a potential risk to a protectee.

In performing evaluations of persons who have either threatened or attacked presidents, pursued them without nefarious intent, or appeared at the White House without invitation, I have searched for a framework that would allow me to integrate my diagnostic opinion of an individual subject with a conceptualization of what is known about others who have acted similarly.

Phillips' classification includes:

* The Resentful Presidential Stalker or Assassin
* The Pathologically Obsessed Presidential Stalker or Assassin
* The Presidential Infamy Seeker
* The Presidential Nuisance or Presidential Attention Seeker

But perhaps most interesting is the part where he illustrates each type with examples from past cases.

These include famous cases, such as John Hinckley - the man who shot President Reagan but was apparently also a stalker of Carter, to less well known cases such as one woman referred to only as 'Ms Doe' who "possessed a delusional love interest" in Clinton.

It's interesting to compare this classification with the independently created typology of stalkers of the British royal family drawn from the Metropolitan Police's Royalty Protection Unit files.

Link to full text of article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

Tooling up the body:

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers an intriguing study that provides further evidence for the theory that the brain treats tools as temporary body parts.

Using tools has lots of interesting effects on our perception. In one of my favourite studies, psychologist Dennis Proffitt found that we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand, but only when we intend to use it.

This latest study found that using a tool for only a few minutes modified the body's action settings. In the experiment, participants were asked to repeatedly pick up a block that had been placed in the middle of the table.

Then, they had to repeat the same actions with a grabber - a long, mechanical lever tipped with a two-fingered "hand" - and then a third time, with their own hand again.

Small LEDs on the volunteers' hands allowed Cardinali to track their movements and calculate the speed and acceleration of their arms. She found that they reached for the block differently after they had been accustomed to the grabber, taking longer to accelerate their hands more slowly and to seize the block (although once they actually touched the blocks, they grasped them in just the same way as before). The delays even affected the speed at which they pointed at the block, a behaviour that wasn't "trained" by the grabber.

To Cardinali, these results suggested that after using the grabber, the volunteers' had included it into their mental representation of their own arms. Because of that, they felt that their arms were longer than they actually were and reached for the block more slowly.

Link to Not Exactly Rocket Science on tools as body extensions.

—Vaughan.

June 16, 2009

In vino veritas:

Wine Psychology is a curious new website dedicated to the pleasures, analysis and cognitive science of our favourite grape-based booze.

It's been launched by psychologist Miles Thomas who has written a number of successful articles on the psychology of wine tasting, including one we featured last year.

The website's blog looks the most promising, and the recent post on passive perceptual learning in wine tasting is a good place to start.

There's a small but surprisingly active research community focussed on wine psychology, largely, I'm guessing, because it is a huge business with lots of dedicated fans.

Rather unusually, I seem to be uniquely affected by wine. From my observations it tends to make other people poorly coordinated and socially unskilled whereas after a few drinks my dancing vastly improves and I become increasingly witty.

Apparently this anomaly has not yet been reported in the literature, so I look forward to a full scientific investigation.

Link to Wine Psychology.

Full disclosure: Miles Thomas and I are both unpaid members of The Psychologist editorial board. He has not paid me, twisted my arm or plied my with booze to write this post.

—Vaughan.

June 09, 2009

The time flies paradox:

Time flies when you're having fun, but why? It's curious if you think about it. Someone whose visual perception was affected by enjoyment would seem rather unusual but the fact that our ability to judge time changes dramatically when we enjoy ourselves seems perfectly unremarkable.

A recent article in the scientific journal Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society attempts to answer exactly this question by reviewing the evidence for the curious link between emotion and time perception.

One of the greatest paradoxes in the field of time psychology is the time–emotion paradox. Over the last few decades, an increasing volume of data has been identified demonstrating the accuracy with which humans are able to estimate time. Confronted with this amazing ability, psychologists have supposed that humans, as other animals, possess a specific mechanism that allows them to measure time...

However, under the influence of emotions, humans can be extremely inaccurate in their time judgements (Droit-Volet & Meck 2007). For example, the passage of time seems to vary depending on whether the subject is in an unpleasant or pleasant context. It drags when being criticized by the boss but flies by when discussing with our friends. That is the time–emotion paradox: why given that we possess a sophisticated time measurement mechanism, are we so inaccurate in our temporal judgements when experiencing emotions?

The article is full of studies that found surprising ways in which our time perception is distorted: by the emotional expression on other people's faces or by the age of people we meet (older people slow time, younger people quicken it).

Link to scientific article on the time-emotion paradox.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

June 08, 2009

Plant psychology:

Science News has an intriguing article on what we might call 'plant psychology' as some biologists are increasingly thinking of our green leafy friends in terms of their memory, communication and behaviour.

On a related note, an edition of ABC Radio National's All in the Mind from the end of last year focussed on the 'psychology' of bacteria.

These sorts of discussions are the interesting result of our current most popular way of understanding the mind: the cognitive approach.

This attempts to explain the mind in terms of an information processing system, so mental processes are defined in terms of how they perform computations.

For example, memory is the process of encoding, storing and retrieving information. Perception transforms sensory data, such as light spots on the retina, into elaborated experiences; and attention selects which channels of processing to prioritise.

In its most basic, and somewhat caricatured form, the cognitive approach says our minds are just calculations because we have been able to successfully describe what parts of it do using maths.

But if the mind is just calculations, it makes it very difficult to say what is and what isn't a mind.

If something learns, reacts and communicates, all of which can be described in information processing terms, than many things could be described as having minds. Computers, plants, bacteria, perhaps even whole ecosystems.

Indeed, many of the big debates in psychology (consciousness, intentionality and so on) are attempting to define the mind outside of the computation metaphor, and this is where the hard work lies.

Discussions about whether plants have minds make us think about how we define our own minds, as simply saying 'a mind is what humans have' doesn't help us understand how to make sense of them.

Link to Science News on plant cognition.
Link to All in the Mind on bacteria cognition.

—Vaughan.

Are you sleeping comfortably? Then we'll begin:

The Boston Globe has an excellent article on the moment when a a group of huddled doctors turned a side-show curiosity into the medical revolution of surgical anaesthesia.

16th October 1846, Boston, Massachusetts, was when the first operation under anaesthesia was conducted in with a brave patient and liberal doses of ether.

The piece is interesting because it notes that the pain killing properties of certain gases or vapours, like laughing gas (nitrous oxide) and ether, were already well known, but the use of them in an operation needed a fundamental change of attitude in the medical establishment.

This was largely due to the fact that pain was considered beneficial during an operation, as it 'stimulated' the patient and supposedly made them less likely to die, but because that experiencing pain was considered to be morally virtuous.

Removing pain through 'artificial' means was therefore considered ethically dubious and consequently regarded by suspicion by the high horse riding doctors of the time.

Interestingly, the article notes that some of these views continue to this day in attitudes regarding anaesthetics and 'natural' childbirth:

Before 1846, the vast majority of religious and medical opinion held that pain was inseparable from sensation in general, and thus from life itself. Though the idea of pain as necessary may seem primitive and brutal to us today, it lingers in certain corners of healthcare, such as obstetrics and childbirth, where epidurals and caesarean sections still carry the taint of moral opprobrium.

In the early 19th century, doctors interested in the pain-relieving properties of ether and nitrous oxide were characterized as cranks and profiteers. The case against them was not merely practical, but moral: They were seen as seeking to exploit their patients' base and cowardly instincts. Furthermore, by whipping up the fear of operations, they were frightening others away from surgery and damaging public health.

The article is by Mike Jay who wrote the The Air Loom Gang, a biography of madman, spy and accidental architect James Tilly Matthews.

The biography is one of my favourite books of all time and was interested to see that Jay has another book just out called The Atmosphere of Heaven about a Victorian medical society who pioneered the study of laughing gas.

Link to Boston Globe article 'The day pain died'.

—Vaughan.

June 02, 2009

Underworld rituals through the lens of autopsy:

An upcoming article for the Journal of Forensic Sciences gives a fascinating insight into the rituals and methods of the Sacra Corona Unita (United Holy Crown) Mafia group from Southern Italy through the post-mortem examination of the bodies of their victims.

Many of the victims are members of the Sacra Corona Unita themselves, giving an insight in the organisation's "mystical approach to all ceremonies among members. Tribal rituals, secret codes, and theatrical punishments transformed the 'onorata società' into a kind of distorted Masonic lodge".

The article recounts the oath of the criminal fraternity and the significance of their tattoos, as well as describing a study on 83 murder victims. Strikingly, each of the victims who were Mafia victims themselves had a ritual object left with them.

As usual in mafia organizations, each member had a nickname, and ritual symbolic objects were found beside the buried bodies that referred to the member's lifetime. For instance, the horns of a bullock were found beside the body of the son of an SCU member named the "Bull" and a mouse beside the body of a member known to be a police informer, known as the "Prostitute.

The murder and burning of the bodies of the victims conformed to the symbolic code understood by all the members. It made explicit reference to the membership ceremonies that warn that the unfaithful will be burned to ashes (just like the holy picture burned during the ceremony).

This technique, obviously, also has some strategic advantages because it makes the possibility of identifying the victim more unlikely and eliminates any traces left by the executors. This mode of operation is called "lupara bianca" (white lupara): "lupara" is a gun with a sawn-off barrel with a high lacerating power at short distance, "white" means a "murder with disappearance of the body."

Link to article.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

June 01, 2009

Rapture of the deep:

When scuba divers start swimming deep under water they can sometimes start feeling dreamy, light-headed and mentally fuzzy, an effect nicknamed 'rapture of the deep' but better known as nitrogen narcosis.

It is caused by changes in the way nitrogen, one of the gases in the divers' air tank, dissolves in the body when under high pressure from the depth of the water.

No-one is quite sure exactly how it affects the brain, but many divers have noted the similarity between nitrogen narcosis and being drunk.

Psychologist Malcom Hobbs was intrigued by this connection and conducted a study [pdf], published last year in Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine, to investigate the psychological similarity between the two states.

The experiment compared the subjective experience and effects on problem solving of alcohol and narcosis, but, also rather elegantly, looked at whether the two effects could be caused by a similar neurobiological process by seeing whether people with high alcohol tolerance also had a high narcosis tolerance.

Hobbs divided a group of divers into experienced and novice divers, as those with more experience should be more tolerant to narcosis, and made a further division between those who drank a lot of booze and those who drank very little, to look at differences in alcohol tolerance.

In the first experiment, they found the interesting effect where experienced divers adapted to the subjective effects of narcosis, but not the behavioural effects. While they felt more in control than novice divers, they actually weren't. This chimes with an identical effect seen in heavy vs light drinkers.

But crucially, Hobbs also found that those affected to a greater degree by nitrogen narcosis are affected to a greater degree by alcohol on both subjective experiences and performance on the problem solving task (and vice versa), indicating that there is cross tolerance between the two states.

This suggests that they may affect the brain in similar ways. Although more research needs to be done on the actual neurobiology of the two states to be sure of the exact relationship, this study suggests that divers may indeed be 'drunk' when experiencing the rapture of the deep.

UPDATE: I just got emailed this interesting snippet by an experienced diver friend (thanks Ben!):

Something extra which happens with narcosis (which deviates from the alcohol analogy) is that, unless you're already dead, the effects are completely reversible with no discernible side effects (eg hangover). One of the tricks divers use if they recognize narcosis (most often in their buddy than in themselves) is that ascending a few metres will often bring immediate clarity.

Even more interesting is that once clarity is achieved, descent back to the narcotic depth doesn't necessarily bring back the narcotic effect of the nitrogen, which hasn't really been explained yet. Theories abound regarding rate of descent and physiological effects of increasing ppN [partial pressure of nitrogen] and how it's dissolved into various tissues.

Divers have known for years about this and have developed practical methods to deal with its effects (decreasing N content in breathing gases, replacing N with other inert gases etc). Actually, it's known that oxygen also has a role to play in narcosis (as in nitrous oxide) but since some of it is metabolized, it's effects are considerably less than the inert gas it accompanies.

I quite like the feeling of a little narcosis; but it does make time fly, and unfortunately time is the real enemy underwater!

pdf of full-text scientific paper.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

May 31, 2009

Synaesthesia in Frankenstein:

One of the new ideas in synaesthesia research is that affected people perhaps don't develop mixed senses as their brains develop, they just fail to lose them. It seems most children might start with naturally mixed senses before perception becomes segregated through pruning of the fuzzy neural pathways.

I've just noted an interesting article in Cognitive Neuropsychology on how this idea actually has long historical routes, and even influenced Mary Shelly's cryopunk classic Frankenstein.

Although Mary Shelley was only 19 when she wrote her timeless novel, Frankenstein (1818), she combined contemporary philosophical and moral issues with a vision of the danger of emerging sciences that still has relevance today. The specific idea of early unity of the senses, very likely inspired by Rousseau, was articulated by Frankenstein's creation in his first-person account of his early experiences:

"It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being: all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses. [Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), chapter 11]"

Shelley goes on to present the creature as very humanlike, and it appears here that she wished to show that this extended to the earliest moments of his mental life. With the publication of Frankenstein, the unified-senses idea was thus brought into the popular culture, and Shelley's words were probably read by some cognitive neuropsychologists in elementary school, even if they paid little heed to the sentiment. The idea also lived on within philosophy and, later, in the science of psychology.

In their professional career, very many cognitive neuropsychologists become acquainted with William James, and indeed the majority should recognize the phrase “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”. Most also recognize this as referring to the world of the infant, but few are probably aware that James was writing about his view that information from different senses is first fused in a child before later segregation.

Link to article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

May 27, 2009

The phantom from the battle field:

The Lancet recently published a fantastic article on one of the earliest cases of phantom limb. It was written by American Civil War surgeon Silas Weir Mitchell but not as a study in a medical journal, but as a short story in a popular magazine.

The story was titled The Case of George Dedlow in which Mitchell gives a careful medical description of sensations coming from a recently amputated limb, a portrait of how the amputation affected the soldier, and some musings on what it means about our relation to reality.

At this stage in the story, Mitchell uses his fictional character to muse on the neurological phenomenon of phantom limbs. Phantom limbs had been described in the mid-16th century by French military surgeon Ambroise Paré, but very little was known about what caused stump neuralgia (in the 1860s, the only treatments were electrotherapy, leeching, irritation of the surface of the stump, and re-amputation, none of which were very successful).

In The Case of George Dedlow, Mitchell speculates freely about what caused absent limbs to itch and feel pain. According to him, sensory impressions were transmitted through nerves to spinal nerve-cells and then to the brain. When a limb was removed, and until the stump healed, nerves continued to accept sensory impressions and to convey these impressions to the brain. If the stump never fully recovered, the result was constant irritation or a burning neuralgia. As Mitchell later explained in his famous textbook, Injuries of the Nerves and Their Consequences (1872), phantom limbs made “the strongest man…scarcely less nervous than the most hysterical girl”.

Somewhat poignantly, it seems Mitchell was haunted by his own phantoms from the war. In his later years he was troubled by 'ghosts' and intrusive memories from his gruesome years as a military surgeon.

It's a fantastic short article that really conjures up the feel of the time as well as giving an insight into this important point in medical history.

Link to Lancet article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to text of short story The Case of George Dedlow.

—Vaughan.

Evolving causal belief:

There's an interesting letter in this week's edition of Nature from biologist Lewis Wolpert making the speculative but interesting claim that the development of causal belief may have been a key turning point in human evolution.

Wolpert is responding to a recent Nature essay critiquing the idea that closely related species will have evolved similar psychological processes, suggesting that it is shared selection pressures rather than genetic similarity that more greatly influences mental make up.

He responds by saying that we should focus on some of things that have uniquely evolved in humans rather than shared processes. He cites the ability to understand cause as a key example.

The feature that is peculiar to humans is their understanding about the causal interactions between physical objects (see, for example, L. Wolpert Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast; Faber, 2006). For example, children realize from an early age that one moving object can make another move on impact. It is this primitive concept of mechanics that is a crucial feature of causal belief, and that conferred an advantage in tool-making and the use of tools — which, in turn, drove human evolution.

Animals, by contrast, have very limited causal beliefs, although they can learn to carry out complex tasks. According to Michael Tomasello (The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition; Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), only human primates understand the causal and intentional relations that hold among external entities. Tomasello illustrates this point for non-human primates with the claim that even though they might watch the wind shaking a branch until its fruit falls, they would never shake the branch themselves to obtain the fruit. Some primates are, nevertheless, at the edge of having causal understanding.

Once causal belief evolved in relation to tools and language, it was inevitable that people would want to understand the causes of all the events that might affect their lives — such as illness, changes in climate and death itself. Once there was a concept of cause and effect, ignorance was no longer bliss, and this could have led to the development of religious beliefs.

Link to Wolpert's letter in Nature.

—Vaughan.

May 26, 2009

Russian roulette in the medical literature:

I've just discovered there's a small medical literature on deaths by Russian roulette, where people put one bullet in a revolver, spin the chamber, put the gun to their head and pull the trigger.

A recent article from the The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology has a 10-year case review covering 24 deaths (wow) from the US state of Kentucky alone and serves as a summary of the research into this fate-tempting and most suicidal of games.

It's a curious set of studies for which the most reliable finding is that people who die by Russian roulette are mostly young men who were drunk or had taken drugs.

On the more unusual side, one study found a link between participation in Russian roulette and "the types and number of tattoos and body piercing".

The article also briefly describes a number of previous case reports from the literature, including this one which is remarkable for both mathematical and ultimately tragic reasons:

Playing a variation of traditional Russian roulette with his brother and 2 friends, the victim placed 5 live rounds in the cylinder, leaving one empty chamber, of a .357 Traus revolver. He spun the cylinder, put the gun to his right temple, and pulled the trigger. Postmortem blood toxicology revealed an ethanol level of 0.01% and the presence of diazepam and nordiazepam. The decedent had played Russian roulette on 2 occasions in the previous several weeks, each time placing only one live round in the cylinder.

Link to study on Russian roulette and risk-taking behaviour.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

May 25, 2009

A hostage to hallucination:

I've just found a morbidly fascinating 1984 study on hallucinations in hostages and kidnap victims.

The paper is from the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease and contains case studies of people who have been held captive by terrorists, kidnappers, rapists, robbers, enemy troops and, er... UFOs.

The reasoning behind including two 'alien abductees' was to compare hallucinations in verified versus unverified hostage situations. Cases of people who were hostages but did not hallucinate are also included.

The study found that one in four hostages had intense hallucinations, and these were invariably people who were in life-threatening situations. Isolation, visual deprivation, physical restraint, violence and death threats also seemed to contribute to the chance of having a hallucinatory experience.

Case 14

A 23-year-old member of a street gang was taken hostage by a rival gang. He was kept in a warehouse, blindfolded and tied to a chair, for 32 hours. He was severely beaten and forced to record ransom demands on a tape recorder. During captivity he became dissociated - "even when they were hitting on me I just tripped out, got out of my body... it was like I was high on Sherms (phencyclidine).'' At one point he felt detached from his body and "floated'' to the ceiling where he observed himself being beaten and burned with cigarettes but denied having any pain. He saw colorful geometric patterns in the air and flashes of past memories "like a dream, only I kept seeing devils and cops and monsters... nightmares I guess". Eventually he was released when his gang paid the ransom.

Some of the case studies are a little disturbing, but it's worth reading the paper in full if you can, or at least from the beginning of the case studies, as it's a rarely discussed but remarkably striking aspect of human experience.

Link to article on 'Hostage Hallucinations'.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

May 23, 2009

On the information alarmageddon:

New York Magazine has an article arguing that the concerns about digital technology drastically affecting our minds are just hype. I really wanted to like it but it's just another poorly researched piece on the psychology of digital technology.

Research has shown that distraction can improve exactly the sorts of skills that the digital doomsayers say will be broken by the high-tech world, but I've never seen it mentioned in any of the recent high-profile articles on the predicted digital meltdown.

In fact, there is a fairly sizeable scientific literature on how interruption affects the ability to complete a task, and instant messaging has been specifically studied.

But despite getting lots of opinions from everyone from attention researcher David Meyer to lifehacker Merlin Mann only one single 'study' on the distracting effect of technology is mentioned in the New York Magazine article: "people who frequently check their email has tested less intelligent than people who are actually high on marijuana".

This is quite amazing because not only was the 'study' in question not an actual scientific study, it was PR stunt for Hewlett Packard, this isn't even an accurate description of it (users were interrupted with email during an IQ test and scored worse, big surprise).

The issue actually breaks down into two parts, one is a scientific question: what is the psychological effect of distraction? and the other, a cultural one: have we become a society where high levels of distraction are more acceptable?

As I mentioned, the first question has been very well researched and the general conclusion is that distraction reduces our ability to complete tasks. Essentially, it's saying that distraction is distracting, which is hardly headline news.

But it also turns out that distraction is most disruptive to stimulus based search tasks, when we are flicking our attention around scanning for bits of information. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when we're on alert for new and different things, something salient like an instant message grabs our attention and knocks us off course.

More thoughtful tasks involving processing meaning are the least affected. This is interesting because most of the digital doomsayers suggest it is exactly this sort of deep thought that being affected by communication technology.

The other line of argument is that all this distraction makes us less creative because creativity needs focus to flourish.

Although not as well studied, it seems this is unlikely. While we assume that distraction reduces creativity, but lab studies tend to show the reverse.

Distraction has also been found to improve decision making, especially for complex fuzzy decisions - again exactly the sort that the doomsayers say will most be at peril.

These studies find that too much concentration reduces our creative thinking because we're stuck in one mind-set, deliberately filtering out what we've already decided is irrelevant, thereby already discarding counter-intuitive ideas (actually this is something the article does touch on). We can speculate that this may be why a preliminary study found that amphetamine-based concentration drug Adderall reduced creativity.

The cultural issue is perhaps more important, but on an individual level is more easily addressed.

You have control over the technology of distraction. If you can't concentrate, switch it off. It it is your job to be distracted and it is affecting other essential parts of your role, that is something to take up with your employers.

It's no different than if you're being distracted by the sound of traffic and can't do your job. Maybe you need an office away from the street? If you or your employers can't do anything about it, maybe that's just one of the downsides of the job.

What research hasn't yet shown is that digital technology is having a significant negative influence on our minds or brains. In some cases, it's showing the reverse.

History has taught us that we worry about widespread new technology and this is usually expressed in society in terms of its negative impact on our minds and social relationships.

If you're really concerned about cognitive abilities, look after your cardiovascular health (eat well and exercise), cherish your relationships, stay mentally active and experience diverse and interesting things. All of which have been shown to maintain mental function, especially as we age.

Technology has an impact on the mind but it's a drop in the ocean compared to the influence of your health and your relationships.

I'm constantly surprised that the impact of technology is clearly of such widespread interest to merit headline grabbing articles in international publications, but apparently not interesting enough that journalists will actually use the internet to find the research.

It's like writing a travel guide without ever visiting the country. I'm just guessing the editors have yet to catch on to the scam.

Link to NYMag article 'In Defense of Distraction'.

—Vaughan.

May 22, 2009

Can't put the thought genie back into the bottle:

PsyBlog has an excellent piece on the counter-intuitive psychology of thought suppression - the deliberate attempt to not think of something that almost invariably backfires.

The article is both fascinating from a scientific point-of-view but also important as a personal mental health resource if you're one of the many people who intuitively think that the best way of dealing with 'bad' thoughts is to try and push them out of the mind.

What psychology research has shown us is that not trying to think of something makes us think of it more frequently (the "don't think of a pink elephant" phenomenon), and that this counter-productive effect is enhanced for emotion-heavy thoughts and in people with mental illnesses where intrusive thoughts are a problem.

Psychologists often use the metaphor of noisy trains passing through the station. Thought suppression is like standing in the middle of the tracks trying to push the train back. You're just going to get run over. Instead, people are encouraged to just wait on the platform, observe the train of thought and wait for it to pass.

The ability to act as a 'detached observer' to the mind's distressing thoughts is a useful cognitive skill and one that is cultivated by mindfulness mediation, something that has increasing evidence as a useful treatment for mental health problems.

There's lots of good research on thought suppression, much of which is covered in PsyBlog article, but this study struck me as particularly inventive:

Wegner and Gold (1995) examined emotional suppression by delving into people's romantic pasts using a neat comparison between 'hot flames' and 'cold flames'. A 'hot flame' is a previous partner who still fires the imagination, while a 'cold flame' is a previous partner for whom the thrill is gone. In theory the 'hot flame' should produce more intrusive thoughts so people should have more practice suppressing them. Meanwhile because the cold flame doesn't produce intrusive thoughts, people should have less practice suppressing them.

The results revealed exactly the expected pattern: people found it harder to to suppress thoughts about cold flames presumably because they had less practice.

Link to PsyBlog on 'Why Thought Suppression is Counter-Productive'.

—Vaughan.

May 01, 2009

Tell me about your mother superior:

I found this fascinating aside in a 1969 article on 'Psychiatric Illness in the Clergy' about a group of monks who underwent psychoanalysis, causing two thirds of them to realise they were "called to married life".

The Pope immediately banned psychoanalysis from the priesthood as a result:

[Bovet] suggests that many clergy would benefit from psychotherapy during their training. This was attempted in Mexico when in 1961 a group of 60 Benedictine monks underwent group and individual psychoanalysis. However, of the original 60 monks taking part in this experiment, only 20 are still monks ; and of the 40 who have left the monastery it is reported that "there are some who realized that they were really called to married life" (Lemercier, 1965).

The Papal Court answered this "threat" the following decree: "You will not maintain in public or in private psychoanalytical theory or practice, under threat of suspension as a priest, and you are rigorously forbidden under threat of destitution to suggest to candidates for the monastery that they should undergo psychoanalysis" (Singleton, 1967).

This would not be the last time psychotherapists cause stirrings in the faithful.

The book Lesbian Nuns, Breaking Silence contains a chapter by the former Sister Mary Benjamin of the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent in California.

Psychotherapists Carl Rogers and William Coulson arranged for the nuns to take part in encounter group, essentially a form of fashionable 60s group psychotherapy aimed as well people rather than patients for 'personal growth'.

The effect was disastrous for the convent, with hundreds of the nuns defaulting on their vows, and several, including Sister Mary Benjamin, discovering repressed lesbian desires.

The convent eventually collapsed and was closed in 1970.

There's a brief online article that also recounts this story and I was intrigued to see a footnote at the end:

Having abandoned his once lucrative career, Dr. William Coulson now lectures to Catholic and Protestant groups on the dangers of psychotherapy, with a particular emphasis upon the "encounter group" dynamic.

There's a whole novel right there in that footnote.

Link to summary of 'Psychiatric Illness in the Clergy'.
Link to online article about Dr William Coulson.

—Vaughan.

April 30, 2009

Lithium levels in drinking water linked to fewer suicides:

Higher levels of naturally occurring lithium in the water supply are associated with fewer suicides in the local population, reports a study just published in The British Journal of Psychiatry.

Lithium is one of the fundamental elements, but is also used by psychiatrists as one the most effective drug treatment for mood disorders, in the form of lithium carbonate and lithium citrate, where it is also known to reduce the risk of suicide.

This new study suggests that even trace amounts might have an influence on the whole population level, and this is not the first time this link has been made.

A 1990 study found higher levels of lithium in drinking water were linked to fewer incidences of crimes, suicides, and arrests related to drug addictions.

This leads to the intriguing question of whether lithium should be added to the water supply as a public health measure.

The idea of adding psychoactive substances to the water supply sounds creepy, but some might argue that if we add fluoride simply to prevent tooth decay, boosting lithium concentrations to the high end of naturally occurring levels to reduce deaths could be justified.

Philosophers and conspiracy theorists start your engines.

Link to BJP lithium study.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

April 29, 2009

Blast from the past:

New Scientist covers the debate on the causes of the non-specific emotional and cognitive symptoms that are appearing at an alarming rate in US soldiers who have been caught up in blasts while on service.

The controversy centres on whether the symptoms of 'post concussional syndrome' (which can include depression, irritability, concentration difficulties, headaches and reduced memory function) are caused by damage to the brain or from shock waves of the explosion, or are largely triggered by an emotional reaction to the stress of war.

It's an interesting debate, not least because it's almost 100 years since almost exactly the same debate raged over shell shock.

This is from an excellent article by medical historian Edgar Jones and colleagues who discuss the similarities between the 'shell shock' debates, and the current controversy:

Frederick Mott, then Britain’s leading neuropathologist, who was recruited by the War Office to discover the etiology of the disorder, argued that in extreme cases shell shock could be fatal if intense commotion affected "the delicate colloidal structures of the living tissues of the brain and spinal cord," arresting "the functions of the vital centers in the medulla". It was also speculated that the disorder resulted from damage to the CNS from carbon monoxide released by the partial detonation of a shell or mortar. In other words, shell shock was formulated as an organic problem even though the pathology remained unclear.

However, research conducted in 1915 and 1916 by Myers, consultant psychologist to the British Expeditionary Force, led to a new hypothesis. Based on his own observations, an increasing appreciation of the stress of trench warfare, and the finding that many shell-shocked soldiers had been nowhere near an explosion but had identical symptoms to those who had, Myers suggested a psychological explanation. For these cases, the term "emotional," rather than "commotional," shock was proposed. The psychological explanation gained ground over the neurological in part because it offered the British Army an opportunity to return shell-shocked soldiers to active duty.

As mentioned by the NewSci two big studies have recently found strikingly similar results: many soldier who have the symptoms of 'post concussional syndrome' were never actually in an explosion.

Extreme stress and trauma, of whatever type, seems to predict the likelihood of someone having the symptoms better than actually being caught up in an explosion.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Link to NewSci 'Brain shock: The new Gulf War syndrome'.
Link to 'Shell Shock and Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: A Historical Review'.

—Vaughan.

April 23, 2009

From the four humours to fMRI:

The excellent Cognition and Culture blog found a fascinating lecture by the energetic medical historian Noga Arikha about the four humours theory of medicine and how its legacy influences our modern day ideas about the mind and brain.

The four humours theory suggested that the function of the mind and body was determined by the balance of four fluids in the body: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.

While specific diseases were explained in this way, so were character traits and, in their excess, mental illness.

Indeed, some of the old names for these fluids still survive as descriptions of character traits (for example, we can still describe someone as phlegmatic or sanguine) even if we're unaware of their origins.

However, Arikha outlines that its possible to trace the thinking behind humoural theories right through history into our current ideas about mind and brain in the age of brain scans and cognitive neuroscience.

The talk is based on her book, called Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, and the video is a bit shaky at times but worth sticking with as it's an engrossing lecture.

Link to video of talk by Noga Arikha.

—Vaughan.

Phantom portraits:

I've just found a gallery of one of my favourite art science projects of all time which used digital photo manipulation to illustrate the phantom limbs of post-amputation patients.

The images are incredibly striking, because they vividly illustrate that phantom limbs are often only phantom part-limbs. Sections can be missing, even in the middle, so a phantom hand can be felt even if a phantom elbow cannot.

Or perhaps a phantom hand can feel as if it protrudes directly from the point of amputation at the shoulder, or perhaps it feels distorted, or perhaps has no intervening phantom arm, or perhaps it is stuck in one position, and so on.

The project was the brainchild of neuropsychologist Peter Halligan, neurologist John Kew and photographer Alexa Wright. Actually, Peter is an ex-boss and I spent several years of my PhD with a huge picture of RD (above) in my office and it never failed to amaze me.

Unfortunately, the pictures in the online gallery are a viewable but a little small, although there are some larger versions if you scroll down in this essay.

Link to After Images online gallery.

—Vaughan.

Reverse psychology in a pill: anti-placebo:

You may be aware of the placebo effect, where an inert pill has an effect because of what the patient thinks it does. You may even be aware of the nocebo effect, where an inert pill causes 'side-effects'. But a fascinating 1970 study reported evidence for the anti-placebo effect, where an inert pill has the opposite effect of what it is expected to do.

Storms and Nisbett were two psychologists interested in attribution, the process of how we explain the causes of events and the impact this has on how we feel.

We know that attributions have a big impact on our level of physical and emotional health. For example, your heart is racing when you're about to give a talk. If you attribute it to a weak heart, you may start worrying whether you might pass out and become incredibly stressed, but if you attribute it to the situation, you might just think its a natural reaction for the event and feel primed and ready.

In anxiety disorders, we know that people often attribute natural bodily reactions to frightening causes, which makes people feel more on edge, and hence, their body kicks into an even higher gear, and so on. The cycle continues, to fever pitch. In essence, it's anxiety-fuelled anxiety.

Insomnia has an element of this. People can be worried that they're not sleeping, and so get anxious thoughts when they go to bed, and so feel on edge, ad nocturnum, until the early hours.

So rather than getting people to fill in questionnaires about causes of insomnia, a typical method in attribution research, Storms and Nisbett wanted to test these ideas in the real world.

They recruited a group of patients with insomnia and told them they were doing a four-night study on dreaming and asked them to rate their difficulty in falling asleep each night.

The first two nights were exactly that, a sleeping and rating exercise, but on the third night the participants were given pills. One group was told that the pill would make them feel more aroused, like a shot of caffeine, while the others were told that the pill would make them feel more relaxed, like a sleeping pill.

On the fourth night, the group were given the 'opposite' pill, but in reality, all the pills were identical and completely inert, containing nothing more than sugar.

Now here's the thing. The insomnia patients taking the 'relaxation' pills slept really badly, and the patients taking the 'arousal' pills slept much better.

What seemed to be happening was that patients taking 'uppers', normally trapped in a cycle of anxious self-monitoring, could attribute any arousal they had to the pill. Any sign of feeling wired wasn't them, it was the pill, so they could relax and fell asleep easily.

In contrast, those who had taken the 'downers' thought that any arousal must be their insomnia causing them problems, and it must be really bad, because it was getting to them despite the supposed sleeping pill they'd taken. In other words, they were freaking out because they couldn't sleep despite the 'medication'.

It turns out that this simple experiment wasn't easily replicated but the problem was solved in 1983 when it was realised that this effect only held for people with insomnia who obsessively self-monitored.

But what these experiments tell us is that the effects of medication, the symptoms of illness and even the process of 'being sick' is partly dependent on our own ideas about what's happening.

Link to PubMed entry for original Storms and Nisbet study.
Link to 1983 replication.

—Vaughan.

April 22, 2009

The medieval senses and the evil eye:

The latest edition of neurology journal Brain has an extended review of three books about the history of the senses which gives a fascinating insight into how the meaning of our sensory experiences has changed over the centuries.

This paragraph is particularly interesting as it relates medieval theories of perception to the superstition of the 'evil eye' where you could curse someone by looking at them.

While we now think of vision as a system for interpreting passively received light, the 'evil eye' makes much more sense when you realize that medieval people thought that light rays could fundamentally influence what they touched and even that the eyes actively sent out rays that could influence the objects within sight.

In 1492, learned debates also influenced how the world was perceived. As medical historians Nancy Siraisi and James T. McIlwain, also a neuroscientist, point out, medieval scholars would have located sensory perception in the brain (Siraisi, 1990; McIlwain, 2006). However, they would have perceived the five senses as active entities conveying information about the outside world to the internal senses of common sense, imagination, judgement, memory and fantasy (the ability to visualize).

Scholars differed considerably over how this worked in practice: for example, were rays emitted from the eyes towards the viewed object or was it the other way round? Either theory allowed for these rays to influence both viewer and object, thus explaining the widespread concept of the evil eye, or a belief still current in the 18th century that what a mother saw affected her foetus. The brain, however, was not the only sensitive organ of the body.

The heart was believed to be the centre of the animal soul, and thus closely associated with more carnal senses such as touch. The brain, the centre of the rational soul, was more closely associated with sight; the eyes often viewed as the ‘windows of the soul’. Sight, therefore, was given pre-eminence in the pre-modern world as it is today, but often for spiritual reasons due to the inter-dependence of religion and rational knowledge (scientia).

Thus even if the brain functioned in the past very much as it does today, the emotional and moral meaning of sensory experience differed dramatically.

The whole review is worth reading in full, not just because of the insights into medieval psychology, but also because these new books introduce 'sensory history' - a history of ideas about how we experienced the world through our bodies.

Link to review.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

April 21, 2009

Predicting the determined self-castrator:

The Journal of Sexual Medicine has a surprising study looking at psychological attributes that predict which castration enthusiasts who will actually go on to remove their own testicles, in contrast to those who just fantasise about it.

This is the abstract from the scientific paper:

A passion for castration: characterizing men who are fascinated with castration, but have not been castrated

Roberts LF, Brett MA, Johnson TW, Wassersug RJ.

J Sex Med. 2008 Jul;5(7):1669-80.

Introduction. A number of men have extreme castration ideations. Many only fantasize about castration; others actualize their fantasies.

Aims. We wish to identify factors that distinguish those who merely fantasize about being castrated from those who are at the greatest risk of genital mutilation.

Methods. Seven hundred thirty-one individuals, who were not castrated, responded to a survey posted on http://www.eunuch.org. We compared the responses of these "wannabes" to those of 92 men who were voluntarily castrated and responded to a companion survey.

Main Outcome Measures. Respondents answered the questionnaire items relating to demographics, origin of interest in castration, and ambition toward eunuchdom.

Results. Two categories of wannabes emerged. A large proportion (∼40%) of wannabes' interest in castration was singularly of a fetishistic nature, and these men appeared to be at a relatively low risk of irreversible genital mutilation. Approximately 20% of the men, however, appeared to be at great risk of genital mutilation. They showed a greater desire to reduce libido, change their genital appearance, transition out of male, and prevent sexually offensive behavior. Nineteen percent of all wannabes have attempted self-castration, yet only 10% have sought medical assistance.

Conclusions. We identify several motivating factors for extreme castration ideations and provide a classification for reasons why some males desire orchiectomies. Castration ideations fall under several categories of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Ed. (DSM-IV), most notably a Gender Identity Disorder other than male-to-female (MtF) transsexual (i.e., male-to-eunuch) and a Body Identity Integrity Disorder. Physicians need to be aware of males who have strong desires for emasculation without a traditional MtF transsexual identity.

We reported on an earlier study by the same research group last year, which discovered that 'voluntary eunuchs' report that they are pleased that they have had their testicles removed and seem mentally healthy.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

—Vaughan.

April 19, 2009

Moses extreme reactions:

Some statistical tests with wonderful names. From SPSS, one of the standard data analysis software packages used by psychologists.

Kendall's W
Cochran's Q
LSD post-hoc
Two-step cluster
Fisher's exact test
Wald-Wolfowitz runs
Moses extreme reactions

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has added to our list of wonderfully named statistical tests used by psychologists. Grabbed from the comments, they include:

Tukey's Honest Significant Difference
Smoothed Bootstrap
Jackknife Variance
Roy's Largest Root

—Vaughan.

April 16, 2009

A classification of royal stalkers:

A fascinating new study on the types of people who stalk or harass the British Royal Family has just been published online by the journal Psychological Medicine.

A group of forensic psychologists examined, by hand, twenty thousand files held by SO14, the Metropolitan Police Service's Royalty Protection unit, to study people who had made inappropriate approaches or communications with the British royals.

This is the classification of harassers and stalkers by motivation:

Delusions of Royal Identity (i.e. pretenders to the throne or to royal kinship). This was the largest group, accounting for 67 cases (26.9%). Seventeen (6.8%) expressed delusional beliefs that they were the true sovereign. This group often wrote lengthy letters accompanied by family trees and multiple annotated documents in support of their claims. Claims of kinship to the sovereign were made by a further 50 (20.1% of the whole sample). There was often evidence in their writings of complex delusional systems.

Amity Seekers were the 41 (16.5%) subjects who offered their friendship and advice, which they expected to be taken, apparently oblivious to the unrealistic nature of their endeavour.

The Intimacy Seekers consisted of 30 (12%) individuals. Fourteen (5.6%) had clearly erotomanic preoccupations, 10 of whom were male. All expressed the conviction that they were loved by or already married to their royal target. Those who were infatuated but not clearly erotomanic (16; 6.4%) usually wished to express their love or offer their hand in marriage to a royal. They understood that the royal personage did not yet love them or even know of their existence, but they still expressed confidence that they would succeed in their suit.

Sanctuary and Help Seekers made up 22 (8.8%) of the sample and were asking for royal assistance with personal adversity or royal protection from supposed persecutors.

The Royally Persecuted were a small group of only eight (3.2%) subjects, who claimed to be victims of organized persecution orchestrated by a member of the Royal Family.

Counsellors who, though similar in some ways to the Amity Seekers, were a group of 28 (11.2%) individuals who saw it as their role to offer advice and opinions to the Royal Family on how they should live their lives and respond to political situations.

Querulants formed a group of 16 (6.4%) people who were pursuing a highly personalized quest for justice and vindication. They were seeking royal assistance with their claims, or complaining of royal indifference to their cause.

The Chaotic comprised a group of 37 cases (14.9%), where no clear motivation could be assigned because their writings and/or their statements to police were so difficult to follow or understand. It was not that there was insufficient information to assign another category. Rather, their thought processes and behaviour were so disturbed as to make a singularity of purpose unlikely.

The most famous stalker of the British Royal Family was probably Klaus Wagner, a German ex-doctor who believed that the Queen was the beast prophesised in Revelations and that Princess Diana was being persecuted by the Royal Family.

He was eventually sent to jail for stalking Diana, and apparently remained on his quest to defeat the 'Elizardbeast' until his death in 2007.

Wagner came to prominence in a controversial UK TV documentary called I'm Your Number One Fan that featured three stalkers of high profile celebrities. It used to be available on the net but has since disappeared, although occasionally turns up on torrent servers.

Interestingly, one of the first cases of what we now call erotomania or de Clérambault's syndrome, the delusional belief that another person - usually of higher status - is in love with you, featured the British Royal Family.

de Clérambault described the case of a 53 year old French woman who believed King George V was in love with her and would interpret twitches in the curtains of Buckingham Palace as secret love signals from the monarch.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

Head first into brain scanner technology:

Nature has a great open-access article on the technology of MRI neuroimaging, responsible for the majority of 'brain scans' that are used in medical examinations, scientific studies and media reports.

Understanding the technology of MRI scanners is not just of interest to medtech geeks, it is essential to be able to interpret and design brain imaging studies.

We tend to think that all brain scanners do the same thing, but comparing raw data across just two scanners can be a big problem.

Imagine if there were two different ways of measuring the layout of a room, one involving placing paper squares on the floor and another by tying string between all the objects. The conclusions might be similar but trying to merge all the raw results into one big data set would be a pain.

A similar problem affects researchers using brain scanners, because manufacturers may use different magnetic pulse sequences, different coils, different processing software and have to tweak the settings for each individual installation.

As a consequence, various studies are now developing ways (mainly data processing algorithms) to ensure that even relatively simple procedures, like structural scans, can be reliably compared across different scanners.

But even using just one scanner, it's important to know what the technology is doing because this determines what aspects of the body's physiology it measures.

The Nature article focuses on the latest developments in MRI scanner technology but also functions as a great brief guide to how scanner go from magnetic coils to measuring brain activity.

Link to Nature on 'How to get ahead in imaging' (via @mocost).

—Vaughan.

April 13, 2009

Microchip-in-a-pill drug monitoring:

Furious Seasons covers a new microchip-in-a-pill that monitors the stomach and detects what drugs the patient is taking, reporting back to the doctor in real time.

The blurb from the company is even more astounding:

Proteus ingestible event markers (IEMs) are tiny, digestible sensors made from food ingredients, which are activated by stomach fluids after swallowing. Once activated, the IEM sends an ultra low-power, private, digital signal through the body to a microelectronic receiver that is either a small bandage style skin patch or a tiny device insert under the skin. The receiver date- and time-stamps, decodes, and records information such as the type of drug, the dose, and the place of manufacture, as well as measures and reports physiologic measures such as heart rate, activity, and respiratory rate.

Like Phil Dawdy, I feel a bit freaked out.

This is interesting for psychiatry for two reasons: one, monitoring for recreational drug or alcohol use and two, monitoring compliance with antipsychotics.

Both of these are interesting because these are both controversial legal areas, in that a court can impose an order or conditions that depend on a clean drug screen, and, thanks to the UK's new 'now with added coercion' 2007 Mental Health Act psychiatrists can impose community treatment orders.

This means that a patient can be returned to hospital, against their will, if they're found not to be complying with their prescribed medication regime. And as involuntary treatment is most commonly imposed on people with psychosis, this usually means taking antipsychotics.

You can see how this technology would be of great use on the monitoring end, but as it supposedly reports on any sort of drug, presumably personal drug use then becomes a data privacy issue.

In other words, you'd have to trust the information technology system to correctly discard the results that you don't want your doctor to see.

More concerning perhaps is 'rights slippage' which is a pervasive problem is psychiatry.

This is the same problem that occurs when a psychiatrist (and thanks to the UK's new Mental Health Act, now a psychologist) says to a patient who is in hospital of their own free will: "If you leave, I'll section you". Essentially, you're free to go, but if you try, I'll legally detain you.

You can see how this new technology could be used for similar strategies - if you let us monitor your drug use and medication compliance, we won't use impose any involuntary treatment, but if you don't, we will.

For people who voluntarily and knowingly decide to use the monitoring device, you can see how it would be a huge medical benefit, but in psychiatry, where involuntary treatment is possible, the ethical difficulties are amplified.

Also, I don't think I need to explain the ironies of potentially implanting microchip monitoring devices into people with psychosis who often have delusions about being implanted with microchip monitoring devices.

Link to Furious Seasons microchip drug monitors.
Link to manufacturers website.

—Vaughan.

Sixty miniature heads used in phrenology:

This is a wonderful image of a 1831 set of sixty miniature heads used to demonstrate the principles of phrenology from the Science Museum in London.

The science museum has a page dedicated to the set, which comes in a wonderful wooden display case, that also includes some other images and information about the exhibit.

Phrenology originated with Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a German physician, assisted by his colleague, Johann Kaspar Spurzheim (1809-72). Phrenologists believed that the shape and size of various areas of the brain (and therefore the overlying skull) determined personality.

Gall and Spurzheim eventually disagreed and went on to promote rival systems of phrenology. These heads are numbered according to Spurzheim’s classification. The heads may have been used to teach phrenology but were probably made as a general reference collection.

A wide range of different heads are present. For instance, head number 54 is that of a scientific man; head number 8 is recorded as the head of an ‘idiot’. The heads were made by William Bally, who studied under Spurzheim from 1828 onwards.

Link to Science Museum exhibit page (via the wonderful Fortean Times).

—Vaughan.

The mind of the condemned:

How do you cope on death row? In 1962 two psychiatrists were puzzled by the fact that inmates condemned to death in New York's notorious Sing Sing prison were not overwhelmed by depression or anxiety. They wrote an article for the American Journal of Psychiatry attempting to explain how 13 prisoners managed the fear of their imminent demise.

It's an uncomfortable and ill-fitting article in many ways. The two psychiatrists are firmly psychoanalytic in their approach, talking of 'ego defense' and 'projective tests', which seems odd to the modern forensic eye.

Moreover, the liberal use of the contemptuous language of sixties psychiatry pervades the article. The inmates are described variously as "inadequate", "obsessed with his own power", "mentally dull", "self-pitying", as if these were facts of the world, rather than the disdainful opinions of two comfortably employed prison psychiatrists.

Disturbingly, several of the condemned prisoners are clearly psychotic, and their madness is invariably explained away as a 'defense mechanism', little more than a tool for managing their anxieties.

But despite the filtering and selective reporting, it is possible to catch a glimpse of how the inmates managed their lives as the condemned.

This man stands out in the series as being the one who most successfully employed intellectualization as a means of defending against anxiety and depression. He elaborated a philosophy of life and values in which his own criminal career became not only justifiable, but even respectable. He rationalized his crimes by emphasizing the hypocrisy and perfidy of society on the one hand and by comparing himself with policemen and soldiers and others who live honorably “by the gun” on the other. This system was so effective for him that even when execution appeared imminent he maintained his hero’s martyr role and disdained to request executive clemency.

Of course, we will all die, and in recent years studies on how we live with this knowledge, so called 'mortality salience' or 'terror management theory' (TMT) research, has become a fertile field of investigation.

Research suggests that when reminded of our own death, we attempt to make ourselves feel better by aligning ourselves more closely with our social groups, cultural values and intimate partners.

But to my knowledge, only one other study has investigated how death row inmates deal with their forthcoming death.

In 2008, two Dutch psychologists, Andreas Schuck and Janelle Ward, analysed the final statements of those executed by the state of Texas to examine how they portrayed themselves and made sense of their situation.

In line with 'terror management theory' the majority of the last statements attempted to align the subject with our society's notion of a 'good' person, often in a common pattern or sequence:

subject [reference to the self]; addresses relevant relationships (from closest to furthest); expresses internal feelings (love, hate); defines situation (responsibility, acceptance versus innocence, political statement, denial); deals with situation (self-comfort, religion, wish/hope, forgiveness, self-blame vs. accusation, denial); closure.

It seems that from the prisoner to the public, death makes us conform, and even those who may have been the most callous of killers want to be a good person when they die.

Link to 1962 death row article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to study on Texas executions last words.

—Vaughan.

April 11, 2009

Old skool lie detectors:

OObject has a fantastic online gallery of vintage analog 'lie detectors' - exactly the type of kit you used to see in old detective films where the police questions would lead to frantic activity on the polygraph as a bead of sweat would run down the perp's face.

It has everything from a tiny 1920s original MacKenzie-Lewis polygraph to the lie detector in a suitcase Pentograph from the 1980s

Despite polygraph-based lie detectors being rubbish at detecting lies, they're still admissible as evidence in some US states and widely used by the security services.

Link to gallery of vintage lie detectors (via BB Gadgets).

—Vaughan.

April 07, 2009

The mysterious death of "Mad King" Ludwig:

This is an interesting snippet about the mysterious 1886 death of “Mad King” Ludwig II of Bavaria and his psychiatrist found in the final part of a Lancet article on the equally mysterious Ganser syndrome.

Born in Dresden in 1853, Sigbert Josef Maria Ganser emerged from the colourful Munich circle of neurologists and psychiatrists that included Jung, Bleuler, and Alzheimer. He trained as a psychiatrist in Wurzburg, then completed his thesis in Munich under Johan Von Gudden, editor of the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten.

Von Gudden was also the supervisor of Emil Kraepelin, and physician to the “Mad King” Ludwig II of Bavaria, last of the German feudal princes [picture on right]. Both Von Gudden and the king were to die in mysterious circumstances three days after Von Gudden certified Ludwig insane.

Their drowned bodies were found in Lake Starnberg, and it is believed that King Ludwig took his own life, as well as that of his physician who wrestled in vain to prevent him from leaping into the lake.

According to the Wikipedia page for "Mad King" Ludwig, the death by drowning is only one version of the story and (unsurprisingly) there are various conspiracy theories about what killed the monarch.

Link to Lancet article on Ganser's Syndrome.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

April 06, 2009

Neural integration of transplanted hand:

Neurophilosophy has an excellent article on a man whose brain's sensation areas have reorganised to integrate a hand transplanted from a corpse, 35 years after the man's original hand was destroyed in an accident.

The somatosensory cortex is literally a 'map' of the body. Each part on this strip of brain corresponds to an area of the body and is involved in perceiving bodily sensation.

We know that the somatosensory map is quite malleable, and can change when limbs are amputated and so no longer feed information into the system.

What happens when new limbs are attached is still largely a mystery as this type of transplant is a relatively new procedure. Nevertheless, this is now beginning to be studied and, as the Neurophilosophy article recounts, it's starting to show us how the brain responds to a changing body:

One consequence of this functional reorganization is phantom limb syndrome, which Savage experienced for a short time following removal of his hand. This is thought to occur because although the deprived somatosensory cortical region takes on another function, it somehow retains a representation of the amputated limb. As a result, the amputee will occasionally experience sensations, sometimes painful ones, which are perceived to be in the missing body part.

In Savage's case, it was thought that these changes may be irreversible, because his brain had been deprived of inputs from the right hand for some 35 years. But a team of neuroscientists led by Scott Frey of the University of Oregon now show that this is not the case. In a functional neuroimaging study published today in Current Biology, they report that Savage's somatosensory cortex has been restored to something like its pre-amputation state, with the transplanted hand "recapturing" the cortical area which represented his own right hand.

The research team have put the full text of the scientific report online as a pdf file if you want to get to the nitty-gritty, otherwise the Neurophilosophy article is an elegant summary of a fascinating study.

Link to Neurophilosophy on neuroscience of hand transplant.
pdf of scientific paper.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

April 02, 2009

Brain washing in post-war London:

BBC Radio 4 recently broadcast an excellent documentary on psychiatrist William Sargant who began experiments in 'brain washing' likely at a behest of the British secret services in post-war London.

Sargant was rumoured to have links to the notorious and secret CIA MKULTRA project that attempted to develop 'brain washing' or 'programming' techniques that were later condemned as unethical when they came to light in the 1970s.

A pioneers in early medical treatments for mental illness, he became famous after writing his book Introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry and became notorious after developing techniques to keep patients asleep for weeks on end with barbiturates and electro-convulsive therapy.

After publishing some early work he was apparently contacted by UK spooks and contracted to do secret research on 'brain washing' style research.

He later wrote a the widely read Battle for the Mind which discussed the psychology and neuroscience of brain washing.

Interestingly, Lord David Owen, the British ex-Foreign secretary, leader of the SDP party and current member of the House of Lords, was Sargant's registrar when he worked as a doctor at St Thomas' Hospital in London.

Unfortunately, the BBC have recently butchered their Radio 4 website and ruined their archive by putting everything on iPlayer, so you can only listen to the programme for another 5 days and only if you're based on the UK.

However, the programme seems to have found it's way to Google Video, so you can listen to a streamed version there.

Link to BBC iPlayer version.
Link to alternative streamed version.

—Vaughan.

March 31, 2009

Misfortunes, Troubles, Disappointments:

I'm just reading Lisa Appignanesi's so-far excellent book Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present where she reproduces an 1810 table of causes of insanity from London's Bethlem Hospital on p54.

It was compiled by the physician William Black and lists various afflictions that have apparently caused mental illness followed by a count of the number of affected patients.

Misfortunes, Troubles, Disappointments

Grief (206)
Religion and Methodism (90)
Love (74)
Jealousy (9)
Pride (8)
Study (15)
Fright (31)
Drink and Intoxication (58)
Fevers (110)
Childbed [i.e. birth or nursing babies] (79)
Obstruction (10)
Family and Heredity (115)
Contusions and Fractures of the Skull (12)
Venereal (14)
Small Pox (7)
Ulcers and Scabs dried up (5)

—Vaughan.

March 26, 2009

Much madness is divinest sense:

I've just found this fantastic poem by 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, where she discusses the link between conformity and madness.

Madness is defined partly in terms of what we consider normal and one of the great critiques of psychiatry is that it is used a method of control over those who do not conform to acting with the acceptable range of behaviour.

To what extent this is necessary or ethical for people who may not have good insight into their extreme states of mind has been one of the key debates in mental health for hundreds of years.

Dickinson describes the 19th method of control ("handled with a chain") although I can't say I ever seen an angry person declared sane, as we still have this implicit idea that being able to control your emotions when necessary or in your interest is a sign of sanity.

Dickinson's poem:

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

Dickinson is probably best known among cognitive scientists for her poem on the brain ('Wider than the sky'), which is perhaps one of the most beautiful literary pieces on our second favourite organ, and widely quoted by researchers.

Link to Bartleby entry for 'Much madness is divinest sense'.

—Vaughan.

March 25, 2009

Tonic to aphrodisiac to energy drink:

The journal Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine has an interesting open-access article about guarana, a stimulating Amazonian berry that was used by the local peoples but is now a global ingredient in energy drinks and 'aphrodisiacs'.

It is often advertised as an ingredient in energy drinks to make them sound more 'exotic' or 'natural', but the kick is largely from caffeine, and it contains about four times as much as the coffee bean.

Indeed, the article notes that guarana seeds contain more caffeine than any other plant in the world.

Guaraná (Paullinia cupana H.B.K., Sapindaceae) is a rainforest vine that was domesticated in the Amazon for its caffeine-rich fruits. Guaraná has long been used as a tonic and to treat various disorders in Brazil and abroad and became a national soda in Brazil about a century ago. In the last two decades or so, guaraná has emerged as a key ingredient in various 'sports' and energy drinks as well as concoctions that allegedly boost one's libido.

For some time, guaraná's high caffeine content was thought to be a detriment because of health concerns about excessive intake of caffeine-rich drinks. But it is precisely this quality, and the fact that it has a mysterious name and comes from an exotic land, that has propelled guaraná into a global beverage.

The article is fairly brief but is a great guide to this curious plant that is becoming increasingly used as a pick-me-up ingredient.

Link to full-text of article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

March 12, 2009

When I get that feeling, I have sexual sneezing:

A few months ago, a surgeon and a psychiatrist wrote an article for the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine on cases of sneezing triggered by sexual thoughts and orgasm. The subsequent media coverage meant that the authors were contacted by members of the public who experienced similarly unusual sneezing triggers.

The researchers have written a fascinating follow-up letter to the same journal of summarise the reaction they got from their article, and the new cases they've discovered.

We surmised that sneezing induced by sexual ideation or orgasm may be under-reported. Subsequent media coverage has lead to many more members of the public stating that they also have this condition. Reports have been on the JRSM website, on internet-based media fora or by unsolicited contact with the lead author. In total the number of people we found reporting sneezing induced by sexual ideation through these disparate methods is 146 (which includes seven doctors), with a further seven reporting sneezing induced by orgasm.

These triggers of sneezing appear to be mutually exclusive; people report either sneezing upon sexual ideation or sneezing upon orgasm. Of those reporting sneezing upon sexual ideation 112 (77%) were men, as were all seven of those reporting sneezing with orgasm, but the gender disproportion may represent sexual bias in the reporting rather than the prevalence of these conditions. Nevertheless, these figures do show that these conditions are not infrequent, and imply that perhaps thousands of people in the UK are affected; many stated that they had never discussed this phenomenon and were relieved to hear that they were not alone.

We also wish to report that two people contacted us to state that several members of their family sneeze on a full stomach; this now doubles the number of families in the medical literature reported to have this as a trigger of sneezing. Interestingly, two of the people who reported sneezing on sexual ideation also admitted to a family history. One lady reported that her brother had the same phenomenon. A man reported that both his brothers and his father also had this. This implies, as we suggested in our original article, that all the unusual triggers of sneezing – light, full stomach, sexual ideation or orgasm – may be inherited in an autosomal dominant manner.

That last sentence is interesting, because a confirmed autosomal dominant pattern of inheritance means that it is likely to be due to changes in a single gene.

This doesn't mean a single gene has evolved to trigger or prevent sneezing when people have sexual thoughts - this would likely be a 'side-effect' some other useful function.

Interestingly, sneezing in response to sunlight is known to be inherited in an autosomal dominant pattern.

Consequently, it has been given the name Autosomal dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst syndrome, or the ACHOO syndrome.

Link to PubMed entry for original article.
Link to follow-up letter.

—Vaughan.

Seven tactile illusions:

New Scientist has got a nice feature online where they explain seven touch illusions you can try yourself, with the explanations for how they're tricking your brain.

My favourite is probably the most simple, the 'Aristotle illusion':

One of the oldest tactile illusions is the Aristotle illusion. It is easy to perform. Cross your fingers, then touch a small spherical object such as a dried pea, and it feels like you are touching two peas. This also works if you touch your nose.

This is an example of what is called "perceptual disjunction". It arises because your brain has failed to take into account that you have crossed your fingers. Because the pea (or nose) touches the outside of both fingers at the same time - something that rarely happens - your brain interprets it as two separate objects.

It's a fantastic little collection and it follows on from NewSci's recent collection of five auditory you can check out online.

Link to NewSci seven tactile illusions.

—Vaughan.

March 09, 2009

A brief history of aspirin:

Wired has a brief article on the history of aspirin, which contains the surprising fact that the same pharmacist who first synthesised the popular headache pill also first synthesised heroin.

1899: Felix Hoffmann, a young pharmacist working for the German pharmaceutical company Bayer, patents a new pain reliever. The trademark name is aspirin.

Hoffmann, who was said to be seeking an effective pain reliever for his father's rheumatism, successfully synthesized acetylsalicylic acid in August 1897. It would later be marketed as aspirin — "a" for "acetyl" and "spirin" for Spirea, the genus name of the source plant for salicylic acid, the pain-relieving agent.

That August, incidentally, was an especially fertile period for Hoffmann: The month also saw him synthesize heroin, which he accomplished accidentally while attempting to acetylate morphine to produce codeine. Obviously, that discovery didn't pan out like aspirin.

It turns out that aspirin was a huge money-spinner for pharmaceutical company Bayer owing to persuasive marketing and powerful patent lawyers.

Link to Wired on the birth of aspirin.

—Vaughan.

February 28, 2009

On believing you died during the operation:

I just found this interesting paper in the medical journal Anesthesiology on fear of imminent death or the delusion that death has actually occurred, both linked to anaesthetic intoxication.

Despite our repeated explanations that she had suffered a local anesthetic-induced complication, the patient remained convinced that she had died and come back to life. This patient had been a non-practicing Christian who believed in an afterlife. She had not had any previous experience of this kind or know of others who had had. She had had no fear of death in the preoperative period.

The article notes that the delusional belief that one has died has been linked to complications with the use of lidocaine, procainamide, and procaine.

As with the drugs used in the Anesthesiology case study, all of these are local anaesthetics. They are just intended to numb a specific area, so the patient is not 'put under' with globally conscious altering substances.

It's also interesting because the delusion that one has died is also known in the psychiatric literature, usually in the context of diagnoses such as schizophrenia or after brain injury.

In these cases it is known as the Cotard delusion which is usually explained, rather unsatisfactorily, as being caused by a general emotional disconnection from the world, interpreted by the patient's faulty reasoning system as being convincing evidence that they are dead.

The case studies from the anaesthesiology literature suggest that these beliefs can be triggered in other ways, although the exact process still remains a mystery.

If you're put off by academic journals, give this article a try. It's well written, short and fascinating.

Link to Anesthesiology article on death delusions.

—Vaughan.

February 26, 2009

The life and times of the truth serum:

I just found this fascinating photo in a 1932 book on forensic psychology in the Universidad de Antioquia's history of medicine section. It pictures the inventor of the truth serum, Dr House, administering the drug to an arrested man in a Texas jail.

The book is called Manual de Psicología Jurídica (literally 'manual of legal psychology') by the pioneering forensic psychiatrist Emilio Mira y López and is a curious mixture of psychological theory, mental tests and descriptions of what seem like strange lie-detecting contraptions.

The history of the 'truth serum' is recounted in a fantastic article by medical historian Alice Winter from Bulletin of the History of Medicine which describes the Dr House's invention and the influence it had on society of the time.

Truth serum was the creation of a rural Texas physician, Robert House. House claimed that the drug scopolamine hydrobromide, which was known for erasing the knowledge of painful events, could actually be used to extract intact information. His announcement was seized upon by journalists, police, and forensic scientists as heralding a potentially transformative new technology, and was just as robustly rejected by the legal community.

Scopolamine's identity as an extractor of "truth" was indebted to certain earlier conventions—notably, research into altered psychic states such as mesmerism and hypnotism, which sometimes were said to create a confessional state. Scopolamine, in turn, created the shoes that other chemical agents would come to fill when, later in the decade and in the 1930s, the new barbiturates sodium amytal and sodium pentothal were said to have the potential to extract "truthful" memories.

These drugs largely act by reducing inhibition, with the hope that the person will speak more freely, but they have never been found to reliably make anyone more truthful.

Alice Winter was also recently interviewed on SciAm's Mind Matters blog, in light of rumours that one of the men involved in the Mumbai attacks had been subjected to interrogation under 'truth serum'.

Link to Winter's article The Making of 'Truth Serum'.
Link to 'What is truth serum?' from SciAm.

—Vaughan.

February 25, 2009

Love is ye drug:

Today's Nature has a fascinating letter from ecologist Joan Ehrenfeld who notes that Shakespeare describes how potions made from certain psychoactive plants were used to encourage reluctant lovers in one of his most famous plays.

Ehrenfeld is riffing on a recent Nature feature article that discussed the neuroscience of love, which seems to have been made open-access.

In his Essay 'Love: neuroscience reveals all' (Nature 457, 148; 2009), Larry Young claims that the biochemical understanding of love is not poetry. But at least one poet, namely William Shakespeare, foretold the application of drugs to manipulate the brain systems associated with pair bonding.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon maintains that topical applications of the juice of the wild pansy (Viola tricolor, called 'love-in-idleness' in the play) "Will make or man or woman madly dote Upon the next live creature that it sees" (Act 2, Scene 1). The potion proves highly effective, supplying much of the humour in the play as Titania falls in love with the donkey-headed Bottom. Shakespeare also suggests that other substances from "Dian's bud" — variously identified as a species of wormwood (Artemisia spp.) or chaste tree (Vitex agnus-castus, a species not native to England but long known for its anti-libidinal properties) — could reverse the neurobiological results of the pansy. Perhaps poets have something to teach us about neurobiology and love after all.

Link to letter in Nature.
Link to Nature article 'Being Human: Love: Neuroscience reveals all'.

—Vaughan.

February 23, 2009

Engraved brains:

Neurophilosophy has just found some beautiful neuroanatomical engravings from an 1823 book called The Anatomy of the Brain, Explained in a Series of Engravings by the pioneering brain researcher Sir Charles Bell.

Those with a slightly medical tendency may know his name from Bell's palsy, a facial muscle paralysis that usually affects one side, and is caused by damage to cranial nerve VII.

We have discussed Bell before on Mind Hacks, when we noted that he learnt his anatomy at a London strip club - although strictly speaking, he studied at a London anatomy school which is now one of the most famous strip clubs in London.

Neurophilosophy has some more of the fantastic engravings and recounts some of the background to the book and Bell's work.

And if you've seen all of them, you may want to check out another great Neurophilosophy post on a intriguing brain scanning study that suggests that the visual cortex is used as storage during working memory for visual images.

Link to Neurophilosophy on antique brain engravings.

—Vaughan.

February 21, 2009

Car crash over before consciousness kicks in:

This is a fascinating run down of an 'anatomy of a crash' from Australian car magazine Drive suggesting that the accident can be over before we're even consciously aware of it happening.

This is a reconstruction of a crash involving a stationary Ford Falcon XT sedan being struck in the driver's door by another vehicle travelling at 50 km/h.

0 milliseconds - An external object touches the driver's door.

1 ms - The car's door pressure sensor detects a pressure wave.

2 ms - An acceleration sensor in the C-pillar behind the rear door also detects a crash event.

2.5 ms - A sensor in the car's centre detects crash vibrations.

5 ms - Car's crash computer checks for insignificant crash events, such as a shopping trolley impact or incidental contact. It is still working out the severity of the crash. Door intrusion structure begins to absorb energy.

6.5 ms - Door pressure sensor registers peak pressures.

7 ms - Crash computer confirms a serious crash and calculates its actions.

8 ms - Computer sends a "fire" signal to side airbag. Meanwhile, B-pillar begins to crumple inwards and energy begins to transfer into cross-car load path beneath the occupant.

8.5 ms - Side airbag system fires.

15 ms - Roof begins to absorb part of the impact. Airbag bursts through seat foam and begins to fill.

17 ms - Cross-car load path and structure under rear seat reach maximum load. Airbag covers occupant's chest and begins to push the shoulder away from impact zone.

20 ms - Door and B-pillar begin to push on front seat. Airbag begins to push occupant's chest away from the impact.

27 ms - Impact velocity has halved from 50 km/h to 23.5 km/h. A "pusher block" in the seat moves occupant's pelvis away from impact zone. Airbag starts controlled deflation.

30 ms - The Falcon has absorbed all crash energy. Airbag remains in place. For a brief moment, occupant experiences maximum force equal to 12 times the force of gravity.

45 ms - Occupant and airbag move together with deforming side structure.

50 ms - Crash computer unlocks car's doors. Passenger safety cell begins to rebound, pushing doors away from occupant.

70 ms - Airbag continues to deflate. Occupant moves back towards middle of car.

Engineers classify crash as "complete".

150-300 ms - Occupant becomes aware of collision.

The video of the crash test, from which is the above is taken, is also available online.

As you can see, it's a lab-based crash test and so doesn't capture the messiness of many real world impacts.

I checked out their figure for conscious awareness kicking in at 150-300ms and it seems to be accurate and mostly taken from the work of neuroscientist Benjamin Libet.

There's a good 2004 review article from the Archives of Neurology that actually cites 300ms as the start of conscious awareness, some other reviews cite 200ms as a 'rule of thumb' figure.

Link to Drive on 'Anatomy of a Crash' (via Sentient Developments).
Link to paper on 'Neuronal Mechanisms of Conscious Awareness'.

—Vaughan.

February 18, 2009

Sleep and psychopathology:

New Scientist has a fascinating article on sleep and mental illness. While it's long been known that mental illness can disrupt sleep the article discusses the much less explored connection where loss of sleep might trigger symptoms of mental illness in some.

Until recently, however, the assumption that poor sleep was a symptom rather than a cause of mental illness was so strong that nobody questioned it. "It was just so easy to say about a patient, well, he's depressed or schizophrenic, of course he's not sleeping well - and never to ask whether there could be a causal relationship the other way," says Robert Stickgold, a sleep researcher at Harvard University. Even when studies did seem to point in the other direction, the findings were largely overlooked, he says.

Scientifically, sleep and mental illness have been long linked. Theories of bipolar disorder as a disruption to circadian rhythms have been kicking round for years and treatments that reduce disruption to sleep routines are known to have a therapeutic effect.

The NewSci article reviews various studies that suggest sleep problems can increase risk for mental illness, but it doesn't mention an equally interesting link.

We also know that sleep deprivation can help otherwise untreatable mood disorders. For example, missing a night's sleep can be used as a treatment in depression.

Link to article 'Are bad sleeping habits driving us mad?'.

—Vaughan.

Why smokers blunt their caffeine hit:

I was just reading an interesting paper on the interaction between antipsychotic drugs, caffeine and smoking and I found this interesting snippet on how smokers need to take in three to four times more caffeine than non-smokers to get the same effect, owing to the fact that by products of increases enzymes in the liver which break-down caffeine.

Byproducts of tobacco smoking, particularly the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are metabolic inducers. These byproducts are inducers of the [liver enzyme] cytochrome P450 isoenzyme 1A2 (CYP1A2) and of the less understood UDP-glucuronosyltransferases (UGTs).The metabolic inductive effects are not specific to tobacco smoking; they can also be expected from marijuana smoking.

Because inducers require the synthesis of new enzymes, several weeks are usually needed before the maximum effects of inducers are seen. Inducers' effects may take a few weeks to disappear as well....

Additional pharmacologic support of the relevance of smoking's inductive effects comes from caffeine intake studies. Caffeine, a drug that is more than 90 percent dependent on CYP1A2 for its metabolism and that is widely used in the United States, can exemplify smoking's effects on drug metabolism.

The C/D [concentration-dose ratio] of caffeine appears to be threefold to fourfold as high among nonsmokers compared with smokers. This higher ratio means that smokers need three to four times the caffeine "dosage" as nonsmokers on average to get the same plasma caffeine levels.

It turns out that two antipsychotic drugs, olanzapine and clozapine, are also broken down by the same enzyme, so smoking will reduce the effect of these drugs.

Hence smokers need larger doses to have the same effect, and patients on these drugs who give up smoking might find a sudden increase in side effects if the dose isn't dropped.

We tend to think of the effect of psychotropic drugs as happening in the brain but drug metabolism happens all over the body with the liver and kidneys being particularly important and having a profound impact on the effect of the compound.

Link to 'Atypical Antipsychotic Dosing: The Effect of Smoking and Caffeine'.

—Vaughan.

February 17, 2009

It was planted on me:

I have discovered that there is small but budding group of cognitive scientists who study the psychological impact of indoor plants.

For example, here is a study on the effects of an indoor plant on creativity and mood from the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.

Effects of an indoor plant on creative task performance and mood.

Shibata S, Suzuki N.

Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. 2004 Nov;45(5):373-81.

In this study, we investigated the effect of an indoor plant on task performance and on mood. Three room arrangements were used as independent variables: a room with (1) a plant, or (2) a magazine rack with magazines placed in front of the participants, or (3) a room with neither of these objects.

Undergraduate students (M= 35, F= 55) performed a task of associating up to 30 words with each of 20 specified words in a room with one of the three room arrangements. Task performance scores showed that female participants performed better in view of the plant in comparison to the magazine rack (p < 0.05).

Moreover, mood was better with the plant or the magazine rack in the room compared to the no object condition (p < 0.05). However, the difference in task performance was highly influenced by the evaluation about the plant or the magazine rack. It is suggested that the compatibility between task demand and the environment is an important factor in facilitating task performances.

Somehow, I feel my world view has not actually changed after reading that study.

But wait, there are also published research studies on:

Effects of the foliage plant on task performance and mood.

Effects of indoor plants on task performance and mood: a comparison between natural and imitated plants.

Influence of limitedly visible leafy indoor plants on the psychology, behavior, and health of students at a junior high school in Taiwan.

The association between indoor plants, stress, productivity and sick leave in office workers.

And someone even did their PhD on "Randomized clinical trials evaluating therapeutic influences of ornamental indoor plants in hospital rooms on health outcomes of patients recovering from surgery".

Link to PubMed entry for Scandinavian Journal of Psychology study.

—Vaughan.

February 13, 2009

Christina the Astonishing and the saints of epilepsy:

I've just read a fascinating article on the wonderfully named Christina the Astonishing, a 12th century saint who died during an epileptic seizure, rose from the 'dead', and according to some accounts, levitated to the roof of the church.

The paper, published in the medical journal Neurology, discusses her case because while various people have suggested that the supernatural experiences of the saints can be nowadays explained as epilepsy, Christina was thought to both be holy and have epilepsy by her contemporaries.

However, the paper begins with this fascinating bit about the history of the relationship between saints and the long mythologised condition:

In 1930, Kanner catalogued no less than 37 saints associated with “the falling sickness” and the eventful lives of many of these are illuminated in Murphy’s excellent paper “The saints of epilepsy.” While many made their name casting out demons and curing epilepsy, Pope Benedict XIV tightened up the rules relating to miraculous cures of seizures in 1743, particularly in relation to a relapse of the condition. No one has been canonized on the basis of a miraculous cure of epilepsy since.

Other saints have a more oblique connection to the condition. For example, St. Albanaus of Mainz (400 AD) was decapitated and the subsequent writhing of his headless body apparently resembled a convulsion, hence his connection. St. Sebastian, who survived being shot by arrows only to be later clubbed to death, is invoked as his initial recovery from near death represents the recovery from a seizure, which at first may seem fatal.

The three wise men of nativity fame, who bestowed gifts on the infant Christ, are also sometimes invoked against epilepsy as they “fell down” before the infant when they found him. In the 14th century, it was thought to be beneficial to whisper the names of these saintly wise men into the ears of people as they convulsed to stop the seizure.

A number of the saints of epilepsy are thought to have suffered seizures themselves, including those from the very highest echelons — see St. Paul. While these diagnoses remain speculative and can often only be inferred from minimal fragments of information, some have gone to considerable lengths to examine their hypotheses, including the investigation of the original court manuscripts in the case of St. Joan of Arc and the examination of a 600-year-old skull in the case of St. Birgitta.

Christina's case is fascinating in itself and the article is well worth a read.

Link to article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

February 10, 2009

Pioneers of psychology, in their own words:

The Wellcome History of Medicine Centre has interviewed some of the UK's cognitive science elders about the early days of neuropsychology and psychiatry research and have put all the video clips online.

The interviews are a wonderful insight into the earliest days of cognitive science research which are only hampered by their annoying presentation, so I've created YouTube playlists so you can just sit down and just watch each of the interviews from end-to-end.

Here they are:

Elizabeth Warrington was one of the pioneers of clinical and cognitive neuropsychology in the 60s and 70s and defined much of the field as we know it today. She was working at a time when it was rare for women to be working in medical research, let alone neuroscience.

Michael Rutter was one of the founders of child psychiatry and had a huge influence on the development of psychiatric epidemiology.

Richard Gregory is a highly influential cognitive psychologist who is famous for his work on visual perception and top-down (meaning-induced) influences on what we perceive.

Uta Frith is one of the world's foremost autism researchers and has been involved in child neuropsychology research since the 1960s.

All of the interviewees have been working for over 50 years, have been founders of their field, and are still involved in research.

Elizabeth Warrington is a personal hero of mine. She not only made some of the foundational discoveries in neuropsychology, but also was one of the creators of many of the assessment methods and techniques we use both for assessing the extent of brain injury and the understanding of what brain damage can tell us about normal brain function.

Actually, I have the minor honour of being Elizabeth Warrington's neuropsychological 'grand child', as I learnt a huge amount working with neuropsychologist Pat McKenna (another one of my personal heroes), who was one of the first people who was trained by Warrington.

A minor connection but one I am proud of, and I'm sure you can see why when you hear her discuss her work in the interview.

The other interviews are also thoroughly engrossing and are like being told stories of times past by people with wisdom of experience behind them.

—Vaughan.

February 07, 2009

Weaving a history of psychiatry from states of mind:

BBC Radio 4 have just concluded a fantastic five part radio series called States of Mind on the history of psychiatry in the UK since the 1950s, covering the death of the asylum, to the age of Prozac, to visions of the future.

It's produced and presented by the fantastic Claudia Hammond and weaves together historical research, commentary from researchers and the personal stories of patients and staff who have memories of treatment through the last 60 years.

Although it specifically focuses on the UK, in many ways it reflects the history of mental health in many parts of the world owing to the fact that Britain has tended to be a leader in both psychiatric treatment and radical views of mental health.

The five parts, all of which have the streamed audio available online, are:

Total Institution
Altered States
Community Care?
Happiness in a Pill?
Which Way Now?

I was altered to the series by the increasingly excellent Frontier Psychiatrist blog which is also well worth checking out.

Link to States of Mind page.

—Vaughan.

February 03, 2009

The hashish inspired art of Jean-Martin Charcot :

While searching for material on the famous 19th Century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, I noticed that a number of online art shops sell drawings he did, apparently while under the influence of hashish - so I've been trying to find out more.

The strip above is only part of the image, as despite the fact that it is now in the public domain, most of the online sources deliberately obscure it, presumably in an attempt to get you to buy their posters while pissing off potential customers at the same time.

However, it seems that the picture is likely to be genuine. This is from a book on Charcot's life where a contemporary recounts their hashish smoking escapades:

As soon as he was under the influence of the narcotic, a tumult of phantasmogoric visions flashed across his mind. The entire page was covered with drawings: prodigious dragons, grimacing monsters, incoherent personages who were superimposed on each other and who were intertwined and twisted in a fabulous whirlpool bringing to mind the apocalyptic visions of Van Bosh and Jacques Callot.

A 2004 article in the medical journal European Neurology discussed his lifelong interest in art and drawing, and contains a sketch of a scene from Hell also apparently created while stoned.

If anyone does know of a high quality online source of these drawings online, do let me know, as I'd particularly love to see the larger image in its full glorious detail.

Link to European Neurology on 'Charcot and Art: From a Hobby to Science'.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

February 02, 2009

Literature and psychiatry:

This month's British Journal of Psychiatry has another one of its fantastic 'psychiatry in 100 words' series, with this month's column focusing on literature.

The short piece is by psychiatrist Femi Oyebode who is the author of a recent book (pictured on the left) on the subject that covers everything from literary accounts of drug abuse to the use of narrative in fictional accounts of mental illness.

Literature and psychiatry — in 100 words

Reading works of fiction and attending to the language, the dialogue, the mood is like listening to patients. In both activities, we enter into other worlds, grasp something about the inner life of characters whose motivations may be unlike our own. D. H. Lawrence referring to this aspect of the novel wrote: `It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life'. Is this not also, partly, the task of psychiatry?

Link to 'Literature and psychiatry — in 100 words'.
Link to details of 'Mindreadings: Literature and Psychiatry' book.

—Vaughan.

January 31, 2009

Shattered delusions:

I've just found a fascinating article in the History of Psychiatry about a type of delusion that was widely reported in the 15th to 17th centuries but rarely occurs in modern times. The reports were of patients who believed that they were made of glass and thought they might shatter if they suffered even the lightest of knocks.

In some of the more unusual forms, people struck with this form of madness might even consider themselves to be an oil lamp, a drinking vessel or even trapped in glass bottle.

The belief could even be specific to certain parts of the body:

Reports of glass bones, arms, and legs appeared much later, but Early Modern accounts were particularly rich in allusions to glass hearts/chests, and fragile heads. Tommaso Garzoni, an Italian monk,wrote a series of character sketches of mentally-disturbed people in 1586. In one of these cameos, drawn from Galen, the fragile delusion presents as a man who thought that his body consisted of only a large head, which he protected from injury by avoiding all contact with his fellows.

The delusion was reported in medical and the proto-scientific literature of the time, but also shows up in plays and literature.

Reportedly, one famous sufferer was King Charles VI of France, who allegedly refused to allow people to touch him, and wore reinforced clothing to protect himself.

While we tend to be most interested in how new delusional themes arise in response to cultural developments, we pay much less attention about delusions which were once common but now rarely occur.

This is a lovely example of a very well researched look at the history of no-longer popular delusions.

It's also worth noting that Wikipedia has a page on the delusion where someone has briefly summarised some of the main points of the article.

Link to 'Reflection of the Glass Delusion of Europe'.
Link to DOI entry for same.
Link to glass delusion page on Wikipedia.

—Vaughan.

January 27, 2009

Complex beginnings:

The term 'complex', used to refer to a mental illness or psychological hang-up, has become so common as to have entered everyday language (e.g. 'he has an inferiority complex') but I only just recently found out about the origin of the concept.

The following is from the epic and endlessly fascinating book The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri Ellenberger, where he discusses the use of the 'word association test' in early 1900s psychiatry.

The story takes us through some of the most important figures in the history of 19th and 20th century mind science. From p691:

The test consisted of enunciating to a subject a succession of carefully chosen words; to each of them the subject had to respond with the first word that occurred to him; the reaction time was exactly measured...

It was invented by Galton, who showed how it could be used to explore the hidden recesses of the mind. It was taken over and perfected by Wundt, who attempted to experimentally establish the laws of the association of ideas.

Then Aschaffenberg and Kraepelin introduced the distinction of inner and outer associations; the former are associations according to meaning, the latter according to forms of speech and sound; they could also be called semantic and verbal associations.

Kraepelin showed that fatigue caused a gradual shift toward a greater proportion of verbal associations. Similar effects were observed in fever and alcoholic intoxication. The same authors compared the results of the word association test in various mental conditions.

Then a new path was opened by Ziehen who found that the reaction time was was longer when the stimulus word was to something unpleasant to the subject. Sometimes, by picking out several delayed responses, one could relate them to a common underlying representation that Ziehen called gefühlsbetonter Vorstellungskomplex (emotionally charged complex of representations), or simply a complex.

Carl Jung later used the test extensively as a more rigorous alternative to Freudian free association and found some interesting results.

In women, erotic complexes were in the foreground with complexes related to the family and dwelling, pregnancy, children and marital situation; in older women he detected complexes showing regrets about former lovers. In men, complexes of ambition, money and striving to succeed came before erotic complexes.

The description comes from a chapter about Carl Jung, who was originally a psychoanalyst but broke away from Freud's system and developed his own.

Freud's theories, with only a few exceptions, just seem to get loopier the more you read them. Jung is interesting because on the surface his ideas seem quite barmy but are often remarkably sensible when you understand them in more detail.

Despite his interest in everything from ghosts to UFOs, he always maintained these were essentially psychological phenomena that reflected important aspects of our collective culture and subconcious mind.

For example, I always thought his concept of the 'collective unconscious' was supposed to be some sort of semi-mystical psychic connection, but in fact, he was just describing much of what is now a premise of evolutionary psychology.

Namely, that by nature of being human, we may share some inherited psychological structures, common symbols or ideas - such as what 'motherhood' entails - that can be seen in both common behaviours and in myths and stories throughout history.

—Vaughan.

January 22, 2009

Simulating hysteria for fun and profit:

I've just found pages from a 1941 French hypnotism manual on the (tastefully NSFW) Au carrefour étrange blog that has some wonderful illustrations of hypnotism 'in action'.

A few are particularly curious because they seem to be directly mimicking famous images of hysteria from the 1800s.

Hysteria is the presence of neurological symptoms without any detectable neurological damage that could account for it (see previous) and the top image on the right is taken from a late 1800s book 'Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System' by Jean-Martin Charcot who argued that patients with hysterical epilepsy can show this type of body posture he called the 'Grande Hysterie Full Arch'.

It's an iconic image and can be seen to the left of the famous painting entitled 'A Clinical Lesson with Doctor Charcot at the Salpêtrière' by André Brouillet that Freud had hung above his couch. You can still see it there in fact, in Freud's old house, now the Freud Museum in London.

The image below is taken from the 1941 French hypnotism manual. In fact, all the images of the woman mimic Charcot's famous photos or drawings of hysterical patients.

For example, here's the Charcot original of a woman between two chairs, and here's the image from the manuel d'hypnotisme.

Unfortunately, the Au carrefour étrange website doesn't have text from the book, but the images suggest that it is encouraging practitioners to simulate these famous poses.

Interestingly, Charcot was the first to suggest that hypnotism and hysteria may rely on similar neurological and psychological processes owing to the fact that it is possible to temporarily simulate hysteria with hypnosis.

Over 100 years later, there is growing evidence that this is the case, as neuroimaging studies have shown that hysterial paralysis and hypnotically-induced paralysis activate remarkably similar brain areas.

However, his classifications of the different body postures of hysteria are now thought to useless, and likely caused by Charcot's own suggestions to his patients.

The pages from the hypnotism book are on a site with tasteful but NSFW images, so be cautious at work, or be ready with your excuse about a historical interest in Charcot.

UPDATE: The same blog has images from another French hypnotism book called Nouveau cours pratique d'hypnotisme et de suggestion from 1929. Dig that cover!

Link to pages of 'Manuel pratique d'hypnotisme' (via MorbidAnatomy).

—Vaughan.

The cutting edge of robotics:

Singularity Hub has reviewed the best commercial and research lab robots from 2008 and has videos of each and every one.

It's a fantastic collection that has everything from exoskeletons, to violin playing humanoids, to ultra-lightweight robots that fly by flapping gossamer-thin wings.

The most curious is probably the robot self-reassembling chair or maybe the robo-shapes from the ISI Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory.

Anyway, a fascinating collection and great to see how AI and mechanical engineering are being applied to create the latest in cutting-edge robotics.

Link to 'A Review of the Best Robots of 2008' videos.

—Vaughan.

January 21, 2009

The shock of the few:

Monsters existed in the 1800s. They were not mythical creatures, but children born with birth defects who were widely discussed in the medical literature and sometimes cruelly paraded in the travelling freak shows of the time. Curiously, one of the most popular explanations for these congenital deformities concerned the psychology of the expectant mother.

If you had asked a 19th century doctor why some children were born with unusual bodies, or even fairly common birthmarks, you might have been told that they were caused by a frightening incident experienced by the mother during pregnancy.

The theory, known as 'maternal impression', suggested the trauma could symbolically imprint itself on the foetus. The 1896 book Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine described many such cases in their chapter on obstetric anomalies, and this is a fairly typical example:

Parvin mentions an instance of the influence of maternal impression in the causation of a large, vivid, red mark or splotch on the face: ``When the mother was in Ireland she was badly frightened by a fire in which some cattle were burned. Again, during the early months of her pregnancy she was frightened by seeing another woman suddenly light the fire with kerosene, and at that time became firmly impressed with the idea that her child would be marked.'

In another case history, a child with hydrocephalus with a "small and rabbit-shaped" face and deformed eyes is explained by the fact that a rabbit jumped at its mother during pregnancy where she was frightened by its 'glare'.

Perhaps one of the most curious cases was published in 1817 and concerned a recalcitrant father who denied being responsible for an unwanted pregnancy, causing the mother a great deal of distress. The child was later born, reportedly with the name of date of birth of his father clearly visible in his eyes.

This is a curious mirror of the first, probably mythical, case of maternal impression, where Hippocrates reportedly saved the honour of an adulterous princess by explaining her dark skinned child as due to her having a portrait of a 'negro' in her room.

Although the theory enjoyed a long and colourful life, it peacefully passed away in the late 19th century when it became clear that the mind of the mother had no influence on birthmarks or congenital deformities.

For many years the psychological state of the expectant mother was thought to have virtually no effect on the developing child.

But then the Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939, and that all began to change.

The quickly assembled Finnish force was vastly outnumbered and ominously outgunned but, unlike their Soviet counterparts, they were quick and comfortable in the Artic conditions and made swift and deadly attacks.

In one of history's great military victories, they defeated the Russians but suffered heavy losses. Many of the dead were young men, and many of the grieving were young pregnant women.

Nearly 40 years later, two Finnish psychiatrists decided to look at the mental health of the children who grew up without fathers. They compared children born to women who grieved during pregnancy, to those born to women who lost their husbands after the child had been born.

Their study, published in 1978, found that mothers who had lost their husbands during pregnancy were much more likely to have children who later developed schizophrenia.

Many similar studies have found that severe maternal stress during pregnancy affects the developing brain of the child, increasing the risk of cognitive or psychiatric problems later in life, possibly due to the effect of the hormonal response of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system.

Thankfully, we no longer think of people as monsters, whatever their size, shape or mental state, and we have long banished the monstrous myths of 'maternal impression'.

But we do know that the mind of the mother is connected to the development of the unborn baby, and that maternal experiences can still echo through the life of the child.

—Vaughan.

January 20, 2009

The mind has a distorted reflection:

Our perception of how mentally sharp we are has more to do with how we're feeling emotionally than how our cognitive functions are actually working.

In other words when someone says, 'I think my memory has become much worse recently', research suggests that this tells us almost nothing about how their memory is working, but reliably indicates that their mood has been low.

It's quite amazing to think that we have such poor insight into the functioning of our own minds that we 'mistake' low mood for a bad memory, poor concentration or impaired problem solving but it's a finding that has been widely replicated in healthy people, both young and old, in psychiatric patients, and most recently in patients with epilepsy - to mention but a few of the studies.

Anosognosia is a condition that can occur after serious brain injury where the patient is unaware of their disability.

In the most striking cases, a patient may be paralysed, amnesic or even blind, but be completely unaware of the fact.

In these cases, we think that the brain damage has impaired our ability to have insight into our own mental functioning, but these studies suggest that we're actually not very good at this to start with.

Link to one of the many studies in the area.

—Vaughan.

January 15, 2009

Beyond hysteria:

I've just discovered that the eScholarship Editions site that has 500 academic books freely available online, several psychology and psychiatry books among them, including the excellent book 'Hysteria Beyond Freud' which takes a historical look at this fascinating and curious condition.

'Hysteria' has meant many things in medical history and originally the Ancient Greeks used it to describe what they thought was a 'wandering womb'. Its modern meaning implies the presence of what seem like neurological symptoms, such as paralysis, seizures or blindness, but without any detectable neurological damage.

Borrowing an idea from Pierre Janet, Freud popularised the idea that these symptoms were physical manifestations of psychological distress or trauma as a way of diverting the psychological pain from the conscious mind - essentially 'converting' the emotional energy to something else.

Although the idea of hysteria 'psychological defence' or 'emotional conversion' has not been well supported by the evidence, it certainly seems the case that striking physical impairments can be unconsciously triggered.

Which is amazing if you think about it.

You could go blind, despite all your visual systems seeming to work perfectly, and you'd have no conscious control over it.

Recent evidence suggests this is possibly due to attentional systems in the brain impairing perceptual functions that occur early in the stream of consciousness, but it's not clear why this happens.

The modern diagnostic manuals label hysteria as 'conversion disorder' or 'dissociative disorder' but they're not necessarily good names because there's still debate about whether the disorder actually involves 'dissociation' or 'conversion'.

Many clinicians and researchers still use the term hysteria, or describe the symptoms as 'functional' or 'psychogenic', or perhaps even the more mysterious 'medically unexplained'.

The picture on the left is called 'The hypnotized patient and the tuning fork' and was taken in the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris in 1889, where much early work on hysteria was conducted by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his colleagues.

It's featured in a chapter of 'Hysteria Beyond Freud' about artistic and photographic depictions of the 'hysteric' which contains many such striking images.

Owing to the fact that hysteria is at once a 'psychological' and 'bodily' condition, images were an early way of studying the condition and popularising it among doctors.

Interestingly, although hysterical symptoms are not consciously produced, they can respond to suggestion. If you're puzzled by how suggestions can have unconscious effects on the body, think placebo.

'Hysteria Beyond Freud' is a fascinating book that tracks the condition through history and there are several other freely available psychology and psychiatry books also available.

Link to chapter 'The Image of the Hysteric'.

—Vaughan.

January 03, 2009

Meditation and the neuroscience of inner peace:

SharpBrains has an interesting interview with neuroscientist Andrew Newberg who discusses his ongoing research into the brain science of meditation.

As we reported last year, research into meditation is really gathering pace and is suggesting that the practice has some immediate and remarkable benefits for our cognitive abilities that are clearly reflected in changes in brain function.

Most of the lab work has focused on how meditation enhances attention while most of the clinical research work on meditation has focused on its ability to prevent relapse in severe depression.

However, Newberg mentions some ongoing work where they're attempting to apply some of the lab work to boosting cognitive function in people who presumably have dementia or age-related cognitive difficulties:

Scientists are researching, for example, what elements of meditation may help manage stress and improve memory. How breathing and meditation techniques can contribute to health and wellness. For example, my lab is now conducting a study where 15 older adults with memory problems are practicing Kirtan Kriya meditation during 8 weeks, and we have found very promising preliminary outcomes in terms of the impact on brain function. This work is being funded by the Alzheimer's Research and Prevention Foundation, but we have submitted a grant request to the National Institute of Health as well.

Also, I just that Time magazine had a special issue on the practice and science of meditation in 2003 which is fully available online, including a funky, if not slightly over-simplified, guide to the neuroanatomy of meditation.

Link to SharpBrains interview with Andrew Newberg.
Link to previous Mind Hacks piece on neuroscience of meditation.
Link to 2003 Time special issue of meditation.

—Vaughan.

December 28, 2008

It's not a supermarket, it's a behavioural science lab:

The Economist has a fascinating article on how new technology is turning supermarkets into behavioural science labs and how you are an unwitting participant in marketing experiments.

The piece discusses the psychology of big store marketing, touching on three areas: store layout and environment design, 'neuromarketing' and customer tracking.

It's interesting that much of the fuss in the media has focused on 'neuromarketing' - the use of cognitive neuroscience to understand consumer behaviour - when it is clear from this article that it is really quite impotent in the face of the two other powerful techniques.

Neuromarketing is largely the study of financial decision making and typically relies on correlating brain activity with simulated consumer purchasing.

The idea is that it will explain how we make purchase decisions and will give us access to some of the unconscious process that are at work. Once we understand these, it could lead marketers to new techniques that we would never have discovered by studying behaviour or opinions alone.

In other words, it's a theory generating process, because the bottom line of marketing is to increase sales - an objectively measured, concrete outcome.

If we want to see if a marketing technique has worked, we would want to study what people actually do with their money, so the proof of any insight from neuromarketing is actually in follow-up behavioural experiments or sales figures.

You can see from the article why the media fuss and commercial hype of neuromarketing is often unjustified because its abstract benefit is no match for the behavioural data and this is being gathered in almost frightening detail every time you shop.

Three technologies are mentioned: RFID tags - tiny radiotransmitters that can be used to track individual items in the shop; using mobile phone signals to track shoppers position and path through the store; and face recognition software to track people via the security cameras and record their emotional expressions.

Combine this with the detailed purchase data from the tills, and you have a marketing psychologists dream: the fine detail of how people actually behave in the store, how they interact with individual products, and what they actually purchase.

In other words, it's possible to see how any changes affect behaviour during decision-making and at the purchase point. The sheer number of shoppers means that the data set is huge - you could not ask for better behaviour science data - and that even quite subtle changes can be tried and tested.

The Economist article does a great job of explaining some of the techniques that are being used to study shoppers, but also some of the techniques that are currently being used to entice / manipulate shoppers (take your pick!) during their visit to the supermarket.

Link to Economist article on the behavioural science of supermarkets.

—Vaughan.

December 15, 2008

The art of the dying brain:

Neurophilosophy has found a wonderful collection of historic neuropathology drawings from the 1800s that manage to be both gruesome and beautiful in equal measure.

The collection is from an 1831 addition to the book Reports on Medical Cases, Selected with a View to Illustrate the Symptoms and Cure of Diseases by a Reference to Morbid Anatomy.

The medical text was authored by Richard Bright who employed various distinguished painters to create the illustrations, including a royal portrait artist.

Neurophilosophy has selected some of the finest and most striking drawings of the nervous system that make for some compelling viewing.

Link to Neurophilosophy on 'Beautiful diseased brains'.

—Vaughan.

Moving sensations from missing hands:

The 'rubber hand illusion' is where we can be fooled into feeling a sensation in a fake hand. A group of researchers have used this same technique with arm amputees and found that they can induce sensations that seem to be located in the rubber hand even in people who have had their real hand amputated.

The study has just been published online by the neurology journal Brain, and it could have important implications for the development of prosthetic limbs that can relay touch sensations which could seem to be experienced in the mechanical fingers.

The study is from the same team that recently hit the headlines with their virtual reality 'body swapping' study, which, like the 'rubber hand illusion', is based on the same general principal.

This is the now widely replicated finding that when we see a fake but convincing body part being touched, and we feel a genuine sensation on the actual body part, our brain 'moves' the sensation to where the fake body part is.

The 'body swapping' study used camera trickery to do this - each person had a camera by their eyes but had goggles which displayed what the person sitting opposite saw. When they shook hands, each person saw themselves from the other person's perspective and with the genuine touch from the handshake, it produced the illusion that the person was located 'inside' their opposite.

However, the 'rubber hand illusion' is a much simpler way of producing a similar effect. It requires that you sit with your real hand out of sight, under the table perhaps, and a rubber arm placed on top of the table as if it were in the natural position of your limb.

When both the real hand and the false hand are touched in an identical way, such as the little finger being stroked with a pen, the sensation seems to be located in the rubber hand, despite the fact you know it to be fake and you're aware your real hand is under the table. There's a video of it online if you want to see an example of the set-up.

This is obviously a little difficult to do with people who have had their arm amputated, but the researchers used the same procedure but stroked the stump of the amputated limb.

Probably because this stimulates the remaining nerve fibres, the same illusion was triggered, and the sensation 'moved' to the rubber hand.

To check the effect wasn't just the participants saying what the experimenters wanted to hear, they wired the participants up to a skin conductance measure - something known to increase when people are stressed.

They then stabbed the rubber hand with a syringe. When this happened after the illusion was induced, the stress response was significantly greater, indicating that the effect was real and compelling enough to increase anxiety.

Interestingly, the illusion was weaker in people who had their hand amputated for longer periods. This is likely due to the fact that the mapping of how brain areas represent body parts slowly rearranges after amputation.

It continues rearranging over time and areas previously used to represent the hand start to be used for representing other existing body parts, making the illusion less compelling. This also explains why phantom limbs often fade or 'warp' over time.

UPDATE: I've just noticed that Scientific American has a good brief article on the rubber hand illusion that appeared this month.

UPDATE TWO: Neurophilosophy also takes a look at the study and actually does a better job than me!

Link to open-access study from Brain.

—Vaughan.

December 07, 2008

Two cases of compulsive swearing - in sign language:

The medical journal Movement Disorders reported two case studies of people who were deaf from birth and had the tic disorder Tourettes, leading them to compulsively swear in sign language.

Tourettes is often associated with compulsive swearing, although this only happens in a minority of cases. It is more commonly associated with compulsive actions, that can be non-word vocal sounds, or actions that range from eye-blinks to hair-combing like actions.

However, in some people compulsive swearing, known as coprolalia, does appear, and in these two cases studies, it seems this can even be expressed through sign in people who have sign language as their first language.

This is from a 2001 case study:

Here we present a 31-year-old man with prelingual deafness who had motor and vocal tics as well as coprolalia expressed through sign language. He would feel a compulsion to use the sign for “cunt” (see Fig. 1: [top]) in contexts (grammatical and social) that were not appropriate. This is essentially the sign for the medical term “vagina” except that the sign is pushed toward the person at whom it is aimed and accompanied by threatening body language and facial expression. The patient would then feel embarrassed about the compulsion and aim to disguise it as another sign. Commonly, this would be the sign for “petrol pump” (see Fig. 2: [bottom]). This can also be used to symbolise a small watering can.

There's also loads of great guides to sign language on the net, including a guide to swearing and a guide to flirting if ever you find yourself wanting to chat up a hot deaf babe or sexy deaf boy.

Link to first case study (vaguely via MeFi).
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to second case study (mentioned above).
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

November 27, 2008

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.

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.

November 20, 2008

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 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

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.

November 09, 2008

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 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.

October 26, 2008

Synaesthesia induced by hypnosis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

October 23, 2008

Pentagon requests robot packs to hunt humans:

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

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

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

From the Pentagon document:

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

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

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

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

PHASE IV: Die puny humans die!

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

October 20, 2008

Monochrome dreaming:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curious.

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

—Vaughan.

October 16, 2008

Myths of the sleep deprived:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

October 09, 2008

The beauty algorithm and coding for the brain:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sci-fi writers, start your engines.

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

—Vaughan.

October 02, 2008

Feeling out of control sparks magical thinking:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

September 19, 2008

Fearing pharmaceutical modifications:

Psychology Today journalist Matthew Hutson covers an interesting study that investigated which drug-based enhancements people are most comfortable with and which changes to the self people view negatively.

It seems drugs that potentially change our fundamental character traits are treated with most suspicion whereas those that change our abilities are thought to be the most acceptable.

Collaborators Jason Riis at NYU, Joseph Simmons at Yale, and Geoffrey Goodwin at Princeton first asked people to rate how fundamental a series of traits were to personal identity. In order of rated importance, the traits were: reflexes, rote memory, wakefulness, foreign language ability, math ability, episodic memory, concentration, music ability, absent-mindedness, self-control, creativity, emotional recovery, relaxation, social comfort, motivation, mood, self-confidence, empathy, and kindness. So people tend to think that emotional traits are more fundamental than cognitive ones.

The researchers then found that people are most reluctant to take pills that enhance the highly fundamental traits. Their most cited concern was personal authenticity.... When rating which types of enhancements should be banned, people instead based their decisions on concerns about competitions and fairness--morality rather than identity.

Link to write-up.
Link to study abstract.

—Vaughan.

September 18, 2008

Neuroaesthetics and the state of the art:

Seed Magazine has an excellent article by Mo Costandi discussing how the study of neuroaesthetics - the neuroscience of art and beauty - is really starting to take off with a dedicated research centre recently launched in London.

I love the idea of neuroaesthetics but remain a little skeptical, not least because some of the literature gives the impression that it's revolutionising our understanding of art when psychologists have been researching it since the beginning of psychology. I've yet to see the 'neuro' aspect add anything particularly novel so far.

I've got a fascinating but out of print book called Cognitive Processes in the Perception of Art that has a collection of papers from a five day conference on art and cognition from 1983.

The chapters cover much of the same sort of thing that is discussed under the neuroaesthetics banner (just without the brain scans) - including methods, symbolism, visual perception, music, improvisation, aesthetics, beauty and synaesthesia.

The introduction is interesting as an overview of the fragmented history of the field, most of which seems to have been undertaken in the expectation that this was something new and exciting:

...since 1876, when Fechner initiated the empirical approach to art through his book 'Vorschule der Aesthetik' psychology has been characterized by different 'schools'; there has been continual dispute about the proper subject-matter of the discipline and about the theories and methods which should be applied to it. In many cases, the various approaches - such as Behaviourism, Gestalt Theory, Psychoanalysis, Humanistic Psychology, Information Theory, and Cognitive Psychology - have made distinctive contributions to the arts. One consequence has been that particular artistic phenomena have been selectively examined and then assimilated to preferred theories and methods of working, and hence these phenomena have escaped broad and systematic investigation as distinctive phenomena in their own right. Approaches to the arts have often been superficial and fragmentary, as Kose points out in his chapter, traditional approaches to the study of art often reveal more about the workings of psychological investigation than they do about art.

I've still yet to see anything that advances on this position.

Furthermore, theories that simply redescribe what you're trying to explain are generally thought to be useless and the test of a good theory is that it can make accurate predictions. Where relevant it also suggests where interventions will have predictable effects.

Consequently, I often wonder whether neuroaesthetics will ever lead to a new and innovative type of artwork or art practice.

One of the most interesting things I've read recently was a discussion on the empyre mailing list (thanks Julian!) with various artists discussing their work in the cognitive and neurosciences. I warn you, it's a pain in the arse to read because it's only available as list archives.

Nevertheless, it mentioned a piece called 'Ghosts in the Machine' which sounds fantastic:

Ghosts in the Machine is a generative, closed system. Random noise from a CCD camera is analyzed for patterns. An algorithm looks for patterns that match the basic geometry and physiognomy of the human face. What it actually finds are pixels on a screen forming blobs and patches of colour that have no actual relation to a real world face. They have no indexical relation to an object. They are not images of people, but another kind of image loaded with meaning, which arises accidentally, but irresistibly, from the hybrid interaction between machine and body. To all intents and purposes when these patches of pixels look like faces, they are images of faces. That such obscure images resolve themselves into faces without conscious effort, and that remain even when attending closely to them, suggests that it is paradoxically their lack of objective meaning that generates their form. It is the very ambiguity and intedeterminacy of the images that allows the brain to reconfigure them as indexical.

It's part of the Einstein's Brain Project which aims to explore "the notion of the brain as a real and metaphoric interface between bodies and worlds in flux, and that examines the idea of the world as a construct sustained through the neurological processes contained within the brain".

Link to Seed article 'Beauty and the Brain'.
Link to details of cognitive processes in art book.
Link to Einstein's Brain Project.
Link to good neuroaesthics primer.

—Vaughan.

September 10, 2008

Taking responsibility:

Cato Unbound has a thought-provoking essay arguing that we need to radically re-think our relationship to psychoactive substances of all kinds to encourage informed responsible drug use rather than relying on the impossibility of prohibition to protect society.

The piece is by the founders of the Erowid drugs information and experience exchange site, who have been at the forefront of promoting education and information as the basis of responsible drug use.

“Know your body. Know your mind. Know your substance. Know your source.” One of Erowid’s earliest slogans, this directive encourages people to pay close attention to multiple aspects of their psychoactive substance use. These include understanding the individuality of response; avoiding drugs contraindicated because of health issues; learning enough about each substance to avoid unexpected effects and overdoses; and choosing both substance and information sources carefully in order to reduce risks. While these principles may seem obvious, they are seldom taught in contemporary drug education.

Alcohol is a good case to study, as its use is accepted in our culture and is not illegal for those over 21. Yet healthy and pragmatic drinking practices are seldom taught by parents, schools, or the government. By the time young adults reach the legal drinking age in the United States the vast majority of them have already consumed alcohol. In 2006, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the average age at which Americans first tried alcohol was 16.5, with only one in ten waiting until they were legally of age to drink.[14] And they haven’t just had a sip; nearly 40% of 20-year-olds have gotten drunk in the last month.[15] The opportunity to teach responsible use of alcohol—the most commonly consumed and arguably one of the most dangerous strong psychoactives[16]—is missed. The situation is much worse for controlled substances.

Teaching responsible, intentional use to young people does not require giving detailed instructions on how to use illegal psychoactives. The general principles can be taught through education about prescribed medications, alcohol, or other legal drugs. There are many practical lessons about how to safely and responsibly use psychoactives, whether learned from personal subjective experience, research, or the hard-won wisdom of others.

They make the important point that this applies to all drugs, illicit, commercial, medical, natural and artificial - from aspirin to angel dust.

Link to 'Towards a Culture of Responsible Psychoactive Drug Use'.

—Vaughan.

September 02, 2008

Drug-fuelled shooting as a spectator sport:

The Atlantic has a provocative article arguing that drug-fuelled shootings would make competitive sport more interesting, although probably not in the way you're thinking.

The piece discusses beta blockers such as propranolol, drugs that have their major effect on the peripheral part of the autonomic nervous system.

They don't actually make the user feel less psychologically anxious, but just reduce the normal 'fight or flight' pumped feeling, so the bodily effects of anxiety such as shaking, sweating, heart pounding and muscle tension are reduced.

These drugs are used widely by professional musicians to stop performance jitters and the Atlantic article argues that they should be allowed in sports like shooting and archery so competitors aren't disadvantaged by performance anxiety.

From a competitive standpoint, this is what makes beta blockers so interesting : they seem to level the playing field for anxious and non-anxious performers, helping nervous performers much more than they help performers who are naturally relaxed. In the British study, for example, the musician who experienced the greatest benefit was the one with the worst nervous tremor. This player's score increased by a whopping 73%, whereas the musicians who were not nervous saw hardly any effect at all.

One of the most compelling arguments against performance enhancing drugs is that they produce an arms race among competitors, who feel compelled to use the drugs even when they would prefer not to, simply to stay competitive. But this argument falls away if the effects of the drug are distributed so unequally. If it's only the nervous performers who are helped by beta blockers, there's no reason for anyone other than nervous performers to use them.

Link to 'In Defense of the Beta Blocker' (via 3QD).

—Vaughan.

August 27, 2008

Who needs sleep? The evolutionary slumber party:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

August 23, 2008

Strip Club Hunter, or the attractions of anatomy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

August 22, 2008

Experienced drivers perceive the road differently:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to PubMed entry for commentary paper.

—Vaughan.

August 21, 2008

Colic psychology:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to New Yorker article 'Colic Conundrum'.

—Vaughan.

August 08, 2008

Recreational drug preference linked to medical speciality:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

August 07, 2008

Rolling thunder:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

August 05, 2008

Don't get high on your own supply:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

Magic in mind:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

August 04, 2008

On the edge of truth:

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

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

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

What is the hottest area today in deception detection?

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

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

—Vaughan.

July 24, 2008

Misdirected magic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

Dennett on magic and misdirection:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pdf of article Explaining the "Magic" of Consciousness.

—Vaughan.

July 23, 2008

Sleight of mind:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to Keith Barry TED 'brain magic' presentation.

—Vaughan.

July 21, 2008

Values, taste perception and psychological blind spots:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

June 24, 2008

The itch is special:

The New Yorker has an excellent article on the neurology of the itch, that curious cutaneous sensation that seems to be handled quite differently from other bodily sensations by the brain.

I warn you, the article is quite icky in places, with a particularly stomach churning case study in one place, but I was quite fascinated to find out that the sensation of the itch seems to rely on itch dedicated nerve cells, distinct from the nerves that transmit pain.

It prompted me to look up some of the literature on the cognitive neuroscience of itch and it turns out there's quite a healthy number of research studies that are suggesting there may be distinct brain networks for processing itch sensations.

One of the most interesting things is that itch seems to be one of the sensations most sensitive to psychological state. For example, I guarantee you'll feel more itchy just reading the article (and probably already reading this).

The New Yorker does a great job of relating this work to wider cognitive science discoveries in perception and the neurology of body image, even touching on the fact that people with phantom limbs can feel itches.

Link to New Yorker article 'The Itch' (via Frontal Cortex).

—Vaughan.

June 17, 2008

Polishing the rough edges of neuroscience:

Boss magazine has a great article on both the cutting edge and the rough edges of neuroscience, discussing how the rapid commercialisation of brain science is pushing us into grey areas of social change.

The piece is by ABC All in the Mind journalist Natasha Mitchell and is only hampered by the fact it's displayed by a bizarre Flash interface that is presumably meant to stop people cutting and pasting.

Over the past year, what has made headlines includes the brains of US voters, murderers, wine drinkers, coma patients, even cockroaches. Studies that caught our attention probed political persuasion, mind-reading, morality, alcoholism, adolescence and ageing. Believe the headlines and we've entered an age of neuro-marketing, neuro-economics, neuro-theology, neuro-leadership and even neuro-architecture.

Many people hold much hope for this research. Brain banks are on the increase, with folk bequeathing their most precious organ to the scientific cause. Scientists are starting to better understand the neural and genetic underpinnings of behavioural and neurological problems, and of healthy heads too. But are we at risk of taking this knowledge too far, too fast? Absolutely.

The same goes for Flash programming obviously.

With perfect synchronicity, this week's edition of ABC Radio National's All in the Mind covers similar territory, discussing the potential impact of the widespread use of 'smart drugs' such as modafinil and methylphenidate.

Link to Flash encased article 'Studying the species'.
Link to AITM on smart drugs and neuroethics.

—Vaughan.

June 12, 2008

Consciousness happens between the panels:

A letter in today's New Scientist noted that artist Scott McCloud's comments on how we infer the narrative from comic strips might also explain how consciousness works.

It reminded me of this panel from McCloud's book Understanding Comics.

Understanding Comics is about the visual language of comic books and is written as a comic. It's fantastically put together but is also fascinating if you're interested in psychology because it largely discusses how we construct rich and complex meanings from very basic visual input.

One of the crucial points is that the comic itself is not the story, our mind builds it as we go and fills in the gaps with perception, cultural associations and our experience of how the world works.

The New Scientist letter reads:

David Bainbridge's description of consciousness (26 January, p 40), including, for example, the fact that we do not know where in the brain consciousness happens, was evocative. Scott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, describes a comic's story as whatever is happening in the blank spaces between the panels.

What if our minds function like a comic: they snap pictures, and our consciousness is simply the story the mind constructs around those pictures? - Saskia Latendresse, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

This is a lovely analogy and captures a well-argued approach in cognitive science that suggests that consciousness functions as a 'narrative maker' to make sense of the output from the disparate functions of the brain into a coherent sense of self.

Link to previous post on narrative and consciousness.
Link to NewSci letter.
Link to info on Understanding Comics.

—Vaughan.

June 08, 2008

A sagacious old dame and some wonderful archives:

The placebo effect is usually thought to involve the patient's belief in a treatment, but as Tom pointed out in an earlier post, the doctor's belief in a treatment seems also to play a part.

I just found this fantastic footnote on a page from the 1849 edition of The Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, where an elderly lady patient decides to select her doctors based on their faith in her treatment.

An old lady, who was attended by her physician and apothecary, seriously requested them to inform her whether she was likely to die. After a deliberate consultation, they resolved to comply with her request, and they told her they she was near the end. "Very well", replied the sagacious old dame, "then I must dismiss you, because, if you think so, it is evident that you are not the persons to get me well again!" and she accordingly discharged them both.

There are now several historical texts and journals from the 1800s available online, in full, without restrictions via Google Books.

In fact, May's edition of The Psychologist (full disclosure: I'm an unpaid associate editor) had an article on John Perceval, famous for his influence on 19th century mental health reform after being admitted to several institutions and writing very eloquently about his experiences.

A scanned copy of an original of Perceval's book is available online. It has the truly wonderful title of:

A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman During a State of Mental Derangement Designed to Explain the Causes and the Nature of Insanity and to Expose the Injudicious Conduct Pursued Towards Many Unfortunate Sufferers Under That Calamity.

—Vaughan.

June 06, 2008

The perils of power tool amputation:

Newsweek has a fascinating article on 'body integrity identity disorder', a condition where people feel they need to have a limb amputated to become normal and often go to extreme lengths to have their arm or leg removed.

BIID, otherwise known as apotemnophilia, is often confused with amputee fetishism, where sexual gratification is linked to ideas of amputation. However, they seem quite distinct in most cases.

Although its not widely studied, the desire seems to be much more about the feeling of being comfortable in one's body rather than anything explicitly sexual.

The Newsweek article discusses the condition and looks at some of the latest scientific research on this seemingly strange desire, but suffers from some rather sloppy thinking about the mind and brain. For example:

BIID is attracting the attention of researchers who suspect that the condition may be related to other body image disorders—including anorexia, body dysmorphic disorder, and gender identity disorder—that at first glance may seem entirely psychological, but may be linked to physical differences in the brain.

All psychological changes are related to physical differences in the brain, so this is a completely bogus distinction.

Whenever you read a sentence like this translate it into the language of theories and evidence.

In other words, '[conditions] that might seem better explained by solely psychological theories now need to be updated as evidence on biological brain changes becomes available'.

The piece then goes on to repeat a common but trashy fallacy that you can describe any brain difference as something that is 'hard wired'.

Despite these disastrous misunderstandings of the fundamentals of neuroscience, the piece is actually quite good.

It's interesting that while the medical viewpoint is that BIID is linked to other body image disorders, the people who have these desires do not feel it is a disorder at all.

I was struck by the fact that a couple of people who have acquired amputations anecdotally report that they feel much better afterwards.

This is in marked contrast to people with body dysmorphic disorder who after plastic surgery to 'fix' their self-perceived distorted body part typically do not feel 'cured'. Or those with anorexia who do not feel satisfied even when they are at a near-fatal point of emaciation.

It would be fascinating to follow-up people who have BIID after they've acquired a successful amputation to see how they fare.

If their desires disappear, they do not become newly fixated on amputating another limb, or experience improved mental health and life-satisfaction as a result, how far can we go in saying its a mental illness?

I've had a search and, sadly, found no such studies.

Link to Newsweek article 'Cutting Desire'.

—Vaughan.

June 04, 2008

Those who forget history, follow a curve:

Cognitive Daily have just concluded a series on three classic studies in early psychology: one on Ebbinghaus who experimented on his own memory, one on Millicent Washburn Shinn who experimented on her own child niece, and another on the Gestalt psychologists whose elegant visual demonstrations have been used to experiment on the rest of us ever since.

Hermann Ebbinghaus achieved a remarkable feat. He published a series of experimental studies on memory, conducted on himself, in 1885, which are still taught today.

As described by the CogDaily article, he created nonsense words and learnt them, again and again, and then tested himself at later times and recorded how quickly he learnt and forgot.

Whenever we use the term 'learning curve' in everyday language we're using a phrase created by Ebbinghaus to describe the rate of learning in his studies. He also mapped out the 'forgetting curve' and these two results largely hold true to this day.

Millicent Washburn Shinn was the first woman to gain a PhD at Berkley for which she studied the psychological development of her niece.

As CogDaily note, this involved a painstaking recording of her niece's early experiences and new abilities and was a forerunner of more recent studies like the 'human speechome' project and Fernyhough's book on his daughter.

Finally, and with some wonderful visual demonstrations, CogDaily cover the work of the early Gestalt psychologists who fired one of the first broadsides in a key psychological debate over whether it is possible to understand the mind better by breaking it down into smaller and smaller functions.

Using a number of now famous visual examples they demonstrated that there must be some high level grouping processes that capture the 'whole' and process concepts on a more global level rather than purely drilling down through the detail.

Link to CogDaily on Ebbinghaus's memory studies.
Link to CogDaily on Millicent Washburn Shinn's baby study.
Link to CogDaily on Gestalt psychology.

—Vaughan.

May 29, 2008

Miracle fruit trips out flavours:

The New York Times have an article on the truly miraculous miracle fruit, a plant that contains a unique protein that transforms even the most intensely acidic flavours into sweet taste sensations.

“You pop it in your mouth and scrape the pulp off the seed, swirl it around and hold it in your mouth for about a minute,” he said. “Then you’re ready to go.” He ushered his guests to a table piled with citrus wedges, cheeses, Brussels sprouts, mustard, vinegars, pickles, dark beers, strawberries and cheap tequila, which Mr. Aliquo promised would now taste like top-shelf Patrón.

The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste.

Apparently, some pioneering barmen have been experimenting with miracle fruit cocktails and the article has video of a 'flavour tripping party' where people get together to try the small red berry before sampling a while range of foods which take on a strange news flavour.

Link to NYT article 'A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue'.

—Vaughan.

May 25, 2008

Mental illness following The Exorcist:

Horror movie The Exorcist remains one of cinema's darkest and most frightening classics. So great was its power that rumours circulated about viewers running in fear, feinting, or even going mad after seeing the film. In fact, it caused such concern that it was discussed in the medical literature for its possible role in triggering mental illness.

In 1975 psychiatrist James Bozzuto wrote an article for the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease entitled 'Cinematic Neurosis Following The Exorcist' that reported four cases of previously untroubled people who seemed to develop psychiatric difficulties after watching the film.

I'll return to the case reports in a moment, but it's probably worth mentioning that Bozzuto was not alone in discussing the possible 'destabilising' effect of the film. In fact, his commentary was remarkably reserved in comparison to some of his contemporaries.

A 1974 Time magazine article quoted some of his less inhibited colleagues:

After seeing the film, two young Chicagoans required hospitalization. "They're way out in leftfield," said Dr. Louis Schlan, psychiatrist and medical director of Riveredge Hospital in Forest Park, Ill. "They see themselves possessed by Satan."

Many others who have seen the film experience nightmares, hysteria and an undefined, but nevertheless profound apprehension. "It is dangerous for people with weak ego control," explains Dr. Vladimir Piskacek, a Manhattan sociologist and psychiatrist, "but it would not cause psychosis." Small children may suffer from hallucinations after seeing The Exorcist, but Dr. Piskacek doubts that the film would permanently impair even an immature mind.

Predictably, there are widespread objections to the film's R rating, which permits youths under 17 to see it if accompanied by a parent. Manhattan Child Psychiatrist Hilde Mosse warns that the film provides a "deadly mixture of sex, violence and evil. The idea that we can solve our problems by magic instead of by rational solutions is destructive. I lived through this before Hitler came to power. He said, 'Listen to the language of your pure Germanic blood, your unconscious.' The Jews in Germany then became the devil to be exorcised. The only thing The Exorcist can do," Dr. Mosse concludes emphatically, "is to pull young people down to a primitive level."

With Hitler, hallucinating children and Satanic possession being invoked in relation to the film, it's no wonder that people had anxieties about its influence.

Bozzuto's explanation for his four case studies is perhaps a little mundane in comparison, but the influence of the media hysteria is plain to see.

One case is particularly striking, owing to gentleman's florid magical thinking about the Devil and his possible malign influence.

Case 4. Mr. Lyle H. was a 24-year-old black male who initially came to the emergency room for three visits approximately 1 month after seeing "The Exorcist". At that time, he complained of flashbacks and of getting "nervous", especially with his two children and his wife; he was frightened that his 5-year-old daughter was possessed, had insomnia, and felt that certain people "looked strange". He was given Vallium and referred to the Psychiatric Clinic. After being contacted for his first interview, he was fearful of coming for he felt that the therapist may have been involved with the Devil.

The patient stated that he knew little about the movie but had seen it discussed on a TV talk show before. He went with his wife and another couple. He was so upset during the movie that he had to walk out, and afterward he was frightened, feeling that the Devil "would come". He had immediate insomnia, 15-pound weight loss over the past month, and numerous nightmares of vampires chasing women with himself interfering. He could not look people directly in the eye for fear he might imagine them to be devils...

Also, since seeing the movie, he complained of a stiff neck which he related to an identification with the girl in the movie. He was afraid to use a razor that his brother-in-law had given him because it might be stolen and it would imply he had done something wrong and would therefore be like the Devil.

Bozzuto suggests that each of his patients was already under significant pressure and the film was the last stressful straw that broke the camel's back.

He also suggests, invoking the spirit of Freud, that the movie's theme of losing control to the love-hate figure of the Devil may have had special significance for the four, each of which was apparently struggling with an ambivalent relationship.

According to Bozzuto, the similarity triggered repressed feelings, leading to an emotional crisis and a subsequent breakdown.

While the cases remain entirely anecdotal, it's interesting that they made it into print at all, considering that almost all films have the potential to trigger emotional crises in some.

The fact that the issue of 'Exorcist madness' was considered serious enough to appear in a medical journal is more likely testament to the fact that the film touched a raw nerve in the America of the 1970s, than the fact that it raised the hackles of some of its audience members.

Link to PubMed entry for 'Cinematic neurosis following The Exorcist'.
Link to Time article 'Exorcist fever'.

—Vaughan.

April 25, 2008

The history and psychology of wine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

March 24, 2008

Common scents and the psychology of smell:

Nerve has a brief but interesting interview with psychologist Rachel Herz who talks about her research on the sense of smell and how it can influence our mind and behaviour.

I've not encountered Herz's work before but it turns out she's done a great deal of scientific research on the psychology and neuroscience of smell and has just written a book, The Scent of Desire, which seems to present the science of smell in an accessible format.

The interview contains a number of gems, but this particularly caught my eye:

Why do we grow accustomed to odors, but not to something like sound? In other words, why is the stench of garbage outside my apartment nowhere near as distracting as the drilling?

When we experience olfactory adaptation, the receptor literally stops responding to a chemical in the air after about twenty minutes. We adapt to all the sensations that are out there, but when the drilling starts and stops, your attention focuses on it and you're irritated.

Smell is a fascinating area, perhaps because it is relatively unstudied (especially compared to vision).

We previously covered an interesting review article that talked about the fact that the brain has two smell networks - something that came us a complete surprise to me.

Link to Nerve interview with Rachel Herz.
Link to more info on The Scent of Desire book.

—Vaughan.

March 16, 2008

Pica: put your money where your mouth is:

An upcoming article in the medical journal Clinical Toxicology reports on a man who suffered lead poisoning owing to his habit of eating roofing plates.

The tendency to eat the inedible is known as 'pica'. It is an established psychiatric diagnosis, is well-reported in the medical literature and has given us some of the more unusual case reports of recent years.

Although there is a specific diagnosis, the term is also used more widely as a general label for any eating behaviour that focuses on inedible objects.

Two of the most striking cases have involved coins. The x-ray on the right is from a case report from the New England Journal of Medicine where doctors discovered five and a half kilograms of coins, necklaces, and needles in a patient's stomach.

In another case report from 1998, a British patient had swallowed £175.32 pounds worth of loose change and had a history of eating a wide range of curious objects:

At different times she has eaten tablets, coins, nuts, wire, plastic, 'purple hearts', Bob Martin's dog conditioning powder and dried flowers. There is much comment made throughout her medical notes detailing vigorous negotiations about the colour, size, number, timing and supply of medication, including a large batch of hand-written letters to her doctor.

The behaviour in the more extreme cases in adults is usually associated with psychosis, as was the case with these two individuals.

It was also the case with one other gentleman, who had suffered lead poisoning after swallowing over 200 live bullets. The case report was rather wittily titled 'Bite the Bullet'.

Normally, however, pica is most commonly seen in children with learning difficulties or autism spectrum diagnoses.

Perhaps giving partial support for the stereotype that pregnancy leads to unusual food cravings, it is known to occur more commonly in pregnant women, particularly from lower income families.

It's not clear why it occurs, but interestingly, it has been linked to iron and zinc deficiencies.

Link to NEJM case report with x-ray.

—Vaughan.

March 03, 2008

Are you experienced? Does it matter?:

Time magazine has an article on the counter-intuitive psychology of expertise and experience. It turns out simple experience might not add anything to our competency, it's how we use our time in attempting to master a skill that counts.

The article notes that research has typically failed to show that experience, on its own, predicts task performance. In other words, old hands often do no better than novices.

Unfortunately for us, it seems the secret to expertise lies within the well-known saying that 'genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration'.

Research suggests that it is experience of practising the most difficult and laborious aspects of a skill that are key.

Ericsson's primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion "deliberate practice," by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair-pulling and fist-pounding. You like the Tuesday New York Times crossword? You have to tackle the Saturday one to be really good.

Take figure-skating. For the 2003 book Expert Performance in Sports, researchers Janice Deakin and Stephen Cobley observed 24 figure skaters as they practiced. Deakin and Cobley asked the skaters to complete diaries about their practice habits. The researchers found that élite skaters spent 68% of their sessions practicing jumps — one of the riskiest and most demanding parts of figure-skating routines. Skaters in a second tier, who were just as experienced in terms of years, spent only 48% of their time on jumps, and they rested more often. As Deakin and her colleagues write in the Cambridge Handbook, "All skaters spent considerably more time practicing jumps that already existed in their repertoire and less time on jumps they were attempting to learn." In other words, we like to practice what we know, stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity rather than stretching our skills. Those who overcome that tendency are the real high performers.

Link to Time article 'The Science of Experience'.

—Vaughan.

February 29, 2008

Fragments of consciousness:

Dana's online neuroscience magazine Cerebrum has a fantastic article on trauma and dissociation - the splitting of consciousness that apparently makes some aspects of the mind inaccessible to others.

Dissociation is a term that's used rather loosely in modern psychology and psychiatry. It is sometimes used to be synonymous with derealisation or depersonalisation, describing a feeling of being detached from reality or not being 'grounded' in your usual sense of self.

However, in its original and most interesting formulation by the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, it describes the splitting of consciousness so one part of conscious experience is compartmentalised, becomes inaccessible, is literally 'dis-associated' from the rest.

Its not clear why it occurs, but Janet's theory (often erroneously ascribed to Freud) suggests its a defence against psychological distress. Like the mental equivalent of brushing something under the carpet until you're unaware it existed or you even did the brushing.

Regardless of whether it is genuinely a 'defence' in this sense, it is thought to be at play in conversion disorder, where a person might experience paralysis despite having no damage to the muscles or nervous system (so called 'hysterical paralysis').

There is now growing evidence that the high level control systems in the brain deliberately inhibit the movement in the immobile limb, outside the conscious control of the patient.

It is also thought to be the mechanism by which hypnosis has its effect on those susceptible to it. In this case, however, it is a form voluntary dissociation guided by suggestion - meaning someone can have the experience of, for example, limb movement without the associated sense of having willed the action.

One of the most striking demonstrations of this form of dissociation is where some people can be hypnotised not to be bothered by pain, despite the fact they can report on its intensity - even to the point of surgical operations being possible without anaesthetic in some rare cases.

Perhaps it's not surprising then that dissociative disorders, where patients are seemingly permanently dissociated from their memory (dissociative amnesia) or dissociated from their senses or actions (conversion disorder) are particularly linked to trauma.

The most controversial of these syndromes is what used to be called 'multiple personality disorder', but is now called 'dissociative identity disorder' to suggest that the patient's very personality structure has become dissociated from itself, seemingly leading to several identities or 'alters'.

It's partly controversial because it was so obviously over-diagnosed in a period of 1950s and 60s American psychiatry that was seemingly drunk on Freudian theory without recourse to the strong coffee of scientific testing.

But its also controversial because its so rare despite still being in the diagnostic manuals. For example, I've never met a patient with the condition, and I've never met anyone who's met a patient with the condition, whereas I've seen many patients with dissociative amnesias and conversion disorders.

The Cerebrum opens as if it's about 'multiple personality disorder' but don't be fooled - it's actually a really good review of what cognitive science has told us about how trauma might cause dissociation (almost all the research mentioned is on memory rather than 'multiple personalities').

This is still a controversial area but the article gives the case for the link. The article presents evidence that experience of childhood abuse, both physical and sexual, may be particularly linked to dissociation, perhaps suggesting that it arises from an attempt at a 'defence' in some cases.

Cognitive scientists are now increasingly interested in dissociation and hopefully this new level of interest should unlock some of the its mysterious secrets.

Link to article 'Coming Apart: Trauma and the Fragmentation of the Self'.

—Vaughan.

February 21, 2008

The science of 'voodoo death':

Can you die from a voodoo curse? Physiologist Walter Cannon was better known for his work on emotion but was fascinated by the idea that someone could die from fright - something he nicknamed 'voodoo death'.

He collected anecdotes from around the world of people who had died after being cursed in a now classic 1942 article.

But rather than simply recount the tales as curiosities, he speculated on the medical basis of how someone might die of fright - triggering a whole line of research into neurocardiology, the study of how the brain and heart work together.

Cannon's ideas were recently revisited by physician Esther Sternberg who looked at whether scientific developments since 1942 have made us any the wiser to this intriguing phenomenon.

While there is no clear idea on whether the belief in a curse directly kills many people, it seems Connon's ideas on fear's effect on the body had remarkable foresight and preceded many later discoveries about body-brain connections.

If you're interested in hearing more, psychiatrist Stuart Brown gave one of the prestigious 2006 'TED' talks on play, which is available to view on the National Institute of Play's website.

Link to Cannon's 1942 "Voodoo" Death article.
Link to Sternberg's 2002 update.

—Vaughan.

February 20, 2008

Three impossible things before breakfast:

The Guardian has a insightful piece by journalist Rik Hemsley describing his personal experiences with Alice in Wonderland syndrome, where the 'body image' or 'body map' becomes distorted, leading the affected person to feel like particular parts of the body, or the whole of it, have changed size or shape.

It doesn't usually involve direct visual hallucinations, but can lead to the sensation that the world around you has grown to an enormous size, or that you have shrunk.

It was first described by psychiatrist John Todd in a 1955 article that you can read freely online, which I discovered when writing an previous post on the neurology of Alice in Wonderland.

It's usually associated with epilepsy or migraine although is actually quite common, although not always in such an intense form as The Guardian article describes.

Children often experience it but grow out of it as they reach adulthood (both of which happened to me).

Link to Guardian article 'I have Alice In Wonderland syndrome' (via BB).
Link to full-text of Todd's original article.

—Vaughan.

February 18, 2008

A history of Freudian fiction:

The changing fortunes of psychoanalysis have been reflected in some of the greatest novels of the last hundred years, a literary history recounted in an article for The Guardian.

The piece is by historian Lisa Appignanesi, author of the highly regarded new book Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800.

The article notes that two recent novels (Kureishi's Something to Tell You and Vickers' The Other Side of You) have reversed the recent tradition of portraying psychoanalysts as somehow deviant, unethical or intellectually bankrupt.

The low-point for the creative depiction of Freudian mind doctors was probably Nabakov's novel Lolita, which is presented as a faux psychiatric case study of a paedophile.

You might think that someone who wrote a widely-read novel about a middle-aged man who desired under-aged girls had good reasons to dislike any theory which attempted to uncover unconscious motivations, but Nabakov was famously and venomously anti-Freudian even before he began writing his masterpiece.

He first started knocking psychoanalysis in his second novel, The Defense, and he often referred to Freud as the 'Viennese Quack' and his theories as 'voodooism' for the rest of life his.

This negative portrayal is not universal though, and many novels contain sympathetic and even highly complementary depictions. For example, Appignanesi notes that in Plath's semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, Dr Nolan is "something of a guardian angel amid the horror of asylum life".

Interestingly, the more recent positive portrayals of psychoanalysts mirror some positive results in the scientific literature.

Two recent randomised controlled trials have found that psychoanalytically-inspired treatments can be effective.

A recent trial on treatments for 'personality disorder' found it effective, as did a recent trial on using it as a treatment for panic disorder.

Unfortunately, these are still a drop in the ocean compared to the evidence for some other psychological treatments, but hopefully this is a sign that psychoanalysis is beginning to adopt a more scientific approach to its theories and practice and we'll be better able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Link to Guardian article on psychoanalysis and literature (thanks Kat!).

—Vaughan.

February 12, 2008

Implicit associations:

You might have prejudices you won't admit to, or, don't even know about. The Implicit Attribution Test claims to measure these hidden associations and it's been one of the most important psychological developments during the last decade.

Edge has a video interview with two of its creators, psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, and an online version of the IAT which allows you to test your unconscious associations in relation to the US presidential candidates.

The IAT is a computer task that measures the strength of automatic, implicit or unconscious associations between concepts.

Let's say we're interested in whether black or white faces are more linked to positive or negative associations.

Faces of black or white people, and either pleasant or unpleasant words are flashed up on screen, one at a time. Participants are asked to press one key if the face is black or the word is pleasant, and other if the face is white or the word is unpleasant.

In other words, you're asked to classify both black faces and pleasant words using the same response, and white faces and unpleasant words using the same response.

Next, you're asked to do the same thing, but with the reverse associations: so you're asked to classify black faces and unpleasant words together, and white faces and pleasant words together.

The idea is that you're going to be quicker doing whichever classification best matches associations you already have.

So, if you already have unconscious associations between white and pleasant, and black and unpleasant, you're going to be quicker when these two responses are grouped.

Importantly, the idea is that these associations are different from our conscious attitudes. Someone who is definitely not racist might still have negative associations with black people, perhaps because of exposure to social stereotypes.

Most studies have more than just the two conditions, to control for order, practice and other effects and if you're interested, you can take part in this exact experiment online.

It was originally thought that the test could uncover people's implicit or hidden attitudes (indeed, it was originally called the Implicit Attitude Test) but it's now generally thought of just in terms of associations, because, in effect, it measures how closely two things are linked, and implicit attitude sounds more like a sort of evaluation or stance on something.

The value in this sort of test is not only in that it can pick out associations we might have but don't admit to or aren't aware of, but it can also map out how various things influence the unconscious structure of meanings in the mind and brain.

Needless to say, it's been researched intensively since it was first uncovered, with research suggesting it can even pick up on hidden violent associations in psychopathic murderers.

Link to video interview and presidential IAT at Edge.
Link to previous WashPost article on the IAT.

—Vaughan.

February 07, 2008

Psychedelic Science online:

In 1997, BBC science programme Horizon broadcast a legendary edition on the use of psychedelic drugs in medicine. Luckily, it's been uploaded to Google Video and you can now watch the whole thing online.

It came at an interesting time in psychedelic drug research - when the authorities were still touchy (they'd only raided Shulgin's licensed lab three years earlier) but were just starting to allow some stirrings of research since they'd shut it down almost completely in the 1960s.

The programme looks at the history of psychedelic drug research when it was still easily possible, focusing on Osmond and Hoffer's early work on using LSD in treating addiction and facilitating psychotherapy.

It's also got loads of great historical footage from the early research but also talks to the new generation of researchers looking at compounds such as ayahuasca and ibogaine, who are now the senior figures in this growing area.

Unfortunately, the video is a bit grainy in places but it's quite watchable and it's got a great soundtrack. The producers used Future Sound of London, Massive Attack and a number of tracks from the Ninja Tune label to give the programme a trippy feel.

Link to 'Psychedelic Science' edition of Horizon.

—Vaughan.

January 28, 2008

Facing down the competition in business and politics:

The Economist covers an intriguing study that found the financial success of a company can be largely guessed by making a judgement based on photographs of the chief executives.

Most interestingly, the people doing the guessing weren't particularly skilled in business or finance, they were undergraduate student volunteers.

And Dr Ambady and Mr Rule were surprised by just how accurate the students' observations were. The results of their study, which are about to be published in Psychological Science, show that both the students' assessments of the leadership potential of the bosses and their ratings for the traits of competence, dominance and facial maturity were significantly related to a company's profits. Moreover, the researchers discovered that these two connections were independent of each other. When they controlled for the “power” traits, they still found the link between perceived leadership and profit, and when they controlled for leadership they still found the link between profit and power.

These findings suggest that instant judgments by the ignorant (nobody even recognised Warren Buffett) are more accurate than assessments made by well-informed professionals. It looks as if knowing a chief executive disrupts the ability to judge his performance.

Other studies have looked at whether it is possible to judge the success of politicians from their photographs.

Perhaps sadly, it seems it is possible. A study [pdf] published in Evolution and Human Behavior found that face shape could reliably predict voter preference in nine leadership elections from four countries - Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA.

A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that photograph-only judgements of competence could also predict the winners in election for US state governor, even when they were flashed on-screen for less than a quarter of a second.

Interestingly, showing people the faces for longer actually changed people's competency ratings and reduced how well these judgements predicted the election winners.

Link to Economist article 'Face value'.

—Vaughan.

January 27, 2008

Out on a phantom limb:

ABC Radio National's opinion programme Ockham's Razor has an engrossing edition on how our perception and ownership of our body can break down after brain injury - leading to disorders where we think our limbs are someone else's, where we feel there's a phantom body behind us, or where we think we've been cloned.

The talk is by neuropsychologist John Bradshaw who specialises in understanding how the body is represented by the brain, including the experience of having feelings from an amputated phantom limb.

The talk is a little dense in places but more than worth the attention it needs, as the somewhat wordy sentences unpack into an evocative tour through the far reaches of some strikingly neurological syndromes.

One of the most unusual of these disorders is somatoparaphrenia.

While limb paralysis is not unusual after brain injury, in somatoparaphrenia the patient denies the limb is their own and often suggests that it is someone else's, such as their husband's, their doctor's, or even a 'dead' limb that has been attached by people trying to trick them.

One of the earliest discussions of these phenomenon is in a 1955 paper on the personification of paralysed limbs. Rather wonderfully, the full text of the paper is available online.

Link to Ockham's Razor on bodily integration, identity and brain injury.
Link to paper 'Personification of Paralysed Limbs in Hemiplegics'.

—Vaughan.

January 22, 2008

Sensory Processing and Neurotopographics:

While we're on the subject of art and neuroscience I recently discovered a couple of pieces that caught my interest.

The picture is a piece by Sandra Dawson called 'Sensory Processing' which has combined a cap used for EEG recordings of the brain with comforting objects and materials.

I recycled two EEG caps, cut up pyjama bottoms which were freeform crocheted with the leads and black yarn, with iPod headphones
symbolizing synaesthesia with output from the eye going to the ear.

It's called "Sensory Processing" and is meant to evoke sensual comforts (music, flannel) that are perceived and processed by the brain; only with my hat, it's abstracted and externalized into fashionable form so that viewers ponder connections.

It's part of a show currently on at the Femina Potens gallery in San Francisco until January 28.

The other piece is one I saw at the weekend called Neurotopographics and is a collaboration between artist Antoni Malinowski, architect Bettina Vismann and neuroscientist Hugo Spiers.

It takes inspiration from the recent discovery of three types of neurons that seem specialised for spatial awareness and navigation.

Place cells provide a 'you are here' signal; grid cells signal information about distances travelled and head direction cells provide a sort of internal compass.

So far, these have only been discovered in rats, but Spiers and his collaborators have created a film of how they might operate in humans.

In fact, they've created three films which run simultaneously:

The resulting artwork – which will be on show at the Gimpel Fils Gallery from 18–21 January – follows the journey of a person through space, in this case the gallery itself. The actor is filmed from two camera viewpoints: a static wide angle position, which records movement and spatial position, similar to a surveillance camera; and from a dynamic point of view, filmed out of the perspective of the actor’s eyes, recording the subjective impressions of the space and his journey through it. The films will be simultaneously projected onto the gallery walls and combined with a two-dimensional animation displayed on the floor representing assumed brain cell activity patterns.

Rather annoying, the website only works properly in Explorer, but the film from the observational point of view and the firing of the cells can be experienced online.

Link to Femina Potens gallery.
Link to Neurotopographics website.

—Vaughan.

January 21, 2008

The inner body:

NPR's radio show Talk of the Nation has a discussion with Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee, authors of a new book on the neuroscience of the body and movement.

If you're interested in the ideas of embodied cognition that we covered the other day, the discussion touches on many of the major findings in cognitive science that are feeding into this important area.

The book, called The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, has a website which is somewhat sparse on readable excerpts but does have links to some more interviews about the topic.

The host of the NPR programme is a bit taken by the idea of 'body maps' (called sensory or somatotopic maps in the scientific literature), where areas of the body are literally mapped by the brain to represent sensation and movement, and the Blakeslees get asked lots of variations on the question 'how do body maps explain x, y and z'.

Of course, somatotopic maps are only one part of a complex brain system that perceives the outside world and allows us to act within it, but I wonder whether this is a sign that 'body maps' might be the new 'mirror neurons' and become a popular explanation for everything from winning the World Cup to finding a partner.

Either way, Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee do a great job of explaining the science and trying to draw out some of the complexities.

Link to NPR discussion.
Link to The Body Has a Mind of Its Own website.

—Vaughan.

January 17, 2008

Can stress stop the menstrual cycle?:

Inkling has an interesting article on the effect of stress on the menstrual cycle that investigates the received wisdom that stress can prevent periods.

It turns out the scientific studies have found no conclusive answer as they've returned mixed results, but this may be because they don't adequately distinguish between physical stress and psychological stress.

A range of physical health problems are known to halt menstruation. Malnutrition is a common example and this is why women with anorexia often don't have periods.

Of course, physical and psychological stress go hand in hand, but one study that looked at healthy young women under a great deal of psychological stress, but no major physical health problems, found no alteration in the menstrual cycle.

So Ellison examined female juniors at Harvard who were preparing for the MCAT [Medical College Admission Test] and compared their anxiety levels (and ovulation schedules) to women who were not preparing for the MCAT. In order to make sure there were no other factors at play, all the women were otherwise physically healthy, were not using any oral contraceptive pill that would change hormone levels, and all reported normal ovulation...

But despite the significant increase in stress, there was no change in ovulation or periods in either group. No matter how stressed these students were about the upcoming exam, they continued to have a visit from Aunt Flow right on schedule. This was even the case during the final days and weeks leading up to the MCAT exam, when the subjects described intense stress levels that only Harvard pre-meds can sustain. The study was published in the December 2007 issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

There's more on the effects of stress on menstruation in the article.

Link to Inkling article 'Of Stress and Periods'.

—Vaughan.

January 16, 2008

Mind, body and goal: the embodied cognition revolution:

The Boston Globe just published an excellent article on 'embodied cognition', an area that's recently been getting a lot of attention in cognitive science and which argues that we can't understand psychology without understanding the body and our actions.

The reason it's so potentially revolutionary is that it challenges the idea that psychology can be understood as a purely abstract mental process and suggests that our mind is shaped as much by our body and how we physically interact with the environment as by 'passive' sensory experience.

In other words, the reason we've developed thinking brains is to allow us to act, and so the possibilities, limitations and feedback from actions must shape our psychology - both in the long term as a species (via evolution) and in the short term as individuals (via learning and plasticity).

The body, it appears, can subtly shape people's preferences. A study led by John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, found that subjects (all non-Chinese speakers) shown a series of Chinese ideographs while either pushing down or pulling up on a table in front of them will say they prefer the ideographs they saw when pulling upward over the ones they saw while pushing downward. Work by Beilock and Holt found that expert typists, when shown pairs of two-letter combinations and told to pick their favorite, tend to pick the pairs that are easier to type - without being able to explain why they did so.

Some of my favourite research in this area is by psychologist Dennis Proffitt who has found a range of bodily effects on perception.

In one particularly striking study, 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.

They suggest that we perceive the environment in terms of our intentions and abilities to act within it.

Link to Boston Globe article 'Don't just stand there, think'.
Link to great introduction to embodied cognition.

—Vaughan.

January 15, 2008

Jesuit hypochondria in early modern Naples:

I always assumed Early Science and Medicine was what happened during 9am ward meetings, but it's apparently an academic history journal.

In a recent issue, it has a curious article that discusses a 'plague' of 'hypochondria' (an unfounded fear of serious illness) that apparently swept through the Jesuit community in 17th century Naples.

The first sentence of the abstract is completely priceless.

Poetry or pathology? Jesuit hypochondria in early modern Naples.

Early Science and Medicine, 12 (2), 187-213.

Haskell Y.

In their didactic poems on fishing and chocolate, both published in 1689, two Neapolitan Jesuits digressed to record and lament a devastating 'plague' of 'hypochondria'. The poetic plagues of Niccolò Giannettasio and Tommaso Strozzi have literary precedents in Lucretius, Vergil, and Fracastoro, but it will be argued that they also have a real, contemporary significance. Hypochondria was considered to be a serious (and epidemic) illness in the seventeenth century, with symptoms ranging from depression to delusions. Not only did our Jesuit poets claim to have suffered from it, but so did prominent members of the 'Accademia degl'Investiganti', a scientific society in Naples that was at odds with both the religious and medical establishments.

Link to PubMed entry.

—Vaughan.

January 14, 2008

Mapping emotions onto the city streets:

Christian Nold maps cities. But instead of mapping their physical layout, he maps their emotional geography.

He uses a technique he invented called biomapping where participants walk the area connected to a system that measures galvanic skin response - a measure of the electrical resistance of the skin which is known to give a rating of arousal and stress.

The system is also connected to a GPS device, so the stress response of each person is physically mapped onto the landscape.

His maps describe an area in terms of how stressful it is, and so far, he's mapped Greenwich in London, San Francisco and Stockport.

He's also done a project that maps the sensory experiences of Newham.

I had the pleasure of meeting Christian the other night and one of the best things is is that he's persuaded Ordinance Survey, the UK's mapping agency, to print the maps!

I have a copy of the Greenwich map and so far everyone I've showed it to has been blown away.

You can buy paper copies of the maps, but also view them in full detail online.

Link to Emotion Map.
Link to Christian Nold's website.

—Vaughan.

Higher price makes cheap wine taste better:

A new brain scanning study has supported what we've suspected all along, more expensive wine tastes better partly because we expect it to.

Neuroscientist Hilke Plassman led a brain-scanning study [pdf], shortly to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where volunteers were asked to taste and rate five different wines, each individually priced.

What the volunteers didn't know was that there were only three different wines, and two of them were tasted twice. One one occasion it was described as costing $90 a bottle, on another as costing $10 a bottle.

The volunteers rated the 'more expensive' wine as significantly more likeable despite being identical to the 'cheaper' wine.

In addition, the brain scans showed when the volunteers tasted the wine they thought was more expensive, their brains showed increased activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and its surrounding area, the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), both areas of the frontal lobes.

The orbitofrontal cortex is known to be involved in the regulation of emotions and encoding the 'value' of experiences. Unsurprisingly, it has been identified as a key area in studies of gambling.

However, it has also been previously found to correlate with ratings of pleasantness of smells, tastes and even music.

Interestingly, there was no difference in the brain areas directly related to experiencing taste, and the researchers suggest that the belief that the wine is more expensive probably doesn't directly change our sensory experience, but leads us to think that the experience is more 'valuable'.

The results echo behavioural studies which have found that the same wine is rated differently when served in different quality bottles.

pdf of full-text paper.
Link to write-up from The Times.

—Vaughan.

January 11, 2008

Fighting over inner experience:

Salon has an entertaining review of the new book Describing Inner Experience which is sort of a combination of an argument and a self-consciousness showdown between philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel and psychologist Russell Hurlburt.

Schwitzgebel is sceptical that we can accurately describe our inner thoughts and experiences, while Hurlburt feels that we are capable of doing so, when properly directed.

If you think that it's obvious we can describe our inner mental states, start by reading the review and you'll get a flavour of what the problem is.

At the beginning of the book's central section, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel meet their volunteer. Her pseudonym is Melanie. She is in her 20s, and she has an interest in psychology but no experience in these debates. Hurlburt explains the rules to her: She will simply tell them what was on her mind just before each beep, and they will try to figure out if her reports are accurate.

Hurlburt handles the direct questioning, then turns her over to Schwitzgebel for cross-examination. They have six sessions, each about an hour long. And over the course of these sessions, something unexpected happens, a novelistic twist that is subtle, hilarious and hard to describe. A battle for interpretive credibility emerges, as the doubt Schwitzgebel casts upon Melanie's self-understanding rebounds upon himself.

The preface and first chapter of the book are freely available online if you want to learn more, and the book itself has just been published.

Link to Salon review.
Link to details of book and sample preface and chapter.

—Vaughan.

January 08, 2008

Knock, knock, room service:

NPR has a short piece on a fascinating study where the researchers informed hotel maids that their normal work counted as exercise, which had the effect of making them more physically fit, despite them not seeming to change their activity levels.

Unfortunately, the NPR segment seems to suggest that the study 'challenges the placebo effect', based on the faulty assumption that the placebo effect only alters 'subjective perception'.

In fact, placebos are known to affect outcome in a range of physical illnesses (and even produce placebo 'side-effects - known as the nocebo effect), and they have been shown to directly stimulate the same brain circuit when they are used to replace a drug to treat Parkinson's disease.

Furthermore, the study itself [pdf] claims to demonstrate the placebo effect in a new domain.

Despite this, it's a fascinating study and raises a number of intriguing questions, such as whether the placebo effect is directly affecting body metabolism, or whether the information given to the maids just made them behave differently, and actually do their work in a way to give more health benefits.

Link to NPR piece on the study.
pdf of full-text of study.

—Vaughan.

January 05, 2008

ECT: the blues and the electric avenue:

Electroconvulsive therapy, ECT or electroshock therapy is the most controversial treatment in psychiatry, and it's also the most misunderstood.

It's impossible to discuss ECT without mentioning One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest because the book, the play and the film have given us the most culturally salient image of the treatment.

Kesey depicts it as little more than tool of oppression to subjugate Randal P. McMurphy who is only in hospital because, as far as he can figure out, "I, uh, fight and fuck too much".

This negative portrayal is almost standard in the film industry but captures little of the reality of the average ECT treatment, which is usually prescribed for depression of the most severe kind (it is sometimes used for psychosis and catatonia, but much less frequently).

ECT treatment involves passing about 800 milliamps of electricity through the brain. 800 milliamps is a bit more than your average mobile phone battery puts out, but is quite significant as far as the brain is concerned and is enough to cause a seizure.

The current can be applied to both sides of the brain (bilaterally, most common) or one side only (unilaterally, less common), and can take the form of a pulse (most common) or a sine-wave (less common). There is evidence to suggest that different versions have different benefits and side effects, but the choice may depend on national guidelines or clinic preference.

This effect on the brain is essentially the same as an epileptic seizure, but it looks quite different. This is because the patient is given a general anaesthetic, so they are unconscious, and a muscle relaxant, so there is barely any movement.

In terms of physical health risks, ECT is thought to be much safer than most drug treatments and is often prescribed to people in the most fragile state of health (e.g. pregnant women, the elderly) for exactly this reason.

The biggest risk to health is actually the anaesthetic and muscle relaxant drug, which is the main reason a heart and general medical check-up is given before treatment.

ECT is usually given in doses of 6-12 treatments over a similar number of weeks (psychiatrists seem to have a superstition about giving an odd number of treatments for some reason, and so it is usually given in 'pairs' of doses), although can be given as a 'maintenance' treatment, less frequently, over longer periods.

We still don't know how ECT works, although effects on brain plasticity (physical change and adaptation) and neurochemistry are being investigated.

In terms of its effectiveness and impact, the whole business of ECT is a complicated issue, but here's what the current evidence suggests.

At least in the short-term, it is one of the most rapid and effective treatments for severe depression.

It is associated with ongoing memory difficulties, even after the treatment has stopped.

Patients generally view it much less favourably than clinicians, and it is generally viewed negatively by the public and carries significant stigma.

Now here are the caveats: because ECT is typically given to the most severely depressed patients (who likely already have cognitive problems), it is difficult to do ideally balanced, gold standard randomised controlled trials that give a good matched measure of both benefit and side-effects. In fact, these sorts of studies have not been done.

This is why there is disagreement, even with the medical and scientific community, about its effects, both good and bad.

Furthermore, Dr Richard Abrams, one of the leaders in ECT research and author of the standard clinical textbook, has a financial interest in, and reportedly owns, Somatics, one the world's biggest suppliers of ECT machines and equipment. This makes some people suspicious of his promotion of the treatment.

However, Dr Harold Sackheim, probably the other 'big name' in ECT research, has no financial interests in any ECT company and does not receive financial compensation for consultation with the ECT industry.

Importantly, there is considerable individual variation in how people respond to ECT, in terms of their symptoms, post-treatment cognitive impairment, their subjective experience, and their attitudes.

Some people find ECT ineffective and damaging, others feel their life has been saved and their illness properly treated for the first time.

There are many articulate and moving accounts of the treatment on the web. Journalist Liz Spikol found ECT largely unhelpful and suffered debilitating cognitive effects, while surgeon Sherwin Nuland found it was the only thing that helped him recover and return to work.

Perhaps the most controversial topic is involuntary or forced treatment.

The majority of ECT patients volunteer for the treatment (usually on the suggestion of their doctors) and sign a consent form for treatment.

In some countries, where law allows, a minority of patients are treated with ECT against their will, usually if they are deemed to be a danger to themselves or others, and where other treatments have failed.

In a nutshell, it seems to be the most effective treatment for severe depression, seems to impair memory, is disliked and stigmatised, and is difficult to research. Most notably, as a patient, your mileage may vary. Some people have no benefit, some have huge improvement; some have no side-effects, some have ongoing difficulties. Most have some of each.

It's also really hard to have a sensible discussion about ECT because of the emotions it stirs up. Like any treatment that provokes such opposite reactions from both those that have had it, and those that haven't, it's worth learning more with a cool head and an open heart.

I've avoided giving my own opinions on the treatment, which, like the evidence are complex, but I hope you'll learn more, decide for yourself and be able to consider both new scientific evidence and reaction from people you meet who have had, or are considering ECT.

Link to Wikipedia page on ECT.

—Vaughan.

December 30, 2007

When a Rose Is Not Red:

There's an interesting article in January's Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience about a brain injured patient who has a curious form of simultanagnosia - the inability to perceive more than one object at once.

In this case, he also seemed unable to report more than one attribute, like colour or name, at a time, while looking at the object.

Simultanagnosia: When a Rose Is Not Red.

J Cogn Neurosci. 2008, 20 (1), 36-48

Coslett HB, Lie G.

Information regarding object identity ("what") and spatial location ("where/how to") is largely segregated in visual processing. Under most circumstances, however, object identity and location are linked. We report data from a simultanagnosic patient (K.E.) with bilateral posterior parietal infarcts who was unable to "see" more than one object in an array despite relatively preserved object processing and normal preattentive processing. K.E. also demonstrated a finding that has not, to our knowledge, been reported: He was unable to report more than one attribute of a single object. For example, he was unable to name the color of the ink in which words were written despite naming the word correctly. Several experiments demonstrated, however, that perceptual attributes that he was unable to report influenced his performance. We suggest that binding of object identity and location is a limited-capacity operation that is essential for conscious awareness for which the posterior parietal lobe is crucial.

This is particularly interesting because it relates to a key question in understanding consciousness, known as the 'binding problem'.

The brain deals with different parts of perception (for example movement, colour, light-dark differences) in different parts of the brain, yet when we perceive an object, it all seems to be integrated into one conscious experience.

For example, our experience of an object's colour and movement never seem to be 'out of synch'. How this happens is the essence of the binding problem.

This case report is of someone whose brain injury seems to prevent 'binding'.

Looking at what brain injured patients can no longer do and matching this with the damaged areas can give us a clue to how the brain works because "you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone".

Strictly speaking, this is called the transparency assumption in cognitive neuropsychology but I call it the Joni Mitchell principle as the quote is a song lyric of hers (I got this from a student essay I once marked so thank you insightful mystery student!).

In this case, the patient suffered damage to both sides of the back of the parietal lobes because of a stroke ("bilateral posterior parietal infarcts"), suggesting the parietal lobes might be key in binding perceptual elements for consciousness.

Unfortunately, I can't get to the full-text of the paper yet, so I'm not sure what insights the authors themselves have offered. Still, a fascinating case.

Link to PubMed abstract.

—Vaughan.

December 25, 2007

Not just a pretty face:

The Economist has a fascinating article on the link between beauty, intelligence and success. It reviews research showing that beautiful people are actually, on average, slightly more intelligent and it's probably a result of genetics.

The first half of the article looks at the psychological research that has found that beauty, and particularly symmetry, is linked to health and intelligence.

Interestingly, visual beauty is only a clue to intelligence at certain stages in life:

They found that the faces of children and adults of middling years did seem to give away intelligence, while those of teenagers and the elderly did not. That is surprising because face-reading of this sort must surely be important in mate selection, and the teenage years are the time when such selection is likely to be at its most intense—though, conversely, they are also the time when evolution will be working hardest to cover up any deficiencies, and the hormone-driven changes taking place during puberty might provide the material needed to do that.

Nevertheless, the accumulating evidence suggests that physical characteristics do give clues about intelligence, that such clues are picked up by other people, and that these clues are also associated with beauty.

The second half of the article reviews an innovative approach to the effect of beauty by economist Daniel Hamermesh.

He's found a robust link between financial success and beauty (interestingly which differs across cultures), but has also looked at the cost-effectiveness of using cosmetics and clothing to boost attractiveness.

It turns out, it's a poor investment. His research study [pdf] found that the financial boost generate by using clothes and beauty treatments only covers 15% of their cost.

Link to Economist article on beauty and success.
pdf of Hamermesh's paper 'Dress for Success: Does Primping Pay?'.

—Vaughan.

December 18, 2007

Alcohol, the cause and solution to all of life's problems:

As the Christmas season is upon us, what better time to think about alcohol, aptly described by Homer Simpson as the "the cause and solution to all of life's problems".

The British Medical Journal has a wonderful article that tells you everything you wanted to know about alcohol (but were too drunk to ask) in one concise package.

It covers the effect of alcohol on the body and brain, and describes what affects how alcohol is absorbed into the body:

Rate of absorption of alcohol depends on several factors. It is quickest, for example, when alcohol is drunk on an empty stomach and the concentration of alcohol is 20-30%. Thus, sherry, with an alcohol concentration of about 20% increases the levels of alcohol in blood more rapidly than beer (3-8%), while spirits (40%) delay gastric emptying and inhibit absorption. Drinks aerated with carbon dioxide—for example, whisky and soda, and champagne—get into the system quicker. Food, and particularly carbohydrate, retards absorption: blood concentrations may not reach a quarter of those achieved on an empty stomach. The pleasurable effects of alcohol are best achieved with a meal or when alcohol is drunk diluted, in the case of spirits.

It also notes that blood alcohol level is affected by stage of the menstrual cycle in women. Apparently, it is highest premenstrually and at ovulation (evolutionary psychologists, start your engines).

Different effect are compared to the amount of alcohol in the blood stream, so it's a really handy summary.

The BMJ also published a systematic review of hangover cures and preventions later in the year, and found, rather sadly, that:

No compelling evidence exists to suggest that any conventional or complementary intervention is effective for preventing or treating alcohol hangover. The most effective way to avoid the symptoms of alcohol induced hangover is to practise abstinence or moderation.

Bugger.

Link to BMJ article 'ABC of Alcohol'.
Link to BMJ systematic review on hangover cures and preventions.

—Vaughan.

December 12, 2007

What IQ doesn’t tell you about race:

IQ has suddenly become a hot topic again, owing to a certain DNA-discovering Nobel laureate putting his foot in his mouth and the publication of a couple of books on the subject. Malcolm Gladwell has written a great article for the New Yorker that summarises many of the recent arguments and suggests why comparing IQ scores of different races is doomed to failure.

IQ is designed so it always has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. However, during the past decades people have been scoring better on IQ tests, something known as the Flynn effect, meaning the new versions have been re-adjusted to make sure the mean stays at 100.

This is important, because it means that comparing IQ from the 1950s is not a far comparison to IQs from the 2000s, because they use tests with different standards.

Some of the people who argued that certain races are more intelligent than others have failed to include these changes in their calculations, and, as Gladwell points out, when these are accounted for, many of these differences completely disappear.

The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look at one of the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called WISC (for Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children)...

For instance, Flynn shows what happens when we recognize that I.Q. is not a freestanding number but a value attached to a specific time and a specific test. When an I.Q. test is created, he reminds us, it is calibrated or “normed” so that the test-takers in the fiftieth percentile—those exactly at the median—are assigned a score of 100. But since I.Q.s are always rising, the only way to keep that hundred-point benchmark is periodically to make the tests more difficult—to “renorm” them. The original WISC was normed in the late nineteen-forties. It was then renormed in the early nineteen-seventies, as the WISC-R; renormed a third time in the late eighties, as the WISC III; and renormed again a few years ago, as the WISC IV—with each version just a little harder than its predecessor. The notion that anyone “has” an I.Q. of a certain number, then, is meaningless unless you know which WISC he took, and when he took it, since there’s a substantial difference between getting a 130 on the WISC IV and getting a 130 on the much easier WISC.

Link to Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker.

—Vaughan.

December 06, 2007

Almost perfect:

The New York Times has a short article on mental health and perfectionism, the tendency to measure success and self-worth by the completion of often unrealistic goals.

Over the last two decades this concept is being increasingly seen as a core component in some types of types of depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive and eating disorders.

A recent study identified several key features of perfectionism as, primarily, excessive concern over making mistakes, with other influences including high personal standards, the perception of high expectations and criticism from parents, doubting of the quality of your own actions, and a preference for order and organisation.

One of the key papers [pdf] in the field that really cemented the idea of perfectionism as an important psychological idea, suggested perfectionism could be focused inward (stringently evaluating and censuring your own behaviour), other-oriented perfectionism (having unrealistic standards for other people) and socially prescribed perfectionism (living up to unrealistic standards which the person perceives others are setting).

For people who already have negative ideas about themselves, perfectionism is thought to work like a constant test. If you can prove to yourself you can pass the test, you feel like a good person.

However, if the standards are unrealistic, you're always going to fail, and ironically, concern and anxiety about achieving these high standards can actually lead to putting things off, or doing the tasks worse.

This can lead to a vicious circle where people feel their emotional well-being is dependent on them reaching impossible goals, but trying to reach the goal makes them feel even worse.

One of the difficult things in psychological treatment, is often trying to persuade people that performing worse is actually a good thing. 'Good enough' rather than 'perfect'.

Link to NYT article on perfectionism.
pdf of key paper 'Perfectionism in the Self and Social Contexts'.

—Vaughan.

November 15, 2007

Does stress turn your hair grey?:

Scientific American has a short article which examines whether there's any truth to the common theory that stress makes your hair go grey. It's turns out there's some circumstantial evidence that stress may have an effect, but no definite causal link has been found.

Apparently, the gradual loss of melanocyte stem cells, ones that are key for hair colouring, lead to the loss of pigment.

Does stress accelerate this demise of the melanocyte population? "It is not so simple," Fisher says, noting that the process of graying is a multivariable equation. Stress hormones may impact the survival and / or activity of melanocytes, but no clear link has been found between stress and gray hair. Suspicions — and hypotheses — abound, however.

"Graying could be a result of chronic free radical damage," says Ralf Paus, professor of dermatology at the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein in Lübeck, Germany. Stress hormones produced either systemically or locally (by cells in the follicle) could produce inflammation that drives the production of free radicals — unstable molecules that damage cells — and "it is possible that these free radicals could influence melanin production or induce bleaching of melanin," Paus says.

"There is evidence that local expression of stress hormones mediate the signals instructing melanocytes to deliver melanin to keratinocytes," notes Jennifer Lin, a dermatologist who conducts molecular biology research at the Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center in Boston. "Conceivably, if that signal is disrupted, melanin will not deliver pigment to your hair."

And general practice physicians have observed accelerated graying among patients under stress, says Tyler Cymet, head of family medicine at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, who conducted a small retrospective study on hair graying among patients at Sinai. "We've seen that people who are stressed two to three years report that they turn gray sooner," he says.

Link to SciAm article 'Fact or Fiction?: Stress Causes Gray Hair' (via 3Q).

—Vaughan.

November 14, 2007

Seeing red can really affect performance:

Cognitive Daily discusses the findings of two interesting studies that suggest that simply seeing the colour red makes us perform worse on tests.

The articles discuss a couple of elegant studies by a research team, led by psychologist Andrew Elliot, which confirmed that seeing red makes us tend to do worse on tests. They then set about trying to understand why.

In a second study, students were given test booklets with the title in one of several possible colours. Interestingly, those who had booklets with red titles tended to choose easier questions, which led to a direct test of a neuropsychological idea about brain symmetry and avoidance:

Students who saw the red test cover chose significantly more easy test questions than either those who saw green or gray test covers. There was no significant difference between the students who saw green and gray.

So it seems that the color red in this context may cause people to avoid challenging or difficult situations. In their final experiment, the researchers took advantage of a robust experimental finding about avoidance. For more than two decades, nearly a hundred studies have found a characteristic brain activity associated with avoidance -- asymmetrical activity in the right frontal cortex. This is easily measured using non-invasive EEG equipment.

The research team used exactly this technique and found that relatively greater right hemisphere was found for red material, but not other colours, suggesting red triggers part of the avoidance system.

As Cognitive Daily note, we can't tell from these experiments whether the red and avoidance link is with us from birth, or whether we've just learnt it through cultural exposure.

It's a really elegant couple of studies though, and as always, they're wonderfully explained by the CogDaily team.

Link to 'Does the color red really impair performance on tests?'.
Link to 'Why does seeing red make test-takers choke?'

—Vaughan.

November 13, 2007

The absinthe minded green fairy:

The New York Times has a brief but wonderfully illustrated article on the cultural history of absinthe, the highly alcoholic spirit that was adopted by numerous famous artists.

Wikipedia also has a fantastic article on absinthe which looks at the history of its creation, popularity, prohibition and revival.

It also exposes the myth that wormwood, a key flavouring ingredient, causes hallucinations. A scientific article looked at the evidence for this and found that the effects of the drink are almost entirely due to its alcohol content.

While thujone, an active ingredient in wormwood, can causes seizures in high enough quantities, there isn't enough in absinthe to have a significant effect.

However, erroneous concerns about the drink leading to dangerous forms of 'madness' led it to be banned in most European countries in the early 1900s, giving it an instant notoriety and cultural impact that far goes beyond its pharmacological influence.

Link to NYT on 'Absinthe Returns in a Glass Half Full of Mystique...'
Link to Wikipedia article on absinthe.
Link to scientific article 'Absinthism: a fictitious 19th century syndrome...'

—Vaughan.

Music in dreams:

From a footnote on p282 of Oliver Sacks Musicophilia:

There have been very few systematic studies of music in dreams, though one such [pdf], by Valeria Uga and her colleagues at the University of Florence in 2006, compared the dream logs of thirty-five professional musicians and thirty non-musicians. The researchers concluded that "musicians dreams of music more than twice as much as non-musicians [and] musical dream frequency is related to the age of commencement of musical instruction, but not to the daily load of musical activity. Nearly half of all recalled music was non-standard, suggesting that original music can be created in dreams." While there have been many anecdotal stories of composers creating original compositions in dreams, this is the first study to lend support to the idea.

The finding has an interesting parallel with findings on the 'age-of-acquisition effect' in language research.

It was known for years that things like the ability to name objects or remember words was influenced by the how common the word is, and how 'concrete' it is. For example, concrete words like tree, apple and house tend to be more robust than abstract words like hope, love or like.

Largely due to the work Andy Ellis it's been found that many of these effects are actually a function of at what age the word was first learnt, with earlier words being more robust in terms of being more easily processed or accessed during cognitive processing.

The Uga study hints that a similar process may be at work with music.

Link to PubMed entry for study on music and dreams.
pdf of full-text of music and dreams study.
Link to Google Scholar search for age-of-acquisition effect.

—Vaughan.

November 12, 2007

Hypnosis as a surgical tool:

The editorial of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute discusses a recent study that found that hypnosis can be successfully used in breast cancer surgery to reduce pain, nausea, painkiller use, tiredness and emotional impact of the surgical procedure.

The study was a randomized controlled trial of patients who were undergoing breast surgery either to treat a cancer or to test a lump to see if it was cancerous.

Patients were randomly assigned to either a brief 15-minute hypnosis condition, or to another where the patient discussed their concerns with an empathic psychologist (to make sure the effects weren't just due to having someone their to 'calm their nerves').

The study found that patients given hypnosis needed less painkilling medication, were less nauseous, less emotionally upset, and experienced less pain intensity than the patients in the 'empathic listening' condition.

The editorial notes that the results suggest hypnosis is a powerful tool for helping patients, discusses why it isn't being used more widely, and what we know about how it affects the brain:

Thus, the study in this issue contributes to an impressive body of research using randomized prospective methodology in sizeable patient populations to demonstrate that adjunctive hypnosis substantially reduces pain and anxiety during surgical procedures while decreasing medication use, procedure time, and cost. If a drug were to do that, everyone would by now be using it.

So why don't they? For one thing, there is no mediating industry to sell the product—dangling watches are out of fashion for hypnotic inductions. Plus, there is still lingering suspicion that hypnosis reeks of stage show trickery. After all, the magic wand originated with Mesmer's use of a magnetic stick to presumably alter magnetic fields in patients' bodies. Yet hypnosis is the oldest Western form of psychotherapy. Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention, with a constriction in peripheral awareness and a heightened responsiveness to social cues. It is most similar to the everyday state of becoming so absorbed in a good movie or a novel that one enters the imagined world and suspends awareness of the usual one, a condition playwrights refer to as the "suspension of disbelief." This state can exert powerful influence on mind and body.

Altering perception using hypnosis results in brain changes that literally reduce pain perception [rather than merely altering the response to pain]. Indeed, simply changing the wording of the hypnotic instruction from "you will feel cool, tingling numbness more than pain" to "the pain will not bother you" alters the brain location of the analgesia from the somatosensory cortex to the anterior cingulate gyrus. Hypnotic alteration of color perception results in bidirectional changes in blood flow in the portions of the visual cortex that process color vision—blood flow in this region increases when color is imagined rather than seen and decreases when color is hypnotically drained from a colorful stimulus. Thus, there is good neurophysiologic reason to believe that hypnosis is potentially a powerful tool to alter perception of pain and associated anxiety.

If you're interested in volunteering for research into the neuropsychology of hypnosis in London (which doesn't involve anything painful!), we're still recruiting participants for sessions at 2pm on Saturday 17th and 24th November.

There's more information at our study web page.

Link to Journal of the National Cancer Institute editorial on hypnosis.
Link to abstract of RCT study.
Link to information on our neuropsychology of hypnosis study.

—Vaughan.

November 10, 2007

Meditation for the nation:

ABC Radio National's All in the Mind just had a programme looking at both the neuroscience of meditation and its increasing use in evidence-based mental health treatments.

Key aspects of meditation are increasingly become adopted into well-researched mainstream cognitive therapies.

Essentially, it's Buddhist mindfulness meditation, repackaged to make it sound more palatable to a wider audience, and often included alongside more traditional approaches.

The two big players in the psychological treatment field at the moment are Mindfulness-based CBT and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Mindfulness approaches seem particularly useful for people with chronic or relapsing symptoms, such as severe relapsing depression, rather than for first-episode or acute conditions.

For example, a key study published in 2000 found that mindfulness-based CBT had a beneficial effect on people who had three or more relapse of depression, but not people who had experienced two relapses or less.

The idea is quite different from cognitive approaches, where clients are encouraged to identify, evaluate and retrain their problematic thoughts and behaviours.

Mindfulness instead encourages people to be fully aware of these troublesome thoughts or sensations, but not to engage with them.

In other words, clients are encouraged to develop a degree of separation from their thoughts and emotions, so they can experience them, but not feel that they are fully controlled by them.

Some research has suggested that this is because mindfulness (and indeed other approaches) improve our ability to monitor, evaluate and engage with our own thoughts - so-called metacognitive ability.

Link to AITM on 'Dr Mindfulness: science and the meditation boom'.

—Vaughan.

November 09, 2007

Dangerous minds:

Malcolm Gladwell has written an excellent article for The New Yorker on the problems with the FBI's methods of profiling serial killers and other serious offenders.

The Behavioral Analysis Unit (formerly the Behavioural Science Unit) is the FBI's psychology unit that aims to research and develop methods of understanding criminal behaviour, police tactics, negotiation, and crime scene analysis.

It is a huge enterprise that exports its expertise around the world. Foreign police forces can often call on their expertise, for free, to help solve domestic cases.

However, in many ways the BAU is a world onto itself. It develops its own techniques that can often be quite distinct from those of non-FBI forensic psychologists. For example, many of its criminal and crime science analysis methods rely heavily on Freudian-style symbolic interpretations.

For example, the FBI classifies serial killers into 'organized' and 'disorganized' types.

Organized serial killers supposedly use logic and planning to commit crimes that fulfil their fantasies. The victim carefully selected, efforts are made to maintain control throughout the crime and the scene is cleaned up afterwards.

In contrast, disorganized serial killers supposedly choose their victims almost randomly and attack in a haphazard way, taking opportunity as it occurs. The crime scene is apparently chaotic and because the 'disorganized killer' has no interest in the person themselves, they may, as Gladwell recounts, "takes steps to obliterate their personalities by quickly knocking them unconscious or covering their faces or otherwise disfiguring them."

Perhaps the thing that raises the most eyebrows is that it publishes and reviews many of its theories in its own in-house journals, meaning they get little outside academic scrutiny.

Gladwell takes a look at some of these ideas in more detail and notes that they haven't faired well to some of the independent academic assessments they've been tested with:

Not long ago, a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool decided to test the F.B.I.'s assumptions [pdf]. First, they made a list of crime-scene characteristics generally considered to show organization: perhaps the victim was alive during the sex acts, or the body was posed in a certain way, or the murder weapon was missing, or the body was concealed, or torture and restraints were involved. Then they made a list of characteristics showing disorganization: perhaps the victim was beaten, the body was left in an isolated spot, the victim's belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised.

If the F.B.I. was right, they reasoned, the crime-scene details on each of those two lists should "co-occur" — that is, if you see one or more organized traits in a crime, there should be a reasonably high probability of seeing other organized traits. When they looked at a sample of a hundred serial crimes, however, they couldn’t find any support for the F.B.I.'s distinction. Crimes don't fall into one camp or the other. It turns out that they're almost always a mixture of a few key organized traits and a random array of disorganized traits. Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of "The Forensic Psychologist’s Casebook," told me, "The whole business is a lot more complicated than the F.B.I. imagines."

The whole article is a fascinating insight into the world of FBI profiling and notes that the methods may rely as much on cognitive distortions for their impact, as on hard evidence.

UPDATE: The forensic psychologists over at the excellent CrimePsychBlog have some commentary on the Gladwell piece, noting, among other things that Gladwell bases his criticisms on methods of profiling pioneers whose time has long since passed. A scientific approach is apparently now the mainstay of profiling practice and (they hope) that also includes the FBI.

Link to New Yorker article 'Dangerous Minds' (via 3Q).

—Vaughan.

November 08, 2007

Alcohol abuse in the New Testament:

I just found this abstract of a 1987 article from the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism that reviewed attitudes to alcohol in the Bible, and found that boozing was looked on considerably more favourably in the Old Testament than the New.

Alcohol abuse in the New Testament.

Seller SC.

Alcohol and Alcoholism. 1987;22(1):83-90.

The New Testament is similar to the Old Testament in terms of some fundamental attitudes towards alcohol. St Paul, for example, in the spirit of the Old Testament, unequivocally condemns drunkenness but recommends the consumption of wine in moderate amounts. Nevertheless, there are significant differences in emphasis between the two documents. Wine is referred to as God's gift in six of the books from the Old Testament, and no such description is offered in the New Testament. Total abstention seems acceptable only under exceptional circumstances in the Old Testament, while it is implicitly extolled through the exemplary role of John the Baptist in the New Testament. Finally, penalties for drunkards, including loss of salvation, are proportionally more frequent and comprehensive in the New Testament.

Link to PubMed entry for article.

—Vaughan.

November 01, 2007

Psychosis in David Lynch's Inland Empire:

The Psychologist has just made an article available that looks at the parallels between the most recent David Lynch film, Inland Empire, and what we know of the psychology of psychosis.

The article looks at some of the proposed pathologies of psychosis, drawn from cognitive science, and suggests how these are represented in Lynch's latest movie.

Paranoia comes with an inherent sense of personal threat and concomitant fear. Inland Empire’s dark and chilling world is produced in part by David Lynch’s use of story. While fear is generated with genuinely unsettling imagery and dark shadowy lighting, it also comes from the carefully managed attrition of any recognisable storyline. The audience, who have been led through the early stages of the plot with some of the conventional devices of storytelling (coherent dialogue, linear chronology) are suddenly thrown into a world of unfamiliar film cuts, unexplained locations and wordless acting. We are forced to jump to our own conclusions and build what narrative we will from scant concrete evidence as to events. Our sense of sense itself forces us to put something together and, given the presence of ominous emotions and apparent malice, what we put together is a paranoid and terrifying vision of the intentions of the characters in the film and even the world we inhabit.

Lynch's hallucinatory style certainly suggests altered realities and this is not the first time that it has been linked with mind-being reality distortion, as countless interpretations of Mulholland Drive testify.

Link to article 'David Lynch and psychosis'.

—Vaughan.

October 29, 2007

The deadly South American arrow poison:

I've just found a fantastic article on the history of curare, the powerful Amazonian arrow poison that causes paralysis and death. It's from a 2005 edition of the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh and is available online as a pdf.

The article tells the story of how the New World poison came to be known to the West, and how explorers, researchers and 'gentleman scientists' attempted to work out how it had its deadly effect.

Curare can be extracted from several plants but the active ingredient is d-tubocurarine.

It has its effect by blocking the effect of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junction. In other words, it blocks the chemical signals that allow nerve signals to activate the muscle.

You may be interested to know that Botox works in an almost identical fashion. It is used in in very small doses in plastic surgery to supposedly 'smooth' wrinkles.

Actually, the main 'smoothing' effect is due to the fact that the underlying muscles are paralysed and so cannot move to cause creases in the skin.

In larger doses it is also very dangerous. The name is a clue - Botox is short for 'botulinum toxin'.

The article on curare also has some fascinating asides about the myths associated with the compound, and some curious historical incidents associated with it - such as its role in a plot to assassinate the British Prime Minister during World War One.

pdf of article 'Curare: the South American arrow poison'.

—Vaughan.

Faces, genetics and addiction:

BBC Radio 4's science programme Material World just had an interesting edition on the links between face structure, psychological attributes and genetics, as well as a discussion on the science of addiction.

It is well known that certain genetic disorders that affect brain development can also lead to differences in facial structure (the most well-known example being Down Syndrome) owing to the fact that the brain and face develop from closely related groups of cells during embryogenesis.

One interesting example mentioned by medical geneticist Dian Donnai is the link between having a single incisor ('front tooth) and possible problems with brain development.

It's now being found that differences in the face, even in people without genetic disorders, reflect aspects of growth and development that can be linked to psychological attributes (or just as interestingly, are reliably linked to perceived psychological traits).

Psychologist Anthony Little is one of the guests on the programme and, with a number of colleagues, has done some fascinating work in this area (often using morphed or averaged faces like the one on the left) with many of the research articles available online.

The second part of the programme discusses the science of addiction in terms of both its psychology and neurobiology, but also in terms of its place in our culture as a concept that is applied to patterns of excessive behaviour.

Both are engaging discussions and are well-worth a listen.

Link to Material World with permanent audio archive.
realaudio of programme.

—Vaughan.

October 27, 2007

My brain made me do it:

Gerontologist and all-round skeptic Raymond Tallis has written an article for The Times where he laments the rise of 'neurolaw' where brain scan evidence is used in court in an attempt to show that the accused was not responsible for their actions.

Tallis cites the example of the trial of Bobby Joe Long where his lawyers tried to argue (unsuccessfully as it turned out) that he wasn't responsible for his crimes because brain scan evidence showed that he had an overactive amygdala (supposedly suggesting increased aggression) and underactive frontal lobes (supposedly suggesting reduced ability to inhibit aggression).

This, Tallis argues, is hardly evidence for diminished responsibility because it assumes that our brain is some sort of separate 'alien force' that is somehow not 'us', when we generally think of the brain as being synonymous with the self.

However, he goes on to cite the example of an epileptic seizure and argues that this is an example where we definitely can't say the person is responsible for twitching or losing consciousness.

Tallis aims to make a clear cut distinction between these different sorts of action and how we attribute responsibility for them, but he is perhaps relying on the extremes when reality can be full of grey areas.

Each of us has a propensity or threshold for violence, so some people will have aggressive urges more easily than others.

One way of looking at the question is 'how responsible is the person for their actions', but another is 'what strength of urge do we think it is reasonable for a person to inhibit'.

Life experience, genetic factors, brain injury or any forms of neurological disturbance may make urges stronger or reduce our ability to inhibit them.

Some epileptic seizures may be 'irresistible' in this way of thinking (although interestingly, some seizures may cause thoughts or urges that are resistible to varying degrees), whereas other patterns of brain activity will produce desires or intentions that can be more easily suppressed.

A serial killer may genuinely have reduced ability to inhibit violence urges, but at what point do we say that the effort they would have to make to stop them reacting violently is beyond what is considered reasonable or possible.

Link to Times article 'Why blame me? It was all my brain's fault'.

—Vaughan.

October 20, 2007

To the bunkers! No really, to the bunkers:

In another sign the robot revolution is coming, a robot cannon used by the South African military malfunctioned and tragically killed nine and wounded fourteen after firing uncontrollably.

Mechanised self-targeting machine guns with artificial intelligence systems to distinguish between targets (e.g. humans) and non-targets (e.g. trees) are becomingly increasingly common.

Last year Samsung announced that it had developed a machine gun toting robot sentry that can identify and shoot a target up to two miles away.

The system uses twin optical and infrared sensors to identify targets from 2.5 miles in daylight and around half that distance at night. It has a microphone and speakers so that passwords can be exchanged with human troops.

If the password is not accepted the robot can either sound an alarm or fire at the target using rubber bullets or a swivel-mounted K-3 machine gun.

South Korea's northern border is the most heavily militarised zone in the world, and the southern government has poured millions of dollars into automated military technology.

...

The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot was jointly developed with a South Korean university, and is designed to replace some of the troops guarding the border with North Korea.

North Korea?!? When World War Three is over, someone is going to get a Darwin Award for that decision.

Where's Asimov when you need him?

Link to 'Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14' from Wired (via BB).
Link to new story on Samsung robot sentry.
Link to Samsung page with specs of their robot sentry.

—Vaughan.

September 17, 2007

Lucid dreaming in art and science:

The New York Times has a short article on the recent upsurge of interest in both the arts and sciences on lucid dreaming - a form of reflective self-awareness in which you realise you're dreaming when it occurs.

You can apparently train yourself to increase your chances of having a lucid dream, and proponents say that the self-awareness allows you to change your 'dream reality' at will.

Unfortunately, it's jolly hard to study scientifically, because its rare, unpredictable and you can't signal when it occurs.

This means its hard even to make simple correlations between lucid dreaming and measures of brain activity.

Although occasional studies have attempted to study it in 'proficient' lucid dreamers, it's also been used as the basis for a philosophical analysis of what it tells us about different types of consciousness.

We normally assume we're unconscious during sleep, yet lucid dreaming suggests that while we have reflective self-consciousness (usually considered the 'highest form' of consciousness), we don't experience the 'lower' form of perceptual conscious awareness to the same degree.

Apparently, The Good Night, a film shortly to appear in cinemas, has lucid dreaming as its central theme. The trailer for the movie is available here as an embedded video.

Link to NYT article 'Living Your Dreams, in a Manner of Speaking'.

—Vaughan.

September 06, 2007

Too much, too young, too little, too late?:

Computer games may contribute to mental illness in children, but for adults they protect against cognitive decline, at least according to neuroscientist Susan Greenfield. However, the evidence for these claims is non-existent for the former, and only preliminary for the latter.

Baroness Greenfield has lent her name, and investment cash, to the 'brain training' game MindFit which was launched today in the UK.

It has apparently been shown in an as-yet-unpublished randomized controlled trial to boost cognitive function in senior citizens.

Interestingly, this time last year, Greenfield was a signatory to an open letter suggesting that "sedentary, screen based entertainment" was damaging to children's brain's because they "they cannot adjust – as full-grown adults can – to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change".

So what evidence is there that computer games are detrimental to children's minds, but beneficial to adults?

There is some evidence that violent media, including computer games, is associated with aggression in children, but none that computer games in general affect mental health or that children cannot adjust to rapid technological and cultural change.

Limited evidence suggests that cognitive training can help healthy older adults stay sharp, but there is no evidence on how it can effect mood or mental health.

So, on the basis of current evidence, or at least the lack of it, we could just as easily warn against the possible mental health implications of "sedentary, screen based entertainment" for seniors as for children.

In lieu of further evidence, I suspect the message that computer games are 'good for adults but bad for children' is based largely on common, but unsupported, social concerns about how technology is used: too much by children, not enough by seniors.

Link to BBC News story 'Mind games'.

—Vaughan.

August 31, 2007

How shops use scent to encourage big spending:

New Scientist has just made a popular article freely available online that focuses on how shops use scent to alter our buying behaviour.

The article looks at 'scent marketing' - the practice of selecting an in-shop scent to encourage spending on a particular product line.

In one recent study, accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Research, Eric Spangenberg, a consumer psychologist and dean of the College of Business and Economics at Washington State University in Pullman, and his colleagues carried out an experiment in a local clothing store. They discovered that when "feminine scents", like vanilla, were used, sales of women's clothes doubled; as did men's clothes when scents like rose maroc were diffused.

"Men don't like to stick around when it smells feminine, and women don't linger in a store if it smells masculine," says Spangenberg, who led the research and has been studying the impact of ambient scents on consumers for more than a decade. Spangenberg says this most recent study underscores the importance of matching gender-preferred scents to the product. Both men and women browsed for longer and spent more money when a fragrance specific to their gender was used to scent the store atmosphere. "Scent marketing is a viable strategy that retailers should consider," says Spangenberg. "But they really need to tailor the scent to the consumer."

It's not clear exactly how this works, but we know that smell has a particularly strong effect on emotional memory.

In fact, the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain's olfactory system that takes information directly from the nose, is linked directly to the amygdala, a key emotion processing area.

Link to New Sci article 'Recruiting smell for the hard sell'.

—Vaughan.

August 23, 2007

Induced out-of-body experiences: Do try this at home:

Science has just published two short papers where researchers induced a touch sensation that that seemed to be felt in a 'fake' body that appeared to be several metres in front - similar to an 'out-of-body-experience'.

The two studies were developed independently but both involved the same idea. In one study, the person was filmed from behind while they had their back stroked. They also wore a special head-mounted display that showed them what the video camera saw.

In other words, they saw their back being stroked as if they were sitting behind themselves and their body was in front of them. After a while, the sensation seemed to be move from their own back to be located in the projected body in front.

Neurophilosopher has found a fantastic video of Prof Olaf Blanke explaining the experiment, which is a wonderful introduction.

The other study did something very similar but used touches to the chest.

While these two studies have demonstrated the effect in a most striking way, the effect isn't new, as it's often been demonstrated with the 'rubber hand illusion'.

In fact, you can do something similar at home, and make touch sensations seem as if they are located in inanimate objects:

This is taken from Hack #64 ('Mold your Body Schema' [pdf]) from the Mind Hacks book, but was originally inspired by a similar exercise in Ramanchandran and Blakesee's book Phantoms in the Brain:

Sit at a table with a friend at your side. Put one hand on your knee, out of sight under the table. Your friend’s job is to tap, touch, and stoke your hidden hand and—with identical movements using her other hand—to tap the top of the table directly above. Do this for a couple of minutes. It helps if you concentrate on the table where your friend is touching, and it's important you don't get hints of how your friend is touching your hidden hand. The more irregular the pattern and the better synchronized the movements on your hand and on the table, the greater the chance this will work for you. About 50% of people begin to feel as if the tapping sensation is arising from the table, where they can see the tapping happening before their very eyes. If you're lucky, the simultaneous touching and visual input have led the table to be incorporated into your body image.

All of these experiments synchronise the touch with visual movement, but put these perceptions in conflict with visual information about where the synchronisation is happening.

The brain attempts to resolve this conflict by prioritising the visual system, which is relatively information rich in comparison to our other senses.

Notably, these new studies are the first to demonstrate something akin to an 'out-of-body-experience'.

It's not really the same as the classic experience where you see your body in front of you, perhaps as you float above it, something known as autoscopy or heautoscopy in the medical literature.

However, as we reported last year, Prof Olaf Blanke's team have studied various types of 'out-of-body' and 'projected self' experiences, either caused by direct brain stimulation, or after neurological disorder.

The lab's publications page has many of their papers available as full-text articles if you want more detail.

Link to video interview and explanation of experiment.
Link to New Scientist write-up.
Link to previous Mind Hacks article on Blanke's and colleagues studies.
pdf to Hack #64 'Mold your Body Schema'.

—Vaughan.

August 21, 2007

The cognitive science of magic:

The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness invited some of the world's best stage magicians along to their June conference to demonstrate how the conscious mind can be manipulated. The New York Times has just published a fantastic article on the conference and the cognitive science of magic.

The symposium was entitled 'The Magic of Consciousness' and was deliberately more than just light entertainment. The magicians were specifically chosen for the interest in the cognitive aspects on illusion and talked on how they take advantage our of brain's quirks.

"This wasn't just a group of world-class performers," said Susana Martinez-Conde, a scientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix who studies optical illusions and what they say about the brain. "They were hand-picked because of their specific interest in the cognitive principles underlying the magic."

She and Stephen Macknik, another Barrow researcher, organized the symposium, appropriately called the Magic of Consciousness.

Apollo, with the pull of his eyes and the arc of his hand, swung around my attention like a gooseneck lamp, so that it always pointed in the wrong direction. When he appeared to be reaching for my left pocket he was swiping something from the right. At the end of the act the audience applauded as he handed me my pen, some crumpled receipts and dollar bills, and my digital audio recorder, which had been running all the while. I hadn't noticed that my watch was gone until he unstrapped it from his own wrist.

Link to NYT article 'Sleights of Mind'.
Link to list of symposium speakers and talks.

—Vaughan.

August 13, 2007

Brain's walking patterns specific for leg and direction:

An ingenious experiment using an adapted treadmill has shown that our brain seems to store patterns for the smooth movement of our legs independently for each leg, and for each direction of walking.

The study, devised by neuroscientists Julia Choi and Dr Amy Bastian, used a split-belt treadmill - a normal treadmill for walking but where each side can be programmed with its own speed and direction.

They asked 40 volunteers to walk on the treadmill while they varied the speed and direction of each belt. They then recorded the limb movements with sensors attached to key body positions.

They found that even for unnatural walking patterns, where the two belts were going in different directions at different speeds, participants quickly adapted so that they maintained smooth graceful walking patterns.

The researchers varied these patterns so that they could separate out the adaptation needed for each limb in different directions.

After the person had adapted to the new pattern, the researchers then asked participants to walk normally.

The participants walked with a limp, showing that the brain had adjusted existing walking patterns within a matter of minutes to allow for the new style of walking, and that this new pattern was stored and still in place, even to the point of slightly disrupting normal walking.

The best demonstration of this is a short video of the results produced by the research team.

Because this could be shown to occur separately for each leg and direction, it suggests that we don't have a single 'rhythm generator' (known as a central pattern generator or CPG) for walking.

This could have important implications for treating people who have walking problems caused by brain damage that affects movement in one particular limb.

Link to study abstract.
Link to video of results.
Link to write-up from Wired.

—Vaughan.

August 10, 2007

The Civil War phantom limb:

Below is an early report of a phantom limb - the perception of feeling from a limb which has since been removed - from the partly-autobiographical fiction of American Civil War physician and writer Silas Weir Mitchell.

It recounts the effect in a Civil War soldier who had both legs amputated after suffering battlefield injuries.

It was published in Section III of Mitchell's sarcastically titled partly autobiographical book The Autobiography of a Quack, available in full on the web.

I got hold of my own identity in a moment or two, and was suddenly aware of a sharp cramp in my left leg. I tried to get at it to rub it with my single arm, but, finding myself too weak, hailed an attendant. "Just rub my left calf," said I, "if you please."

"Calf?" said he. "You ain't none. It's took off."

"I know better," said I. "I have pain in both legs."

"Wall, I never!" said he. "You ain't got nary leg."

As I did not believe him, he threw off the covers, and, to my horror, showed me that I had suffered amputation of both thighs, very high up.

"That will do," said I, faintly.

Although earlier accounts of phantom limbs have been found in retrospect, Mitchell was the first clinician to seriously consider this phenomenon and he included it, and other neurological conditions, in his fiction.

A recent paper [pdf] in the journal Neurology examined how his writing used these syndromes and what his fiction tells us about the disorders that affect the brain.

pdf of paper 'The neurologic content of S. Weir Mitchell’s fiction'.
Link to page with excerpt, with links to full text.

—Vaughan.

August 07, 2007

Brands affect perceptions of preschoolers:

A recently published study on brand influence has reported that preschool children perceive carrots to taste better when they come out of a McDonald's bag, even though the company doesn't sell carrots.

The study shows that even very young children have internalised advertising and that it significantly affects their perception of the outside world.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the strength of the effect was found to correlate with the number of TVs present in the child's house.

The research team was led by Prof Thomas Robinson and was published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

The team tested 63 three to five year-olds and asked them to taste a number of foods. One sample of the food was presented in McDonald's packaging, another sample was presented in a similar plain paper bag.

These included foods genuinely from McDonald's and others that the company don't sell (milk, apple juice and carrots).

Children consistently said the food from the McDonald's packaging actually tasted better, regardless of whether it was actually from the company, or whether the company even had it on their menus.

The researchers then looked at what might be linked to the strength of this effect, and found that how often the child eats at the fast food chain was a significant factor.

However, another significant predictor was how many televisions the family had in their home, suggesting that exposure to advertising itself might play a part.

Link to full-text of scientific paper.
Link to write-up and '60 sec podcast' from SciAm.

—Vaughan.

August 06, 2007

A social history of death and dying:

BBC Radio 4's social history and sociology programme Thinking Allowed recently had a programme on how death and dying customs have changed over time and how obituaries say as much about society as they do about the deceased.

A guest on the show is sociologist Prof Allan Kelehear who discusses his book A Social History of Dying (ISBN 9780521694292) that charts how changes in the physical process of death have meant our social customs have altered to better make sense of new forms of dying.

In ancient times, death was generally quick and sudden, and so little ceremony was needed and people were generally left where they died.

However, as humans became better at avoiding a violent end, death was more often due to disease which was a slower process and so changed the social customs related to the dying process.

Kelehear argues that as we have become better at predicting death, even through the modern times, we've developed ways of preparing for our imminent demise, both socially and psychologically.

The other guest is sociologist Prof Bridget Fowler who has analysed obituaries through the ages to answer the question, 'who have we considered worthy of an obituary?'

As obituary is a type of 'social memory', something we decided to record because we feel other people should know it for the future, it also reflects the cultural assumptions about who and what are important at the current time.

Unsurprisingly, obituaries have typically been concerned with the deaths of the upper classes, but she notes that their style is changing and has become somewhat more democratic and surprisingly frank in some instances.

Link to Thinking Allowed on the sociology of death and dying.
Link to A Social History of Dying on Google Books.

—Vaughan.

August 03, 2007

LSD, hypnosis and the Catholic Church:

I found this interesting snippet, among many interesting snippets, on p194 of David Healy's book The Creation of Psychopharmacology (ISBN 0674015991), a history of the science and medicine of psychiatric drug development.

It discusses the similarities between the reaction of the authorities to LSD in the 1960s and the reaction to hypnotism in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The LSD story has a backdrop of considerable historical resonance. It seemed that under the influence of LSD mainstream cultures were inhibited, that a dose of LSD would lead to a humanizing of society and a democratizing of values. A similar story had played out two hundred years earlier with the development of mesmerism (hypnosis).

Mesmerism led to a perception among "therapists" that the entire social order could have resulted from suggestion. Many viewed mesmerism not just as a means of correcting the problems of an individual but as a means of changing society. Quite a few of the men who signed the early documents triggering the French Revolution were also members of Franz Mesmer's Society of Harmony.

One of the responses of the establishment was to proscribe mesmerism, and later hypnosis. Mesmerism remained officially banned for almost a hundred years; it took the influence of the most famous clinician of his day, Jean-Martin Charcot, to bring it back to the scientific doman.

But the work of Charcot and Janet on hypnotism created further problems. It began to seem that many religious phenomena, including the stigmata of saints were hypnoid phenomena, and this perception led to the suggestion that saints exhibiting such effects were in fact hysterics.

Hypnosis fell under a further cloud when its use by Freud was associated with his claims that hysteria was linked to sexual abuse during childhood. There was widespread disquiet. The Catholic Church, for example, proscribed hypnosis in the 1880s, and the ban was not lifted until 1955.

The image is part of a larger painting called 'A Clinical Lesson with Doctor Charcot at the Salpetriere, 1887' painted by André Brouillet.

It depicts Charcot and one of his most famous 'hysterical' patients Blanche, being supported by Joseph Babiński.

Freud had a copy of this picture in his consulting room, and it can still be seen in his old house, now the Freud Museum in London.

UPDATE: Jeremy, of the excellent Advances in the History of Psychology has emailed to say that they recently posted a summary of papers that look at the history of LSD, psychology and psychiatry. Thanks!

Link to book info.
Link to The Creation of Psychopharmacology on Google books.

—Vaughan.

July 17, 2007

Hand actions fire mirror neurons in handless people:

Science reports that people born without hands show 'mirror neuron' activity when they view hand actions, but in the area of the brain that controls the feet.

The 'mirror neuron' system is a brain network that activates both when an action is being carried out, and when it is being observed, and has been hypothesised to be involved in perceiving and comprehending others' actions.

The mirror neuron system is widely hyped but there's no doubt it is an important brain function.

The researchers in this study were interested what sort of 'mirror neuron' activity would be apparent in people who had never had hands, while they watched hand actions.

The study, led by Dr Valeria Gazzola, recruited two people with arm aplasia, a developmental condition where the arms and hands are missing at birth, and sixteen comparison participants with normally developed hands.

The participants were brain scanned while being shown video of hands manipulating various objects (e.g. grabbing a glass or scooping soup out of a bowl) as well as still images of the hands resting behind the same objects.

Scans were also taken while participants completed actions with their lips, feet, and for the control group, with their hands - to see how this matched up with the 'mirror neuron' activity when watching the video.

When watching the hand actions, activity in the brain of two handless participants looked more like they were moving their feet.

As both participants use their feet to manipulate objects on a day-to-day basis, the researchers suggest that they are 'mirroring' the same goal, but using the brain systems that match how they would actually get the job done in everyday life.

One difficulty is that the activity from the two aplasic participants is quite variable, meaning the study really needs to be replicated to be sure of the effect.

However, if it bears out, it is a fascinating finding. It suggests that the mirror neuron system is much less action-based than we thought, and is, perhaps, equally as wrapped up with perceiving outcomes as movements.

Link to write-up from Science.
Link to abstract of scientific study.

—Vaughan.

Unconscious beauty primes positive emotions:

We can correctly classify faces as attractive or unattractive, even when they appear so quickly that we're not conscious of seeing them. This is according to a study that also found that subliminal attractive faces also prime positive emotions.

Profs Ingrid Olson and Christy Marshuetz flashed up photos of faces previously rated as either extremely attractive or extremely unattractive.

Each face stayed on-screen for only 13 milliseconds and was preceded by a picture of a scrambled face and was followed by a picture of a cartoon face.

Showing something just before or just after a briefly presented picture is known as 'masking' and helps to ensure that after it appears, the picture doesn't stay in iconic memory - a very brief 'after-image' memory that extends our visual experience after something has gone.

Essentially, masking ensures the image doesn't register consciously, and when participants were asked to classify the flashes as either attractive or unattractive faces they claimed they were just guessing because they couldn't 'see' any photographs of faces.

But, on average, they managed to correctly classify the faces as attractive or unattractive, suggesting that facial attractiveness is something that is something that we process very quickly, so quick, it can happen before we're consciously aware of it.

In another experiment, the researchers flashed up pictures of attractive and unattractive faces and houses, shortly followed by a word.

The word could either be linked to positive emotions (such as 'laughter') or negative emotions (such as 'agony') and participants were asked just to hit a button to classify the words as either good or bad.

The idea was to test whether attractive faces made participants react more quickly to positive words - strong evidence that these concepts had been 'primed'.

Priming is where one concept activates related concepts in the brain. So if you're thinking of 'football', semantically related concepts like 'game', 'crowd' or 'team' will be made more available to your thoughts.

Psychologists know this because people will react more quickly to related concepts than to unrelated concepts if asked to identify them.

Olson and Marshuetz found that unconsciously presented attractive faces, but not attractive houses, primed positive emotions.

This suggests that attractive faces may have a particular attention and emotion grabbing effect. The effect seems so strong, it seems to work even when a face hasn't registered in our conscious mind.

pdf of full-text paper.
Link to write-up from Science Daily.

—Vaughan.

July 11, 2007

Synaesthesia in one language only:

New Scientist have recently published a fascinating exchange on synaesthesia which has highlighted that some bilingual people with the condition experience the effect in one language only.

A reader wrote in to suggest that the consistently found associations of certain colours with specific letters of the alphabet may be due to with the way the letters are represented in children's 'ABC' books.

Psychologist Dr Julia Simner replied, noting that research shows this wasn't the case, but most interestingly, her letter indicates that some bilingual people only experience synaesthesia in one language:

Slessenger's proposal that synaesthetes' colours stem simply from childhood ABC books is sensible, but has been tested, and rejected, elsewhere. Anina Rich and colleagues traced 136 ABC books published as far back as 1862 - of which, surprisingly, only 38 used colour in any prominent sense. However, only 1 in 150 of their synaesthetes experienced colours consistent with any alphabet book [pdf].

Additionally, although Slessenger's account is plausible for the examples he provided (eg, "A is for (red) apple, it's less tenable when the entirety of alphabetic colours are considered. Indeed if synaesthetes' colours were indicative solely of ABC learning, this would imply they lived in a world of green elephants (E), red mothers (M), black and blue tigers (T) and yellow cats (C).

Instead, our research indicates a different cause: synaesthetes colour their alphabets with a sophisticated, unconscious rule-system, in which, for example, associations are mapped according to the frequency with which letters and colour terms are encountered in the English language. High-frequency letters such as A are significantly likely to pair with high-frequency colour terms such as "red".

Finally, Slessenger suggests our synaesthetes should be given symbols from an unknown language to test whether associations are independent of experience. This approach has been investigated and proved unhelpful. Strangely, depth of familiarity is not a strong predictor of synaesthetic colouring since some bilingual people have colour in only one language - and some monolinguals have colour for languages they do not understand.

In original letter was in response to a May article on the condition and some of Simner's research findings. Unfortunately, the main article is behind a pay wall, but the letters are fascinating in themselves.

Link to original letter.
Link to Dr Simner's reply.

—Vaughan.

July 10, 2007

The relative exposure of our respective arses:

In 1980, the New York Review of Books published a heated exchange between psychologist and IQ researcher Hans Eysenck and biologist and IQ skeptic Stephen Jay Gould.

It remains a classic moment in the IQ debate, not least because of the entertaining mud slinging.

The exchange followed a review of Arthur Jensen's book Bias in Mental Testing by Stephen Jay Gould in which he slams the concept of IQ and general intelligence - the idea that there is a core resource of psychological ability that most mental tasks draw upon.

In the first exchange, Hans Eysenck, one of the world's most famous psychologists at the time, wrote to the magazine throwing doubt on pretty much everything Gould had to say.

Gould makes a valiant comeback, dismissing most the arguments as attacking him rather than his claims, but notes that one is "the only meat in a sandwich surrounded by too much very stale (if not moldy) bread".

You can always tell a scientific argument has got interesting when it wanders off the original point and focuses on who can see whose arse.

Eysenck starts the second exchange with "It is always interesting to note the reactions of a critic who is caught with his pants down, and Stephen Jay Gould's reply to my letter is no exception".

Gould, unable to resist carrying the metaphor, replies: "I don't wish to engage Mr. Eysenck in a protracted debate about the relative exposure of our respective arses; nonetheless, I can't resist noting that his initial remark surprised me because I thought I had caught him in the same unenviable posture he ascribes to me."

The debate was heated largely because of Eysenck's controversial views on intelligence. He suggested that IQ was largely determined by genetics and that small but significant differences could be seen between races as a result.

He was accused of being racist, but he claimed he was simply reporting the data from his studies and noted, in his defence, that he found that Asian people typically came out with the highest IQ - hardly the views of a white supremacist.

Gould was shortly to publish The Mismeasure of Man, a book pouring scorn on the whole concept of IQ and arguing that the tests had serious cultural biases built into them so they were never going to be a fair comparison.

The exchange is worth reading in full both to get a flavour of the debate (essentially the same points are still being made today) and, of course, just for sheer entertainment value.

Link to original book review.
Link to round one.
Link to round two.

—Vaughan.

Edelman on neural darwinism and consciousness:

Biologist Gerald Edelman is interviewed in Discover magazine about his views on the brain's own internal 'natural selection' process and its possible role in the development of consciousness.

Edelman won the Nobel Prize in 1972 for his work on antibodies, but later turned to neuroscience and is keen to crack the problem of consciousness.

He argues that pathways in the brain are created by a process akin to 'natural selection, where the most useful survive.

In the first few months of life, the neurons, on average, are more connected with each other than later in life.

If you click here you can see a graph of the number of synapses (inter-neuron connections) present in the human visual cortex by age.

According to the study that this graph is taken from, the peak time for synaptic connections is 6 months old. After that the number rapidly decreases.

This happens because connections that aren't used disappear on a 'use it or lose it' basis, and the ones that are left form the more permanent connections in the brain.

In other words, from all the random variation, the weak connections die out and the strongest survive.

Edelman also argues that this principal applies to larger patterns of activity in the brain - with past and ongoing experience determining what can be considered useful.

Edelman talks about his theory and how he thinks it is crucial in understanding consciousness, and also how his research group is attempting to build robots based on the same principal.

Link to Edelman interview in Discover magazine.

—Vaughan.

July 04, 2007

Dreaming of the dead:

The New York Times has an eye-opening article on research that has looked at how contents of dreams can be linked to emotional concerns - particularly when they relate to lost loved ones or turbulent life events.

'Dream interpretation' has got a bad name, partly due to the proliferation of books that claim to 'decode' dreams on a seemingly random basis (e.g. lemon = unrequited love), and partly because of its importance in the history of Freudian psychotherapy, which is now deeply unfashionable in some quarters.

Unfortunately, this has meant that research on the content of dreams has also fallen out of favour, despite the fact that it remains an interesting scientific topic and is still of clinical concern.

Modern psychotherapists will occasionally get into discussions about dreams, but, these days, will tend to avoid a strictly Freudian approach of trying to 'interpret' them.

Instead, they might use them as a point of discussion to make sense of real life concerns.

For example, if you've been particularly disturbed by a dream about work, it might be an opportunity to reflect on how you've been dealing with work-related stress, particularly if your reaction to the dream was quite a surprise in itself.

The NYT article looks research on the content of dreams, particularly 'big dreams': those of a more profound nature, often concerning deaths or other significant losses.

"Back to life" or "visitation" dreams, as they are known among dream specialists and psychologists, are vivid and memorable dreams of the dead. They are a particularly potent form of what Carl Jung called "big dreams," the emotionally vibrant ones we remember for the rest of our lives.

Big dreams are once again on the minds of psychologists as part of a larger trend toward studying dreams as meaningful representations of our concerns and emotions. "Big dreams are transformative," Roger Knudson, director of the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology at Miami University of Ohio, said in a telephone interview. The dreaming imagination does not just harvest images from remembered experience, he said. It has a "poetic creativity" that connects the dots and "deforms the given," turning scattered memories and emotions into vivid, experiential vignettes that can help us to reflect on our lives.

Link to article 'Winding Through ‘Big Dreams’ Are the Threads of Our Lives'.

—Vaughan.

July 02, 2007

Unconscious inspiration:

I've just found an article from The Psychologist that examines historical accounts of sometimes world-changing ideas which have seemed to arrive during sleep or dreaming.

The article looks at inspirational slumber which has inspired everything from sewing machine designs to the theory of relativity.

The author, psychologist Josephine Ross, has discovered some great examples. My favourite being from horror writer Stephen King on how the plot for his novel Misery came to him when he fell asleep on a plane.

Ross notes that people's own insight into whether the dream was genuinely the inspiration may not be entirely accurate.

They may just have been 'incubating' the idea (having it 'at the back of the mind') and because we sleep so often, it might be easy to attribute it to last night's dreaming.

However, a study published in Nature in 2004 suggested that sleep might genuinely help in problem solving.

The researchers found that volunteers asked to complete maths problems were three times more likely than sleep-deprived participants to figure out a hidden rule for solving the problem if they had eight hours of sleep.

Link to Psychologist article 'Sleep on a problem... it works like a dream'.

—Vaughan.

July 01, 2007

Shapes of thought:

Neurofuture has picked up on a fantastic science-art project that is creating beautiful 'thought images' by visualising EEG readings in 3D.

The project is part of the Einstein's Brain collaboration which involved two artists, Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow, and medical researcher Morley Hollenberg.

The image on the left is the visualisation of anger. The image is described:

The shape of anger. Hypnotised participant's thought form emerges as she recalls an incident in which she became uncontrollably angry. In this visualisation the elements are separated to show background of beta activity from 15 to 25 Hz from which emerges a dynamic form generated by wild swings between beta and alpha activity in the range 4 - 30 Hz, as she oscillated between meditative recall and consciousness.

Link to Neurofuture on the project.
Link to more 'Shapes of Thought'.

—Vaughan.

June 28, 2007

Is bigotry a mental illness?:

The Psychiatric Times has an interesting article discussing whether bigotry should be classified as a mental illness. The author concludes no, but the discussion gives an important insight into how we decide what is a mental illness and what is not.

Most people might think that an opinion, no matter how disagreeable, shouldn't get someone diagnosed with a mental disorder.

The difficulty comes when deciding what criteria you should use to decide that someone's mental state has gone beyond what is normal and should be considered an illness.

Generally, if a mental state is considered to cause distress or impairment, it's considered to be a sign of mental illness.

This goes for physical illness as well. A physical difference is only considered an illness if it causes problems as a result.

However, someone who is extremely racist might genuinely suffer problems as a result of their opinions.

As we reported previously, a small group of psychiatrists are pushing for a diagnosis of 'racist disorder' to be included in the next revision of the diagnostic manual on this basis.

One argument to be wary of in the justification of this, or any other mental disorder, is that 'it must exist because biological differences can be found between people thought to have the condition and those without'.

As the mind and behaviour is just a reflection of brain function, any difference, no matter how trivial (ice cream preference for example), will have a related biological difference.

As with physical illness, biological differences in themselves can't define an illness, because they have to be linked to what is considered serious distress or impairment in everyday life.

Biology might tell us why the difference occurs, but it can't tell us whether the difference should be considered good or bad.

This decision is essentially a value judgement, because what is considered serious, distressing, impairing or relevant to everyday life aren't cut-and-dry decisions and are made on the basis of a consensus of opinions.

In some cases, such as cancer, it's easy, because everyone agrees that an early painful death is bad.

In other cases, particularly for mental illnesses, the issues can be a lot less straightforward because there there are few obvious and direct effects of mental states.

These issues ask us to question what we consider an illness and highlight that the decision is as based as much on social considerations and context, as on the science of biology.

The Psychiatric Times article tackles exactly these sorts of issues in its discussion of bigotry, and is a great guide to the philosophical issues involved in classifying mental disorder.

If you want to explore further, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a great entry on mental illness that tackles many of the conceptual difficulties.

Link to Psychiatric Times article 'Is bigotry a mental illness?'
Link to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on mental illness.

—Vaughan.

June 26, 2007

Harnessing humans for subconscious computing:

Technology Review has an article on using humans as part of a digital face recognition system. Uniquely, you don't have to take part in any deliberate recognition, the system uses electrical readings to automatically measure the response of the brain - even if you're not aware of it.

The system, developed by Microsoft Research, takes advantage of the fact that when we see something we recognise as a face, a specific electrical signal is generated by face-perception brain activity that can be picked up by electrodes.

Crucially, this brain activity happens automatically, we don't have to make a special effort.

Last year, I wrote an article entitled 'Hijacking Intelligence', noting that software is increasingly being designed to use humans as 'biological subroutines' for the things computers find most difficult.

Labelling pictures is one such task - it's something humans find trivial, computers find difficult, and it's needed in large numbers to create an index for image searches.

To get round this problem, Google designed an online game that involved labelling pictures. Humans play for fun, while Google get the benefit of your intelligence for their database.

This new system takes it a step further, as you don't have to be doing anything related for it to take advantage of your 'mental work'.

For example, a picture could flash up every time you hit save on a word processor, or every time you look at a certain website.

Each time your brain signals that you've seen a face, the system reads your recognition activity and sends it back to the main database to classify the image.

This might be one way of sifting through security images to see which should be inspected in more detail.

As a substitute for advertising, maybe you'd be offered free internet access if you had the system installed. Your brain would pay the bills.

While the system has only been developed as a proof-of-concept, it's interesting, if not a little scary, to speculate how technology will harness our mental skills, even when we're not aware of it.

Link to Technology Review article 'Human-Aided Computing'.

—Vaughan.

June 21, 2007

The attractions of complex plastic bags:

Another snippet from the Journal of Forensic Sciences, this time from a post-mortem case report from the July edition:

"We here report the case of a 34-year-old man who died due to asphyxia, secondary to body wrapping in the largest and most complex plastic bag ever involved in a published case of autoerotic death."

People are sources of such surprising sexual diversity and you can just feel the curiousity radiating from the case report.

Despite the seemingly unusual nature of the death, over 400 autoerotic fatalities have been reported in the medical literature, suggesting that similar practices are probably conducted safely on a much wider basis.

For people who deal with tragic circumstances on a day-to-day basis, the intellectual fascination helps cope with the emotions these sorts of cases stir up.

I remember sitting in a cafe with a forensic psychologist happily chatting away, when the people next to us stood up and moved to another table as they seemed to be increasingly put off their food.

Being able to eat lunch while discussing gruesome case reports is one of the benefits of this form of coping strategy.

Link to abstract of 'Complex autoerotic death with full body wrapping in a plastic body bag'.

—Vaughan.

June 19, 2007

Homosexuality in body, brain and behaviour:

The New York Magazine has an in-depth article on the science of sexual orientation and whether the biological factors which may make someone more likely to be gay, also make them more likely to appear gay to others.

There are now a range of established findings that suggest that gay men are likely to have a number of physical traits not shared by straight men (the findings on gay women are a lot less clear-cut it seems).

For example, a 2004 study [pdf] found that gay men were much more likely to have a counter-clockwise hair whorl (as pictured) than straight men.

Other studies have found differences in finger lengths, size of structures in the hypothalamus (a deep brain area), and on a number of psychological abilities like mental shape rotation and navigation to name but a few.

Some researchers believe that the same biological conditions that increase the chances of homosexuality, also increase the chances of some of these body, brain and mind differences.

While genetics is thought to play a part, researchers are also interested in the time when an unborn child is developing in the womb.

Interestingly, many of the differences are linked to hormone exposure in the womb and can be seen to different degrees in both gay and straight men.

One of the critical questions is still how much of the influence is to do with biological factors and how much with social influence, opportunity and freedom of expression.

The New York Magazine is a fantastic guide to the science of sexual orientation, but is also a wonderful commentary on how this research is perceived by parts of the gay community and what it might mean for gay politics.

The only slight drawback is that it repeats the 'scientists tried to turn sheep gay' myth, but apart from that, it's a compelling read.

UPDATE: Discover Magazine just had a feature article on the genetics of homosexuality which accompanies this piece nicely.

Link to article 'The Science of Gaydar'.

—Vaughan.

Mirror touches:

Nature reports on a recently discovered form of synaesthesia where affected individuals actually feel a sensation when they observe someone else being touched.

Synaesthesia is a condition where senses become crossed, so people might seeing colours when they encounter numbers, or tastes when they hear certain words.

This new form of synaesthesia was found by accident, during a talk by neuropsychologist Dr Jamie Ward:

"We first came across the mirror-touch synaesthesia by chance," says Ward. The sensation of touch was being discussed at a UCL neuroscience seminar, and someone suggested, as a thought experiment, imagining that people felt what they saw. A colleague of Ward's objected, vigorously insisting that everyone does, in fact, feel what they see. It was the first time Ward had realised such a condition could exist.

"There may be a lot of such people around, since they are unaware that that they have the condition. They think it is normal," says Ward. When he started to look for people who experience mirror-touch synaesthesia, he had little trouble finding them, he says.

Ward collaborated with Michael Bannisy to study the condition and they found that they affected people were more likely to confuse an observed touch with a real touch than unaffected people under experimental conditions.

They also found that people with the condition were especially sensitive to other people's emotions, rating much higher on measures of emotional empathy.

The study is published in Nature Neuroscience but I've just discovered there's also a great write-up over at The Neurophilosopher.

Link to Nature news story.
Link to write-up from the The Neurophilosopher.

—Vaughan.

June 12, 2007

The psychology of self-accusation, from 1902:

Every month, the British Journal of Psychiatry has a section that prints 100-year-old excerpts from medical journals relevant to modern psychiatry.

They are usually both fascinating and shocking. As a brief window on the past, they can show a very different understanding of mental disorder, but not always the respect that people with psychiatric difficulties deserve.

This from a 1902 letter to the Lancet about people who go to court to accuse themselves of a crime that they haven't committed.

The committal of a notorious crime which excites popular imagination and which remains undetected for a time often leads to the appearance in law courts of self-accusing culprits who charge themselves with being the authors of the crime in question. Dr. Ernest Dupré of Paris in a paper read before the Annual Congress of French Alienists and Neurologists recently held at Grenoble attempts to delineate with exactitude the psychological nature of "auto-accusation" and to show that certain morbid elements play an important part in it.

He points out that "auto-accusation" is not often or merely the result of a weak-mindedness; the subject of it is a person who has positively developed general ideas of unworthiness, guilt, and remorse, and in a word is suffering from mild melancholia with vague delusions of guilt and sin. Another type of self-accuser is the proud and vain "degenerate" who with a brain warped by congenital anomaly of development constructs romances of which he readily persuades himself to be the hero or the martyr.

There is, adds Dr. Dupré, a marked contrast between these two types. The one is abject, lowly, self-humiliating; the other proud, egiostic, and vain. Among other types of the same abnormality are found persons of alcoholic or hysterical character.

The full letter goes on to describe the supposed characteristics of the 'alcoholic self-accuser' and the 'female self-accuser' who was apparently likely to be suffering from 'marked hysteria'.

One of my favourites is a curious case report of a Cambridge student who had seemed to have lost his identity.

There's many more historical gems in the archives that are well worth checking out.

Link to '100 years ago' section of the British Journal of Psychiatry.

—Vaughan.

June 11, 2007

Uncanny valley - the movie:

The Age has a brief article looking at how film makers are trying to avoid the 'uncanny valley' - the phenomenon where artificially created characters seem more unnervingly odd as they are made more life-like.

The idea is that we're so used to picking up the subtlies of human appearance that android-like figures seem cold and stilted whereas less life-like cartoons or animals can often seem more expressive and 'warm' because we aren't distracted by their not-quite-right attempts at being human.

This is a concept developed by robotics researchers but is also important when film-makers are trying to make likeable characters that audiences will warm to.

The article has noted that film makers have spent a lot of time trying to develop computer software to simulate things like hair movement, in an attempt to improve realism.

It's hard to say what exactly is off-putting about 'artificial humans' though, so it's not easy to know what to focus on to improve their likeability.

This might be one area where significant advances in human-computer interaction might be driven by the film and entertainment industry.

Link to article 'When fantasy is too close for comfort'.

—Vaughan.

June 10, 2007

The mind is a metaphor:

Dr Brad Pasanek is a literature researcher at the University of Southern California who has created a database of metaphors of the mind used in 18th century English literature.

It allows you to search by everything from standard keywords to the politics of the author and has over 8,000 entries.

As illustrated by Douwe Draaisma's excellent book Metaphors of Memory, our scientific understanding of the mind often uses metaphors of the latest technological developments.

It's no accident that we now tend to understand the mind in computational terms, as an information processing system, whereas in past centuries it was thought to operate on the principles of pressures, fluids and vapours.

Pasanek also runs a blog that highlights some of the background and history to the more interesting examples.

Link to The Mind is a Metaphor database.
Link to The Mind is a Metaphor blog.

—Vaughan.

June 07, 2007

Learning field sense:

Wired has an article on 'field sense' - a sportsman's ability to infer seemingly unknowable information from subtle perceptual cues.

This means that some sportsman appear to have a 'sixth sense' of where players are on the field, or can work out where a ball is likely to go before it is struck.

This tends to be present in pro-sportsman and previously, it was just thought to be something you're born with. An advantage that makes some people more likely to rise to the top.

Wired magazine covers recent research in sports psychology suggesting it's actually something that it learnt, and might well be teachable.

What happened in that fraction of a second? A lot, Farrow reasoned. Up to a point, he theorized, the direction of a serve was fundamentally unpredictable: Whatever clues existed weren't ones that an opposing player could discern. By the time the ball had been hit, on the other hand, even a novice could make a plausible guess at its trajectory. What separated the pros from everyone else was the ability to pull directional information out of the early stages of a swing and therefore to predict a split second earlier where to head. This fraction of time is game- changing. A serve going 120 miles per hour takes approximately a third of a second to travel the 60 feet from baseline to service line. This means that an expert, who doesn't have to wait until contact, has twice as long to move, plant his feet, and swing.

This discovery fit with something Farrow and other tennis researchers had already suspected: Reflex speed is not the key factor in returning a serve. "People have tested casual players and experts, and their reaction times are essentially the same," Farrow says. The fact that Roger Federer can drill back a 140-mile-per-hour serve is partly a matter of muscle control. But it's also about processing subtle visual cues to predict where the ball will go and get to the right spot.

Link to article 'Wayne Gretzky-Style 'Field Sense' May Be Teachable'.

—Vaughan.

May 31, 2007

Selling disgust:

An article in Time magazine discusses how an understanding of the psychology of disgust is being applied to selling products and the arrangement of items in supermarkets.

One key finding has been that disgust is heavily linked to ideas of contamination and this holds even when there's no risk - just the idea is enough.

For example, people are less likely to want to put a plastic spoon in their mouth that has touched fake plastic vomit, despite the fact that it is no more risky than putting a spoon in your mouth that has touched other plastic spoons in the packet.

Psychologists Andrea Morales and Gavan Fitzsimons has discovered that this principle applies to consumer products that are linked to things that can trigger disgust - rubbish bags, nappies, toilet paper and so on.

Crucially, the contamination principal works here, so people view things less favourably that have been near these products.

Strong preferences were just what the subjects exhibited. Any food that touched something perceived to be disgusting became immediately less desirable itself, though all of the products were in their original wrapping. The appeal of the food fell even if the two products were merely close together; an inch seemed to be the critical distance. "It makes no sense if you think about it," says Fitzsimons. More irrationally still, the subjects were less comfortable with a transparent package than an opaque one, as if it somehow had greater power to leak contamination. Whatever the severity of the taint, the result was predictable...

"More and more stores organize products by category," says Morales, "so you have a baby aisle, for example, with diapers and wipes and baby food all together." Supermarkets might want to rethink that arrangement.

Link to Time article 'The Science of Disgust'.

—Vaughan.

May 21, 2007

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!:

I've just found an entry on PubMed for a curious sounding case study:

An unusual perversion: the desire to be injured by an automobile operated by a woman.

American Journal of Psychiatry. 1960 May;116:1032.

KEELER MH.

I imagine it caused havoc during rush hour.

Unfortunately, the paper doesn't have a summary, and I'm not able to access back issues of the AJP at the moment, so it will have to remain a mystery for the time being.

Link to PubMed entry.

—Vaughan.

May 20, 2007

You can’t make metaphysics out of fudge:

Philosopher Jerry Fodor has written a wonderfully entertaining review of Galen Strawson's new book 'Consciousness and Its Place in Nature' for the London Review of Books.

In his book, Strawson looks at the assumption that consciousness arises from the physical matter of the brain and comes to the startling but coherent conclusion that maybe everything has the capacity for consciousness.

Fodor explains it like so:

So, then, if everything is made of the same sort of stuff as tables and chairs (as per monism), and if at least some of the things made of that sort of stuff are conscious (there is no doubt that we are), and if there is no way of assembling stuff that isn't conscious that produces stuff that is (there's no emergence), it follows that the stuff that tables, chairs and the bodies of animals (and, indeed, everything else) is made of must itself be conscious. Strawson, having wrestled his angel to a draw, stands revealed as a panpsychist: basic things (protons, for example) are loci of conscious experience. You don't find that plausible? Well, I warned you.

Fodor is always a great read (just have a look at the first paragraph of the review) and he often writes amusing and original articles.

One of his papers (and for the life of me I can't remember which) takes the form of him explaining a philosophical argument to his aunt.

His ideas causes all sorts of controversy in cognitive science. For example, he argues that humans have a language of thought - a sort of common basic code that all thought is based on.

Artificial intelligence researchers love this approach, as you might expect, but it drives many people nuts as they object to the ideas that the mind is just an information processor and that concepts and beliefs can be independently represented in the brain.

My favourite retort is from a book by Still and Costall called 'Against Cognitivism' (ISBN 0745010253) who write that Fodor's theories are

"where one tries to keep a reasonably straight face while presenting the absurd consequences of the scheme as exciting theoretical revelations".

Have that sir!

There's a funny tagline at the bottom of Fodor's review relating to such criticisms which made me chuckle:

Jerry Fodor teaches philosophy and psychology at Rutgers University. Everyone wonders why he is writing still another book about the language of thought.

And if anyone knows the name of the Fodor article I can't remember, do let me know!

Link to review of 'Consciousness and Its Place in Nature' (via 3Q).
Link to details of book.

—Vaughan.

May 18, 2007

How doctors think, but psychiatrists still a mystery:

Dr Jerome Groopman has written a book on the psychology of medical decision making called How Doctors Think but interestingly, he specifically excludes psychiatrists, as he says their thought processes are too complicated to understand.

Groopman talks about his book on the NPR radio programme Fresh Air, which also has the introduction of his book available online.

The end of the introduction is telling:

I quickly realized that trying to assess how psychiatrists think was beyond my abilities. Therapy of mental illness is a huge field unto itself that encompasses various schools of thought and theories of mind. For that reason, I do not delve into psychiatry in this book.

Among the medical profession psychiatry is one of the more poorly paid and less respected specialities, possibly because traditionally 'dangerous' medical interventions (such as surgery) are limited, and it often involves dealing with disturbed and difficult patients - which makes it seem less glamorous to the public.

You'll notice this at election time. Politicians are quite happy to stand next to grateful working folk who've just had a life threatening tumour removed, but are strangely reluctant to stand next to oddly behaving unemployed people who've just been saved from suicide.

This lack of status belies the fact that psychiatrists deal with the most complex conceptual problems.

There is very little discussion about the philosophy of cardiology because we tend to understand disordered hearts on a limited number of levels.

In contrast, the philosophy of psychiatry is a huge area, because understanding the disordered mind involves drawing together a number of different levels and approaches in the context of one person's life and experience.

Psychology, neuroscience, sociology, physiology, philosophy, ethics and law are all needed for even the most simple of consultations. And this is just for starters.

This is not to say that other types of medicine are straightforward, but they certainly deal with fewer philosophical difficulties on a day-to-day basis.

This leads to uncertainty and doctors generally hate not knowing what's happening as it's often considered a sign of failure.

Psychiatrists, good ones at least, will spend a lot more time saying they don't know than other doctors. They handle a lot more uncertainty, and this is what makes some physicians uncomfortable.

The fact that someone could write a book on the thought processes of physicians but won't even attempt to start on the mental life of psychiatrists is, I think, a very sincere compliment.

Link to NPR Fresh Air on 'How Doctors Think'.

—Vaughan.

May 15, 2007

How the Mind Works: The video lectures:

The Technology, Entertainment, Design conference has strayed from its original focus and now hosts a wide-ranging set of talks, including a number on 'How the Mind Works', all of which are available online as streamed video.

I'm always a bit suspicious of anything in psychology with grand titles like this.

I remember smiling to myself when I started reading Steven Pinker's (actually very good) book of the same name, where he wrote in the first few pages that the book won't actually tell you how the mind works, but will just help explain what we've worked out already.

I thought it would be better called 'What I Think About What We Know About How the Mind Works So Far', but I suspect the publisher's would have objected.

The joke goes that Daniel Dennett's equally as grandly titled book 'Consciousness Explained' should really be called 'Consciousness Explained Away', as he argues that their is no such thing as qualia and no hard problem to solve, two of the main issues thought to be key in consciousness research.

If you want to know more about Dennett's views on consciousness, you can have a look at his TED lecture.

The other talks are fascinating and diverse. Helen Fisher talks about the psychology and biology of love, Daniel Gilbert talks about happiness and why we are so bad at understanding it, Ray Kurzweil talk about how we're shortly all to become super evolved drug-enhanced semi-robots.

There's plenty of other talks as well, so see what catches your interest. None of them will tell you how the mind works, but they'll tell you some of what we know so far.

Link to videos of TED mind, brain and society talks.

—Vaughan.

May 11, 2007

Weird world of the Psychological Atlas:

Archive.org has a copy of a 1948 book entitled the Psychological Atlas that is full of weird and wonderful things from the world of 1940s psychology and beyond.

It's got some serious psychology in there, mixed in with the paranormal, weird and curious stuff, probably reflecting the public understanding of the field at the time.

The Second World War was a critical time for psychology as many influential psychologists (like Gordon Allport and JJ Gibson) were employed to help select recruits and design better functioning equipment.

This helped significantly with psychology being taken seriously as a science, and this slightly post-war volume probably still has some of the hangovers from the pre-war years.

A fascinating read nonetheless.

Link to Psychological Atlas (via BoingBoing).

—Vaughan.

May 08, 2007

Understanding wisdom:

You would think they'd be lots of good psychological theories of wisdom, as it's something we talk about all the time in everyday life, but there just isn't.

Psychologists have traditionally avoided the subject, although, thankfully, this is now starting to change and the New York Times has an in-depth article looking at some of the recent findings.

The article also looks at why the subject has been ignored, partly, of course, because it's quite hard to define.

Nevertheless, one person who has pioneered the study of wisdom is neuropsychologist Dr Vivian Clayton who began studying this most valued of human traits in the 1970s.

Between 1976, when she finished her dissertation, and 1982, Clayton published several groundbreaking papers that are now generally acknowledged as the first to suggest that researchers could study wisdom empirically. She identified three general aspects of human activity that were central to wisdom — the acquisition of knowledge (cognitive) and the analysis of that information (reflective) filtered through the emotions (affective). Then she assembled a battery of existing psychological tests to measure it.

Clayton laid several important markers on the field at its inception. She realized that "neither were the old always wise, nor the young lacking in wisdom." She also argued that while intelligence represented a nonsocial and impersonal domain of knowledge that might diminish in value over the course of a lifetime, wisdom represented a social, interpersonal form of knowledge about human nature that resisted erosion and might increase with age. Clayton's early work was "a big deal," Sternberg says. "It was a breakthrough to say wisdom is something you could study." Jacqui Smith, who has conducted wisdom research since the 1980s, says it "was seminal work that really triggered subsequent studies."

The article discusses some of Clayton's early groundbreaking work in the field and goes on to look at what modern psychology and neuroscience is telling us about how we understand wisdom and act wisely, particularly in terms of emotion and maturity through the later years.

Link to NYT article 'The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis'.

—Vaughan.

May 01, 2007

Getting emotional about cognitive science:

The Boston Globe has a well-researched article on how emotion has become increasingly important in scientific models of the mind.

Only two decades ago, cognitive psychology rarely discussed emotion and was largely about the supposedly 'cold' computational aspects of mind: memory, attention, problem solving, language and so on.

It is now being recognised that emotion plays an important role in all of these aspects of mental life, largely because of developments in neuroscience.

This new science of emotion has brought a new conception of what it means to think, and, in some sense, a rediscovery of the unconscious. In the five decades since the cognitive revolution began, scientists have developed ways of measuring the brain that could not have been imagined at the time. Researchers can make maps of the brain at work, and literally monitor emotions as they unfold, measuring the interplay of feeling and thinking in colorful snapshots. Although we aren't aware of this mental activity -- much of it occurs unconsciously -- it plays a crucial role in governing all aspects of thought. The black box of the mind has been flung wide open.

As an aside, the author of the piece is science writer Jonah Lehrer, who also writes neuroscience blog Frontal Cortex.

Link to Boston Globe article 'Hearts and Minds'.

—Vaughan.

Science of hypnosis:

Hypnosis and Suggestion is a fantastic website created by Dr Matt Whalley, an academic hypnosis researcher who gives a level-headed and detailed account of what is known about the science of hypnotic states and suggestion.

Hypnosis is a well researched psychological phenomenon and, increasingly, it is being investigated by cognitive neuroscientists.

What we know is that some people are more susceptible to hypnotic suggestions than others.

Research has shown that the level of hypnotic susceptibility is known to be stable across the life span and related to genetics.

A twin study shown that hypnotisability is likely to be heritable and recent molecular genetics studies have shown that it may be influenced by a gene known as COMT.

Interest has recently begin to focus on what makes some people highly hypnotisable compared to others.

A recent study looking at brain structure found that the front part of the corpus callosum was almost a third bigger in highly hypnotisable people.

This matches up with other neuroimaging studies which have suggested that highly hypnotisable people show differences in the function of frontal lobes, particularly the anterior cingulate cortex.

These differences are likely to be linked to an ability to become very 'absorbed' in things, with a simultaneous reduction in conflict and distraction when highly focused.

This might explain why hypnotic suggestions seem to have their effect on highly hypnotisable people, as they become absorbed in what the hypnotist says and can voluntarily 'switch off' the need to constantly self-monitor and evaluate their own reactions.

Interestingly, research suggests that we aren't very good at working out how hypnotisable we are.

Matt Whalley's site is a fantastic introduction to what is known about the science of hypnosis, including a list of frequently asked questions, an overview of the current theories of hypnosis, its history and its use by legitmate clinicians.

A fascinating read and well worth investigating if you're curious about this intriguing human phenomenon.

Link to Hypnosis and Suggestion website.

—Vaughan.