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 c