November 05, 2009

The mind and brain in 2010:

The latest issue of Wired UK has a cover feature on breaking ideas for 2010. Mind and brain innovations feature strongly and several are freely available online.

I might immodestly recommend the piece on 'neurosecurity' and how researchers are having harden neural implants against hackers, as it was written by me. Regular readers will know we broke the story back in June, although it was great to have it selected as one of the 'ideas of the future' by Wired UK.

There's also a fascinating piece on 'hyperopia' - a cognitive bias where people falsely assume they'll be happier in the future by forgoing an indulgent pleasure and doing something 'sensible' that will benefit the long-term.

It was described by psychologists Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz and their original paper is available online as a pdf. It's a lovely flip-side to the self-control research, that has shown the ability to delay gratification predicts success in a number of areas of life. Hyperopia demonstrates that this ability can make people worse off if used in excess.

There's also a couple of great pieces on the interface between psychology and technology.

The article on 'bionic noticing' discusses how portable networked devices both allow us to be passively alerted to things in our environment through location specific information sources but also how simply having the technology can change of awareness: for example, the ability to instantly post pictures online from mobile devices can change how we look at the environment.

There's also a piece on 'digital forgetting', arguing that the ability to permanently store photos, conversations and social network interactions is a bug, not a feature, and we need to build in forgetting processes to facilitate to the traditional social practice of 'putting things behind us'.

The print version has lots of other breaking ideas for 2010 which are not available online, including a piece by me on 'networked drugs'.

Link to Wired UK neurosecurity article.
Link to Wired UK hyperopia article.
Link to Wired UK bionic noticing article.
Link to Wired UK digital forgetting article.

Full disclosure: I'm contributing editor at Wired UK and my neural implant has no password.

—Vaughan.

November 04, 2009

Dr Smile:

The Philip K. Dick novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch features a portable device which allows patients to consult with the virtual psychiatrist Dr Smile. If I'm not mistaken, the system seems to have re-invented by this research team:

Virtual patient: a photo-real virtual human for VR-based therapy

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2004;98:154-6.

Kiss B, Benedek B, Szijártó G, Csukly G, Simon L, Takács B.

A high fidelity Virtual Human Interface (VHI) system was developed using low-cost and portable computers. The system features real-time photo-realistic digital replicas of multiple individuals capable of talking, acting and showing emotions and over 60 different facial expressions. These virtual patients appear in a high-performance virtual reality environment featuring full panoramic backgrounds, animated 3D objects, behavior and AI models, a complete vision system for supporting interaction and advanced animation interfaces. The VHI takes advantage of the latest advances in computer graphics. As such, it allows medical researchers and practitioners to create real-time responsive virtual humans for their experiments using computer systems priced under $2000.

Link to PubMed entry for Dr Smile re-invention.

—Vaughan.

November 03, 2009

Johnson and the Nutt Sack:

As regular readers will know, we often note the passing of the regular British ritual where the UK government asks a group of scientific advisers to give evidence on the harmfulness of drugs and then ignores them.

The unwritten rule is that everyone feigns mild exasperation and then goes about their business as if nothing had happened, but the Home Secretary Alan Johnson has gone and spoiled the party by firing neuroscientist David Nutt, the head of the drugs advisory committee, for, well, waving that damned evidence about.

The home secretary's officially sacked the chief adviser for breaking what turns out to be a non-existent rule about discussing government policy in a recent lecture - using the carefully mischosen words "I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy".

Subsequently, two other scientists from the advisory committee have resigned and both the government's Chief Scientific Advisor and the Science Minister expressed their dismay.

An evidence free drugs policy isn't a British speciality, unfortunately, as shown by a recent World Health Organisation study that showed that severity of drug laws around the world have virtually no relation to the drug use of the population.

So why did the home secretary break the unwritten rule about quietly ignoring the evidence in the service of some pointless sabre rattling? Surely nothing to do with the fact that a general election is coming up.

—Vaughan.

October 16, 2009

Neuroethics at SfN 2009:

The world's largest scientific conference, the Society for Neuroscience meeting, starts tomorrow in Chicago. Tens of thousands of researchers from all areas of neuroscience will meet to discuss all aspects of the brain. The conference always has a full programme of social events, as well as the usual scientific programme (I am still filled with regret about missing the 'Hippocampus Poetry Slam' the last time I went). If you are in Chigaco this year, one particular event you might want to check out is the Neuroethics Social, hosted by Martha Farah from the University of Pennslyvania

Neuroethics Social
Time & Date: Tuesday Oct 20, 6:30-8:00
Location: Room N139, convention center
Guests: J.T. Cacioppo J.D. Haynes J. Illes S. Laureys H.S. Mayberg E.A. Phelps R.A. Poldrack B.J. Sahakian
"Interested in the ethical, legal or policy implications of neuroscience? Come to the neuroethics social hour and meet others with the same interests. And don't miss the short but spirited debate, between two leading neuroimaging researchers, on the proposition that "brain imaging is already capable of (something worthy of the term) 'mind reading'."

Martha is the academic director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society at U. of Pennsylvania and for the last few years has been running a 'Neuroscience Bootcamp' for professionals and graduate students in fields such as law, ethics and education who feel they need a crash course in modern neuroscience.

—tom.

October 12, 2009

Colombia bound:

There's a chance Mind Hacks posts might be a bit sporadic over the next week as I'm returning to beautiful Colombia to work with the fantastic psychologists and psychiatrists in Hospital Universitario San Vicente de Paúl in Medellín.

I'm at the airport in London, but due to my bargain basement plane tickets I won't arrive in Medellín for another 30 hours and then have to find somewhere to live.

After the jet lag has cleared and I find a reliable internet connection, normal service will be resumed, but in the meantime I'll post when I can.

By the way, the picture is the entrance to the psychiatric ward in Hospital San Vicente de Paúl, which like the rest of the hospital, is remarkably beautiful.

—Vaughan.

October 08, 2009

NeuroPod on learning in coma-like states:

The latest Nature NeuroPod podcast has just been released and covers the use of the hot new genetics technique genome-wide association studies in neuroscience, sections on colour-blindness and stroke, and a recent study on learning in patients in coma-like states.

The discussion of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) is interesting in light of some headline studies that have come along recently on schizophrenia, autism and Alzheimer's disease. There's also a fantastic article in this week's Nature that discusses the successes and failures of the technique, including in recent studies on the genetics of schizophrenia.

Perhaps the most interesting section is the discussion on how patients in a coma-like 'persistent vegetative state' (PVS) can show conditioned learning where they can associate different sensations. Not all unconscious patient could show learning, but the ones that did showed much better recovery from their severe brain damage.

Link to NeuroPod page.
mp3 of this edition.

—Vaughan.

October 03, 2009

Do antidepressants cause mud flinging?:

Prospect magazine has an interesting article covering psychologist Irving Kirsch's widely publicised meta-analyses that have questioned whether Prozac-style SSRI antidepressants are any better than placebo.

Kirsch has become well known for requesting unpublished trial data via the US Freedom of Information Act and pooling it with the published evidence. The conclusion of his latest re-analysis was that there was little difference between sugar pills and SSRIs in the treatment of depression.

This has kicked up all sorts of merry hell, not least because the media reported (and the Prospect article implies) that 'antidepressants don't work' which is clearly false. They do work, but the debate is over how much of the effect is due to placebo.

It's not quite as simple as it seems of course, as not everyone agrees with Kirsch's methods and, as noted in an insightful 2008 paper, his argument is based on the assumption that people who respond to antidepressants also respond to placebo in a similar way, when we know there are individual variations in both.

Kirsch apparently has a book coming out shortly which is likely to restart the debate and it's likely to be heated.

There are some hints of this in the article where several prominent psychiatric scientists give variations on the "don't criticise the evidence, you're harming children!" argument. In fact, head of the NHS trust where my research institution is based apparently blames 'the media, and psychologists' "who have a vested interest in constantly attacking antidepressants". Yes, we've reached that level already.

We went through a very similar process when concerns over whether SSRIs increased suicidal thinking in adolescents were raised. Lots of similar mud-flinging ensued.

Interestingly, a meta-analysis of suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts in 372 trials just published in the British Medical Journal found that overall SSRIs had no effect on risk of self-harm, and that when the data was divided by age, there was a slight increase in thoughts and attempt in people younger than 25 and a slight decrease in adults aged over 65 (the comments on the article are also worth reading).

It's probably worth saying that even in young people self-harm when taking antidepressants is very rare, but the fact that the drugs had no overall protective effect except in older people should give us pause for thought.

But getting people to focus on the evidence when they're wound up is like getting people to focus on the fire exits during a strip show. We all accept the importance of doing so but few can quite manage it when the time comes.

Link to Prospect article on antidepressants (via @researchdigest)

—Vaughan.

September 28, 2009

No research, no problem:

Time magazine has a remarkably one-sided article on America's first 'internet addiction' clinic. The clinic turns out to be a few rooms in someone's house, but the article gives away an interesting if not depressing gem about the likely status of the 'internet addiction' diagnosis in the DSM-V, the next version of the psychiatrists' diagnostic manual:

"The central issue is the absence of research literature on this," says Dr. Charles O'Brien, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Studies in Addiction and the current chair of the DSM-V committee to revise the manual, adding that with the backdrop of the health-care debate, now is a precarious time to introduce new disorders that will require more money to treat.

"At this point I think it's appropriate that it's not considered an official disease," says O'Brien. "We are probably going to mention it in the appendix."

The appendix refers to Appendix B, which is a list of diagnoses worthy of future study, and yes, that's the head of the DSM addiction committee saying that an "absence of research literature" makes something worthy of future study.

In which case, I might write to him and ask to have my own diagnosis of "impulsive diagnosis inclusion syndrome" listed on the same basis.

But not only is his reasoning rather odd, he's also wrong. There's quite a sizeable literature on the 'internet addiction' diagnosis and, as noted by a meta-analysis published last year, it turns out to be rubbish.

If you're interested in reading something a little more balanced, I get to spar with Kimberley Young, one of the long-standing 'internet addiction' promoters, in an article in this month's Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Link to Time on America's first 'internet addiction' clinic.
Link to 'internet addiction' scrap in CMAJ.

—Vaughan.

September 24, 2009

The English Surgeon online:

Last year I posted about a wonderful film called The English Surgeon, a sublime documentary about the work of neurosurgeons Henry Marsh and Igor Kurilets in the Ukraine. It turns out you can now watch it for free online at the PBS website until 9th October.

As I mentioned last time "to say the film was just about brain surgery would be vastly under value its significance, and to describe it as a meditation on the humanity of medicine would be to confine it to a cliché."

As far as I can work out, it should be available wherever you are in the world.

By the way, it turns out that Henry Marsh is the husband of social anthropologist Kate Fox who wrote the book Watching the English that we discussed earlier, so interesting to see that Marsh embodies many typical English traits.

Link to The English Surgeon online (via @mocost @balajajian).

—Vaughan.

September 14, 2009

London walk / crossing the line:

This Saturday, I'm going to walk between the two poles of London's psyche, the Maudsley Hospital and the Tavistock Clinic, whose rivalries have shaped our understanding of the mind in both the UK and around the world. If you'd like to join me, you'd be more than welcome.

Both were galvanised by the experience of the First World War where 'war neuroses' became a major source of casualties as the mechanised slaughter took a massive toll even on the survivors.

The South London Maudsley pioneered the scientific approach to psychiatry focusing on statistical empiricism and neuroscience while the North London Tavistock pioneered the clinical use of psychotherapy developing group treatments and youth work.

The competition between the two institutions swayed between healthy rivarly to outright distrust and as a result both have developed as contrasting sides to the city's psyche each conveniently separated by the Thames.

The dark clouds of the Second World War brought an influx of European Jewish émigrés into London, including Sigmund and Anna Freud into the psychoanalytic community orbiting around the Tavistock; while the Maudsley benefited from the arrival of psychopathologists such as Alfred Meyer and William Mayer-Gross.

This cemented their reputation and their outlook and both remain centres of excellence nationally and internationally.

The walk is about 8 miles but I'm planning for a few minor detours for interesting sites (grounds of the old Bedlam Hospital, now the Imperial War Museum, St Thomas' Hospital and the like) and with stops for lunch and maybe the occasional pint, I reckon leaving the Maudsley at 11am, arriving at the Tavistock will be between about 4-5pm.

I've no idea if anyone else wants to walk across London, guided by psychiatric hospitals, but if you do drop me a line, and I'll email you the exact details nearer the time. I shall be going rain or shine so no need to commit. It's just so I don't have to think so bloody far ahead.

I'll post some details on the day via the Twitter (@vaughanbell) so you can always catch up at any point.

In summary, 11am, near the Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill, Saturday 19th September, to walk to the Tavistock Clinic in the leafy suburb of Belsize Park for about 4-5ish.

—Vaughan.

September 03, 2009

Why you'll never see hypnosis on TV, hopefully:

A TV watchdog has ticked off Australian company Channel Nine for breaching the broadcasters code of conduct and showing a hypnosis session.

You may not be aware, but in many countries any broadcast of a hypnosis session is banned. Here is the relevant rule from the regulations [pdf] from the British TV watchdog Ofcom:

Rule 2.9 Hypnosis

Elements of the hypnotist’s routine may be broadcast to set the scene. However, it is important not to broadcast the routine in its entirety, nor to broadcast elements that may cause a member of the audience to believe they are being influenced in some way.

This is because it is perfectly possible to be hypnotised through the TV, or indeed through the radio.

There is no 'magic' to hypnosis, it just requires that someone relax, focus, listen to suggestions and engage with the process, and some research suggests that even the relaxing and focusing is optional.

The most important thing to know about hypnosis is that people vary in their hypnotisability and this is the single most important thing that determines whether suggestions will have an effect.

As long as they are spoken clearly, it doesn't seem to matter how they're presented.

In fact, one of the most widely used measures of hypnotisability in the scientific literature takes participants through a number of hypnotic suggestions to see which they can experience and is usually just run from a pre-recorded tape.

Link to ABC news 'Nine attempted to 'hypnotise viewers' (thanks David!).

—Vaughan.

September 01, 2009

NeuroPod on updating ye olde brain map:

The latest edition of Nature's NeuroPod podcast has just hit the wires and has some great items on updating the Brodmann brain map, a challenge to the 'use it or lose it' theory of synapse formation, genetic copy and pasting in neurons and face perception in the monkey.

The first part is about a project to update the Brodmann areas, a map of the brain by different neuron structures that forms the basis of much modern neuroscience but is now 100 years old.

German neurologist Korbinian Brodmann started mapping the brain with his microscope and charting the different ways brain cells were organised and still today, if you read scientific papers on the brain, they often refer to places like Brodmann area 10 as a way of locating specific parts.

So you can see why the 100 year-old map needs an update.

Link to NeuroPod webpage.
mp3 of latest edition.

—Vaughan.

Drug smuggling innovations bulletin:

I've just discovered the joys of the Microgram Bulletin, the newsletter of the US Drug Enforcement Administration that explains interesting new drug finds and novel methods for smuggling illicit substances.

It's a curious mirror of the illicit drug trade and contains numerous mysterious finds, such as playground marbles systematically placed in cocaine bricks for an unknown purpose, or a find of cocaine smuggled as clear plastic-like coating for calendars, photos or magazines.

The bulletin also reports 'mimic' drugs, where manufacturers are passing off cheaper (and often nastier) substances as pill-based drugs such as ecstasy or amphetamine.

The publication has been going mostly monthly since 2003, and I recommend checking out some of the earlier editions as they contain some great essays and technical reports on the drug trade.

For example, there's one edition with an analysis of cocaine trafficking derived from chemical analysis of seized drugs, and another on chemical dumps from illegal drug labs.

The picture on the left is from a report entitled "Cocaine concealed in religious plaques in Miami, Florida" from a report from May this year.

Link to DEA Microgram Bulletin online.

—Vaughan.

August 12, 2009

Internet addiction storm breaks in China:

For several years 'internet addiction' has been promoted by the Chinese government as a serious mental illness affecting large numbers of young people, but in recent months it has started to pull back, seemingly due to the growth of a widespread, poorly regulated and abusive system of internet addiction 'treatment' centres.

Firstly, let me say that most of my sources on this issue are from China Daily, a state-run news service, but whether this reflects the reality or not, it is clear that the Chinese authorities are becoming worried about how the problem is being dealt with.

For example, the Chinese authorities recently shut down an unlicensed internet 'boot camp' style clinic and arrested 13 employees after a 15-year-old boy was beaten to death by camp counsellors for apparently running too slowly.

This follows news that the Chinese Ministry of Health has recently banned electroshock therapy for 'internet addiction'. The same state media source reported that in Linyi Psychiatric Hospital alone, 3,000 young people had been 'treated' in this way. Both Chinese and Western media report that electroshock was also used as a punishment (note that some reports portray it as mild electrical current while others specifically describe it as electroconvulsive therapy).

The clinics seems to be a mixture of private clinics, of which 400 or so are estimated to exist, and government run clinics of an indeterminate number.

The approach of one of the most prestigious state-run clinics is described in this article:

Co-founded by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China and Beijing Military Region General Hospital in 2004, Tao's clinic in the suburbs of Beijing has treated nearly 5,000 Internet-addicted youths and says 75 percent have been cured.

At the clinic, young addicts receive "comprehensive therapy" including medication, psychological counseling and low-intensity military training. They also take interactive courses with their parents to learn communication skills.

Tao also uses psychotropic drugs to treat patients suffering from mental illnesses such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression.

This clinic seems to be the only one to have admitted Western journalists and it has been featured in TV and radio news reports, which, at times, make for quite disturbing viewing.

The recent admission of abuses in 'internet addiction' treatment centres is a significant change in tack as previous reports have typically discussed the internet in rather alarming terms, variously claiming that it has caused schizophrenia, led to drug addiction, resulted in job loss and the like. State media claims that about 10% of young net users are addicts.

Reading all the stories on 'internet addiction' in China, both from Chinese and Western media, I was struck by how it consistently reflected the idea that the popularity of the 'treatment' is being driven by parents' anxieties about their children not conforming to the social pressures of family and academic achievement.

This is remarkably similar to what seems to drive the concept in the Western world and while our stereotype can often be that 'internet addiction' is simply a tool of Chinese state repression of free speech, it is worth bearing in mind that it may be closer to home than we like to believe.

Link to TV news report on 'internet addiction' in China.
Link to China Daily on shut down of illegal clinics.

—Vaughan.

Interrogation Inc.:

The New York Times has a profile of the two psychologists who developed the US 'war on terror' interrogations that were widely condemned as torture.

The piece makes an interesting update to the 2007 Vanity Fair article that first fingered Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, and has compiled additional information about the pair from interviews with ex-colleagues.

For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency’s “mistakes.”

The psychologists’ subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring.

The piece notes that a decision in imminent on whether a criminal enquiry will be launched into the use of harsh interrogation techniques. If so, all psychologists involved in the programme, not just Jessen and Mitchell, are likely to be the focus of some uncomfortable scrutiny.

Given the somewhat odd behaviour and heal dragging by the American Psychological Association during the saga that eventually led them to an outright ban on participation, one wonders whether any high level contact between the US military and the APA will come to light.

Link to NYT piece 'Interrogation Inc.' (via BoingBoing).
Link to Vanity Fair piece on psychologists and interrogation.

—Vaughan.

August 04, 2009

The whole body nervous system scan is here:

The New England Journal of Medicine has a brilliant research paper describing the first MRI scan capable of imaging the whole nervous system, plus a little something extra.

The technology is based on diffusion MRI, a technique which takes advantage of how water molecules move to separate out nerves from the rest of the body.

Water molecules bounce around inside all of the body tissues. Nerve fibres are long and thin, and so water molecules trapped inside are restricted in their movement - like jumping beans in a pipe.

Diffusion MRI works out which water molecules diffuse only along a fixed route (the nerves) and which are moving more freely (the rest of the body).

Of course, there could be some false positives in there, so the scan looks specifically for this diffusion effect only in tissue of the right density for nerve fibres.

Normal MRI scans are essentially density maps and to do this the scanner aligns the proton spins of the body's hydrogen atoms using huge magnets. It then fires off a electromagnetic pulse which knocks the spins out of alignment. As the spins return to alignment (called the 'relaxation time') a radio signal is given off which differs depending on the type of tissue. This can be read, mapped and turned into a scan.

As an analogy, imagine if you had compasses with lots of different liquids inside. They'd all point north, but you could knock them out of alignment by giving them a shake. Slowly the needles would return to north, but the liquid inside would affect how quickly they moved. Just by measuring the speed of return you could work out the density of the liquid. Treacle would take longer than oil, oil longer than water.

So if you restrict the scan only to pick out tissue with the same density as nerve fibres, that also only has water molecules moving along a single route, you've got a very high-tech nerve mapper.

The researchers tweaked this process for the whole body and produced the first scan of the entire nervous system which they called 'Whole-Body Magnetic Resonance Neurography'.

You may notice from the scans that as well as imaging the young man's nervous system, it also gives a remarkably good likeness of his cock.

As it turns out, the prostate, testes, and penis also hit the sweet spot of restricting water molecule diffusion while giving off a similar radio signal to nerves.

Action potential? Oh give over.

Link to 'Whole-Body Magnetic Resonance Neurography' (via @PsychTimes)

—Vaughan.

July 30, 2009

On the dead beat:

Anyone who thinks science can't be beautiful or profound should spend an hour in the audio headspace of the latest RadioLab as it tackles life, death and mortality.

It contemplates how death has moved from the heart to the brain, the attempt to weigh souls, delusions of non-existence, digital immortality, neuroimaging for flickers of life, and a man who survived a suicide plunge that has killed almost everyone else who made the leap.

One highlight is a reading of an amazing short story from a book by neuroscientist David Eagleman in which he imagines 40 versions of the afterlife.

In this particular story, people live in a limbo after death where they exist while their names are still remembered by the living. While some leave this realm when they fade the collective consciousness, others become famous and are trapped, slave to their recollected selves that warp slowly over time as the living distort their memories.

Eagleman notes that it was inspired by the neuroscience of memory, which information is kept alive by being constantly re-represented in the brain.

As always, it's beautifully produced and hits. just. the. right. notes. for such a powerful subject.

There is probably no better way to spend an hour in the underworld.

Link to RadioLab edition 'After Life'.

—Vaughan.

Rorschach and awe:

The New York Times covers the recent flap over the internet publication of the ink blots used in the Rorschach test. While the images are out of copyright and can be legally uploaded, some American psychologists are furious that the validity of the test may be compromised.

The test has been controversial since it was created and partly because of what it symbolises. It is one of the few remaining tests that are drawn from the psychoanalytic tradition and so battles over the Rorschach are always partly battles over the validity of Freudian-ideas.

You can see the influence of these ideas in how it is used. It is a type of 'projective' test, where participants are shown the images and then asked to give their impressions. The psychologist writes down what they make of each image and then interprets what they say and do.

These interpretations supposedly give an insight into the person's personality, loosely framed in Freudian concepts.

The original version of the Rorschach was quite clearly hokum, but over the years the 'comprehensive system' was developed by psychologist John Exner which allowed independent clinicians to come to similar conclusions when assessing the same responses.

Not everyone agrees on this and, on the basis of evidence reviews, some argue that the test's reliability has been exaggerated. But the trouble is, even if it is reliable, it's still a bit rubbish. It doesn't seem to correlate well with other mental health measures and has a particular tendency to 'diagnose' schizophrenic tendencies in perfectly healthy people.

While the release of the ink blots onto the internet seems to have caused controversy among US psychologists, most European psychologists are likely to be rolling their eyes, as the test never caught on and is largely extinct.

However, the wider issue of test material being released online is of significant concern.

Almost every psychological test relies on the fact that the person being assessed has no foreknowledge of the material. In technology terms, they rely on security through obscurity for their validity.

Currently, this is enforced by the test companies only supplying tests to qualified professionals, charging excessively high prices for each one and enforcing copyright. This is backed up by professional organisations who come down like a ton of bricks on anyone seen to be promoting wider availability.

As anyone involved in security will tell you, this model is doomed to failure in the age of the internet as it only takes one significant breach for the test to be publicly available.

Psychologists need to start designing tests where knowledge of the test material does not have such a profound influence on performance, but unfortunately, this requires a significant shift in current thinking and a huge research effort to validate the tests. Hence inertia weds us to our current doomed methods.

Link to NYT 'A Rorschach Cheat Sheet on Wikipedia?'

—Vaughan.

July 27, 2009

A war of algorithms:

The New Atlantis magazine has a fantastic article on the increasing use of robots and artificial intelligence systems in warfare and how they bring the fog of war to the murky area of military ethics and international law.

This comes as the The New York Times has just run a report on a recent closed meeting where some of the world's top artificial intelligence researchers gathered to discuss what limits should be placed on the development of autonomous AI systems.

The NYT article frames the issue as a worry over whether machines will 'outsmart' humans, but the issue is really whether machines will outdumb us, as it is a combination of the responsibilities assigned to them and their limitations which pose the greatest threat.

One particularly difficulty is the unpredictability of AI systems. For example, you may be interested to know that while we can define the mathematical algorithms for simple artificial neural networks, exactly how the network is representing the knowledge it has learnt through training can be a mystery.

If you examine the 'weights' of connections across different instances of the same network after being trained, you can find differences in how they're distributed even though they seem to be completing the task in the same way.

In other words, simply because we have built and trained something, it does not follow that we can fully control its actions or understand its responses in all situations.

In light of this, it is now worryingly common for militaries to publicly deploy or request armed autonomous weapons systems based, at least partly, on similar technologies.

Only recently this has included Israel, South Korea, the US, Australia and South Africa - the latter of which suffered the deaths of nine soldiers when a robot cannon was affected by a software error.

Of course, the use of technology of assist medical decision-making and safety control is also a key issue, but it is the military use of robots which is currently causing the most concern.

And it is exactly this topic that military researcher Peter W. Singer tackles in his engaging article for The New Atlantis magazine.

He traces the history of robot weapons systems, including the little known deployment of unmanned weapons systems in World War Two and Vietnam, and gives some excellent coverage of the latest in war zone robots and how they are being deployed in current conflicts.

Interestingly, the article claims that remotely-controlled drone missions now outnumber manned aircraft missions in the US military, with battles increasingly being fought through pixelated screens and image processing algorithms.

Singer makes the point that the rules of war become murky when the fighting is carried out by software. Copyright lawyer Lawrence Lessig has highlighted how social and legal rules are becoming effectively implemented as software ('Code is Law') but the same point can be extended to armed conflict if the Geneva convention is being entrusted to algorithms.

The New Atlantis article is taken from a new book by Singer called Wired for War and if you'd like more on the ethics of AI systems the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has a fantastic and very complete reading list covering all the major issues.

Correction: I originally thought the author was the philosopher Peter Singer and linked to his Wikipedia entry. It turns out it is Peter W. Singer the defence and foreign policy expert. The link has now been fixed!

Link to excellent Peter Singer article in The New Atlantis.
Link to NYT piece on AI limits conference.
Link to AAAI reading list on ethics and AI.

—Vaughan.

July 22, 2009

Of manuals and madness, the fight rolls on:

ABC Radio National's Background Briefing has a good programme on the issues and debates about the new version of the DSM that is currently being prepared and causing much flailing of handbags in the process.

The radio show is not particularly focused but touches on some contentious diagnoses and the problems with defining mental illness.

But there is one surprising part where they ask Australian psychiatrist and DSM-V committee member Gavin Andrews to respond to criticisms by ex-committee chief Robert Spitzer over the lack of openness in the process.

His answer, like an earlier response from American Psychiatric Association to their critics, is remarkable for the fact it contains a personal attack:

Well, he was the guy that wrote DSM-III, and we all owe him a considerable debt because someone had to be strong-willed and very strongly opinionated to pull that off. He's saying, something's going on and no-one's telling me everything. Well, there's no need for him to be told everything day by day. I'm sure he probably hasn't read all those books that we've already published, and he certainly hasn't written to me about the research planning conference that I ran. So I presume it's a sense of not being on the centre of the stage, as he once sensibly and gloriously was.

Believe it or not, it actually sounds more patronising when you hear the original audio. Either these ad hominem attacks are a sign of the committee being rattled or they are evidence for exactly what the critics accuse them of, and neither is particular promising.

And if anyone thinks that the squabbling was just a bit of internal politicking, you might be interested to know that it's featured as one of the major news stories in this week's Nature.

However, while the DSM is often described as the psychiatric 'bible', it's probably more accurate to call it the American psychiatrists' 'bible'.

While it's widely used in the US and Latin America, much of the rest of the world uses the slightly less barmy (pun intended) International Classification of Diseases (ICD) from the World Health Organisation.

The danger is not so much that the DSM will become ridiculous, but that it will become irrelevant.

Link to Background Briefing on 'Expanding mental illness'.

—Vaughan.

July 15, 2009

Street drugs and dopamine theory overdoses:

Furious Seasons has alerted me to an interesting article in the Boston Globe about street dealing of the antipsychotic drug quetiapine - interesting because it reveals some of our prejudices about the neuroscience of recreational drug use.

One of the mantras of neuroscience is that drugs of abuse boost the dopamine system. This led to the somewhat bizarre headlines earlier this year that modafinil may be 'addictive' because it was found to increase dopamine function in the nucleus accumbens, a key part of the reward system.

The reason this was bizarre is because while there are many reports of people illicitly using the drug to avoid sleep and maintain focus, there are none about 'modafinil addicts'. In fact, I couldn't find a single case in the literature.

However, the 'all drugs of abuse boost dopamine' mantra trumped the fact that there aren't any actual addicts to make people warn about its potential for addiction. And by people I don't just mean the press, I mean the neuroscientists who carried out the research, including Nora Volkow, head of the US's National Institute on Drug Abuse.

And this is why the reports of the abuse of quetiapine (trade name Seroquel), both in the popular press and in the medical literature, are so interesting, because quetiapine is a dopamine blocker.

In fact, it reduces function at the same D₂ dopamine receptors in exactly the same 'reward circuits' that are supposedly always stimulated by drugs of abuse.

In other words, it does exactly the opposite of what the received wisdom tell us, and yet, it is being widely abused to the point where people are getting gunned down over shady quetiapine deals.

As scientists one of our greatest vices is fitting the world into our theories, rather than fitting our theories to the world. For neuroscientists, this is especially tempting because society has come to the popular but false conclusion that brain-based explanations trump behavioural or psychological observations.

There is more to drug abuse and addiction than dopamine and our clichés about the 'reward system' are hampering our efforts to make sense of it all.

Link to Boston Globe article 'Psychiatric drug sought on streets'.
Link to Furious Seasons who have been on the case for ages.

—Vaughan.

July 10, 2009

neuro culture:

neuro culture is a beautiful and interesting website that tracks the interaction between neuroscience and visual art as it develops across the world.

It works as a cross between an online gallery and an art studies venture, looking at how artists are making sense of the increasing awareness and interest in the brain through all levels of society.

Visual and digital technologies of the brain, the widespread dissemination of psychotropic drugs, expanding programs in consciousness studies and other neurotechnologies are having a significant impact on individuals and society.

These ongoing transformations in science and society are deeply pervading popular culture and are appearing in a profusion of media and artistic expanse- from the visual arts to film, theatre, novels and advertisements.

With this website, we explore and document past and current manifestations of this phenomenon and introduce an online platform for the analysis and exchange of cultural projects intersecting neuroscience, the arts and the humanities.

There's some truly beautiful artwork on the site which is worth a visit purely for the rich visual spectacle.

Link to neuro culture.

—Vaughan.

July 08, 2009

NeuroPod on virtual lesions, vision bias and reply:

The latest edition of the Nature NeuroPod podcast is now available. It has the usual collection of cutting edge brain stories but is particularly good for an introduction to transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS, a technique that allows researchers to temporarily 'switch off' bits of the human brain during experiments.

TMS is really just a large electromagnetic coil that can switched on and off very quickly, allowing a focused high intensity magnetic field to be directed into the brain from a few centimetres outside the skull.

As you may remember from high school physics, when a magnetic field passes over a conductor it causes an electrical current. In this case, the conductor is the area of your brain just at the focus of the magnetic field and the current is enough to trigger all the neurons in that small area.

Because neurons are all busy doing their thing, suddenly electrifying them all at once effectively 'resets' them, and so switches them off for a brief moment before they resume.

If you suspect that a particular brain area is involved in a task, you can get someone to do the task and switch the brain area off for a few hundred milliseconds with TMS. If the area is genuinely involved, the person should do it slightly worse or slightly slower, whereas, if it isn't, there should be no difference.

TMS can also be used before someone is doing a task to make the area more or less excitable in general terms, by applying repetitive pulses to the area a few minutes before. Think of it like changing the mood of a crowd before the main event. It'll affect how they react later on.

It's a versatile and interesting technique for exploring brain function, but the exact detail of how it affected the electrical circuitry of the brain has been a mystery.

NeuroPod interviews neuroscientist Sven Bestmann, who recently published a paper on what we know about TMS and the brain, where he discusses the latest discoveries and explains the technique in more detail.

Link to NeuroPod webpage.
mp3 of latest podcast.

—Vaughan.

July 07, 2009

Psychiatry's diagnostic manual feuding continues:

The storm over the new version of the diagnostic manual for psychiatrists shows no signs of dying down as a committee member has publicly resigned over concerns that new diagnoses are being created without proper regard to the scientific evidence.

The 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental disorders, known as the DSM-V, is due out in 2012. It is hotly anticipated because it defines mental illness for the USA and much of the world.

The Carlat Psychiatry Blog reports that Dr. Jane Costello, a member of the Work Group on Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence, recently resigned in protest at what she suggests are unrealistic aims and a disregard of the research evidence. A copy of her resignation letter has already found its way online.

Carlat also reports that Allen Frances and Robert Spitzer, both chiefs of the committee for past versions of the manual, have amplified their recent criticisms in a leaked letter by writing to the American Psychiatric Association Board of Trustee to denounce the DSM-V leadership as having "lost contact with the field" and urging that "It is your responsibility to save DSM-V from itself before it is too late".

As Frances' last public criticism was greeted by a strongly worded and surprisingly personal response, this may be the beginning of a drawn out public battle.

Link to Carlat Psychiatry Blog on latest DSM feuding.

—Vaughan.

July 06, 2009

SciAmMind on music, kids, the perfect and the pumped:

The latest edition of Scientific American Mind has just hit the shelves with a number of freely available online articles covering music and its emotional kick, the tyranny of perfectionism, the drama of developing child and the neural benefits of exercise.

One of the most interesting articles tackles a fascinating genetic effect called genomic imprinting where certain genes have different effects, depending on whether you inherited them from your mother or your father.

The classic examples are the Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes, both of which are genetic disorders linked to learning disabilities and neurological problems.

Both are caused by a partial deletion of genes from chromosome 15. When this is inherited from the mother, it causes Angelman syndrome, when inherited from the father, it causes Prader-Willi syndrome.

Recently, two Canadian researchers suggested that this process could also contribute to a whole range of mental difficulties and disorders, including relatively common ones like autism and psychosis which they cite as being differently affected by opposite and competing genetic influences from each parent.

The theory is perhaps a little fanciful, in that it seems to ignore cases of people with both conditions and doesn't account for more recent evidence finding that forms of a genetic mutation known as a 'copy number variation' seems to increase the risk of both.

However, there is good evidence for the more general effect, where some genes can have a different psychological effect depending on where they originate, and the article discusses what we know about the science of this quirk of inheritance.

Link to July's Scientific American Mind.

—Vaughan.

July 05, 2009

Ghost in the machine:

Electronic brain implants are becoming increasingly common in both research and medicine but little attention has been paid to the digital security of these grey matter gateways. A new article in Neurosurgical Focus discusses their potential back doors and security weaknesses.

While there's a small literature on hardware problems in implantable deep brain stimulators, little consideration has been give to data privacy, access control and crash protection for neural implants.

Many of these devices are designed to be surgically implanted and controlled, tuned or reprogrammed from outside the body by a wireless link but very few (if any) have an in-built authentication system that only allows access to people who are authorised to make the changes.

Currently, they work more like TV remote controls. Anyone with the correct remote control can change the settings on your TV, but it's just assumed that no one except the owner would want to.

As these devices become more widespread, however, it leaves open the possibility that malicious attackers could alter the function of the brain by taking control of the device.

In fact the research group that wrote this article managed exactly this sort of remote pwnage on a commercial implantable heart defibrillator in 2003:

In our past research, we experimentally demonstrated that a hacker could wirelessly compromise the security and privacy of a representative implantable medical device: an implantable cardiac defibrillator introduced into the US market in 2003.

Specifically, our prior research [pdf] found that a third party, using his or her own homemade and low-cost equipment, could wirelessly change a patient's therapies, disable therapies altogether, and induce ventricular fibrillation (a potentially fatal heart rhythm).

Although we only conducted our experiments using short-range, 10-cm wireless communications, and although we believe that the risk of an attack on a patient today is very low, the implications are clear: unless appropriate safeguards are in place, a hacker could compromise the security and privacy of a medical implant and cause serious physical harm to a patient.

We believe that some future hackers — if given the opportunity — will have no qualms in targeting neural devices.

It also seems that there is little concern for data privacy on these devices, so everything is broadcast 'in the clear'. This means even if you didn't own a legitimate controller, you could potentially intercept the data, learn its structure and create your own.

While information about an individual's neural firing patterns are probably of little interest at the current time, we just don't know enough about them to 'reveal' anything personal about the patient, their frequency and pattern could conceivably leave both the device and the patient open to side channel attacks - where the external behaviour of a system can give clues to its internal weaknesses.

For example, take a patient who has an implantable chip that detects when epileptic seizures are about to start and cools the disturbed part of the brain, a technology that is already in development.

It would be possible to know when the system kicks in by monitoring radio transmissions, giving the outside observer a reliable guide to what external conditions trigger seizures in the patient.

If transmitted, it might also be possible to read the exact frequency at which neural oscillations lead to seizures, giving clues as to how to trigger them with lights or sounds.

Another problem is the integrity of the devices. For example, the devices need to be resistant to interference from other radio signals, magnetic fields or even deliberate attempts to crash them.

This new article serves as both a warning and a plea to consider security when designing and deploying these increasingly common medical technologies.

By the way, the whole issue of Neurosurgical Focus is dedicated to brain-machine interfaces and is freely available online.

Link to 'Neurosecurity: security and privacy for neural devices'.

—Vaughan.

July 02, 2009

Fringe benefits:

Thanks to everyone who came along to the Troublemaker's Fringe last night and I hope you all enjoyed the evening as much as I did.

The slides for my talk "Don't touch that dial! Technology Scares and the Media" are online as a PowerPoint file and everything was captured as audio recordings so you should be able check out the evening's events, including Ben and Petra's excellent talks, as they appear online.

Apparently, they'll be a discussion kicking off on badscience.net about some of the issues raised by the speakers, so I'll keep you posted as the links appear.

—Vaughan.

June 30, 2009

Troublemaker's Fringe, tomorrow, after the day job:

If you're in London Town Wednesday evening, don't forget to come along to the Troublemaker's Fringe, where we'll be tackling the problems of science journalism and discussing how misleading, dangerous and inaccurate stories keep making the headlines.

Hilariously, we've already been slagged off by Steve Connor of The Independent who deals out some scorching criticism, calls us arrogant, and defends the accuracy of the mainstream media by saying:

The medics met in a pub in London last night to explain why the "mainstream media's science coverage is broken, misleading, dangerous, lazy, venal and silly".

Except we're meeting tomorrow night, and there's only one medic.

Ugh! Feel the heat!

Link to full details of the Troublemaker's Fringe.
Link to Steve Connor in The Independent (I recommend the comments).

—Vaughan.

DSM-V bun fight in full swing:

The arguments over the forthcoming revision of the psychiatrists' diagnostic manual, the DSM-V, have just been heated up again by an unusually acerbic response from the American Psychiatric Association attacking their main critic.

The article that condemns the new diagnostic manual committee by ex-DSM chairman Allen Francis' has just been officially published, alongside an interview where he furthers his damning criticism.

The American Psychiatric Association has apparently written a response which seems to have been leaked online, and it contains some robust responses to Francis' points as well as a surprising ad hominem attack - suggesting he is motivated by losing money after the DSM-IV goes out of print.

The APA makes some good replies to the main criticisms, defending their record of openness, their reliance on the scientific data and their proposed changes to the diagnostic process based on current best practice, but the final paragraph is quite suprising:

Both Dr. Frances and Dr. Spitzer have more than a personal “pride of authorship” interest in preserving the DSM-IV and its related case book and study products. Both continue to receive royalties on DSM-IV associated products. The fact that Dr. Frances was informed at the APA Annual Meeting last month that subsequent editions of his DSM-IV associated products would cease when the new edition is finalized, should be considered when evaluating his critique and its timing.

This line of criticism is perhaps most surprising for the fact that, as recently reported in USA Today, 68% of the DSM-V committee report financial ties with drug companies.

While the committee rules require that members cannot receive more than $10,000 in drug company payments while at work on the DSM, I can't help but thinking that they are better off not opening the Pandora's box of conflict-of-interest criticisms.

Link to Frances article in Psychiatric Times.
Link to Frances interview in Psychiatric Times.
Link to leaked alleged APA response (via Carlat blog).

—Vaughan.

June 25, 2009

Ex psychiatric bible chief slams new secret committee:

The forthcoming revision of the psychiatrists' diagnostic manual, the DSM-V, is controversially being written behind closed doors and has already sparked criticisms for its lack of openness to outside scrutiny. So far, critics have managed to raise little more than smoke signals but the tinderbox may well have just been ignited by an article of scorching criticism penned by the head of the last DSM committee.

The article, by psychiatrist Allen Frances, is apparently due to be published in Psychiatric Times but a pre-publication version seems to have found its way online as a pdf and is already being widely circulated.

Frances slams the new chairman, the process, and the ethos of secrecy behind the new manual saying that "The work on DSM-5 has, so far, displayed an unhappy combination of soaring ambition and remarkably weak methodology."

He also cites the openness of previous revisions as key to their acceptance and validity, and criticises the supposedly impending diagnostic creep that would make mild disturbances diagnosable mental illnesses.

Such heavyweight criticism in one of American psychiatry's main news publications signals that the shit has really hit the fan for what was already a controversial project.

The article was posted online by psychiatrist Doug Brenner who also described being kicked off the authors list for an academic paper and denounced to members of a DSM sub-committee for criticising conflicts of interest in the committee in an earlier blog post.

This spurred well-known psychiatrist and blogger Daniel Carlat to recount his own experience of being denounced to the DSM committee for nothing more than a critical comment on his site, left by a reader.

If these reports are to be believed, it seems the committee members are already becoming hot under the collar and the apparently forthcoming Psychiatric Times piece can only turn up the heat.

pdf of Allen Frances article for Psychiatric Times.

—Vaughan.

June 24, 2009

A Troublemaker's fringe:

Next week the World Conference of Science Journalists will be coming to London. A few of us felt they might not adequately address some of the key problems in their profession, which has deteriorated to the point where they present a serious danger to public health, fail to keep geeks well nourished, and actively undermine the publics’ understanding of what it means for there to be evidence for a claim.

More importantly we fancied some troublemaking and a night in the pub.

As a result, you have the opportunity to come and see three angry nerds explain how and why mainstream media’s science coverage is broken, misleading, dangerous, lazy, venal, and silly. Join our angry rabble, and tell the world of science journalists exactly what you think about their work. All are welcome, admission is free. They may not come.

After the presentations (with powerpoint and everything, in a pub) we will attempt to collaboratively and drunkenly derive some best practise guidelines for health and science journalists, with your kind assistance.

Ben Goldacre has written the Guardian’s Bad Science column for 6 years, where he exposes misleading science journalism, health scare hoaxes, pill-pushing quacks and the crimes of the evil multinational pharmaceutical industry. He will talk about how the media promote the publics’ misunderstanding of evidence, focusing on health scares, journalists’ hoaxes, and their consequences, as well as cases where scientists have had their work misrepresented and failed to get satisfaction from newspapers.

Vaughan Bell is a neuropsychology researcher and clinician in the NHS, where he deals with disorders of the mind and brain, and is a writer for MindHacks.com, where he deals with disorders of the media. His talk will be called “Don’t touch that dial! Technology scares and the media” and will discuss how the media loves to tell us that new technology will give us brain damage and mental illness but is strangely adverse to discussing the research even when the science says there’s not a lot to be worried about.

Petra Boynton is a Social Psychologist and Lecturer in International Health Services Research. She specialises in researching sex and relationships health. For the past 7 years Petra has worked as as an Agony Aunt in print, online and broadcast media. She actively campaigns for free and accurate sexual health advice within the media both in the UK and Internationally. Petra will talk about the consequences of PR companies misusing surveys and formulas as a form of cheap advertising, the problem of unethical or untrained people posing as ‘media experts’, and what happens when journalists fail to fact check science and health stories.

www.badscience.net
www.mindhacks.com
www.drpetra.co.uk

Of note, attending the WCSJ will cost you £200 a day. You are welcome to come to our event entirely for free, beer/shrapnel in a bucket gratefully received. Journalists, corporate event organisers: welcome to the shits and giggles economy. Special thanks to Sid the Skeptic from Viz for booking the room at short notice.

What:

World Conference of Science Journalists 2009 – Troublemakers Fringe

Where:

Penderel’s Oak Pub, 286-288 High Holborn, London WC1V 7HJ, Holborn Tube.

Google Maps here

When:

1st July 7pm for 8pm – Midnight

—Vaughan.

June 18, 2009

The holy grail of military psychiatry:

Neuron Culture covers a new study on predictors of PTSD in deployed American combat troops. Predicting whether a soldier will break down through combat has been one of the Holy Grails of military psychiatry and the impressive results of this study suggest that this may be getting closer.

World War One was the crucible of military psychiatry as it became clear that even the bravest and best soldiers could break down due to combat stress.

When World War Two arrived, the British and American militaries invested a great deal in psychological screening to attempt to distinguish which soldiers would break down more quickly.

The project was widely regarded as a failure as the only reliably predictor seemed to be the duration and ferocity of the combat the soldier was exposed to.

However, as Dobbs notes, this new study finds that a simple measure of physical health could be a powerful way of preventing half of all PTSD cases in combat deployed troops.

The study found that the least healthy 15% of the troops in the study who saw combat accounted for well over half -- 58% -- of the post-combat PTSD cases, as indicated by either the study's own criteria or by self-report of a PTSD diagnosis from the soldiers during follow-up.

This is a pretty stunning result. And it certainly suggests that, as the study put it, "more vulnerable members of the population could be identified and benefit from interventions targeted to prevent new onset PTSD." The beauty of this finding is that fairly general measures of health are the indicators, so you can predict a lot from fairly simple and easy-to-collect data.

Obviously not all of the 15% who scored lowest on PTSD; but that bottom 15% accounted for more cases than do the entire remaining 85%. So at a time when we are much concerned with reducing PTSD in combat troops, it seems fairly plain that we could cut the PTSD rate by more than 50% simply by keeping the least healthy 15% -- as measured by fairly simple health questionnaires we already have in any and -- out of combat zones.

He also notes a curiosity that while the study was on US troops, the paper was published in the British Medical Journal, and wonders whether there were some PTSD politicking that meant it was rejected from American journals.

As we've discussed before, PTSD is perhaps the most politicised psychiatric diagnosis. It was originally called post-Vietnam syndrome and was created to allow the US healthcare system treat Vietnam veterans.

The direct effects of trauma where never previously thought to be a mental illness in itself, although it was known to be a risk factor for a number of conditions.

Psychologist Dave Grossman, author of On Killing, convincingly argues that Vietnam was particularly conducive to combat trauma for US troops, owing to the fact that US forces had no front line and hence no 'safe' areas to relax in, and that they often found themselves fighting a irregular army of civilians including women and children.

Link to Neuron Culture on predicting PTSD in combat troops.
Link to full-text of study from BMJ.

—Vaughan.

June 11, 2009

Television tunnel vision:

This week's Nature has a feature article on how visual motion media impacts on young children. It's an interesting article because it focuses largely on television.

This is notable for two reasons: the first is that numerous research studies have found that, as a generalisation, watching television negatively impacts on children's concentration, increases the risk of obesity and interferes with play and communication. The second is that this rarely makes the headlines.

Despite studies appearing regularly in the medical literature, it simply isn't fashionable to panic about television - that's so last century.

In contrast, evidence-free panicking about computers or the internet gets broadcast across the world, because it's something new to panic about, and that's what the media does best.

It's not all bad news about television and children though. There's some evidence that it increases imaginative play and broadens knowledge.

You also may be interested to know that Sesame Street was developed with psychologists to specifically help children improve social attitudes and increase numeracy and literacy.

The programme has been carefully and scientifically evaluated, tweaked and re-evaluated and many of the studies appear in the academic literature. It was the first and most successful evidence-based children's programme.

Link to Nature article 'Media research: The black box'.

—Vaughan.

June 04, 2009

Neuropod on stress, genes, hobbits and hearing:

The latest edition of the neuroscience podcast Neuropod has just hit the tubes and has sections on stress, genetics and culture in birdsong, the ongoing debate about homo florensis and hearing.

One of the most interesting sections is the part on stress, and accompanies a special collection of articles on stress in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

It also contains the phrase, 'the frontal lobes are the goldilocks of the brain', which I can't help but love.

mp3 of latest Neuropod podcast.
Link to Neuropod homepage with audio stream.

—Vaughan.

June 02, 2009

The Psychologist on virtuality, siblings, giftedness:

The June issue of The Psychologist has been made freely available online and has articles on psychology in virtual worlds, sibling rivalry, the neuroscience of giftedness and Albert Bandura's plan to apply psychology to global problems.

The interface is a little bit clunky (you need to click on a page to see it in readable size) but gives you the full layout of the magazine as it appears in print.

The main articles start here and kick off with one on psychology (and, indeed, psychologists) in virtual worlds, but I always turn to the news section first and it's a great place for quick updates and summaries of interesting new studies from the last month.

Link to June edition of The Psychologist.

Full disclosure: I'm an occasional columnist and unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist and I want to look like Albert Bandura when I'm fully grown up. True.

—Vaughan.

May 28, 2009

Valuing the unusual illness debate:

One of the particular joys of psychiatry is the regular ritual where a small but determined group of researchers try and get their idea for a new diagnosis accepted into the DSM. The most recent outbreak has hit the LA Times where a short article notes the proposal for 'posttraumatic embitterment disorder'.

The idea for the disorder, where people are impaired by feelings of bitterness after "a severe and negative life event", is not new. A small group of German researchers have been proposing the disorder in the medical literature since 2003 and have recently released a psychometric scale which they argue can diagnose the condition.

The last incarnation of this debate to hit the mainstream press was discussion over whether extreme racism could or should be diagnosed as 'racist personality disorder'.

The discussions are interesting because they cut to the heart of how we define an illness. This is usually discussed as if it is a problem specific to psychiatry, as if diagnoses in other areas of medicine are more obvious, but this is not the case.

Implicit in medical diagnoses is the concept that the change or difference in the person has a negative impact.

Importantly, the biological 'facts' have little to do with this, because whether something has a 'negative impact' is largely a value judgement.

An infectious disease is not defined solely on the basis that it is a bacteria or virus, as we have many bacteria or viruses in our bodies that cause no problems. It's only when they cause us distress or impairment that they're classified as an illness.

In fact, there are some bacteria or viruses that are completely harmless in certain areas of the body, but cause problems in others. Like in cases of viral encephalitis where otherwise benign viruses can cause problems when they get into brain tissue.

In some cases the definition is partly based on a comparison to what's average for a person of this type. Differences in brain structure, such as some white matter lesions, may be considered medical problems in young people but normal in older people.

But there are many human characteristics that we could equally classify as being 'not normal' and 'negative' but we don't currently accept as illnesses.

Being left-handed is clearly a statistical deviation from the average, has been associated with a greater risk of breast cancer, an increase in accidental injuries, and has been genetically linked to schizophrenia. But left-handedness is not considered an illness.

In other words, there is no definition of an illness which is divorced from a subjective interpretation of what counts as 'negative'.

We also have some subjective and fairly fuzzy cultural ideas just about what sort of things count as medical conditions and require attention from doctors. Someone born with a missing thumb - yes, someone born left-handed - no.

Many of these assumptions are not about the properties of the 'illness' but about what we think doctors should be doing and what we feel the place of medicine in society should be.

Psychiatric disorders are just another instance of this. So when you hear proposals for seemingly wacky mental illnesses, think to yourself, why is this not an illness?

Importantly, we should do the same for widely accepted mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia or depression. Ask yourself, on what basis is this an illness?

It's not that all new diagnoses are useful or all existing ones are nonsense, it's just that the process of questioning highlights our assumptions regarding the relationship between normality, human distress, impairment and the role of medicine in society.

Link to LA Times piece on bitterness as a mental illness.
Link to brilliant Stanford Philosophy Encyclopaedia entry on mental illness.

—Vaughan.

Winning the vaccine wars:

PLoS Biology has an excellent article on the social factors behind how recent vaccination scares sparked off and continue, despite them having no scientific basis and having been repeatedly proved incorrect.

I'm morbidly fascinated by the autism scares because they are meeting of two very different forms of systems in which to think about knowledge.

Broadly, scientists think about how well a belief is supported by looking at its justifying evidence, whereas the antivaxxers decide on the conclusion often based on what they believe about their children and then bend or reject any evidence to fit the mould.

The piece focuses on the American antivaxxers and looks at how the US media amplified the scare story through focusing on personal stories and presenting them heavy weight scientific evidence.

Rachel Casiday, a medical anthropologist at the Centre for Integrated Health Care Research at Durham University, UK, who studied British parents' attitudes toward MMR, says scientists should not underestimate the importance of narrative. People relate much more to a dramatic story—“he got his vaccination, he stopped interacting, and he hasn't been the same since”—than they do to facts, risk analyses, and statistical studies.

“If you discount these stories, people think you have an ulterior motive or you're not taking them seriously,” she explains. Casiday suggests providing an alternative, science-based explanation or relating emotionally compelling tales about counter-risk—such as helplessly watching a young child die of a vaccine-preventable disease—in the same narrative format.

While scientists have been (for years now) presenting the facts to people, it has really made very little difference and this is the first article I know of that suggests that science uses the power of the narrative to gets its vaccine safety message across.

UPDATE: I really recommend a post on the Providentia blog where psychologist Romeo Vitelli describes how the first life-saving smallpox vaccinations were opposed by a fledgling anti-vaccination movement that bear remarkable similarities to their modern day counterparts. The series on the historical antivaccination theme will continue, so look out for further posts on the same blog.

Link to PLoS Biology article (via @bengoldacre).

—Vaughan.

May 26, 2009

Changes to psychiatrists' diagnostic 'bible' hinted at:

PsychCentral reports on the likely changes to appear in the DSM-V, the new version of the psychiatrist's diagnostic manual, due out in 2012 and discussed in a recent presentation in last week's American Psychiatric Association annual conference.

The most significant change proposed has to do with the inclusion of dimensional assessments for depression, anxiety, cognitive impairment and reality distortion that span across many major mental disorders. So a clinician might diagnose schizophrenia, but then also rate these four dimensions for the patient to characterize the schizophrenia in a more detailed and descriptive manner.

Despite the PR spin that “no limits” were placed on this revision of the DSM, the reality is that there will be very few significant changes from the existing edition of the DSM-IV. While virtually all disorders will be revised, the revisions will, for the most part, be incremental and small. Why? Because the APA recognizes that you can’t retrain 300,000 mental health professionals (not to mention the 500,000 general physicians) in the field to completely relearn their way of diagnosing common mental disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD and schizophrenia. Changes are always incremental and tweak the existing system, nothing more.

The inclusion of dimensional ratings owes much to the role of psychometrics in the assessment of mental illness, but it remains to be seen how extensively this is implemented as it could just be a fancy label for sub-categories of degree (slight, moderate, severe etc) rather than the reliance on statistically sound measurements.

The post also mentions that there may be some moving of the diagnostic furniture with some additions and retractions but no major shakeups.

There's more coverage on MedPage, but bear in mind that as we're still three years away from publication so it's worth bearing in mind that some of the final decisions have still to be made.

Link to PsychCentral post 'Update: DSM-V Major Changes'.
Link to MedPage coverage.

—Vaughan.

May 14, 2009

US military pours millions into 'EEG telepathy':

I get the feeling that DARPA, the American military research agency, only ever select their research projects from sci-fi comics.

Wired reports that their latest multi-million dollar project is to create an EEG-based 'telepathy' communication system for the battlefield solder:

Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they’ll read each other’s minds.

At least, that’s the hope of researchers at the Pentagon’s mad-science division Darpa. The agency’s budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” That’s on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy.

Before being vocalized, speech exists as word-specific neural signals in the mind. Darpa wants to develop technology that would detect these signals of “pre-speech,” analyze them, and then transmit the statement to an intended interlocutor. Darpa plans to use EEG to read the brain waves. It’s a technique they’re also testing in a project to devise mind-reading binoculars that alert soldiers to threats faster the conscious mind can process them.

It's all getting a bit Rogue Trooper isn't it?

Link to Wired on DARPA barmyness.

—Vaughan.

May 09, 2009

The Broken:

I seem to have accidentally written dialogue about the Capgras delusion for the 2008 psychological horror film The Broken.

The therapist in this clip says "Have you ever heard about the Capgras syndrome? It's a rare disorder in which a person holds a belief that an acquaintance, usually a close family member or spouse has been replaced by an identical looking imposter."

This is taken from the Wikipedia entry for the Capgras delusion, the first sentence of which I wrote in the first version way back in 2003.

The film, by the way, is excellent with a fantastic twist ending, although it stops at what I thought was perhaps the most interesting part when the character realises the truth and attempts to comprehend what this means about herself.

Anyway, my next project is to get a line from the schizophrenia article into a Madonna song.

Wish me luck.

Link to clip from The Broken.
Link to Wikipedia entry for the Capgras delusion.

—Vaughan.

May 07, 2009

Paranoia espresso:

A case study just out in CNS Spectrums describes an apparent case of 'caffeine-induced psychosis'. The summary is below although the full paper is available online as a pdf.

If you're a regular coffee drinker, I don't think you should worry though. It's impossible to say whether caffeine was the definite cause in this case, and the gentleman concerned was drinking about 36 cups of coffee a day.

Caffeine-induced psychosis

Hedges DW, Woon FL, Hoopes SP.

As a competitive adenosine antagonist, caffeine affects dopamine transmission and has been reported to worsen psychosis in people with schizophrenia and to cause psychosis in otherwise healthy people. We report of case of apparent chronic caffeine-induced psychosis characterized by delusions and paranoia in a 47-year-old man with high caffeine intake. The psychosis resolved within 7 weeks after lowering caffeine intake without use of antipsychotic medication. Clinicians might consider the possibility of caffeinism when evaluating chronic psychosis.

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

—Vaughan.

May 06, 2009

Sweden bound for Scandinavian cognitive science:

Apologies if updates are a little sporadic over the next couple of days as I've been kindly invited to speak at KVIT 2009 in Sweden, which is the only cognitive science conference I know of that has an accompanying music video.

It looks like it should be a fantastic few days and it's my first time in Scandinavia, let alone Sweden, so I look forward to meeting some of their many talented mind and brain scientists.

If I manage to get some internet access, I'll try and get some updates online.

Link to KVIT 2009.

—Vaughan.

May 05, 2009

The hunting of the SNARC:

Cognitive Daily has an excellent article on the fascinating SNARC effect, where we react quicker to numbers with the hand that most approximates their position in space as if they were written out in front of us.

In other words, people react faster with their left hand for small numbers, and faster with their right hand for big numbers. This suggest that our number concepts are mapped partly mapped out in space.

Of course, this has largely been tested on English readers, who all read left to right, but Cognitive Daily reports on some new research that tested Arabic readers, for whom larger numbers would be on the left, and found that they show show the same effect, but in reverse.

Finally, the study investigated the effect on Israeli students, who know both left-right and right-left texts, as they learn both English and Arabic, and found that the effect didn't appear.

In case you're wondering, SNARC stands for the rather unwieldy phrase 'spatial numerical association of response codes'.

While we're on the subject of the excellent Cognitive Daily blog, you may be interested to know that they've started a new in-depth feature called 'Cognitive Monthly' which you can download to your computer, iPhone or Kindle reader for $2.

They kindly sent me a free copy of the first edition, on the psychology of film and theatre, and I can heartily recommend it as excellent.

Link to post on culture and the SNARC effect.
Link to Cognitive Monthly details.

—Vaughan.

May 02, 2009

Art and mental illness at the birth of modern psychiatry:

If you're in London before the end of June, make sure you drop into the Wellcome Collection museum which has two fantastic free exhibitions on the art and history of mental illness. If you can't make it, the exhibition website is excellent and has video and images from the shows.

The first exhibition, Madness and Modernity, explores mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna in 1900, then the epicentre of the medical world.

Modern psychiatry was beginning to emerge and the 'mad doctors' employed some of Europe's most pioneering architects to create asylums that were intended to be therapeutic by their very design.

For example, this poster is for one of the newly developed asylums of the time, as well as being beautiful in itself. The image to the right is the somewhat more intimidating 'Tower of Fools'.

Also the use of art as a tool to document and disseminate ideas about mental illness became popular, as did an interest in the 'art of the insane'.

There's a video on the site which is a wonderful summary of the exhibition as well as being a great standalone discussion of how art and psychiatry influenced each other in the heady culture of 1900s Vienna.

The other exhibition is a series of diary paintings made by artist Bobby Baker from 1997-2008, as she charted her experience of mental illness and treatment. They're only really done justice when seen as larger pictures, and the online gallery will give you a feel for their impact and humour.

A couple of things you can't get online are the free events that accompany the exhibitions, which sadly seem all booked up, and the bookshop, which has a special section where they've collected (curated?) a great collection of books on almost everything to do with madness, the mind, art and history.

If you're just visiting the website, you may need to do a bit of clicking around to see the best of the online material, but it's well worth the visit. Watch the video if nothing else.

Link to Wellcome Collection Art and Mental Illness website.

Full Disclosure: I'm an occasional grant reviewer for the Wellcome Arts scheme, but I'm not associated with this exhibition in any way.

—Vaughan.

April 29, 2009

NeuroPod oscilates 100 year-old autistic robots:

The latest edition of Nature's excellent neuroscience podcast NeuroPod has just the wires and discusses using light to control the brain, a quite remarkable breakthrough in the genetics of autism, emotional robots and neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, the first Nobel prizewinner to turn 100.

The highlight is probably the section about Rita Levi-Montalcini who jointly won the Nobel prize for her discovery of nerve growth factor, a protein that is known to be key in neuroplasticity.

Although actually, it's one of the most interesting and varied NeuroPod's I've heard in a while, which is saying something for a programme which is usually on top form. Enjoy.

Link to NeuroPod page with streaming and download.
mp3 of April edition.

—Vaughan.

Voodoo II: this time it isn't personal:

More analysis problems with brain scanning research have come to light in a new study just released in Nature Neuroscience and expertly covered by the BPS Research Digest. It demonstrates that the common practice of using the same data set to identify an area of interest and then home in on this area to test further ideas can lead to misleading results.

This usually occurs when brain activation is compared between two conditions where participants are doing different tasks. A whole brain analysis looks for statistically significant differences at every point in the brain.

It's very complete, but because of the large amount of data, but the data also contains a large amount of noise, so it's hard to find areas which you can confidently say are more active in one condition than the other.

An alternative approach is to only look at activation in one area of the brain, perhaps an area where it is most likely to occur based on what we already know about how the brain works. This is called region of interest analysis (often done with the wonderfully named 'MarsBaR' tool) and because the data set is much smaller, it is more likely to find a reliable difference.

However, some studies do a whole brain analysis to find likely areas, and then home in using region of analysis tools to examine them 'more closely'. This 'magnifying glass' metaphor seems intuitive, but because your using the same data set to create and test hypothesis, it can be problematic.

It's like shooting arrows randomly into a wall and then drawing a target around ones which landed together. Someone looking at wall afterwards might think the archer was a good shot, but this impression is caused by the after-the-event painting of the target, and the same problem could affect these brain imaging studies.

After the recent furore over the 'voodoo correlations' study, this new study is markedly more measured in its language and doesn't list individual offenders.

Indeed, the 'Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience' paper was actually retitled on publication to 'Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition', presumably to avoid stirring the pot any further.

However, this new study takes a similar tack, demonstrating through several careful simulations that 'double dipping' a data set is likely to distort the results just due to statistical problems.

From the BPS Research Digest:

Nikolaus Kriegeskorte and colleagues analysed all the fMRI studies published in Nature, Science, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron and Journal of Neuroscience, in 2008, and found that 42 per cent of these 134 papers were guilty of performing at least one non-independent selective analysis - what Kriegeskorte's team dub "double dipping".

This is the procedure, also condemned by the Voodoo paper, in which researchers first perform an all-over analysis to find a brain region(s) that responds to the condition of interest, before going on to test their hypothesis on data collected in just that brain region. The cardinal sin is that the same data are used in both stages.

A similarly flawed approach can be seen in brain imaging studies that claim to be able to discern a presented stimulus from patterns of activity recorded in a given brain area. These are the kind of studies that lead to "mind reading" headlines in the popular press. In this case, the alleged statistical crime is to use the same data for the training phase of pattern extraction and the subsequent hypothesis testing phase.

Link to BPS Research Digest on the fMRI analysis problems.
Link to PubMed entry for study.

—Vaughan.

April 28, 2009

Stylish psychotherapy magazine launches:

Contemporary Psychotherapy is a new magazine dedicated to the practice of psychological treatment of all types and the current debates in this sometimes hotly contested field.

The first issue contains articles on the future of psychotherapy, CBT in North America, how psychiatrists deal with somatic or psychogenic symptoms and the challenges in conducting psychotherapy with asylum seekers, to name but a few.

It makes a good complement to the US-based Psychotherapy Networker magazine, it's stylishly put together, you can download it for free as a PDF file, and long may it continue as it's off to a brilliant start.

Link to Contemporary Psychotherapy with PDF download.

—Vaughan.

April 26, 2009

CIA psychology through the declassified memos:

I've been reading the recently released CIA memos on the interrogation of 'war on terror' detainees. The memos make clear that the psychological impact of the process is the most important aim of interrogation, from the moment the detainee is captured through the various phases of interrogation.

Although disturbing, they're interesting for what they reveal about the CIA's psychologists and their approach to interrogation.

General framework
It is clear that empirical psychological science is core to interrogation-based intelligence gathering on both the individual and general approach levels. In clinical psychology, this is known as the scientist-practitioner model, where scientific research is used to understand types of problems and design interventions, but also where an iterative hypothesis-testing information-gathering process is applied to each individual.

The memos state that psychologists are involved in both directing interrogations and mental health assessments, making it likely that the majority of military psychologists are originally trained as clinical psychologists.

Indeed, after a visit to Guantanamo Bay, American Psychological Association president Ronald Levant wrote about his trip in an article for Military Psychology noting "I turned to see a former doctoral student in clinical psychology from Nova Southeastern University (NSU), who is now a military psychologist". NSU strongly emphasises the scientist-practitioner model and it this style of clinical psychologist which probably makes up the bulk of the CIA's 'Behavioral Science Consultation Teams' (BSCTs).

It is also clear that the CIA are interested in finding out two types of information: one, intelligence from the detainees, and two, which methods are most effective in doing so. It is interesting that all references to the impact and effectiveness of the interrogation methods are based on single cases (x has started giving intelligence after the use of y) or data from the US Military's own SERE interrogation resistance programme, run on its own personnel.

There is no significant blacked out text in these sections, indicating that there are unlikely to be other key sources of evidence (such as secret research on the effectiveness of torture). In other words, Guantanamo and other interrogation facilities are as much interrogation labs as they are interrogation centres.

Integrated physiological monitoring
The memo [pdf] that discusses the interrogation of 'al-Quaeda operative' Abu Zubaydah has an interesting part where it states that "in an initial confrontational incident, Zubaydah showed signs of sympathetic nervous system arousal". This would suggest that the detainees are wired-up to a system that detects physiological arousal - probably GSR, blood pressure, heart rate or a similar combination.

This would allow the interrogators to look for patterns in stress responses and focus on areas where stress was present despite an outward appearance of calm. The memo also notes that Zubaydah "appears to have a fear of insects". Assuming that detainees would not voluntarily disclose their phobias, we can assume that likely phobias are detected by exposing the detainee to photos or situations related to common fears and then monitoring the detainee for abnormal stress responses.

Profiling
The summary of the psychological profile of Zubaydah is notable for the fact it doesn't use the psychoanalytic or psychodynamic language more favoured by FBI profilers, instead using the relatively plain language of cognitive and psychometric approaches. For example, it describes his "coping resources", rather than his 'defences', "problems" rather than 'conflicts' and makes no reference to any unconscious desires or motivations.

The profile is apparently "based on interviews with Zubaydah, observations of him, and information collected from other sources such as intelligence and press reports". As with the FBI, there is likely to be formal psychometric methods for analysing self-written text to help inform the personality profile, although the complete profile is probably put together by a psychologist who integrates the various sources of information with only a conservative level of interpretation.

Confused understanding of 'learned helplessness'
A couple of the memos note that the whole interrogation procedure and environment is designed "to create a state of learned helplessness". This is a concept originally developed by psychologist Martin Seligman who found that dogs given inescapable electric shocks would eventually just give up trying to avoid them and remain passive while electrocuted. The theory was related to depression where people with no control over their unpleasant lives supposedly just learnt to be withdrawn and passive.

The concept is not particularly well validated, but even if it was and you were an interrogator, you'd want to avoid learned helplessness at all costs, because the detainee would see no point in co-operating. Furthermore, the acceptance of the theory is in direct contrast to the claims that the interrogations should not cause "severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Learned helplessness is, by definition, the effect of chronic uncontrollable suffering.

What the interrogators want, and indeed, what the memos describe, is not learned helplessness, but where the detainees know and can demonstrate that co-operation is the only method that allows them control over their environment. This is more akin to sociologist Ervin Goffman's concept of a total institution.

Clues and curiosities
One memo [pdf] mentions the concept of 'resistance posture', meaning the act of resisting the interrogators demands. The fact that this a specific term is used, and that it is additionally referred to as something that could be measured ('This sequence "may continue for several more iterations as the interrogators continue to measure the [detainee's] resistance posture"') suggests that this might be a specific psychological concept that is being empirically measured, perhaps through a combination of behavioural and physiological responses, presumably to help distinguish between resistance and genuinely not knowing the answer to a question.

It's interesting that there is no reference to any neuroscience-based research or monitoring to justify conclusions, despite the widespread reports of the US secret services funding billions of pounds of research in this area. This may be because it's too secret to release to the public, but it is just as likely that, as with other brain-based 'prediction' methods (neuromarketing, brain-scan 'lie detection') the data is less useful than more straightforward and better validated psychological and physiological methods.

As has been picked up by Wired the claims that 180 hours of sleep deprivation is not harmful in the long-term is based on a selective and limited reading of the scientific literature and is disputed by the people who carried out the research.

Link to PDFs of released memos.

—Vaughan.

April 21, 2009

Inside Britain's highest security psychiatric hospital:

The Independent has an article giving a rare look inside Broadmoor Hospital, one of only four high security psychiatric hospital in the UK, which houses some of the most severely dangerous offenders with mental illness.

Broadmoor is the oldest and most well-known high secure hospital in Britain, having housed a string of high profile murders and other violent offenders since Victorian times to the present day.

The article focuses on the Paddock Centre, a new section to treat people with a dangerous and severe personality disorder (DSPD).

DSPD is not a medical diagnosis, it is a category created by the UK government to classify a group of offenders with a diagnosable personality disorder who are thought to be at risk of violent offending in the future.

The category was devised because the government wanted to find a way in which psychiatrists could treat persistently violent offenders with an antisocial personality disorder diagnosis, because the mental health act only allowed people to be detained if their condition was treatable.

Since there was no treatment, psychiatrists couldn't detain such people and refused to do so, so the government created the category and changed the law so they could.

Hence we now have the rapidly expanding DSPD Programme and Broadmoor houses the Paddock Centre, the biggest DSPD centre in the country.

The category has caused a great deal of ethical debate and even heated argument, as it allows currently untreatable people to be detained on the basis of risk, rather than for committing a specific crime.

However, the Independent article is more focused on the day-to-day running of the unit, talking to its lead psychiatrists and giving a picture of how it functions.

Journalistic insights into Broadmoor are incredibly infrequent, so this is a rare opportunity to get a glimpse of what goes on. The only other recent example I can think of was a 2004 edition of BBC All in the Mind that you can still listen to online.

Link to Independent 'Exclusive: Inside Broadmoor'.

—Vaughan.

April 18, 2009

Psychologists central to war on terror interrogations:

The Washington Post has an article exploring recently released 'war on terror' interrogation memos, showing that "psychologists, physicians and other health officials" played a key part in interrogations widely condemned as torture.

It's an interesting revelation because during the long debates, and some say heal-dragging, over whether the American Psychological Association should ban its members from participation, one of their main arguments was that psychologists should participate to prevent any unethical behaviour.

Instead, it looks like the presence of psychologists and other health officials was used to justify the interrogations as reasonable, despite the fact that the Red Cross's condemnation of techniques as "tantamount to torture" has now been justified by the release of official documents.

Their names are among the few details censored in the long-concealed Bush administration memos released Thursday, but the documents show a steady stream of psychologists, physicians and other health officials who both kept detainees alive and actively participated in designing the interrogation program and monitoring its implementation. Their presence also enabled the government to argue that the interrogations did not include torture.

Most of the psychologists were contract employees of the CIA, according to intelligence officials familiar with the program....

The CIA dispatched personnel from its office of medical services to each secret prison and evaluated medical professionals involved in interrogations "to make sure they could stand up, psychologically handle it," according to a former CIA official.

The alleged actions of medical professionals in the secret prisons are viewed as particularly troubling by an array of groups, including the American Medical Association and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The documents apparently describe instances where psychologists guided interrogations and provided information about mental weakness of detainees so they could be specifically exploited by interrogators.

Link to WashPost on 'Psychologists Helped Guide Interrogations'.

—Vaughan.

April 16, 2009

The myth of sex addiction:

Finally, a sceptical take on sex addiction. The Times just published an excellent article examining the problem with the concept of being 'addicted to sex', something that has almost entirely been an invention of private treatment clinics and the media.

There is virtually no published research on 'sex addiction' and it isn't an officially recognised diagnosis, but it has become fashionable to describe compulsive or non-mainstream sexual tendencies in these terms.

Partly, as the article notes, because addiction has become the 21st century's label of choice for people who want to medicalise less acceptable sexual behaviours, especially when someone gets 'caught in the act'.

Dr Philip Hopley, an addiction specialist at the Priory Hospital at Roehampton, southwest London, and a consultant psychiatrist for LPP Consulting, says that public scepticism is “understandable”. He says: “The major concern is where sex-related problem behaviour is labelled an ‘addiction' when in fact poor decision-making and/or impulse control lie at the root of the problem. What constitutes normal, average or healthy sex? There is no recommended limit for adults as there is for, say, alcohol - and if there was, would it be different for males and females?”

Phillip Hodson, a Fellow of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, points out that the whole idea of having an addiction to a natural drive is problematic. “The excuse, of course, is that nature wants us to have sex to make babies and isn't bothered about rationing the drive. It's the same with eating. You cannot really be ‘addicted' to normal drives. What's the cure - to stop procreating or eating?” Yet perhaps one can't really blame people for using the term “addiction”, because compulsivity or mania don't have quite the same ring. “Sex maniac” sounds like something out of a Carry On film.

The media love sex addiction and go to great lengths to quote media-hungry rent-a-quotes who can make it sound valid.

Unfortunately, the media tends to like people who have already media connections, and so the dissenting voices barely get a byline.

This article is interesting because it is written by Jed Mercurio, a TV drama writer currently researching a book on JFK, so he's prime 'get in the papers' material.

Interestingly though, he used to be a doctor, and knows a fadish medical concept when he sees one. Hence we get a rare sceptical look at a current media obsession.

Link to 'JFK, Russell Brand and the myth of sex addiction'.

—Vaughan.

April 07, 2009

Drug company pushes jet lag as a medical disorder:

The Wall Street Journal's health blog reports that drug company Cephalon are trying to get jet lag recognised as a 'circadian rhythm sleep disorder' in an attempt to promote their stay-up-forever drugs modafinil and armodafinil.

Modafinil, under the trade name Provigil, is currently a big seller for the company owing to the fact that it deletes the need for sleep and improves concentration typically without making the person feel particularly 'wired'.

It's licensed for the treatment of narcolepsy but is widely used by people without a prescription to stay awake and fend off mental tiredness.

Unfortunately, for Cephalon, modafinil will go out of patent in 2012, meaning its profit making capabilities virtually disappear as competitors will be able to produce the compound at a markedly reduced price.

In the mean time, the company has been developing a very similar but newly patentable drug named armodafinil. In fact, armodafinil has been created by a common ploy used by drug companies when they need to renew a patent on a drug.

Many drug molecules have two versions - both identical but mirror images of each other. Drugs work when the drug molecule 'hand' inserts itself into the appropriately matching neuroreceptor 'glove'.

In the same way that you can't put your left hand into a right glove, mirror image drug molecules need their matching receptor and each might have a different effect.

Many drugs, like modafinil, are mixture of both left and right-handed enantiomers, even though only one of the mirror images has the desired effect. In the case of modafinil, it's the right-handed mirror image that seems the most potent.

So a common drug company ploy is to released a new drug which has been synthesised to remove the inactive or less active molecule.

Armodafinil, their new drug, is just this. It's just the right-handed modafinil molecules.

So essentially it's the same drug but without the action of the other 'half'. This can sometimes reduce side effects, or improve the action of the drug, but in general the difference is relatively minor.

Importantly though, you can get a new patent on this synthesized version, meaning profit is guaranteed as long as you can convince people that your new drug is worth switching too. And this is where the spin comes in.

Because in many countries drug must be approved for a medical problem, Cephalon are trying to get jet lag classified as a disorder so they have a whole new market for their compound.

It also turns out that they're sharply hiking the price on modafinil, so when the new, initially lower-priced armodafinil appears, people will switch.

They'll then get used to using armodafinil and when modafinil becomes super-cheap and generic sometime later they've already established their market on their 'premium branded' new compound. Normally, the price begins to rise afterwards.

Isn't progress great?

Link to WSJ on Cephalon and jet lag as a 'disorder'.
Link to WSJ on modafinil price hike strategy.

—Vaughan.

April 03, 2009

A dark inheritance:

There's a brief but powerful piece in today's New York Times on inheritance, environment and suicide by the daughter of poet Anne Sexton, who ended her own life in 1974 while in her mid-forties.

The article reflects on the recent suicide of Nicholas Hughes, the son of poet Sylvia Plath who also die in the same way.

It's a striking piece because Sexton's daughter has made her own suicide attempts and tries to untangle what contributes to a risk for self-harm which can run through families.

If you've not read it, Edge, Plath's last poem, written only days before she died is a remarkable thing, dark yet calm and at once fluent and disjointed.

Link to NYT piece 'A Tortured Inheritance' (via Trouble with Spikol)

—Vaughan.

April 01, 2009

Duck and coverage:

Charlie Brooker's Newswipe is a comedy news analysis programme that often has a serious point. A recent episode had a section examining TV coverage of the tragic school shooting that recently occurred in Germany and its relation to the motivations of potential copycat killers.

The video clip contrasts the advice of a forensic psychiatrist on how to cover the story in the media to prevent further tragedies and the actual coverage the incident received. I'm sure you can guess the rest.

The forensic psychiatrist being interviewed is Park Dietz, who frequently appears in the media but who has also done a great deal of research in the area, including the classic article 'Mass, serial and sensational homicides' where he noted that publicity was a major factor in driving these sorts of public killing sprees.

This was published in 1986 and more than 20 years later satirists are being fed material by TV stations who can't resist sensationalist coverage.

Both funny and uncomfortably chilling.

Link to Newswipe on media coverage of school shooting.
Link to full text of 'Mass, serial and sensational homicides'.

—Vaughan.

March 27, 2009

Neurosurgeon has mid-operation heart attack, continues:

BBC News is reporting that neurosurgeon Claudio Vitale had a heart-attack during an operation to remove a brain tumour, but continued with the surgery as he knew the patient wouldn't recover if he left the theatre.

According to reports, Mr Vitale started to feel chest pains part way through the operation at Naples' Cardarelli Hospital.

When the pains worsened, Mr Vitale's team urged him to stop the procedure and get treatment, but he refused.

He agreed to undergo a blood test, which confirmed a heart problem, but the neurosurgeon insisted on completing the operation before getting medical help, reports say.

ABC News also has a good write-up.

Link to BBC News article 'Doctor in mid-surgery heart scare' (via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

March 23, 2009

Medellín, mi corazón:

I leave Medellín and the beautiful country of Colombia today after six fantastic months working at the Universidad de Antioquia and the Hospital Universitario San Vicente de Paúl.

My thanks to the everyone I worked with here for the fantastically warm welcome, the careful tuition in scientific Spanish and the fascinating conversations.

Colombia is a wonderfully friendly and stunningly beautiful country that I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone, visitor or worker alike.

The picture is of one of the many beautiful mountains of Antioquia, in the 'Paisa' region.

Apologies for the likely sporadic updates over the next couple of days as I fly back to the UK and fight the jet lag.

Hasta pronto Colombia.

—Vaughan.

March 19, 2009

Get me a mentally ill celebrity:

The New Statesman has an interesting article by a press officer from one of the UK's biggest mental health charities describing how press stories are put together and why it's almost impossible to get any media interest without a 'mentally ill celebrity'.

But there’s the rub. Shouldn’t we want to hear about these issues anyway? Do we really need to look to the stars? I started “selling” this campaign to journalists armed with a raft of compelling stories of real-life discrimination – the experienced business analyst who, after six months off with depression, made 150 job applications before an employer would give him a chance; the singer barred from joining a choir because she had had schizophrenia; the Cambridge graduate refused a chance to train as a teacher because of a history of mental health problems.

They’re interesting stories, emblematic of a stigma that still surrounds mental illness, and they matter to a great many people: one in four of us will have a mental health problem at some stage. And journalists know it. “Wow, yes, that is very interesting,” they say. “It’s dreadful, isn’t it? I know someone that happened to, actually, but . . . I was wondering if you could get me Mel C, y’know, Sporty Spice? Or Ruby Wax? Or, even better, do you have any new celebs who’ve had problems in the past?”

Link to New Statesman piece 'Get me Sporty Spice'.

—Vaughan.

March 18, 2009

Stunning photo collection of abandoned hospital:

Flickr user Isaac E has posted a stunning photo collection of images taken inside the now abandoned Bradgate Park Nursing Home and Beacon Lodge psychiatric unit.

The photos have been fantastically composed and are processed with high dynamic ranging imaging meaning they are incredibly striking.

Link to photo collection.

—Vaughan.

March 14, 2009

JAMA editors pressure antidepressant whistle blower:

This is both odd and slightly disturbing. The Wall Street Journal reports that a medical researcher has been publicly insulted and allegedly threatened by the editors of the medical heavyweight Journal of the American Medical Association for calling out an antidepressant study for undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Jonathan Leo, a professor of neuroanatomy at Lincoln Memorial University, wrote a succinct and reasonably worded letter to the British Medical Journal noting that a study on the use of the antidepressant escitalopram (Lexapro) in stroke had concluded that the drug was better than other treatments, when in fact the data supported no such claims.

He also noted that the authors had failed to disclose their ties to the drug makers Forest Laboratories.

For his trouble he was phoned by the JAMA editors who allegedly made some academic threats to him, his students, and his superiors.

The story was followed-up by the Wall Street Journal who contacted the editor-in-chief Catherine DeAngelis. Surprisingly, DeAngelis publicly insulted Leo and is quoted by the WSJ saying:

“This guy is a nobody and a nothing” she said of Leo. “He is trying to make a name for himself. Please call me about something important.” She added that Leo “should be spending time with his students instead of doing this.”

When asked if she called his superiors and what she said to them, DeAngelis said “it is none of your business.” She added that she did not threaten Leo or anyone at the school.

This would perhaps be less shocking had the authors of the study in question not publicly apologised for omitting conflicts of interest and confirmed that the drug was not a superior treatment in subsequent letters to JAMA.

Ironically, DeAngelis has a reputation for closely monitoring conflicts of interest and has made JAMA a leader in requiring such admissions from authors.

Furious Seasons has been keeping tabs on the situation and as usual had the scoop before the WSJ got involved.

Link to WSJ piece "JAMA Editor Calls Critic a ‘Nobody and a Nothing’".

—Vaughan.

March 10, 2009

A.C. Grayling on regulating armed robots:

Philosopher A.C. Grayling has a just-released opinion piece on the New Scientist site arguing that we should regulate armed military robots before they are responsible for, presumably, what would otherwise be classified as war crimes.

As we reported in 2007, a military robot has already malfunctioned and ended up killing nine people with gunfire.

Grayling notes that military robots are already deployed on 'active duty' and that we need to regulate the consequences of an increasingly mechanised military that relies on artificial intelligence technology to engage its firepower.

Robot sentries patrol the borders of South Korea and Israel. Remote-controlled aircraft mount missile attacks on enemy positions. Other military robots are already in service, and not just for defusing bombs or detecting landmines: a coming generation of autonomous combat robots capable of deep penetration into enemy territory raises questions about whether they will be able to discriminate between soldiers and innocent civilians...

In the next decades, completely autonomous robots might be involved in many military, policing, transport and even caring roles. What if they malfunction? What if a programming glitch makes them kill, electrocute, demolish, drown and explode, or fail at the crucial moment? Whose insurance will pay for damage to furniture, other traffic or the baby, when things go wrong? The software company, the manufacturer, the owner?

Most thinking about the implications of robotics tends to take sci-fi forms: robots enslave humankind, or beautifully sculpted humanoid machines have sex with their owners and then post-coitally tidy the room and make coffee. But the real concern lies in the areas to which the money already flows: the military and the police.

Link to NewSci piece by A.C. Grayling (via David Dobbs).

—Vaughan.

March 09, 2009

The best of psychology and neuroscience on Twitter:

Many thanks for sending or posting all your suggestions for psychology and neuroscience Twitter feeds to follow. After watching the streams for a few days, here are my suggestions for some of the best:

@mocost
Probably the single best mind and brain Twitter feed I've yet found. By the author of the excellent Neurophilosophy blog. Diverse, regularly updated, fascinating.

@noahwilliamgray
One of the neuroscience editors for Nature, who used to write for the underperforming 'Action Potential' blog. However, he's really hit his stride since moving on to better things and he posts a load of interesting material to his feed, including live updates from a recent conference. Has a slight neurobiological tendency.

@PsychScience
The Association for Psychological Science's Twitter feed focuses on new discoveries and association members in the news. The 'members in the news' posts usually lead to good articles but you'll need to follow the link to find out what they're about as it often doesn't say.

@allinthemind
Wonderful radio show that keeps going from strength to strength and now posts to Twitter. Previews of upcoming programmes and commentary from the programme's switched on host Natasha Mitchell.

@anibalmastobiza
A Spanish cognitive scientist who blogs in Spanish but Tweets in English. A high signal to noise ratio and with only 15 followers at the moment, one of Twitter's best kept secrets.

@DrShock
A Dutch psychiatrist who you may know from the blog of the same name. Links to interesting mind, brain and mental health snippets with the occasional bonus tweet in Dutch about, well... I've no idea.

@RightThought
A psychotherapist who often posts useful and interesting links to mind and brain news, as well as the occasional productivity and successful living tip.

@sandygautam
Like being rained on with psychology and neuroscience content. A high volume, stream of consciousness feed, but luckily a stream with plenty of gold nuggets in it.

@mentalhealthuk
I have no idea who or what mentalhealthuk are, but they refeed pretty much every mention of mental health in the media to their Twitter account. High volume, but very complete.

I'm sure there are others that I've not discovered or who have been quiet since I've been watching, so I'll post here when I find further gems.

Please note that the Mind Hacks feed @mindhacksblog just alerts you to new blog posts, but, after some weeks of trying to work out what the hell I'd do with it, I have started posting to Twitter myself.

You can find me at @vaughanbell, where I've essentially been posting mind and brain stuff I find interesting or curious. Not a great surprise I know, but hopefully it'll be of interest.

—Vaughan.

March 04, 2009

Finding a Twitter flock:

I'm interesting in creating a list of people on Twitter that Mind Hacks readers might be interested in: psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, AI hackers, anthropologists, sociologists, science writers, philosophers - you know the sort.

However, it seems quite hard to track down people by their interests.

So if you follow, or are, someone who posts lots of interesting mind and brain stuff on Twitter, leave a comment on this post, or email me using this web form with Twitter in the title.

My only caveat is I'm not particularly interested in, for example, a psychologist who mostly twitters about their cat, the news, sport or whatever. They need to be a good source of mind and brain insights.

I'll filter the list and post it up here.

—Vaughan.

mindhacks is now on twitter:

mindhacks.com is now on twitter. You can find us at /mindhacksblog.

Our rss is piped to twitter via the magic of twitterfeed. Thanks to Brent for the suggestion.

—tom.

February 26, 2009

Warning of ghosts in the machine:

Today's issue of Science has a letter from neuroscientist Martha Farah and theologian Nancey Murphy warning against 'non-materialist neuroscience' becoming the new front-line in the religion wars.

Most religions endorse the idea of a soul (or spirit) that is distinct from the physical body. Yet as neuroscience advances, it increasingly seems that all aspects of a person can be explained by the functioning of a material system. This first became clear in the realms of motor control and perception. Yet, models of perceptual and motor capacities such as color vision and gait do not directly threaten the idea of the soul. You can still believe in what Gilbert Ryle called "the ghost in the machine" and simply conclude that color vision and gait are features of the machine rather than the ghost.

However, as neuroscience begins to reveal the mechanisms underlying personality, love, morality, and spirituality, the idea of a ghost in the machine becomes strained. Brain imaging indicates that all of these traits have physical correlates in brain function. Furthermore, pharmacologic influences on these traits, as well as the effects of localized stimulation or damage, demonstrate that the brain processes in question are not mere correlates but are the physical bases of these central aspects of our personhood. If these aspects of the person are all features of the machine, why have a ghost at all?

By raising questions like this, it seems likely that neuroscience will pose a far more fundamental challenge than evolutionary biology to many religions. Predictably, then, some theologians and even neuroscientists are resisting the implications of modern cognitive and affective neuroscience. "Nonmaterialist neuroscience" has joined "intelligent design" as an alternative interpretation of scientific data. This work is counterproductive, however, in that it ignores what most scholars of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures now understand about biblical views of human nature. These views were physicalist, and body-soul dualism entered Christian thought around a century after Jesus' day.

As I've noted before, I remain sceptical that this will pose much of a threat, largely due to the fact that non-materialist neuroscience is not particularly new - many famous neuroscientists (including the Nobel prize-winning John Eccles) have been explicitly non-materialist with few contemporary ripples.

Unlike evolution, which bluntly contradicts what many religious texts claim, very few holy books describe any concepts of the soul that can be directly contradicted by neuroscience.

However, there is certainly some interest in the neuroscience bashing among Christian fundamentalists, who recently held their first conference on the issue. We shall have to see how successfully they manage to enthuse their flock.

Link to letter 'Neuroscience and the Soul'.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

February 25, 2009

Think of the children, not the evidence:

The BBC's flagship news analysis programme Newsnight featured a hefty segment on the 'Facebook causes cancer / the end of the world as we know it' nonsense that recently hit the headlines. The Beeb invited alarmist psychologist Aric Sigman on the show but, God bless 'em, they also invited Bad Science author Ben Goldacre who did a great job of countering the drivel. And due to wonders of the internet you can see the whole interview on YouTube.

The segment also features neuroscientist Susan Greenfield who has recently taken to warning everybody (including in the House of Lords believe it or not) about the 'neurological dangers' of children using the internet - based entirely on her own prejudices and in the absence of any good evidence.

She is featured in the TV report where, rather bizarrely, she admits there is no evidence but then goes on to warn of the dangers.

The debate between Goldacre and Sigman is pure TV gold, not least for watching Goldacre's facial expressions.

Ben has also written-up the episode and put load of links and background material on Bad Science.

Link to Newsnight interview and debate.
Link to Bad Science with more on the debate.

—Vaughan.

February 19, 2009

The Psychologist on stigma, statistics and S&M:

The British Psychological Society's monthly magazine The Psychologist is continuing to dip its toes into the world of open-access and has made the entire March edition freely available online.

A couple of articles stand out. The first is on stigma that discusses studies on how we internally structure information and notes that even here, the golden ratio may play a role, with a crucial 68% / 32% split on negative and positive information being linked to stigmatised people.

The other is a surprising article on an interpretation of the sexually explicit sado-masochist novel The Story of O in light of Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance.

More tea vicar?

In comparison, my page 9 column on language-dependent psychosis rather pales in comparison.

The magazine is available as an embedded document, so you get to see the whole magazine as it appears in print, although I'm not sure you can link to individual papers so you'll have to explore!

Link to March edition of The Psychologist.

Full disclosure: I'm an occasional columnist and unpaid member of the editoral board for The Psychologist.

—Vaughan.

Facebook causes marble loss:

You know that awkward feeling you get when you stop laughing because you realise the person you're talking to isn't actually joking? I've just had it after reading the news reports that tell us 'Facebook raises cancer risk', ruining what I thought was a very funny parody.

They're based on an appalling article by psychologist Aric Sigman which was published in the magazine Biologist. You can read it online as a pdf and it is a wonderful example of cherry-picking evidence and citing correlations as causes.

His claim is that electronic media, and particularly the use of social networking sites, are leading us to interact face-to-face less and that this has health risks.

So what evidence does Sigman cite to support his claim that social networking sites and face-to-face interaction are linked - a correlation showing that as social media use has increased, face-to-face interaction has decreased. Really, that's it, and as we shall see it's largely nonsense.

He then goes on to cite evidence that subjective loneliness is associated with various biological effects and health risks.

The last bit is well supported, loneliness is associated with negative health risks, but Sigman neglects to cite any studies that test the link between face-to-face interaction and the use of services such as Facebook.

This is not surprising, because so far, they've typically found that people who who these sites actually feel more socially connected and have better social ties.

Like this study that found that students use Facebook to enhance relationships they already formed in real life, or this study that found that Facebook use was associated with greater levels of social capital and psychological well-being.

In contrast, the link between loneliness and internet communication has not been reliably established and it is notable to we have almost nothing but correlational studies. So we don't know whether internet communication increases loneliness in some people, or whether lonely people just use the internet to try and make themselves less lonely.

In fact, studies have reported correlations in both directions. Interestingly, while the early studies tended to find a link, later studies have been much less likely to do so, and in fact, many find exactly the opposite to what Sigman claims, but these are not mentioned.

For example, like one study that found that older adults who use the internet more report lower levels of loneliness, or this study in children that found internet use was associated with less loneliness, or this study that found no link in adolescents.

I'd like to be charitable and assume that this one-sidedness was down to ignorance, but the conclusion of the article makes me think it was deliberate cherry-picking. He writes:

A decade ago, a detailed classic study of 73 families who used the internet for communication, The Internet Paradox, concluded that greater use of the internet was associated with declines in communication between family members in the house, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their levels of depression and loneliness. They went on to report “both social disengagement and worsening of mood... and limited face-to-face social interaction... poor quality of life and diminished physical and psychological health” (Kraut et al, 1998).

This study was indeed a classic. It was so important that the same research team followed up the same participants several years later and published their results in a study called Internet Paradox Revisted that you can read online as a pdf file.

What they found was that the negative effects reported in the first study, except for a measure of daily hassles, had disappeared, and that the internet use was associated with better a social life:

Internet was associated with mainly positive outcomes over a range of dependent variables measuring social involvement and psychological well-being, local and distant social circle, face-to-face communication, community involvement, trust in people, positive affect, and unsurprisingly, computer skill.

Just typing 'internet paradox' into Google brings up both studies, but the second seems to be missing.

The article is quite clearly drivel if you spend more than 20 seconds on Google, but it seems to have been swallowed by most mainstream press outlets without question.

What is it about mentioning the internet that makes the press lose their marbles? I blame it on not using the internet.

—Vaughan.

February 15, 2009

Killing the veneration of unbending concentration:

A few days ago I wrote a piece criticising the arguments of author Maggie Jackson on the effects of digital technology and concentration. The piece garnered some fantastic reader comments, including a thoughtful response from Jackson herself, which I've reproduced below:

In my interview with Wired and my book Distracted, I don't argue that we need to venerate unbending concentration and single-tasking. In fact, that's a monochromatic Industrial Age vision of attention that I reject! In cultures where work and productivity are now information-based, we do need to hone skills related to multitasking and split-focus, skimming and non-linear reasoning.

But in the US and other tech-centric societies today, we've become so reliant on this narrow band of skills that we've begun to undermine our ability to go deeply in thought and relations. We're fragmenting and diffusing our multifaceted attentional abilities - and this is not by any means "progress."

As for cooking and babies, I'd agree that at any time in history, the environment makes demands on our attention. Attention is in essence how we interact with our environment! But attention is also central to the pursuit of goals, to planning, judgment, vision. The point is, are we using our powers of attention well by cultivating environments of interruption, fragmentation,and skimming, and by losing time/space for reflection, disciplined problem-solving, deep reading?

In short, the "concentration oasis" is a myth I don't subscribe to. And yet it's truly short-sighted to fail to consider the costs of cultivating a culture of distraction and inattention.

Link to the original post and comments.

—Vaughan.

February 12, 2009

Distress targeted Twitter spam:

An interesting if dubious Twitter phenomenon: a $200 an hour online therapist website is spamming people who express distress in their twitter bulletins with a reply advertising their service.

The service is called AskAnAlly and the Twitter spam has really pissed a number people off.

Like many of the other people, I can't help reading the name as AskAnally, which I shall be charitable and assume is a reference to Freudian psychotherapy.

It seems life imitates Web Therapy.

Thanks for Mind Hacks reader Rachel for letting me know.

—Vaughan.

February 11, 2009

The myth of the concentration oasis:

Wired has an interview with author Maggie Jackson who's recently written a book called 'Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age' in which she argues modern life and digital technology constantly demand our attention and are consequently damaging our ability to concentrate and be creative. The trouble is, I just don't buy it and it's easy to see why.

The 'modern technology is hurting our brain' argument is widespread but it seems so short-sighted. It's based on the idea that before digital communication technology came along, people spent their time focusing on single tasks for hours on end and were rarely distracted.

The trouble is, it's plainly rubbish, and you just have to spend time with some low tech communities to see this is the case.

In some of the poorer neighbourhoods Medellín, my current city of residence, there is no electricity. In these barrios, computers, the internet, and even washing machines and telephones don't exist in the average home.

Pretty much everything is done manually. By the lights of the 'driven to digital distraction' argument, the residents should be able to live blissfully focused distraction-free lives, but they don't.

If you think twitter is an attention magnet, try living with an infant. Kids are the most distracting thing there is and when you have three of even four in the house it is both impossible to focus on one thing, and stressful, because the consequences of not keeping an eye on your kids can be frightening even to think about.

The manual nature of all the tasks means you have to watch everything. There is no timer on the cooker, so you need to watch the food. The washing has to be done, by hand, while keeping an eye on everything else.

People call all the time, because, well, there is no other way of communication. Street vendors pass by the house and shout what they're selling. If you miss out on something, it might mean your days food planning has gone down the drain.

On top of this, people may be working to make a living in the same building. Running a shop, mending stuff, selling food, or whatever their business might be.

The difference between this, and the "oh isn't email stressful" situation, is that you can take a break from email and phone calls. You can switch everything off for an hour so you can concentrate. You can tell people you won't be available.

For people trying to work and run a family at the same time, not only are the consequences of missing something more important and potentially more dangerous, but it's impossible to take a break. A break means your kids are in danger, your family doesn't get fed and you're losing money that buys the food.

Now, think about the fact that the majority of the world live just like this, and not in not in the world of email, tweets and instant messaging. Until about 100 years ago everyone lived like this.

In other words, the ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted, is the strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development.

New technology has not created some sort of unnatural cyber-world, but is just moving us away from a relatively short blip of focus that pervaded parts of the Western world for probably about 50 years at most.

And when we compare the level of stress and distraction it causes in comparison to the life of the average low-tech family, it's nothing. It actually allows us to focus, because it makes things less urgent, it controls the consequences and allows us to suffer no more than social indignation if we don't respond immediately.

The past, and for most people on the planet, the present, have never been an oasis of mental calm and creativity. And anyone who thinks they have it hard because people keep emailing them should trying bringing up a room of kids with nothing but two pairs of hands and a cooking pot.

Link to Wired interview with short-sighted digital doomsayer.

—Vaughan.

February 09, 2009

Music to my mind:

I've just realised that a new series of ABC Radio National's excellent All in the Mind just kicked off the other week with a fantastic programme on the therapeutic potential of music.

The programme is both wonderful to listen to because music is threaded woven throughout the interviews, but it's also a critical and well-balanced look at music therapy.

It immediately tackles the fallacy of 'Mozart makes you smarter' but then goes on to discuss the evidence behind music therapy itself.

This form of treatment is usually regarded with a great deal of enthusiasm by staff and patients but doesn't have a huge research base to back it up in comparison to other forms of psychological treatment, largely, it has to be said, because music therapists get very little in the way of research training.

However, the studies that have been done (for example, see this Cochrane review on its effect in schizophrenia) suggest it can be quite effective.

The programme is a really great introduction to the topic and great to see AITM back with a new series.

Link to AITM on 'Music: Is it really therapeutic?'.

—Vaughan.

February 06, 2009

2009-02-06 Spike activity:

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

Furious Seasons has the curious news that FDA has linked anti-depressants to the development of neuroleptic malignant syndrome. Curious as NMS is traditionally linked to dopamine inhibitors, and serotonin syndrome has several similar symptoms but is already known.

Readers build vivid mental simulations of literary narratives, suggests brain scanning study.

Brain has a interesting commentary on the vascular theory of migraine - 'a great story wrecked by the facts'.

The wonderful RadioLab has a brief post-season follow-up programme with an excellent section on 'stereotype threat'.

USA Today covers an fMRI study on a women with hypermnesia or 'super memory' as the paper calls it.

Speed dating as a method for studying the psychology of attraction is discussed by Science News.

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers research suggesting colours affect the mind - red improves attention to detail, blue boosts creativity.

Hypothesis / conclusion confusion hits BBC News, again, as it says Alzheimer's 'is brain diabetes'.

Neurophilosophy has a typically excellent article on a study looking at how the age of a memory being recalled is linked to which brain areas are active during remembering.

A study on the epidemiology and prognosis of coma in soap operas is covered by Neurotopia.

Time magazine asks will plastic surgery make you happier? Unlikely, is the answer.

Financial bubbles, economic crashes and cognitive biases are discussed by The Atlantic.

Nth Position reviews an interesting looking new book on the 'globalisation of addiction'.

A study on the negative effects of violent video games on social helping is discussed by New Scientist.

BoingBoing notes news that a Hollywood film about amnesic patient H.M. could be in the pipeline.

Activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group, according to a new study covered by New Scientist.

BPS Research Digest asks how much thought do we put into our moral judgements?

There's only so much science can tell us about human morality, argues Howard Gardner in an article for Slate.

Cognitive Daily has a great piece on how the Kanizsa illusion is being used to study how we recognise shapes.

—Vaughan.

February 04, 2009

NeuroPod on pheromones, neural nets, fMRI and sleep:

The latest Nature Neuropod neuroscience podcast has just hit the net, with a great selection of discussions and interviews covering everything from pheromones and sexual attraction to the impact of poor quality sleep on memory.

This final section on an intriguing and recently published study found that even mild disturbance that didn't wake the sleeper but knocked them out of deeper sleeper into the shallower sleep stages could still disrupt the retention of material learned the previous day.

However, as I am remarkably tired myself I need as much deep sleep as I can get, so I shall leave the rest of the podcast as a voyage of discovery. Enjoy!

Link to Neuropod home page with audio.
mp3 of latest podcast.

—Vaughan.

January 30, 2009

Legal threat for criticising neurobabble 'lie detector':

Francisco Lacerda is a professor of phonetics and the author of an academic article criticising the use of the unproven voice analysis 'life detector' technology in the legal system. He highlighted "discrepancies between the claims the producers and vendors make and what their products are capable of delivering" and as a result, is now being threatened with a libel suit by a company that makes these devices.

The academic journal received similar threats and, rather disappointingly, has now taken the article offline.

But have no fear, a copy was grabbed from the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law before it disappeared and is now available online for all to read.

The article makes for interesting reading, as it looks at the claims and scientific basis of both specific products and the whole project of using voice stress for 'detecting' lies.

The company concerned are Nemesysco, who manufacture devices that supposedly detect lies by analysing speech patterns, despite the fact that there is no conclusive peer-reviewed evidence that the devices reliably detect untruths.

The company claim that their products works like this:

The technology detects minute, involuntary changes in the voice reflective of various types of brain activity. By utilizing a wide range spectrum analysis to detect minute changes in the speech waveform, LVA detects anomalies in brain activity and classifies them in terms of stress, excitement, deception, and varying emotional states, accordingly. This way, LVA detects what we call 'brain activity traces,' using the voice as a medium. The information that is gathered is then processed and analyzed to reveal the speaker's current state of mind.

If that made no sense to you, read it again. It won't make any more sense but it does get funnier.

Rather than presenting data showing that their devices work, the company is resorting to legal action to silence their critics.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments:

The article is quite unusual for a scientific article. For example, it has a section titled "who is Mr. Liberman?" addressing a private person and claiming that he is a charlatan based on a visit by a friend made to a private company.

Link to report of legal threat from Stockholm University.
Link to copy of pulled article.

—Vaughan.

January 29, 2009

New SciAmMind on play, placebo, lies and illusion:

The new edition of the excellent Scientific American Mind has just hit the shelves and several of the feature articles are freely available online - covering the psychology of play, some fascinating new research on the placebo effect, the quest to build a brain scan lie detector and several other fantastic reports.

I found the article on the cognitive benefits of free play particularly interesting. In this instance 'free play' is where kids are playing without set rules or requirements, as are needed when playing structured games or doing tasks.

The article is full of intriguing studies that indicate the immediate and long-term benefits of imaginative play. Even rough-and-tumble seems to be associated with better social skills:

Play fighting also improves problem solving. According to a paper published by Pellegrini in 1989, the more elementary school boys engaged in rough-housing, the better they scored on a test of social problem solving. During the test, researchers presented kids with five pictures of a child trying to get a toy from a peer and five pictures of a child trying to avoid being reprimanded by his mother. The subjects were then asked to come up with as many possible solutions to each social problem; their score was based on the variety of strategies they mentioned, and children who play-fought regularly tended to score much better.

As well as checking out the latest issue of SciAmMind, you may also want to have a look at a fantastic online gallery they've put together which captures numerous visual illusions that have been realised as 3D sculpures, some of epic proportions.

If you want to see some of M.C. Escher's impossible staircases rendered in lego, or several impressive sculptures that change depending on the light or viewing angle, do have a look.

Link to Feb 2009 SciAmMind with plenty of freely available articles.
Link to visual illusions sculpture gallery.

—Vaughan.

January 27, 2009

Giant killing:

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer are about to settle a legal case brought by the US Government over illegal promotion of their now withdrawn painkiller Bextra (valdecoxib) for a staggering $2.3 billion.

This follows the news that Eli Lilly have just settled a similar case against them for a previous record of $1.42 billion related to illegal promotion of their antipsychotic drug Zyprexa (olanzapine) with several cases against them still ongoing.

The cases relate to 'off-label marketing', an illegal practice where companies explicitly encourage doctors to prescribe drugs for conditions that the compound isn't licensed for. In the case of olanzapine, this included dementia, and we now know the combination of antipsychotics and dementia greatly increases short and longer-term mortality.

The practice of off-label promotion is widespread and has been for years but this is the first time that such massive cases have been settled against the companies concerned.

As an aside, one of the most useful sources for news on the pharma industry and psychiatry is a blog we often link to called Furious Seasons.

It's written by Phil Dawdy, an ex-newspaper journalist and ex-antipsychotic user who does some remarkable investigative journalism that is almost entirely supported by donations from readers of the website.

I mention this as he's just had another experience of a journalist pumping him for information and then neglecting to mention him, despite the fact that he's not only been on the pulse of developments for the last few years, he's actually been part of the story as he publicly hosted some incriminating documents for the Zyprexa case.

He was recently flagged up as a great example of independent web journalism by respected science writer David Dobbs, but only seems to get credit from writers who already get self-publishing.

I don't always agree with his take but find Furious Seasons essential reading nonetheless, which must be a sign of a good writer.

I credit him with having a sort of underground sensibility for sorting through the spin of corporate psychiatry but it won't be long before he goes mainstream, so catch him while he's still live and direct.

Link to WSJ on Pfizer settlement.
Link to Furious Seasons.

—Vaughan.

January 25, 2009

Electricity, let it wash all over me:

I've just found a fantastic article that discusses the representation of epilepsy in contemporary rock and hip hop. It was published last year in the neurology journal Epilepsy and Behaviour and is both fascinating and funny owing to the contrast between the stuffy academic journal style and the lyrics drawn from the street.

For example, where else are you likely to read anything like the following:

In "Ballad of Worms," Cage, a New York rap artist with a troubled psychiatric past, rails against God for giving his girlfriend (previously "the hottest bitch") meningitis.

It's a fascinating review, not least because most of the songs that mention epilepsy are from death metal bands, lyrical singer-song writers or hip hop artists.

I was a bit confused at first because it misses out some obvious tracks, but I quickly realised it's just sampling from lyrics about epilepsy, rather than trying to give a complete overview.

For example, we mentioned a Beastie Boys track where Adrock gives props to his own epilepsy back in 2007. Beck also gives a nod to his epilepsy in his 2006 track Elevator Music:

I shake a leg on the ground
Like an epileptic battery man
I'm making my move

Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis famously developed epilepsy and had several seizures on stage. Their pulsing 1979 track She's Lost Control, although not explicitly about his own experiences, vividly describes a girl having a seizure in the street.

There are many more examples, and after doing a search I was surprised at quite how often epilepsy and seizures are referenced in rock n' roll.

The review notes that epilepsy is often linked to the historical themes of madness and cognitive impairment, but interestingly contemporary music also uses it as a metaphor for all consuming love and sexual desire, as well as wild abandon in dancing - which are not traditional themes.

The paper is by clinical neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale, who does some compelling and diverse research into epilepsy, including a recent article on the representation of epilepsy in movies.

Link to 'The representation of epilepsy in popular music'.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

January 24, 2009

I don't like Mondays:

The defenders of Bullshit Blue Monday tend to suggest that even if the formula is nonsense, it promotes awareness of mental health at a time of the year when people are feeling particularly low. In light of this, today's Bad Science column discusses the research on mood and time of year and finds there's no reliable link between season and depression.

The piece looks at studies of suicides, depression, prescriptions of antidepressants, mood changes and hospital admissions - and none show a reliable connection.

Goldacre concludes:

And worst of all, we know that lots of things really are associated with depression, like social isolation, stressful life events, neighbourhood social disorder, poverty, child abuse, and the rest. Get those in the news, I dare you. Suicide is the third biggest cause of life years lost. Anything real you could do to study the causes, and possible preventive measures, or effective interventions, would be cracking. Making stupid stuff up about the most depressing day of the year, on the other hand, doesn’t help anyone, because bullshit presented as fact is simply disempowering.

By the way, during previous Bullshit Blue Monday posts, I alluded to a researcher who was threatened with legal action by Cliff Arnall for criticising the formula.

As it happens, it was psychologist Petra Boyton and you can now read her account of being subject to below-the-belt nastiness.

To lighten the tone a little, I must point out my highlight of the whole media debacle: an article in The Scotsman who gave the date of Blue Monday as the 23rd 21st of January - a Wednesday.

Link to Bad Science on season, mood and Bullshit Blue Monday.
Link to Petra Boyton on formulas, science reporting and legal threats.

—Vaughan.

January 17, 2009

Lycanthropy in Babylon:

An interesting case series from the Babylon region of Iraq, reporting eight patients who had clinical lycanthropy where they had the delusional belief that they had changed into an animal. Seven believed they had changed into dogs, one believed he had changed into a cow.

Lycanthropy alive in Babylon: the existence of archetype.

Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2009 Feb;119(2):161-4; discussion 164-5. Epub 2008

Younis AA, Moselhy HF.

OBJECTIVE: Lycanthropy is the belief in the capacity of human metamorphosis into animal form. It has been recorded in many cultures. Apart from historic description of lycanthropy, there has been several case reports described in the medical literature over the past 30 years. METHOD: We identified eight cases of lycanthropy in 20 years, mainly in the area of Babylon, Iraq. RESULTS: The most commonly reported diagnosis was severe depressive disorder with psychotic symptoms. The type of animal that the patients changed into were mainly dogs (seven cases) and only one case changed into a cow for the first time to report. CONCLUSION: Lycanthropy delusion is a rare delusion but appears to have survived into modern times with possible archetypal existence.

Link to PubMed entry for 'Lycanthropy alive in Babylon'.

—Vaughan.

January 16, 2009

Caffeine, hallucinations and an odd ghost obsession:

A recent study hit the headlines reporting a link between caffeine intake and susceptibility to hallucinations. I've just read the paper and it's an interesting well-conducted correlational study, but what struck me was the wackiness of the headlines it generated.

The study, led by researcher Simon Jones, was inspired by previous scientific work that has found a link between the stress-related hormone cortisol and psychosis.

Caffeine is known to interact with stress to increase cortisol levels further, so the researchers wondered whether there would be a direct link between caffeine intake and psychosis-type changes in thoughts and perception in people without a mental illness.

They asked 219 students to fill in well-validated standardised questionnaires relating to caffeine intake, stress, persecutory thoughts and hallucinatory experience and found that caffeine intake was associated with a small but reliable increase in susceptibility to hallucinations.

Actually, stress accounted for more hallucination susceptibility than caffeine, but as the first study to show an association between perceptual distortion and the world's most popular stimulant in healthy people, it's useful research.

I will now recount some of the headlines:

Coffee addicts see dead people

Caffeine, Responsible For Hallucinations

Did You See That Pink Elephant?

Too Much Coffee Can Cause You To Freak Out, Man

Coffee may make you see ghosts

Coffee linked to 'visions'

'Coffeeholics wake the dead'

If you think I'm cherry picking, these are actually fairly typical.

The news stories are a strange mix between an obsession with ghosts, which came from God knows where, and a profound confusion between correlation and causation.

UPDATE: I notice Bad Science has just picked up on the same study, and the same media obsession with ghosts, but also looks at a common element of the stories claiming that 7 cups of coffee a day 'triples' the risk of hallucinations - which didn't appear in the paper but was apparently sourced from a bit of ad-hoc jiggery pokery for the press-release.

Link to DOI entry and study summary.
Link to sensible write-up from Science Daily.

—Vaughan.

January 15, 2009

Voodoo accusations false, reply 'red list' researchers:

Some of the researchers under fire from the recent 'Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience' article have responded to the accusations of misleading data analysis by suggesting that the accusers have misunderstood the finer points of brain imaging, leading them to falsely infer errors where none exist.

In an academic reply, available online as a pdf, and in an article on the controversy published in this week's Nature, some of the researchers responsible for the 'red list' studies set out their case.

As you might expect, the responses are fairly technical points about statistical analysis in neuroimaging research but are generally well made, suggesting that the accusers don't fully grasp which measures are related or unrelated, that they don't account for tests which reduce spurious findings, and that they didn't ask in sufficient detail about the methods used and so have based their analysis on incomplete information.

However, one in particular seems a little hopeful and relates to a central point made by Vul and his colleagues.

Vul suggested that the correlations shouldn't exceed the maximum reliability of two measures. As we discussed previously, if you have two measures that are 90% reliable (accurate), on average, you wouldn't expect correlations higher than 90% because the other 10% of the measurement is likely to be affected by randomness.

However, the response from neuroscientist Mbemba Jabbi and colleagues suggest that this should be based on the maximum reliability ever found.

Vul et al. argue that many of the brain-behavior correlations published in social neuroscience articles are "impossibly high" and that "the highest possible meaningful correlation that could be obtained would be .74". This categorical claim is based on a statistical upper bound argument which relies on the questionable assumption that "fMRI measures will not often have reliabilities greater than about .7". However, logically, any theoretical upper bound argument would have to be based on the highest reliability values ever reported for behavioural and fMRI data, respectively (e.g. for fMRI, near-perfect reliabilities of 0.98 have been reported in Fernandez et al. 2003).

I think they've caricatured the argument a little bit here. Vul's point was that most studies suggest an average reliability of .7, therefore, it becomes increasingly unlikely as correlations exceed this limit that they reflect genuine relationships.

It's not a 'this is strictly impossible' argument, it's a 'it's too unlikely to believe' argument.

However, the majority of ripostes, that Vul and his colleagues have misunderstood the analysis process, are quite a counterpunch to the heavyweight criticisms.

As an aside, there's an interesting comment from neuroscientist Tania Singer on how the study has been discussed:

"I first heard about this when I got a call from a journalist," comments neuroscientist Tania Singer of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, whose papers on empathy are listed as examples of bad analytical practice. "I was shocked — this is not the way that scientific discourse should take place."

Since when? The paper was accepted by a peer-reviewed journal before it was released to the public. The idea that something actually has to appear in print before anyone is allowed to discuss it seems to be a little outdated (in fact, was this ever the case?).

UPDATE: Ed Vul has replied to the rebuttal online. You can read his responses here (via the BPSRD which also has a good piece on the controversy).

It's interesting that Vul's reply essentially makes the counter-claim that the 'red list' researchers have misunderstood the analysis process.

This really highlights the point that neuroimaging analysis is not only at the forefront of the understanding of neurophysiology, but also at the forefront of the development of statistical methods.

In other words, the maths 'aint obvious because the data sets are large, complex, and inter-related in ways we don't fully understand. We're still developing methods to make sense of these. This controversy is part of that process.

pdf of academic reply to 'Voodoo correlations' paper (thanks Alex!)
Link to excellent Nature article on the controversy.

—Vaughan.

January 14, 2009

How does it feel?:

Our Bullshit Blue Monday competition is so popular, even the PR company that promote the day have entered!

In a comment to our original post, one of the founders of Green PR has entered a formula into the competition, and includes a long-winded rant suggesting that our criticisms of the nonsense formula are "snide", a "‘Lord of the Flies’-like, vendetta", and are "too hidebound by logic".

I've added my response below the fold so everyone can enjoy the comedy gold.

By the way, this is your last chance to get your entries in for our competition to invent a formula that describes what total bullshit these formulas are. Either leave it as a comment on any of the Bullshit Blue Monday posts or email me via this web form.

The best entry gets a prize!

My name is Andy Green. I am a partner with GREEN communications and it was me who created the name ‘Blue Monday’ to link it with the existing story about the ‘most depressing day of the year’ inspired by the formula devised by Cliff Arnall.

Hi Andy, my comments will appear like this.

My colleague has already been in touch with you to set the record straight on some serious inaccuracies in your blog.

We'll get to those right away.

I am now adding my contribution.

It is a pity your respect for hard scientific facts has not been carried through in your post about ‘Blue Monday’. The dictionary defines ‘bullshit’ as containing misleading, or false language and statements. A simple phone call or e mail to Beat Blue Monday campaign, the source of your story, would have enabled you to avoid a number of significant false statements.

We respect anyone advancing the cause of scientific understanding but you seem more intent on pursuing a personal, school playground, or ‘Lord of the Flies’-like, vendetta on the psychologist Cliff Arnall.

Fact: You originally claim the Mental Health Foundation has shelled out ‘hard cash’ to be linked with the ‘Blue Monday’ campaign. This was totally not true. GREEN communications, the public relations company behind the current Blue Monday campaign, approached the charity to be a beneficiary, completely free of charge. After my colleague contacted you, I now see this detail has, at least, been amended.

Fact denied! I wrote "the Mental Health Foundation have seemingly shelled out hard cash". I link to the dictionary definition of seem for your edification.

As a result of the Blue Monday campaign, an outstanding charity which has to compete with thousands of other worthy causes, would receive welcome name and brand exposure, as well as specific publicity about its own mental health guide. If fully capitalised-upon, the campaign could also be a significant long-term fund-raiser vehicle for the charity, again where all funds generated would go to the charity.

Fact: Blue Monday is not ‘owned’ by anyone. In the same way ‘Valentines Day’ or ‘Pancake Day’ are owned by anyone. The idea for ‘the most depressing day of the year story’ was not even originally conceived by GREEN communications. Rather the company recognised an opportunity to do some good in the world by harnessing its professional skills in public relations. Beat Blue Monday is a completely non-commercial enterprise. We do it because we think it is a good thing to do.

Fact denied! See the scare quotes in my original quote ("PR agency Green Communications who 'own' Blue Monday"). Although, using them in your refutation claim makes no sense. I link to a page on the use and meaning of scare quotes for your edification.

Fact: There has been a paradigm shift in the ‘most depressing day of the year story’. The story was originally put out by a London based public relations agency for their travel client in 2005. When it discovered the story was not going to be used in subsequent years, GREEN communications picked up the opportunity (after clearing it with the agency concerned and Cliff Arnall) and since 2006 has run the ‘Beat Blue Monday’ campaign. Note, the story as it stands now is not about the day being ‘scientifically proven’ but rather the formula representing the ‘symbolic day’ of being ‘the most depressing day of they year.’ The criticism levelled against the Blue Monday campaign relates to the earlier incarnation of the campaign.

Fact denied! The original criticism of the campaign was that it used a bullshit formula that made no sense and that incorrectly and illogically indicated that a certain day is the worst of the year. Your campaign does exactly the same. Hence, the criticism is equally as relevant.

Fact: Read up on memes. You will discover these are self-replicating vehicles of communication. What GREEN communications recognized was the ‘most depressing day of the year’ story was a meme, already in the infosphere. Through its involvement GREEN has harnessed this meme, branded it with the name ‘Blue Monday’ and directed this body of information towards achieving a social and cultural good (as determined by our liberal, humanist values, for any post-modernists out there.)

Fact deni... Hey, wait a minute. "Read up on memes" isn't a fact, it's a command. And if you're a post-modernist, what are you doing talking about all these facts?

Fact: I too share concerns about the need to expand understanding and engagement with science. We have generations who leave the education system with the barest scientific knowledge. As a result, real important issues such as climate change, or the seeming lack of any real debate about a new generation of nuclear power stations, are inadequately addressed.

Unlike the understanding of logically incoherent rubbish like the Blue Monday formula which gets international media coverage.

The real problem here is not the likes of Cliff Arnall somehow taking up valuable media space which the scientific community would otherwise receive.

Science gets the reputation it deserves with limited media exposure, partially through the difficulty in understanding of some of its subject matter to non-scientific audiences. More fundamental, and fix-able, is that the scientific community has not invested in telling its story as thorough and effective as possible, sometimes being too hidebound by logic, and failing to recognize the potency of emotion in communications, and the reality of memes.

Jesus wept.

The Blue Monday campaign does not seek to claim to be addressing real issues for the scientific community in the world. If you are sincere scientists, as opposed to the snide variety, why not focus on real issues and spend your valuable time addressing these?

That'll be my day job then.

Opinion: Having met Mr. Arnall, where he gives up his time for Blue Monday at no cost, and in his professional career has helped hundreds of people with depression and addictive behaviour problems, I am of the opinion that he is a thoroughly decent human being.

Actually me too. Really, I've never met the guy and have never criticised him personally - just his nonsense formulae. Although his tendency to threaten to sue people for criticising his formula is a little off colour I feel. You may want to talk to him about this.

He is however, guilty: of agreeing with us that his information for ‘the most depressing day of the year story’ can be directed to achieving a social good.

You can do just as much social good without misleading people. I say again, I applaud your efforts to promote mental health. Misinforming people in the process is counter-productive. Just run a campaign that isn't based on tosh. Job done. Everyone's a winner.

Nothing could be further from the truth of the image of Cliff somehow raking in lots of corporate gold from this venture. Over the four years of ‘the most depressing day of the year’ story he has probably earned less than £1,700 – and has not been paid a penny by GREEN communications.

Cliff is understandably concerned, now that his children are using the Internet, they don’t come across unfounded and malicious references to their father, such as one post suggesting he should be ‘shot through the face with a crossbow’. Any right minded person would act to protect their reputation in such instances.

The post, not written here, did not suggest that this should happen. It just described something nasty that he could write a formula about. However, a tasteless example, I agree. Interestingly, I believe Cliff didn't threaten to sue over this, it was over another post by another author that was entirely reasonable in its assertions.

You have invited contributions of new formulas. You might want to consider this one:

G+O+O²+D = Beat Blue Monday
S+N+I+D+E

where
G = Desire to create good to make the world a better place
O = Available meme and publicity skills
O² = Public and media receptiveness
D = Failing to address real issues for the scientific community in the world

S = Highly intelligent individuals
N = Too much time on their hands
I = Inadequate fact-checking
D = Failing to address real issues for the scientific community in the world
E = Propensity to pick on easy targets

In the spirit of your invitation to be creative, maybe the English language could be enriched by a new term, distinct from ‘bullshit’ called ‘snideshit’: a term to describe negative opinions, containing misleading or false statements, used, like children in a playground, to pick on an easy-to-hit victim. I am too gracious to suggest the term should be applied to anyone involved in this debate.

I leave the comedy as an exercise for the reader.

So, where do we go from here?

Pub?

I have a strong suspicion the interests of balance and fair reporting might be subsumed in your subsequent journalist coverage about Blue Monday. You have the easy option to write a one-sided editorial in your column, which gives you a platform to score easy points.

I think you're confusing me with Dr Ben Goldacre, who also thinks this is tosh.

However, rather than have an on-line slanging match, where it easy to posture and hide behind the facelessness of the Internet, I would really welcome an open, off-line meeting. (I am sure I could get Cliff Arnall to take part as well)

As the Martini ad used to say ‘anytime, anyplace, anywhere’ – where we would have a genuine open discussion on any questions you care to raise about what ‘Blue Monday’ is, and represents. It could even be extended it to a wider debate of how can science meet the challenge of getting the reputation it deserves.

Taking part in such an open meeting gives you the chance to prove yourself not as a group of ‘snide scientists’, but willing to take part in a real, open discussion to explore how can ‘good science’ be communicated.

How can an open discussion happen in a private meeting? That's the point. You're promoting nonsense publicly, so we're criticising you publicly. Rather odd that a PR company isn't comfortable with public debate but there you go.

That approach may be old school, but will avoid the depressing prospect not of Blue Monday itself on January 19th, but of a worthwhile initiative being undermined by your talent, which if focussed on more worthwhile ends, could achieve some better good for the world at large, while also helping the cause of scientific understanding.

There's a really simple solution that doesn't need a meeting. Drop the formula and the 'worst day of the year' drivel, and just promote the Mental Health Foundation and overcoming depression without misleading people. That's all we're asking.

You do some good and the campaign doesn't hinder my work treating patients, who genuinely get misled by this sort of thing, doing scientific research into mental illness, which the nonsense formula apes in the media, and educating people about science, which your current campaign undermines.

—Vaughan.

January 12, 2009

'Human terrain' style teams to deploy in Africa:

Wired reports that social scientists are being sought as contractors by the US Military to support their Africa Command in the form of a "socio-cultural cell".

Rather than being directly employed by the US Army, as with members of the existing Human Terrain System (HTS), the cells look like they'll be operated by risk management firm Archimedes Global - who, if the link from the article is correct, have a website that is so generic as to actually be slightly sinister.

The Wired news item cites a job ad, which isn't online, but clearly describes a Human Terrain style set-up:

According to the job ad, the teams will work support AFRICOM's Special Analysis Branch, which among other things will provide "operational multi-layered analysis and Joint Intelligence Preparations of the Operational Environment." Cells will include personnel with expertise in "human terrain, all-source and Geo-spatial analysis." A second socio-cultural cell will stand up within six months.

I am interested in why the US Military has recently begun to specifically deploy 'Human Terrain' teams to understand the structure of society when they already have an extensive PSYOPS service.

I found this fascinating 2004 defence report from the UK Government in the parliamentary records that describes the British military's "information operations" that suggests that a 'human terrain' style focus, including the use of civilian social scientists, is already well integrated:

DTIO [Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations] provides strategic guidance on targeting and the cross-government information campaign, as well as advice to Ministers and the Chiefs of Staff. In DTIO itself, the staff of 98 includes a psychiatrist, an anthropologist and other specialist staff.

At the strategic level the British have been paying an American consultancy firm, the Redon Group, to provide advice on information campaigns for some five years. DTIO also has contacts with a variety of experts in the United Kingdom in universities and other institutions.

And as we discussed back in June, British PSYOPS already includes anthropology in its core techniques.

The report also hints that at the time, the US military was not addressing these issues, with a British Air Vice Marshal suggesting that the American forces were lacking a sensitive knowledge of the local cultures and that the UK forces were better at understanding the needs of the people.

However, it's interesting that US military chose to address these issues by create a new 'human terrain' programme rather than simply assigning their existing PSYOPS units to the task.

Link to Wired on 'Human Terrain' teams for Africa.
Link to 2004 UK Government report on 'Information Operations'.

—Vaughan.

January 10, 2009

The morbid attractions of sweet anaesthesia :

The New Republic magazine has an excellent article about drug addiction among anaesthetists. It tracks the story of one rising star in the speciality who became addicted and discusses discussing why opioid dependence is still a problem in the field.

It's probably worth stressing that while anaesthetists have the highest rates of opioid addiction among doctors, the absolute rates are still actually quite low.

A 2002 study found level of drug abuse in the US to be 1.0% among faculty members and 1.6% among residents (junior doctors), and 'drug abuse' here doesn't entail addiction - it just describes illicit use of controlled substances.

However, the increased rates of drug use are certainly cause for concern, this is from a review article on 'Addiction and Substance Abuse in Anesthesiology' published last year:

Anesthesiologists (as well as any physician) may suffer from addiction to any number of substances, though addiction to opioids remains the most common. As recently as 2005, the drug of choice for anesthesiologists entering treatment was an opioid, with fentanyl and propofol, ketamine, sodium thiopental, lidocaine, nitrous oxide, and the potent volatile anesthetics, are less frequently abused but have documented abuse potential. Alcoholism and other forms of impairment impact anesthesiologists at rates similar to those in other professions.

The New Republic article is an engaging look at this issue that manages to tackle both the human issues and the view from the medical literature.

If you're interested in the history of anaesthesia, ABC Radio National's In Conversation recently had a fascinating discussion with historian Stephanie Snow, who's just written a book on the subject called Blessed Days Of Anaesthesia.

It has loads of intriguing nuggets of information, such as the fact that resistance to the introduction to effective pain killing was bolstered by moral arguments as to the necessity of pain, but also scientific theories about the nervous system that suggested it was essential during operations to keep the body functioning.

A fascinating insight into early thinking about the value of pain.

Link to The New Republic article 'Going Under' (via MeFi).
Link to In Conversation on 'Blessed Days Of Anaesthesia'.

—Vaughan.

January 09, 2009

I struggle, fight dark forces in the clear moon light:

A study just published online by the journal Schizophrenia Research has found a marked relationship between insomnia and paranoia in both the general public and in patients with psychosis.

The study, led by psychologist Daniel Freeman, was cross-sectional, meaning they just looked at whether the two things were associated and so it can't say for definite which causes which.

In other words, it's impossible to say whether lack of sleep triggers paranoia, or whether paranoid thoughts are more likely to keep us up at night.

However, the study also measured anxiety, known to affect sleep, and it accounted for part but not all of the sleeplessness, suggesting that both paranoia and insomnia probably feed into each other.

Sleep has an interesting relationship to mental illness. While sleeplessness and disturbed circadian rhythms have been linked to mood disorders for many years, sleep deprivation is known to have an antidepressant effect and is sometimes used to treat the most severe cases of depression.

By the way, the title of the post is taken from the lyrics to Faithless' dancefloor masterpiece Insomnia which also gives a wonderful description of insomnia fuelled paranoia - although I suspect it also refers to the after effects of a night of drugs-based clubbing so probably not exactly what the researchers had in mind.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

Full disclosure: Two of the study authors are research collaborators.

—Vaughan.

January 08, 2009

Bullshit Blue Monday a downer on Wikipedia:

Is this the most incompetent Wikipedia edit ever? Green Communications, the PR company who promotes the Blue Monday 'worst day of the year' bullshit festival, recently tried to 'anonymously' delete criticism from the Blue Monday Wikipedia page without realising their IP address was a complete giveaway.

This obviously failed, and they just tried to paste on a whole block of text onto the bottom of the article that started with (and I kid you not):

THE FOLLOWING CONTENT IS ALL FACTUALLY CORRECT. IF YOU DISPUTE IT PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR.

Spank me nanny! Spank me!

Actually, they originally tried to do this from an anonymous IP address that didn't track back to Green Communications, but then blew their cover by using a registered account to reinsert the text - time under the name 'Honest Green' and with the added power caps.

Now, I'm going to assume that the information is ALL FACTUALLY CORRECT so I want to address the last line of their bolt-on Wikipedia press release:

The on-going campaign is run by Wakefield-based public relations company GREEN Communications, on a non-commercial basis as part of its own corporate social responsibility activities.

Let's make this clear. Green Communications - I applaud your efforts for running non-commercial PR campaigns aimed at promoting mental health. It's a vastly neglected area that gets scant attention in the press.

However, the reason that the 'Blue Monday' / worst day of the year formulae rubbish gets the back up of medical doctors, psychologists and researchers is not just that it's ridiculous.

It's that promoting the misunderstanding of science and psychology actually harms people's ability to make informed choices about their mental health.

It devalues genuine evidence-based work in the area and misleads people as to what they need to consider when trying to manage their own emotions, or, if the need arises, decide on what sort of help or treatment they want when things get too difficult to manage their own.

So, I'd like nothing more than next year, you run a non-commercial PR campaign aimed at empowering and informing people about depression that wasn't based on misinformation.

You're an award winning PR company, so I'm sure you can find an equally catchy way of grabbing people's attention that doesn't involve obvious drivel.

UPDATE: Just a reminder that you can still enter our Bullshit Blue Monday make up your own nonsense formula competition where you could win a prize!

Link to Bullshit Blue Monday antidote from Ben Goldacre.
Link to Bullshit Blue Monday antidote from Petra Boyton.

—Vaughan.

Laughing gas increases imagination, suggestibility:

A new study has found that laughing gas, a common anaesthetic used by dentists, increases the vividness of imagination and also increases suggestibility, making people slightly more likely to experience hypnosis-like suggestions.

The study, just published in the medical journal Psychopharmacology, stems from the informal observations of dentists that patients under laughing gas (nitrous oxide) sedation are particularly suggestible and the researchers aimed to test this out in more detail.

The researchers randomised patients at a dental surgery to either receive a nitrous oxide and oxygen mix, or just oxygen, with the patients not knowing which they were receiving. Two weeks later they were invited back and given which ever type of gas mix they hadn't already had.

While inhaling each gas mix, the participants were asked to complete a measure of imaginative ability, rating the clarity and vividness of their visual imagery, as well as being given various suggestions - without the hypnotic induction - from the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale.

This includes suggestions that your hands might move of their own accord, to suggested temporary paralysis, to a suggestion to experience hallucinated sounds - to name but a few.

The researchers found that nitrous oxide boosted imaginative ability considerably, and increased suggestibility modestly but reliably.

The paper discusses the small but interesting literature on which drugs affect suggestibility, and reviews some of the past studies which have tested some quite surprising substances in this way:

Little research has investigated the effects of other drugs upon suggestibility in a controlled manner. Sjoberg and Hollister (1965) administered lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), mescaline and psilocybin separately and in combination to participants and measured imaginative suggestibility before and after drug administration.

Gibson et al (1977) measured the effect of benzodiazepine administration upon hypnotic suggestibility, and Kelly et al (1978) tested the effect of cannabis intoxication upon the imaginative suggestibility of participants initially scoring low to medium on a standardised scale.

Details of these studies and the resulting changes in suggestibility are given in Table 2 [see further down this page for a web version]. The greatest changes in suggestibility, in order of decreasing size, are evident after administration of nitrous oxide, cannabis, LSD, mescaline, combination of [LSD+mescaline+psilocybin] and diazepam.

So it seems that nitrous oxide may have a particular suggestibility boosting effect.

By the way, the study was led by psychologist Matt Whalley, who also runs the excellent Hypnosis and Suggestion website, undoubtedly the best internet resource for scientific information on hypnosis.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to excellent Hypnosis and Suggestion website.

—Vaughan.

January 07, 2009

The science of 'voodoo' brain correlations:

The Neurocritic has an excellent post explaining the science of why some of the most widely reported brain scanning studies on social interaction are flawed.

The new analysis has been led by neuroscientist Edward Vul and we reported on this bombshell last week, but this new post clearly explains the problems for those not wanting to plough through the original academic text.

The paper stems from the observation that some of the correlations between brain activity and psychological states in some of these headline studies are remarkably high, one as high as .88

A correlation is a test of how much two measures are related. A correlation of 1 means that the two measures are perfectly in sync, every change in one is mirrored by changed in the other, whereas a correlation of 0 means that there is no syncing at all. Any number in between gives a sliding scale of how much 'syncing' there is .

So a correlation of .88 is pretty impressive and suggest near-perfect syncing. Except that it's higher than would be possible based on how accurate the two measures are.

Imagine that you have a 10cm rule than can only measure to the nearest centimetre. It means that the accuracy of your ruler is only 90% because it fudges any part-centimetre length down the nearest centimetre.

It would be almost impossible to get a perfect correlation using this ruler, because there's 10% randomness - or 10% out-of-syncness, in every measurement.

And once you know how much randomness there is, you can estimate the maximum correlation you can get because you know the randomness is not going to reliably sync with anything else.

Edward Vul and his team did this with these headline social brain imaging studies and found that some produced correlations higher than would be possible from what we know of how accurate the brain scanning and psychological measures are. So something must be up.

It turns out that some studies deliberately picked out brain areas based on which voxels [micro areas] already had high correlations, while others only reported correlations from a spot in an area that was already the most active.

In other words, they were only selecting the cream of the crop but were reporting it as if it was the general picture.

Neurocritic goes into this in more detail in relation to specific studies, and it's well worth checking out for the gory details.

Importantly, the researchers of the flawed studies weren't trying to 'fake' results, there were using a common method which Vul has discovered is flawed.

He has called for the researchers to use a more representative form of analysis and correct their findings. We'll see what happens.

Link to Neurocritic on 'Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience'.
pdf of Vul's paper.

—Vaughan.

Psychiatry and Big Pharma - in 100 words:

This month's British Journal of Psychiatry has another one of its regular '...in 100 words' series - this month giving a concise guide to 'psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry'.

It's written by psychiatrist and historian of psychopharmacology David Healy, who's had more than his fair share of heat from the drug industry.

Psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry - in 100 words

Little Pharma made profits by making novel compounds; Big Pharma does it by marketing. Doctors say they consume (prescribe) medication according to the evidence, so marketeers design and run trials to increase a drug’s use. They select the trials, data and authors that suit, publish in quality journals, facilitate incorporation in guidelines, then exhort doctors to practise evidence-based medicine. Because ‘they’re worth it’, doctors consume branded high-cost but less effective ‘evidence-based’ derivatives of older compounds making these drugs worth more than their weight in gold. Posted parcels meanwhile are tracked far more accurately than adverse treatment effects on patients.

Link to psychiatry and the pharma industry in 100 words at the BJP.

—Vaughan.

January 05, 2009

Blue Monday bullshit competition:

Two weeks today will be the annual 'Blue Monday' bullshit festival, where Cliff Arnall and his "formula" are wheeled out in an attempt to make us believe that it tells us about the most depressing day of the year. However, Mind Hacks is running a competition that may prove a useful antedote and you can enter.

To be fair, the day is usually quite depressing, but only because we have to put up with the usual rubbish masquerading as science in the media.

The whole idea is still being pushed by a PR agency, but rather disappointingly, the respected UK charity the Mental Health Foundation have seemingly shelled out hard cash for [see update below] the dubious pleasure of using the opportunity to try and promote mental well-being.

Promoting mental health is, of course, a fantastic idea, but using utter gibberish and pseudoscience to do so is like trying to promote a healthy diet by telling people that apples are particularly bad for us on certain days.

So, to help cheer us all up we want you to come up with a formula that describes what total bullshit these formulas are.

Be creative. As with the original formula, don't feel you have to be chained by the laws of maths, or even logic.

The most creative entry will win a prize. Sent to you where ever you are in the world.

Be careful not to say nasty things about Mr Arnall himself, rumour has it has he a tendency to threaten legal action against people who say things that could be interpreted as casting aspersions on him directly, although it would be perfectly acceptable to point out that his formula is utter nonsense.

You can either include your entry as a comment to this post, post them to your own blog and send us a link, or email me directly via this web form.

Not only will you be helping the public understanding of science through sarcasm, you could win a prize and get featured on Mind Hacks.

We will print the best entries a few days before the date itself.

The game is afoot!

UPDATE Green Communications commented on a later entry to say that the Mental Health Foundation has not paid for this publicity campaign and that it is being completed on a non-commercial basis.

—Vaughan.

Acquiring a natural edge:

The Boston Globe has an interesting article on how we interact with urban environments and discusses research suggesting that contact with nature has significant cognitive benefits.

It's a fascinating article that touches on studies that have found a range of benefits for having contact with a natural environment:

Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard...

City life can also lead to loss of emotional control. Kuo and her colleagues found less domestic violence in the apartments with views of greenery. These data build on earlier work that demonstrated how aspects of the urban environment, such as crowding and unpredictable noise, can also lead to increased levels of aggression.

It does, however, contain one misreading that suggests that urban environments blunt our mental sharpness, based on a recent study led by psychologist Marc Berman.

The study actually found that a walk in an urban environment had no significant effect on our mental abilities, although a walk in a natural environment improved them.

Each of these changes was measured relative to an initial assessment conducted indoors and the same pattern emerged when participants just viewed pictures or natural or urban environments.

As far as I know, there is no evidence that urban environments have a negative impact on our cognitive abilities. Comment or get in touch if you know otherwise.

However, we do know that living in an urban environment is one of the most reliable and important environmental risk factors for the development of schizophrenia.

It's not clear exactly what it is about urban living that raises the risk, although there's a good commentary by psychiatrist Jim van Os that discusses some of the current explanations.

Link to Boston Globe article on urban impact.
Link to study on the cognitive benefits of interacting with nature.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

January 04, 2009

Mind Bites:

Mind Bites is a beautiful photography project by artist Will Lion which combines striking images with quotes from cognitive science research.

You can either view it as a Flickr photo set or as an interactive Flash gallery.

The image on the left is one of the more abstract pictures, but the full range contains everything from portraits, to landscapes, to still life photos - with the research quotes taken from studies on memory to hormonal influence on the earnings of lap dancers.

I can't help thinking these would make great pictures to have in a psychology department which are usually adorned with faded conference posters and dull oil paintings.

The full set of Will Lion's 'Mind Bites' project is both visually engaging and thought-provoking which is the essence of much great art.

Link to images as Flickr photo set.
Link to Mind Bites as interactive Flash gallery.

—Vaughan.

December 31, 2008

A very rough guide to highlights of 2008:

A not very thorough list of my personal 2008 highlights in mind and brain news, dredged from my memory and reproduced for your reading pleasure:

Funniest (unintentional)
USA Today publishing an alarmist story about 'digital drugs' that can, according to the article, mimic the effects of alcohol, marijuana, LSD, crack, heroin, sex, heaven and hell. Sadly not true, although hilarious to read.

Funniest (intentional)
The Web Therapy web series staring Lisa Kudrow as an incompetent psychologist. Wonderfully produced, cleverly satirical and very funny to boot.

Best film
The English Surgeon. A profoundly beautiful documentary about the work of London-based neurosurgeon Henry Marsh and his colleague Igor Kurilets in the Ukraine. Do not miss it. See the comments!

Best podcast / radio episode
RadioLab's delicious programme on Orson Well's War of the Worlds broadcast and its subsequent psychological impact. Just pure audio delightfulness.

Best video lecture
A gripping lecture at the University of California by historian Prof Alfred McCoy on the 'psychological torture: a CIA history'.

Most interesting new concept
Brain-computer interfaces to weapons systems pose problems for the definition of a 'war crime' if they're triggered preconsciously, according to an interesting analysis by lawyer Stephen White.

Most interesting interview
A tie between sociologist Harry Collins discussing his work on the social interactions of physicists and what this tells us about what we have to do to be considered an expert and what types of expertise there are, and an Neurophilosophy interview with Heather Perry who trepanned herself and is remarkably reflective about the experience.

Most useful academic article
Nikos Logothetis' article in Nature about what fMRI is really measuring and what we can and can't infer about the mind and brain from neuroimaging experiment.

Best example of neurobabble
The cover article on neuroscience-based management in an issue of HR Magazine which has to be read to be believed. Or maybe that's just your basal ganglia talking.

Most tangential post
I start off talking about blond girls in t-shirts and end up talking about philosophy of mind. Actually, usually happens the other way round in real life.

Best cognitive science art project
Artificially intelligence punk rock pogo robots. Enough said.

Best random clip of TV documentary
A TV presenter is intravenously injected with differing mixtures of the active ingredients of cannabis as part of the BBC documentary Should I Smoke Dope?.

Most overdue decision
The American Psychological Association banning participation in torture. Did it really need all the fuss?

To the bunkers! Most likely to hasten the coming robot war
Pentagon requests robot packs to hunt humans. Uh huh.

—Vaughan.

December 30, 2008

The Human Terrain System, 1867:

I was under the impression that the US Military's Human Terrain System, their new band of 'militarised' anthropologists, was a relatively new development but I just found a fascinating article on the use of social scientists by the Russian army during their invasion and occupation of Turkestan in the 1860s.

As with the modern military project, this also generated formal academic research which has surprising echoes with the modern push to get academics involved in focused foreign policy-oriented research.

The project was the brain child of Konstantin von Kaufman (pictured), a Russian army veteran who was appointed Governor-General of the newly acquired territories of Turkestan.

Learning from failure, Konstantin von Kaufman made ethnographic knowledge “the core” of his administrative policies in Turkestan...

But beyond religious tolerance, von Kaufman’s ethnographic inquiry was being undertaken with the utmost enthusiasm. Geographers, linguists, ethnographers, artists, natural scientists and other social scientists were employed to carry out von Kaufman’s project...

[Modern historian Daniel] Brower goes on to describe the “flood” of scholarly and popular articles and publications on Turkestan that followed. The attempt to classify the peoples of Central Asia met with confusion as people’s identities were frequently “multiple and contradictory.” But the “real needs of Kaufman’s ethnographic project were met.” Kaufman’s influence was, despite some interruptions, a lasting policy that even influenced the Soviets’ policies in Central Asia.

The article is taken from a blog written by Christian Bleuer, a doctoral student studying the social, political and military dynamics of Afghanistan.

There's another good post on the site directly relevant to the modern Human Terrain System, which describes the fluctuating and complex social power structures of Afghani society which makes understanding it such a challenge.

Link to piece on Russia's 'Human Terrain System' of the 1860s.
Link to piece on social power structures of Afghanistan.

—Vaughan.

December 29, 2008

'War on terror' social science funding announced:

Wired has the list of funded projects from the Pentagon's new $50 million 'Minerva' programme that supports social science research intended to have a strategic benefit for the 'war on terror'.

Named after the Roman goddess of wisdom and war, the project is part of the US Government's increasing reliance on social science to fight the 'war on terror' and it comes in the wake of the controversy over its Human Terrain System.

However, a key difference is that the Human Terrain System is a team of social scientists employed by the US Army to directly assist the military with its ongoing operations, while the Minerva project funds university research.

The seven funded projects cover sociology, psychology, religious studies and political science and Wired gives brief rundown:

Susan Shirk of the University of California at San Diego. Shirk will lead a project titled "The Evolving Relationship between Technology and National Security in China: Innovation, Defense Transformation and China's Place in the Global Technology Order."

Arizona State Religious Studies prof Mark Woodward. His team will investigate "counter radical-Muslim discourse." (Read Woodward's recent commentary on the Bush shoe-throwing incident here.)

Arms control expert Patricia Lewis, who is deputy director and scientist-in-residence at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Her project will look at Iraqi perspectives on the U.S. wars in the Middle East.

Jacob Shapiro of Princeton University. Shapiro studies the organizational aspects of terrorism; his proposal was titled "Terrorism Governance and Development."

San Francisco State University psychology prof David Matsumoto, who leads a project called "Emotion and Intergroup Relations."

Foreign policy expert James Lindsay of the University of Texas. He is leading an investigation into the effects of climate change on state stability in Africa.

MIT's Nazli Choucri. Her project will focus on "cyber international relations."

Unfortunately, the announcement is a little short on details and we only have the titles so far, but the projects seem interesting at first glance as they are much more general than the typical Pentagon funded research in this area which is often highly applied and bears upon an immediate and pressing problems.

Wired notes that the Minerva project was announced, in part, to 'heal the rift' between the government and social scientists, some of whom have expressed their anger at the 'militarization' of their discipline.

Thanks to the excellent Advances in the History of Psychology for the heads-up on this.

Link to Wired's closer look at Minerva's funding.

—Vaughan.

Drug corruption: a rough guide:

The January edition of the New York Review of Books has an excellent article on the pharmaceutical industry and the corruption of medical ethics that summarises the recent revelations of fraud, undisclosed payments, data burying and off-label promotion that pervade the industry.

The piece is by Marcia Angell, who spent 20 years as editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and is now a senior lecturer in Harvard Medical School.

Rather disappointingly, although not particularly surprisingly, is the fact that psychiatry holds pride of place in the drug company corruption and unethical dealings stakes, with the large part of the article focusing on the marketing of major psychiatric drugs.

Marketing in the pharmaceutical industry not only relates to advertising and payments to doctors - in the form of money or gifts - but also to the published research which is often specifically designed to show the drug in the best possible light, or is deliberately buried if it doesn't.

One person who has been instrumental in uncovering some of the most recent revelations is US Senator Charles Grassley who has spent the last year digging into payments to doctors and has uncovered large undisclosed sums paid to the biggest names in psychiatry.

The New York Review of Books article is a fantastic potted guide to the whole sordid business and is well worth a read if you want an update on the latest techniques used to market psychiatric drugs.

Link to NYRB piece 'Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption'.

—Vaughan.

December 27, 2008

The psychosis podcast:

The University of Manchester have developed a pilot of an educational podcast on psychosis and they'd like your help in evaluating it.

Their page has all the details and I won't give you too much additional information on it here, except to say you just need to answer a brief questionnaire, listen to the podcast and give your feedback online.

It's part of a project to provide accurate and useful information on delusions, hallucinations and their effects, as well as tips of dealing with unusual experiences if they occur.

You just need to check their page and all will be explained.

Link to Manchester Uni podcast evaluation page.

—Vaughan.

December 26, 2008

The original sex machine:

New Scientist has a completely charming article on 'Elektro' - the world's first celebrity robot who wowed the crowds at the 1939 New York World's Fair with his mechanics that produced a remarkable interactive experience for the time.

The article is by Noel Sharkey, an AI and robotics researcher, who recounts the robot's amazing story as he moved from mechanical marvel, to forgotten relic, to museum centrepiece.

One curious part of the story is that Elektro tried the classic B-list celebrity tactic of using sex to revive a flagging career - appearing in a proto soft porn film in the 1960s.

The movie was entitled Sex Kittens Go to College, and you can see Elektro featured in the trailer. The movie is remarkable largely for the fact that it is so soft as to be completely safe for work - presumably relying on the strategy rediscovered by millions of bloggers that simply mentioning sex in the title gets attention regardless of the content (see above).

However, there's also some great colour newsreel footage of Elektro in action at the World's Fair and you can see how impressive he was.

The NewSci article describes some of the technology that drove Elektro. The mechanics of the 'voice recognition' system are a particularly inventive hack.

The incredible ingenuity of Elektro's design was topped off by his sleek exterior. There was no remote control. Instead, the robot relied on a combination of motors, photoelectric cells, telephone relays and record players to perform 26 preprogrammed routines, each one initiated by voice commands from a human co-star. These were spoken into a telephone connected to the robot's chest, where circuitry converted each syllable into a pulse of light and transmitted it to a photoelectric cell. A second circuit added up the syllables and triggered relays to operate the corresponding electromechanical functions: a command with three syllables, for example, would start the robot's routine, and four syllables would stop it. As part of these routines, Elektro would raise and lower his arms, turn his head, move his mouth, count on his fingers and even smoke a cigarette and puff out smoke.

The robot could also respond to questions by using relays to switch between a bank of phonographs playing 78 rpm voice recordings that were hidden behind a curtain. This gave Elektro a vocabulary of 700 words and an extensive repertoire of banter: "I am a smart fellow as I have a very fine brain of 48 electrical relays," he would tell the crowd. "It works just like a telephone switchboard. If I get a wrong number I can always blame the operator. And by the way, I see a lot of good numbers out in our audience today."

Link to NewSci article on Elektro.
Link to trailer for Sex Kittens Go to College.
Link to footage of Elektro at the 1939 World's Fair.

—Vaughan.

December 23, 2008

Neuropod on HM, brain banking and 2008 highlights:

The latest Nature Neuropod podcast has just hit the wires and as is fitting for the December edition it contains a great roundup of the year's neuroscience highlights.

There's also a tribute to recently departed HM from neuropsychologist Susan Corkin, a visit to the UCL brain bank (check the wonderfully appropriate Hammer Horror German accent) and some interesting updates from the world of molecular neuroscience.

In the final section, Nature Neuroscience editor Charvy Narain discusses her highlights of the year in new discoveries and what better way to end the year.

Link to Neurpod page and streaming.
mp3 of December podcast.

—Vaughan.

December 18, 2008

The brand new book of human troubles:

With three years still left until publication, the fights over the new version of the psychiatric diagnostic manual, the DSM-V, are hotting up and The New York Times has a concise article that covers most of the main point of contention.

“What you have in the end,” Mr. Shorter said, “is this process of sorting the deck of symptoms into syndromes, and the outcome all depends on how the cards fall.”

Psychiatrists involved in preparing the new manual contend that it is too early to say for sure which cards will be added and which dropped.

Although I doubt the DSM committee are using that exact metaphor, it certainly illustrates the point that the process requires a certain degree of value-judgement.

It's interesting, however, that the public debate is currently focused on whether certain diagnoses should be included or not, rather than whether diagnosis itself is useful for psychiatry.

We've had psychometrics for a good 100 years that allow us to measure dimensions of human experience and performance with a much greater degree of accuracy than clinical diagnosis allows.

The slightly obsessive need to classify everything is both an inheritance from the infection model of disease, where one either has the pathogen or does not, and is encouraged by the US health care system, where insurance companies will only pay for treatment if it is diagnosed with an 'official' diagnosis.

Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible to treat someone based on continuous measures of distress, impairment and functioning using evidence-based cut-off points to judge whether a particular treatment should be applied.

In fact, many physical diseases are treated in exactly this way. The definitions of obesity, hypertension, diabetes and many others rely on an evidence-based cut-off point on a continuous scale of weight, blood pressure and blood glucose level.

There is no qualitatively different cut-and-dry distinction between just below the cut-off and just above it - it's just the point at which outcome studies predict that other things get much worse.

So rather than questioning the process, we need also to question the system, because diagnoses are tools and we need to know when and where they are most useful.

Link to NYT 'Psychiatrists Revise the Book of Human Troubles'.

—Vaughan.

December 17, 2008

Excessive and highly structured daydreaming:

An article in press for Consciousness and Cognition reports the case of a 36 year-old woman with a long history of excessive daydreaming where she'd spent long periods of time wrapped up in a fantasy world.

Importantly, the patient has no significant signs of mental illness and can easily distinguish fantasy from reality but just gets caught up in her internal reveries.

The subject of this case report is a professionally accomplished 36-year-old female presenting with a long history of excessive and highly structured daydreaming which she states has contributed to considerable distress during periods of her life. The patient is single, does not smoke, drink or use illegal drugs, and comes from a supportive and healthy family, reporting no abuse or trauma in her history.

Her distress, though subjectively reported as significant enough to seek and continue psychiatric treatment, remains difficult for us to diagnose. The imaginative episodes and their content are experienced as neither dysphoric nor intrusive, and the patient has been rigorously assessed for contributing or comorbid symptoms of mood, anxiety, personality, schizotypal, dissociative, and attentional disorders; indeed we have monitored her for over ten years, and have employed all clinical psychiatric measures available to consistently rule out comorbidity or mental status change in her case.

We have tenuously viewed her symptoms as indicating possible features of obsessive-compulsive behavior, reflected in the prescription of 50 mg/day of fluvoxamine, an antidepressant believed to influence obsessiveness and/or compulsivity. The medication has been continued for 10 years, as the patient affirms this treatment has made her daydreaming much easier to control. She reports that occasionally the amount of time spent daydreaming will rise and she will increase her dosage of fluvoxamine briefly until it subsides...

Recently, the patient discovered a website containing a surprising number of anonymous postings on the topic of excessive or uncontrolled daydreaming. Numerous posters described patterns and tendencies that appeared remarkably consistent with the patient’s experience (including the original pacing behavior) and emphasized the stress of concealing their imaginary lives and the attendant shame, confusion, and difficulty in controlling their divided realities.

Link to case study.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

December 15, 2008

Neuroscience Boot Camp:

The University of Pennsylvania have announced a Neuroscience Boot Camp. Over 10 days in August 2009, through "a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits", the Boot Camp promises to cover all the neuroscience you need to know to be an informed consumer of neuroscience research.

The Boot Camp is aimed at grad students and professionals from law, policy, education, business, ethics and other fields for which recent neuroscience research could be relevant. The Boot Camp is based out of Penn's Neuroethics centre, so it is sure to be run by people who are used to thinking through the possible implications of findings from cognitive and affective neuroscience research.

Link Neuroscience Boot Camp
Link Neuroscience Boot Camp goals

—tom.

December 13, 2008

The fire within:

The Beautiful Mind is an online gallery of stunning neuroscience photographs, aiming to demonstrate the beauty within.

Although it's currently an online exhibition, it will be touring Europe in 2009 and aims to promote art-science integration.

If you can suffer the shrink wrapped Flash interface, it has some wonderful images. The one featured in this post is a photo of mitochondria from astrocytes in cell culture.

Link to The Beautiful Mind exhibition (thanks Sandra!).

—Vaughan.

December 12, 2008

Human brain tissue found after two thousand years:

CNN has an interesting piece on how an archaeological dig in the North of England has dug up intact human brain tissue, preserved for 2,000 years.

Rachel Cubitt, who was taking part in the dig, described how she felt something move inside the cranium as she cleaned the soil-covered skull's outer surface. Peering through the base of the skull, she spotted an unusual yellow substance.

"It jogged my memory of a university lecture on the rare survival of ancient brain tissue. We gave the skull special conservation treatment as a result, and sought expert medical opinion," she said in a statement on York University's Web site.

A sophisticated CT scanner at York Hospital was then used to produce startlingly clear images of the skull's contents.

Philip Duffey, Consultant Neurologist at the Hospital said: "I'm amazed and excited that scanning has shown structures which appear to be unequivocally of brain origin. I think that it will be very important to establish how these structures have survived, whether there are traces of biological material within them and, if not, what is their composition."

Link to 'Britain's oldest human brain unearthed' (via BoingBoing).

—Vaughan.

December 10, 2008

New Scientist neuroscience top 10 available online:

New Scientist have recently made a years' worth of articles freely available online and have compiled a list of 2008's top 10 neuroscience articles.

There are some fantastic articles in there, my favourite being a piece on Karl Friston's 'unified theory of the brain' which argues that it's essentially a hierarchy of Bayesian probability functions. We discussed it back in May if you want a brief overview.

If you're not sure what Bayesian probability functions are or even if you do and it sounds like a long-shot theory, have a read as it's a thought-provoking idea.

Some of the other pieces are also well worth checking out, and includes topics such as whether autism is an exaggeration of certain otherwise normal brain function, whether the brain has built in randomness and what happens to the sleeping brain, to name but a few.

A great collection and wonderful to see NewSci opening up their archive. Good stuff.

Link to NewSci 2008 brain science top 10.

—Vaughan.

December 09, 2008

Death of a psychologist:

This time last week Marjorie Kisner Mira was leaving home to make one of her regular community visits. She never returned, and after several days of frantic searching her barely recognisable body was found in a deserted area of Medellín, Colombia's second city.

A recently qualified clinical psychologist, Kisner worked for the city's Peace and Reconciliation programme, a project to help ex-paramilitaries reintegrate into society as part of the solution to the ongoing civil war.

Only 34, she lived only a few blocks away from my current home, in the mid-scale barrio of Laureles, and was last seen alive in Villa Hermosa, a more troubled neighbourhood to the north of the city.

Unfortunately, this is not the only tragedy to befall Colombian psychology this week. While writing this post, news of the the murder of the 25-year-old psychologist Yamid Correa has emerged, a victim of the FARC left wing guerilla group.

Correa worked in the rural south of Colombia for the mobile medical unit of the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar, a humanitarian organisation that helps families in crisis. He was travelling with colleagues when their vehicle was attacked, killing Correa and the driver and injuring a social worker, nutritionist and child specialist.

To understand why psychologists are at risk, you need to understand a little about the role of psychology in Colombian society.

Unless you work privately for well-off clients, clinical psychologists are not well paid here, making only 2-3 times the minimum wage. They are, however, well respected. Colombia has an official 'day of the psychologist' in November and psychology is considered key to solving some of the country's social problems.

Some weeks ago I was in one of Medellín's poorest barrios, famous for a Spanish-built library that is imposing and inspiring in equal measure and I was surprised to see that the top floor of the library was dedicated to courses in communication and body language for the local children.

The idea being that if kids are better able to know when trouble is about to kick off, or are better able to resolve conflicts when they do occur, it will lead to a reduction in violence.

Unlike in Europe and the US, where social psychology is largely a topic for research, here it is a vibrant, active and applied discipline that is considered one of the principal methods for dealing with social problems.

It follows that psychologists often working in some of the most dangerous areas, attempting to diminish the cycle of violence by working within the most affected communities. But more than this, they are often working against the people who use violence to maintain control.

It's difficult writing about the problems of Colombia because it a country cursed by the stereotypes of drugs and violence, when it is so much more than the clichés.

It is not that these problems don't exist, it is simply that they are too frequently used to define the country when they are only part of the Colombia's warm and vibrant human fabric.

Marjorie Kisner and Yamid Correa were two examples of how this fabric is woven through society and their deaths are an unfortunate tribute to their dedication to their work and their faith in a better future.

Link to a tribute to Marjorie Kisner from El Colombiano.
Link to news of Yamid Correa's death from El Tiempo.

—Vaughan.

The Psychologist on men, gossip and Kahneman:

The editor of the The Psychologist magazine has just made the full issue of the January 2009 edition available online for free. It's been uploaded to a service called issuu, so you can see every page as it appears in print, something that is usually only available to subscribers.

The Psychologist is the monthly magazine of The British Psychological Society, the professional body for UK psychologists, and aims to tackle current scientific and professional issues.

After a long time of it being, well, a bit dull, it has transformed in recent years and now looks sharp, has a dedicated journalist (friend of Mind Hacks, Christian), and is reaching out to a wider audience.

In the service of full disclosure, I'm an unpaid member of the editorial board, and am now a semi-regular columnist for the magazine discussing cross-cultural and interdisciplinary issues.

You can read my first column on page four where I discuss civil war, Jesuit priests and what psychologists can learn from Latin America.

The magazine also has feature articles on the psychology of gossip, testosterone and male behaviour, stigma and help-seeking, psychology and obesity and an interview with Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

Link to January 2009 issue of The Psychologist.

—Vaughan.

December 08, 2008

Mainstreaming cognitive enhancement:

Nature has just published an article arguing that the use cognition enhancing drugs by healthy individuals should be by accepted by society and appropriately regulated.

The authors are an interesting mix. They consist of several cognitive neuroscientists, a lawyer, an ethicist and the Nature editor-in-chief.

The piece follows a survey and discussion pieces published earlier this year by the magazine to try and kick-start the debate on these widely but often illicitly obtained substances.

It's a thoughtful piece covering both practical and ethical issues which argues seven main points:

Based on our considerations, we call for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs.

We call for an evidence-based approach to the evaluation of the risks and benefits of cognitive enhancement.

We call for enforceable policies concerning the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs to support fairness, protect individuals from coercion and minimize enhancement-related socioeconomic disparities.

We call for a programme of research into the use and impacts of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy individuals.

We call for physicians, educators, regulators and others to collaborate in developing policies that address the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy individuals.

We call for information to be broadly disseminated concerning the risks, benefits and alternatives to pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement.

We call for careful and limited legislative action to channel cognitive-enhancement technologies into useful paths.

However, I can't help but thinking that the piece has the feel of trying to move the use of these drugs from the 'bad' to the 'good' category, where I tend towards thinking that we need to be less concerned about classifying drugs types and more about distinguishing between responsible and irresponsible drug use, which, of course, can differ between situation, purpose, and the specific drug being discussed.

For example, I wonder how easy it is to define 'cognitive enhancers'. If someone has a drink before public speaking to help them relax and so make fewer mistakes - are they using a cognitive enhancer?

Link to 'Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy'.

—Vaughan.

December 03, 2008

Technology to see through other people's eyes:

Neurotech analyst Zack Lynch has an interesting post on his Brain Waves blog about trying out the EyeSeeCam, a wearable camera that tracks eye movements so it can film exactly where the person is looking, allowing others to literally see the world through somebody else's eyes.

Lynch wore the device while at the recent Society for Neuroscience conference and describes how it works:

EyeSeeCam is based on the combination of two technologies: an eye tracking and a camera motion device that operates as an artificial eye. The challenges in designing such a system are mobility, high bandwidth, and low total latency. These challenges are met by a newly developed lightweight eye tracker that is able to synchronously measure binocular eye positions at up to 600 Hertz. The camera motion device consists of a parallel kinematics setup with a backlash-free gimbal joint that is driven by piezo actuators with no reduction gears. As a result, the latency between eye rotations and the camera is as low as 10 milliseconds.

EyeSeeCam provides a new tool for fundamental studies in vision research, particularly, on human gaze behavior in the real world. This prototype is a first attempt to combine free user mobility with biological image stabilization and unrestricted exploration of the visual surround in a man-made technical vision system.

Does this remind anyone else of Strange Days?

Link to Zack Lynch on wearing the EyeSeeCam.
Link to scientific paper with cool video.

—Vaughan.

Thanks for the memories HM:

The densely amnesic Patient HM, one of the most famous and important patients in the history of neuroscience, has passed away.

HM, now revealed as Henry G. Molaison, suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy that was not helped by existing drugs and so was referred to neurosurgeon William Scoville in 1953.

Scoville attempted a new type of operation to remove the parts of the brain which triggered the seizures, cutting out the majority of the hippocampus on both sides of the brain, along with the amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus.

This left HM with a dense antereograde amnesia, meaning that while his memory for pre-surgery events was generally very good, he was unable to create new conscious long-term memories.

His ability to learn new skills and obtain conditioned associations remained intact, however, and the differences in his memory abilities and the precise knowledge of which parts of the brain were missing allowed some of the first insights into the neuropsychology of memory.

The initial study on HM and his dense amnesia was first published in 1957 by Scoville and the young psychologist Brenda Milner. It has since become one of the most widely cited and widely taught of all neuropsychology case studies.

However, HM continued to participate in research studies since his initial appearance in the scientific literature and was known among researchers for his warm and easy going personality.

The most recent study on HM was published only this year and examined the linguistic content of his crossword puzzles, of which he'd been a fan of for the whole of his adult life. The study examined whether his language skills had been affected by years of dense amnesia.

They hadn't, suggesting that once acquired, the maintenance of written language skills doesn't seem to require intact medial temporal lobes.

Much of the later work with HM was completed in partnership with neuropsychologist Suzanne Corkin, who wrote an article [pdf] for Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2002 that was part tribute and part research summary, detailing his massive contribution to our understanding of memory.

UPDATE: The New York Times has an excellent obituary for HM.

Link to announcement of HM's death (via MeFi).
Link to classic case study.
pdf of 2002 review article.

—Vaughan.

December 01, 2008

SciAmMind on brain injury, stimulation and diversity:

The new Scientific American Mind has just arrived and has a number of fantastic freely available features articles online.

One of the most interesting articles is about post-accident brain treatments, used in the hours and minutes following severe injury, to protect the brain and minimize the chances of long-term cognitive problems.

The best hope for improved healing lies neither in new medications, which have been disappointing so far, nor in exotic fixes involving stem cells and neural regeneration, which are at least a decade away, researchers say. Rather the biggest gains will likely result from advances in emergency room and intensive care practices that curtail the secondary damage from TBI. The methods include slowing the brain’s metabolism with cooling techniques, removing part of the skull to relieve intracranial pressure and injecting an experimental polymer “glue” to repair damaged brain cells.

Other articles discuss mild traumatic brain injury and the role of emotional disturbance in the following impairments, deep brain stimulation, the difficulty of making life changing decisions after our 20s, and intelligence throughout the animal kingdom.

Link to latest SciAmMind.

—Vaughan.

November 25, 2008

The myth of urban loneliness:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

November 23, 2008

The perils of not realising scaffolding is a metaphor:

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

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

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

Yes, I'm making Jerome Bruner jokes.

Yes, I really should get out more.

Yes, I know I've promised that before.

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

—Vaughan.

November 22, 2008

New RadioLab on the psychology of choice:

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

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

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

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

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

Link to programme webpage with streaming audio and mp3.

—Vaughan.

November 20, 2008

The excellent Cognition and Culture blog:

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

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

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

Link to Cognition and Culture blog.

—Vaughan.

November 19, 2008

Shaking the foundations of the hidden bias test:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

An epidemic of depression?:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to PsychiatricTimes article 'An epidemic of depression'.

—Vaughan.

November 17, 2008

Ganzfeld hallucinations:

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

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

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

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

Some of the descriptions of hallucinations are really quite striking:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to Cortex special issue.

—Vaughan.

New psychiatric diagnoses developed in secret:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

November 13, 2008

Online psychosis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

November 10, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

November 09, 2008

Holy hypnosis sent to baffle materialists:

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

November 05, 2008

Why are people reluctant to exchange lottery tickets?:

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

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

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

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

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

Risen JL, Gilovich T.

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

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

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

Link to paper.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

Doubting lie detectors and blushing beauties:

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

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

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

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

You gotta respect that.

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

—Vaughan.

November 04, 2008

What's driving voter decison-making:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

October 31, 2008

Brain scans and buyer beware:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to WashPost review of 'Buy-ology'.

—Vaughan.

October 30, 2008

Neuropod focuses on the autistic spectrum:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

October 29, 2008

Drug addiction and factory pharming :

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

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

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

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

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

Link to SciAm 1950s narcotics farm slide show.

—Vaughan.

October 28, 2008

Online opium museum:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

October 24, 2008

Milgram's culture shock :

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

Creationists unaware of past, doomed to repeat it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

2008-10-24 Spike activity:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

October 23, 2008

Submit your entries for Encephalon, this Monday:

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

Neuropsychiatry in Venezuela:

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

October 20, 2008

Colombian Congress of Psychiatry report:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

October 16, 2008

Memory, brainwashing and the Cold War:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to part two of The Living Dead.

—Vaughan.

October 15, 2008

Test your moral radar :

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

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

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

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

Link to the 'Moral Sense Test'.

—Vaughan.

Psychedelic Brittanica:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

October 09, 2008

Bogotá bound:

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

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

—Vaughan.

October 05, 2008

Medellín at last:

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

October 02, 2008

SciAmMind tackles implants, scans, death and terror:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to October SciAmMind.

—Vaughan.

October 01, 2008

Neuropod on depression, theatre, speech and credit:

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

September 30, 2008

A quick fix for the soul or slow milking of the cash cow:

An article in The Guardian by psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues that new psychological therapies are driven by a capitalist approach to mental well-being and that they commoditise the soul.

This article is the latest salvo aimed at bashing cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), an evidence-based psychological treatment which has inspired the ire of psychoanalysts for recently being heavily funded by the UK government.

CBT is a psychological therapy that typically looks at the link between thoughts, feelings and behaviour and is usually time-limited to 12 or 16 sessions. It is evidence-based with meta-analyses and randomized controlled trials showing it to be effective for various conditions and it is subject to improvement and testing by cognitive science.

Not only that, but the research has been almost entirely funded independent of industry or special interest groups, meaning some of the major conflicts of that pervade mental health are absent (although some remain relevant).

Leader's article repeats several common accusations which, when not plain wrong, are just a bit bizarre.

Chief among these are the fact that CBT does not go 'deep enough' and doesn't address the root problem, and this is apparently related to a 'quick fix' capitalist view of human nature (a criticism often made by UK psychologist Oliver James).

There are two parts to the 'doesn't go deep enough' criticism. The first is that psychoanalysis says that symptoms are not the problem, they're just the expression of an underlying conflict, so if you treat the symptom another will appear in its place unless you've dealt with the unconscious turmoil. Virtually the only verifiable aspect of this is the idea of 'symptom substitution' which is both testable and entirely without evidence, as we discussed previously.

Leader refers to the fact that something could be empirically testable as the 'new rhetoric of "science"' (yes, those are really scare quotes around the word science), but that aside, psychoanalysis certainly does go 'deeper' than CBT. This is because it continues for years on end.

Owing to the fact that public health organisations are reluctant to fund poorly validated treatments, there are few psychoanalysts who work in the health public system, so a typical session from the many hundreds of you will need can set you back about £60-100 pounds a hour in the UK.

I only mention this because it strikes me that a psychoanalyst is the last person who should be accusing anyone of mental capitalism, let alone focusing his criticism on a therapy that's widely available on the public health system.

The rest of the article is full of curious straw men, saying that CBT aims to 'correct' people's thinking (it doesn't, it trains people to test themselves for how useful their assumptions and beliefs are), that it is unconcerned with early experiences (it isn't and considers that many of our assumptions come from earlier life and childhood), and that symptoms are just seen as meaningless aberrations of the mind (if this was the case, why would CBT even try to tackle them?).

A further irony is that when actually tested with "science" - sorry, science - psychoanalytically-inspired therapies of the briefer kind actually do quite well for the limited evidence that exists. This seems to be particularly the case for people diagnosed with 'personality disorder' - a vague and controversial category but one which suggests the person has pervasive problems with sustaining relationships.

Interestingly, transference is one of the genuinely important, testable and innovative ideas to come out psychoanalysis, and it specifically describes how experiences of past relationships affect how we interpret social interactions.

Unfortunately, psychoanalysis has always had something a little homeopathic about it, suggesting that it treats people 'holistically' and so empirical studies and "science" are irrelevant. Oddly, Freud was quite convinced of the opposite - that he was doing science, despite virtually avoiding anything scientific during the development of his now famous therapy.

It comes down to the fact that if you want any particular therapy funded by the government or your health insurance company you need to do studies to show it's effective.

Now let me give my statement of 'full disclosure' - I'm trained in CBT and have used it regularly. I don't think it's perfect or a cure all, but it is a very useful and effective way of working with distressed people, despite its drawbacks.

I think a lot of psychoanalysis is bunk but I also think other parts, like transference, are wonderful and innovative. Psychoanalytically-inspired therapies seem also to be powerful and effective on the basis of the little rigorous evidence that exists.

What's odd is that rather than being pleased that a psychological therapy is being widely promoted and throwing their ideas into the mix, some psychoanalysts seem to have gone on the attack and retreated into the the "we're above science" position, while this actually seems a perfect opportunity to take the chance to test the evidence for psychoanalytic treatments while the funders are listening.

I'm constantly struck by the irony that for a practice that focuses on resolving conflicts, psychoanalysis has a long tradition of infighting. This latest episode seems to be the most recent manifestation of this recurrent pattern. Troubled infancy perhaps?

UPDATE: With uncanny timing, today's New England Journal of Medicine has published a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of long-term (1 year+) psychodynamic psychotherapy in complex mental disorders, finding it a useful and effective treatment. It's not a huge sample of studies (11 RCTs and 12 observational studies) but clearly suggests the benefit of this type of psychological treatment (thanks Ben!).

Link to oddly acerbic 'A quick fix for the soul' article.

—Vaughan.

September 29, 2008

The war within:

The latest edition of The New Yorker has the tragic story of a US Marine who became famous after writing about his struggle with PTSD for the Marine Corps Gazette, met the President as a result, but who later killed himself owing to the intensity of his experiences.

The New Yorker Article weaves the story of decorated Staff Sergeant Travis Twiggs with commentary on the effects of PTSD and the current support for US veterans who have been traumatised by their experiences.

Compared with other American wars, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be producing victims at a high rate. A recent RAND Corporation study estimated that three hundred thousand veterans of America’s post-9/11 wars—nearly twenty per cent of those who have served—are suffering from P.T.S.D. or major depression, and many more cases are expected to surface in the years ahead. This elevated rate is generally attributed to the rigors of a long war being fought without conscription: multiple deployments and heavy use of National Guard and reserve units. And on the ground, at unit level, the discouragement of anyone with stress symptoms from asking for help is intense. The same RAND study found that, mainly because of the stigma still attached to P.T.S.D., only half of those afflicted have sought treatment.

Twiggs was apparently a highly experienced, highly decorated and trusted marine and the article demonstrates one of the key findings of military psychiatry: every man has his limit.

The holy grail of military psychiatry has been to develop a way of predicting who will suffer psychiatric illness before deployment but this has never been realised because the biggest predictor is not the character or attributes of the soldier, but the intensity of the fighting to which they're exposed.

Saying that, there are other factors which do contribute, and unfortunately the US military seem to have a policy of extended and lengthy tours which may explain why rates of PTSD are higher in the deployed US military than in the soldiers of other forces in the same conflict.

The New Yorker article is vivid and tragic in equal measure, but helps to illustrate the personal experiences behind the statistics.

Link to New Yorker article 'The Last Tour' (via Furious Seasons).
Link to Travis Twiggs' article for the Marine Corps Gazette.

—Vaughan.

Neuroplastic fantastic:

ABC Radio National's All in the Mind had a two part series on the implications of neuroplasticity - particularly the discovery that the brain can physically 'rewire' itself through adulthood, albeit in a more limited way in comparison to the process that occurs during childhood.

I found the second part a little more satisfying than the first as it's a bit more focused, but it's also interesting as it mostly discusses the relationship between neuroplasticity and psychotherapy.

The interviewee is psychiatrist Norman Doidge who is obviously quite a committed Freudian and argues than many of Freud's ideas can be now understood in terms of neuroplasticity.

Some of his comments are provocative, some innovative and others a little too much like dogma re-interpreting modern neuroscience, but it's a fascinating conversation none-the-less.

One of the difficulties with the term 'neuroplasticity' is that it's actually fairly vague. It is often applied to normal neuronal changes (during memory formation, for example) to the growth of new neurons (neurogenesis) to the changes in activation after brain injury seen on neuroimaging studies and to improvements in abilities after brain injury even when no direct measurement of the brain has taken place.

This means it can be all things to everyone and easily fits into any other explanation of change without necessarily adding anything.

We know that neuroplasticity happens. Saying how it happens is key, and a measure of a good explanation is where this knowledge helps us understand the cognitive and behavioural changes better.

Indeed, Doidge does a good job of discussing how various forms of neuroplasticity might reflect different types of behavioural changes, which makes the programme time well spent.

Link to part one of 'The power of plasticity'
Link to part two.

—Vaughan.

September 28, 2008

Down on ecstasy:

An unintentionally funny headline from The Telegraph: "Home Office considers downgrading ecstasy", presumably to just a general feeling of contentment.

The serious story behind the headline is the annual ritual in the UK where the government asks a panel of scientific advisors about the link between the legal classification of drugs and the scientific evidence for their harm, and then ignores them.

This recent review is being headed up by psychopharmacologist David Nutt who was also involved in the government commissioned report that used the scientific evidence to rank recreational drugs, both legal and illegal, by their dangerousness. As is traditional, the list bore no relation to the legal classification and was ignored.

Not that it matters, as a recent World Health Organisation study that found that drug laws in any particular country were not related to the extent of drug use by the population.

There's nothing like an evidence-based drugs policy.

Link to Telegraph story (thanks Tenyen!).
Link to World Health organisation study in PLoS Medicine.

—Vaughan.

September 27, 2008

Travels, posting frequency and Medellín:

Apologies if Mind Hacks posts are a little irregular over the next week or so. I'm currently in the process of leaving London and moving to the beautiful city of Medellín, Colombia, where I'll be working with some fantastic neuropsychiatrists at the Universidad de Antioquia and the Hospital Universitario San Vicente de Paúl.

I leave a week today and I shall be continuing with Mind Hacks although I might be a bit scrambled by the move and the jet lag for a while.

It looks like I shall be discovering a great deal about Latin American cognitive science over the next few months, so I'll try to pass on some of the highlights here.

Other than that, normal service should continue!

If you're interested in neuropsychiatry in Colombia, the open-access national psychiatry journal Revista Colombiana de Psiquiatría published a special issue last year that gave an impressive review of the area and it includes summaries in English.

Link to full-text of special issue.

—Vaughan.

September 26, 2008

Seeing double with Eli Lilly's antidepressant:

The Clinical Psych Blog has caught Eli Lilly publishing identical data on its new antidepressant drug in two separate scientific papers. This is a dubious practice often carried out to make a drug seem to have more supporting evidence than than has actually been collected.

The study, originally published in the Jan 2008 edition of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry tested the new antidepressant duloxetine (trade name 'Cymbalta') and looked at symptoms of both depression and physical pain.

Eli Lilly have been trying to promote duloxetine as a drug that helps with physical pain for a while, despite the fact that a meta-analysis published earlier this year found that there was no evidence for its pain killing properties.

This new study looks at whether the drug helps physical pain when patients are switched from traditional SSRI medication. It finds that it does help physical pain, but doesn't include a control group, so really doesn't tell us anything specific about the drug. Maybe people were just getting better anyway. We can't tell.

However, a study about to appear in the Journal of Psychiatry Research uses exactly the same data set. In fact, the only thing that's different is there's a couple of minor additional subscale results.

Publishing different articles on the same data is not necessarily foul play, but protocol says you do two things. The first is to say it's the same data that's been published before so everyone knows where they stand, and the second is you report a new and scientifically interesting analysis.

This new article does neither, contrary to the rules of the scientific journal Eli Lilly have published in, but also contrary to the general spirit of honesty and fair play that allows doctors to reasonably assess the evidence upon which they base their treatment decisions.

Clinical Psych Blog notes a few more suspicious things about the articles (new authors mysteriously appear, for example) and looks at the study in more depth if you want the full scientific details.

Also good if just want to see a major pharmaceutical company get caught with their pants down.

Link to Clinical Psych Blog on dodgy duplicate publication.

—Vaughan.

September 25, 2008

Sleepless in Victorian London - Holmes on the case:

The October issue of The Psychologist has just hit the wires and two of articles, freely available online, have a fascinating take on the Victorian mind. The first looks at the 19th century understanding of insomnia, and the second on what master detective Sherlock Holmes can teach modern cognitive psychology. The game is afoot!

The article on the Victorian's view on insomnia is fascinating as it illustrates how far our thinking has come in terms of the relationship between body and mind.

Despite the fact that we now think of sleep as primarily to do with the mind and brain, early Victorian theories rarely considered these as important and instead suggested seemingly odd 'treatments' focused on the blood, for example.

Over time people started becoming more brain centric, seemingly due to the discovery of effective sleep-inducing medications, and more aware of the effects of stress, anxiety and thought on sleep.

The article on Holmes and cognitive psychology is by two authors who research the psychology of expertise. Case studies of experts are often used to illustrate the theories but in this case, however, they argue that Sherlock Holmes could serve equally as well.

To this day, research on expertise has devoted little attention to expert reasoning, and the few available studies on this theme mostly deal with inductive reasoning. However, experts use abductive reasoning in many situations. Abductive reasoning consists of starting from observed data and deriving from these data the most likely explanation or hypothesis. From this explanation, the data can be deduced by implication (e.g. Hanson, 1958). Holmes clearly explains the method of reasoning to Watson in A Study in Scarlet (1887):

‘In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.’ ‘I confess’, said I, ‘that I do not quite follow you.’

‘I hardly expected that you would. Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically.’

In this example, Holmes describes in his words, but also with precision, the nature of abductive reasoning.

The only drawback is that the article finishes just as it gets going, but a great idea none-the-less.

Link to 'Insomnia – Victorian style'.
Link to 'Can Sherlock Holmes help cognitive psychology?'.

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

—Vaughan.

September 24, 2008

Psychiatrists still participating in banned interrogations:

Using documents obtained under the freedom of information act, the New England Journal of Medicine has just published an eye-opening article on the involvement of psychiatrists on 'war on terror' interrogations who participate despite their professional ban.

The piece is timely because American psychologists have just been banned from these interrogations after a drawn out internal battle. However, the main psychiatric body swiftly and unequivocally banned their members from doing the same in 2006.

As we speculated previously, these bans are unlikely to have much effect on the individual level owing to the secret nature of the work and the consequent difficulty in finding and disciplining members who disregard ethical regulations.

This new article demonstrates that the ethical rules are indeed being flouted by some psychiatrists, as military documents show several have been trained as members of the Behavioural Science Consultation or 'biscuit teams' that work with interrogation techniques condemned as torture by the UN and Red Cross.

Yet documents recently provided to us by the U.S. Army in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) make clear that the Department of Defense still wants doctors to be involved and continues to resist the positions taken by medicine's professional associations... The memo appears to claim that psychiatrists should be able to provide advice regarding the interrogation of individual detainees if they are not providing medical care to detainees, their advice is not based on medical information they originally obtained for medical purposes, and their input is "warranted by compelling national security interests." The advice envisaged by the memo includes "evaluat[ing] the psychological strengths and vulnerabilities of detainees" and "assist[ing] in integrating these factors into a successful interrogation."...

Other documents obtained under FOIA indicate that between July 2006 and October 2007, five Army psychiatrists were put through the "behavioral science consultation" training course. The policy memo raises critical questions about that course, among them, Why are consultants receiving training in "learned helplessness" — a term that invokes the work of psychologist Martin Seligman, who used electric shocks to induce passive behavior in dogs and destroy their will to escape?

The NEJM has also made the US Military's 'behavioural science consultantion policy' it gained through the freedom of information act available online and it makes for interesting if not slightly disturbing reading.

It clearly states that 'biscuit teams' can comprise of psychologists, psychiatrists and physicians and notes that 'behavioural science technicians' must have at least 10 years experience in mental health.

The document constantly re-states the ethical obligations of the team members but is full of contradictions - for example, by stating that members must remain within "professional ethical boundaries established by their professional associations" despite the fact that the document is dated after psychiatrists were banned from taking part.

It also notes later that ethical codes do not supersede "US and international law, regulations and DoD [Department of Defense] policy" suggesting that they can be overruled where necessary.

It also contains some remarkably vague statements about the confidentiality of medical and mental health information and whether it can be used in an interrogation - apparently not when it could result in "inhumane treatment or would not be in accordance with applicable law".

This is telling, considering that the NEJM reported in 2005 that at Guantanamo Bay "health information has been routinely available to behavioral science consultants and others who are responsible for crafting and carrying out interrogation strategies".

Link to NEJM on psychiatrists in banned interrogations (via CC).
Link to US Military's 'behavioural science consultantion policy'.

—Vaughan.

September 23, 2008

Political bias in the interpretation of neuroscience:

Slate has an interesting article arguing that there is a pervasive liberal bias in the interpretation of studies on political beliefs that casts right-wing voters in a bad light.

You'll have to forgive the spectacularly wrong-headed first paragraph (summary: this week the Obama campaign has been described as panicking, so why have neuroscience studies suggested liberal voters are less fearful?) but it does make an interesting and important point.

The piece riffs on a recent study published in Science that reported that conservatives show greater skin conductance and higher blink rates to threatening images than liberals, indicating higher levels of arousal.

This was widely interpreted as suggesting conservatives are more fearful than liberals. Although the study didn't ask about fear directly, both blinking and sweating have been linked to elevated fear responses before.

The researchers themselves were very careful simply to discuss the results and didn't make any value judgements on their claims, but the Slate article makes the point that it was widely discussed as if the study found a weakness in conservative voters.

These interpretations are interesting, because they immediately make a value judgement about whether the fear response is appropriate or not. As the Slate piece notes, another interpretation is that liberal participants were less emotionally responsive.

Most pointedly, the article also suggests a wider bias in the interpretation of studies on individual politics so differences linked to conservative views are cast in a negative light, and that this could be due to the overwhelming number of Democrats in science.

Unfortunately, the piece doesn't do a good job of separating the scientific findings, the researchers' interpretation and the subsequent commentaries (although no more so than other science articles) but the main thrust is relevant to the distinction between data and its meaning.

This is a pervasive problem in psychology and neuroscience and one researchers are very careful to avoid, at least in the scientific literature. That is, not to over-interpret the findings or the significance of a single study.

Individual studies cannot be interpreted without reference to other scientific work, not least because the methods are usually drawn from a base of other studies which have validated them. Individual studies also rarely provide evidence that any value-based interpretations are correct.

However, this also means that critiques that aim to counter the negative value judgements based on a dissection of the methods without reference to other studies are equally as invalid.

This was the case with a prior Slate article that had some valid points but was generally remarkably off key for this reason as it picked apart the details of the method without reference to the amount of evidence for their validity.

It's a bit like saying "a neurologist says my friend has brain damage, but he used a Babinski sign test that involved stroking the bottom of his foot - but the foot is at the other end of the body!".

Even seemingly implausible methods can be valid because science is full of counter-intuitive findings. The important thing is not how they seem on the surface, but what other scientific evidence supports them.

Political bias in the interpretation of studies on personal politics is widespread, so beware of any over-interpretation in either direction, and take anyone who uses a single study to make their point with a pinch of salt.

UPDATE: Wired Science has some good commentary on this post and notes I may have been too hasty (i.e. wrong!) in my judgement of the press coverage of the recent study, which was generally more careful than I had given it credit for.

Link to Slate article on bias in neuroscience interpretation.
Link to text of recent Science study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

September 22, 2008

Finally, APA bans work on 'war on terror' interrogations:

After media allegations of psychologists' role in torture, senior resignations, accusations of rigged committee votes and underhand tactics, a partial condemnation, a clarification, an 'anti-torture' candidate standing for the presidency and the forcing of a referendum, the American Psychological Association has finally and unequivocally banned participation of its members in military interrogations after a popular vote.

The debate has largely been sparked by the existence of psychology-led Behavioural Science Consultation Teams (aka 'biscuit teams') in Guantanamo Bay who study inmates and recommend 'personalised' interrogation techniques - some of which were described as "tantamount to torture" in a leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross and explicitly condemned as torture by the United Nations.

The text of the new resolution states that "psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights".

The effect of the ban on these practices is questionable, however, and the influence is more likely to be at the organisational level.

Despite the psychiatric and medical associations' immediate and unequivocal ban on their members' participation in 'war on terror' interrogations, the complicity of medical staff is widely reported.

The fact that APA membership is optional for many psychologists and that most of the contested interrogations occur in secret or closed facilities means that disciplining individual psychologists will remain difficult at best.

However, the ban will mean that the APA will find it difficult to show any public support for the role of psychology in interrogations, and, perhaps more importantly, to make explicit organisational links between the psychologists' governing body and the US intelligence services.

Some have speculated that the two years of APA heel dragging suggest a more chummy relationship with the military than has been admitted publicly and this new ban may be a bigger blow than is obvious if this turns out to be true.

Link to APA announcement of ballot result and full ban.
Link to good write-up from the New York Sun (via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

September 17, 2008

The divining sage:

The New York Times has an interesting piece on salvia divinorum, a powerful psychedelic plant that's legal in most countries and is widely sold on the internet.

The plant is in the same family as sage and mint and was originally used ceremonially by the Mazatec of Mexico for spiritual rituals, owing to its reality altering properties. It contains the drug Salvinorin A which is often cited as one of the most potent hallucinogenic compounds ever discovered.

It's fascinating for a number of reasons, not least because it can completely and intensely detach the user from reality, lasts no more than 15 minutes, and works on an opioid receptor in the brain - unlike most other hallucinogens that typically affect serotonin (e.g. LSD) or glutamate (e.g. ketamine).

Unlike opiates such as heroin and morphine which mainly work on the mu opioid receptor, salvia seems to have a unique and specific affinity for the kappa opioid receptor and so has very different effects.

The NYT piece discusses its rising popularity and the prevalence of trip videos on YouTube where incapacitated users are filmed while off their heads. Apparently, it is becoming increasingly outlawed in the US at the state level and apparently the federal government are considering banning it.

I tried salvia once and found the experience very intense but quite unpleasant, mainly for the deep physical discomfort it caused (I wonder whether this is explained by evidence suggesting it also inhibits the mu opioid receptor - known to modulate pain perception). It's also quite incapacitating and hardly seemed to qualify as a 'recreational drug' in any sense of the word.

Fascinating compound scientifically though, and one which is likely to teach us a great deal about the little known role of the opioid system in perception.

Link to NYT piece on salvia.

—Vaughan.

September 15, 2008

Reminiscence competition winner:

Congratulations to Jon C, the winner of the tickets to see Reminiscence, which closes at the end of this week on Saturday September 20th.

Just a last word on the play to say many thanks to everyone who came along to the post-show science forum last Sunday, it was a pleasure debating with you, and just a reminder that there's another one after the matinee performance this Wednesday as well.

Christian has posted a brief write-up of the show where he discusses some of the ideas behind it and also describes me as "mesmerisingly encyclopedic", which I'm guessing is a journalistic euphemism for "a bit geeky".

Link to BPSRD write-up of Reminiscence.
Link to play website.

—Vaughan.

September 11, 2008

Judges insanity decisions show same sex bias:

An interesting abstract from the latest Nordic Journal of Psychiatry: when given otherwise identical case reports of murderers marked either male or female, psychiatrists and psychology students were more likely to declare women 'not guilty by reason of insanity'. In contrast, judges showed an interesting same sex bias, in that they were more likely to declare a person of the same sex 'legally insane' than a perpetrator of the opposite sex.

Evidence of gender bias in legal insanity evaluations: a case vignette study of clinicians, judges and students.

Nord J Psychiatry. 2008;62(4):273-8.

Yourstone J, Lindholm T, Grann M, Svenson O.

Forensic psychiatric decision-making plays a key role in the legal process of homicide cases. Research show that women defendants have a higher likelihood of being declared legally insane and being diverted to hospital. This study attempted to explore if this gender difference is explained by biases in the forensic psychiatric assessments. Participants were 45 practicing forensic psychiatric clinicians, 46 chief judges and 80 psychology students. Participants received a written vignette describing a homicide case, with either a female or a male perpetrator. The results suggested strong gender effects on legal insanity judgements. Forensic psychiatric clinicians and psychology students assessed the case information as more indicative of legal insanity if the perpetrator was a woman than a man. Judges assessed offenders of their own gender, as they were more likely to be declared legally insane than a perpetrator of the opposite gender. Implications of and possible ways to minimize such gender biases in forensic psychiatric evaluations need to be thoroughly considered by the legal system.

Is it me, or does the first author already look like she's just stepped out of some CSI spin-off?

Link to PubMed entry for study.

—Vaughan.

September 10, 2008

Reminiscence tickets competition:

The lovely production team behind the London neurology and reality play Reminiscence have been kind enough to offer Mind Hacks readers the chance to win two tickets to see the piece on the date of your choice.

It runs until the 20th September in Jackson's Lane Theatre in Highgate and all you have to do to enter is just email before about 9am Friday Morning (Queen's Standard Time) when I shall stick all the email addresses into a spreadsheet, sort by a randomly generated number, and pick out the one on top.

If you want enter, just send an email to:

reminiscencetickets@googlemail.com

I've caught it in rehearsal and shall be seeing it 'live' for the first time tonight, and I can't wait!

Just to reiterate, I'm not financially connected to the play in anyway but have had the pleasure of working with the team to discuss the mind, brain and disturbances of reality and I hope as many people get to see it as possible.

Link to more information in earlier post.

—Vaughan.

September 09, 2008

Reminiscence opening:

Neuroscience and fabric of reality play Reminiscence opens tonight in London. For those not able to make it, the company have put images from the production online, which are quite beautiful in themselves.

Mrs O'Connor is a woman who develops a temporal lobe epilepsy that triggers hallucinated music and memories that seem to help her come to terms with a lost youth.

You'll notice the set is actually a huge backdrop and one of the amazing things about the play is that it literally uses this fabric to model the mindscape of the main character.

It is not only the surface for some stunning visual projections, but is dynamically reshaped as Mrs O'Connor moves through the story and shifts from reality, to memory, to hallucination.

As science has told as that much of our remembering is reconstruction, the play centres around whether her seizure-sparked memories are real, or just fragments woven together to best fit what she hopes is true.

While Mrs O'Connor is tempted to succumb to her recollections, her neurologist is worried about the consequences of unchecked epilepsy, and both have to weigh neuroscience against the meaning of her memories.

All this is woven together with some stunning original music, played by the cast, who are also professional musicians and singers as well as actors.

I've been lucky enough to spend many happy hours discussing neuroscience with the cast and writers, and if you're keen to come and join the discussion, I'll be part of the free science forums that happen after the matinee performances on Sunday September 14th and Wednesday September 17th.

You can come along to these even if you saw the play on another day.

The play runs from 9 – 20 September at the Jackson's Lane Theatre in Highgate.

Hopefully, I should have some more exciting news shortly!

Link to Reminiscence information.
Link to online ticket sales.
Link to photos of the production.

—Vaughan.

September 02, 2008

NeuroPod on altruism, imprinting, eating and magic:

The August edition of the Nature Neuroscience podcast, NeuroPod, arrived online after a summer break with some fascinating discussions on everything from altruism to magic.

Perhaps the most interesting bit is on genomic imprinting - a curious effect where the same gene may be expressed differently depending on whether you inherited it from your mother or your father.

The most widely known examples are the Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes, both of which are genetic disorders linked to learning disabilities and neurological problems.

Both are caused by a partial deletion of genes from chromosome 15. When this is inherited from the mother, it causes Angelman syndrome, when inherited from the father, it causes Prader-Willi syndrome.

A recent opinion piece published in Nature, written by sociologist Christopher Badcock and biologist Bernard Crespi, argued that genetic imprinting may be key to a much wider range of conditions - including many of the more common psychiatric disorders such as depression or schizophrenia.

We believe that psychiatric illness may be less to do with the genes a mother and father pass down, and more to do with which genes they program for expression. By our hypothesis, a hidden battle of the sexes — where a mother’s egg and a father’s sperm engage in an evolutionary struggle to turn gene expression up or down — could play a crucial part in determining the balance or imbalance of an offspring’s brain. If this proves true, it would greatly clarify the diagnosis of mental disorders. It might even make it possible to reset the mind’s balance with targeted drugs.

The article then goes on to propose the idea (presumably related to a similar Chris Frith theory) that autism and psychosis might be 'diametric opposites', echoing an argument they expanded on more fully in a larger article earlier this year.

I've not read the bigger piece, but my first thought is how they manage to account for the fact that people with Asperger's or autism can become psychotic. I shall look forward to seeing what they have to say in more detail.

Anyway, the podcast discusses the main points, as well as getting some comments from some more sceptical scientists.

Link to NeuroPod homepage (now with flash streaming).
mp3 of August Neuropod.
Link to piece on genetic imprinting and psychiatric disorder.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

August 29, 2008

Minds and myths:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

August 27, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

August 26, 2008

Reminiscence rising:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to Reminiscence website and details.

—Vaughan.

August 20, 2008

Placebo - interactive ingredients:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

August 18, 2008

Neurowar report online:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to online report.
pdf of executive summary.

—Vaughan.

August 14, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to Boston Globe op-ed.

—Vaughan.

August 13, 2008

Interrupting Napoleon on the genetics of mental illness:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Vaughan.

August 08, 2008

Preminiscence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to details of Reminiscence play.

—Vaughan.

August 01, 2008

Avalance of new SciAmMind articles:

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

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

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

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

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

Link to August 2008 SciAmMind.

—Vaughan.

July 30, 2008

Promising Alzheimer's drug announced:

The results of a moderate sized trial on a new Alzheimer's drug have just been announced and the results, if reliable, may suggest that the treatment is one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the century.

Alzheimer's disease is a type of dementia, a degenerative disorder of where the brain starts to degrade more quickly than would be expected through normal ageing.

One of the common features of Alzheimer's disease is the accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles in the brain. These are clumps of tau protein that accumulate inside dying neurons. There have been debates about whether these cause the problems or are just the result, but most researchers are now coming round to the idea that tau protein tangles are the main problem.

The drug has been given the tradename 'remben' and was initially thought to be useful as it dissolved tangles in the test tube. It has just been tested in a Phase II trial which have been announced at an Alzheimer's research conference.

The results of the first announced trial has not been published but there are details on the conference press release which I've included below the fold.

What's most impressive from the preliminary details, is that the drug seemed to both slow or even stop cognitive decline in some cases, as well as eliminating the decline in blood flow in the areas usually most affected by the disease suggesting that it is halting the spread of tangles.

Interestingly, the company behind the drug, TauRx, have just launched their website today to catch the wave of publicity.

However, I'm wondering whether there's more to it than meets the eye because, if I've got it right, the drug isn't actually new.

Its chemical name is methylthioninium chloride but it's also known as methylene blue and was synthesised way back in 1876. It was shown to be active against malaria by Paul Ehrlich in 1891 and