Mind Hacks: News Archives

May 07, 2008

Soft money in psychiatry muddies manuals, airwaves:

Mental health blog Furious Seasons has just alerted me to some recent revelations about conflicts of interest in psychiatry. More than half of the new committee members in charge of the next edition of the psychiatrists' diagnostic 'bible', the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), have ties to the drug industry.

Furthermore, an article for Slate reveals that a supposedly 'independent' NPR national radio show on the safety of antidepressants had three guests, a host and the production company, all of whom received money from drug companies.

While the financial interests of the DSM committee must be declared, drug company links were not revealed in relation to the radio programme and the production company seem to be being evasive about discussing the situation.

Apparently, the committee for the new DSM (the DSM-V) largely parallels the situation with the previous version, where over half of the members had drug company ties.

Because of the way the US health system woks, US health insurers tend only to pay for treatments when a specific diagnosis has been made, so it is in the drug companies' interest to influence the classification of mental illnesses to make prescribing more likely.

However, there are rumours that the insurance industry and getting rather fed up of having to pay out on potentially drug company influenced diagnoses, and are considering funding research of their own into the validity of diagnoses to counter this trend.

The two news items mentioned above seem to be the work of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest that campaigns for transparency in science education and policy.

At the end of the Slate article, the organisation note that they have a list of leading scientists who do not have links to industry. Journalists are welcome to contact them if they want a source free of potential biases.

Link to Slate article 'Stealth Marketers'.
Link to CSPI news item on DSM-V committee.

—Vaughan.

May 03, 2008

Sexual PsyOps:

We've covered some of the historical archives of propaganda material before on Mind Hacks, but ex-US PsyOps Sergeant Major Herbert Friedman has created an archive of historical propaganda that was specifically themed to target sexual insecurities.

The page is not the easiest to read owing to the rather rough and ready formatting, but it has a fascinating archive of 20th century wartime propaganda that used sexual images to rally the civilian population or lower moral in enemy troops.

The images are NSFW but are most are not particularly pornographic by today's standards, although a few are obviously designed to be particularly offensive.

Most images aimed at civilians use the theme that the enemy are sexual deviants who will defile the country's women if they're not defeated, while most aimed at enemy soldiers suggest that their girlfriends and wives will be unfaithful while they're away - or simply highlight the contrast between staying and fighting or, for example, returning home to drink cocktails with topless women.

Some of the leaflets are quite complex for the time, using see-through covers to make them visually more appealing, while they were often specifically designed to take advantage of the specific insecurities of allied forces.

For example, this section discusses German sexual propaganda leaflets dropped to allied soldiers in World War II:

There are two major differences between the leaflets aimed at the Americans and those aimed at the French. The American leaflets are much cruder and the pictures not nearly as well drawn. The second difference is that while the leaflet to the French showed British soldiers with the women, thus attacking an ally, the leaflet aimed at the GIs showed American civilians with the wives and girlfriends, so the propaganda theme might be considered more "anti-slacker" or "anti-draft-dodger".

A fascinating collection, and if you're interested in a browsing through probably the most comprehensive archive of propaganda leaflets on the net (including examples from as recent as last year), I notice the PsyWar website is back online.

UPDATE: The original page seems to be a bit unreliable, but thanks to Will for posting a link to a mirror of the page which you can read here.

Link to NSFW Sex and Psychological Operations archive.
Link to PsyWar archive.

—Vaughan.

May 02, 2008

Man, controller of the neuroverse:

The medical journal Neurosurgery is celebrating its 30 year anniversary and I've just noticed that their February edition had this wonderful cover.

It's the detail from a painting by Mexican artist Diego Rivera called Man, Controller of the Universe. A beautiful image, although never let it be said that our neurosurgical friends miss an opportunity to express their grandiosity.

Nevertheless, the edition contains a large number of wonderful Rivera prints in between article such as 'Ballistics for the Neurosurgeon', 'A New Multipurpose Ventriculoscope' and 'Enchanced Tumor Growth Elicited by L-Type Amino Acid Transporter 1 in Human Malignant Glioma Cells'.

It makes for slightly surreal but completely delightful read.

The journal has a tradition of having an article by a neurosurgeon commenting on the cover image, which is often a great article in itself and is usually has nothing directly to do with neuroscience.

Sadly, the journal is closed access, but their free sample issue has an excellent 'Cover Comment' article [pdf] on Herman Melville and his classic novel Moby Dick.

Link to image of entire painting.
pdf of Neurosurgery article on Moby Dick.

—Vaughan.

April 30, 2008

Solar powered EEG headset:

The New Scientist Tech Blog has an interesting article on a new prototype EEG machine that, like all others, is designed to read electrical activity from the brain. The novelty is that it is totally enclosed in an earphones-like headset and is solar-powered. Apparently, it also generates power from the body's own heat.

The new headset can generate at least 1 milliWatt of power in most circumstances. That is more than the 0.8mW needed to detect electrical activity observed in the brain, and transmit it over wifi to a computer.

"Using both power sources, you get twice as much power, so it's roughly half the size," say Chris van Hoof, also of IMEC, comparing the new headset to the previous device.

Van Hoof says small, preclinical trials show the headset collects data identical to those of EEGs used in hospitals. The portable headset should provide a look at the brain in environments it has not been studied in before.

This looks like it builds on research that has been going on at Imperial College in London on low power technology for 'wearable cognition systems'.

The 'cognition' bit is only likely to be very approximate to what psychologists think of as cognitive processes (as we discussed previously), but I suspect the trick will be developing new applications for the technology, rather than using the technology to try and replace the precision of already existing systems.

A paper on the technology was recently published by the Imperial team. Unfortunately, I can't find the full-text online but the summary itself is well-worth a read.

Link to article on NewSciTechBlog (via Neurophilosophy).
Link to summary of low power tech for wearable cognition paper.

—Vaughan.

Doctor Who Hears Voices torrent online:

The recent UK TV docudrama, The Doctor Who Hears Voices, that we discussed previously has appeared on torrent servers and seems available for download. I've not yet seen the programme or fully downloaded it myself yet, but I'm assuming it works OK.

Clinical psychologist Rufus May plays himself. An interesting choice because he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 18 and later trained as a clinical psychologist. As an aside, he's also recently launched his own blog to try and encourage debate around mental health.

May works in Bradford, which has turned out to be a bit of a UK centre for radical ideas in mental health.

Bradford is also the home to psychiatrists Patrick Bracken and Philip Thomas, who wrote a thought-provoking article for the British Medical Journal in 2001 on 'post-psychiatry' that has proven to be one of the cornerstones of progressive mental health philosophy.

The groups tends to be treated with suspicion by mainstream psychiatrists, who can be quite a defensive bunch at times, but it's interesting that some of the ideas that the Bradford group pioneered, such as treating people in their own homes, are now accepted as mainstream practice.

Link to torrent of docudrama on mininova.
Link to BMJ article on 'post-psychiatry'.

—Vaughan.

April 24, 2008

Champagne neuronova:

Not a moment after I wonder whether Nature Neuroscience's podcast has succumbed to rock n' roll disaster, one of the NeuroPod team calls in to say all is well and the new edition is online.

Kerri from NeuroPod here. I'm happy to report that after a few months' break, NeuroPod is back (April's edition went live yesterday) and will be coming at you monthly for the rest of this year. They tried to make me go to rehab...and I said, neuro, neuro, neuro.

This month, we make some risky decisions, liken working memory to a digital camera, link stress and anxiety to genetics and explore the unfathomable world of the teenage brain.

I hope you enjoy the new show. We're excited to be back, and very touched that we were missed.

Link to NeuroPod webpage.
mp3 of April NeuroPod.

—Vaughan.

April 23, 2008

Neuro killed the radio star:

The excellent Neuroanthropology has just had a brief round up of podcasts on neuroscience or anthropology so you can satisfy all your brain science and human diversity listening desires.

It's a really comprehensive list (and the anthropology podcasts are completely new to me) so there's likely to be something to discover even if you're the most diligent podcast enthusiast.

However, Nature's NeuroPod podcast is still eerily silent and has been since December. Has life on the road taken its toll? Has one of them gone into rehab? I think we should be told.

Link to Neuroanthropology's podcast round up.

—Vaughan.

April 22, 2008

Hearing voices with your head in the sand:

UK TV station Channel 4 broadcast a docudrama last night called The Doctor Who Hears Voices, a fictionalised account of an apparently real-life situation where psychologist Rufus May (who played himself) treated a junior doctor who began hearing hallucinated voices.

I've not seen it yet, although should be interesting viewing as May is a UK clinical psychologist who was himself diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 18.

His story is an interesting journey in itself and he's a valuable critic of the mental health system, even if you're not fully in agreement with all of his views.

The reviews have largely been positive and the UK's largest mental health charity Mind have sung it's praises.

However, The Independent's TV critic Brian Viner obviously didn't like the programme, which is fair enough, but also manages to add some pretty appalling prejudice in his review:

May thinks that society should embrace mentally ill people, not shun them, an admirable - enough ambition that is slightly clouded by the stark statistic that 50 murders a year are committed by people with mental-health problems; 1,200 a year kill themselves.

It's probably worth mentioning at this point that people with schizophrenia are at much greater risk of being victims of violence that perpetrators (one study found 14 times greater chance of being a victim of a violent crime that being arrested for one).

But I'm still slightly startled that this is used, as well as the shockingly high suicide rate, as something that might "cloud" an ambition not to shun people with mental health problems.

If a torrent of the programme turns online, I shall post a link to it so you can make your own mind up, or if you'd rather take the Viner route, you can just re-arrange your prejudices rather than do any serious consideration.

Link to Channel 4 info on film.

—Vaughan.

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War psychiatry - in 100 words:

Every month, the British Journal of Psychiatry has a 100 word summary of key issues in mental health and psychopathology. March's edition had a fantastic summary of military psychiatry by consultant psychiatrist to the UK Army, Simon Wessely.

War is hell, but it can be a job–a strange job in which one voluntarily (these days) exposes oneself to the risk of physical and psychiatric injury. Our generation think we discovered post-traumatic stress disorder, but it is neither new, nor the commonest, mental health problem in the UK Armed Forces. That ‘honour’ goes to depression and alcohol. Are these always the result of going to war? No, things are rarely that simple. Can we treat them? Sometimes–but what makes people good soldiers makes them bad patients. Can we prevent them? Possibly–but only if we don’t send people to war.

As a follow-up to our recent post on Tim Crow's ideas on schizophrenia, this month's BJP has a 100 word summary, by Crow, where he does a remarkable job of getting the details of the genetics and neurobiology into succinct description of his theory.

Link to 'War Psychiatry - in 100 words'.
Link to 'Psychosis: the price Homo Sapiens pays for language – in 100 words'.

—Vaughan.

April 20, 2008

Human Terrain System still a source of conflict:

Newsweek recently published an article that was highly critical of the Pentagon's Human Terrain System, the controversial project that deploys anthropologists and related social scientists alongside the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan to better understand the cultures of these occupied countries.

The latest coverage has reignited a row in the world of academic anthropology, whose governing body have questioned the ethics of using professionals sworn to 'do no harm' as hired researchers for one side of a military occupation.

As we discussed previously, the project has caused such heated debate that one ex-Human Terrain operative was heckled to the point of tears at a recent conference.

This new article claims that the project is a fiasco with inadequately trained staff. Furthermore, it claims those with prior knowledge of the language and region are being treated with suspicion and sometimes outright hostility by the regular forces with whom they work.

In a response published by Wired, Montgomery McFate, one of the architects of the Human Terrain System has issued a sharply worded condemnation suggesting that the article is both partisan and inaccurate, while Defense Secretary Gates has admitted in a recent speech that the project "is still in its infancy and has attendant growing pains".

The Newsweek piece has even sparked a response from the American Anthropological Association which, although largely information free, does indicate how important it is for the association to be seen to have its finger on the pulse of this contentious issue.

Link to Newsweek article (via Neuroanthropology).
Link to Wired coverage and reaction.
Link to previous Mind Hacks coverage of the 'Human Terrain System'.

—Vaughan.

April 18, 2008

Police shooting differs by age, race, sex, education:

A study on police officers from Riverside County in California has found that the likelihood of the officer using deadly force is linked to their age, race, sex and experience of previous shootings.

Male officers were more likely to shoot than females. White officers were more likely to shoot than other ethnic groups. Shooting was most common in young officers, and in those who did not have a college education.

Police Officer Characteristics and the Likelihood of Using Deadly Force

Criminal Justice and Behavior, Vol. 35, No. 4, 505-521

James P. McElvain, Augustine J. Kposowa

Past research on police shootings, when examining officer characteristics, has focused on the officer's race, particularly when it is not the same as the race of the person shot. Data from 186 officer-involved shootings were used to examine whether race effects existed and, if so, would be eliminated or attenuated by controlling for officer gender, education, age, and history of shooting. Male officers were more likely to shoot than female officers, and college-educated officers were less likely to be involved in shootings than officers with no college education. Risk of officer-involved shooting was reduced as the officer aged. White, non-Hispanic officers were more likely to shoot than Hispanic officers; however, there was no significant difference between Hispanic and Black officers. Officers with a previous history of shooting were more than 51% as likely to shoot during the follow-up period as officers without a history of shootings.

Link to abstract of scientific study.

—Vaughan.

Drug adverts full of unsupported claims:

We're so used to drug companies burying data, spinning their results, ghostwriting papers, 'financially incentivising' doctors and designing biased studies, you'd just assume that if drug advert cited a research it would back up the claim being made for the medication. According to a new study, you'd often be wrong.

The Royal Society of Chemistry's magazine 'Chemistry World' has an article on a new study of psychiatric drug ads in medical journals that found that over a third of the total claims made by drug ads are not actually supported by the studies they reference as evidence.

Taken on an advert by advert basis, the results are even more shocking:

42 out of the 53 ads (nearly 80 per cent) the researchers examined made at least one claim the team couldn't substantiate. 27 made a claim that was not supported by the data source cited by the ad. A further 15 contained claims that couldn't be verified by the team - usually because the ads provided no sources of data to back up their claims, or made claims that could not be verified because drug firms either failed to respond to the researchers' requests for trial data, or refused to supply it.

Six out of nine pharmaceutical companies - including GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Shire - did not reply to the researchers, while Wyeth refused to send trial data.

'In these cases, we have to take their word [that their claims were supported by scientific evidence], which, personally, I would think is not a wise idea,' says Spielmans. Only Janssen Pharmaceutica - makers of schizophrenia drug Risperdal (risperidone) - and medical device firm Cyberonics sent relevant studies to back up their claims.

You'd think after spending all that time and effort to design and run trials which consistently support the manufacturers product you could just reference your own studies, but apparently even that seems too excruciatingly transparent for the spin-happy industry.

Like the Fast Show Geezer, it seems they can't even be polite enough to deceive us honestly.

Link to Chemistry World article (via Furious Seasons).
Link to abstract of scientific paper.

—Vaughan.

April 17, 2008

Insomnia, mirror neurons and the recanting of bluster:

This week's Nature has a couple of interesting books reviews: one on insomnia, and another on mirror neurons. The review of the mirror neuron book is by V.S. Ramachandran who also recants one of his famous and more outlandish statements made almost a decade ago.

Insomniac is a book on the trials, tribulations and scientific investigations of insomnia which is reviewed by sleep psychologist Jim Horne.

I nearly took Prof Horne's course on sleep psychology as an undergraduate but decided against it (rather ironically) as I thought it started too early in the morning.

My early bird housemate decided to take the plunge and many years later he is now a sleep psychologist living on the beach in Australia. There's a moral in that story somewhere, but I've never thought it very wise to think too hard about it.

However, the book review does contain a few gems, most notably some wonderfully succinct descriptions of sleep problems and their treatment:

This tiredness can be linked to insomnia, but both are usually symptoms of something more deep-seated. Treating the insomnia alone (by hypnotic drugs, for example) makes little difference and can be an expensive, frustrating and fruitless course of action, especially in the United States, where sleep induction is a billion-dollar industry. Many, like Green, then seek the solace and sympathies of alternative therapies.

Insomnia comes in many forms: difficulty in falling asleep, too many fitful awakenings or waking up too early. Although there may be obvious physical causes, such as pain and physical illness, for most other sufferers (especially [the author] Green) insomnia is more a problem of wakefulness intruding into sleep, rather than just bad sleep. To be more explicit, it is a 24-hour disorder in which persistent anxiety, anger or miserable notions, sitting constantly at the back of a person's mind, ruin the expectations of their next sleep. Clearly, the eventual cure must address this state of waking mind. It is pointless going to bed with these stresses.

In the other review, V.S. Ramachandran tackles a book on mirror neurons by Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia.

Ramachandran famously made the rather overblown statement that "mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology".

I always assumed that this meant they would annoy creationists, but, rather predictably, neither my interpretation nor Ramachandran's have come to pass.

However, in the last sentence of the review he recants his decade-old bluster with the slightly more realistic "It remains to be seen whether they will turn out to be anything as important as that, but as Sherlock Holmes said to Watson: 'The game is afoot.'"

Link to review of 'Insomniac'.
Link to review of 'Reflecting on the mind'.

—Vaughan.

April 14, 2008

It's not where we've been, it's where we're at:

The New York Times Freakanomics blog just had a great discussion questioning how much progress psychology and psychiatry have really made during the last century, with contributions from psychologists, psychiatrists, economists and a woman who lost her son to suicide.

The responses obviously come from quite differing perspectives but are largely positive and seem mostly to cite a scientific approach to understanding the mind and brain as the most important factor (danke schön Willhelm Wundt).

Dan Ariely's comments are particularly interesting as he suggests that one of our greatest advances is the discovery that our own experience isn't necessarily a good guide to how our own mind works.

Anyway, a good collection of short commentaries that are worth reading in full.

Link to NYT Freakanomics psychology and psychiatry discussion.

—Vaughan.

April 10, 2008

Turned out Nice again:

The picture on the right is both a five story high sculpture and library that was opposite the 16th European Congress of Psychiatry from which I've just returned.

It's by the artist Sacha Sosno and apparently the books are kept in the 'head' of the surrealist bust.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see a great deal of the research at the conference as I spent most of it either locked in a hotel room preparing with my collaborators Frank Laroi and Andrea Raballo, or teaching our course on Phenomenology, Cinema and Psychosis (thanks to all who came!).

Apart from that it was a fairly typical display of academic debate and pharmaceutical company largess.

The prize for the most ridiculous stand goes to the makers of the antipsychotic drug ziprasidone, who were obviously trying to promote the medication despite the fact that it doesn't seem to treat psychosis as well as some of the other drugs, on the basis that it is one of the least likely to make you fat or raise your risk of diabetes or heart disease.

Rather than saying this straight off (advertisers know better than to push negative messages), they seemingly had to think of a way of selling a theory that helps promote the idea that their drug is linked to a 'healthy' lifestyle.

So based on one rather ropey study (of only 14 people), they're recommending that giving the drug with food increases its bioavailability.

And what better way to promote their new message than have an onsite chef create mouth watering but completely unrealistic meals.

Oh, and have models riding exercise bikes as well.

Science marches on.

—Vaughan.

April 09, 2008

Repressing the bricks and mortar of madness:

Of Two Minds has alerted me to the fact that the famous-but-now-defunct Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York is going to be converted into a luxury hotel. It will probably join a long list of old psychiatric hospital conversions whose origin becomes lost to the public mind.

Bellevue has had a number of well-known patients over the years, perhaps most notoriously treating Mark Chapman, the person who killed John Lennon while likely severely mentally ill.

It was created as a centre of excellence, but particularly during the latter half of the 20th century was known for its chaotic state, as articles describing conditions in the 1960s and the 1980s attest.

There's an increasing move to shut down the old Victorian asylums in favour of psychiatric units in general hospitals, and many of the old buildings have now been converted to other uses, often with their history unknown by most people.

Many of these buildings are quite beautiful, as the architecture and surroundings were designed to be therapeutic (even if the methods used within them were often brutal or based on ignorance).

I put some pictures online of Caroline Gardens, social housing in South East London which was originally built as the Licensed Victuallers' Asylum in 1827, and some images of Whitchurch Hospital in Cardiff, which is in the process of being closed to be turned into flats.

London's Imperial War Museum is housed in the old Bethlem Hospital buildings, the institution that gave rise to the phrase 'bedlam', and Craiglockhart Hospital, where W.H.R. Rivers treated poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon for 'shell shock' during World War One (now immortalised on Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy) is now part of Napier University.

Often the conversions deliberately conceal the buildings' original function. Have a look at the website for the luxurious Princess Park Manor, accommodation designed for the super-rich.

Click on the 'history' link. Absolutely no mention of the fact that the building was originally the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, one of London's major Victorian psychiatric hospitals (pictured on the right).

Link to ABC News story on imminent Bellevue conversion.

—Vaughan.

April 07, 2008

Nice work if you can get it:

Apologies if updates are a bit intermittent over the next few days, but I'm in Nice, in the lovely South of France, at the European Congress of Psychiatry.

I'm here to teach a course on 'Phenomenology, Cinema and Psychosis' with psychiatrist Andrea Raballo and psychologist Frank Larøi.

You can try and work out which of us is which from the picture on the left.

I'm not sure how internet access is going to work out, but I should try and get you some updates from the conference at the very least.

—Vaughan.

April 04, 2008

Orgasms, insanity and microbes in SciAmMind:

The new edition of Scientific American Mind has just hit the shelves and has some fantastic articles. It seems they've changed schedule to releasing one major feature article online for free every week, and the first is a piece on stereotype threat.

Stereotype threat is an intriguing effect where people perform worse when they think the task might confirm a social prejudice about them. When exactly the same test is presented as being unrelated to the negative stereotype, people perform better.

Actually, I can't wait to read other articles on the neuroscience of orgasm, the role of infection in psychosis, the latest treatments being tried for stimulant drug addiction and body dysmorphic disorder, to name but a few.

I'm not sure which are going to make it online, but we'll link to them when they appear.

Good 'ole SciAmMind.

Link to article on the psychology of stereotype threat.
Link to latest edition of SciAmMind.

—Vaughan.

Pills, shills and bellyaches:

Investigative journalist Phil Dawdy has written a fantastic piece for the Willamette Week looking at the background to the recent research on buried antidepressant drug trials.

The paper was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine by psychiatrist Erick Turner, who used to do paid promotional work for the drug industry before he got disillusioned with towing the company line.

Dawdy's piece focuses on Turner, his mission to uncover all the data on antidepressant efficacy and its impact since publication.

You may know Dawdy from his blog, Furious Seasons, which even if you don't agree with every angle, is doggedly researched and compulsive reading.

There's also an amusing post-script to the Willamette Week article just published on the blog which gave me a chuckle.

Link to Willamette Week article 'Bitter Pill'.

—Vaughan.

April 03, 2008

Neuromarketing does great job of selling itself:

A couple of high profile newspaper articles have recently sung the praises of 'neuromarketing', both naively and wrongly hailing it as a more accurate way of measuring the effectiveness of advertising.

Despite what these articles in the Guardian and New York Times say, neuroscience has yet to show that directly measuring brain function predicts sales or advertising success better than existing methods.

One interesting study is cited though. So far, it is the only study I know of that has compared how well brain activation and self-report matched up in a purchasing task.

Crucially, it didn't find that brain scans predicted actual purchasing better than what the participants consciously said they'd purchase.

Only that brain activity when viewing the product and deciding whether to buy it was more closely matched to the instant decision than a post-experiment evaluation of how much they liked the product or thought it was value-for-money.

It's an interesting study, but it doesn't really help marketers. Not least because it's a lab task, and no money was involved, but also because the benchmark to which brain activity was compared was what people said they'd buy.

In other words, the 'gold standard' to which the other evidence was compared in this study, was simply asking people what they'd buy - no different to what traditional market research already does.

It's an interesting study on decision-making, but if you read the newspaper articles, it's shocking to compare their grandiose claims with this study which is currently the best 'neuromarketing' evidence.

Most of the other studies (trash like election and Super Bowl brain scans aside) don't even compare what people say they'd buy with brain activity, so they're not comparisons which can even possibly say whether measuring the brain is a more effective technique for measuring marketing success.

They almost entirely rely on vague inferences that because a certain brain area is active, the person must be thinking in some specific way.

As individual brain areas are involved in numerous functions (even just including the ones we know about), you can use this technique to suggest almost anything.

The bottom line is this: for products, sales dictate whether marketing succeeds or fails. Trying to measure anything else is what is known as relying on a surrogate marker, something known to be dodgy.

The first study that shows that brain activation predicts actual purchases better than what people say they would buy will be the true birth of neuromarketing.

So far, it hasn't happened, and the best marketing that's happening is 'neuromarketing' companies marketing themselves.

That's not to sat that the neuropsychology of financial decision-making isn't interesting (far from it), but, so far, none of these techniques will help you decide whether your ad will be a success better than simply asking people.

Link to naive NYT article on neuromarketing.
Link to credulous Guardian article on neuromarketing.
Link to full text of 'Neural predictors of purchases' study.

—Vaughan.

April 01, 2008

Trust me, I'm a brain scan:

Hot on the heals of a recent study that found that neuroscience jargon made unlikely scientific claims more believable, comes a new study, covered by the BPS Research Digest, that found that simply showing a picture of a brain scan made bogus science more convincing.

David McCabe and Alan Castel presented university students with 300-word news stories about fictional cognitive research findings that were based on flawed scientific reasoning. For example, one story claimed that watching TV was linked to maths ability, based on the fact that both TV viewing and maths activate the temporal lobe. Crucially, students rated these stories to be more scientifically sound when they were accompanied by a brain image, compared with when the equivalent data were presented in a bar chart, or when there was no graphical illustration at all.

McCabe and Castel repeated the experiment with a control condition featuring a topographical activation map - it's just as visually complex as a brain image but it doesn't look like a brain. These stories were rated as more credible when accompanied by a brain image compared with a topographical map, showing that the allure of brain images is not merely down to their complexity.

Most of these sorts of reasoning errors are due to the fact that the public at large still thinks about the mind and brain as separate, loosely connected systems.

The influence of 'placebo science-a-likes' isn't a problem restricted to neuroscience, of course. I suspect adding the language of genetics will have a similar confidence-boosting effect, regardless of the actual claim being made.

If you want to know the nitty gritty about how fMRI brain scans can mislead, I highly recommend the sardonic guide, How to Lie with fMRI Statistics.

Link to BPSRD on 'The power of blobs on the brain'.
pdf of full-text of scientific paper.

—Vaughan.

March 31, 2008

English Surgeon link:

The English Surgeon is now available on the BBC iPlayer website for 6 days. Enjoy!

—Vaughan.

March 29, 2008

English Surgeon reminder:

Just a reminder for our readers that have access to the BBC TV channel, BBC Two, that the stunning documentary on neurosurgeons Henry Marsh and Igor Kurilets that we featured previously on Mind Hacks will be shown on Sunday 30th March at 10.55pm

British residents will be able to watch it over the net for a week after on BBC's iPlayer, which I'll link to as soon as it appears online.

Everyone else is going to have to wait for a torrent, but I'll keep an eye out and post a link if one appears.

Either way, Henry Marsh was the first guest on BBC Radio 4's Midweek which you can listen to via the programme's webpage.

Link to BBC 2 listing for documentary.
Link to Midweek discussion with Marsh.

—Vaughan.

Lancet and MNI neuroscience podcasts:

I've just discovered a couple of great high class neuroscience podcasts. The first is the Lancet Neurology podcast and the second is series of podcasts and video from the Montreal Neurological Institute.

The Lancet Neurology podcasts are all-too-brief but are really well done. In contrast to the American Academy of Neurology podcasts we featured previously, they're quite accessible even to the non-neurologist.

The MNI is one of the most famous hospitals and neuroscience research centres in the world, and needless to say they have some wonderfully produced podcasts and some great video lectures online. A treasure trove of useful brain listening.

Link to Lancet Neurology podcast.
Link to Montreal Neurological Institute podcasts and video.

—Vaughan.

March 28, 2008

Impact of digital media review hits the wires:

Psychologist Dr Tanya Byron has just released a remarkably sensible review on the effect of digital media on children, commissioned by the UK government.

Tanya Byron is great. She came to prominence as the resident psychologist on several UK TV parenting programmes but used evidence-based interventions, essentially demonstrating what a clinical psychologist would do if your child got referred for behaviour problems.

Most notably, she obviously knew her shit and is widely respected among clinical psychologists. Despite often being described as a 'TV psychologist' she remained working in the NHS at the coal face of clinical work.

She's just published her review on the effects of the internet and computer games on children and has been remarkably level-headed in a time when the media loves 'internet addiction' and 'computer games make killer kids' stories.

BBC News has a video interview with her (skip to 1m20s to avoid the preamble). As well as refusing to soundbite the complexity of the issues, she's not afraid to use uses phrases like "causal models of harm" and "research effects literature" in interviews. Go Tanya!

The full report [pdf] is long, and I've not read it all, but I really recommend reading the summary on pages 3-5. Here's some key points:

4. ...Overall I have found that a search for direct cause and effect in this area is often too simplistic, not least because it would in many cases be unethical to do the necessary research. However, mixed research evidence on the actual harm from video games and use of the internet does not mean that the risks do not exist. To help us measure and manage those risks we need to focus on what the child brings to the technology and use our understanding of children’s development to inform an approach that is based on the ‘probability of risk’ in different circumstances.

5. We need to take into account children’s individual strengths and vulnerabilities, because the factors that can discriminate a ‘beneficial’ from a ‘harmful’ experience online and in video games will often be individual factors in the child. The very same content can be useful to a child at a certain point in their life and development and may be equally damaging to another child. That means focusing on the child, what we know about how children’s brains develop, how they learn and how they change as they grow up. This is not straightforward – while we can try to categorise children by age and gender there are vast individual differences that will impact on a child’s experience when gaming or online, especially the wider context in which they have developed and in which they experience the technology...

Her recommendations focus on the all too pressing point that kids often vastly outclass adults in understanding the technology and that parents are often not competent in being able to guide children as they'd wish.

Needless to say, Byron recommends that parents need support and guidance themselves in being able to regulate their children's use of new technology.

From what I've read so far, it's clear that Byron has understood both the psychological research and the technology. No mean feat in an age where commentators often demonstrate little except the fact that they are a bit baffled by this new fangled interweb thing.

Link to Byron review webpage.
Link to BBC News on the report and interview.

—Vaughan.

March 26, 2008

Court imitates life in antipsychotic drug battle:

The New York Times has an article which skilfully captures one of the central dilemmas in mental health: deciding whether the benefits of psychiatric drugs outweigh their side-effects for any individual patient.

The story centres on the ongoing court case where the state of Alaska are suing drug company Eli Lilly over claims that the multinational failed to inform professionals and the public about the side-effects of the antipsychotic drug olanzapine (Zyprexa) despite knowing about them for some time.

Olanzapine is a useful and effective drug for managing psychosis and, for some people, the only effective treatment for severe mental illness.

But, like the other newer generation drugs in this class, causes weight gain and significantly increases the risk for heart disease and diabetes. Like all other antipsychotics, it can also leave you feeling groggy and reduce your ability to experience pleasure (owing to the fact it affects the dopamine 'reward' system).

While mental health professionals tend to focus on the benefits of the drug for the person's mental state, patients tend to focus on its negative effects on their health and enjoyment.

This differing focus is partly because the mental health professionals, on the whole, are not the ones who have to take the drugs and experience their side-effects, but also because psychosis often means the person does not realise their thinking has become disturbed, meaning they don't see the point of being prescribed medication in the first place.

This dilemma was rather poignantly mirrored in the Alaska court house. While the Alaska vs Eli Lilly case was going on in one courtroom, in the next was a case concerning whether an obviously disturbed man should be compelled to take olanzapine by his hospital.

The NYT piece covers the two cases, drawing parallels between the individual dilemma and the landmark legal action, and captures the dilemma very succinctly.

Link to NYT article 'One Drug, Two Faces' (via Furious Seasons).
Link to Furious Seasons coverage of the Alaska vs Eli Lilly case.

—Vaughan.

March 23, 2008

Playing mind games, off the shelf:

PhysOrg has a brief article on the various 'mind reading' headsets that are in the pipeline and could make it onto the gaming market this year.

The article mentions several systems that are apparently close to release and notes some of technology which is intended to allow 'thought control' of games:

Emotiv, a company based in San Francisco, says its mind-control headsets will be on shelves later this year, along with a host of novel "biofeedback" games developed by its partners.

Several other companies - including EmSense in Monterey, California; NeuroSky in San Jose, California; and Hitachi in Tokyo - are also developing technology to detect players´ brainwaves and use them in next-gen video games.

The technology is based on medical technology that has been around for decades. Using a combination of EEGs (which reveal alpha waves that signify calmness), EMGs (which measure muscle movement), and ECGs and GSR (which measure heart rate and sweating), developers hope to create a picture of a player´s mental and physical state. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which monitors changes in blood oxygenation, could also be incorporated since it overcomes some of the interference problems with EEGs.

I'll be intrigued to see how well they work, but I suspect they'll be more of a novelty than a genuinely useful addition for avid gamers, at least at first.

This is largely because the main technology for reading brain activity is EEG.

Even with thousands of pounds worth of kit, neuroscientists get participants to do the same task over and over and then average the results to get a reliable waveform.

This is partly because this technology is a relatively crude measure of the total electrical activity that happens over a large area (so on any one occasion the wave will be influenced by a number of other brain functions going on at the same time), and partly because the electrical activity from something as small as the eye-blink muscles drowns out the signal from the brain.

It's interesting that the article mentions near infrared spectroscopy as another possible way of reading brain function (as used by Natalie Portman).

This involves beaming near-infrared light into the head, where it penetrates the skull and gets absorbed by brain to differing degrees, depending on how much blood is in the area. The amount of light that bounces back can be used to infer blood saturation and, hence, brain activity.

However, changes in blood flow lag behind the activity of the neurons by up to 5 seconds (and interestingly, this varies as we age). This is because blood is 'called in' to replenish the local nutrients that are instantly available but in short supply.

Similarly, systems that measure skin conductance or heart rate (a proxy measure for arousal or stress) have a similar problem with lag.

So gamers wanting to control games at the 'speed of thought' are likely to be disappointed. EEG is too noisy, NIRS is too slow.

What the headsets might do well, however, is something quite different.

The MIT Affective Computing group have spent several years looking at how computers could present information differently depending on the emotional state of the user.

According to Jonathan Moreno's book Mind Wars this is also something that the US Military has great interest in, and you can also see how it would enhance games.

The readings from the headset will probably do a better job of keeping track of the easier to measure and relatively slow moving responses like arousal and stress, and these could be used by game designers to enhance your experience (maybe to slow things down if you're too stressed and under-performing to avoid frustration, or to pump-things up at tense moments).

One of the most interesting possibilities is what might happen when hackers got hold of the systems.

Suddenly, they'll be thousands of people with standard kit for reading physiological responses and, to a certain extent, brain function.

As soon as someone finds a way to reliably read a novel type of brain function, even with this limited technology, everyone will be able to use it.

Furthermore, it might lead to some fascinating home cognitive neuroscience experiments and demonstrations. Imagine having a home NIRS system - rock on!

Link to PhysOrg article on 'Mind Gaming' (via 3QD).

—Vaughan.

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March 20, 2008

Better living through reckless self-experimentation:

Scientific American have just concluded its series on scientists who have experimented on themselves in an effort to better understand the mind, brain and body.

The first piece is about Kevin 'Captain Cyborg' Warwick, who seems mainly to have been experimenting with the media rather than himself.

I've always considered him the poor man's Stelarc to be honest, but then again, Stelarc hasn't had a distinguished research career in robotics so swings and roundabouts I guess.

A further story discusses Olivier Ameisen, a cardiologist who became alcoholic and treated himself with baclofen, a drug then untested for the condition.

There's a couple of people who experimented on their children, which doesn't really count as self-experimentation in my book, but they make for good reads nonetheless.

One covers Deb Roy's recording of the entire first two years of his child's vocalisations and speech to help understand how language develops.

The other describes Jay Giedd's project to brain scan his daughter every three months from the age of four upwards. Interestingly, it got stopped by the ethics committee because she might feel pressured to take part. Surely bribery by Pokemon cards would have solved that problem?

While there are several other scientists discussed, the only other one of psychological interest in the legendary Alexander Shulgin who has spent most of his life synthesising new hallucinogenic drugs and trying them on himself. He's now 83. There's a moral in that story somewhere.

Link to SciAm's self-experimenters series.

—Vaughan.

Will Working Mothers’ Brains Explode?:

A new journal, Neuroethics, has just launched and among the freely available articles is an engaging piece on 'neurosexism', the increasing trend to portray sex differences as 'hard wired' into the brain.

The piece is by psychologist Cordelia Fine who argues that some recent popular science books and articles are simply restating old stereotypes but making them sound more modern with an appeal to neuroscience.

Neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine’s book The Female Brain comes in for particular criticism, as it has in the scientific literature. But despite the fact it seems to play fast and loose with the scientific evidence, it has become an international best-seller.

Then, too, with the buzz-phrase ‘hard-wiring’ comes an extraordinary insistence on locating social pressures in the brain. In The Female Brain, for example, the working mother learns that she is struggling against “the natural wiring of our female brains and biological reality” (p. 161). According to Brizendine, combining motherhood with career gives rise to a neurological “tug-of-war because of overloaded brain circuits” (p. 160). Career circuits and maternal circuits battle it out, leading to “increased stress, increased anxiety, and reduced brainpower for the mother’s work and her children.” (p. 112).

But Brizendine promises her female readers that “understanding our innate biology empowers us to better plan our future.” (p. 159). It may startle some readers to learn that family friendly workplace policies are not the solution to reduced maternal stress and anxiety, and that fathers who do the kindergarten pick-ups, pack the lunch-boxes, stay home when the kids are sick, get up in the night when the baby wakes up, and buy the birthday presents and ring the paediatrician in their lunch hour are not the obvious solution to enhanced maternal ‘brainpower’.

No, it is an appreciation of female brain wiring that will see the working mother through the hard times. (Predictably, Brizendine never even hints that the over-wired working mother consider the simplest antidote to the ill-effects of going against her ‘natural wiring’: namely, giving her partner a giant kick up the neurological backside.)

Fine's argument is not that that sex differences don't exist in the mind and brain. Indeed, there are numerous scientific studies which have reported these.

The problem is that they are often portrayed in the popular literature as being 'hard wired' - an ugly analogy taken from computers that suggests that the difference is an innate and permanent feature.

Apart from ignoring the fact sex differences are typically only stable at the group level (meaning that this difference is not significant in any single male-female comparison) most of these claims about 'hard wiring' are not based on evidence about the innateness of the difference.

Actually, I've never been clear what 'hard-wired' is supposed to mean. Even if we presume that a particular behaviour or feature is coded in the DNA, the brain develops only through interaction with its environment - be this after birth, or in the womb.

In other words, most claims about a human ability being 'hard wired' ignore the history of how these develop through our lives.

The rest of the first issue of Neuroethics also looks fascinating, with article on neuroenhancement of love and lust, nanotech, neuroimaging and understanding others' mind, to name but a few.

pdf or web version of Fine's article 'Will Working Mothers’ Brains Explode?'.
Link to Neuroethics 1st issue table of contents (via Neurophilosophy).

—Vaughan.

March 19, 2008

The northern lights of neural stem cells:

The beautiful image on the right is a collection of neural stem cells stained with fluorescent die, taken from the finalists of the Wellcome Image Awards.

A wonderful image of the bacteria that cause a type of meningitis is another brain-related image in the finalists' gallery.

There are plenty more images of course, but don't miss the audio interviews that accompany each image where the scientist discusses their work.

All of the pictures are quite stunning so well worth a look.

Link to 2008 Wellcome Image Awards gallery.

—Vaughan.

Internet addiction nonsense hits the AJP:

While we've got used to 'internet addiction' popping up in the media from time to time, it has inexplicably been the subject of an editorial in this month's American Journal of Psychiatry arguing it should be included in the DSM-IV - the next version of the diagnostic manual for psychiatry.

The editorial suggests that we should make 'internet addiction' a serious public health issue despite the fact that no-one yet has suggested anything that uniquely distinguishes it from its use as a tool or a source of entertainment.

For example, here are the components that the author, psychiatrist Jerald Block, cites as evidence that someone can become addicted to the internet:

1) excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives, 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible, 3) tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue

Apart from the fact that these and most other supposed criteria make no distinction between using the internet and what the person is using the internet for, it's easy to see that they don't describe anything unique to the net.

For example, here are my criteria for 'sports team addiction':

1) excessive time following games, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives, 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when team news or matches are inaccessible, 3) tolerance, including the need for better match viewing equipment, more news, or more hours of team-related activity, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue

As more people in the world follow sports teams than have access to the internet, surely this is the more serious problem, especially considering the high levels of violence and alcohol abuse associated with this tragic affliction.

You may, of course, substitute whatever interest you want into the criteria to capture people who are the most motivated to pursue their favourite interest, or who are workaholics who rely on the technology (if you want a retro version, substitute the 'postal system' for the internet for a 1908 style communication addiction).

Rather curiously, the editorial mentions the figure that 86% of people with 'internet addiction' have another mental illness. What this suggests is that heavy use of the internet is not the major problem that brings people into treatment.

In fact, 'internet addiction', however it is defined, is associated with depression and anxiety but no-one has ever found this to be a causal connection.

Recent research shows that shy or depressed people use the internet excessively to (surprise, surprise) meet people and manage their shyness.

And in fact, as I mentioned in an earlier article, one of the only longitudinal studies [pdf] on the general population found that internet use is generally associated with positive effects on communication, social involvement, and well-being, although interestingly, those who were already introverts show increased withdrawal.

In other words, the internet is a communication tool and people use it manage their emotional states, like they do with any other technology.

Of course there are some people who are depressed and anxious who use the internet (or follow sports teams, or read books, or watch TV...) to excess, but why we have to describe this as an addiction still completely baffles me.

Link to AJP editorial. Don't click! You're feeding your addiction!
Link to previous post 'Why there is no such thing as internet addiction'.

—Vaughan.

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Head transplants and Szymborska's Experiment:

The Nobel prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska wrote one of her most striking poems about a morbid experiment where a dog's head was cut from its body but kept alive by a blood-pumping machine.

The poem serves as a commentary on happiness and anxiety about the purpose of existence, but what many people don't know is that the experiment was genuinely completed, and the black and white film that the poem is based on can be viewed online.

The experiment was executed by Russian scientists and anticipated later work by neurosurgeon Robert White, who attempted transplant the heads of two monkeys, as can be seen in footage from the procedure.

While White thought of it as a possible precursor to human head transplantation, the scientific community reacted with outrage and these days it's generally thought of as a pretty appalling experiment that achieved virtually nothing of consequence.

Neuroscientist Steven Rose gives an interesting video commentary on the experiment, drawing from recent findings in 'embodied cognition' which have suggested that the brain cannot be meaningfully switched because so much of our experience of our minds relies on the body in which it has developed and is embedded.

I've also included Szymborska's poem below the fold if you want to see her literary reflection on watching the original Russian film.

Link to Soviet film on separated dog head.
Link to footage of White's monkey head transplant film.
Link to video with reaction and commentary to White's experiments.

The Experiment
by Wisława Szymborska

As a short subject before the main feature -
in which the actors did their best
to make me cry and even laugh -
we were shown an interesting experiment
involving a head.

The head
a minute earlier was still attached to...
but now it was cut off.
Everyone could see that it didn't have a body.
The tubes dangling from the neck hooked it up to a machine
that kept its blood circulating.
The head
was doing just fine.

Without showing pain or even surprise,
it followed a moving flashlight with its eyes.
It pricked up its ears at the sound of a bell.
Its moist nose could tell
the smell of bacon from odorless oblivion,
and licking its chops with evident relish
it salivated its salute to physiology.

A dog's faithful head,
a dog's friendly head
squinted its eyes when stroked,
convinced that it was still part of a whole
that crooks its back if patted
and wags its tail.

I thought about happiness and was frightened.
For if that's all life is about,
the head
was happy.

—Vaughan.

March 18, 2008

Kiddie psychopaths and the database nation:

Gary Pugh, the director of forensic sciences for the British police has sparked controversy after he suggested that children as young as five who display 'future offending traits' should be placed on a DNA database so they are more likely to be picked up if they commit crime in the future.

Pugh is almost certainly talking about children who have what are known as 'callous-unemotional' traits, described somewhat less politically correctly as 'kiddie psychopathy'.

These have indeed been found to weakly predict future antisocial behaviour, but the picture is more complex than it seems and, as we'll see, they aren't a good basis on which to base future crime fighting efforts.

Psychopathy describes a pattern of shallow emotion, low empathy and the lack of conscience for antisocial acts, with the ability to seem charming on the surface. Callous-unemotional traits describe something similar in children.

A recent study on the prevalence of these traits in children used a fairly typical definition:

1. Makes a good impression at first but people tend to see through him/her after they get to know him/her
2. Shallow or fast-changing emotions.
3. Too full of his/her own abilities.
4. Is not genuinely sorry if s/he has hurt someone or acted badly.
5. Can seem cold-blooded or callous.
6. Doesn't keep promises.
7. Not genuine in his/her expression of emotions.

This traits have been found in much higher levels in children with conduct disorder. CD is a psychiatric diagnosis, but really just describes a pattern of quite severe antisocial behaviour.

These studies have also found that in children already displaying aggressive or antisocial behaviour, callous-unemotional traits are associated with more severe aggressive, antisocial behaviour in the future.

However, recent studies that looked at these traits in the general population found that these traits reliably, but only very weakly, predict antisocial behaviour during the following years

So, if you look at the population as a whole, you could say that these childhood traits are genuinely linked to later antisocial acts, but the overall difference between children with and without these characteristics is small.

In other words, if you put every child with these traits on a DNA database, you're unlikely to see a significant increase in later crime detection as a result and you'll have the DNA of a lot of children who will never get in trouble with the law.

Link to BBC News story 'Police spokesman sparks DNA row'.

—Vaughan.

March 17, 2008

Faking the biscuit:

They say sincerity is everything, and if you can fake that, you've got it made. Nowhere is this more true than in marketing and Time magazine discusses the seemingly related concept of 'synthetic authenticity' - the feeling that a product is the 'real deal', which is supposedly going to be one of the big commercial trends in the near future.

And how does a cutting edge company make a product seem authentic? Well, it's not really clear from the article, but it seems to involve some sort of emotional attachment to the product which prompts associations with a sense of community and trust.

Two hundred years ago, agrarian Americans decided whether to buy a hoe mainly on the basis of whether it was available and affordable. But in the past 20 years, a school of behavioral economists has emerged to point out the obvious: consumers with higher living standards often make stupid, irrational decisions. We don't simply look at price and quality; we decide how we feel about a refrigerator or even a pair of socks before we buy.

Authenticity is a way of understanding this concept... Gilmore and Pine give a name to this ephemeral dimension of consumer behavior: in addition to the established dimensions of availability, price and quality, we are buying according to authenticity.

In some instances, it seems to be a way of making the commercial relationship between buyer and seller seems less like a commercial relationship and more of an implicit partnership of friends.

In others, it seems to rely on the idea that the consumer is accessing some sort of underlying 'true' experience that cannot be captured by modern technology.

The ideas are based on a recent book by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore who started the 'experience economy' movement ('sell experiences, not products') some years back.

One can't help but wonder whether they were inspired by Philip K Dick's alternative reality novel The Man in the High Castle. One character, Mr Wyndham-Matson, is involved in selling fake antiques to unsuspecting punters.

The thing that makes the object valuable, suggests Wyndham-Matson, is 'historicity' - the perception that the object has been involved in something historically significant.

He notes that if an antique gun has gone through a famous battle "it's the same as if it hadn't, unless you know", with the implication that the feeling of history (and dare we say, authenticity), is as much to do with the smoke and mirrors of persuasion as it is to do with the properties of the product.

Link to Time article 'Synthetic Authenticity'.

—Vaughan.

March 16, 2008

The English Surgeon:

I had the pleasure of watching a screening of a stunning new documentary called The English Surgeon yesterday. It's a film about the work of London-based neurosurgeon Henry Marsh and his colleague Igor Kurilets in the Ukraine.

However, 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.

Although Marsh normally works at St George's, one of London's most established hospitals, he has regularly travelled to the Ukraine for 15 years to assist the development of neurosurgery in this still struggling country.

The contrast itself is striking. One scene sees Marsh and Kurilets looking through street market hardware stalls for screws, rivets and power tools to use in their operations.

One of the most gripping scenes is where the two surgeons open a patient's skull using a Bosch power drill only to find the battery is going flat as they proceed.

The man has been only given local anaesthetic as the Ukrainian hospital doesn't have the facilities to safely put someone under and wake them up after initial part of the procedure.

Some of the most moving moments concern the tension between the shortcoming of medicine and the hope of the patients. There are many profound moments that aren't well captured by brief summaries, and I'm sure each viewer takes something different away from them, so you'll need to experience them for yourselves.

It's probably worth saying that the film is also incredibly funny in places, partly owing to Marsh's phlegmatic personality, but partly owing to the dark humour and comic irony posed by the situations that arise.

Marsh was the subject of another documentary by the same filmmaker created for the BBC as part of their medical series Your Life in Their Hands. Sadly, it's not available online (or anywhere by the looks of it), but let me know if it appears as a torrent and I'll link to it.

If you want to see it on the big screen there are screenings in Norwich, Brighton, London, York, Glasgow and Edinburgh before the end of March, and apparently it will be shown on BBC Two on March 30th.

International readers will have to hope for a torrent as things currently stand.

As an aside, the soundtrack was composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and is fittingly beautiful.

Link to film website (thanks Kat!).

—Vaughan.

March 12, 2008

A personal note / una nota personal:

I qualify as a clinical psychologist in September and would like to work in Latin America for 6 months to a year afterwards.

If you know anyone in Spanish speaking Latin America who might be interested employing a newly qualified clinical psychologist who speaks passable Spanish (with room for improvement) and has a PhD in cognitive neuropsychiatry, please get in touch.

I can send my CV in Spanish or English and am happy to consider all types of psychology job.

For those not familiar with the world of psychology, Latin American has a long tradition of valuing psychology as an important scientific and clinical pursuit.

The first university course teaching psychology in Latin America started in 1897 and was taught by Prof Ezequiel Chavez in the Preparatory School of Mexico, five years later to become the National University of Mexico.

The first experimental psychology lab opened in 1891 in San Juan in Argentina, with the first university lab opening in 1898 in the Colegio Nacional of Buenos Aires.

In 1907 Latin America's first professional psychology association was launched - the Sociedad de Estudios Psicologicos that gathered psychologists from across the region.

Owing to periods of social and political turmoil, Latin American psychology has traditionally been focused on applied research and practice - aiming to use psychology to improve the health and well-being of the population.

Latin America maintains a leading role in world psychology. As a testament to this, the Internation Neuropsychological Society will be holding their July conference jointly with the Neuropsychology Society of Argentina in Buenos Aires.

So, you can see why I'm keen to work in the region.

pdf of article on the history of Latin American psychology.

—Vaughan.

Inner speech signals, but isn't a psychic telephone:

New Scientist reports on a neck-band technology that allows the wearer's silent thoughts to trigger messages over a phone line.

It sounds impressive, but the video that accompanies the story makes it look like the technology reads your inner thoughts and transmits them as sounds, when it fact it does something far more basic.

Whenever we think to ourselves, rather curiously, the vocal chords get activated very slightly - faintly mirroring what would happen if we were to say the words out loud.

This is known as subvocal speech and can be picked up by EMG sensors on the neck that pick up the tiny electrical signals generated by the weakly activated muscles.

While the technology doesn't exist to turn these signals back into speech, it is possible to train the system to distinguish between a number of different general patterns which can trigger specific computer commands.

Lancet Neurology reported in 2004 that the same team had a basic system running that recognised six words (stop, go, left, right, alpha, omega) and 10 digits, to allow 'silent' control of a machine or a software application.

The team seem to have developed the technology and it can apparently now recognise many more commands, however, it doesn't 'translate' thoughts into their corresponding words.

In the video, the wearer is triggering sound recordings of specific sentences, pre-arranged to provide answers to the rehearsed telephone 'conversation'. Still impressive, but not a genuine conversation in the way we would normally think of it.

As an aside, for more than 20 years now, we've know that subvocal speech accompanies hallucinated voices in people who have been diagnosed with psychosis.

This means people who hear constant hallucinated voices will probably not be able to use the system effectively.

However, we now know that healthy individuals have much higher levels of hallucinations than previously thought, although most people are not bothered or distressed by them.

For example, in a 2004 study Louise Johns and colleagues found that 0.7% of the British population had experienced an auditory hallucination in the last year.

It's interesting to speculate that a significant minority of the population might experience problems with this technology as their hallucinations accidentally trigger commands or send messages on their behalf!

Link to NewSci story 'Nerve-tapping neckband allows 'telepathic' chat'.
Link to video of product presentation.

—Vaughan.

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March 11, 2008

Exporting psychological treatments, importing wisdom:

A recent 60 country World Health Organisation study found that depression is the most serious chronic illness, worse than angina, arthritis, asthma, and diabetes. Unfortunately, the majority of people who experience depression live in low income countries where help is least likely to be available.

The New York Times has a fascinating article on an ongoing project in Goa, India, that screens every attendee at a local health centre and then uses psychological therapy to help with low mood or anxiety.

It's not a simple case of just using Western techniques in a new environment.

As the NYT article mentions, mental illness carries a significant stigma in many cultures. For example, a diagnosis may not only be stigmatising for the affected person, but it may also mean the person's children are less likely to be thought of as suitable marriage partners, potentially affecting the whole family's future.

Futhermore, depression is known to present quite differently in some non-Western cultures. Studies have found that people are more likely to report 'somatic symptoms' such as diffuse pains or tiredness, rather than low mood or emotional problems.

This is partly due to stigma, but sometimes because certain languages don't have the same, or even such a varied vocabulary for emotions and mental states.

I'm currently working with a Pakistani psychiatrist who often surprises me by pointing out that even what I assume are relatively straightforward words, such as depression or anxiety, might not have a direct translation in some Asian languages.

All of these issues mean that the treatment centre in Goa tackles the issue in a slightly different way:

Most are also apparently wary of visiting a mental hospital. In India, the stigma of mental illness remains strong. To minimize the problem, health workers avoid using the words “mental illness,” “depression” or “anxiety” with patients, relying on more commonly used words like “strain” and “tension.”

The patients “are happy to talk,” Dr. Sudipto Chatterjee, a psychiatrist at Sangath, said, “as long as you stay away from the idea of mental illness.”

I find the issue of having different vocabularies for our mental states fascinating.

The philosopher Wittgenstein noted how difficult it is to agree on common words for internal states because errors are so hard to correct.

If a mother and child see a rabbit and the child says "elephant!", the mother can point to the rabbit and correct the misnomer. But what can a mother, or anyone do, if someone 'misnames' an emotion?

Or to put it another way, as we don't have external things to refer to for internal states, how do we ever agree on a vocabulary that is at all meaningful?

I'm always curious when I come across differences concerning emotion words in other languages. For example, Spanish has the same word (vergüenza) for shame and embarrassment.

From my native language perspective it strikes me as amazing that another language doesn't individually label these two states which seem to have such different personal and social implications.

I'm sure there are many reverse examples and many other emotional vocabulary mismatches across the world's languages.

Link to NYT article 'Psychotherapy for All: An Experiment'.

—Vaughan.

March 10, 2008

Pimping insomnia:

Discover Magazine has an exposé of a recent surge of news stories on insomnia and sleep disorders that stretch from the dull to the frankly unbelievable.

It turns out a fair number seem to be based on press releases from PR firms, some trying to promote hotels, but others coming from the National Sleep Foundation.

The author of the piece looked at the 2005 financial figures from this organisation and discovered that over 80% of its funding came from drug companies and almost three quarters was spent on 'public education' - i.e. advertising the existence of sleep disorders.

Of course, sleep disorders can be distressing, disabling and potentially dangerous but research suggests that particularly for insomnia, the judicious use of drugs should be a last resort (most have the potential for addiction), as behavioural and psychological treatments are safer and more effective for most people.

Unfortunately, these approaches are often not available, meaning 'public awareness' increases diagnosis but leads to drug prescription, partly because people go to doctors and list what symptoms they think they have from the advertising rather than describing their experiences.

The National Sleep Foundation do a lot of excellent work but the article suggests that there seems to be an element of disease mongering and astroturfing to their promotions.

Link to article 'Deflating the Bogus Insomnia “Epidemic”'

—Vaughan.

Possessed :

Film-maker Martin Hampton has created a revealing documentary on four people with different degrees of compulsive hoarding, where individuals incessantly collect household objects, even to the point of not being able to throw out rubbish.

Compulsive hoarding is often linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder, where affected people experience intrusive thoughts or urges to complete certain actions (most commonly 'washing' or 'checking') even though they know how seriously these intrusions are affecting their lives.

Hampton's documentary is a remarkably well made account of people with similar urges, in this case to collect and retain, and just lets the individuals and the images speak for themselves (it is also freely available online as wide screen HD, so looks wonderful).

Apparently the documentary was created as part of a Master's course in visual anthropology, a field I'd not come across before, but which seems to be concerned with documenting the diversity of human experience through film.

Possessed does this admirably and seems to have garnered numerous awards since it's release.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments. An update and a request from the director!

I am the director of this film and am now researching the next stage of the project. I am trying to compile a collection of peoples experiences of OCD and other anxiety based disorders. I have found from experience that although symptoms might be similar, the actual particularities of the obsessions and compulsions are often very varied. For example, one might wash ones hands 30 times a day, but have a very unique self discovered reason for doing so. I would be very grateful to hear of your or any friend / acquaintances experiences / difficulties. Many thanks and I hope you find the film interesting. Please email me at martin@martinhampton.com

Link to Martin Hampton's documentary Possessed (via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

March 07, 2008

Decorating inner space:

The New York Times has a fun article on how psychotherapists decorate their office and what this might portray about the inner life of the shrink.

Psychoanalysts (Freudian psychotherapists) in particular are very careful about what sort of impression they project about themselves, preferring, at least initially, to be as insubstantial as possible so the patient can transfer feelings and impressions onto them, allowing relationship patterns and emotional reactions to be uncovered and worked on.

However, many psychotherapists work from home, using rooms in their house as offices. The NYT piece notes that a recent academic paper in the journal Psychoanalytic Psychology caused a storm by questioning the ethics of this practice, as impressions or even people from the therapists family life might interfere in the crucial relationship forming process.

Of course, the office is also a way of making the patient feel comfortable and at ease and so the tension between how the therapist attempts to express this, and how they express themselves, can be quite revealing.

Freud famously had a painting over his psychoanalytic couch of Jean-Martin Charcot (Freud's mentor) presiding over the swooning and almost bare breasted young woman 'Blanche'. No wishful thinking going on there of course.

In the UK, where most psychological treatment happens in the NHS, the rooms are often comfortable but plain outpatient appointment rooms that are shared and booked as necessary.

Occasionally, clinicians will have their own office in which to see patients. In these case, I've noticed that psychotherapists and counsellors have a much better sense of interior decoration (all rugs and soft lighting) than clinical psychologists, who tend to go for books and photocopied papers look.

Link to NYT article on therapists' offices.

—Vaughan.

March 06, 2008

Moses on high article available online:

Thanks to Debbie from the My Mind on Books blog who managed to track down the original academic article from psychologist Benny Shanon who argues that Moses' experiences on Mount Sinai may have been due to a hallucinogenic experience.

Shannon suggests that a mixture prepared from the acacia tree and the bush peganum harmala could have been responsible.

The article is freely available so you can read it in detail for yourself. As well as Shanon's main idea, it also contains a wealth of information about the use of psychedelic plants in the ancient world.

Link to article 'Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative Hypothesis'.

—Vaughan.