Mind Hacks: News Archives

March 04, 2010

How reliable are fMRI results?:

A new study has looked at the reliability of fMRI brain scanning results over time, finding that the same experiment will only only be moderately reproducible when conducted at two different times, suggesting that fMRI is much less reliable than most researchers assume.

The authors of the paper are the same ones who brought us the study showing that it's possible to find 'brain activity' in a dead fish if the analysis is done in a way that is common but prone to false positives.

The paper will shortly appear in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences but they've put a copy online and, although it's a scientific article, it's remarkably easy to read.

They review all the studies to date on what is known as the 'test-retest reliability' of fMRI. This refers to the ability of a measure to give reproducible results.

For example, if you're measuring an adult's height you want to make sure that your tape measure gives you similar results each time you use it on the same person. Of course, you may have readings that vary by a millimetre or two each time, but if you get wildly different results on Monday and Tuesday, you probably want to bin your tape measure.

In fMRI there are two types of results. One is 'where in the brain' and the other is 'how strong' is the activity.

We can examine the first by looking at how well the active brain areas overlap in scans taken at two different times, and we can examine the second by looking at the similarity of the strength of the results using a statistical test like a correlation.

The better the overlap and the statistical relationship between the results from the same test on the same people at different times, the more we can rely on our measurement technique.

This new analysis reviewed all the previous studies that have looked at the test-retest reliability of fMRI and found that overall, active brain areas overlap about 30% of the time and the correlation for the strength of the activity was about 0.5. To get some perspective a result of 1 would indicate perfectly reliable and reproducible results while a result of 0 would indicate no reliability at all.

An overlap of 30% and a correlation result of 0.5 shows fMRI has moderate reliability, but is much poorer than most people assume.

However, this overall result is perhaps a little too broad, and the authors make the point that the reliability varies depending on the type of scanner being used, what test is being carried out by the participants, what brain areas are being investigated and how the results are analysed.

Indeed, a recent study on the test-retest reliability of fMRI studies of the 'reward system' found the reproducibility of the results to be worse than this general figure while another study found an auditory detection task produced better results.

The authors conclude:

One thing is abundantly clear: fMRI is an effective research tool that has opened broad new horizons of investigation to scientists around the world. However, the results from fMRI research may be somewhat less reliable than many researchers implicitly believe. While it may be frustrating to know that fMRI results are not perfectly replicable, it is beneficial to take a longer-term view regarding the scientific impact of these studies. In neuroimaging, as in other scientific fields, errors will be made and some results will not replicate. Still, over time some measure of truth will accrue. This chapter is not intended to be an accusation against fMRI as a method. Quite the contrary, it is meant to increase the understanding of how much each fMRI result can contribute to scientific knowledge.

Link to full text of paper (via @hysell).

—Vaughan.

February 21, 2010

Love amid chaos:

Swansea Love Story is a gritty, tragic and surprisingly funny documentary about heroin users in a struggling South Wales town.

It follows a number of addicts as they score, skip meetings with drugs counsellors, philosophise about their predicament and go about their chaotic daily lives.

The piece is, in parts, desolate, particularly as we hear about the lives of those now relying on heroin, but there are also some outrageously funny moments as the protagonists relate their intense experiences with a combination of unintentional irony and casual exaggeration.

The film is produced and directed by Andy Capper and Leo Leigh, the latter apparently being the son of famous British director Mike Leigh and although it has only recently been released, the video is available in full on archive.org.

It makes an interesting comparison to the 1999 documentary Black Tar Heroin, that follows several users in Southern California, although is no less downbeat in its conclusions.

Link to documentary on archive.org (via Addiction Inbox).

—Vaughan.

February 13, 2010

France strikes transexualism from list of mental illnesses:

France has become the first country in the world to remove gender identity disorder, also known as transexualism, from its list of officially recognised mental illnesses. This is huge news but seems yet to have been picked up by English language news sources.

The news was reported yesterday in the French national daily Le Figaro and by the AFP newswire in French and English, so my details are from the Spanish language report (e.g. this report in Colombian national El Tiempo).

My translation of an excerpt from the Spanish-language AFP newswire report:

The Minister of Health, Roselyne Bachelot, had announced on 16th May 2009, before the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, that transexualism would not be not considered a psychiatric disorder in France.

On that occasion, numerous personalities from the world of politics and science had signed an article that appeared in the press to petition the World Health Organisation to stop "considering transexuals as affected by mental illness".

"France is the first country in the world that does not consider transexualism as a mental illness" said Joël Bedos, French representative of IDAHO (International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia), to AFP on Friday. "It's historic", added Philippe Caste, spokesperson for the 'Interasociativa lesbiana, gay, bi y trans'. "It was something very important and was greatly anticipated since the promise was made" added Roselyne Bachelot.

This move will likely be widely supported by the transgender community. However, the prospect of the diagnoses being removed in all countries might be a double-edge sword for some. Although the fact that being diagnosed as mentally ill is a requirement to obtain sex-reassignment in some places has been resented, the removal of the diagnosis could raise fears that the procedure may become less accessible.

Simply being transgendered or having trangender desires itself does not currently qualify for the diagnoses, as it requires significant psychological distress to also be present. However, campaigners argue that this distress is largely caused by discrimination and stigma, to which the diagnosis contributes.

The move by France, however, does not de-list the diagnoses from the World Health Organisation's ICD-10 classification or the American Psychiatric Association's DSM and, in fact, the draft DSM-V only slightly modifies the criteria for the diagnoses in children and adults although does rename it 'gender incongruence'.

Nevertheless, this will put pressure on both the World Health Organisation and the American Psychiatric Association to remove the diagnoses which have a long-standing target of criticism from the LGBT community.

Link to French-language report in Le Figaro.
Link to Spanish-language AFP newswire report.

—Vaughan.

February 10, 2010

The draft of the new 'psychiatric bible' is published:

The draft version of the American Psychiatric Association's DSM 5, the psychiatric 'bible' that defines the revised criteria for diagnosing mental illness, has finally been published.

It's a masterpiece of compromise - intended to be largely backwardly compatible, so most psychiatrists could just get on diagnosing the few major mental illnesses that all clinicians recognise in the same way they always did, with some extra features if you're an advanced user.

One of the most striking extra features is the addition of dimensions. These are essentially mini questionnaire-like ratings that allow the extent of a condition to be numerically rated, rather than just relying on a 'you have it or you do not' categorical diagnosis.

For example, the proposed dimension of emotional distress in depression is available online as a pdf and you will recognise the format if you've ever filled out a mood questionnaire. Take this item for example: "I felt worthless..." Never / Rarely / Sometimes / Often / Always.

One of the most striking changes is to the diagnosis of schizophrenia, which, although the core features remain the same, has changed radically in some ways. This is interesting because many people thought it would be largely untouched with just the addition of dimensions, but actually it's been fundamentally restructured.

For many years, schizophrenia has been divided into various subtypes: paranoid schizophrenia, disorganised schizophrenia, catatonic schizophrenia, and the like, that reflect different symptom profiles.

The subtypes are currently a mess. It's possible for two people to be diagnosed with schizophrenia with not a single psychological symptom in common and the groupings were made on a rather ad-hoc basis.

In the draft version the subtypes have been completely eliminated and instead, the replaced by dimensions, reflecting the fact most of the symptoms occur in different patients at different severities and that symptom profiles can change over time.

There is also a long overdue fix. Catatonic schizophrenia is a subtype that describes a pattern where patients have movement problems: catatonia - like being 'frozen' in one place or having an unusual symptom called waxy flexibility where no movement is initiated but if a limb is moved, it just stays there - a bit like a bendy doll.

It's an unusual condition that was first described by the psychiatrist Karl Kahlbaum in 1874, but which isn't actually specific to schizophrenia. In fact, it is more likely to turn up alongside severe depression and bipolar disorder, or in some types of brain damage, and is treated in a completely different way to schizophrenia, responding best to anti-anxiety drugs and ECT.

For reasons of misguided convenience, and against the best knowledge that was around for a century, it got classified as a subtype of schizophrenia. In a move that will have older psychiatrists rolling their eyes in a 'I told you so' sort of way, it is now a specifier that can just be plonked onto pretty much any other diagnosis if it occurs.

One of the changes likely to have the widest and most controversial effects is the creation of the 'Psychosis Risk Syndrome' - a sort of something's-a-bit-strange-but-you're-not-completely-mad state, where people might have hallucinations, delusion-like ideas and disorganised thoughts, but not to the extent that they are completely disabled by them.

This is drawn from research on what has been called the 'prodromal' or 'at risk' mental state with the hope that it could identify and treat patients before they become properly psychotic.

One difficulty is that only about a third of people identified as being 'at risk' actually become psychotic at a later date. This wouldn't be particularly worrying were it not for the fact that people in this 'at risk' state (perhaps better called 1-in-3 chance state) are often prescribed antipsychotic drugs.

As the first effective treatment for madness, antipsychotics are some of the most important drugs in medical history, but they are also some of the most toxic with long-lasting effects on the body and brain. The thought of giving them out to large numbers of people who might never become psychotic frightens many.

There is also the issue that this diagnosis might pathologise lots of eccentric but perfectly functional people. Research has shown that about %10 of Joe Public have higher levels of hallucinations and delusion-like ideas than the average psychotic inpatient but are rarely bothered by their experiences.

In other words, lots, and I mean lots, of people have unusual experiences - hearing voices, magical ideas, expansive moments - that never cause them any problems, but these people could now be diagnosed with a form of not-quite-mental-illness.

The other diagnoses that have received a radical rethink are the personality disorders which have been completely reconceptualised. Interestingly, the idea has been brought more in line with psychological definitions of personality and the consequent disorders are described as being disruptions to the self (identity integration, integrity of self-concept, and self-directedness) and interpersonal relations (empathy, intimacy and cooperativeness, and complexity and integration of representations of others).

A new child diagnosis of Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria has been added. If this seems unremarkable it's actually big slap in the face for a small but vocal group of US psychiatrists who have been pushing the idea of 'child bipolar disorder' - arguing that sad children who have tantrums are showing a juvenile form of 'manic depression'.

This has become popular, almost entirely in the US, and has led to the alarming rise in children taking antipsychotics. The LA Times reports that this new diagnosis has been created in large part to stop kids being diagnosed with child bipolar. That's the slap.

Many of the other changes are largely bug fixes. The much discussed change where Asperger's syndrome and autism have been combined into autism spectrum disorder fixes the anomaly that the only difference between Asperger's and high functioning autism was a technical point about what age the child started talking.

Post-traumatic stress disorder has been tightened up so it doesn't rely solely on someone's self-definition of trauma, preventing PTSD being diagnosed after seeing disasters on TV or after being troubled by upsetting but everyday events, such as insults at work.

The sexual disorders see quite a few additions including hypersexual disorder, that attempts to define being too interested in sex as a mental illness, and paraphilic coercive disorder, that is likely to cause legal controversy as it defines being turned on by forcing people into sex as a psychiatric problem, rather than a moral failing.

Binge-eating disorder has been added, addiction diagnoses for specific drugs have been created (included cannabis withdrawal), gambling addiction has been added, and the manual mentions 'internet addiction' in the non-committal, we need more information category.

Another interesting change is to conversion disorder, traditionally known as 'hysteria', where medical symptoms appear - such as paralysis - without the usual tissue or nerve damage. The Freudian theory is that the mind is 'converting' trauma into physical symptoms to protect consciousness from the mental pain, but the last remnants of Freud have been removed.

Previously, the clinician had to attribute motivations, unconscious or otherwise to the symptoms, but now they just have to appear without being explained by "a general medical condition, the direct effects of a substance, or a culturally sanctioned behavior or experience".

The related cluster of dissociative and somatoform disorder have also been subtly de-Freuded, as American psychiatry presumably wishes to finally put the old Viennese ghost to rest.

As for the scientific basis of the disorders as distinct separate entities rather than somewhat cobbled together pragmatic descriptions, a quote in The New York Times article hits the nail on the head:

The good news, said Edward Shorter, a historian of psychiatry who has been critical of the manual, is that most patients will be spared the confusion of a changed diagnosis. But “the bad news,” he added, “is that the scientific status of the main diseases in previous editions of the D.S.M. — the keystones of the vault of psychiatry — is fragile.”

Link to draft version of the DSM-V.
Link to Washington Post coverage.
Link to New York Times coverage.
Link to LA Times coverage.
Link to Wall Street Journal blog coverage.
Link to NPR coverage via Integral Options Cafe.

—Vaughan.

February 02, 2010

Fight club debate on computers and kids' brains:

On Thursday, I shall be taking part in a live debate hosted by The Times Online entitled 'Is screen culture damaging our children's brains?' where I will be debating psychologist Tracey Alloway who recently made headlines by suggesting Facebook 'enhances intelligence' but Twitter 'diminishes it'.

It one of those online chat things but you are welcome to sign up and take part. It happens at 1pm UK time which turns out to be far-too-early-o'clock Colombian time so I may be in my dressing gown. Don't let that put you off.

An article on the same topic will also be coming out on Thursday which should help set the scene and which I'll link to when it appears.

Link to 'Is screen culture damaging our children's brains?' debate.

—Vaughan.

January 28, 2010

Better Thinking Through Chemistry:

This chapter was due for inclusion in The Rough Guide Book of Brain Training, but was cut - probably because the advice it gives is so unsexy!

The idea of cognitive enhancers is an appealing one, and its attraction is obvious. Who wouldn't want to take a pill to make them smarter? It's the sort of vision of the future we were promised on kids TV, alongside jetpacks and talking computers.

Sadly, this glorious future isn't here yet. The original and best cognitive enhancer is caffeine ("creative lighter fluid" as one author called it), and experts agree that there isn't anything else available to beat it. Lately, sleep researchers have been staying up and getting exciting about a stimulant called modafinil, which seems to temporarily eliminate the need for sleep without the jitters or comedown of caffeine. Modafinil isn't a cognitive enhancer so much as something that might help with jetlag, or let you stay awake when you really should be getting some kip.

Creative types have had a long romance with alcohol and other more illicit narcotics. The big problem with this sort of drug (aside from the oft-documented propensity for turning people into terrible bores), is that your brain adapts to, and tries to counteract, the effects of foreign substances that affect its function. This produces the tolerance that is a feature of most prolonged drug use - whereby the user needs more and more to get the same effect - and also the withdrawal that characterises drug addiction. You might think this is a problem only for junkies but, if you are a coffee or tea drinker just pause for moment and reflect on any morning when you've felt stupid and unable to function until your morning cuppa. It might be for this reason that the pharmaceutical industry is not currently focusing on developing drugs for creativity. Plans for future cognitive enhancers focus on more mundane, workplace-useful skills such as memory and concentration. Memory-boosters would likely be most useful to older adults, especially those with worries about failing memories, rather than younger adults.

Although there is no reason in principle why cognitive enhancers couldn't be found which fine-tune our concentration or hone our memories, the likelihood is that, as with recreational drugs, tolerance and addiction would develop. These enhancing drugs would need to be taken in moderate doses and have mild effects - just as many people successfully use caffeine and nicotine for their cognitive effects on concentration today. Even if this allowed us to manage the consequences of the brain trying to achieve its natural level, there's still the very real possibility that use of the enhancing drugs would need to be fairly continuous - just as it is with smokers and drinkers of tea and coffee. And even then our brains would learn to associate the drug with the purpose for which they are taken, which means it would get harder and harder to perform that purpose without the drugs, as with the coffee drinker who can't start work until he's had his coffee. Furthermore, some reports suggest that those with high IQ who take cognitive enhancers are mostly likely to mistake the pleasurable effect of the substance in question for a performance benefit, while actually getting worse at the thing they're taking the drug for.

The best cognitive enhancer may well be simply making best use of the brain's natural ability to adapt. Over time we improve anything we practice, and we can practice almost anything. There's a hundred better ways to think and learn - some of them are in this book. By practicing different mental activities we can enhance our cognitive skills without drugs. The effects can be long lasting, the side effects are positive, and we won't have to put money in the pockets of a pharmaceutical company.

Link to more about The Rough Guide book of Brain Training
Three excellent magazine articles on cognitive enhancers, from: The New Yorker, Wired and Discover

—tom.

January 20, 2010

Cognitive Daily has left the bulding:

Cognitive Daily, one of the most established and respected psychology blogs on the internet, has just announced it has come to an end on the five year anniversary of its first post.

We've been fans of CD since, well, since they started as they kicked off only a few months after we did.

However, all is not lost, as both Dave and Greta will continue with their many online projects and there is a mysterious 'new project' soon to be announced (greatest hits? musical? concept album?)

What will we do with all that time we've freed up? Greta plans to continue her work as Professor of Psychology at Davidson College, teaching and mentoring students, conducting research, and sharing her love of music, literature, and art. Dave will continue as editor of ResearchBlogging.org and weekly columnist for SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, and he'll maintain his personal blog, Word Munger and his obsessively-updated Twitter account. In addition, Dave's planning a new project, to be unveiled within the next few weeks. Look for more information about it on Twitter and Word Munger.

Many thanks to you both for five years of fantastic psychology coverage on Cognitive Daily and we wish you all the best for future projects.

Link to Cognitive Daily announcement.

—Vaughan.

January 18, 2010

Chasing the digital dragon:

Wired has an excellent report on abuses in China's 'internet addiction' boot camps in the wake of the death of a young man from a beating only hours after he was admitted to one of the facilities.

As we reported last August, after years of promoting the 'psychiatric dangers' of the internet, the Chinese government has started to rein in its own clinics after criticisms of its treatments (that included electroshock) and has begun to crack down on the numerous private clinics after reports of widespread abuses.

The Wired piece follows the story of Deng Senshan, the young man who was beaten to death in one of the camps, and explores how the rise of the treatment clinics have followed the increase in anxiety about young people using the internet.

The article also pulls out some of the cultural factors that drive the concept of internet addiction in China, which are quite different from those that are common in the United States.

In fact, this was discussed in a study by anthropologists Alex Golub and Kate Lingley, who noted that in America, parents typically take their children to internet addiction clinics because they don't spend any time outside or don't socialise, whereas in China, people take their children to Internet addiction clinics because their children are playing basketball, dating, and playing video games instead of studying.

Link to Wired article 'Obsessed With the Internet: A Tale From China'.
Link to our previous report on China's 'net addiction' clinics.
Link to study on cultural factors behind Chinese 'net addiction'.

—Vaughan.

Scientific references and links used in researching the book

January 14, 2010

The Rough Guide to Brain Training (Moore & Stafford, 2010):

The Rough Guide to Brain Training is a puzzle book which incluces essays and vignettes by myself. The book has 100 days of puzzles which will challenge your mental imagery, verbal fluency, numeracy, working memory and reasoning skills. There are puzzles that will look familiar like suduko, and some new ones I've never seen before. Fortunately the answers are included at the back. Gareth made these puzzles. I find them really hard.

I have 10 short essays in the book, covering topics such as evidence-based brain training, how music affects the developing brain, optimal brain nutrition and what the brains of the future will look like. As well as the essays, I wrote numerous short vignettes, helpful hints and suprising facts from the world of psychology and neuroscience (did you know that squids have dounut shaped brains? That you share 50% of your genes with a banana? That signals travel between brain cells at up to 200mph, which is fast compared to a cycle courier, but slow compared to a fibre optic cable). Throughout the book I try to tell it straight about what is, isn't and might be true about brain training. I read the latest research and I hope I tell a sober, but optimistic, message about the potential for us to change how we think over our lifetimes (and the potential to protect our minds against cognitive decline in older age). I also used my research to provide a sprinkling of evidence-based advice for those who are trying to improve a skill, study for an exam or simply remember things better.

Writing the book was a great opportunity for me to dig into the research on brain training. It is a topic I'd always meant to investigate properly, but hadn't gotten around to. The claims of those pushing commercial brain training products always seemed suspicious, but the general idea - that our brains change based on practice and experience - seemed plausible. In fact, this idea has been one of the major trends of the last fifty years of neuroscience research. It has been a big surprise to neuroscientists as experiment after experiment has shown exactly how malleable (aka 'plastic') the structure and function of the brain is. The resolution of this paradox of the general plausibility of brain training with my suspicion of specific products is in the vital issue of control groups. Although experience changes our brains, and although it is now beyond doubt that a physically and mentally active life can prevent cognitive decline across the lifespan, it isn't at all clear what kinds of activities are necessary or essential for general mental sharpness. Sure, after practicing something you'll get better at it. And doing something is better than doing nothing, but the crucial question is doing something you pay for better than doing something else that is free? The holy grail of brain training would be a simple task which you could practice (and copyright! and sell!!) and which would have benefits for all mental skills. Nobody has shown that such a task or set of tasks exists, so while you could buy a puzzle book, you could also go for a jog or go to the theatre with friends. Science wouldn't be able to say for certain which activity would have the most benefits for your mental sharpness as an individual - although the smart money is probably on going jogging. It is to the credit of the editors at the Rough Guides that they let me say this in the introduction to the Rough Guide to Brain Training!

There wasn't room in the book for all the references I used while writing it. This was a great sadness to me, since I believe that unless you include the references for a claim, you're just spouting off, relying on a dubious authority, rather than really talking about science. So, to make up for this, and by way of an apology, I've put the references here. It will be harder to track specific claims from this general list that it would be with in-text citations, so if you do have a query, please get in touch and I promise will point you to the evidence for any claims I make in the book.

Additionally, I'll be posting here a few things from the cutting room floor - text that I wrote for the book which didn't make it into the final draft. Watch out, and if you do get your hands on a copy of this Rough Guide to Brain Training, get in touch and let me know what you think.

Amazon link (only £5.24!)

—tom.

December 31, 2009

Undercover in Accra Psychiatric Hospital:

Award winning journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas went undercover in Ghana's Accra Psychiatric Hospital and has published a hard hitting report on the appalling conditions in one of the country's main institutions for treating mental illness.

In a spectacular piece of investigative reporting Anas posed as a patient, a trader, a baker and a taxi driver and has reported on institution-wide problems that include drug dealing, abuse, maltreatment, thieving, and medical negligence leading to the deaths of patients.

One of the most striking parts of the report is where he notes a few of the staff members who carry out their roles with due diligence and genuine compassion for the patients in the midst of the systemic failure of the institution.

The neglect, abuse and maltreatment of patients by nurses in the hospital remain one of the most disturbing aspects of life within the hospital. On many occasions, this reporter filmed instances where patients suffering severe fits were left to lie at the mercy of the weather, with nurses totally apathetic. Some nurses were captured beating patients who lay on the ground helpless and writhing in pain. On one occasion, a male patient is seen helping a female patient suffering from epilepsy to get on her feet. After many futile attempts to help the ailing girl, the male patient leaves her on the ground close to a nurse’s office and moves on. Minutes later, a nurse passes by without offering any assistance to the patient. Not far from the patient, three nurses could be seen chatting idly as the epileptic patient lies in pain. When help finally arrives, the patient is beaten mercilessly by the nurses amidst shouts of “get up”, “foolish girl”, “if we beat her she would get up”.

The attitude of nurses is generally so outrageous that the hard work and conscientious disposition of Ken Wholley Brantuo, Alex Baah and a few others shone forth like torch in pitch- darkness.

Francisca Ntow, a young nurse at the hospital epitomised the spirit of care and love that accompanies nursing. With beaming smiles each day, she tries her best to give attention to patients and to find out their state of being. Her shining example gives hope to the future of psychiatric nursing in the country.

If you check out nothing else I recommend listening to a gripping interview with Anas where he discusses his undercover investigation on Ghana's Super Morning Show

His follow-up piece on abuse of people with mental illness by traditional healers and prayer camps is also a powerful piece of reporting.

Probably one of the most remarkable pieces of mental health reporting you are likely to encounter for a very long time. Truly excellent work.

Link to Exposed: Inside Ghana’s “Mad House” (via TWS).
Link to interview with Anas Aremeyaw Anas on his investigation.
Link to 'Investigative report: Lies of prayer camps and traditional healers'.

—Vaughan.

A year in science and sex:

Dr Petra has two great posts, one looking at the best and worst of sex and science stories from 2009, and another revisiting her annual predictions for the year in sexuality and sexual health.

The best and worst include everything from clitorocentric conspiracies, informed sex education, the Ugandan government, female sex drugs and Shakira (who is clearly still too shy to call).

Additionally, Petra will shortly post her predictions for the coming year online, so you can see how 2010 might shape up.

Link to 'The best and worst sex (and science) stories of 2009'.
Link to 'Revisiting my sex predictions for 2009'.

—Vaughan.

December 29, 2009

Ten to know:

The Brainspin blog has a list of 'Ten Psychology Studies from 2009 Worth Knowing About' that covers a mix of well-known studies and hidden gems from the last year.

The descriptions, as you might expect, are a little brief and give just the punchline without some of the possible drawbacks but all are linked to the original study so you can them in full (well, at least as far as your access allows).

One of my favourites was number 7, which provides evidence against the common idea that people who connect better with others might be better at detecting lies:

A study in the journal Psychological Science tested the hypothesis that emotional mimicry—the tendency to mirror the emotions of someone we’re interacting with—makes it difficult to identify liars. Nonmimickers were significantly better at identifying liars than mimickers, and thus were harder to fool with the old flim flam sales routine. The reason is that mimicry reduces psychological distance and lowers defenses. Even if someone probably isn’t lying to you, it’s best to keep the cushion in place just in case.

Link to 'Ten Psychology Studies from 2009 Worth Knowing About'.

—Vaughan.

December 26, 2009

New issue of Contemporary Psychotherapy:

A new issue of the sleek internet magazine Contemporary Psychotherapy has just appeared online and is well worth checking out if you're interested in the art of psychological treatment.

The magazine is aimed at psychotherapists and deals with everything from the bricks-and-mortar issues of running a practice to relationship dynamics in couples and families.

However, it doesn't wander off into the thickets of theoretical jargon and makes a good read if you're just interested in the world of therapy.

Link to Contemporary Psychotherapy.

—Vaughan.

December 15, 2009

The psychiatric bible: the state of play:

New Scientist has a good piece which outlines the current state of play in the contentious and recently delayed revision of the forthcoming psychiatric diagnostic manual, the DSM 5.

If you've been following the bad-tempered tussling among the psychiatric community over the re-writing of the manual, you probably won't find much new in the main piece but it is a great summary and is accompanied by some examples of contentious disorders that are being considered for the new version.

These include complicated grief, a form of extended and unresolved grieving; changes to 'gender identity disorder', which currently describes the state of feeling like you're a different gender; and hebephilia, a sexual interest in pubescent children.

The NewSci article is also accompanied by an interesting editorial that argues that the American Psychiatric Association should ditch the book and move to a database format where individual diagnoses could be updated when necessary as new evidence requires.

Link to NewSci article 'Psychiatry's civil war'.
Link to editorial 'Psychiatry's bible: Its time has passed'.

—Vaughan.

December 12, 2009

Psychology in the New York Times Year in Ideas:

I really recommend the 2009 Year in Ideas review from The New York Times as it is packed full of developments in the world of psychology and social science.

If you're a regular Mind Hacks reader you'll recognise some of the ideas from experiments and studies we've covered during 2009, but there are many more curiosities that make for compulsive reading.

Probably the majority of the articles will be of interest to mind and brain enthusiasts but I particularly enjoyed Literary Alzheimer's, Lithium in the Water Supply, Treating P.T.S.D. With Tetris, Cognitive Illiberalism, The Counterfeit Self, Drunken Ultimatums and to be fair, pretty much all the others too.

My only complaint is the short pieces don't link to the original sources (suggestion for Year in Ideas 2010: inline links!) but otherwise if you like the sort of stuff we post on Mind Hacks there's plenty to keep you occupied here as well.

Link to NYT Year In Ideas 2009.

—Vaughan.

December 10, 2009

Publication of new DSM diagnostic manual put back:

The American Psychiatric Association has announced that it has put back the publication of the forthcoming 'DSM 5' revision of the influential diagnostic manual of mental disorders back one year to May 2013.

The press release, available online as a pdf, notes:

“Extending the timeline will allow more time for public review, field trials and revisions,” said APA President Alan Schatzberg, M.D. “The APA is committed to developing a manual that is based on the best science available and useful to clinicians and researchers.”

Which could equally well be code for 'owing to the recent shitstorm over our behind-closed-doors policy and strident criticism from past committee members about the scientific quality of our review process, we've decided we need a bit of breathing space'.

As long as the time is genuinely used to get a better scientific footing for the project it could be genuinely beneficial, although to be fair, it's hardly likely that any new revision of the controversial manual will be greeted with universal approval.

pdf of APA press release on DSM 5 delay (via @DrDavidBallard).

—Vaughan.

December 01, 2009

Spice flow: the new street drug pharmacology:

Forensic Science International recently published an eye-opening study on a new generation of synthetic cannabinoids that have become popular as 'legal highs', provided by a highly organised neuroscience-savvy industry that is ready and waiting with new compounds before the law changes.

The study concerns several legal smoking mixtures, 'Spice' being the most well-known (pictured), which were recently found to contain synthetic cannabinoids.

Cannabinoids are named for their abundance in the cannabis plant, but this class of substance also naturally occurs in the nervous system as part of the normal biological signalling system. In fact, the street drug cannabis has its effect because its various cannabinoids, the most famous being THC, target one or more of the brain's cannabinoid receptors.

Marijuana and its derivatives are illegal in most countries but the brain's cannabinoid system is complex and so it is possible to synthesise other types of drugs in the same class as the plant's active ingredients, which target the same receptor sites, that have similar effects, but which are completely legal.

Although officially labelled as incense and not for human consumption, Spice was typically marketed as one of the many 'herbal smoking mixtures' which traditionally have been sold in head shops on the basis of their druggy associations despite having no psychoactive effects to speak of.

However, this brand became wildly popular and in 2008 scientific analysis found that it also contained the synthetic cannabinoids CP 47,497-C8 and JWH-018 which are structurally similar to THC.

I can't imagine what it was like when this was first discovered. It reminds me of the hair bristling moment in movies when the scientists discover that some form of ultra-advanced technology is behind a spate of odd occurrences.

You see, drugs like speed, heroine, cocaine and ecstasy require legally controlled raw materials but the processing stage is low-tech. That's why some types of speed are called 'bathtub crank', because some of it is literally synthesised in a bathtub, as images of meth lab busts illustrate.

But this is not the case with cannabinoids which require a complex and careful lab process with many stages and sometimes the separation of mirror image molecules (enantiomers) from each other as only one of the 'reflections' is desirable.

These are not trivial process. They can't be done in back rooms and they can't be done by amateurs.

What's more, these aren't just copy-cat syntheses done by your average underground lab who know the illicit process and just want to recreate it. These are new compounds, perhaps reported only a handful of times in the scientific literature and selected for their specific effect on the brain.

The authors of the Forensic Science International paper note "It is evident that the producers of these products have gone about in a very methodical manner to mine the scientific literature for promising psychoactive compounds. Most likely the published CB1 binding affinities were exploited as primary criterion."

CB1 is a specific type of cannabinoid receptor and is the one most activated by THC, the principal active ingredient in marijuana, and it seems the producers were making their selections based on their knowledge of neuroscience and psychopharmacology.

Several countries have now banned, or are in the process of banning, the synthetic cannabinoids found in Spice and related products. In fact, Germany was particularly quick off the mark and outlawed the products in January 2009.

Now this is where it gets interesting because the researchers note that a new product appeared on the market, containing JWH-073 - another synthetic cannabinoid, within four weeks of the ban. JWH-073 has similar similar effects, but isn't covered by the law and so remains legal.

The speed at which it appeared suggests that it had been selected and synthesised in advance, in anticipation of the ban:

Our analysis demonstrated that just 4 weeks after the prohibition took effect a multitude of second generation products were flooding the market. The speed of introduction of new products and the use of JWH-073 as a substitute for JWH-018 not only showed that the producers are well aware of the legal frameworks, but that they likely anticipated the prohibition and already had an array of replacement products on hand (JWH-073-positive products are still available on the German market; last checked: June 5th, 2009).

In other words, the legal high industry is packing neuroscientists and heavyweight lab pharmacologists. It is no longer just head-shop hippies repackaging obscure psychoactive and barely recreational plants as a poor substitute for street drugs. The legal high industry has become professionalised.

Seemingly based on the model of the pharmaceutical industry, it is becoming science-led, regulation savvy and is out-manoeuvring the authorities well before they catch up.

To use drug war terminology, it's an interesting new front because the producers are not trying to evade capture, they're using the agility of science of evade regulation.

Link to PubMed entry for Forensic Science International paper.
Link to .rar archive with pdf of full text inside (weird huh? via Google)
Link to good EMCDDA page on synthetic cannabinoids.

—Vaughan.

November 25, 2009

NeuroPod covers the best of SfN:

Don't miss a special edition of the Nature NeuroPod podcast which is dedicated to highlights from the recent Society for Neuroscience annual gathering of the tribes which took place in Chicago in October.

The discussion looks at the big themes in this year's conference, including optogenetics - the use of light stimulation to alter ~~gene expression~~ neuron activity with millisecond precision, society and neuroethics, and the use of techniques from stage magic to explore attention and consciousness.

A fascinating summary that clearly only scratches the surface of the biggest brain meeting on the planet but it still has plenty of shiny new gems.

Link to NeurPod homepage.
mp3 of NeuroPod Extra podcast of SfN highlights.

—Vaughan.

November 24, 2009

Autism, desperation and untested treatments:

The Chicago Tribune has just published two important articles on how untested and potentially dangerous medical treatments are being used on autistic children by US parents desperate for a cure.

Many of these treatments are based on flimsy or non-existent evidence and they are being promoted by a subculture of parents of autistic children, who seem to overlap significantly with the anti-vaccination movement.

Dr. Carlos Pardo was trying to head off trouble.

The Johns Hopkins neurologist and his colleagues had autopsied the brains of people with autism who died in accidents and found evidence of neuroinflammation. This rare look inside the autistic brain had the potential to increase understanding of the mysterious disorder.

It also, he knew, could inspire doctors aiming to help children recover from autism to develop new experimental treatments -- even though the research was so preliminary the scientists did not know whether the inflammation was good or bad, or even how it might relate to autism.

So when Pardo and his colleagues published their paper in the Annals of Neurology in 2005, they added an online primer that clearly explained their findings in layman's terms and sternly warned doctors not to use them to develop treatments...

Citing Pardo's research, doctors have treated children with a blood product typically reserved for people with severe immune system disorders like the one known as "bubble boy" disease. They have used it to justify sealing children with autism in pressurized bags and submarine-like metal chambers. Other children have been given a drug used to treat extremely rare genetic disorders.

The articles have several more examples of how scientific findings have been distorted or misinterpreted to justify dubious treatments (like chelation therapy, hormone suppressors and hyperbaric chambers) without any clear evidence for their benefit.

They're both in-depth articles but are well worth your time as, along with Wired's recent article on autism and antivaxxers, they are some of the best mainstream articles to track the growing trend for pseudo-medical autism treatments in recent times.

Link to 'Risky alternative therapies have little basis in science'.
Link to 'Science hijacked to support alternative therapies' (both via MeFi)

—Vaughan.

November 23, 2009

Media cat and mouse game with brain simulations:

Henry Markram, leader of the Blue Brain neural tissue simulation project, has sent an angry email to IBM following their widely-reported but misleading announcement that they'd created a simulation as complex as a cat brain.

This has come some months after similar headlines declared that an equivalent of a 'mouse brain' had been simulated by the IBM-affiliated Blue Brain project.

The initial claims were clearly false, as the project only aims to simulate cortical columns, a type of highly organised brain tissue that is common in the cortex, and the most recent simulation to make the headlines is even more simple.

Even the Blue Brain project, which is attempting realistic biological simulations, is not aiming to simulate the complexity or the function of a whole brain, in the same way that a simulation of muscle tissue, no matter how accurate, is clearly not going to produce an artificial human.

In an email which was copied to several leading science publications, project leader Henry Markram takes IBM's PR department and one of their cognitive computing researchers to task for 'stupid statements' and 'mass deception of the public' - and those statements are some of the tamer ones. Here are points 1-3:

1. These are point neurons (missing 99.999% of the brain; no branches; no detailed ion channels; the simplest possible equation you can imagine to simulate a neuron, totally trivial synapses; and using the STDP learning rule I discovered in this way is also is a joke).

2. All these kinds of simulations are trivial and have been around for decades - simply called artificial neural network (ANN) simulations. We even stooped to doing these kinds of simulations as bench mark tests 4 years ago with 10's of millions of such points before we bought the Blue Gene/L. If we (or anyone else) wanted to we could easily do this for a billion "points", but we would certainly not call it a cat-scale simulation. It is really no big deal to simulate a billion points interacting if you have a big enough computer. The only step here is that they have at their disposal a big computer. For a grown up "researcher" to get excited because one can simulate billions of points interacting is ludicrous.

3. It is not even an innovation in simulation technology. You don't need any special "C2 simulator", this is just a hoax and a PR stunt. Most neural network simulators for parallel machines can can do this today. Nest, pNeuron, SPIKE, CSIM, etc, etc. all of them can do this! We could do the same simulation immediately, this very second by just loading up some network of points on such a machine, but it would just be a complete waste of time - and again, I would consider it shameful and unethical to call it a cat simulation.

It's a stinging response from someone clearly annoyed at the misrepresentation of this sort of biological simulation work.

If you want to get a good handle on the aims of the Blue Brain project at least, Jonah Lehrer's piece for Seed is the best you're likely to read for a while.

Link to Markram's email in IEEE Spectrum (via @Neurotechnology)

—Vaughan.

November 20, 2009

Feliz Día Nacional del Psicólogo en Colombia:

Colombia has an official Day of the Psychologist and you might be forgiven for thinking that it's a self-declared promotional event by the psychology association here, but it isn't, the day is established by law. Article 92 of Law 1090 establishes 20th November as the official celebration.

Psychology departments around the country usually celebrate the day with conferences and parties. I was kindly invited to give a talk on the 'Neuropsicología de Alucinaciones' at the four day conference (wow) at the University of Antioquia, so many thanks to everyone who attended.

Later on, there is a free concert at the university which will be broadcast live on radio station La Mega, so you can see the celebration is taken quite seriously.

It turns out that Colombia is not the only country with a 'day of the psychologist' as they also seem to happen in Argentina (13th October), Guatemala (23rd July), Uruguay (6th December), Mexico (22nd May) and Cuba (13th April).

I'm wondering whether this is purely a Latin American phenomenon, so if you know of any more, anywhere in the world, please let me know.

So, qué tengas un buen Día Nacional del Psicólogo and I'll see you at the concert.

—Vaughan.

November 17, 2009

The Argentinian love affair with psychoanalysis:

The Wall Street Journal has a revealing article on why Argentina has the largest concentration of psychologists anywhere in the world and why it has a long-standing cultural fascination with psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis is a set of psychological theories and form of psychotherapy based strongly on the ideas of Freud. Buenos Aires is one of the world centres of psychoanalysis and has been since the earliest days of Freud's work.

Unlike in many countries, where psychoanalysis was, and remains, a psychology for the rich, the practice took off in Argentina during the 1960s to the point where is is common for everyday folk to see an analyst. The WSJ cites a recent survey suggesting that 32% of Argentinians have seen an analyst at some point in their lives.

Argentina is also known as a centre of Lacanian psychoanalysis, based on the work of French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan. If you can, imagine a French post-modern take on Freud. If you can't, reading Lacan is unlikely to help because it's an almost impenetrable reinterpretation of what was already a set of theories that was fairly loopy in places.

But psychoanalysis is more than a psychological practice in Argentina, it is a central part of the culture, and the WSJ article explores some of its social popularity.

Psychoanalysis is embedded in the geography of Buenos Aires, where many analysts are clustered in a neighborhood popularly known as Villa Freud.

Freudian thought colors political reporting. The newsweekly Noticias recently turned to a panel of 10 psychoanalysts to explain the behavior of ex-president Néstor Kirchner, who has been stealing the policymaking spotlight from his wife, Cristina, the current president.

One magazine query: What to make of Mrs. Kirchner's statement that her husband sleeps in the fetal position?

Meanwhile, on TV, a drama series called "Tratame Bien," ("Treat Me Well"), focuses on the travails of José and Sofia, a husband and wife, each of whom has an analyst. Facing midlife crises, the two make a momentous decision: retaining a third analyst they can see together for couples' therapy.

Interestingly, lots of Latin America is still heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, probably due to the historical influences of the USA to the North and Argentina in the West.

However, since working here, I've realised that doing evidence-based empirical psychology and psychiatry is a lot more difficult in countries with limited resources.

Access to the evidence is expensive (thanks to the use of restrictive copyright and excessive pricing by scientific journals) and research is difficult when there is little free time and few funding opportunities.

However, this is much less of an issue with psychoanalysis because the major source of information is your own experience, insights and work with the patient, plus discussions in a limited set of journals.

In other words, it's much easier to fulfil the requirements of what is expected of a well-informed competent psychoanalytic practitioner than what is expected of a scientifically-oriented evidence-based psychologist.

This, I suspect, is one of the many reasons that psychoanalysis remains popular in Latin America.

Link to WSJ piece on psychoanalysis in Argentina (via PCFTI).
Link to entry for Argentina in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.

—Vaughan.

November 16, 2009

Dog eat dog:

Writer Malcolm Gladwell recently published a collection of his essays in his new book What the Dog Saw. It was recently reviewed in The New York Times by cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker who complements Gladwell as "a writer of many gifts" but notes that "he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong".

Pinker cites several errors (including describing eigenvalues as 'Igon values') but cites one claim, over the link between IQ and American football players' rankings, as "simply not true".

Gladwell has just written a stinging response where he notes Pinker was using data from blog posts rather than the scientific article Gladwell was basing his claims on.

While the two writers spar over the details, the subtext is that Pinker is a proponent of IQ being a reliable predictor of success with a significant genetic influence (see The Blank Slate) whereas Gladwell has argued that success is largely a combination of practice plus being in the right place at the right time (see Outliers).

However, you may be interested to know that all of the essays collected in Gladwell's new book are available for free on his website, so you can try before you buy.

Link to Pinker's review in the NYT
Link to Gladwell's reply (via @carlzimmer).

—Vaughan.

November 08, 2009

Psychiatric tales:

Darryl Cunningham draws amazing comics about psychiatry and mental illness, drawn from his time working as a student nurse on psychiatric wards.

His comic strip Psychiatric Tales has been regularly appearing online and he's just posted the amazing and heartfelt last chapter along with an announcement that the series is to be published as a book by Blank Slate Publishing in February.

If you want to get a feel for Cunningham's work, set aside some time and have a look at some of the piece at the links below - they're well worth the time.

People With Mental Illness Enhance Our Lives

Dementia Ward

Suicide

Schizophrenia

Cut and Delusions

Last Chapter

The strips are brilliantly written and drawn, and do something quite rare in discussion of mental illness - they manage to capture both the experience of people with psychiatric difficulties and the experience of the staff caring for them.

There are other chapters on his website so do go and have a look. Fantastic stuff.

Link to Darryl Cunningham's blog.

—Vaughan.

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.

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

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.

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.

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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.

Link to this post | Comments (6)

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.

Link to this post | Comments (7)

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.

Link to this post | Comments (16)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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 later as a useful antibacterial drug (have a look at this fascinating NYT article from 1910).

In the late 1980s it was tried as a treatment for manic-depressive disorder and found to be useful.

Is this seems surprising, you may be interested to know that methylene blue was the basic compound from which the first antipsychotic drug chlorpromazine or Thorazine was made (in case you're wondering, this family of antipsychotics can also work as anti-bacterial drugs, but have not been used due to other drugs having less side-effects).

If this is really just methylene blue, what this means in financial terms is that the drug can't be patented.

In other words, anyone can make the drug which means its much harder to make money on it as pricing becomes competitive. In contrast, a patent gives you a time-limited monopoly - albeit one that can earn billions.

A widely available cheap generic drug that treats a major disease is actually a fantastic thing for society, but developing them is not typical behaviour for pharmaceutical companies who tend to shun unpatentable drugs.

Also, it's probably true to say that the history of drug development shows a typical three stage process:

1. We've found a miracle cure!
2. We've found a miracle cure, but it can kill people.
3. It's not a miracle cure, it can kill people, but it's worth the risk in many cases.

So, time will tell how useful it is in the real world, but pretty much everyone has their fingers crossed that it will work out as a useful treatment.

Link to write-up from The Telegraph.

A Phase IIb Trial of a Tau Aggregation Inhibitor Therapy

[ Press Release from Alzheimer's Association International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease 2008. Original here ]

As an alternative to anti-amyloid therapies for Alzheimer's, researchers continue to examine a variety of treatments and targets with the potential to curb the disease. This includes presenting data supporting the viability of therapies targeting tau protein and its aggregation into the "tangles" originally discovered by Alois Alzheimer.

Previous research has shown that the buildup of brain lesions known as neurofibrillary tangles, which are composed of a short fragment of a protein called tau, is correlated with increasing levels of dementia symptoms. And, these tangles first appear in the brain long before symptoms of the disease become clinically apparent. Methylthioninium chloride (MTC, or brand name remberTM) has been shown in the test tube to dissolve tau tangle filaments and prevent aggregation of tau into tangles. MTC has also been shown to block the toxic effects of aggregated tau in cells. In animal models, MTC has demonstrated cognitive and behavioral benefits in line with reduced tau pathology.

In research reported at ICAD 2008, Claude M. Wischik, Professor in Mental Health, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom and Chairman, TauRx Therapeutics, Singapore, and colleagues conducted a 24-week, double-blind, randomized, dose-ranging, parallel design trial of MTC monotherapy in 321 people with Alzheimer's at 17 centers in the United Kingdom and Singapore, followed by a 60-week, blinded, active treatment extension. The control group received placebo for the initial 24 weeks and then a minimal efficacy dose subsequently. The primary objective was to investigate the effects of oral MTC at 30, 60 and 100 mg doses three times per day, compared with placebo, over 24 weeks on cognitive function as measured by the ADAS-cog in patients with mild or moderate Alzheimer's, stratified by stage of the disease. Another objective was to determine MTC's potential to modify the course of Alzheimer's over 19 months. Imaging results from SPECT and PET scans were collected at baseline and after 24 weeks of treatment.

The researchers found that, at 24 weeks, MTC produced a significant improvement relative to placebo of -5.5 ADAS-cog units in moderate subjects at the 60 mg dose (p = 0.0208). There was no placebo decline in people with mild Alzheimer's in the control group over the first 24 weeks preventing initial efficacy analysis, although efficacy was demonstrated in mild Alzheimer's by SPECT-scan outcomes over the same period. MTC stabilized the progression of Alzheimer's over 50 weeks in both mild and moderate Alzheimer's. The overall effect size was -6.8 ADAS-cog units vs. decline of 7.8 units in the control arm (p < 0.0001), with significant efficacy demonstrated separately in mild and moderate subgroups.

According to the researchers, as a first approximation to supporting disease modifying efficacy, treatment with MTC at the 60mg dose produced a significantly larger effect size at 50 weeks than at 24 weeks implying an effect on the rate of cognitive decline (p = 0.0014). This was confirmed in a mixed effects slope analysis, showing an 81 percent reduction of long run rate of progression of decline over 50 weeks (p < 0.0001). The final 84-week analysis confirmed the long term effect of the 60mg dose in subjects remaining on treatment, with apparent decline still not significantly different from baseline at the final assessment, whereas there was significant decline in the other study arms.

The researchers added that brain imaging using SPECT and PET confirmed the clinical trial results. SPECT measures regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) which is closely related to brain cell activity. The study showed that treatment with MTC at the 60mg dose eliminated the rCBF decline that was seen in control subjects. The effect was greatest in brain regions that had the most severe tau aggregation pathology, namely the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex, which are regions affected early and most severely in Alzheimer's.

"This is the first instance of a disease-modifying Alzheimer's therapy that has attained its primary, pre-specified cognitive efficacy target in a clinical trial," said Wischik. "This trial therefore provides the first clinical trial evidence that an Alzheimer's therapy aimed at blocking tau aggregation may be a viable disease-modifying treatment. We now need to confirm this in a larger Phase III trial."

"Our results appear to meet the draft EMEA clinical guidelines for disease-modifying therapy, supported by SPECT and PET evidence of efficacy in brain regions heavily affected by tau pathology," Wischik added.

—Vaughan.

July 19, 2008

On the brink of a social psychology revolution:

The Times has a brief article noting the growing influence of social psychology in government thinking and economic policy, mirroring the popular interest in a slew of new books on behavioural economics.

It's interesting that the article lists various ways in those close to the British political establishment are increasingly bringing ideas drawn from empirical social sciences in their thinking, mirroring the murmurings about the Obama team's interest in behavioural economics.

And, as we've noted here, there's now an increasing interest, causing an ongoing controversy, about the use of social scientists in the occupying military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We hear a great deal about interest and initiatives in these areas, but very little about outcome studies (although its possible that the military keep theirs secret) so I wonder whether the success of these approaches will depend on the maturity of the science in terms of how well it actually predicts changes in the real world.

Link to Times article on the 'social psychology revolution'.

—Vaughan.

July 17, 2008

One step beyond:

Neurophilosophy has found a fascinating black and white TV documentary on Mexican hallucinogenic mushrooms from 1961, where the presenter samples some of the psilocybin-containing fungus and reports the effects during the trip.

In the January 4th, 1961 episode of One Step Beyond, director and presenter John Newland ingests psilocybin under laboratory conditions, to investigate whether or not the hallucinogenic mushroom can enhance his abilities of extra-sensory perception.

The programme was apparently inspired by a 1959 book called The Sacred Mushroom, by parapsychologist Andrija Puharich, who is known for taking the spoon-bending fraudster Uri Geller to the United States for investigation.

As Neurophilosophy notes, this was before the dawn of the psychedelic age, and so it was unlikely that this would have been connected to drug culture as we might do today, but was likely to be viewed as a documentary on the strange ways of 'them overseas'.

It has some interesting parallels to a 1955 BBC documentary on mescaline, where the Labour MP Christopher Mayhew took a fairly stiff dose and narrated the effects ("Tubby is disappearing in time...").

The magic mushroom documentary also has some wonderfully stilted dialogue in places, and mentions that they could be used to treat mental disorder - an area which is being researched once more.

We'll have some more on this research shortly, so look out for a forthcoming interview.

Link to Neurophilosopy with documentary video.

—Vaughan.

July 16, 2008

Crumbling cuckoo's nests:

Time reports that Oregon State Hospital, the psychiatric hospital used to film the Oscar-winning movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is being demolished.

It's not the hospital that Kesey based his play on, but it's interesting that even the demolition of the hospital which was the background for the movie makes big news.

The book, film and play have fascinated me for years, not least because they are still where most people get their mental images from when they think of a psychiatric hospital. Needless to say, the images are usually pretty stark.

The other image people seem to have, which I call the '12 Monkeys' scenario, is where lots of wacked out patients wearing pyjamas acts as if they're in a world of their own, while a TV set shows old cartoons in the corner.

Needless to say, modern hospital care bears little resemblance to these stereotypes and tends to go from what I call 'airport departure wards' at the worst (full of bored people, sitting around, waiting to leave) to comfortable and relaxing environments with constructive activities available and a good medical team at the best.

However, there is generally a move away from monolithic psychiatric hospitals to having psychiatric wards as part of general hospitals.

As we noted earlier this year, the sometimes beautiful buildings of these older hospitals are rapidly disappearing, often because people are uncomfortable with either the troubled past of the hospital, or with the idea of madness in general.

On a similar note, ABC Radio National's All in the Mind has just started a 3-part series, exploring the oral history of one of Australia's biggest and oldest hospitals, built in 1865.

Link to Time article 'Cuckoo's Nest Hospital to be Torn Down' (via BB).
Link to AITM on the history of Goodna Mental Hospital.

—Vaughan.

July 14, 2008

Bonkersfest! strikes this Saturday:

Bonkersfest! South East London's fantastic festival of mirth and madness, kicks off this Saturday with its biggest ever event. It's also finally getting the recognition it deserves with a fantastic article in The Times and another in the New Statesman covering the upcoming celebrations.

In fact, it was also recently name dropped in a Guardian article and a story in The New York Times, although I can proudly say that we covered the mayhem back when it first started in 2006, when it was launched by the Mayor of Southwark firing a banana laden cannon.

From The Times:

So Dolly Sen, 37, an artist and writer, will spend the day trying to screw a light bulb into the sky because “the world is dark enough as it is”. There will also be a moving padded cell, a de-normalisation programme, and performance art by Bobby Baker featuring seven adults dressed as frozen peas.

Does it sound a bit crazy? Well, that’s the point. “There’s a history of many artists and writers being diagnosed with mental illness,” says Baker. “People who were unusual and different used to be more celebrated and accommodated, but now there’s a tremendous amount of fear. I feel people like me have a sensitivity and creativity that is very valuable, as well as an enormous sense of humour about the whole thing.”

The irreverent tone and celebration of all things outside the norm make it quite different from your average mental health event - even if the rock bands, circus performers and techno DJs are also a giveaway.

Bonkersfest! has just got better each time and always seems to be blessed by wonderful weather and great performers (although, I have to say, I did almost evaporate waiting for John Hegley to come on stage in a rather warm marquee last year).

It's organised by Creative Routes, a grass roots arts association for people with mental health difficulties, who are one of the gems of South London.

It happens on Camberwell Green (not the site of the original Bedlam Hospital, as the NYT seemed to think) but still only two minutes walk from the Maudsley Hospital - the spiritual home of British psychiatry.

The Times article also features Liz Spikol, whose name I'm sure you'll recognise if you're a regular visitor to Mind Hacks.

Also, one of the organisers of Bonkersfest! changed her name by deed poll to Sarah Tonin, and you gotta respect that.

Link to Bonkersfest! website.
Link to article in The Times.
Link to article in the New Statesman.

—Vaughan.

Psychiatrists' association faces drug funding probe:

After a number of investigations into the under-disclosure of drug industry earnings by top psychiatry researchers, The New York Times reports that US Senator Charles Grassley is aiming at the mothership of American psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association.

Grassley is a Republican senator who has been pushing for transparency in the drug industry for some time and has particularly focused on drug payments to researchers and clinicians in recent months.

He's been behind some recent high profile investigations which have indicated that some of America's most influential psychiatrists have been receiving millions of dollars in undisclosed payments.

Grassley has recently focussed his attention on the APA itself, which, according to the NYT piece got about $20 million from the drug industry in 2006. These 2006 figures are the most recent, however, as the full details of the association's funding are not made public.

The issue is not solely one about funding large organisations or the high flying opinion-leaders though.

Soft money is awash throughout the profession with drug company bonuses being routinely paid to individual psychiatrists who agree to talk on behalf of the company, while those that don't take hard cash are likely to be taken out for expensive meals, given all expenses trips to plush conferences and given other barely-concealed incentives.

However, it is clear that this is not solely a problem with psychiatrists, as patient groups are often heavily funded by the drug industry, to the point where they've been described as being "perilously close to becoming extensions of pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments".

Link to NYT article on scrutiny of APA funding (via Furious Seasons).

—Vaughan.

July 13, 2008

Punk rock pogo robots:

In early July, London's Institute of Contemporary Arts hosted three nights of punk rock chaos with a difference, some of the audience were artificially intelligent robots designed to pogo when they recognised punk music being played.

The project was led by artist Fiddian Warman who created the headlining band, Neurotic and the PVC's for the event, while collaborating on the robot design with computational biologist Peter McOwan and neurologist Barry Gibb.

Actually, this is not the first time we've had to resist making a Bee Gees joke about Dr Gibb, as we covered some of the media (over)excitement about a bit in his book The Rough Guide to the Brain last year.

The website for the project is fantastic and has lots of details about the project including a bit about the design of the neural network built and trained to recognise punk rock.

BBC News has some great video of the gigs, and the band even has its own MySpace page with some of the tracks ready for listening (which are actually pretty good).

Link to Neurotic and the pogoing robots website.
Link to BBC News story and video.
Link to Neurotic band MySpace page.

—Vaughan.

July 10, 2008

United States of Analgesia:

DrugMonkey has alerted to me an interactive map of the USA which displays rates of prescription drug abuse across all 50 states.

You can select the year up the top, the drug of abuse on the left-hand side, and point the mouse at a particular state to get the details.

It's part of an investigation by the paper into why so many of these drugs are being used illicitly, and why Nevada, the state in which Las Vegas resides, seems to have one of the highest rates of abuse.

All the drugs are opioids and the maps on the right show the rates of consumption for oxycodone, a drug nicknamed 'hillbilly heroin'.

You can see how the 2000 map clearly shows the highest rates of consumption in the 'hillbilly' areas across the Appalachian Mountains, although by 2006 the West Coast has caught up and most of the rest of the country seem to have got into the painkiller habit.

Link to interactive drug map.
Link to Las Vegas Sun series on prescription drug abuse.

—Vaughan.

July 03, 2008

Push the button: Milgram rides again:

The New York Times has a good article on some recent replications of Milgram's infamous conformity experiment where he ordered participants to give what they thought were potentially lethal shocks to an actor pretending to scream in pain.

They're not quite replications, because Milgram's experiment as it was actually run is considered unethical, but they're pretty close and the results are frighteningly similar.

There's also an interesting twist in one of the studies, that suggests people who go on to give the more dangerous shocks think about responsibility differently, assuming they are not responsible because they're being 'ordered'.

In the other paper, due out in the journal American Psychologist, a professor at Santa Clara University replicates part of the Milgram studies — stopping at 150 volts, the critical juncture at which the subject cries out to stop — to see whether people today would still obey. Ethics committees bar researchers from pushing subjects through to an imaginary 450 volts, as Milgram did.

The answer was yes. Once again, more than half the participants agreed to proceed with the experiment past the 150-volt mark. Jerry M. Burger, the author, interviewed the participants afterward and found that those who stopped generally believed themselves to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to hold the experimenter accountable. That is, the Milgram work also demonstrated individual differences in perceptions of accountability — of who’s on the hook for what.

I recommend the picture on Jerry Burger's webpage. I swear he must of practised that movie villain grin especially for the Milgram replications.

Link to NYT article 'Would I Pull That Switch?'

—Vaughan.

June 30, 2008

Arch of Hysteria:

I've just bought an excellent book called Invention of Hysteria which is about how the use of photography by the 19th century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot helped shape the our concepts of 'hysteria' - a disorder where psychological disturbances manifest themselves as what seem like neurological symptoms.

Such patients would today be diagnosed with 'conversion disorder', usually after presenting to a neurology clinic with paralysis, blindness or epilepsy, only for it to be found that there is no damage to any of the areas you might expect or no seizure activity in the brain during a 'fit'.

Importantly, the patients aren't 'faking', they genuinely experience themselves as paralysed, blind, or otherwise impaired.

What recent research suggests is that there may be a disturbance in higher level brain function which may be suppressing normal actions or sensation.

To use a business analogy, none of the workers are on strike but the management is causing problems so the work can't be carried out.

Charcot revived interest in this disorder through his weekly, somewhat theatrical, case demonstrations, and, as the book discusses, through some striking and equally theatrical photos and illustrations.

This wonderfully illustrated book examines the history of Charcot's work at the Salpêtrière, the famous Paris hospital, and how the newly developed technology of photography played a key role in popularising the disorder and shaping our ideas about hysteria.

In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, the Salpêtrière was what it had always been: a kind of feminine inferno, a citta dolorosa confining four thousand incurable or mad women. It was a nightmare in the midst of Paris’s Belle Epoque.

This is where Charcot rediscovered hysteria. I attempt to retrace how he did so, amidst all the various clinical and experimental procedures, through hypnosis and the spectacular presentations of patients having hysterical attacks in the amphitheater where he held his famous Tuesday Lectures. With Charcot we discover the capacity of the hysterical body, which is, in fact, prodigious. It is prodigious; it surpasses the imagination, surpasses “all hopes,” as they say.

Whose imagination? Whose hopes? There’s the rub. What the hysterics of the Salpêtrière could exhibit with their bodies betokens an extraordinary complicity between patients and doctors, a relationship of desires, gazes, and knowledge. This relationship is interrogated here.

What still remains with us is the series of images of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. It contains everything: poses, attacks, cries, “attitudes passionnelles,” “crucifixions,” “ecstasy,” and all the postures of delirium. If everything seems to be in these images, it is because photography was in the ideal position to crystallize the link between the fantasy of hysteria and the fantasy of knowledge.

A reciprocity of charm was instituted between physicians, with their insatiable desire for images of Hysteria, and hysterics, who willingly participated and actually raised the stakes through their increasingly theatricalized bodies. In this way, hysteria in the clinic became the spectacle, the invention of hysteria. Indeed, hysteria was covertly identified with something like an art, close to theater or painting.

The book's website has the first chapter freely available, but sadly none of the photos.

Most of Charcot's books, containing many of the wonderful illustrations and photos, are listed on Google Books but for some reason I can't work out, you can't view the pages.

As they were published in the late 1800s, they should be well out of copyright, so its a bit frustrating we can't read them.

To give you an idea, however, the illustration on the left is the 'Grande Hysterie Full Arch', one of Charcot's classifications of hysterical epilepsy.

This is one of Charcot's many illustrations of amazing bodily contortions that was used as inspiration by the famed and somewhat eccentric French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, as you can see in a (possibly NSFW?) article on her work from the Tate magazine.

Link to details of book with sample chapter.

—Vaughan.

June 27, 2008

Psychobabble worst offenders:

PsyBlog has collected the responses to its request for the most annoying psychobabble and you can now vote for your favourite worst offender.

The list reminds me of how many terms, particularly from psychoanalysis, have become part of the language, probably without people realising it.

Being 'in denial', being 'anal', being 'defensive', feeling 'split' over a decision, 'projecting' your fears, 'repressing' a thought, having a big 'ego', increasing 'libido' and feeling 'castrated' were all terms created or popularised by Freud and his followers.

Sadly for jargon haters, today's psychobabble is tomorrow's everyday language.

As the late psychologist Julian Jaynes pointed out, the Ancient Greek epic the Iliad makes no reference to a concept of the self or any mental states anywhere in the text.

Much of our everyday language of the mind is a relatively new cultural invention, suggesting that language is just another form of technology.

Hopefully though, some of the more annoying linguistic technologies will fall into disuse fairly soon, although I have to say, I have a fondness for some of the more arcane terms.

'Enthusiastical', meaning a form of religiously induced madness, is charmingly Dickensian, and 'alienist' - the old word for psychiatrist - has a completely different spin now we tend to think of little green men when we hear the word.

Link to PsyBlog psychobabble vote.

—Vaughan.

June 26, 2008

PsychCentral hits Time:

PsychCentral, one of the original internet psychology sites, has recently been featured by Time magazine as one of the 50 best websites of 2008.

One of my favourite PsychCentral features is Flashback which says what was featured on the site 1, 5 and 10 years ago.

That's a fantastic pedigree for an internet site and being featured in Time is surely a testament to the hard work psychologist John Grohol has put into keeping it updated with quality news and information.

Time allows you to rate each site, so if you're a fan like me, drop by and show your appreciation.

Link to PsychCentral on Time's 50 Best Websites 2008.

—Vaughan.

June 25, 2008

Review of Kluge by Gary Marcus:

I respect Gary Marcus' research tremendously, but I found his latest popular science book glib and unconvincing. For details of why read my review of "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind" from BBC Focus magazine #191 (July 2008):

Link

—tom.

June 23, 2008

Psychobabble and the expressions we love to hate:

PsyBlog has asked readers to nominate the worst examples of psychobabble, to identify verbal crimes against neuroscience, and to nominate where the language of cognitive science is being most used and abused. The best of the worst will be collected and published online, so now's your chance to name and shame.

There are a few great examples there already and you can either add your contribution to the comments or email Jeremy with your nomination.

My contribution would be the term "hardwired", which is surely one of the most abused terms in both science journalism and everyday language.

Presumably, it originally meant an innate behaviour or process that is almost entirely genetically determined, or at least, is present from birth without the need for prior experience.

However, it gets used to refer to almost biological finding or reported sex difference.

According to even usually quite reliable sources, we're "hardwired" for money, risky behaviour, religion, feeling others' pain, art, fraud, oh, and liking pink, if you're a girl of course.

Anyway, if you've got any misleading jargon that's been bothering you, do send them on.

Link to PsyBlog's request for psychobabble.

—Vaughan.

June 20, 2008

Female PsyOps soldier dies in Afghanistan:

The papers are full of reports about Corporal Sarah Bryant, the first female soldier from the UK forces to die in Aghanistan at the tragically young age of 26. Bryant was serving in Afghanistan as a member of the 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group, a tri-service PsyOps support service to the British Armed Forces.

The group released a 2007/2008 annual report, and the pdf is available online via the excellent PsyWar website.

One of the key roles of 15 (UK) PSYOPS Group seems to be similar to the US military's human terrain system, that is, understanding the structure and dynamics of the local society and influencing the people within it.

The bedrock underpinning effective PSYOPS is Target Audience Analysis (TAA) linked to timely intelligence support. TAA involves the systematic study of people in order to enhance our understanding of a military psychological environment. TAA is crucial to the PSYOPS Estimate process and aims to: identify Target Audience attitudes, vulnerabilities and susceptibilities, developing lines of persuasion, key communicators and appropriate symbology and media to exploit a line of persuasion.

In the introduction to the report, the Group Commanding Officer cites 'Manoeuvrism' as one of their key philosophies - an approach that aims to unpredictably strike the enemy at their weak points, rather than use sheer force in pitched battle.

Needless to say, accurate, up-to-date intelligence is essential for this approach and PsyOps has become a key part in this process.

Which is probably why these services seem to have been keen to recruit human scientists during the last few years to try and expand their services.

pdf of 15 (UK) PSYOPS Group 2007/2008 annual report.
Link to PsyWar website.

—Vaughan.

June 18, 2008

Psychology Today blog network launches:

Popular psychology magazine Psychology Today have launched their own blog network with some of the biggest names in psychology, psychiatry and philosophy of mind regularly writing for it.

As a magazine, PsyToday has had a long reputation for being a bit populist and light on what most psychologists what actually think of as psychology.

That seems to have been changing in recent years and there's been a consistent increase in the quality of the articles.

For their blog network, they seem to have recruited some of the most interesting and well-known researchers from around the world to write for them, including Dan Ariely, Jesse Bering, Peter Kramer, Nassir Ghaemi, Roy Baumeister, Nancy Segal, Scott Lilienfeld to name but a few of the many.

The latest posts are at the top, but scroll down for the (huge!) complete list of contributors.

Link to Psychology Today blog network (via Neurophilosophy).

—Vaughan.

June 16, 2008

Loaded dice in gambling addiction research :

'Who says Americans don't do irony?' I joked the other week, noting the National Center for Responsible Gaming conference on gambling addiction was being held in Las Vegas. According to an article in Salon, the joke has fallen a little flat, as the NCRG is funded by the gambling industry and may have a vested interest in directing research towards certain theories of addiction.

"The NCRG is committed to the idea that most 'normal' people aren't at risk of developing a gambling problem," says Schull. "They're trying to show that all addicts share a common pathway, which involved the reward system of the brain. This really helps the industry because the idea is, if these people were not to gamble, they would find something else to be addicted to. They come into the world with the brain disposition of an addict, so you can't blame casinos."

Schull says the industry has successfully defined the terms of gambling addiction; it's telling that we speak about problem gamblers, she says, but not problem machines, problem environments, or problem business practices. Currently, Schull is working in the young field of "neuroeconomics." She says that brain scans and genetics studies are producing fascinating data, but can't fully explain the complicated problem of gambling addiction. "Doing this research, I've become a behaviorist in a weird way," she says. "I've come around to thinking that if you put any rat in a cage, under the right circumstances, you can addict it. Some of us have greater liability than others, but that doesn't mean that it's not on a continuum."

The piece is interesting because it shows the significant ambiguity and disagreement at the heart of gambling addiction, the 'crown jewels' of the behavioural addiction field.

This is important because there is an increasing drive to reframe existing disorders and medicalise problems of excess as addictions.

Rather disappointingly, it seems heavily driven by the media who are happy to publicise utter drivel as news when it is nothing more than empty PR.

Here's a BBC story supposedly on 'exercise addiction' which actually is just the private Huntercombe Hospital saying they can treat it. Here's another story on 'mobile phone addiction' based on the fact that a private clinic in Spain announced it was treating two boys. And here's another on 'internet dating addiction' based on nothing except a press release to promote an Australian University.

Not a single one of these is based on research. It's just people announcing a new form of addiction. That's all you have to do and you can get international press.

For extra bonus points you can mention dopamine, and it sounds like science.

We know dopamine is involved in drug addiction, but we also know that anything we enjoy, 'addictive' or not, also engages the dopamine system. So saying that the activity is addictive because it engages the dopamine system is an empty statement.

What we've learnt from the drug industry is that research can be used as a way of advertising theories. Essentially, it's PR for an industry favourable world view.

And what years of persuasion research has told us is that people who don't have the time or ability to evaluate the details are often persuaded by a plausible sounding (in this case 'sciencey') explanations, however empty.

The Salon piece notes that in its rhetoric the industry tends to cherry pick studies. Rhetoric is currently important to the gambling industry because it is being sued by people who have lost thousands through gambling.

Because the legal system determines responsibility, it's in the industry's interest to promote theories which say that problem lies largely in the neurobiology of the individual, rather than in their business practices.

Link to Salon article 'Gambling with science'

—Vaughan.

June 15, 2008

Northern Ireland health chief, homosexuality an illness:

Homosexuality is a mental illness, at least according to the head of Northern Ireland's health committee. Iris Robinson MP, who, with impeccable timing, put forth her views on a radio show while responding to the news that a local man had been badly beaten in a homophobic attack.

After apparently branding homosexuality as "disgusting, loathsome, nauseating, wicked and vile" she went on to recommend that "I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals - trying to turn away from what they are engaged in".

The "lovely psychiatrist" turns out to be Paul Miller who doesn't actually seem to defend the idea that homosexuality is a mental illness but does seem to have a sideline in assisting people to change their sexual orientation.

In a recent newspaper article Miller claims this is based on research:

Dr Miller cited a study by American psychiatrists Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse which he said concluded that people can change sexual orientation and that the process of change was not damaging.

"That was a very robust study because in the past, and rightly so, people who worked in this field were criticised for not having robust research."

So what is this research Miller talks about? A randomised controlled trial from the peer-review medical literature? A meta-analysis of past treatment programmes? Perhaps just an exploratory outcome study?

No, it's a book released by a Christian publisher and written by a psychologist and psychiatrist employed by a private evangelical college in the States.

In a subsequent BBC interview on her comments, Mrs Robinson well, just keeps on digging.

For those of you interested in the new fangled practice of 'evidence based medicine' that seems not to have caught up with Iris Robinson, one of the most influential studies on the mental health of homosexuals was published in 1957.

Conducted by psychologist Evelyn Hooker, it used several measures to profile a group of homosexual and heterosexual males and asked a number of psychiatrists to determine who was gay and straight just by looking at the data from the mental health assessments.

They couldn't, and two thirds of both of gay and straight samples were rated as well-adjusted. This was the first of many studies that showed that there is nothing innately psychopathological about homosexuality.

Link to Petra Boyton with some good coverage.
Link to full text of Evelyn Hooker's 1957 study.

—Vaughan.

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June 10, 2008

Web making us worried, but probably not stupid:

The cover article of this month's Atlantic magazine argues that our increasing reliance on internet technology means we're becoming less able to focus and absorb ourselves in a task because we're so used to mentally 'jumping around'. It's a common concern, but is almost entirely devoid of evidence.

Similar arguments have been put forward before, and they usually take the form of suggesting that digital technology influences how we think to point of it affecting our fundamental ability to concentrate and reflect for sustained periods (tellingly, the example usually given is 'reading books').

Probably the first version of the argument was put forward by Jane Healy in her 1990 book Endangered Minds, and expanded in the 1998 book Failure to Connect.

Healy argues that children's increasing exposure to computers has created a "toxic environment" that leads to patterns of "disorganized thinking" and "mental restlessness" akin to ADHD.

Interestingly, computer use has been linked to the symptoms of child ADHD in a 2006 study, but it only reported an association between computer use and symptoms reported by parents - no measure of attention was used.

One other study found that ADHD kids have more problems playing the games, but the only study I know of that actually measured sustained attention during video gaming found that ADHD kids could concentrate equally as well as other kids.

In other words, their inability to focus seemed to 'disappear' when using a computer, which might explain the association mentioned earlier. In other words, kids with ADHD might use computers more because they help them focus.

Nevertheless, the argument has now broadened to encompass the effects of adults, the 'brain plasticity' is almost always mentioned as an explanation.

While the Atlantic article warns against conclusions drawn from anecdotes, it is almost entirely anecdotal. Tellingly, it quotes not a single study that has measured any of the things mentioned as a concern by the author or anyone else.

So here's what we'd want to do to test this concern out: use some neuropsychological tests of sustained attention to investigate whether internet use is linked to worse concentration.

A cross-sectional study that just compared heavy web users with light web users would provide suggestive, but ultimately weak, evidence, because it may just be that those with worse concentration find the web more attractive (like the ADHD kids with games).

A longitudinal study would be more useful. It would need to test a group of people at the beginning to make sure they were all equivalent and would then re-test everyone at a later date and see whether those who became heavy web users had worse sustained attention.

A randomised controlled trial would be the best evidence, and it would randomly assign a group of equivalent people to heavy or light web use and then it would measure the effects on the ability to concentrate.

As far as I can tell, not a single study has been completed that has actually tested sustained attention in web users - even for the weakest form of evidence. If you know of one, do let me know, because I'd be interested to find out. So far though, I know of none.

There have been some related studies on video games, but they tend to show the reverse, that video games are linked to better mental performance.

The improvements here all almost all in divided attention or visual search - the ability to take in information over a wider space - so it's difficult to generalise to sustained attention.

In terms of any new technology, it's obvious having tools to hand changes the strategies we use to solve problems, but so far, there is no strong evidence that Google, YouTube, Facebook or any other part of the web affects the fundamentals of how we think.

As the article mentions, concerns about new technology go back to Plato's worries that writing will make people mentally dull because it encourages 'laziness'.

Until the hard evidence comes in, anxieties about the web remain fear rather than fact. The data just doesn't exist.

Link to Atlantic article 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?'.

—Vaughan.

June 09, 2008

Long live the new Encephalon! Edition 47 arrives:

According to the 1983 movie Videodrome, the television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. The latest edition of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon is hosted by the Channel N video blog, showing us that the online video screen is equally a window into the psyche.

An article on a rather dubious link between synaesthesia and metaphor is one of my favourites, as is a video of a robot choreographed by input from a sleep EEG.

~~Sadly, it seems, someone has removed the archive of the Karen Carpenter biopic focusing on her struggle with anorexia, echoing its banning some years earlier.~~ It seems to be working!

After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there?

Link to Encephalon 47.

—Vaughan.

Uncle Clonazepam's Army:

This week's Time magazine has a cover article on 'America's Medicated Army', discussing the widespread use of antidepressant and anxiety-reducing drugs in US Army troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The saying goes that 'military psychiatry is to psychiatry what military music is to music', and, certainly, military mental health clinicians have quite different objectives to their civilian counterparts.

Treating someone who has been traumatised by a war zone with the priority of returning them to combat is an unusual way of working from a civilian perspective.

While military psychiatry has traditionally relied on rest from combat operations using the 'PIE' principle of minimal withdrawal from the theatre of war, for the first time, the American military are now allowing deployed troops to be prescribed psychiatric medication, principally to treat depression and anxiety.

The article is an interesting angle on the sorts of intense stresses that soliders endure, but it's probably worth remembering that having soldiers medicated against the traumas of war is not particularly new.

Traditionally, however, soldiers have medicated themselves with whatever substances were to hand.

Drug use by US troops in the the Vietnam War has been widely portrayed in Hollywood films but it is based on hard medical evidence. Contemporary medical studies reported that approximately 1 in 5 soldiers was addicted to heroin, with marijuana and alcohol use even more widespread.

I looked and couldn't find any data on illicit drug use in troops in Iraq, but a recent report notes that 11% of US soldiers in Iraq who sought mental health care had 'severe misuse of alcohol', rising to 18% if 'moderate' cases are included.

These figures are hard to compare directly, but that's 18% of soldiers referred to military psychiatrists, not 18% of the total troop population, which makes me think there's probably less self-medication occurring during this war than the Vietnam war at least, and possibly others.

Even if this rather rough estimate turns out to be true, it's impossible to say whether the availability of prescribed medication is reducing drug and alcohol misuse, or whether it is being used to shore up the troops in an geographical area where recreational substances are just harder to come by.

The history of military psychiatry has told us that the single best way of preventing mental illness (and death, injury and civilian causalities) is to not deploy troops into combat.

Unfortunately, history has also told us that the blindingly obvious has never been particularly popular with political leaders, and until that time, the military may simply be trying to avoid widespread illicit self-drugging by making army approved medication available to its depressed and anxious soldiers.

Link to Time article 'America's Medicated Army'.

—Vaughan.

June 07, 2008

35, single and psychoneurotic:

The Bonkers Institute for Nearly Genuine Research has added a gallery of vintage drug adverts to its site, showcasing some of the more outlandish psychiatric advertising from the 20th century.

One of the most striking things is the Thorazine gallery, that highlights how the drug, also known under its generic name chlorpromazine, was advertised for pretty much everything.

This included alcoholism, hostility, menopause, senility, arthritis and cancer to name but a few.

While we now think of chlorpromizine and other selective D2 dopamine antagonists (blockers) as 'antipsychotics', it's important to remember that the fact we now describe these compounds in terms of their effect on psychosis was a marketing coup in itself.

For example, Thorazine was also sold under the name 'Largactil', to give the impression it was 'large acting' and could be used in a number of different conditions.

In fact, these drugs were originally marketed as major tranquillisers, then neuroleptics, then antipsychotics, and now, history has come full circle, as drug companies are now trying to reposition 'atypical antipsychotics' as general psychiatric medicines by getting them licensed as treatments for more general conditions such as depression and anxiety.

It's a classic marketing technique to sell products as solutions to problems, but we simply don't understand enough about the neurobiology of mental illness to design medication to selectively treat a specific diagnosis.

In other words, labels like 'antidepressant', 'antipsychotic' or 'mood stabiliser' tell us next to nothing about the action of the drug and only inform us how they are used.

It's like the word 'shampoo'. While the product may have a few tweaks that make it better for washing hair, it doesn't mean it cleans your hair and nothing else. That's just how this particular soap product is used and sold.

So if someone decides to promote antipsychotics to treat anxiety, or shampoo to wash your car, the same principle applies as if they're being marketed to treat psychosis or clean your hair.

Don't take the labels as evidence, and look for the scientific data for their effectiveness.

Link to Bonkers Institute Gallery.

—Vaughan.

June 06, 2008

BBC All in the Mind kicks off its summer season:

BBC Radio 4's seasonal mind and brain programme All in the Mind has just started its summer run, and the first programme discusses virtual paranoia, heroics and the politics of detaining people with mental health problems.

Rather than the usual host of psychiatrist Raj Persuave (I realise it's not spelt like that but it seems to fit better), this season is fronted by the excellent Claudia Hammond - a rare breed of journalist who obviously knows her stuff about psychology and neuroscience.

The first programme looks at the use of virtual reality to study paranoia, talks to Philip Zimbardo about the psychology of heroism in the face of systemic abuse, and discusses whether changes in UK mental health law will mean abuses are less likely to be detected.

It'll be broadcast weekly for the next 5 week, so catch the archive which appears online every Wednesday.

Link to BBC Radio 4's All in the Mind.

—Vaughan.

June 04, 2008

NeuroPod on music and free will:

I've just noticed that the month slipped past without me realising that the May edition of Nature's NeuroPod show hit the net, covering musical neuroscience, the vagaries of free will and Huntingdon's disease.

One highlight is neuroscientist John Dylan Haynes arguing that free will is dead, and while we're still waiting for the conclusive scientific data, we can probably bank on it being an illusion.

There's also a fascinating piece on the psychology and neuroscience of music and its value as a social force.

As a musical aside, you may be interested to know the the BBC broadcast a documentary last night based on the Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia. If you live in the UK, you can watch it online via the BBC, although sadly only for the next 6 says.

Link to Nature NeuroPod archive.
Link to BBC documentary on Musicophilia (UK only).

—Vaughan.

May 30, 2008

In the midst of the video game fury :

The BPS Research Digest has just alerted me to an excellent cover article from Prospect magazine on the effects of computer games on young minds and why the scaremongering is largely hot air.

One of the biggest mongers of scare is the otherwise excellent Susan Greenfield, who seems to be convinced, mostly on the basis of speculations from some rather obliquely-related neuroscience studies, that video games and electronic culture and doing dreadful things to young minds (although not to elderly minds, who should apparently buy the 'brain training' software she's endorsed).

There is indeed evidence of an association between violent video games and aggression aggression in some young people, but there's also plenty of evidence of the benefits of children playing games.

Psychologist Tanya Byron wrote a remarkably well-researched report on the topic for the UK government, which is rightly highlighted by the Prospect article as one of the high-points of the debate.

The Prospect piece is a great overview of some of the things less often touched on by the academic literature, such as the real-life management skills needed to succeed in some of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game's like World of Warcraft or Second Life.

Link to Prospect article 'Rage Against the Machines'.

—Vaughan.

May 27, 2008

Placebo is not what you think:

The New York Times covers an interesting development in the world of consumer medicine - a company selling placebos to consumers that they can use to ease their children's ills.

For doctors, the use of placebos to treat medical conditions is explicitly banned by most medical associations but their use is widely debated.

Thousands of clinical trials have shown us that placebo is one of the most effective and safest of medicines (although it is not entirely without side-effects).

However, it is also one of the most misunderstood of treatments.

An article in this month's Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (which has been debating placebo over the past year or two) dispels some of the myths.

The placebo effect is usually equated with the average response of patients receiving placebo controls in randomized trials. However, it's not quite that simple.

For example, not every improvement that happens after someone is given a placebo treatment is the 'placebo effect' (some symptoms will just get better by themselves) and not every improvement after medication is the active effect of the drug, some of that will be 'placebo effect' too.

Placebos are not 'ineffective'. In fact, when three condition trials are run (no treatment vs placebo vs medical treatment), placebo consistently out performs 'no treatment' and of course, not uncommonly, the medical treatment condition as well.

Placebos are not a 'non-specific' treatment. A study on people who take the dopamine-boosting drug L-DOPA for Parkinson's disease but who took a placebo L-DOPA pill, showed almost identical brain changes, as if they'd taken the real thing.

Furthermore, studies done in the 1970s showed that when heroin users inject water (sometimes done deliberately to alleviate cravings when drugs are in short supply), they can experience drug-like euphoria and have been observed to show opiate-like physiological signs such as pupil constriction.

This last point also demonstrates that placebo is not solely about expectancy, belief or 'being fooled', as the heroin users knew they were injecting themselves with water. Conditioned responses play a role.

This can also be seen from the fact that these specific effects of placebo tend to fade after a while, as the conditioning becomes extinguished.

The fact that placebo can be a relatively safe, effective, and sometimes selective treatment has led some to argue that doctors should be able to use it officially (although, of course, many use it unofficially).

Law professor Adam Kolber (who you may know from the excellent Neuroethics and Law blog) wrote a fascinating paper last year that reviewed the research and argued that in limited circumstances, placebos could be ethically used.

The article is available online and I really recommend reading the 'Avoiding Deception' section if nothing else - for series of recommendations on how placebo could be used without straight up deception.

Link to NYT on buy-your-own placebos for kids.
Link to JRSM article on placebo. Full text here (thanks Ines!).
Link to Adam Kolber's article (scroll down for free full text download).

—Vaughan.

May 20, 2008

Decline of a Baghdad psychiatric hospital:

The New York Times covers the disturbing state of the Ibn Rushid hospital, one of only two psychiatric hospitals in Baghdad that serves the entire population of 6 million.

The article is equally moving and disturbing as it describes how the local citizens are suffering the effects of war with little available assistance while the doctors resort to desperate measures to try and help.

The hospital's fortunes have changed markedly during the occupation. Apparently in decline since the days of Saddam Hussein, a 2004 Psychiatric News article described how it had been refurbished after being looted by armed men shortly after the beginning of the war.

It now seems that a sharp decline is in progress once more as medication is increasingly scarce and ECT is being given on faulty equipment without anaesthetic or muscle relaxants.

One aspect of Iraq's mental health system which has been consistently reported since the occupation is the fact that many Iraqi psychiatrists have left the country owing to violence and kidnapping that has targeted doctors.

Both major Baghdad hospital have been sacked by armed looters and have been affected by nearby fighting.

The NYT article is accompanied by a photo essay that documents a day in the life of the Ibn Rushid hospital.

Link to NYT article 'War Takes Toll on Baghdad Psychiatric Hospital'.
Link to NYT photo essay.

—Vaughan.

May 17, 2008

How neurotech will change the world, one brain at a time:

High end business magazine Condé Nast Portfolio has a feature article on the latest developments in the 120 billion dollar neurotech industry that aims to develop drugs and devices to cure diseases and optimise our brains.

The article takes a broad view of the industry, but also highlights a few areas which are looking hot and gives a guide to the sort of business thinking that motivates both the neurotech giants and the fledgling startups.

It seems the industry is currently a high stakes, high risk investment prospect as the majority of companies do not make money, so investors are betting long-term or hoping they're backing a blockbuster.

The piece also mentions the work of Zack Lynch of the neurotech industry group NIO, who in partnership with his co-director and wife Casey Lynch, seems to have been lobbying the US government for significant support for the sector:

The couple’s new push is to get more federal dollars channeled toward the industry. Zack has been traveling back and forth to Washington, sometimes taking along neurotech C.E.O.’s, to promote a $1 billion “national neurotechnology initiative” that Representative Patrick Kennedy, a Rhode Island Democrat, recently announced he will introduce in Congress. The legislation asks the federal government to spend $200 million a year for five years on neurotech, including $30 million for the Food and Drug Administration to train more experts, $80 million for the National Institutes of Health to coordinate the neuroresearch efforts that are now run by 16 different institutes, and $75 million to increase small-business grants for neurotech companies.

One issue the article touches on is the deregulation of the industry so they can develop pharmaceuticals for cognitive enhancement of healthy people without having to get their medication licensed for a specific medical disorder.

While some remain suitably demure about the possibilities (at least in public), this is obviously the neurotech holy grail and is undoubtedly high on the long-term goals of the industry.

The article also has a couple of fantastic interactive features accompanying it - one on drugs and the other on implants. Also check the right-hand column for a series of related articles from the same publication.

Link to Condé Nast Portfolio article 'The Ultimate Cure' (via BrainWaves).

—Vaughan.

May 16, 2008

Pharmaceutical product placement rife in TV shows:

Treatment Online reviews some recent research showing that there is an increasing trend for pharmaceutical drug brand names to appear in prime-time TV shows in what looks increasingly like widespread product placement advertising.

Unsurprisingly, the main culprits tend to be popular medical shows, where the rate of pharmaceutical name-dropping seems to be increasing.

You might think that drug brand names are just being mentioned so the shows can be realistic and use the names of real medications. But it is possible to mention drugs without mentioning brand names, and this is probably more more realistic.

Medical drugs have two common names. One is the generic name which refers to the compound, one is the brand name, which refers to a specific drug company's version.

For example, aspirin is a generic drug often sold under the name Anadin. Fluoxetine is the generic drug often sold under the name Prozac.

So, there's not really any particular reason for TV shows to use brand names (in fact, doctors more commonly use the generic names). But despite this, the trend is growing and there is evidence that some of the name dropping is actually paid advertising through the back door [insert your own suppository joke here].

Industry watchdog Nielsen Product Placement notes that the number of casual references to name-brand pharmaceuticals is higher than ever before and continues to rise with each new TV season. Medical shows in particular lend themselves to this form of non-advertising, and they are among the most popular prime-time programs. Shows like "House," "Scrubs," and "Grey's Anatomy" routinely feature medical environments where sexy doctors and nurses drop references to brand-name drugs in settings both private and professional.

Studies reveal that the authority granted to these characters leaves viewers less likely to notice or question their implied endorsements of the products at hand - and, by the very nature of the fiction, a TV doctor recommending Vicodin is not as overbearing an advocate as the same character might be when marveling over the many great features of his brand-new Hummer.

Some companies actually admit to negotiating placement deals despite the industrywide contention that the vast majority of these references do not fulfill any contract. While these placements are not illegal, necessary federal oversight remains very poor if it exists at all.

Link to Treatment Online on drug company product placement.

—Vaughan.

May 08, 2008

The history of the brain:

BBC Radio 4's legendary history of ideas programme In Our Time takes an in-depth and fascinating look at the history of the brain.

The programme tracks the earliest Western ideas on the function and purpose of the brain from the times of the ancient Greeks.

What's most fascinating is how some completely false ideas about the brain survived centuries, despite the fact that it would have been easy to see how they were incorrect, if it weren't for the reluctance to actually do dissection studies on humans.

However, there were rare exceptions in the ancient world. For example, Herophilos and Erasistratus dissected the brains of live criminals!

It's a wonderfully erudite and in-depth discussion, and thoroughly delightful if you're interested in the history of the seat of human thought.

Link to webpage with permanent streamed audio (thanks Ben!).
mp3 of programme (disappears after a week).

—Vaughan.

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.

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 manufacturer's 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.

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.

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.

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.

March 05, 2008

We will please pill:

Placebo has its effect through our beliefs and expectations. Because we get many of our assumptions through culture, changing social attitudes could alter how effective it is.

Placebo is sometimes called the 'expectancy effect' and describes the fact that our expectations of what the dummy treatment will do can influence the outcome.

We noted before that the colour of the pill can significantly alter its effect, but it's intriguing to think that we probably get most of these sorts of expectations from our culture.

Bad Science looks at how the strength of the placebo effect has changed over time for different drug trials, suggesting that as our cultural beliefs change, the effectiveness dummy treatments might also change depending on how they're presented.

Similarly, The New York Times have just published a brief article on a new study that found placebos described as costing $2.50 a dose are more effective pain killers than those presented to participants as costing 10 cents a dose.

In other words, if placebo is a form of faith healing, changes in our collective faith will alter the healing potential of a placebo associated with those ideas.

These social effects on placebo are interesting, because we judge the effectiveness of medications by comparing them to placebo. Furthermore, we know the effectiveness of most medications will be partly explained by the placebo effect.

In other words, changes in our cultural attitudes influence the effectiveness of medication.

While we assume that much of medicine objectively definable, much is only comprehensible by making sense of social issues.

For example, drug side-effects are usually talked about as if they are objectively described properties of the chemical.

However, its easy to see that these actually depend on the person, not the drug.

For example, take the drug terazosin. It lowers blood pressure and shrinks the prostate.

If you have high blood pressure but a normal prostate, the side-effect is a reduced prostate. If you have prostate problems but normal blood pressure, the side-effect is reduced blood pressure. If you have both high blood pressure and prostate problems, it's potentially side-effect free.

One man's treatment is another man's side-effect. This is why the sociology of medicine is as important as biology, chemistry or another other bench-based science in understanding illness and treatment.

Link to Bad Science on placebo.
Link to NYT on price of placebo study.

—Vaughan.

March 04, 2008

Laughter and the return of RadioLab:

RadioLab, one of the most wonderfully produced radio shows around, has just started a new series with a fantastic edition on the psychology and neuroscience of laughter.

Tuning in to RadioLab is like listening to the enthusiastic daydreams of some slightly stoned but fantastically well informed scientists.

This edition looks at laughter, the behaviour that Aristotle thought was one of the few that were uniquely human.

Most interesting, the programme looks at the social uses of laughter and how it signals dominance and superiority, and how we use it to make others feel safe. But there much more than that, including laughing rats and laughing hysteria.

Another great edition and a pleasure to listen to.

Link to RadioLab on laughter (with streamed and mp3 audio).

—Vaughan.

March 03, 2008

Blue Brain Rising:

Seed Magazine has a fantastic article on the 'Blue Brain' project that aims to eventually create a biologically accurate simulation of the human brain on a supercomputer.

So far, they've only managed to simulate a cortical column but this in itself is quite impressive as many thought it could never be done.

The project is currently simulating about 10,000 neurons and a total of about 30 million synaptic connections.

If you've heard about artificial neural networks before this might not sound very impressive, but the difference between this project and most others is that it attempts digitally simulate the biological processes of each individual cell.

In contrast, most neural networks are made up of individual elements that are usually little more than metaphors of how neurons actually work.

A huge boost is that the project has shown that their software cortical column spontaneously acts like its biological equivalent when its switched on and stimulated.

It didn't take long before the model reacted. After only a few electrical jolts, the artificial neural circuit began to act just like a real neural circuit. Clusters of connected neurons began to fire in close synchrony: the cells were wiring themselves together. Different cell types obeyed their genetic instructions. The scientists could see the cellular looms flash and then fade as the cells wove themselves into meaningful patterns. Dendrites reached out to each other, like branches looking for light. "This all happened on its own," Markram says. "It was entirely spontaneous." For the Blue Brain team, it was a thrilling breakthrough. After years of hard work, they were finally able to watch their make-believe brain develop, synapse by synapse. The microchips were turning themselves into a mind.

It's an engrossing article that captures both the science behind the project and some of the personalities involved.

Link to Seed article 'Out of the Blue'.

—Vaughan.

March 02, 2008

Dr Ginger Campbell's Brain Science Podcasts:

I've been listening to some of Dr Ginger Campbell's brain science podcasts recently and am thoroughly enjoying them.

Campbell has been broadcasting for a fair while now (she's just put her 31st podcast online) but these latest editions are particularly good.

I caught a few of the early ones and found them a little rough around the edges to be honest. I have only recently revisited to discover I've been missing out on some great discussions.

Not tied down by the dictates of a radio schedule, the programmes are often wonderfully satisfying and in-depth. She doesn't like Chomsky's theories very much though as you'll discover in a recent edition on the evolution of language!

Campbell has obviously also put a lot of hard work into getting neuroscientists on the show to be interviewed, which make for some of the most interesting exchanges.

Link to Dr Ginger Campbell's Brain Science podcast.

—Vaughan.

February 28, 2008

Medicated Americans:

Scientific American Mind has a fantastic article on the endemic use of antidepressant drugs in the United States. It starts with some surprising statistics: 11 percent of American women and 5 percent of men are on antidepressants.

Serious clinical depression is devastating, and if ever you needed convincing that mental illness should be taken as seriously as physical illness, you only need to meet someone suffering in the depths of a mood disorder.

In contrast, the article notes that the modern concept of depression and the diagnostic criteria have been increasingly widened to cover states of low mood or disinterest that would previously have never been thought of as a medical problem.

It's full of interesting snippets from the scientific literature to suggest the pervasive influence of this new broader 'depression' on society.

For example, a 2007 study found that 1 in 4 people treated for depression have recently experienced a major emotional setback, such as a marriage break-up, a job loss or a financial crisis - suggesting the emotional difficulties may be part of a normal reaction to a serious life event.

A 2006 study found that three-quarters of people prescribed antidepressants receive them for a non-licensed or 'off label' reason - for a purpose that there is no strong evidence for.

Furthermore:

If statistics serve, we know a number of things about the Medicated American. We know there is a very good chance she has no psychiatric diagnosis. A study of antidepressant use in private health insurance plans by the New England Research Institute found that 43 percent of those who had been prescribed antidepressants had no psychiatric diagnosis or any mental health care beyond the prescription of the drug. We know she is probably female: twice as many psychiatric drugs are prescribed for women than for men, reported a 1991 study in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Remarkably, in 2002 more than one in three doctor’s office visits by women involved the prescription of an antidepressant, either for the writing of a new prescription or for the maintenance of an existing one, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This is not to dismiss the suffering of those who have less disabling mood problems - each of which can be a torment in itself.

The key question though, is should it be the responsibility of medicine to prevent these unpleasant mood states, and if so, is medication the answer?

Psychological therapies are known to be effective treatments when depression first occurs and better than drugs in preventing relapse, and for much mild - moderate depression increasing activity levels and light exercise can be strikingly effective.

For more serious cases, a combination of drugs and psychological treatment is the most effective treatment.

The boundaries of illness say as much about our society as they do about our medical advances because it is impossible to define illness without making a value judgement about what point normal variation becomes a pathology.

Depression and antidepressants and complicated because there are many interests - individual, professional, scientific and financial - all shaping how we detect and treat 'it'.

Over these last few months it has become clear that medication is not as effective as the published evidence has led us to believe, and that we need to radically rethink how we understand mood problems and help those who suffer them.

While the SciAm article focuses on the US where the problem is most apparent, it is clear that this is an issue facing many countries in the West.

Link to SciAm article 'The Medicated Americans'.

—Vaughan.

Encephalon reminder:

Just a reminder that we will be hosting the next edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival here, next Monday.

So if you want your writing featured send a link to your article to:

encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com

...and we'll look forward to including it.

—Vaughan.

February 26, 2008

New antidepressants all bark and no bite?:

The new generation antidepressants are no better than placebo in mild-moderate depression according to a new analysis of published and unpublished trials that were submitted during the drugs' approval.

The study is published in PLoS Medicine and despite the huge headlines it has generated, is not entirely surprising.

Psychologist Irving Kirsch, who led this new research, has conducted several previous studies looking at the effectiveness of SSRI antidepressant drugs and found similar results, although this is the first time that the study has factored in the severity of depression.

This study focused on the drugs fluoxetine (Prozac), venlafaxine (Effexor), nefazodone (Serzone), and paroxetine (Seroxat or Paxil) and used the US Freedom of Information Act to request data on (mainly) negative trials that haven't been published to complement the data set from published trials.

In this new analysis, only in severe depression did these medications show a distinct improvement over placebo, and this, the authors suggest, is because of the reduced placebo effect in the severely depressed, rather than than the fact that the medication has a differential effect in those most affected by mood disorders.

It's important to note that the study didn't show that the drugs had no effect in mild-moderate depression. They were all associated with an improvement in depression, but this was no different from placebo (a powerful effect in itself).

It's also important to note that this finding doesn't apply to all antidepressant drugs, and that it doesn't apply to the use of these four drugs in all situations. They are also commonly prescribed for anxiety disorders which weren't investigated in this study.

However, this is another example of how drug companies' attempts to obscure data from negative trials are coming back to haunt them.

The Times has one of the best write-ups but as usual, the PLoS article has a jargon-free summary included so you can get the findings from the source even if you're not familiar with scientific writing.

UPDATE: An important clarification from PJ, taken from the comments:

I think that by saying "this was no different from placebo" you are being misleading. Strictly speaking it was statistically different from placebo but did not reach the NICE criteria for a clinically significant difference:

"a three-point difference in Hamilton Rating Scale of Depression (HRSD)scores or a standardized mean difference (d) of 0.50"

Thanks PJ!

Link to full-text of PLoS Medicine paper.
Link to Times write-up.

—Vaughan.

February 25, 2008

The Lobotomist documentary available online:

After being put back from January, the fantastic documentary on Walter Freeman and the rise and fall of the frontal lobotomy is finally available to view online.

Unfortunately, it's been cut up into little chunks and is only available as a Quicktime or Windows Media stream, which makes it a pain to watch and completely inaccessible to anyone not using Windows or Mac.

Needless to say, a better quality version is available on some torrent servers as a sensibly packaged video file and the healthiest torrent seems to be this one.

It's a fantastically well-researched and balanced documentary, looking at the history of the procedure, Freeman's over-identification with the operation and its abandonment as the problems became clear.

The tale is tragic for many reasons, not least of which is Freeman's flawed personality and unwillingness to admit that the lobotomy was not the miracle cure he initially claimed.

There's plenty more background information on the programme website and the Neurophilosophy article on the history of the procedure has some more details.

Link to The Lobotomist website and streamed version.
Link to Mininova torrent.

—Vaughan.

February 24, 2008

The ghost of moral madness:

Only the morally weak and degenerate became mentally ill in the 18th century. At least, that's what the popular theories of the time suggested. Madness was caused by moral failings and those who lost their mind were sinners.

We like to think that we live in enlightened times and that only in the far outskirts of the religious fringe are mental disorder and immorality thought to be (presumably gay) bedfellows.

Politics is one of the few areas were accusations of mental illness are considered fair game. I don't mean simply calling someone or their ideas 'mad', 'loony' or 'crazy'. I mean suggesting a politician or a political group has a diagnosable mental disorder.

US psychiatrist Lyle Rossiter published a book in 2006 claiming that liberalism was a form of clinical mental illness. Bang up to date with the latest in 1920s Freudian analysis, Rossiter claims that liberalism is caused by problems with relationships as a child, leading to a pathological fear of abandonment and an obsessive need for an omnipotent control of others.

Presidents fair little better. A 2004 book claimed George W Bush is an untreated alcoholic, while a 2000 book claimed Clinton was racked with compulsions.

In the UK, so many people accused Tony Blair of being insane that an article was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine that gathered the accusations and wondered why otherwise respectable clinicians feel the need to diagnose public figures.

It seems this is one of our last bastions of publicly acceptable prejudice against mental illness. We would be horrified if politicians were labelled epileptic because of their views, but barely blink an eyelid when they're called schizophrenic.

This makes it all the more ironic that numerous successful politicians have been genuinely mentally ill. Winston Churchill was famously pursued by his 'black dog' throughout his time as Prime Minister and a recent biographical study by Duke University found evidence for psychiatric problems in 37 US Presidents from 1776 to 1974.

One of the most remarkable stories from recent years comes from Scandanavia, where Kjell Magne Bondevik, the then serving Prime Minister of Norway, announced he needed three weeks sick leave owing to an episode of depression.

Bondevik returned to work and was re-elected in the subsequent election. He's now retired from politics, campaigns to fight the stigma associated with mental illness and was recently interviewed (realvideo) about his experiences on BBC's Newsnight programme.

It's a optimistic story for many reasons, but the fact that the Norwegian electorate seemed more concerned with his past record than his diagnosis gives us genuine hope that we're slowly banishing the ghost of moral madness.

Link to JRSM article 'The Madness of Politics'.
realvideo of Kjell Magne Bondevik interview.

—Vaughan.

February 23, 2008

Maternal disorder:

The drowning of five children by their mother, Andrea Yates, was a case that forced many to confront an issue that most would rather ignore. Yates was one of the rare cases of women with puerperal (childbirth associated) psychosis who kill their children.

This week's ABC Radio National's All in the Mind talks to three forensic clinicians who research and work with women who have either killed or injured their children while mentally ill.

It's an extraordinarily emotive issue, both due to the cries of condemnation from those appalled by what they consider 'evil' acts, and the concerns of others worried that focusing on the issue will strengthen the largely unfounded stereotype of the 'dangerous mentally ill'.

All in the Mind manages to tackle the issue incredibly sensitively, a rarity in a world where these tragic situations only ever seem to get attention as sensational news stories or political point-scoring.

The programme looks at the sorts of mental states which have led to these tragedies and talks to two female forensic psychiatrists about how they deal with the strong emotions that these cases stir up.

If you're interested in a more academic approach to the research in this area, psychiatrist Margaret Spinelli wrote an important 2004 article on maternal infanticide in the American Journal of Psychiatry that's freely available online.

The programme also tackles the difficult subject of female sex offenders and how clinical science is being applied to preventing and treating this subset of the forensic population.

Link to AITM on maternal disorder.
Link to AJP article on maternal infanticide.

—Vaughan.

February 22, 2008

War apparently boosts Iraqi teenagers' self-esteem:

Who would have guessed the Iraq war would be so uplifting to the children of Baghdad? According to research funded by the US Military, the invasion boosted the self-esteem of Iraqi teenagers.

The BPS Research Digest covers the study which took place in the summer of 2004, a year after the invasion.

With this new found benefit of invasion, the next target seems obvious - those self-deprecating Canadians!

Link to BPS Research Digest write-up of the study.

—Vaughan.

Psychology Today, every day:

Psychology Today is a bimonthly US magazine that's traditionally been thought of as a 'pop psychology' publication but has made efforts in recent years to be more scientific. They've just launched a blog network and have attracted some big names in academic psychology to contribute.

Authors include psychiatrist Peter Kramer, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa and MIT media lab cognitive scientist Dan Ariely, as well as the regular editorial staff from the magazine.

Some of the authors aren't due to start in earnest until the beginning of March, but there's some good material on there already and looks very promising.

Link to Psychology Today blogs.

—Vaughan.

February 19, 2008

A bait and switch trick on torture and psychologists?:

A poster on Metafilter has collected together news reports on the growing number of psychologists leaving the American Psychological Association in protest at their failure to condemn members who take part in the 'War on Terror' interrogations.

One of the most surprising aspects is from a contributor who suggests that the APA released a different text to the one approved by a 2006 committee vote that was intended to condemn abusive practices by psychologists.

The campaign group Coalition for an Ethical Psychology released a report [pdf] claiming that the original statement reviewed by the committee defined torture in terms of the United Nations criteria, but the published resolution had been changed to refer to the US Constitution, providing a definition of torture that is being used to allow abusive interrogations.

Strong public protests over the PENS Report [which condoned psychologists participating in interrogations, without mentioning torture or other abuse] prompted the APA Divisions for Social Justice and others to craft a new resolution prohibiting psychologists from participating in abusive detainee interrogations. In August 2006, after much discussion and debate, the APA’S Council of Representatives passed a Resolution Against Torture, Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment.

However, the version published by the APA differed from the version discussed and passed by the Council, in at least one significant respect: in the document reviewed by Council, psychologists were instructed to look to the United Nations Principles of Medical Ethics and international instruments for definitions of unethical behavior and "torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment." In the published document, the definition of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment instead was taken from the 5th, 8th and 14th amendments to the US Constitution, precisely the same definitions that had been used by the CIA, the DoD and the Bush Administration to assert that the abusive interrogation techniques in use at Guantánamo, CIA black sites, and elsewhere were not "torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

The more recent August 2007 resolution refers to both the United Nations and the US Constitution criteria, presumably making for a much stricter definition, although still fails to define some key definitions concerning distress.

However, the fact that an earlier version was 'switched' is quite concerning as it has become clear that psychologists are an incredibly valuable part of interrogation or 'Behavioral Science Consultation Teams' (aka 'biscuit teams').

In contrast, psychologists' colleagues in both the American medical and psychiatric associations have outright banned their members from participation.

In practice, this hasn't stopped some physicians becoming complicit in these interrogations, but many US psychologists are embarrassed by their parent organisations unwillingness to take the equivalent ethical line when the profession is increasingly seeking equal status to doctors.

Link to MeFi on psychologists leaving the APA (via BoingBoing).

—Vaughan.

Diagnostic handshake:

Mark Gurrieri was diagnosed with a brain tumour after shaking a doctor's hand. BBC News has an interesting piece on the incident, where the doctor noticed that Gurrieri's hand was spongy and swollen, suggesting a growth hormone problem that can be caused by a tumour on the brain's pituitary gland.

Mr Gurrieri underwent tests and was found to have acromegaly - caused by a tumour in the pituitary gland which leads to excess growth hormone.

The condition is seen in just three people per million, and can have serious effects if left undiagnosed.

It causes problems with vision and can lead to diabetes and blood pressure problems.

If untreated acromegaly can also cause premature death.

Mr Gurrieri thought his hands were getting bigger because of too much DIY and working in his restaurant kitchen.

Link to BBC News article 'Handshake diagnosed brain tumour'.

—Vaughan.

February 18, 2008

Push my brain button:

You can promote almost anything with a few words about the brain because it sounds like science. This week's Bad Science column takes a close look at 'Brain Gym', a scheme introduced into large numbers of UK schools that attempts to boost brain function by getting the kids to do, well, complete nonsense.

For example, a "back and forward movement of the head" apparently "increases the circulation to the frontal lobe for greater comprehension and rational thinking". According to this wisdom, a good clip around the ear has remarkable brain boosting properties.

One of my favourite examples of nonsense neuroscience is the use of the 'explanation' that an activity is pleasurable because it 'boosts endorphins' or 'releases opioids' in the brain.

Here's a great example from the widely distributed and widely discarded London newspaper The Metro which managed to give a cod brain science explanation in a (NSFW but remarkably dull) article on bondage and whipping.

Apparently:

The person getting the flogging (the bottom) gets pleasure from natural opiates generated in the brain and the person doing the flogging (the top) gets pleasure watching their partner... Even a runner's high after exercise is nothing compared with the boost of natural opiates that can be released in a flogging.

Apart from the fact that they don't know the difference between opiates (derivatives of the opium poppy) and opioids (any substance that binds to opioid receptors, including the brain's naturally produced chemicals) this really explains nothing about why being flogged is supposed to be pleasurable.

Opioids are definitely part of the experience of pleasure, but they're also part of the experience of pretty much everything else.

Experiencing pain is one thing that definitely causes increased opioid activity, but if pleasure were that simple, we'd find fighting so much fun that Planet Earth would be be like Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a laugh track.

These attempts at an explanation are really nothing more than placebos that still don't tell us how we experience pleasure as a result of the activity, or what role opioids play in this process.

Even if pleasure was purely opioid release, the trick with an explanation is to explain how and why this occurs, not just say that it does.

It's not that these simple links aren't important, but they're not explanations in themselves, even though they're often presented as such.

My other pet hate is when something pleasurable is described as having the same effect on the brain as one of the four dopamen of the neurocalypse: 'drugs', 'sex', 'gambling' and 'chocolate'.

Almost any one is used to explain the effect of the others, and if you're really lucky, all four will be invoked to make for an exciting-sounding but often scientifically empty article.

This is another example where the crucial information is how these activities have their effect on the dopamine system, not the fact that they do.

So, as with the faux science that supposedly supports 'Brain Gym', always ask yourself how it occurs, rather than relying on the illusion of brain magic.

Link to Bad Science article on why we fall for brain-based promotions.

—Vaughan.

February 11, 2008

Psychological torture: a CIA history:

Advances in the History of Psychology has alerted me to a gripping video lecture on the development of CIA psychological torture techniques from the Cold War to War on Terror.

It was an invited lecture at the University of California by historian Prof Alfred McCoy who has long specialised in the history of the US secret services.

He argues that the results of CIA research into psychological torture can be clearly seen in both the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo bay and images of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

By contrast when I looked at those photos, I did not see snapshots of simple brutality or a breakdown in military discipline. For example, that most iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi with fake electrical wires hanging from his extended arms shows not the sadism of a few 'creeps', but instead, the two key trademarks of the CIA's psychological torture: the hood was for sensory disorientation and the arms extended for self-inflicted pain.

McCoy discusses how these techniques were researched and developed by some of the most distinguished cognitive scientists of the time and were reflected in now uncovered CIA documents, including the 1961 'Manipulation of Human Behavior' research summary, the 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, and the 1983 'Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual'.

He notes that these techniques have been developed and legitimised by a legal framework that was deliberately designed not to outlaw existing techniques, despite the fact there is no strong basis for their effectiveness and evidence suggests that psychological torture has a similar long-term impact to physical torture.

Interestingly, he suggests that Guantanamo is both being used as a centre for gathering intelligence, as well as a sort of 'lab' for testing and developing new methods.

McCoy is the author of the recent book 'A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror' on which this talk is based, in which he also argues that the work on Donald Hebb and Stanley Milgram were partly funded by the CIA to help understand how to break through people's psychological defences.

The lecture has a long introduction by one of the University's dignitaries, so you can skip to 11:30 when it really starts in earnest.

Advances in the History of psychology has also been keeping track of recent discussion about the book and recent findings about the role of the CIA in funding American psychology research in the 50s and 60s.

Link to YouTube video of McCoy lecture.

—Vaughan.

February 06, 2008

It Came From Inner Space:

In light of the unusual behaviour displayed by some of NASA's astronauts in recent times, the American space agency is aiming to use increased psychological screening for its potential space travellers.

They say there is nothing new orbiting the sun and, as testament to this, the exact same issue was discussed way back in 1959, in a special issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry on 'space psychiatry'.

It's a rather curious discussion to say the least, showing a mix of 1950s prejudice, naive awe, and some rather charming if not slightly potty Freudian analysis.

An article by A.J Silverman and colleagues discusses the possibilities of using psychological selection techniques for space crew and notes that it should exclude "the person with a history of constantly fighting and rebelling both against peers and authority figures, as well as those with pressing homosexual or other major neurotic conflicts."

Silverman was writing at a time when homosexuality was still 15 years away from being de-listed as a mental illness but the issue of whether to send an openly gay person into space is still a hot topic. Apparently, Lance Bass, ex-'N Sync singer and commercial astronaut, might be the first.

Despite a few throwaway comments, the authors of the 'space psychiatry' articles actually spend much more time discussing the terrors of outer space, and how they relate to the terrors of inner space, rather than how to screen crews.

Air Force Captain George Ruff notes two serious sources of space anxiety: one is "the possibility that equipment failure or operator error may cause death within a few seconds". The other, is "the subject's infantile fantasies" (Houston, we have an unresolved Oedipus complex).

In contrast, Eugene Brody sees 'separation anxiety' as the most likely source of psychological disturbance. This is what young children suffer when they are taken, even temporarily, from their mothers.

Brody thought this would be equally as stressful when astronauts were separated from 'mother earth' and suggested that the consequences could be dire:

These factors plus the sensory input patterns which may be encountered in space flight, and such apparently basic fears as that of impenetrable darkness might in theory at least be expected in time to produce-even in a well-selected and trained pilot-something akin to the panic of schizophrenia. The regressive defense may be revealed in symptom formations such as hallucinations or delusions..."

In other words, Brody is arguing that the existential loneliness of space may break down the usual defences of astronauts causing them to experience their innermost conflicts as delusions and hallucinations, imposed upon reality.

What's remarkable, is this is strikingly similar to the main themes in Stanislaw Lem's influential novel Solaris which was published in 1961, two years after the American Journal of Psychiatry special issue.

It's interesting to speculate that Lem may have been inspired to explore these concepts after they were discussed by American psychiatrists and disseminated by starry-eyed futurists.

Link to AJP 'Symposium of Space Psychiatry' (sadly, closed access).
Link to USA Today article on astronaut selection.
Link to Wired article on hopes for gay astronauts.

—Vaughan.

January 31, 2008

Kissing, corporate evil and a pat on the head:

The new Scientific American Mind has just arrived online with its customary couple of feature articles freely available online. The issue also has a review of psychology and neuroscience blogs, which kindly features Mind Hacks.

According to the review SciAmMind "offers up a hearty helping of science" whereas blogs offer "extra crumbs of brain candy". Nothing like getting patronised by the best I guess.

Apart from that though, they actually say some pretty complementary things about a number of online mind and brain blogs, so it can't be all that bad.

One of their freely available feature articles is on the psychology and neuroscience of kissing.

Human lips enjoy the slimmest layer of skin on the human body, and the lips are among the most densely populated with sensory neurons of any body region. When we kiss, these neurons, along with those in the tongue and mouth, rocket messages to the brain and body, setting off delightful sensations, intense emotions and physical reactions.

Of the 12 or 13 cranial nerves that affect cerebral function, five are at work when we kiss, shuttling messages from our lips, tongue, cheeks and nose to a brain that snatches information about the temperature, taste, smell and movements of the entire affair. Some of that information arrives in the somatosensory cortex, a swath of tissue on the surface of the brain that represents tactile information in a map of the body. In that map, the lips loom large because the size of each represented body region is proportional to the density of its nerve endings.

The other freely available article apparently discusses what capitalism and the corporate world can tell us about the psychology of competition and altruism, but seems largely an enthusiastic description of Google's business practices - novel as they may be.

Link to article 'Affairs of the Lips'.
Link to article 'Do All Companies Have to be Evil?'.

—Vaughan.

January 25, 2008

Griefer madness:

You know it's a bad day when it starts raining penises during a media interview. Wired has an article on the 'griefer' subculture, sociopaths of the virtual world.

Essentially, they are virtual world vandals, or online versions of those local kids on the street who love shouting abuse and messing the place up.

Like most other aspects of human behaviour, antisocial behaviour transfers from the offline to the online world.

But like many subcultures on the internet, it is a new phenomenon in that people who would never normally get a chance to meet many others who share their socially unpopular beliefs, suddenly have access to a huge, distributed community of such people.

One of the most notorious 'griefer' attacks, before the term was even conceived, was described in the landmark article 'A Rape in Cyberspace', and describes an antisocial user taking over a text-based environment

It was one of the first pieces to convince people that internet interactions could have serious emotional effects, and is widely cited in the internet psychology literature.

The Wired article discusses the motivations (and even, the 'philosophy') behind these groups, as well as their impact on the increasingly commercial virtual worlds.

Link to Wired article on 'griefer subculture'.

—Vaughan.

January 17, 2008

Effect of antidepressants exaggerated due to buried data:

The New England Journal of Medicine has just published a study that found the effectiveness of 12 of the most popular antidepressants has been exaggerated because pharmaceutical companies have been 'hiding' data from negative drug trials.

Known as the 'file drawer effect', it involves submitting only positive results to be published in scientific journals.

This type of selective publishing was recognised as a pervasive problem in medicine, and to try and combat this, a rule was introduced that required all clinical trials to be registered before they began.

This means no-one could claim that a negative study didn't occur and others could try and track down the data if needed.

The researchers in this new study decide to do exactly this. They examined the American Food and Drug Admistration (FDA) register and requested data from all 74 trials of the most commonly used antidepressant drugs.

They then compared the results from all the trials, to just the trials that had been published in the medical literature.

The findings are quite shocking:

A total of 37 studies viewed by the FDA as having positive results were published; 1 study viewed as positive was not published.

Studies viewed by the FDA as having negative or questionable results were, with 3 exceptions, either not published (22 studies) or published in a way that, in our opinion, conveyed a positive outcome (11 studies).

According to the published literature, it appeared that 94% of the trials conducted were positive. By contrast, the FDA analysis showed that 51% were positive.

In other words, when all the studies are examined, there's only about 50-50 chance that a scientific study of an antidepressant drug will find it more effective than placebo in treating depression.

The Wall Street Journal has a good write-up of the study, from which I've also taken the graph below. It describes which antidepressant drugs have their apparent effect most boosted by the hiding of negative findings.

As we live in the age of 'evidence based medicine', doctors will used the available evidence to decide which drugs to prescribe.

Needless to say, distortions in the published results can affect individual patients owing to the effect on doctors decision-making.

Link to abstract of study.
Link to good write-up from the Wall Street Journal.

—Vaughan.

January 15, 2008

I take your brain to another dimension:

Pay close attention. The New York Times has an article on the Boltzmann brain theory that argues that random fluctuations in the universe could create self-aware entities. In other words, brains, being spontaneously created by the universe.

It turns out, the theory isn't solely about brains. It argues that matter could be created from fluctuations in the universe and it is mathematically conceivable that one of these fluctuations could create matter configured as a conscious creature.

Like Nick Bostrom's 'we could be living in a computer simulation' argument, it takes mathematically possibilities to their most astonishing extreme.

Regardless of the infinitesimally small probability of this actually happening, it does lead to some wonderful language in the article.

Where else are you going to read the sentence: "The numbers of regular and freak observers are both infinite."

Link to NYT article 'Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?'

—Vaughan.

January 12, 2008

Nature NeuroPod visits SfN megaconference:

Nature Neuroscience's NeuroPod podcast has a special on the recent Society for Neuroscience annual megaconference that picks up on some of the more interesting new developments.

There's loads of fascinating new findings in there, but don't miss the last few minutes of the podcast where Prof Eleanor Maguire talks about ongoing work with London Taxi drivers.

Maguire's team famously discovered in 2000 that London Taxi drivers have bigger than average hippocampi, a brain structure known to be heavily involved in learning routes and spatial representations.

The study found that the size of the hippocampus correlated with the length of time being a taxi driver, suggesting that the extensive training and navigational experience may change and develop the hippocampus.

The study won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2003 for research "that cannot, or should not, be reproduced" but was actually one of the first studies to show likely experience-related changes to the structure of the human brain.

In the podcast Maguire discusses a new study which updates the findings and suggests that the taxi drivers' pumped hippocampi come at a cost.

While their navigational abilities were increased, their ability to learn new associations between things (another function of the hippocampus) was poor, and the size of the anterior hippocampi (a more forward area) was actually smaller.

This suggests that overdevelopment in one area of the hippocampus may actually reduce development in another.

mp3 of NeuroPod special at SfN 2007 conference.
Link to NeuroPod index page.
pdf of Eleanor Maguire's Taxi driver update study.

—Vaughan.

January 10, 2008

The psychology of the politics of fear:

Newsweek has a fantastic article on the psychology and neuroscience behind the politics of fear which draws directly on examples from the current and past US elections.

American politics in particular it seems, has, in recent years, used fear as a way of trying to motivate voters and support particular candidates.

The Newsweek article looks at why fear is such a potent force in decision-making and what psychology research has shown us about how invoking concepts of death or threat actually affects our reasoning and desires.

"When we're insecure, we want our leaders to have what's called an 'unconflicted personality'," says political psychologist Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona. "Bush was very clear in his beliefs and had no doubts, but Kerry was painted as a flip-flopper...

That real-world observation has been replicated in lab studies. In one experiment Greenberg and colleagues ran during the 2004 campaign, volunteers who completed a questionnaire that reminded them about their own inevitable death (how thoughts of their own death made them feel and what they thought would happen to them physically after they died) expressed greater support for Bush than voters of similar leanings who were not reminded of mortality. The researchers also found that subliminal reminders of death increased support for Bush (and decreased support for Kerry) even among liberals. It's not clear if such responses in the lab would endure in an actual voting booth. So perhaps one should not be too cynical about the decision by the Department of Homeland Security to raise the terror-threat level on Election Day 2004. "Political use of fear is not something new," says NYU's LeDoux. "But certainly the ante has been upped. We've gone from 'vote for me or you'll end up poor' to 'vote for me or you'll end up dead'."

Documentary maker Adam Curtis argued in his three-part series The Power of Nightmares (video: parts one, two, three) that since the cold war politicians across the globe have been attempting to promote the idea of foreign threats so they can then promise to deliver us from them.

Curtis is by no means a neutral commentator, but as he's demonstrated with a number of his documentaries, his analysis of politics as an essentially psychological process is an interesting take on world affairs.

My only reservation about the Newsweek piece is that it takes the somewhat simplistic line that the amygdala equals fear in the brain.

The amygdala must have the worst PR of all of the brain structures, but to set the record straight, there's more to the amygdala than fear, and more to fear than the amygdala.

Neurophilosophy has a guide to the neurobiology of fear if you want an overview of the wider fear circuits in the brain, and Current Biology has a freely available article which is a primer on the amygdala.

You may be interested to know that this almond shaped brain area is also involved in a range of positive emotional states, so it's not all doom and gloom.

Link to Newsweek article 'The Roots of Fear' (via Schneier).

—Vaughan.

January 08, 2008

Composing, by brain waves:

Mick Grierson has been hacking some applications for a brain-computer interface that uses EEG to convert the brain's electrical signals into a thought-driven synthesizer control mechanism.

The kit is just in a test stage at the moment, but there's a YouTube video of him being able to trigger specific notes from his EEG signals.

OK. So I’ve had my EEG for about a month now. Within a few days, I’d successfully run a project that allowed me to spell words with my thoughts. This took some practice, and the algorithms are really elementary at the moment. However, it’s nice to be on the edge of what is possible. I’ve just spent a few days integrating a fairly obvious matching algorithm - basically an algorithm that detects unconscious responses to stimuli on a simple level - into a synthesiser built in max/msp. This took quite a lot of effort. Anyhow, this system is a variation of those which you may have been hearing about on and off….my system now allows me (with a bit of work) to control the pitch of the synthesiser with my thoughts in real-time. This reliably allows me to play tunes - slowly. I often ‘hit’ wrong notes, but it sort of works. Has anyone else done this yet?

Can't wait to see how the project advances. The first jam session will be quite a sight (and sound!), I'm sure.

Link to video of BCI synthesiser (via DevIntel).
Link to Grierson's blog.

—Vaughan.

January 07, 2008

17th century brain surgery, digitally recreated:

A reader of neuroscience blog Retrospectacle wrote in to say they'd created a video simulation of how a 17th century brain surgery tool would work, and it's a wonderfully vivid, if not somewhat gruesome, animation of the tool in action.

The tool was the elevatorium biploidum and was described by the pioneering Dutch surgeon Cornelius Solingen in his book Manuale Operatien der Chirurgie.

Boerhaave Museum describes the use of the tool:

Bullets from seventeenth-century guns had slightly less velocity than the bullets of today. The damage they caused, particularly if you were hit in the head, was consequently sometimes less serious than might have been expected. Not every bullet penetrated the skull, but they often left a sizeable dent. Under the dent there might be haemorrhaging, because of the rupturing of local blood vessel as a result of the impact. In order to treat that bleeding and the associated pressure on the brain the Hague surgeon Cornelis Solingen (1641-1687) has developed a sort of 'corkscrew', with which you could raise the dented cranium again.

The tool obviously had (if you'll excuse the pun) quite an impact at the time as it is featured on the front page of the museum's website. Indeed, similar surgical techniques are still in use today.

Link to video animation of the elevatorium biploidum.
Link to Retrospectacle post.
Link to Boerhaave Museum page on the tool.

—Vaughan.

January 06, 2008

Dreamy panic mashup:

ABC Radio National's All in the Mind recently broadcast a beautifully produced edition on the cultural history of panic.

Curiously, it inspired a student of one of the sociologists interviewed on the programme to create their own retro video mashup using some of the audio.

It's a wonderfully atmospheric, dreamily paranoid and a striking accompaniment to the programme.

Whoever thought panic could feel so ambient?

Link to AITM on a cultural history of panic.
Link to video of dreamy panic video (via AITM blog).

—Vaughan.

January 03, 2008

Boredom, psychedelics and mind-bending images:

The bi-monthly Scientific American Mind seem to be making more of their feature articles freely available online after the first month has gone (and bravo to that!), and they've just opened-up two new articles: one on the psychology of boredom and the other on the use of psychedelic drugs to treat mental illness.

But before we start on the articles, have a look at the beautiful image on the right. Click for a larger version because the small size doesn't do it justice.

It's the image that accompanies the psychedelics article and it's by Phil Wheeler, who, as it turns out, seems to specialise in wonderful psychological illustrations.

They're psychological in both senses of the word, as some contain images associated with psychology, but also often contain hidden images, visual illusions and distortions.

His online gallery of images is really quite striking, and many of them meander between a sort of organic cyberpunk and a visual stream of consciousness.

The psychedelics article discusses the neuroscience and current research trials and looks at some of the main research compounds: LSD, ketamine, MDMA, and ibogaine, and, although it barely touches on psilocybin, is remarkably comprehensive for a feature article of its size.

The article on boredom does a really good job of investigating this under-appreciated mental state, and looks at research showing that having nothing to do is only part of being bored - personality factors, emotions and current interpretations all play a part.

It also makes a distinction between transient, situational boredom, and a more profound existential boredom stemming from a dissatisfaction with life.

A little ironically, it turns out there's a surprising amount of fascinating research on boredom.

Link to Phil Wheeler's beautiful illustrations.
Link to Phil Wheeler website with more images.
Link to SciAmMind article 'Bored?'.
Link to SciAmMind article 'Psychedelic Healing?'.

—Vaughan.

January 02, 2008

Changing minds:

Online chin-scratching club Edge have asked their annual question. This year's it's "What have you changed your mind about?" and the respondents include a number of cognitive scientists or people thinking about mind and brain issues.

Actually, all of them are a good read (although spot the few who don't seem to have changed their mind very much!).

We've listed the psychology and neuroscience-related answers below if you want to cut to the chase (and fixed a few broken links from the original website along the way).

Enjoy!

Joseph LeDoux: Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used.

Karl Sabbagh: I used to believe that there were experts and non-experts and that, on the whole, the judgment of experts is more accurate, more valid, and more correct than my own judgment.

Howard Gardner: Wrestling with Jean Piaget, my Paragon.

Donald Hoffman: Veridical Perception.

Michael Shermer: The Nature of Human Nature.

Irene Pepperberg: The Fallacy of Hypothesis Testing.

Rudy Rucker: Can Robots See God?

Nick Bostrom: Everything.

Arnold Rehub: I have never questioned the conventional view that a good grounding in the physical sciences is needed for a deep understanding of the biological sciences. It did not occur to me that the opposite view might also be true.

Dan Sperber: How I Became An Evolutionary Psychologist.

Thomas Metzinger: There are No Moral Facts.

Marc D. Hauser: The Limits Of Darwinian Reasoning.

Robert Provine: In Praise of Fishing Expeditions.

Todd Feinberg: Soul Searching.

David Myers: Reading and reporting on psychological science has changed my mind many times...

Daniel Everett: Homeopathic Bias and Language Origins.

Max Tegmark: Do we need to understand consciousness to understand physics? I used to answer "yes", thinking that we could never figure out the elusive "theory of everything" for our external physical reality without first understanding the distorting mental lens through which we perceive it.

Robert Sapolsky: I'm both a neurobiologist and a primatologist, and I've changed my mind about plenty of things in both of these realms. But the most fundamental change is one that transcends either of those disciplines — this was my realizing that the most interesting and important things in the life sciences are not going to be explained with sheer reductionism.

Rodney Brooks: Computation as the Ultimate Metaphor.

Robert Trivers: The Science of Self-deception Requires a Deep Understanding of Biology.

Gary Marcus: What's Special About Human Language.

A. Garrett Lisi: I Used To Think I Could Change My Mind.

Jeffrey Epstein: The question presupposes a well defined "you", and an implied ability that is under "your" control to change your "mind". The "you" I now believe is distributed amongst others (family friends, in hierarchal structures)...

Stephen Kosslyn: The World in the Brain.

Gary Klein: Exchanging Your Mind.

John McCarthy: Attitudes Trump Facts.

Ernst Pöppel: Being Caught In The Language Trap — Or Wittgenstein's Straitjacket.

Marcel Kinsbourne: The Impressionable Brain.

Marti Hearst: Computational Analysis of Language Requires Understanding Language.

Diane F. Halpern: From A Simple Truth To "It All Depends".

Roger Shank: AI?

John Horgan: Changing My Mind About the Mind-Body Problem.

Sherry Turkle: What I've Changed My Mind About.

Daniel Gilbert: The Benefit of Being Able to Change My Mind.

Judith Rich Harris: Generalization.

Terrence Sejnowski: I have changed my mind about cortical neurons and now think that they are far more capable than we ever imagined.

Jon Haidt: Sports and fraternities are not so bad.

Steven Pinker: Have Humans Stopped Evolving?

Eduardo Punset: The soul is in the brain.

Leo Chalupa: Brain plasticity.

Scott Atran: The Religious Politics of Fictive Kinship.

Marco Iacoboni: The eradication of irrational thinking is (not) inevitable (it will require some serious work).

Richard Wrangham: The Human Recipe.

Stanislas Deheane: The brain's Schrödinger equation.

Mary Bateson: Making and Changing Minds.

Aubrey de Brey: Curiosity is addictive, and this is not an entirely good thing.

Helena Cronin: More dumbbells but more Nobels: Why men are at the top.

Daniel Dennet: Competition in the brain.

Nicholas Christakis: Culture can change our genes.

Rupert Sheldrake: The skepticism of believers.

Philip Campbell: I've changed my mind about the use of enhancement drugs by healthy people.

James Geary: Neuroeconomics really explains human economic behavior.

Daniel Goleman: The Inexplicable Monks.

David Buss: Female Sexual Psychology.

Sam Harris: Mother Nature is Not Our Friend.

Paul Ewald: Trusting Experts.

Nicholas Humphrey: The hardness of the problem of consciousness is the key to its solution.

Susan Blackmore: The Paranormal.

Gerd Gigerenzer: The Advent of Health Literacy.

Jaron Larnier: Virtual Reality and PTSD.

Simon Baron-Cohen: Equality.

Alison Gopnick: Imagination is Real.

Geoffrey Miller: Asking For Directions.

Barry Smith: The Experience of the Normally Functioning Mind is the Exception.

Roger Bingham: Changing My Religion ('The Church of Evolutionary Psychology'!).

Lera Boroditsky: Do our languages shape the nuts and bolts of perception, the very way we see the world?

Jamshed Bharucha: Education as Stretching the Mind.

Linda Gottfredson: The Calculus of Small but Consistent Effects.

Randolph Nesse: Truth does not reside with smart university experts.

Daniel Kahneman: The sad tale of the aspiration treadmill.

—Vaughan.

Challenging the banality of evil:

The British Psychological Society's magazine The Psychologist has just been redesigned and relaunched and its cover article on the psychology of evil has been made freely available online.

The phrase the 'banality of evil' was coined by philosopher Hannah Arendt after witnessing the trial of high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann who seemed, at least to Arendt, to be the most mundane of individuals whose evil acts were driven by the requirements of the state and orders from above.

A number of social psychologists, most notably Philip Zimbardo - famous for his prison experiment, have argued for a similar view of evil, suggesting that evil occurs when ordinary individuals are put into corrupt situations that encourage their conformity.

The cover article in The Psychologist re-examines key historical studies and new experimental evidence to challenge the "clear consensus amongst social psychologists, historians and philosophers that everyone succumbs to the power of the group and hence no one can resist evil once in its midst".

For example, some Nazis who later claimed to be 'just following orders' often exceeded their orders in their brutality, while others deliberately avoided capricious violence, suggesting a significant amount of personal choice was involved.

Interestingly, this seems to apply equally to Eichmann and Arendt's famous phrase may have been a result of her leaving the trial at a crucial point:

On the historical side, a number of new studies – notably David Cesarani's (2004) meticulous examination of Eichmann’s life and crimes – have suggested that Arendt’s analysis was, at best, naive. Not least, this was because she only attended the start of his trial. In this, Eichmann worked hard to undermine the charge that he was a dangerous fanatic by presenting himself as an inoffensive pen-pusher. Arendt then left.

Had she stayed, though, she (and we) would have discovered a very different Eichmann: a man who identified strongly with anti-semitism and Nazi ideology; a man who did not simply follow orders but who pioneered creative new policies; a man who was well aware of what he was doing and was proud of his murderous ‘achievements’.

The article also looks at famous psychology studies, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram's conformity studies, and argues that the people who were supposedly most likely to be led into brutality were actually psychologically quite different from the others, suggesting that they were not just 'average people'.

It's a refreshingly provocative look at the widely accepted idea that group pressure is the key driving force in the birth of 'evil'.

Link to article 'Questioning the banality of evil' (with link to PDF version).

Full Disclosure: I'm an unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist.

—Vaughan.

December 28, 2007

Philosophy, as God intended (if he were a school girl):

It seems it's still handbags at 40 paces as the full text of Colin McGinn's increasingly infamous review of Honderich's book On Conciousness has been posted to the web, so you can enjoy the academic mudslinging in all its glory.

If you're not clear on the background to this spectacular resurgence of the long-running feud, have a look at our post from a few days back.

To continue the saga, Honderich has also posted his own reply , followed by McGinn's subsequent response with his own (one sentence!) reply to that.

Of course, there's some good conceptual points being made about the nature of consciousness, but let's be honest, that's not why we're reading it.

Link to McGinn's review of On Consciousness with links to replies (via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

December 22, 2007

Philosophical feud reignites:

The Guardian has an article on a feud between philosophers Colin McGinn and Ted Honderich which has recently been reignited after McGinn wrote a review of Honderich's new book on consciousness which the newspaper describes as "probably the most negative book review ever written".

The review was published in the July edition of academic journal Philosophical Review, and the article has some of the highlights:

"This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad," begins Colin McGinn's review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. "It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent."

The ending isn't much better: "Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness? Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark. His instincts, at least, are not always wrong. It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others)."

And in the middle, there is nothing to cheer the book's author. Honderich's book is, according to McGinn, sly, woefully uninformed, preposterous, easily refuted, unsophisticated, uncomprehending, banal, pointless, excruciating.

What does the man on the receiving end think of this review? "It is a cold, calculated attempt to murder a philosopher's reputation," says Honderich.

Both philosophers can be adequately described as larger than life and both hold positions on consciousness that can be thought of as fairly radical when compared to the mainstream of philosophical thought.

Apparently, the feud goes back many years and includes everything from philosophical mudslinging to backhanded remarks about girlfriends.

Connoisseurs of academic mudslinging may wish to revisit a couple of classics to accompany this recent fine display.

Link to Guardian article 'Enemies of thought' (via 3Q).

—Vaughan.

Christmas update:

This is just a brief note to wish all our readers a very happy Christmas, Solstice, Diwali, Hanukkah, Eid ul-Adha, Yalda or non-theist winter holiday, and to say that updates might be a bit irregular over the next week as we take time off to travel and spread good cheer.

Many thanks for your all your comments, contributions and, most of all, continued interest in Mind Hacks. We enjoy writing it and it's always great to hear that other people enjoy reading it.

Wishing you all life, love and mental health!

—Vaughan.

December 20, 2007

What a difference a friend makes:

It's a big glossy website with lots of smiling people promoting an intervention for mental illness. Surely, drug company marketing you think? Actually, it turns out to be a US Government initiative promoting the importance of friendship in mental health and recovery from mental illness.

In the medical literature, friends and family are described as 'social support' and we know that social support is one of the biggest protectors against mental illness and one of the best predictors of recovery.

It's probably one of the best studied aspects of mental health, and we know it has a significant impact on physical health as well. For example, it's clear from the depression research that social support has a positive effect in a wide range of people and situations.

The website has resources on different types of mental illness, tips for helping people you know and information on getting further advice and support, all very well presented with video and audio as well.

Largely because you can't make a profit from love and friendship, you don't see it promoted much, despite it being one of the most effective ways of combating psychiatric disorder.

Hopefully, this website is part of a larger campaign to get the word out. Bravo!

Link to What a Difference a Friend Makes.

—Vaughan.

December 19, 2007

Altered mates: drugs in science:

This week's Nature has an article about the illicit use of cognitive enhancing drugs by healthy people just wanting to push their limits, including working scientists.

These are the same drugs that have caused concern about their level of use among students, chiefly modafinil (Provigil) and methylphenidate (Ritalin), although other drugs such as Alzheimer's medication donepezil (Aricept), non-amphetamine ADHD drug atomoxetine (Strattera) are also candidates.

The article argues that the use of these drugs by healthy people raises some new ethical questions that need to be addressed and particularly discusses their use by scientists.

The issue is hardly new, however, as scientists have been using chemical pick-me-ups as long as science has existed.

Mathematicians have been noted for their use of amphetamines (Paul Erdős being a famous example) and there are plenty of famous figures from other fields who have made use of drugs for tweaking their mood or mind.

William Stewart Halsted, the "father of American surgery" and founder of the surgery department at John Hopkins Medical School, was a long-term cocaine and morphine addict.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have had a long history of trying out drugs on themselves and expanding their consciousness with hallucinogens in attempts to understand how the mind and reality can become distorted.

As we've noted previously, many of the so-called 'new' ethical issues, apply equally well to past drugs and past situations.

Probably the only genuinely new aspect, is that there are virtually no long-term studies on these newer drugs, so it's still not clear on what the long-term effects might be. Perhaps more scary than their use by consenting adults therefore, is their use on children.

Nevertheless, on this occasion Nature have set up an online forum to discuss the use of drugs by scientists, so you can join the debate yourself.

Link to Nature article 'Professor's little helper'.
Link to Nature forum 'Would you boost your brain power?'.

—Vaughan.

December 16, 2007

Tortured minds: psychiatry and human rights:

ABC Radio National's All the the Mind has just concluded a two part series on human rights and psychiatry that looks at the role of mental health professionals in military interrogations, and the rights of psychiatric detainees.

The first part is based at the World Psychiatric Association conference in Australia and interviews several psychiatrists about their views on whether mental health professionals should be involved in, most relevantly, 'war on terror' interrogations that some argue are tantamount to torture.

The response is a bit predictable as psychiatrists have already firmly decided to have no part in these interrogations which they see as incompatible with their oath to 'do no harm', unlike the American Psychological Association which has decided to endorse participation within some rather vague limits.

There's a particularly interesting contribution from psychiatrist Prof Steven Sharfstein, who as president of the American Psychiatric Association was taken to Guantanamo Bay by the US Government, presumably to reassure him and other clinical leaders that the horror stories about the place were unjustified.

Instead, he came away convinced that Guantanamo should be closed for good.

In contrast, the American Psychological Association president, Prof Ronald Levant, who attended the same visit, came away with no strong convictions that any unethical practices were taking place.

The second part of the All in the Mind special investigation looks at the treatment of psychiatric patients across the world, particularly focusing on parts of the developing world where asylums can sometimes be little more than prisons.

The programme mentions a 2003 edition of Time Asia which had a photo essay on some of the shocking conditions in some Asian institutions.

It also discuss the newly agreed UN Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which is likely to have a significant impact on the rights of people with mental difficulties.

One of the most interesting contributions is from psychiatrist Prof Vikram Patel who headed up the excellent Lancet series on Global Mental Health.

It was a fantastic series of articles, including a paper entitled 'Barriers to improvement of mental health services in low income and middle income countries' which identifies education and funding as two key factors, and another called 'Resources for mental health: scarcity, inequity, and inefficiency'.

Without a hint of irony, the series is closed-access and individual articles are charged at $30 each.

The last in the series of article urges the global mental health community to "scale up the coverage of services for mental disorders in all countries, but especially in low-income and middle-income countries".

So I've uploaded all the articles to the web. Enjoy.

No health without mental health [pdf]

Resources for mental health: scarcity, inequity and inefficiency [pdf]

Treatment and prevention of mental disorders in low-income and middle-income countries [pdf]

Mental health systems in countries: where are we now? [pdf]

Barriers to improvement of mental health services in low income and middle income countries [pdf]

Scale up services for mental disorders: a call for action [pdf]

Link to AITM on participation in interrogation or torture.
Link to AITM on 'Who speaks for the chained and incarcerated?'.
Link to 2003 Time Asia article and photo essay on Asia's mental health centres.

—Vaughan.

December 14, 2007

CT in the Sky with Diamonds:

Inkling Magazine has discovered a curious episode in the history of music and neuroscience where The Beatles helped to fund the development of the CT scanner.

If you ever suffer a head injury, you're likely to given a CT head scan as its a quick, convenient way of look for damage to brain tissue.

In a recent talk, consultant radiologist Dr Ben Timmins claimed that the sales of Beatles records allowed EMI to fund Sir Godfrey Hounsfield to develop the first scanner.

As a direct result of The Beatles’ success, Dr Timmis claimed, the scanner’s inventor, Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, was able to devote about four years developing the scanner from its 1968 prototype, to something that could be used in a clinical setting. His work was done in the Central Research Laboratory, a facility near Heathrow airport that was part of the EMI Group. Having sold 200 million of the Fab Four’s singles, (at seven inches, almost enough vinyl to stretch the length of the equator) the Beatles’ record company, EMI, was able to fund Hounsfield to do his research and the scanner was ready be used in hospitals in the 1970’s.

Link to Inkling Magazine on The Fab Four and CT scanners.
Link to The Independent with a short article on new CT scan and its history.

—Vaughan.

December 11, 2007

Daily Express cures Alzheimer's:

The front page of the today's Daily Express, a UK national newspaper, has one of the worst neuroscience stories I have a read in a very long time.

It's actually on a valuable research project being run by an established team of researchers and involves giving people with Alzheimer's disease a small digital camera to wear around their neck which takes pictures every 30 seconds.

The person then views the pictures at a later date. There is a rapid presentation mode (10 pictures per second) but the person has the option to view images individually at will.

It isn't a cure, it's just a useful way of reviewing events and 'refreshing' the memory. This is likely to prevent people with Alzheimer's forgetting events so quickly if they're captured on camera.

I say likely, because the research that the Daily Express story talks about hasn't been published yet, but a single case study on a woman with limbic encephalitis did show it made a considerable difference to her recall of past events when compared to a diary.

Now let's just pause for a minute and think what sort of headline you'd write if you were going to publish a story on this line of early research.

Obviously someone had the same decision to make at the Daily Express, and came up with:

BREAKTHROUGH ON ALZHEIMER'S
British scientists bring real hope of a cure

The paper describes the system as involving "a small camera taking photographs every 30 seconds which are then artificially 'forced' on to the brain" and says that "In some cases, patients have experienced up to 90 per cent of their memory being restored after just two weeks".

How they got from 'viewing pictures on a computer' to 'forcing images on the brain' is anyone's guess, and presumably the 90% figure is the score on a memory test rather than amount of memory loss restored, although without any published data its hard to say.

So how did this preliminary research make the front page of a UK daily as a "real hope of a cure"?

Microsoft have developed the camera and are funding this project (along with several other similar studies), and I can't help but wonder whether their PR people have been at work behind the scenes.

Actually, there are other systems that have been around a while now which are equally as interesting. The NeuroPage system is another simple idea.

It's a pager for people with memory problems and people can program the system to send reminders. So far, early research has found it to be quite effective in helping people with memory impairments.

Despite the hype, the SenseCam project is a great idea and could lead to a genuine benefit to people with memory problems, but it won't cure Alzheimer's.

Link to abstract of case study on person with limbic encephalitis.
Link to Microsoft SenseCam and memory loss page.

—Vaughan.

* The ‘Cat Lady’ Conundrum
* Ambiguity Promotes Liking

December 10, 2007

Mind and brain science storms NYT's 'Year in Ideas':

The New York Times seems to have been publishing loads of mind and brain articles recently and their end of 2007 round-up of 'hot ideas' contains no less than 11 articles on developments in psychology and neuroscience - including everything from Alzheimer's to Zygotes (via Lap Dancing).

I was alerted to the series by Matthew Hutson, who emailed to say he'd written the article on 'neurorealism' - the tendency for people to believe even quite outlandish claims if they think they're backed up by neuroscience.

In a blog post about his piece, he notes some of the sources and origins of his article, including some peer reviewed research and our own Tom Stafford, who coined the term 'neuroessentialism' (independently, as did two others!) to describe the same phenomenon.

The other psychology and neuroscience articles cover a whole range of topics, and are all two-minute write-ups of ingenious studies or theories (sort of like a behavioural science tapas selection):

* Alzheimer’s Telephone Screening
* Faces Decide Elections
* Lap-Dance Science
* The God Effect
* Hope Can Be Worse Than Hopelessness
* Mindful Exercise
* Quitting Can Be Good for You
* Starch Made Us Human
* Zygotic Social Networking

UPDATE: Two more with mind and brain themes!

—Vaughan.

The Truth About Female Desire available online:

Finally, one of the best TV series on the psychology, biology and neuroscience of female sexuality is available online as a torrent.

The Truth About Female Desire was a four part UK television series broadcast in 2005 which was a collaboration between the respected sex research centre The Kinsey Institute, London's Brunel University and Channel 4.

Eight women volunteered to undergo a number of experiments on sex and sexuality largely taken from the scientific literature, ranging from how suggestion affects attraction, to the physiology of female sexual arousal, to the neuroscience of orgasm, to name just a few.

Researchers are on hand to discuss the results with the women who seem genuinely fascinated about how these results might reflect their own varied experiences of sex, whether straight, gay, stable or single.

While the discussion is frank, if you're just looking for porn with a bit of science thrown in, you'll need to go elsewhere.

There's very little naked flesh on display, and despite this (magazine editors take note!) it's enormously good fun, quite sexy in places, and utterly fascinating.

~~There are two torrents available online each of which contains all four 50 minute episodes as one 1.7Gb file.~~

There is one good torrent available online which contains all four 50 minute episodes as one 1.7Gb download.

At the moment, both have a only a few other people currently downloading, so it may be a little slow to start with, but the more people downloading, the quicker it gets.

It's rare that proper scientific sex research makes the media and even rarer that it is made into compelling TV, so it's a few hours well-spent if you're interested in female sexuality, or sex research in general.

If you're not sure what a torrent is or how to download one there's a guide here and if you're having trouble playing the files the free VLC media player should do the trick.

Finally, thanks to zoidberg for letting me know about the series arriving online.

Link to mininova page with torrent of series.
~~Link to mininova page with alternative torrent for series.~~

—Vaughan.

December 05, 2007

Fighting over font-change semantics:

Philosopher Patricia Churchland wrote a damning review of Steven Pinker's new book, 'The Stuff of Thought', for Nature and it's caused a bit of a rumble.

One particular highlight was that she described a theory from Pinker's book, that suggests that language and thought can refer to meaning in a similar way, as:

...about as applicable to real meaning as 'Dungeons and Dragons' is to real life. Aptly ridiculed by critics as 'font-change semantics', the theory still has its disciples. Including Steven Pinker.

Apart from showing a woeful misunderstanding of Dungeons and Dragons, Churchland also failed to notice that Pinker had never proposed this theory in his book. In fact, his book argues against it.

In this week's Nature, psychologist Marc Hauser writes in to say Churchland doesn't seem to have read the book, and Pinker comes back with his own rebuke:

The book apparently stimulated the reviewer to free-associate to her own beliefs that psychological phenomena can be explained at the level of neurons and that human thinking is in the service of motor control. The fact that I (like most cognitive psychologists) have not signed up to these views is the only point of contact between my book and her review.

While definitely being more entertaining than your average book review , it doesn't even come close to matching the slanging match between Hans Eyesenck and Stephen Jay Gould, where they ending up arguing over the 'relative exposure of our respective arses' in The New York Review of Books.

—Vaughan.

Sleeping and dreaming:

London's newest science museum, the Wellcome Collection, has just kicked off what looks to be a fantastic exhibition on the art and science of sleeping and dreaming.

It runs until March 2008 and aims to illustrate how we've understood sleep through the ages, as well as the contemporary science of this still mysterious state.

If you can't make it in person, there's an online taster that contains a collection of striking images from the exhibition with some brief commentary.

The exhibition also has free guided expert-led tours, including ones by sleep researcher Dr Mary Morrell on December 19th, and one by sleep doctor Dr Neil Stanley on January 17th.

Other tours are guided by science journalists and some of the exhibited artists.

Link to exhibition details.
Link to online 'taster' exhibition.

Full disclosure: I've received grant funding from the Wellcome Trust for a science art collaboration and I am an occasional paid reviewer for their Arts Awards. As far as I know though, neither are connected with this exhibition.

—Vaughan.

December 04, 2007

War, social networks and ethical minefields:

Wired has an article in its latest edition that discusses why understanding human networks are becoming key to the US Military's mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the article seems to do little more than uncritically echo military enthusiasm for this new approach while telling us little about the actual science behind the techniques.

But the most interesting story is not the strategy itself, which is hardly new, but how it is causing a rift among anthropologists to the point where conference speakers have been heckled and left in tears for their participation.

The debate centres on the US Military's Human Terrain System, a project that aims to understand the culture, society and social networks in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a view to using this information to further military objectives.

In contrast, the NYT managed to do a brief but considerably more balanced article and video segment on the project last May, noting that the crux of the matter is that the project has employed numerous anthropologists, as anthropology now plays a key role in US military strategy.

Concerns centre over whether co-operating with the military violates the strict codes of ethics that compels anthropologists to 'do no harm' to the cultures they are studying, and to ask for informed consent from the people that are observing to make them fully aware of the purpose of the research.

Critics believe that aiding a military occupation is unethical, as it will inevitably lead to deaths prompted by the intelligence they provide, and requires a level of secrecy - violating both of the 'do no harm' and 'informed consent' principles.

This has caused an angry rift with accusations of 'mercenary anthropology' and, in an interesting parallel to the ethical dilemmas faced by the American Psychological Association, the American Anthropological Association has been forced to issue a report and statement on the issue; disapproving of the project while refusing to ban its members from participating.

Last Thursday, at a panel session on the issue at the American Anthropological Association conference, Zenia Helbig, an ex-Human Terrain System researcher, cried when she was heckled by the audience.

Wired describes the scene as 'ugly' and quotes Helbig as implying the hecklers were being driven by conspiracy theories, while Inside Higher Education gives a more nuanced account, suggesting audience reactions were mixed.

The overarching issue is that the military has cottoned-on to the fact that its in-house 'psyops' services are inadequate for the complexity of new forms of warfare, and are seeking the collaboration of academic disciplines which have been founded on principles of non-coercion.

The debate essentially centres around whether these principles should be universally applied to all people, or whether they are trumped by loyalty to the national interests of a researcher's country.

Link to NYT article 'Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones'.
Link to abstract of Human Terrain System paper.
Link to Inside Higher Ed article on panel discussion.

—Vaughan.

December 03, 2007

Encephalon 37 arrives:

The 37th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just pulled into town and is hosted on A Blog Around the Clock.

A couple of my favourites include a post on whether smiling actually makes you feel better, and one on some of the hidden motivators for our voting behaviour.

There's much more great mind and brain writing in the mix (including a raft of new student writers), so have a browse and see what catches your eye.

Link to Encephalon 37.

—Vaughan.

SciAmMind on Smart Kids, Sex Bias and Psychopaths:

The latest Scientific American has just hit the shelves and two of the feature articles are available online: one with tips for raising hard-working and motivated children from developmental psychology research, and another on whether neuropsychology helps us understand the gender bias in fields like maths and physics.

However, there is another, stand out article on psychopaths that describes what the term actually means in psychology.

It's something that's commonly but wrongly confused with psychosis, largely because they're both unfortunately shortened to 'psycho', despite them being completely different.

This month, the articles in the print edition look particularly good. They cover everything from people who want to be amputees, to the psychology of terrorism, to psychedelic drug therapy, to phantom limbs and more.

Link to article on raising smart kids.
Link to article on gender and scientific achievement.
Link to article on psychopaths.

—Vaughan.

November 29, 2007

Trippin':

I'm just reading a book called The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness which sounds like some stoned hippy opus, but is actually a wonderfully written travel book into the neuroscience of naturally occurring altered states of consciousness.

It was recommended to me by Tom, who got sent a copy to review, and was so enthusiastic about it, he sent it to me afterwards. And I'm very glad he did.

The author, Jeff Warren, wants to experience various altered states of consciousness that are described in the scientific literature, like the hypnagogic state - the hallucinatory period when dropping off, or lucid dreaming, when you're aware that you're dreaming, or hypnosis.

So he travels the world meeting researchers, taking part in experiments, trying things out on himself, and explaining the science along the way.

And this he does very well. He manages to capture some of the key debates in the literature, explain some tricky concepts, as well as introducing us to often curious and compelling characters who research these phenomena.

He skilfully compares the myths, claims and speculation with what is known from scientific studies, and what he managed to experience himself.

There's quite a large section of the book dedicated to sleep and dreaming, and if ever you thought sleeping was the uninteresting third of your life you spend unconscious, this is the book which will make you think again.

Just great fun, and, if you'll excuse the slightly awkward metaphor, wonderfully eye-opening as well.

In the meantime, if you want a quick fix on the science of dreaming, the Washington Post had a recent brief article that discussed the topic.

Link to book's website.
Link to Washington Post article 'Dream on...'

—Vaughan.

A subconsciousness raising exercise:

This week's New Scientist has a cover story on the psychology that goes on behind the scenes, in the subconscious.

Or you could call it the unconscious, or the pre-conscious. Despite the differences in terminology it's much the same idea. Essentially, it's the work the brain does that we're not conscious of.

Unfortunately, the article has a bit of an excruciating tag-line:

Subconscious thought processes may play a crucial role in many of the mental facilities we prize as uniquely human, including creativity, memory, learning and language.

Next week: Sea contains water! Don't be put off though, the article's actually a good guide to some of the latest theories on how information crosses the consciousness divide.

What's more, non-conscious thinking may actually work best in some cases where you might imagine rational, conscious thought is the best tool for the job. In situations where people have to make difficult choices based on large amounts of hard-to-assess information, psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands has found that they are happier with their decision when acting on gut instinct than when forced to try to think the choice through rationally (New Scientist, 5 May 2007, p 35). Dijksterhuis is convinced that subconscious thought processes are superior in many situations - including most social interactions - because they allow us to integrate complex information in a more holistic way than can be managed by rational thought processes.

Something similar sometimes happens in problem solving, according to Jonathan Schooler from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. By asking subjects to explain their reasoning as they go, he has found that verbalising what they are doing has no effect on people's ability to solve analytical, mathematical or logic problems but actually hinders performance on insight problems, such as solving a riddle - those for which the solution seems to pop out of the blue in an aha! moment. Remember that subconscious thought processes differ from conscious ones in that we are unable to articulate the former. So here, it seems, is experimental evidence for something we all instinctively know: that subconscious thinking is the source of our inspiration - it is central to creativity.

Rather ironically, for an article on the unconscious, it's been hidden behind a pay wall. So you'll need to get a copy from your newsagent, or if you want to expand the subconscious mind, photocopy it in the library.

Link to table of contents for this week's NewSci.

—Vaughan.

November 26, 2007

Free Ramachandran talk, Wednesday in London:

I just found out that V.S. Ramachandran is giving a free talk, this Wednesday, at the Royal Society in London.

The talk is entitled 'Nature and nurture in brain function: clues from synesthesia and phantom limbs' and for those not able to make the event in person, it's going to be webcast live.

Ramchandran is an excellent speaker, so shouldn't be missed if you've not seen him talk before.

Link to details of Ramchandran talk.

—Vaughan.

November 25, 2007

The mother of all drug battles:

Furious Seasons reports that the US state of Arkansas is suing drug company Johnson and Johnson over claims that they misrepresented the facts over their popular antipsychotic drug risperidone.

This, in itself, is not a new occurrence, as it joins a long list of US state lawsuits against drug companies. With rumours that a similar 26 state joint lawsuit is about to begin, this is an indication that the corporate drug world is about to be shaken up on a grand scale.

Most of the lawsuits are over allegations that drug companies hid or massaged evidence to show that their new generation ('atypical') antipsychotic drugs were more effective or less harmful than is now thought, or that they illegally promoted their drugs for conditions for which they weren't licensed.

Most of the most popular atypical antipsychotics were introduced in the 1990s and were marketed as having less side-effects than the older generation drugs.

One of the most unpleasant are extrapyramidal side-effects. Caused by changes the dopamine system they can include involuntary movements and muscle stiffness that can resemble Parkinson's disease in some respects.

However, recent reviews have challenged the idea that the newer drugs have less of these side-effects and other evidence has suggested that they have a higher risk of inducing problems with weight-gain and diabetes.

The marketing was remarkably successful though and the idea that the newer drugs 'cause less side-effects' still persists. Only this week, a letter published in New Scientist stated that the newer drugs benefited patients because they have fewer side-effects.

Later, marketing shifted to suggesting atypicals were better for the 'negative symptoms' of schizophrenia (impaired emotion and motivation), and later still to suggest that they improved cognitive function, largely based on industry funded clinical trials.

Two ongoing independent studies have been key in challenging some of these ideas. The UK's CUtLASS project and the US's CATIE project are not funded by drug companies and have found, contrary to industry research, that, for example, newer antipsychotics are no better than the older drugs in improving cognitive function and that they have no advantage in improving quality of life.

Antipsychotics are genuinely useful and probably one of the most significant medical advances of the 20th century. Before then, no effective treatment for psychosis existed.

However, when side-effects appear (which is not always the case), they can range from the unpleasant to the medically serious, so doctors and patients need to be fully informed about the risks.

The most recent lawsuit from the state of Arkansas [pdf] alleges that, among other things, the drug company deliberately rigged their clinical trials to show less side-effects, failed to warn clinicians about the dangers and promoted their drug illegally.

While people like psychiatrist David Healy have been making these allegations for years, the fact that a large number of US states are willing to take the allegations to court signals that we are about to see a huge battle, and hopefully a period of significant reform, in how drug companies develop, test and market their products.

Reform is sorely needed. As well as scientific manipulation, personal drug marketing to psychiatrists is largely based on ensuring a regular supply of lavish gifts and selective information - as detailed by an article in today's New York Times.

As an aside, if you're in London this Tuesday, a debate is being held at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley Hospital on exactly this topic.

It's entitled "Swallowing it Whole: This house believes that psychiatrists are unable to resist the seductive messages on the pharmaceutical industry" and is likely to be a lively event.

Link to Furious Seasons on the Arkansas law suit.
Link to NYT article 'Dr Pharma Rep'.
Link to details of the Maudsley debate.

—Vaughan.

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November 23, 2007

Encephalon 35 and 36 catch up:

The psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon published both its 35th edition and its 36th edition in recent weeks, and I seemed to have slept through these momentous occasions, so hopefully this post will make amends.

Encephalon 35 was hosted at The Primate Diaries and includes articles on, among other things, the neuropsychology of creative thinking and the link between education and Alzheimer's disease.

Brain in a Vat was the place to be for Encephalon 36 which had many fantastic pieces, including one on embodied cognition and another on the growth of the brain in people diagnosed with ADHD.

That's just a sample of the large selection of articles submitted to the carnivals, so have a browse through both editions to get a flavour of what's been hot in the online mind and brain world.

Link to Encephalon 35.
Link to Encephalon 36.

—Vaughan.

November 22, 2007

The last of the neuromercials?:

One of the most interesting things about the recent election brain scan nonsense is not that it got to the front page of The New York Times, as that's happened several times before, but that the slap down from the scientific community has been remarkably strong and public.

The media is obsessed by neuroscience but in a very odd way. This means that sometimes complete nonsense gets published, like on this occasion, or the focus is on the least important thing.

For example, there have been many reports during the last few days about a study on people with migraines.

Almost all the headlines are variants of the 'Migraine Sufferers Have Different Brains' line. This just isn't news. We know migraine sufferers have different brains because they have migraines and its a brain difference. It's like reporting that 'taller people have different heights'.

What the study actually found was that the somatosensory cortex, an area of the brain that is involved with representing body sensation, is thicker in people with migraines. Most interestingly, this was most pronounced in the section of this brain area that maps to the head and neck.

It was a correlational study, so it's impossible to say whether these differences cause, or are caused by, migraine, but it's a fascinating finding. Isn't this so this much more interesting than repeating the obvious?

The media love stories about the brain because they often sound like explanations even when they're nothing more than descriptions.

This is why nonsense like the 'election brain scans' gets media attention. In this case, it wasn't even as if the ideas were distorted in the retelling, it was clearly nonsense from beginning to end. But because it had all the trappings of science, it made headlines.

This time, however, the size of the backlash from the scientific has been unprecedented.

It got plenty of negative attention in the blogs, but it also inspired a list of leading neuroscientists to write to the NYT to criticise it, it got featured in The Guardian's 'Bad Science' column and has just been roundly condemned in the editorial from this week's Nature.

If brain scans could really predict how people will react when they encounter advertising, you'd think that FKF Research would use it on their own material.

Ironically, for a company that supposedly specialises in neuromarketing, they just got themselves some incredibly bad press.

Link to Nature editorial.

—Vaughan.

November 20, 2007

Personality to prevent teen drinking:

A study that successfully used personality-tailored training to reduce teen drinking is shortly to appear in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. It's interesting because it's one of a few studies that have found that the psychology of personality is useful for solving clinical problems.

Your average person on the street probably thinks that clinical psychologists spend a lot of time trying to 'work out' people's personalities as a necessary part of treating them.

Of course, this is something that happens as the psychologist meets and talks to the patient, but considering that a great deal of research in psychology is focused on understanding personality, the findings and techniques barely make a scratch on clinical work.

This is largely because using psychological measures to find out whether someone is introverted, extroverted, conscientious, or any other of the so-called 'big five' personality traits, have been found to be of little use in helping treat or prevent mental disorders or behavioural problems.

Compared to reliably assessing someone's mood, anxiety, risk of self-harm, cognitive abilities or reasoning style, personality is rarely essential for clinical decision-making.

However, one related aspect of personality, similar to the 'Openness to Experience' in the 'big five' model, has been found to relate to substance misuse.

It's called 'sensation seeking' and it's been linked to risky behaviour, including binge-drinking and risky sexual encounters.

In this study, led by psychologist Dr Patricia Conrod, the research team assessed the personality of over 350 teenagers and specifically tailored a programme to focus on common differences between high and low sensation-seekers.

The programme had an educational component, a motivational part and a section that taught the kids skills how to solve problems, manage their thoughts and moods, and pick out common cognitive errors when reasoning about drinking.

It turned out that it was particularly effective in reducing binge-drinking in the high-sensation seekers, the most risky group.

As well as developing a useful way of reducing problem alcohol use in teenagers, it's also interesting to see that a personality measure can be genuinely useful in the prevention of problems.

Clinical psychology is traditionally focused on trying to help with problems after they've happened, rather than before, which is perhaps why personality is not so useful. It's just too subtle when something serious like mental illness affects the mind and brain.

Nevertheless, it's possible that personality will be key in preventive programmes, where this more subtle approach has much more of an effect when the person is not trying to manage a mental crisis.

Link to abstract of study.

—Vaughan.

November 19, 2007

BBC AIl in the Mind on Tasers, film and Anthony Clare:

BBC Radio 4 has just kicked off a new series of All in the Mind with a programme on tasers and their use on people with mental illness, the psychoanalytic film festival and a tribute to the late great Irish psychiatrist Anthony Clare.

Not to be confused with the Australian radio show of the same name, All in the Mind takes a look at whether police are properly trained to detect mental illness in light of preliminary evidence that they may be using Tasers on people with psychiatric disorders more than other people.

The show also talks to some of the participants in the recent European Psychoanalytic Film Festival and traces the intertwined history of film and psychoanalysis.

Finally, the show broadcasts a tribute to Irish psychiatrist Anthony Clare, who, as we reported recently, passed away at the end of October. Among many other things, he was famous as a past presenter of the programme.

Link to first of the BBC All in the Mind new series.

—Vaughan.

November 12, 2007

Antidote to TV drug ads:

Consumer Reports have created a sort of video film review for a popular US television drug ad, where they update the commercial with scientific findings that aren't mentioned.

The advert is for a drug that aims to treat 'restless legs syndrome', and both the condition and the drug are apparently being heavily marketed in the US at the moment.

Consumer Reports have their own take on the ad, noting that the side-effects of the drug can be worse than the condition itself, and highlighting that although trials showed the drug was effective in up to 73% of people, placebo was effective in up to 57% of people.

It's great to see a counter-point to this sort of advertising, especially when it's produced so well.

Link to Consumer Reports page with embedded video (via TWS).

—Vaughan.

'Marlborough Marine' fights post-war trauma, depression:

The Los Angeles Times has a moving video and photo essay about Lance Corporal James Blake Miller, made famous by the iconic photo taken during the battle of Fallujah, and his post-war struggles with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

It's somewhat ironic that the photo, which has become a symbol of the stoicism of the US Marine Corps, depicts Miller at a time when he was first struggling with the trauma of war.

The photo essay is by photographer Luis Sinco, who made the marine famous, and his been following Miller since he returned home from Iraq.

Sadly, Miller has suffered divorce, PTSD, depression and suicidal thoughts since his return owing to his experiences during the fighting.

It's an incredibly powerful piece, with some quite poignant moments (e.g. being ignored by one politician who he had arranged to meet to discuss the effect of PTSD on troops), especially considering that mental illness in the US military is at an all time high.

Link to LA Times photo-essay on James Blake Miller (via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

November 08, 2007

All walk and no trouser:

A study shortly to be published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour reports that the menstrual cycle has an effect on women's walking style and its attractiveness to men, but has also provoked speculation that highlights the worst in evolutionary psychology story-telling.

The study found that women's walking style differed during the menstrual cycle, but that men rated it as most attractive when they were least fertile.

This contrasts with several previous studies have found that women dress, act and are perceived as most attractive during their most fertile time of the month.

Some researchers suggest that we've evolved so women subtly advertise their fertility to potential mates, perhaps, quite reasonably, as this happens in far more obvious ways almost uniformly throughout the animal kingdom.

So you might think that something to consider is that this finding is evidence against this idea, or that maybe the link with walking style is just a 'side-effect'.

For example, estrogen affects dopamine function in the striatum, part of key action pathways in the brain, and the menstrual cycle is linked to changes in neuromuscular coordination. It could be that evolution has selected for the behaviour via these mechanisms, but it could also be that they have no evolutionary significance.

However, the alternative is barely considered in the paper or in the press reports. This from New Scientist:

However, Provost and her colleagues say there is in fact no contradiction between this research and other studies, as they are investigating two different kinds of signal. The previous research investigating men's response to fertile women focused on signals such as smells and facial expressions, which can only be detected at close range. That makes evolutionary sense, as it would benefit a woman to advertise her fertility to a man that she has decided is worth having children with and has therefore allowed to get close to her.

In contrast, men can pick up on the attractiveness of a woman's walk from long distance, and it can therefore act as an unwitting signal to less appealing males who she might not want to choose. So the advantage of having a less sexy walk around the time of ovulation becomes clear: it allows a woman to hide her fertile period from undesirable men who might take advantage of her at that time.

As an explanation, I actually quite like it, but there's little consideration of the 'side-effect' idea, or even the contradictory evidence. For example, it goes against research which suggests that women dress more attractively during their most fertile time.

Evolutionary psychology is sometimes criticised for creating 'just so stories' - unverifiable explanations that weave a story about how the data suggests that evolution has selected for a particular cognitive or behavioural difference.

It's true to say that this accusation is levelled at evolutionary psychology more than is warranted. It does make testable predictions and all science involves some story telling to some degree.

Nevertheless, evolutionary psychology researchers would do well to show that they are considering the alternative explanation - that some behaviours might be associated with sex or fertility while having no influence on survival, the chance of mating, or passing on certain genes.

At this point I normally castigate the media for picking up on the sexy speculations and not the debate, but unfortunately, in this case, the scientific paper seems to make the same mistake.

Link to abstract of study.
Link to media reporting.

—Vaughan.

November 07, 2007

Neuropod on blow, brainbows and optimism:

The November edition of the newly minted Nature Neuroscience podcast Neuropod has just been released with features on the 'brainbow' multi-colour neuron staining, the neurobiology and regulation of cannabis, the cognitive neuroscience of optimism, and the sleep cycle.

The interview on cannabis is with neuroscientist Paul Morrison and psychiatrist Robin Murray - two leading cannabis researchers.

Despite him leading recent research which has shown a modest but likely causal link between cannabis use and psychosis, Murray has always maintained a level-headed approach to the problem and is well-worth listening to (fast forward to 10 minutes in, if you're in a hurry).

He's on fine form and has this take on the effect of the drug on the political classes:

Essentially, cannabis is very bad for the brains of politicians, they do not know what to do. Firstly, they're asked 'have you ever smoked cannabis?' and they don't know whether to say yes or no, and then they have this belief that tinkering with the classification will actually do something.

Link to Neuropod webpage with audio.

—Vaughan.

November 05, 2007

Is the developing world better for schizophrenia?:

One of the most commonly repeated facts about schizophrenia is that people diagnosed with the condition tend to do better in developing countries, rather than in rich Western countries. A new study has reviewed outcome studies from low and middle-income countries across the world and found the picture just isn't that clear.

The original finding that people with the diagnosis do better in developing countries was from three World Health Organisation studies.

The recent review has criticised the previous studies for not adequately dealing with some important factors - like mortality.

It's important to account for deaths in outcome studies, because they could skew the results, if not counted properly, to make outcome look better.

For example, three people with schizophrenia are assessed at the beginning of the study, a year later they are re-assessed, but sadly, one has died. Of the other two, one has improved and one got worse.

Death is, perhaps, the worst possible outcome, and since schizophrenia involves a high risk of suicide and is associated with a lower life expectancy, it is more likely in those affected.

If this isn't noted, however, the follow-up results might suggest that out of the two remaining, half improved, and half got worse.

In fact, the outcome was worse in two thirds, as one got worse and one died, and only one third improved.

So not being able to account for deaths may make the picture look rosier than it is.

The study looked at these these factors, as well as other more socially relevant effects, such as on marriage, social relationships and employment - rather than purely examining clinical symptoms. It also investigated whether outcomes were different for males and females.

The conclusions of the study suggest that the picture is complex and dependent on many different influences, as it varies greatly between countries:

First, there appears to be great variation in clinical outcomes and patterns of course. Whereas, some studies in India strongly support the "better prognosis" hypothesis outcomes do not appear to be nearly as positive in Brazil and China. Additionally, limited evidence suggests that gender effects vary cross-nationally.

Second, similar patterns are found in the domains of disability and social functioning: good in most studies in India and Indonesia, but poorer in Nigeria, and much poorer in a cohort of untreated persons in Chennai, India. Social functioning by gender also varied: in the MLS [Madras Longitudinal Study], women had high levels, while in Nigeria women fared poorly. Outcomes in occupational and marital status also varied. A more important point, however, is that status in these 2 domains must be interpreted in the context of sociocultural norms and assessed, at least to some degree, qualitatively. Viewed from this perspective, the data in table 7 suggest that rates of marriage for people with schizophrenia are relatively low and rates of divorce/separation are high.

The study was conducted by a team of four researchers, from America, the UK, India and Nigeria and is published in November's Schizophrenia Bulletin as an open-access paper, so the full text is freely available online.

Link to full text of study.

—Vaughan.

Help with research on the neuropsychology of hypnosis:

I'm currently involved with a research group investigating the neural basis of hypnosis and dissociative disorders and, if you live in London, we'd like to invite you to take part in our research.

Dissociative disorders are where people lose abilities that they normally have, such as limb movement, in the absence of underlying neurological illness.

However, for this stage of the research we're inviting healthy participants to complete some short questionnaires and take a short test that measures how hypnotisable you are.

This will take place with group of other people and everyone gets an £8 volunteer fee for their time.

We're running sessions at the Institute of Psychiatry in Camberwell, on the following dates:

2pm, Saturday 10th November
2pm, Saturday 17th November
2pm, Saturday 24th November

After taking part we may invite you to participate in further parts of the study at another time (such as a brain scan or some measures of memory or attention) but you are under no obligation to do so.

Each part is separate, and, if you are invited, volunteering for one part doesn't mean you have to take part in any others.

Like all good scientific research, the study has been fully reviewed and approved by the local research ethics committee.

If you're interested in finding out more, there's further information on our study webpage where you can also contact me, ask questions, get sent the full information sheet, or volunteer for one of the sessions.

Link to study info and contact details.
Link to webpage to email me.

—Vaughan.

October 30, 2007

Ramachandran journeys to the center of your mind:

Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran gave a talk in March on how some startling syndromes tell us about how the normal brain works. It's just been put online and is available as a wonderfully produced video lecture.

To be perfectly honest, Ramachandran largely trots out the same stuff he talked about in his 1999 book Phantoms in the Brain (ISBN 1857028953) and covered in his 2003 BBC Reith lectures.

If you've not encountered any of these before, check the video, as he's a brilliant and engaging speaker and you will thoroughly enjoy the journey.

My only slight niggles (apart from the repetition) are his suggesting that the Capgras delusion is rare, when in fact it's relatively common in psychosis linked to dementia, and suggesting that the 'textbooks' give a Freudian account, when these were uncommon even before the now-standard explanation - based on a disruption to face recognition processes in the brain.

Link to TED Ramachandran lecture.

—Vaughan.

October 28, 2007

Neurology in the UK:

I've just found this on the announcements for the Wellcome Trust's Small Arts Awards grant scheme. It's a proposed art / science project that combines neurology, computational modelling, robots and punk rock!

"Neurotic" by Fiddian Warman

Neurotic questions the neurology associated with the essential human experience of pleasure, learning, taste and aging in the context of the instinct to dance. The project, which involves a collaboration between a neurologist, a computational biologist, punk musicians and a robotics artist, culminates in a live performance at the ICA. Punk band Neurotic will play to an audience of both humans and a group of robots whose cognition is modelled on brain function. The human-sized robots will ‘pogo’ alongside the human audience when their neural networks, modelled on real neural pathways, are appropriately stimulated by the music. The event will be accompanied by discussions on the role of memory, emotion and cultural context in the development of taste in humans and a website which explores neuroscientific issues raised by the research and performance.

Rock on! I can't wait to see it completed. The full list includes many more innovative art / science collaborations.

Link to full list of Wellcome Trust Small Arts Awards funded projects list.

Full disclosure: I've been involved in Wellcome funded art / science projects and am an occasional grant reviewer for the scheme.

—Vaughan.

October 26, 2007

All in the Mind blog launches:

ABC Radio National's ever-excellent radio programme All in the Mind has just launched a blog.

It has the latest on issues arising from the programme as well as other interesting snippets from the world of psychology and neuroscience.

The blog will also clue us into forthcoming editions, and there's also a chance for you to comment, discuss and suggest ideas on anything that comes to mind.

And there's even a scan of Natasha Mitchell's brain. What more could you ask for?

As for the programme itself, tomorrow's edition will feature Steven Pinker discussing ideas from his latest book.

Link to ABC Radio National's All in the Mind blog.

—Vaughan.

October 25, 2007

Who's afraid of Kanye West?:

Jonah Lehrer is a neuroscientist, blogger, editor and now author of a new book on what neuroscience can learn from art and literature. Wired has a brief Q&A with him, where he discusses Virginia Woolf, cognitive science and Kanye West.

Actually, this just serves as a brief introduction to some of Lehrer's thoughts, as he's promised to talk to Mind Hacks in more detail about art, the cutting edge of brain research and his new book Proust was a Neuroscientist.

We'll post the interview shortly, but in the meantime Wired has a brief introduction to some of the key ideas.

Link to Wired Q&A with Jonah Lehrer.

—Vaughan.

Philosophy and cognitive science archive launches:

Two important new cognitive science resources have just been launched: Online Papers on Consciousness is a huge database of full-text papers and articles on consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and MindPapers is a much larger index that contains entries for both open and closed access work.

The impressive project has been a joint venture between two tech-savvy philosophers: David Bourget, who is both a computer scientist and a philosopher of mind, and David Chalmers, who has been a beacon of philosophy information on the net for many years, alongside his notable achievements in consciousness studies.

The site also uses an interesting mechanism to classify papers:

...entries are categorized along two dimensions. First, all newly harvested entries are evaluated for their relevance to MindPapers. Second, those entries which have a sufficiently high likelihood of being relevant are assigned categories from the directory. Both of these steps make use of a specially developed Bayesian categorization program. In a nutshell, this program assigns probabilities to entry-category pairs based on heuristics and statistics drawn from training sets. The training set for the first categorization step was derived from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy... The training set for the second categorization stage is MindPapers itself.

It's a lovely computational approach to making sense of huge amounts of work in this area. Perhaps this is the birth of a new field - computational philosophy?

Either way, both sites are going to be hugely valuable resources for philosophy and cognitive science alike.

Bravo!

Link to Online Papers on Consciousness (thanks Katerina!).
Link to MindPapers.
Link to more from Neurophilosophy.

—Vaughan.

October 23, 2007

Psychic studies may be influenced by suggestion:

The BPS Research Digest has discussed a recent study that analysed recordings of parapsychology experiments and has found that some of the positive findings may be due to experimenters unconsciously prompting the participants as they gave their answers.

The experiments used the Ganzfeld technique where one participant has diffuse white light and auditory noise played to them, effectively blocking the key senses, while another tries to 'send' images to them through mental projection.

Afterwards, the 'receiver' tells the experimenter what images came to mind and the research team see if it matches what the 'sender' was trying to transmit.

Taken as a whole, these sorts of experiments show a weak but positive evidence for extra-sensory perception (ESP), but it's not clear whether this isn't just due to a tendency for some negative trials not being reported.

In this new study, psychologist Robin Woofit analysed the tapes of Ganzfeld experiments from the mid-1990s and found that experimenters were more likely to respond decisively to correct responses but give subtle cues (such as saying 'mm hm') to give more information when the response wasn't initially accurate.

This suggests that some of the positive findings may be due to this subtle prompting which is known as the Clever Hans effect, after a horse who was thought to be able to do amazing calculations, until it was later discovered that he was simply clopping his hoof until his trainer responded in a positive way.

However, this also highlights another aspects of parapsychology - they do some of the most thorough experiments in psychology.

This new study was only possible because the researchers keep archived audio recordings of every experimental session, something that almost never happens for other psychology studies.

It could be that other experimental findings in psychology are influenced by the Clever Hans effect, but we'll never know, because few labs keep such thorough records.

Try asking for the audio recordings of decade-old experimental sessions from other areas of psychology if you're not convinced.

It sometimes strikes me as ironic that some scientists consider academic parapsychologists to be unscientific when they do often some of the most carefully designed studies in the literature.

The fact that these studies typically find no evidence of ESP doesn't mean they're not doing science, and in fact, they're provided some of the best evidence against airy fairy notions of 'psychic powers'.

UPDATE: This is an important clarification on the study from Christian, which puts a different spin on it:

The observed interaction effect occurred during the review phase, where the researcher goes through the images the receiver spoke out loud earlier as the the 'sender' watched the video clip. This is prior to the receiver's attempt to choose the correct video clip from a few distractors.

The review generally follows the pattern of the researcher saying 'you said you saw x', the receiver say 'yes' or 'no' or maybe elaborates. It was those times the receiver elaborated, that experimenters appeared to have an influence - if they said 'okay' and moved onto the next item, then that was that, but if they went 'hmm mm' with an enquiring tone, then the receiver tended to ramble on a bit more and lose confidence in their imagery.

I don't think it is clear that this would make positive results more likely, and could even make a negative result more likely. Remember too that these were double blind experiments, so it is not a case of the experimenters directing the receivers towards the correct imagery. It is possible though that a sceptical researcher could be more prone to the 'hmm mm' noises, and therefore would make their receivers less confident.

Link to BPSRD on parapsychology and suggestion.
Link to abstract of scientific study.

—Vaughan.

October 22, 2007

Feel good necklace:

The scientifically accurate molecular jewellery store Made With Molecules has produced this wonderfully alluring endorphin necklace.

The necklace accurately depicts the structure of human beta-endorphin and is wrought in silver to adorn someone who will undoubtedly make you feel as good as the opioid brain chemical itself.

It is handmade by biochemist turned artisan Dr Raven Hanna, and contains each of the 31 amino acids as separate links in the chain.

You'll notice it has a price tag to match the quality of the craftsmanship, so is strictly for the most glamorous occasions.

Link to Made With Molecules endorphin necklace.

—Vaughan.

October 18, 2007

BBC series has an odd definition of alternative:

The BBC have announced a new series which will investigate the scientific basis of three 'alternative therapies': reflexology, hypnosis and meditation - except that two of them, hypnosis and meditation, are well-supported scientifically validated treatments.

In fact, systematic reviews have found hypnosis to be an effective treatment for reducing nausea and vomiting during chemotherapy, distress during childbirth, irritable bowel syndrome, and needle pain in children, to name but a few. That's not counting the numerous studies on the cognitive neuroscience of hypnosis and hypnotisability.

Similarly, mindfulness meditation-based therapies have been researched extensively and found to be useful in a large number of conditions.

In fact, they are one of the best treatments to prevent relapse in people who have already had several depressive episodes in the past.

Both hypnosis and mindfulness-based therapy are used in Britain's National Health Service and the Royal Society of Medicine has its own dedicated hypnosis section.

Although it's probably true to say that meditation and hypnosis are also used inappropriately by quacks, so are vitamins, painkillers and exercise, none of which are thought of as 'alternative'.

The measure of a treatment is not only what it does, but what it's used for. Antibiotics aren't an alternative therapy unless you're trying to use them to cure cancer.

Presumably, the BBC's next series on alternative music will feature The Rolling Stones and U2 (in contrast, I'm guessing reflexology is the Menswear of medicine).

Link to odd BBC programme announcement.

—Vaughan.

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October 17, 2007

Tuning the ageing brain:

Wired News has a brief article on how ageing affects the brain and what are the current best-supported practices to keep our mental edge as we progress into our senior years.

The article discusses ways in which the brain overcomes the natural decline in function and how this process can be supported.

Despite the current interest in 'brain training', which in its current version seems to have a moderate effect at best, the most effective technique seems to be physical exercise (although a combination of both may well be the best option of course).

Exercise is known both to boost mood and maintain the blood supply network to the brain, both of which are known to be crucial to mental functioning.

What's the advice for now?

Physical exercise is the best-proven prescription so far, the scientists agreed. Memory improved when 72-year-olds started a walking program three days a week, and sophisticated scans showed their brains' activity patterns started resembling those of younger people.

Then there's the "use-it-or-lose-it" theory, that people with higher education, more challenging occupations and enriched social lives build more cognitive reserve than couch potatoes.

It's never too late to start building up that reserve, said Columbia University neuroscientist Yaakov Stern. But, "the question is how. What is the recipe?"

Everything from doing crossword puzzles to various computer-based brain-training programs has been touted, but nothing is yet proven to work. Johns Hopkins University has a major government-funded study under way called the "Experience Corps," where older adults volunteer to tutor school students 15 hours a week, to see if such long-term stimulation maintains the elders' brains.

What about medication? Companies have been reluctant to test side effect-prone drugs in an otherwise healthy aging brain, but scientists cited animal studies suggesting low-dose estrogen and drugs that might mimic or ramp up brain signaling are promising possibilities.

Link to Wired article 'Doctors Discuss Theories on Aging Brains'.

—Vaughan.

October 16, 2007

The immortal brain:

New Scientist has an article and video interviews with several transhumanists who are attempting to make the human brain immortal by reversing neural ageing, implanting stem cells and uploading the mind to a computer.

Transhumanism is a movement that aims to enhance the limits of human capabilities through techology.

The ideas stretche from the reasonable and shortly to be possible, to the outlandish and barely conceivable.

Unlike some other slightly left-field movements, it's got some heavy-weight scientists attached to it. This means it's rarely dull and at the very least it's thought-provoking, even when it does stretch to the outer limits of sci-fi philosophy.

The New Scientist article discusses the possibilities of escaping death by developing the cutting edge of biotech.

Sandberg and his fellow transhumanists plan to bypass death by using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), genetic engineering and nanotechnology to radically accelerate human evolution, eventually merging people with machines to make us immortal. This may not be possible yet, the transhumanists reason, but as long as they live long enough - a few decades perhaps - the technology will surely catch up.

To many, these ideas sound seriously scary, and transhumanists have been attacked for jeopardising the future of humanity. What if they ended up creating a race of elite superhumans bent on enslaving the unmodified masses, or unwittingly programmed an army of self-replicating nanobots that would turn us all into grey goo? In 2004, political scientist Francis Fukuyama singled out transhumanism as the world's "most dangerous idea".

If you think these fears are unreasonable, have a look at some of the Marvin Minsky quotes later in the article. He obviously wants to be robot overlord when SkyNet becomes sentient.

Link to New Scientist article 'The plan for eternal life'.
Link to video interview with Sandberg, de Grey and Bostrom.

—Vaughan.

Walking the line:

Last weekend, a group of mental health professionals took part in a study as part of the art science collaboration Walking Here and There. It's a joint effort between myself and artist Simon Pope, and like earlier stages of the project, it questions how we use art and science to construct meaning out of memory, location and psychosis.

The study looked at the influence of recall on walking behaviour, drawing on an existing paradigm in psychosis research.

But the experiment was also designed to give the participants an experience common to psychiatric inpatients: feeling disoriented, having their experience of the hospital affected by their memories of being outside, and being experimented on.

The experiment was designed, reviewed and ethically approved, with the scientific aim of looking at how walking is affected by recall via differences in hemispheric activation.

Participants were asked to walk a route around Ruskin Park, a tranquil green area near to the Maudsley Hospital which inpatients often visit on breaks from the ward. Later, while blindfolded and earplugged, participants were asked to recall aloud their stroll around the park while attempting to keep to a midline in a basement corridor of the hospital.

A similar approach has found that people with higher levels of schizotypy (subclinical psychosis-like experiences) and people given the dopamine boosting drug L-DOPA, are more likely to veer to the left on this task, reflecting increased right hemisphere activation.

Recall is known to preferentially activate the right hemisphere, so we might expect greater left veering during the task.

However, the study was located both to communicate some of the subjective experience of psychiatric inpatients to Maudsley staff, and also as a commentary on mental health care, as patients often find their time in the park more therapeutic than the disorienting environment of the hospital.

By doing this, we're also attempting to question whether experiments can be meaningful beyond their data.

Occasionally, the sheer existence of a study has profound implications for society. Experiments such as Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment or Milgram's conformity experiment were landmarks in reforming the ethics of participation owing to the subjective experience of the participants and their attempt to study the extremes of human behaviour.

With the increased ethical scrutiny into research, perhaps experiments are now only valued for their data, and participants only for their behaviour.

An earlier phase of the project, Gallery Space Recall, was a gallery exhibition without any objects. Visitors, largely artists and art curators, were asked to recall, while walking through the gallery, their experience of an earlier exhibition.

And while the walking experiment was designed to comment on mental health care, one of the main themes for Simon was that Gallery Space Recall critiqued the art world and its obsession with saleable objects and the prestige of gallery spaces.

But in terms of the experience, the gallery visitors were asked to value their subjective experience as a key component in the piece, rather than relying on any objective aspects of an artwork.

In the walking experiment, we attempted to do something similar, but rather than attempting to highlight the role of subjective experience in art, we focused on the subjective aspects of science.

We're debating what to do with the experimental data, and we think we might bury it - to create an exhibition without objects and an experiment without data.

Link to Walking Here and There.

—Vaughan.