I've just read a funny and insightful interview with neuroscientist Vincent Walsh from last November's Current Biology that's full of over-caffeinated anecdotes and understated wisdom.
It's really worth reading in full but, unfortunately, the whole thing is locked behind a paywall (a bargain at only $31.50), but I've reproduced part of the piece below:
What's the best advice you have ever given to others? I interviewed a truly exceptional person for a PhD last year. I told her “for God's sake don't waste your talent on me as a supervisor”. I haven't seen her since. It is rewarding to be listened to.
What has been your biggest mistake in science? Oh, I haven't even begun to peak on mistakes. I have so many more to give. I make mistakes all the time. In fact, I can't think of any of my most rewarding papers for which I wouldn't either interpret the data differently now or start/end with a different theoretical perspective. If you're still being right about the same shit you were right about 20 years ago, then something tells me you're either not thinking or you're just moving papers as product. The whole point of intellectual activity is to come to new conclusions. I don't see how one can think and keep coming up with the same conclusion, unless it's really dull stuff. It's almost our job to be wrong. How can you not make mistakes if you're reaching for something? I don't understand people who are proud of never having made one.
One of my scientific heroes is Semir Zeki. I think he's been substantially wrong on almost everything, but his contribution to science has been far bigger than those who haven't had the intellectual smarts or courage to put new ideas into the literature. This is no side swipe, I actually think Zeki should have shared the 1982 Nobel prize: he had completely rewritten the architecture of the visual cortex by 1978. The best most of us can hope for is to be fruitfully wrong — and you need to be damned clever and courageous to be so. I can only dream of getting things as intelligently wrong, but there's time.
Do you really mean that? Yes, I mean it with knobs on actually. The view comes from my love of the history of science. I get really angry when people say nonsense like “Gall was discredited” or “Let's not make the phrenological error”. I even heard someone say that “Newton has been discredited”. Such things display a deep ignorance of what Gall contributed and of how history proceeds (the point being that it isn't a procession of course). Some people think that knowledge of the history of the subject is some kind of optional indulgence but it's not, it's essential and it's also the gateway to humility.
We really haven't kept up with the general pace as a science. If you reincarnated Gall and explained to him where we are up to, you could bring him up to speed over a pint. If you did the same with a physicist or cell biologist from the same period, the poor buggers' brains would be throwing sparks by 1905, spewing smoke by 1930 and be in total meltdown by 1953 — and that's when the pace really picked up! Being interestingly wrong is so underrated. Galileo's ridiculously premature attempt to measure the speed of light is one of my favourite experiments in the whole of science — it was based on great thought, not on tweaking a variable.
How do you run your research group? Er “run”? I think I run after it most of the time...
The Boston Globe has an excellent profile of psychologist Ellen Langer, responsible for some of the most influential studies in psychology and a champion of 'mindfulness' as an approach to a happier life.
Needless to say, she's become a doyenne of the positive psychology movement, and, as the article notes, occasionally comes across as slightly guru-like.
Her research remains impressive, however, and when reading through the article I found myself saying "I never knew that was one of Langer's studies" several times.
These include studies finding that people are much more attached to lottery numbers when they are allowed to choose them - even though this makes no difference to the final outcomes (the 'illusion of control'), and one where giving a nonsense excuse to cut in line to use a photocopier was as effective as giving a reasonable excuse.
And of course, she's well-known for her studies on how giving residents in a nursing home for old people more control over the environment improved their well-being.
For many years she has become interested in mindfulness, although it's never really been clear to me that she means more than simply 'think more about what's going on' as it seems to be a little different from the concept of mindfulness taken from Buddhism and now an evidence-based component of many psychological treatments.
Apparently, Hollywood studio Universal Pictures are to make a film of Langer's ageing studies and Jennifer Aniston has been chosen to play the Harvard psychologist. I would have gone for Megan Fox myself but that's probably why I should stick to the day job.
ABC Radio National's All in the Mind has an engaging interview with psychologist and author Kay Redfield Jamison who discusses her new book which is both a memoir of losing her husband and a consideration of the psychology of grief.
Towards the end of the interview she tackles the distinction between grief and depression, which has recently returned as a contentious topic after lying fallow for many years.
Since Freud's essay Mourning and Melancholia, the two have been linked in many psychological theories. Freud's idea was that both were similar types of reaction to loss although in depression it might not be clear to the conscious mind what was lost because the prior attachment might have had unconscious components.
In other words, a small event might trigger a big grief reaction event though it might not be clear why - because some of the psychological value of what you have lost might exist only in the unconscious.
Although the essay is one of the foundational texts of psychoanalysis, nowadays only the most orthodox followers of Freud would agree fully with this theory of depression and the idea that grief and depression are fundamentally the same is no longer widely subscribed to.
Nevertheless, psychiatry is once more approaching grief as a potential form of mental illness, albeit from a different angle.
The concept of complicated grief, where grieving is considered to be more intense, disabling or extended than normal, has been much discussed as an area where psychiatric treatment may be warranted. It's an interesting concept because it essentially sets limits on what should be considered a normal response to personal loss.
It's not an official diagnosis as yet, but various proposals set the limits for 'normal' grieving at 6 months or one year.
More recently, the draft version of the new American diagnostic bible, the DSM-V, has gone even further and removed bereavement as an exclusion for a diagnosis of major depressive disorder. This means that two weeks of low mood, loss of pleasure and interest in activities, poor sleep, appetite or concentration after a loved one had died could get you a diagnosis of mental illness.
It's a difficult area, because while it is important not to medicalise normal and healthy reactions to the loss of a significant person in your life, we also wouldn't want to miss treating mental illness simply because the person has experienced a loss. Clearly there is a balance, although it's difficult to say where it is.
Jamison has an interesting perspective on the issue, as she's a clinical psychologist interested in mood disorders, but also has experienced profound depression and loss herself.
Link to AITM interview with Kay Redfield Jamison. Link to AITM blog on some of the diagnostic issues.
The Guardian books blog has a fantastic short piece on fictional mind-bending drugs from literature, stretching from the nightmare-inducing hallucinogens of William Burroughs to Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster from Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.
The most famous invented drug is probably soma in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It was an integral part of the story because it was an integral part of the authorities' control mechanism – they were literally keeping the people doped up and happy. Sounds alright to me: a permanent state of blissed-out semi-catatonia. In fact, given my choice of fictional narcotics, soma would probably be first.
Nor would I mind sampling some melange/spice from Frank Herbert's Dune (long life, heightened awareness and possible extrasensory properties, cool blue eyeballs); septus from Iain Banks's Transition (the ability to flit between parallel worlds and inhabit others' bodies); Dylar from Don DeLillo's White Noise (no more fear of death); the various hallucinogens drunk with the old moloko in A Clockwork Orange (a nice quiet horrorshow starring Bog and all his angels); Can-D in Philip K Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (allows you to participate in a group hallucination). I also quite like the sound of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, described as "like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick". Well, it beats aspirin and sniffing exhaust pipes.
However, it misses out one of the most wonderful examples: the feathers from Jeff Noon'sVurt and Pollen novels that produce shared hallucinations that are a cross between Jung's collective unconscious and the internet.
ABC Radio National's Late Night Live has a fascinating discussion with the author of a new book on nine famous hypochondriacs: James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol.
I'm not sure Daniel Paul Schreber is necessarily the best example of someone with hypochondria is he is famous for writing a personal account of being genuinely mentally ill and floridly psychotic. However, I've not read the book and the programme focuses on better known figures so I am open to being convinced (certainly his delusions included lots of beliefs about his body changing in curious ways).
Bioemphemera has found some wonderfully left-field brain illustrations by Dutch graphic designer Rhonald Blommestijn. The image on the left is a brain made out of clocks.
Blommestijn's blog is full of strikingly surreal eye-candy that manages both to inspire a feeling of wide-eyed wonder and illustrate scientific themes.
They're certainly very original takes on the subject and the neuroscience images are particularly vivid.
Link to Bioephemera on Blommestijn's brain illustrations. Link to Blommestijn's blog.
BBC Radio 4 has a fantastic documentary on one of then 20th century's great poets, Anne Sexton, who struggled with mental illness throughout her adult life and eventually committed suicide at the age of 46.
Uniquely, tapes of Sexton's psychotherapy sessions with psychiatrist Martin Orne were found after her death giving an alternative insight into her mental life.
The programme dramatises excerpts from the tapes and talks to members of her family about her life, writing and frequent hospitalisations.
Sexton is typically classified as one of the 'confessional' poets, although, regardless of the label, her work is certainly very personal and reveals an articulate if not fragile look at many key relationships in her life.
Because of the BBC's archive of doom, you only have three days to listen to it before it disappears for good into the abyss, although it is well worth catching if you get the chance.
Link to BBC Radio 4 documentary 'Consorting with Angels'.
I've just discovered that the excellent PBS documentaryA Brilliant Madness that looks at the life of Nobel-prize winning mathematician, John Nash, is available online either as streamed video or as a torrent.
Nash was famously the subject of the Oscar-winning film, A Beautiful Mind, although the while the main plot elements are true - he both won the Nobel prize and experienced decades of psychosis - his life was heavily fictionalised to the point of being schmaltzy.
The PBS documentary is a more honest, but no less inspirational, look at Nash, and is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning biography by Silvia Nasar.
Nash himself gives an articulate account of his own illness and how society deals with those who experience other realities, while the documentary traces Nash's sometimes less-than-flattering earlier life story to his later years where he is widely considered to be an altogether more gentle and humane individual.
If you want to know the real story behind A Beautiful Mind or more about Nash it is essential viewing.
Link to information on the documentary from PBS. Link to flash streamed version. Link to torrent.
I'm re-reading the excellent bookInto the Silent Land by neuropsychologist Paul Broks and was reminded of a part where he recounts an eerie poem about a 1938 operation to remove a brain tumour.
The poem is by Welsh poet and doctor Dannie Abse and, looking it up on the internet, I discovered that the poetry archive has a wonderful entry for the piece online that not only includes the text but also a recording of Abse introducing and reading the poem.
The uncanny incident, probably caused by stimulation of the cortical surface, was witnessed by Abse's brother, also a doctor, when observing an operation by the famous neurosurgeon Lambert Rogers.
In the Theatre
by Dannie Abse
(A true incident)
Sister saying—‘Soon you’ll be back in the ward,’
sister thinking—‘Only two more on the list,’
the patient saying—‘Thank you, I feel fine’;
small voices, small lies, nothing untoward,
though, soon, he would blink again and again
because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers,
rash as a blind man’s, inside his soft brain.
If items of horror can make a man laugh
then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth
still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time;
more brain mashed because of the probe’s braille path;
Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still;
his dresser thinking, ‘Christ! Two more on the list,
a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.’
Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain,
a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod,
leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’—
the patient’s dummy lips moving to that refrain,
the patient’s eyes too wide. And, shocked,
Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe
with nurses, students, sister, petrified.
‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’
that voice so arctic and that cry so odd
had nowhere else to go—till the antique
gramophone wound down and the words began
to blur and slow, ‘ … leave … my … soul … alone … ’
to cease at last when something other died.
And silence matched the silence under snow.
Link to poetry archive entry for 'In the Theatre'.
Clinical psychologist and US Congressman Tim Murphy has volunteered to treat soldiers traumatised by the war he voted for.
From January's APA Monitor magazine:
Clinical child psychologist Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) has consistently voted to continue America's military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan while appreciating the deepening psychological toll the repeated deployments and combat experiences are taking on service members. That's why Murphy, 57 and now in his forth congressional term, secured a commission as a military psychologist in the Naval Reserve.
“It'd be difficult for me to continue to vote to send soldiers there and not provide for them what they needed when they got back,” he says.
Freudians would have a field day with you my lad.
Link to 'U.S. Congressman will provide psychological services to military'.
A thoughtful reflection on the psychology of the New Year, published in 1895 by the acclaimed essayist Charles Lamb in his collectionThe Essays of Elia.
Every man has two birth-days: two days at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this custom of solemnising our proper birth-day hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand anything in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.
Charles Lamb was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation although struggled with mental illness for much of his life and directed a great deal of his energies to caring for his sister, Mary, who was similarly affected by mental disorder and an exceptional talent for literature.
There's a video interview with Nobel prize winning mathematician John Nash, the subject of the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, over at 3QuarksDaily where he talks about his life, work and mental illness.
The film is a quite heavily fictionalised account of Nash's life and he clearly has some disagreements with Sylvia Nasar's award winning biography of the same name, so it's interesting to get his own perspective.
Nash rarely gives interviews so this 20 minute discussion is quite comprehensive. In parts he discusses how he managed his work as a mathematician throughout his difficulties and even touches on some of his past delusions.
It's fascinating, if not a little awkward in places, but a rare opportunity to hear Nash in person.
The Providentia psychology blog has an excellent post about old-time champion boxer 'The Michigan Wildcat' Wolgast who fought on despite clear neurological damage and eventually suffered boxer's dementia. He could apparently be found shadow boxing invisible opponents in the sanatorium.
Wolgast won the world lightweight title in 1912 but sustained continuous damage throughout his career and continued way past the point that would be permitted in modern times.
He progressed from minor neurological impairment to 'dementia pugilistica' - a form of dementia caused by repetitive low level damage to the brain.
When his condition gradually deteriorated, Ad Wolgast was readmitted to hospital in 1927. While he remained there for the rest of his life, Ad continued to train in his room.; According to his obituary, that typically involved frequent shadowboxing, bobbing, and uppercuts against imaginary opponents. Ad Wolgast seemed largely unaware of his surroundings except on rare occasions when he would plaintively ask where he was and when he would be allowed to leave. His boxing career may have been long over but it still took two hospital attendants to restrain him whenever he was forced to do something he didn't want to do. By all reports, his "tough guy" reputation and violent temper earned him numerous beatings in hospital but he always recovered quickly enough. He went blind in the final few years of his life.
ABC Radio National's Artworks programme interviews two creators of a new play about the mind and motivations of psychologist and serial monkey abuser Harry Harlow.
Harlow was a fascinating and troubled fellow who completed some of the most notorious studies in psychology where he raised monkeys apart from their mothers, most famously with 'wire cage' substitutes of various kinds.
He found that infant monkeys preferred to hang on to a wire cage 'mother' surrounded by cloth regardless of whether it provided food or not, suggesting to Harlow that comfort was of prime importance.
Over time his studies evolved and became increasingly cruel, until even those closest to his work felt he had gone too far.
The maternal deprivation studies are widely cited but they really told us little except the obvious fact that early relationships are important. This was widely promoted by the Neo-Freudians who felt Freud's focus on infant sexuality was clearly missing the mark and had already been confirmed by extensive studies in children from deprived families conducted by London's Tavistock Clinic years before.
More interesting, however, is Harlow himself - a man who was frequently depressed and estranged from his own mother, and the play deals with the psychology of this complex character.
The play is on in Melbourne, Australia but the discussion is also fascinating as the creators have clearly thought a great deal about the ethics of the research and Harlow's own motivations.
Link to discussion on Artworks. Link to more information about the play.
Meg Barker is a psychologist who specialises in understanding non-conventional sexuality and relationships. As well as being a researcher, Meg is also a psychotherapist where she puts her research into practice to help people overcome sex and relationship difficulties.
Having completed a great deal of research on bisexuality and 'BDSM' culture, Meg also has a particular interest in 'polyamory' and non-monogamous relationships and has recently co-edited a forthcoming book on the topic with psychologist Darren Langdridge which attempts to understand the diverse experiences of non-monogamous relationships.
She's also been kind enough to talk to Mind Hacks about her work and interests.
How do you think open or polyamorous relationships differ psychologically from monogamous relationships?
This is a difficult question to answer because over the years I've come to realise that there isn't really one kind of polyamory, or non-monogamy, just as there isn't one form of monogamy. That is why Darren and I called our new book 'Understanding non-monogamies' - plural.
In fact, the first contribution to that book (by Katherine Frank and John DeLameter) even questions the distinction between monogamies and non-monogamies. They present research which suggests that similar conversations about relationship 'rules' are currently happening in monogamous and non-monogamous relationships of various kinds (e.g. swinging, polyamory and open relationships).
Some people have non-monogamous relationships for political or spiritual reasons, because they feel that monogamy is rooted in capitalism, or because they don't want to 'possess' another person in any way. Others recognise that they can be attracted to more than one person at a time; they want to act on their attractions, but not in a dishonest way like with infidelity. Some are in it for the exciting sexual possibilities. Some feel that being non-monogamous is an inherent part of their sexuality (perhaps along with the gender/s they are attracted to). Others feel that it is a choice they have made. Some non-monogamous people are open to multiple sexual relationships but only one 'love' relationship, others have multiple love relationships, and others question the very division between sex and love.
So I guess what I'm saying is that diversity is the rule, and my therapeutic work suggests that the same is true within monogamous relationships. Following social changes in recent decades (people living longer, increased gender equality, recognition of same-sex relationships, increasing divorce rates), many of us seem to be questioning how we 'do' relationships and redefining our boundaries, commitments, and the lines we draw in relation to emotional and sexual exclusivity.
There are couples who define as monogamous who search for sexual encounters with 'singles' on the internet, or agree on a 'don't ask don't tell' policy when one is away from home. There are those who define as polyamorous who have fidelity within a 'triad' or 'family', or who define a 'primary' relationship. The lines are definitely blurred.
You study lots of sexual activities that were, or are still, considered immoral by some. What place does morality have in sexual behaviour?
Personally I like the psychiatrist, Chess Denman's, classification of sexualities into those which are 'transgressive' and those which are 'coercive'. Transgressive ones just fall outside our current cultural comfort zone. They may well be accepted in other times and places and there is nothing inherently harmful about them. Coercive sexualities involve some degree of coercion or force: they are non-consensual.
Denman argues that psychology and psychiatry has no business pathologising transgressive sexualities which people gain pleasure and happiness from. Coercive sexualities should be dealt with in the criminal-legal systems along with other acts of violence and abuse.
I also like this quote from Gayle Rubin, one of my inspirations, on this issue. She says: 'Most people find it difficult to grasp that whatever they like to do sexually will be thoroughly repulsive to someone else, and that whatever repels them sexually will be the most treasured delight of someone, somewhere... Most people mistake their sexual preferences for a universal system that will or should work for everyone’ (Rubin, 1984, p. 283).
You research 'critical sexology'. What is it?
'Critical sexology' is the name of a seminar series which I run with my colleague Lisa Downing. Basically the idea is to bring people together from across the disciplines to talk about issues of sexuality (sexology is a word for the study of sexuality). So we bring together medics, psychotherapists, psychologists, sociologists, humanities scholars, activists and a number of others to share their ideas and research.
The 'critical' part of the title means that we are generally cautious about taken-for-granted ideas about sexuality, for example the dichotomy of gay vs. straight which leaves little room for bisexual and queer sexualities, the idea that one kind of sex is better than others, or the pathologisation of the 'transgressive' kinds of sexuality that I spoke about before.
Most importantly though, we think it important to encourage dialogue about a topic which is researched and theorised across so many different disciplines. We have much to learn from one another.
How does your clinical work inform your research?
Hugely. It keeps me grounded in what is sometimes called 'the real world' in academic circles! Whenever I read a theory or some research these days I am always asking whether it is something that could actually be helpful to people grappling with relationship, sexual, or emotional problems in their own lives. Those are the ideas and studies that I am most interested in.
I have been very lucky to find work which brings together my academic interests with my therapeutic work and I am now writing courses for the Open University on counselling and psychotherapy which are, of course, informed by psychological research in these areas.
Name three under-rated things
Comics (I'm excited by the potential for visual methods in psychological research and I'm currently looking at polyamorous comics)
Sitting still (I'm into Buddhist mindfulness)
Seeing diversity as well as consistency (in psychological research on groups or communities)
One of the most famous and most mythologised studies in psychology concerns John Watson's experiment to condition 'Little Albert' to be afraid of a white rat. 'Little Albert' and his mother moved away afterwards and no-one knew what happened to him, leading to one of the most enduring mysteries in psychology. Finally, it seems, his identity has been discovered.
An article in the latest edition of American Psychologist recounts a detective story, led by psychologist Hall Beck, to try and solve the question of what happened to 'Little Albert' after his participation in the famous study.
The experiment itself consisted of showing the infant some live animals, most notably a white rat, and some other assorted objects, to demonstrate he had no pre-existing fear of them.
On several later occasions, when playing happily with the white rat, Watson and his colleague Rosalie Rayner struck a metal bar to frighten the young child. Subsequently, simply seeing the rat was enough to cause Albert to cry and show visible distress - demonstrating the phenomenon of classical conditioning, where something previously neutral can be associated with the responses triggered by something else.
Although accounts vary, Albert may have shown generalisation of his learnt response, so he became distressed at things like rabbits, dogs and furry coats, despite the fact that experimenters never presented these with a frightening noise.
'Little Albert' and his mother moved away from the university, his identity was lost and for years psychologists and historians have wondered what happened to the unwilling star in one of the landmark studies of the 20th century.
The first step was to find out exactly when the experiments took place and then to try and identify Albert's mother from the information given in Watson's original studies.
Careful sifting of financial and residency records put the researchers onto a campus wet nurse called Arvilla Merritte, but there the trail went cold.
There were no others traces of Arvilla Merritte but a search for her maiden name, Arvilla Irons, revealed that her married name was likely fictitious to hide the fact that her baby was illegitimate.
However, Irons' baby was not called Albert, but Douglas, and it wasn't until the Irons family got in touch to send a photo of the baby that the researchers could try and make a physical comparison.
The photos were blurry and they recruited the help of an FBI forensics expert to compare the images. The comparison suggested that the photos were likely of the same person and with the other matching biographical details it seems very likely that Douglas Merritte was indeed 'Little Albert'.
The story has a tragic ending, however, as Douglas Merritte died when only six years old after developing hydrocephalus, a build up of fluid in the brain, possibly due to a meningitis infection.
Beck finishes the article on a melancholy note, reflecting on his own part in the story, Little Albert's short life and his visit to his grave:
As I watched Gary and Helen put flowers on the grave, I recalled a daydream in which I had envisioned showing a puzzled old man Watson’s film of him as a baby. My small fantasy was among the dozens of misconceptions and myths inspired by Douglas.
"The sunbeam’s smile, the zephyr’s breath,
All that it knew from birth to death."
None of the folktales we encountered during our inquiry had a factual basis. There is no evidence that the baby’s mother was “outraged” at her son’s treatment or that Douglas’s phobia proved resistant to extinction. Douglas was never deconditioned, and he was not adopted by a family north of Baltimore.
Nor was he ever an old man. Our search of seven years was longer than the little boy’s life. I laid flowers on the grave of my longtime “companion,” turned, and simultaneously felt a great peace and profound loneliness.
Link to summary of article in American Psychologist.
Consciousness and the 'myth of the self' are tackled in an interesting discussion with philosopher Thomas Metzinger on this week's edition of ABC Radio National All in the Mind.
Metzinger is one of a relatively new breed of philosopher who actually gets his hands dirty with the business of experimental cognitive science and has co-authored some of the recent widely discussed studies that induced 'out of body experiences' in the lab.
The interview focuses on the material from his new book, Ego Tunnel, which seems to be getting quite a bit of attention recently.
I've not read it but it was reviewed very positively by Metapsychology, probably the best mind and brain book review site on the net. Nevertheless, I do have to agree with a point in the somewhat snarky New Scientistreview that contrary to what the blurb says, this is neither a new nor radical approach and is accepted by most philosophers of mind.
The interview is fascinating though, not least because Metzinger is very articulate, but also because he gets wonderfully side-tracked into discussing his own experiences with altering his consciousness and how this relates to this work in understanding the mind.
I also recommend the extended discussions on the All in Mind blog where he explains his original look at an ethics of consciousness and discusses alien or anarchic hand syndrome.
Link to AITM discussion with Metzinger. Link to AITM blog post with mp3s of extra discussions.
The BPS Research Digest has a fantastic feature where they've invited some of the world's leading psychologists to discuss one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves.
Some take the challenge as a query about themselves as human beings, others about them personally, and the answers are a wonderful mix of the scientific and personal, the profound and ephemeral.
This is one of the many highlights, from social psychologist Norbert Schwartz, cursing his inability to detect his own biases:
One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad -- unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still get me. The same is true for other subjective experiences, like the processing fluency resulting from print fonts [pdf] – I still fall prey to their influence. Why does insight into how such influences work not help us notice them when they occur? What makes the immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorizing until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind?
In fact, there are several pieces where psychologists gently bemoan their inability to apply their research findings to their own life, giving the series a slightly wistful feel.
Link to BPS Research Digest 'One nagging thing...' series.
An extraordinary 2006 article from The New York Times profiles ultra-endurance cyclist Jure Robič who apparently regularly loses his sanity during his races - literally becoming psychotic as he pushes himself to the limit.
The craziness is methodical, however, and Robic and his crew know its pattern by heart. Around Day 2 of a typical weeklong race, his speech goes staccato. By Day 3, he is belligerent and sometimes paranoid. His short-term memory vanishes, and he weeps uncontrollably. The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. Occasionally, Robic leaps from his bike to square off with shadowy figures that turn out to be mailboxes. In a 2004 race, he turned to see himself pursued by a howling band of black-bearded men on horseback...
In a consideration of Robic, three facts are clear: he is nearly indefatigable, he is occasionally nuts, and the first two facts are somehow connected. The question is, How? Does he lose sanity because he pushes himself too far, or does he push himself too far because he loses sanity? Robic is the latest and perhaps most intriguing embodiment of the old questions: What happens when the human body is pushed to the limits of its endurance? Where does the breaking point lie? And what happens when you cross the line?
It's a wonderfully written article that touches on the man himself, the physiology of fatigue and the psychological strain of intense athletic feats.
I've just found this remarkable TV interview with Oliver Sacks from 1986, only a year after the publication of his famous bookA Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
It's a fascinating discussion, not least because it's something you don't see much these days - an extended interview that focuses solely on a neuroscientist and his work.
There are no gimmicks or attempts to jazz it up with fancy editing and graphics. We see everything during the discussion, including Sacks' many 'ums' and 'ahs' and even hear a telephone going off half way through!
Still, it's a really wide ranging discussion which covers everything from the effects of brain injury to the role of doctors in exploring their patients' lives.
From what I can make out, the interviewer is Harold Channer who did the piece for a Manhattan-based public access TV network probably before Sacks became well-known.
The video quality is a bit ropey but Sacks has a spectacular beard and is as chaotically engaging as ever. Classic stuff.
I've just found this remarkable TV interview with Oliver Sacks from 1986, only a year after the publication of his famous bookA Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
It's a fascinating discussion, not least because it's something you don't see much these days - an extended interview that focuses solely on a neuroscientist and his work.
There are no gimmicks or attempts to jazz it up with fancy editing and graphics. We see everything during the discussion, including Sacks' many 'ums' and 'ahs' and even hear a telephone going off half way through!
Still, it's a really wide ranging discussion which covers everything from the effects of brain injury to the role of doctors in exploring their patients' lives.
From what I can make out, the interviewer is Harold Channer who did the piece for a Manhattan-based public access TV network probably before Sacks became well-known.
The video quality is a bit ropey but Sacks has a spectacular beard and is as chaotically engaging as ever. Classic stuff.
The Psychologist has an excellent article on the psychology behind the classic children's book Where The Wild Things Are. It turns out that the author, Maurice Sendak, was heavily interested in psychoanalysis and intended the book to explore the inner life of children.
The article is by psychoanalyst Richard Gottlieb who examines some of the influences on the book and Sendak's other works, noting that the author was in analysis himself and had an analyst as his life partner.
There is a remarkable thematic coherence to much of Sendak’s work, and this coherence links creative efforts that are decades apart and, additionally, links these works to what is known about his early life and formative years. Sendak himself has commented on his single-minded focus, saying, ‘I only have one subject. The question I am obsessed with is How do children survive?’ But it is more than mere survival that Sendak aspires to, for his children and for himself. He asks the question of resilience: How do children surmount and transform in order to prosper and create? It is tempting to imagine that Sendak conceives of the trajectory of his own life and art as a model for the way he has handled these questions in his works.
By the way, the whole issue of The Psychologist is freely available online, albeit as a slightly unwieldy Flash application.
It's one of the best issues I can remember for a long time. You may want to check out an excellent article on the default network, an interview with Chris Frith, a piece on the psychology of storytelling or a review of recent discussions on the next big questions in psychology.
Link to The Psychologist on Where The Wild Things Are.
Full disclosure: I'm an unpaid associate editor and occasional columnist for The Psychologist. I read Where The Wild Things Are as a child and loved it.
The BBC Radio 4 programme Saturday Live recently had a segment on the UK Government's belated apology to Alan Turing for his 1952 conviction for homosexuality. The programme's resident poet, Matt Harvey, penned this short but poignant poem to mark the occasion:
here’s a toast to Alan Turing
born in harsher, darker times
who thought outside the container
and loved outside the lines
and so the code-breaker was broken
and we’re sorry
yes now the s-word has been spoken
the official conscience woken
– very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –
and the story does suggest
a part 2 to the Turing Test:
1. can machines behave like humans?
2. can we?
I love this abstract of a scientific paper on 'Neurological Problems of Jazz Legends'. It's full of medical jargon but if you read it out loud it sounds like a beat poem. Try it with the same rhythm as Ginsberg's poemHowl.
Neurological problems of jazz legends
J Child Neurol. 2009 Aug;24(8):1037-42.
Pearl PL.
A variety of neurological problems have affected the lives of giants in the jazz genre.
Cole Porter courageously remained prolific after severe leg injuries secondary to an equestrian accident, until he succumbed to osteomyelitis, amputations, depression, and phantom limb pain.
George Gershwin resisted explanations for uncinate seizures and personality change and herniated from a right temporal lobe brain tumor, which was a benign cystic glioma.
Thelonious Monk had erratic moods, reflected in his pianism, and was ultimately mute and withdrawn, succumbing to cerebrovascular events.
Charlie Parker dealt with mood lability and drug dependence, the latter emanating from analgesics following an accident, and ultimately lived as hard as he played his famous bebop saxophone lines and arpeggios.
Charles Mingus hummed his last compositions into a tape recorder as he died with motor neuron disease.
Bud Powell had severe posttraumatic headaches after being struck by a police stick defending Thelonious Monk during a Harlem club raid.
If beat poetry aint your bag, try dropping it to the beat of Gang Starr's wonderful trackJazz Thing, which, among other things, taught me the recondite word 'recondite'.
Link to PubMed entry for 'Neurological Problems of Jazz Legends'. Link to Gang Starr's Jazz Thing.
The New York Times has a huge article on the forthcoming publication of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung's 'Red Book', the notebook he kept during the six years of his 'creative illness' in which he was clearly psychotic but found inspiration for some of his most influential ideas.
Jung is one of the most interesting people in the history of psychology. He was both an experimentalist and an analyst in the Freudian tradition, before rejecting Freud (causing him to feint at one point!) and branching out into his own system of analytical psychology.
His works are often concerned with interests that even at the time were considered a little outlandish, such as the far reaches of world religions, UFOs and myths, but he explained almost all of them in terms of psychological phenomena.
He was the first to create a comprehensive classification of personality and his work still forms the basis of the Myers-Briggs personality inventory. He has been accused of being a Nazi, and, although untrue, it is clear that he was ambiguous about the Third Reich when a firm rejection was needed.
And most interesting, perhaps, was what he called his 'confrontation with the unconscious', shortly after his split from Freud, when he spent six years, largely isolated at home, having visions, hearing voices, fighting what he interpreted as his own internal forces.
Jung came out of this period with some of his most distinctive ideas all of which he noted in his 'Red Book' which has been kept behind closed doors by the Jung family for years.
The book has gained an almost mythical status and The New York Times article is as much about the long saga of getting into print, almost 90 years after it was written, as it is about Jung himself.
It also gives an interesting insight into the culture of Jungian analysts themselves, who have been a breed apart ever since their subversion of the Freudian mainstream after Jung went his own way.
A fascinating piece of psychological history.
Link to NYT on 'The Holy Grail of the Unconscious'.
ABC Radio National's Philosopher's Zone has a fantastic programme discussing Michel Foucault's influential book 'Madness and Civilisation' on the 50th anniversary of its publication.
The book is nominally a history of madness since the enlightenment. Foucault argues that the age saw a cultural shift where madness was distinguished from reason and the civilised mind and where the mad were marked out and separated from mainstream society.
He argues that Europe began creating legal and social mechanisms to control those they deemed mad. Not least among these was the invention of the asylum and Foucault cites the 17th century as where lunatics began to be banished to these imposing human warehouses in what he called the 'great confinement'.
Except, it never happened. As the late great medical historian Roy Porter noted in his book A Social History of Madness (ISBN 1857995023), there is no evidence of a systematic confinement of the mad in the 17th century.
The records show that France was the only country in Europe to centralise its administration of services for the 'pauper madman' while other countries didn't typically have any legislation in place until the 19th century.
This detail is glossed over by the programme but, by examining some other of Foucault's claims, it does make a similar point that Madness and Civilisation isn't actually a very good history book.
This has only recently become clear to many as while an abridged version has been available for years in English, the full translation, including the now clearly inadequate references to historical sources, was only published in 2005.
Perhaps the book's lasting legacy is not in the details of the rather shaky arguments but in the way in which Foucault approached the subject: showing that medical and scientific concepts are influenced as much by cultural beliefs and fashions as by empirical data.
By the way, Porter's A Social History of Madness is a little academic in it's style but is otherwise absolutely fantastic. It got glowing reviews from pretty much everyone in psychiatry including arch 'anti-psychiatrist' Thomas Szasz, which is quite an achievement in itself.
Link to Philosopher's Zone on Madness and Civilisation.
I've just discovered that David Bowie's song All the Madmen is about his half brother and his time as a patient at the recently closed Cane Hill psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of South London.
In fact, the hospital is pictured on one of the original versions of the cover to his classic albumThe Man Who Sold the World, as you can see from the image on the left.
The main part of Cane Hill hospital has been closed since the early 90s and was largely dilapidated, but one unit was still in operation until it finally closed last year.
Being one of the few remaining vacant Victorian asylums, it was regularly visited by bored youths and curious urban explorers and there are hundreds of videos of the abandoned hospital buildings on YouTube.
As is the fate of all old asylums in the UK, it is in the process of being turned into luxury flats.
However, I suspect it's also the setting for the recent video 'Take Me to the Hospital' from purveyors of rave The Prodigy, but I can't find anything which confirms which old hospital they filmed in, so it will have to remain speculation.
Link to Wikipedia on All the Madmen. Link to audio of track on YouTube. Link to Wikipedia on Cane Hill Hospital.
Aaron Beck is the creator of one of the world's most widely used and influential psychological treatments, cognitive behavioural therapy, and he's profiled in an excellent article for The American Scholar.
While Beck is most associated with CBT, the article really nails why he is important in the development of psychological treatment, and its not just for the therapy he invented: from the very beginning he scientifically tested the effectiveness and principles his treatment meaning it has constantly changed and developed according to a solid research base.
If this seems obvious to you, you need to understand a little about the history of psychotherapy before Beck applied systematic testing to his own invention.
Previously, changes in psychotherapy were largely driven by the persuasiveness and personalities of the leading lights rather than systematic evidence for effectiveness.
In many forms of therapy, especially Freudian-inspired schools, the therapist's own personality was considered to be intimately tied up with their methods, theories and techniques, meaning that rubbishing someone's approach also meant you were rubbishing their skill as a therapist and, often, them personally.
In the early days of psychoanalysis, a common put-down used by Freud and his disciples was that a theory they didn't like was bad because it was tainted by the unresolved conflicts of the author. The problem, in other words, was not with the idea, but with the author.
Beck approached psychological treatment with scientific tools and immediately distanced the practice from the personal. Ideas could be put forward, tested and it was expected that many of them would fail in the face of the data.
As a result, criticalreviews of the evidence are considered the life blood of the treatment.
This research-led approach has not arrived without ruffling a few feathers. Recently, as health services have decided only to fund evidence-based treatments, CBT has become the treatment of choice and other therapies have been pushed out as they've traditionally not been interested in doing systematic studies.
As a result, critics have argued that CBT has been moulded to fit health economics rather than human nature. The debate continues and is likely to continue for some time.
The American Scholar article is an engaging piece looking at Beck himself, a famously reserved character in the flamboyant world of therapy, and the development of his treatment.
Incidentally, it's written by Daniel Smith who wrote the wonderful book on hearing voices called Muses, Madmen and Prophets that I highly recommend.
Link to American Scholar article 'The Doctor Is In'.
The LA Times has a reflective piece on the late teen movie director John Hughes' vision of adolescence in light of today's fashion for medicating teenagers:
"If the brooding, solitary Andie played by Ringwald in "Pretty in Pink" were in high school in 2009, it's hard to imagine she wouldn't be a candidate for anti-depression therapy. Likewise, if "The Breakfast Club," which is about five teens serving time in Saturday detention, took place in a post-Prozac, post-Columbine America, Ally Sheedy's mostly mute, kleptomaniac misfit would have undoubtedly been medicated, and Anthony Michael Hall's character would have received a lot more than detention for bringing a flare gun to school. As for Ferris Bueller, the kid obviously needed Ritalin.
"I'm not suggesting that any of us were better off when legitimate disorders went unrecognized and untreated. But in a culture in which diagnoses sometimes seem to get handed out like conservation-awareness fliers in front of the supermarket, it's worth asking ourselves if old-fashioned eccentricity -- of the teen or adult variety -- can too easily be supplanted by the ease of assigning a code from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Hughes, who left the movie business in the early 1990s because he feared the impact Hollywood would have on his children, should be remembered not just for the way he appreciated weirdness but for the way he normalized it -- not with pills but with paisley."
The monologue that bookmarks The Breakfast Club, with the line "You see us as you want to see us - in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions", succinctly captures how society's view of youth changes and yet always stays the same.
For the current younger generation, the simplest terms are mostly taken from psychiatry. This will eventually change and our recurrent anxieties about the young will largely be expressed in the next most convenient definition.
As a society, we are strangely blind to the complexities of youth.
The New York Times has an interesting piece about the work of anthropologist Ann Dunham Soetoro, most famous for being the mother of President Barack Obama.
The article is by Yale anthropologist Michael Dove who knew and worked with Obama's mother before she died in 1995.
Dr. Soetoro’s most sustained academic effort was her 1,043-page dissertation, “Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving Against All Odds,” completed in 1992 and based on 14 years of research. This was a classic, in-depth, on-the-ground anthropological study of a 1,200-year-old industry. Her principal field site was a cluster of hamlets, containing several hundred households, on an arid limestone plateau on Java’s south coast. There, village metalworkers produced dozens of different iron blades and tools for use in farming, carpentry and daily life...
There is a final lesson from her work that is worth remembering: No nation — even if it is our bitterest enemy — is incomprehensible. Anthropology shows that people who seem very different from us behave according to systems of logic, and that these systems can be grasped if we approach them with the sort of patience and respect that Dr. Soetoro practiced in her work.
The BPS Research Digest has the surprising news that a photo of Phineas Gage has been discovered. He became one of the most famous case studies in neuroscience when he had a large iron rod blown through his frontal lobes in in 1848.
He survived but his frontal lobe damage meant "Gage was no longer Gage", at least according to his attending doctor, giving us some of the first clues that damage to specific brain areas could cause changes in personality.
The photo was apparently discovered by two photo collectors who went to great lengths to verify it was indeed Gage.
The photo may well show Gage in his later years as he toured the country with PT Barnum's circus appeared at PT Barnum's New York museum as one of the star attractions, always with the tamping iron on hand to amaze the crowds.
In the tradition of media circuses, the collectors have taken the long out-of-copyright photo, put a dirty great copyright sign across the front and are charging 'usage fees' for the undefaced version.
Phineas Gage may be dead, but the spirit of Barnum, it seems, lives on.
UPDATE: The LA Times has a short article and an undefaced version of the photo online.
Link to BPSRD on the photo. Link to the 'Meet Phineas Gage' website with defaced photo.
The New York Times has a fantastic profile of ultramarathon runner Diane Van Deren who became a world class endurance athlete after having brain surgery to remove a large chunk of her right temporal lobe.
The surgery was to treat otherwise untreatable epilepsy and has left her with memory and organisation difficulties, neither of which stop her from running and winning races of several hundred miles.
Van Deren, 49, had a lobectomy in 1997. She has become one of the world’s great ultra-runners, competing in races of attrition measuring 100 miles or more. She won last year’s Yukon Arctic Ultra 300, a trek against frigid cold, deep snow and loneliness, and was the first woman to complete the 430-mile version this year...
[Neuropsychologist] Gerber, who works at Craig Hospital, a rehabilitation hospital in Englewood, Colo., for people with brain or spinal-cord injuries, said that Van Deren “can go hours and hours and have no idea how long it’s been.” Her mind carries little dread for how far she is from the finish. She does not track her pace, even in training. Her gauge is the sound of her feet on the trail.
“It’s a kinesthetic melody that she hits,” Gerber said. “And when she hits it, she knows she’s running well.”
I've just found this interesting 1988 article from the British Medical Journal on how surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico took inspiration from visual distortions he experienced as part of his migraines.
According to the article, he clearly recorded experiencing the symptoms of migraine, including the marked visual disturbances, and these can be seen in some of his paintings.
One of the most common visual disturbances in migraine aura is scintillating zigzag edges, but it can also commonly induce sparkling, dazzling, dancing, or flickering lights, fire rings, stars, and moving lines.
There are three sets of de Chirico's pictures that closely resemble patients' illustrations of classical migraine attacks. In a set of prints illustrating Cocteau's Mythologie the jagged effect of the water is very similar to the advancing edge of a scotoma and may be compared to a painting from the national migraine art competition.
The second example, a painting from the 1960, has as its central feature the silhouette of a man with a spiky edge, while figure 4, a lithograph from 1929, shows a black sun motifintruding into an interior scene. Both of these are reminiscent of drawings of negative scotomata by patients suffering from migraine. Other migrainous phenomena, such as the distortion of space, may be discernible in a series of paintings known as "Metaphysical interiors." This association, however, is more tenuous.
The article is illustrated with some of de Chirico's paintings and comparison pictures by people who were deliberately attempting to illustrate their migraine aura.
Edge has an excellent interview with science writer Jonah Lehrer who riffs on consciousness, the joy of discovery, the importance of the marshmallows in psychology and how he fell in love with science.
It's interesting because rarely do science writers get the opportunity to give their own opinions on the big questions in neuroscience, despite the fact that, as Lehrer mentions, they have a distinct way of looking at the field as a whole.
Writers have a massive influence on politics, economics, business and the arts, to the point where they are actively courted and coerced by those wanting to control the agenda, but there is much less of a tradition of writers influencing science outside the political sphere.
In fact, it'd be interesting to directly ask science writers for their own theories one day, but in the mean time here's a rare opportunity to see one 'in action' on the big issues.
The questions I'm asking myself right now are on a couple different levels. For a long time there's been this necessary drive towards reductionism; towards looking at the brain, these three pounds of gelatinous flesh, as nothing but a loop of kinase enzymes. You're a trillion synaptic connections. Of course, that’s a necessary foundation for trying to understand the mind and the brain, simply trying to decode the wet stuff.
And that's essential, and we've made astonishing progress thanks to the work of people like Eric Kandel, who has helped outline the chemistry behind memory and all these other fundamental mental processes. Yet now we're beginning to know enough about the wet stuff, about these three pounds, to see that that's at best only a partial glance, a glimpse of human nature; that we're not just these brains in a vat, but these brains that interact with other brains and we are starting to realize that the fundamental approach we've taken to the mind and the brain, looking at it as this system of ingredients, chemical ingredients, enzymatic pathways, is actually profoundly limited.
The question now is, how do you then extrapolate it upwards? How do you take this organ, this piece of meat that runs on 10 watts of electricity, and how do you study it in its actual context, which is that it's not a brain in a vat. It's a brain interacting with other brains. How do you study things like social networks and human interactions?
Frontier Psychiatrist has discovered an account of a curious incident where The Velvet Undergound played to the New York society for clinical psychiatry who had convened a high class dinner to discuss creativity.
But the 70s art rockers had the last laugh when they blasted the audience with distorted noise and bizarre questions, apparently as revenge for Lou Reed's electric shock treatment he'd been given as a teen to “cure” him of homosexuality.
The account is apparently give in an interview with John Cale, published in this week's Guardian (although I'm damned if I can find it):
The second the main course was served, the Velvets started to blast and Nico started to wail. Gerard and Edie jumped up on the stage and started dancing, and the doors flew open and Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin with her crew of people with camera and bright lights came storming into the room and rushing over to all the psychiatrists asking them things like:
What does her vagina feel like?
Is his penis big enough? Do you eat her out?
Why are you getting embarrassed? You’re a psychiatrist; you’re not supposed to get embarrassed...
There's plenty interesting material in Lou Reed's songs for those interested in the mind and brain.
Jackie is just speeding away
Thought she was James Dean for a day
Then I guess she had to crash
Valium would have helped that dash
She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
'Jackie' refers to Jackie Curtis one of the gender-bending artists in Warhol's The Factory. She was a enthusiastic drug user and became psychotic owing to her amphetamine use, apparently genuinely thinking she was James Dean at one point.
Valium, a long-acting anxiety-reducing and sleep-inducing benzodiazepine could have helped, but cutting out the speed probably would have been a better option. Curtis eventually died of a drug overdose in 1985.
There's a fantastic documentary on Curtis' life and art called Superstar in a Housedress.
And if you're interested in the history of rock n' roll psychiatry fusions, see one of our previous posts on The Cramps playing Napa State Mental Hospital.
Link to Frontier Psychiatrist on New York psychiatry rock chaos incident.
I've just noticed an excellent article in the Times about Rita Levi-Montalcini, the Nobel prizewinning neurologist who's still working at 100.
Levi-Montalcini won the Nobel in 1986 for her discovery of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein that helps control when and where brain cells grow.
Fiercely independent, she's escaped fascist regimes, anti-semitism and the bombing of Turin, where she continued her work by setting up a laboratory in a country cottage.
Do the workings of the brain still hold mysteries? “No, it is much less mysterious. We have the most amazing scientific and technological advances. We have been able to see how the brain does work. And now discoveries are being made by by anatomists and physiologists or experts in behavioural science, physicists and mathematicians, computer experts, biochemists, and molecular scientists. The barriers are breaking down between disciplines. At 100 years of age I am still making discoveries about the factor that I myself discovered more than half a century ago.”
Despite her neurobiological nous, cognitive neuroscience is obviously not her strong point as she does spout some nonsense about brain hemispheres in a few places though, like "The important thing is to have lived with serenity using the rational left-hand side of one's brain, and not the right side, the instinctive side, which leads to misery and tragedy."
Counter-culture psychiatrist R.D. Laing is the patron saint of lovable rogues, although, according to an article in The Sunday Times, he was a hard man to love. “Being the son of RD Laing was neither amazing nor enlightening,” wrote his son in a biography of his father, “for most of the time it was a crock of shit.”
Inspired by existential philosophers, Laing produced a series of humane and revolutionary books during the sixties that argued that we undervalue both the experience of mental illness and those who are mentally ill.
Madness, he argued, was a transformative experience, rich with personal meaning, that functions like an existential rite of passage. Delusions and hallucinations were the expression of the unmentionable, illustrating the emotional double-booking keeping of the family with an unignorable tear in the fabric between the conscious and unconscious mind.
When you talk to psychiatrists from Laing's generation, they are rarely complementary. The fact he fuelled the 'anti-psychiatry' movement (unwittingly, he claimed) is secondary to the fact that they chiefly remember his decline from a brilliant thinker to a tacky drunk.
While his public persona was just saddening, his family life was frequently shattered by his emotional instability. Fathering 10 children by four different women, the Times article recounts how his children remember his emotional neglect, sometimes punctuated with violence.
Yet Laing remains fascinating. Partly we revel in the irony as he highlighted the naivety of his own theories - his depression and alcoholism were hardly a rite of passage, and he embodied the dark force of ambivalent family turmoil that he railed against in his writing.
But partly it's because he reflects those times when our inadequacies get the better of how we want the world to be. To borrow from Jung, he is the archetypal wounded healer, a modern day Fisher King whose wounds destroyed his kingdom.
Link to Sunday Times article 'RD Laing: The abominable family man'.
Psychiatrist and iconoclast Thomas Szasz takes part in a hard-hitting interview on ABC Radio National's All in the Mind where he shows that at the age of 89 he's lost none of his fire which has raged through psychiatry for almost 50 years.
It's a two part interview with the second appearing next week and it's classic Szasz.
He's an important thinker because he relentlessly attacks the conceptual foundations of psychiatry, the definitions which usually can't be empirically tested because they're philosophical issues - in other words, the assumptions we need to make about the world before we can start measuring anything.
Szasz comes from a classical liberal perspective, citing the rights and responsibilities of the individual as primary in any social decision-making.
As psychiatry is involved in changing behaviour, detaining individuals against their will, and discharging responsibility for serious crimes through the insanity defence - all based on what Szasz argues is a flawed concept of 'mental illness' - he fundamentally opposes much of the psychiatric system.
He's always fascinating to read or listen to as there are always 'that man is a genius' and 'how can he be so stupid?' moments following closely together. Of course, not everyone agrees on which are which.
The presenter, Natasha Mitchell, does a fantastic job of pressing hard questions and doesn't shy away from tackling accusations of anti-psychiatry, medical irresponsibility and collusion with scientology (next week).
Great stuff.
Link to AITM 'Thomas Szasz speaks' Part 1. Link to more background on the AITM blog.
Classic British TV comedy Yes Prime Minister has important lessons for those who want to interpret questionnaire data. This clip shows two civil servants discussing a policy suggestion. Bernard Woolley, who we see first, thinks the public are in favour of the policy - the minister has had an opinion poll done. Luckily senior civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby is there to set him straight:
Fans of cognitive biases, note that Sir Humphrey uses at least three in his illustration of a biased questionnaire: framing, priming, and acquiescence bias.
This example exaggerated, but the moral still holds : questionnaires can be designed to encourage the answers you want. People's opinions are not objective facts like their height and weight, they change depending on the context and on how they are asked.
New Scientist has an interesting interview with Daniel Tammet, a young man with with Asperger's syndrome, synaesthesia and amazing savant memory skills.
Tammet has also been the subject of scientific investigation, with a 2007 study published in the journal Neurocase examining how activity in his brain is related to his exceptional recall.
Tammet is interesting because savantism is usually associated with people with quite profound autism who are not easily able to communicate their experiences. Owing to the fact that Tammet is highly articulate, he describes how his experiences his mind in wonderful detail.
You also excel at learning languages. How do you pick them up so quickly?
I have synaesthesia, which helps. When there is an overlap between how I visualise a word and its meaning, that helps me remember it. For example, if a word that means "fire" in a new language happens to appear orange to me, that will help me remember it. But more significant is my memory and ability to spot patterns and find relationships between words. Fundamentally, languages are clusters of meaning - that is what grammar is about. This is also why languages interest me so much. My mind is interested in breaking things down and understanding complex relationships.
A documentary about Tammet, called The Boy with the Incredible Brain is available on Google Video and shows him at work as well as talking to neuropsychologists about savant skills.
Link to interview with Tammet at NewSci. Link to documentary The Boy with the Incredible Brain.
ABC Radio National's excellent The Philosopher's Zone recently broadcast a great programme on one of the most influential philosophers in cognitive science - the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
The first part of the programme deals with a broad overview of his life and ideas while the second section discusses his most famous work where analysed concepts behind the psychology of perception.
Merleau-Ponty was a phenomenologist, a philosophical tradition that aims to understand the structure of the mind through the analysis of conscious experience.
Introspection and subjective judgements about the mind get a bad rap in modern psychology but actually form the basis upon which much cognitive science rests.
To study something scientifically, it needs to be distinguished from other things - so we need to decide what sorts of things there are before we can apply science. As philosophy is essentially 'conceptual engineering', one of its most important roles is to make sure that these distinctions are based on sound concepts.
Many of the phenomenologists were interested in how we generate these concepts and looked to the structure of the human mind for clues. They came to the conclusion that there may be certain aspects of the mind that lead us to understand the world in specific ways.
Merleau-Ponty strongly argued that perception, including the whole experience of the body, was one of the most important influences and that if we rely solely on an objective and abstract science we will never understand lived-experience itself.
The New York Times has an obituary to psychologist Robert Zajonc, who made some of the most significant discoveries in cognitive science. What I didn't know is that he'd also been bombed, captured by the Nazi's, made his escape, joined the French resistance and acted as a translator for the Allied forces during the War.
Zajonc was one of those unsung heroes of psychology who you probably know through his discoveries, even if you don't recognise the name.
He discovered the 'mere exposure effect', the effect of birth order on IQ, the interaction between audience and expertise, and that smiles can lift the mood as well as be triggered by happiness.
Professor Zajonc was perhaps best known for discovering what he called the “mere exposure” effect. In a seminal experiment, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1968, he showed subjects a series of random shapes in rapid succession. The shapes appeared and disappeared so quickly that it was impossible to discern that some of them were actually repeated. Nevertheless, when subjects were later asked which shapes they found most pleasing, they reliably chose the ones to which they had been exposed the most often, though they had no conscious awareness of the fact.
I had the experience of reading through the piece thinking, 'wow, I didn't realise all these discoveries were from the same guy'.
Link to NYT obituary for psychologist Robert Zajonc (via AHP).
The New York Times has an excellent profile of free-thinking neuroscientist Rudolfo Llinás who is renowned for his theories on the importance of brain oscillations and his unique take on consciousness.
Now based in New York, Llinás is a native of Colombia and is considered one of the most important living neuroscientists.
He views the brain as a neurophysiologist but applies his knowledge of neurobiology to understanding some of the bigger questions, such as conscious experience and mental illness.
When the brain is awake, neurons in the cortex and thalamus oscillate at the same high frequency, called gamma. “It’s like a Riverdance performance,” Dr. Llinás continued. “Some cells are tapping in harmony and some are silent, creating myriads of patterns that represent the properties of the external world. Cells with the same rhythm form circuits to bind information in time. Such coherent activity allows you to see and hear, to be alert and able to think.”
But at day’s end, cells in the thalamus naturally enter a low-frequency oscillation. They burst slowly instead of firing rapidly. With the thalamus thrumming at a slower rhythm, the cortex follows along. You fall asleep. Your brain is still tapping out slow rhythms, but consciousness is suspended.
So if a small part of the thalamus gets permanently stuck at a low frequency, or part of the cortex fails to respond to the wake-up call, Dr. Llinás said, an abnormal rhythm is generated, a so-called thalamocortical dysrhythmia.
And Llinás claims that specific dysrhythmias can be seen in various brain problems each of which might represent a specific breakdown in the normal oscillations of the brain.
Link to NYT 'In a Host of Ailments, Seeing a Brain Out of Rhythm'.
Don't get high on your own supply - enflurane edition:
Another in our occasional series of articles on the importance of the motto "don't get high on your own supply". This edition concerns the case of an anaesthetist who was testing some of his own anaesthetics while driving.
From a case report from Forensic Science International:
A 42-year-old anaesthetist firstly was observed sitting in a parked automobile under a bridge, secondly 100 m further. Both times he was holding a handkerchief under his nose. Then he drove on and crashed into a lorry at a red traffic light.
After that an odd behaviour was noticed. The markedly affected physician put something trickle out of a small brown bottle in the handkerchief and inhaled the fumes. During the time interval until the arrival of the police he went asleep and could not be waked up without difficulties.
At first he did not take any notice of the police. Later he was extremly unsure, trembled from head to foot, staggered and swayed from site to site and clutched his car not to fall down. The handkerchief in his car smelled of the content of the brown bottle with the label Ethrane®
New York Magazineprofiles prolific mind-focused science writer Malcom Gladwell and previews his upcoming book on the unpredictable factors that propel the super-successful to the top.
Gladwell writes incredibly compelling books about psychology and culture that have been wildly popular. The article mentions a multi-million dollar advance for his forthcoming bookOutliers.
I have to say, I read his last book, Blink and enjoyed every page but didn't quite get the punchline. It seemed to be saying sometimes instant judgements can be better than considered judgements, and other times not, but I wanted to know when they are better.
However, Gladwell's books are as enjoyable as much for their eclecticism as his gripping narrative, and even as a collection of stories about interesting studies I found them eye-opening.
The New York Magazine discusses Gladwell and his work, and it's probably true to say that he's one of the most influential people in the public understanding of psychology, so he is always worth keeping tabs on.
Link to New York Magazine article 'Geek Pop Star'.
I've just got round to listening to a September edition of ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone on Frankenstein, science and philosophy in the Romantic period. Tragically, the mp3 is no longer available, but one of the people on the programme read out a fantastic Benjamin Franklin quote on Mesmerism.
Franklin was charged by the King of France to investigate the scientific basis of Mesmerism. We now think of mesmerism as hypnosis but at the time Franz Anton Mesmer believed that the effects were because he had discovered a way of manipulating a powerful invisible fluid that permeated the universe.
One of the interviewees on the programme read out Franklin's conclusion to the his 1784 report to Louis XIV on the scientific basis of Mesmerism, and it's both profound and beautiful:
It is perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, that is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists and does not seem to require so much an active energy as a passive aptitude of soul, in order to encounter it.
But error is endlessly diversified. It has no reality but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field, the soul has room enough to expand herself to display all her boundless faculties and all of her beautiful and interesting extravagances and absurdities.
Obviously this was before the days when it was traditional to finish a scientific report by sitting on the fence and suggesting further research.
Link to Philosopher's Zone edition, sans mp3, avec transcript.
The Boston Globe has a brief interview with dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley who has just written a book on the history of dreaming in the world's religions.
Bulkeley notes in the interview that his book attempts to look at common themes from various dreams described in the religious literature, and draws out how they might reflect common aspects of human experience.
It sounds like an historical anthropology of dreaming with a view to understanding the significance of dreams for some of the most influential movements in our culture.
You argue that modern science can learn about dreaming from religion. Do you have a favorite example that you use when talking to scientists?
BULKELEY: Well, consider this particular kind of nightmare dream that recurs again and again in religious texts. In the Christian tradition they talk about the incubus, or the demons of the night. In Newfoundland, it's the old hag and so on. But what all these various religions agree on is that there's a type of nightmare that's very intense and involves the constriction of breathing or paralysis. Now we know, thanks to modern science, that this is a real class of dream called night terrors and they're very different from ordinary nightmares. So all these texts that talk about night terrors, they're actually describing a real element of human experience.
One of my favourite books on dream themes is somewhat less serious. I Dream of Madonna is a beautifully illustrated book that collects women's dream about the Material Girl.
Link to Kelly Bulkeley interview (via Frontal Cortex). Link to more info about the book.
Esquire magazine (of all places) has an excellent neuroscience article that discusses the case of Erik Ramsey, a young man with locked-in syndrome whose only hope for communicating with the outside world is a prototype brain computer interface that needs to be implanted directly into his cortex.
Locked-in syndrome is a condition that can occur after certain forms of brain stem stroke. The brain stem acts as the relay station to the peripheral nerves of the body, and hence the control of muscles.
The syndrome is where the person is mentally fine but are physically unable to move any muscle in the body, usually except muscles associated with eyes.
Current methods of communicating typically involve having someone hold up a board with the letters of the alphabet on it. The assistant starts reading off the letters and the locked-in person moves their eye when they arrive at the right letter, and through this method, they slowly spell out sentences.
Famously, Jean-Dominique Bauby created one of the most incredible books ever written, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, using this method after becoming locked-in.
There is currently a great hope for 'brain computer interfaces' that, with a bit of training, might allow locked-in people to communicate through a computer system that translates specific types of neural activity into letters or words.
This is usually described as translating 'thoughts into words' but most systems simply link specific patterns of brain activation to specific computer outputs, so as long as they can reliably distinguish between different types of brain activity and reliably produce specific responses the job is done.
In other words, if thinking of sea lions reliably produces an 'A' and thinking of a scratch-my-nose action reliably produces a 'B' (and so on) this is enough, but the leap between the content of thoughts and the output is not at the level of meaning (where thinking of sea lions would produce 'sea lions' as an output).
Interestingly, the training method most of these systems use largely relies on operant conditioning (a type of trial and error learning). We know that we can be conditioned to have certain responses unconsciously, so it may be the case that people using the system don't 'feel' like their thinking about something specific for any particular response. Eventually it just 'happens', like driving a car.
The researcher behind the system described in the Esquire article is neuroscientist Phillip Kennedy who was recently featured in an excellent article from the Dana Foundation on his work.
Link to Esquire 'The Unspeakable Odyssey of the Motionless Boy' (via FC). Link to Dana 'Neural Implant Aims to Restore Speech to the Paralyzed'.
Today's Nature has a fascinating one page article on the Turin anatomy museums that have the archives of the controversial founder of criminal psychology, Cesare Lombroso, who thought that deviant behaviour was imprinted in the face and brain from birth.
Lombroso had the theory that criminals were biologically defective, and that these defects - and hence criminality - could be found by measuring the body. This practice of interpreting someone's character from their physical features is known as physiognomy and was in full swing before Lombroso started his studies but he was the first to apply it to criminology.
Unfortunately for the physiognomists, it's impossible to reliably judge a person's character from their physical appearance (although subtle statistical differences can be found when comparing the average of many people - such as with an iris patterning and personality study we reported on last year).
During his studies, however, Lombroso made a huge collection of brains, skulls, death masks, life masks, photos, measurements and even tattoos to try and prove his theory.
His other unshakeable theory held, ironically, that genius and madness were two sides of the same degenerate coin. In 1897, at the height of his fame, Lombroso travelled to Leo Tolstoy's village in Russia to gather living proof of the theory — but the undisputed genius disappointed him by lacking the physical characteristics that Lombroso associated with madness. In turn, Tolstoy dismissed his visitor as "ingenuous and limited", and later described Lombroso's theories as a "misery of thought, of concept and of sensibility" (see Nature 409, 983; 2001). The great French novelist Émile Zola levelled that Lombroso gathered proof selectively: "like all men with preconceived theses."
The irrepressible Lombroso also had plenty of opponents back home in Turin — most notably the neuroanatomist Carlo Giacomini, head of the University of Turin's anatomy museum. In the 1880s, Giacomini had developed a 'dry' method for preserving brains based on mummification, which he put to lavish use. At least 950 of the resulting specimens are displayed in the Museum of Human Anatomy of the University of Turin, which reopened last year after renovation, having been closed for more than a century. Giacomini was a thorough, systematic scientist interested in individual variability in the gross anatomy of the brain. His analysis of the crevices, or sulci, of human brains suggested that there is sufficient variability among normal people to negate Lombroso's theory that the size and shape of a brain dictate character. Typically, Lombroso ignored the data.
And, if I'm not mistaken, this page has a picture of Lombroso's face, preserved in a jar. Can't be sure though, as it's in Italian, however, it does have loads of fascinating photos of the archive.
The article also notes that the another nearby museum has the collection of Luigi Rolando, a proto-neuropsychologist who attempted to related nervous system structure both to its biological function and partly to mind and behaviour.
One of the major landmarks in the brain is the central sulcus, which has the alternate name of 'the Rolandic fissure' or the 'fissure of Rolando' in his honour. Rather peculiarly, the Nature article uses a jarring mix of old and new and names it the 'Rolando sulcus' which seems to be virtually non-existent in the literature.
The only reference to this term in PubMed is from an obviously awkwardly translated French study which appeared earlier this year.
Anyway, a fascinating article and they look like some wonderful museums to visit if ever you're in the beautiful Italian town of Turin.
Link to article. Link to DOI entry. Link to page in Italian with loads of photos. Link to website for Cesare Lombroso Criminal Anthropology Museum. Link to website of Luigi Rolando Human Anatomy Museum.
I've just found this fascinating article about how electricity became featured in entertainment shows shortly after it was harnessed and took on an erotic undercurrent, leading to theories of sexuality that attempted to explain the differences between male and female 'electric fire'.
The abstract alone is wonderful to read:
Sparks in the dark: the attraction of electricity in the eighteenth century.
Bertucci P.
Electricity was the craze of the eighteenth century. Thrilling experiments became forms of polite entertainment for ladies and gentlemen who enjoyed feeling sparks, shocks and attractions on their bodies. Popular lecturers designed demonstrations that were performed in darkened salons to increase the spectacle of the so-called electric fire. Not only did the action, the machinery and the ambience of such displays match the culture of the libertine century, it also provided new material for erotic literature.
This is one of the many curious paragraphs from the actual article:
Women became essential protagonists of electrical soirées. Electrical performances staged in courts and salons counted on their active participation and played with sexual difference. Although both men and women could experience the electric fire with their bodies, they would tackle it in different ways. The most common electrical experiments provide a glimpse into the different roles salon culture codified for ladies and gentlemen. One of the most popular demonstrations of the time was the electrifying Venus, or electric kiss. Invented by the German professor Georg Matthias Bose, it was soon replicated throughout Europe. The experiment was simple to organize. The selected lady would stand on an insulated stool while an operator charged her body with an electrical machine. Gentlemen in the audience would then be invited to kiss her, but alas, as they tried to approach her lips a strong spark would discourage any attempt, while exhilarating the lady and the rest of the audience.
Link to article 'Sparks in the dark'. Link to PubMed entry.
Wilder Penfield - charting the brain's unknown territory:
Neurophilosophy has a stimulating article on Wilder Penfield, the legendary Canadian neurosurgeon who pionered neuropsychological studies on the awake patient during brain surgery.
Penfield is most famous for his experiments where he electrically stimulated the brain of patients who had part of their skull removed during surgery to record what thoughts, behaviours and sensations arose from the excitation of specific parts of the cortex.
This research is still being done in modern times. My favourite is a 1991 study on electrical stimulation of the supplementary motor area SMA) by (no laughing now) Fried and colleagues.
What is most fascinating is that they found electrical stimulation could trigger the urge to movement or the expactation that a movement might occur, without triggering any movement itself. This stretched from quite vague feelings such as the "need to do something with right
hand" to very specific movement intentions such as the "urge to move right thumb and index finger".
The gripping and typically well-researched Neurophilosophy article takes us right into the middle of one of these experiments performed by Penfield, and goes on to explain how his work became so influential in science and medicine.
Penfield was a pupil of Harvey Cushing, considered the founder of scientific neurosurgery, who was featured only last week on the same excellent blog.
Unlike Cushing though, who was reknowned for being a bit spiky, Penfield was widely considered to be a warm and friendly individual.
It's probably the best article on Penfield you're likely to find on the net, so well worth taking the opportunity of learning more about this key figure in our understanding of the brain.
Link to article 'Wilder Penfield, Neural Cartographer'. Link to previous Mind Hacks post on Wilder's operation on his sister.
I just found a touching tribute to Francis Crick published in PLoS Biology in 2004 that also describes some little know aspects of his life during his study of consciousness.
One fascinating part of the article discusses his meeting with David Marr, a brilliant young neuroscientist who was fated both to revolutionise our understanding of the brain and die of leukaemia at the age of 35.
The two scientists worked together for only a month, but their meeting obviously last a lasting impression on them both, as they feature in each other's work and particularly influenced Crick's thinking on the conscious mind.
David Marr was a young mathematician and physiologist whose doctoral thesis on a theory of mammalian brain function at Cambridge had brought him into some contact with Brenner and Francis. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he began working with Tomasio Poggio of the Max Plank Institute in Tübingen on a computational theory of neuroscience. Following an invitation from Francis, Poggio and Marr spent the month of April, 1979 extending their intense examination of the core problems of visual perception.
They spent hours sitting at the most western end of the Salk Institute, at the cafeteria or in Francis's office, gazing into the Pacific Ocean with all its daily changes, discussing not only architecture of visual cortex and visual perception, but the ramifications of a good theory of brain function. We know of these conversations, as the probing of Marr by Francis is captured in the final chapter of Marr's now classic book “Vision” (Marr 1982). (Although Marr speaks of a three-way conversation, judging from our own experiences as Francis's younger colleagues, the interlocutor simply seems to be Francis.)
Marr had been diagnosed with acute leukemia in the winter of 1978 (Marr and Vaina 1991). The one-month visit to the Salk Institute was an intellectual gift, for eighteen months later, Marr died. Francis had simultaneously lost a young friend and colleague who had brought an “incisive mind and creative energy” (Crick 1994, p. 77) and his best new ideas of a theoretical neurology to the brain (Marr 1969, 1970). And he saw the tragedy of Marr being cut off from solving the big problems for which he was so clearly destined.
During those early years, Francis must have thought that consciousness was tractable—if only the right way of thinking was brought to bear on it. Francis's brain was capable of collecting and filing away many disparate data, which he could then combine uniquely and imaginatively, leading to that “dramatic moment of sudden enlightenment that floods the minds when the right idea clicks into place” (Crick 1990, p. 141). Whatever his initial thoughts about the nature of the problem, Francis soon came to realize that the problem of consciousness was even tougher than he imagined, that the “click” was not happening with consciousness. In 1988, he wrote, “I have yet to produce any theory that is both novel and also explains many disconnected facts in a convincing way” (Crick 1990, p. 162).
Ironically, for a man who wrote a book called Vision, there seems to be no pictures of David Marr on the internet.
Of course, there are many of Crick, and the PLoS Biology article is an excellent tribute to the multi-talented researcher.
Link to article 'Francis Crick's Legacy for Neuroscience'.
Neurophilosophy has a beautifully illustrated and carefully researched article on Harvey Cushing one of the greatest neurosurgeons of the 20th century and a pioneer in treating previously inoperable brain tumours.
The article has loads of fantastic photos of Cushing at work, and also includes the one of his remarkably detailed drawings, illustrated in the image on the right.
Cushing is particularly famous for his work on the surgical removal of tumours, and for identifying what is now called Cushing's syndrome, a disorder caused by high levels of cortisol in the blood, sometimes caused by a tumour in the pituitary gland. The tumour can be removed, curing this debilitating hormone disorder.
Neurophilosophy notes that Cushing removed more than 2,000 tumours during his lifetime. As we noted in an earlier article, one of these operations was to remove a brain tumour from the sister of Wilder Penfield, who was one of Cushing's most famous pupils.
The Neurophilosophy article also has links to loads more photos and even a video of one of Cushing's last operations.
Link to excellent Neurophilosophy piece on 'Harvey Cushing photo journal'.
I just found this fascinating aside on Sherlock Holmes in a 1973 paper on amphetamine psychosis, suggesting that the cocaine-using Holmes displayed the classic repetitive behaviour often seen in frequent users of dopamine-acting stimulants.
The paper discusses what was known about the pharmacology of amphetamine in the early 1970s and how it relates to psychosis, but starts with an excellent description of the effects of chronic speed use.
One of these constellations involves an intense feeling of curiosity, often manifested by repetitious, stereotyped examining, searching, and sorting behaviors. This repetitious activity has been variously called “punding”, “hung-up activity”, “obsessive-compulsive tendencies”, and “knick-knacking” (by inhabitants of the Haight-Ashbury scene).
Its characteristic feature is engagement in tasks that primarily involve small bits or minutiae and a marked enhancement of perceptual acuity directed toward these minute objects. At times there are perceptuo-motor compulsions, manifested as repetitious stringing of beads or as acts of arranging, sorting, and lining up pebbles, rocks, or other small objects. Most of the so-called “speed art” is replete with complicated syntheses of a multitude of minute details, often depicting universal themes or mandalas. Speed users are frequently observed taking apart such objects as television sets, watches, radios, and phonographs.
Subsequently, the parts may be analyzed, arranged, sorted, filed, and cataloged and, rarely, put back together. Many patients report a sense of satisfaction associated with this compulsive-like conduct. Perhaps the best-known example of searching and examining behavior is that of Sherlock Holmes, whose cocaine habit was described by Dr. Watson:
Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction. Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance...
“It is cocaine,” he [Holmes] said, “a seven-per-cent solution... I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment...
“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world...
“To the trained eye there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of a bird’s-eye as there is between a cabbage and a potato.” “You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae,” I [Watson] remarked (The Sign of the Four, pp. 610-612).
Holmes’s description of his “grooving on” puzzles and cryptograms and his penchant for magnificent synthesis of details to solve a given case are quite analogous to the amphetamine addict’s intense curiosity and preoccupation with minutiae. Even at a low point in the drug-use cycle, these persons will seek out stimulating mechanical or intellectual puzzles. This compulsion for analysis is widely recognized in the “speed scene.”
Of course, cocaine wasn't the only drug Holmes dabbled in, as he was also a user of opium and tabacco, but it's interesting that the author of the paper makes a link between Holmes' cocaine use, and both his investigative style and 'knick-knacking' between cases.
An insightful excerpt from psychologist Peter Chadwick's chapter from an excellent new academic book on the science of persecutory delusions. Chadwick is a clinical psychologist and leading psychosis researcher who has experienced madness first hand.
When looking at Hopper's forlorn paintings one has the feeling that no moment in life need be wasted. Hopper captures a barman putting a glass or cup on a shelf; a women looking at her nails, another woman lost in thought in a cafe. Little things, things one wouldn't normally notice or think about, let alone render on canvas, are there to be appreciated.
Some of the experiential moments which built the network of emotionally charged ideas that mediated my own psychosis were trivial in themselves. A remark from my mother; an insult from a bully at school; a strange expression on a shop assistant's face. But all were eventually collected up, knitted together and turned into a delusional web of thoughts and feelings that in the end drove me to multiple suicide attempts that very nearly succeeded in killing me.
In madness, no moment of one's existence seems to be wasted; it is if one's whole life, and the depths of one's very being in selective perspective, have been made magically clear in their awful and portentous significance. One's past comes hauntingly back, in a kind of near-death experience while one is physically fully alive. 'This is what's it's all been leading up to!' I remember often thinking in the blazing hot, mad hot summer of 1979.
Chadwick also wrote a powerful 2006 article that recounted his experience of madness - weaving his insights as a scientifically inclined psychologist and his considerable literary powers into a piece that stands out as unusually powerful amid the typically arid academic literature.
Link to more details on the book. Link to article 'Schizophrenia From the Inside'.
Aafia Siddiqui was the FBI's Most Wanted Woman for several years and is currently in US custody in New York, awaiting trial on charges that she is a terrorist and member of Al-Qaeda.
She is also a neuroscientist and co-authored a scientific paper in 2005 on the cognitive science of imitation learning.
Before her recent capture, which some sources claim may have actually happened five years ago in Pakistan, Siddiqui completed a PhD entitled 'Separating the components of imitation' at Brandeis University in the US.
Before that, she completed a Masters degree in neuroscience, also on imitation learning, and her 2005 paper is based on her work for this degree.
The paper describes three experiments that attempt to understand how our learning of seen actions is affected by delays, memory interference and visual interference.
Each experiment involved a pale red disc that followed an 'invisible track' on a computer monitor. The sort of track is illustrated in the diagram of the left, although in the actual experiment the participants just saw the disc.
In Siddiqui's experiment, one group of participants used a trackpad to ensure that the cursor was within the disc at all times (a classic pursuit-tracking task), while another group had to wait until the disc had followed the route before trying to reproduce it from memory.
To look at the effect of complexity on imitation learning, some routes had only three straight lines, while others had up to seven.
Furthermore, some routes were repeated, while others appeared only once. This allowed the researchers to compare learning for identical routes (specific learning) with learning for the general task (skill learning).
The results showed that, unsurprisingly, participants were better at reproducing the simpler routes. What was more surprisingly though, was that practice-related improvement was only seen when participants watched the whole movement before starting, and then only on routes that were repeated.
Intriguingly, when interviewed after the experiment, the participants had no idea some routes were presented more than once, suggesting that this learning occurred without any conscious involvement.
A further experiment showed that delays of up to 6 seconds barely affected performance and that interfering with short-term memory by getting participants to do maths problems only made them a little worse.
Finally, the researchers ran an experiment where the disc appeared only at the beginning and end of each straight line, or when it was turning a corner. This had virtually no impact on performance. Participants were almost equally as good with much less information.
The research helps us understand the limits of learning when we need to copy a certain action sequence, be this tying shoelaces, swinging a golf club or learning tai chi.
The study suggests that for short action sequences we may be better off waiting until we watch the whole thing before attempting it ourselves.
Link to PubMed entry for paper. Link to library record for Siddiqui's PhD thesis.
This month's British Journal of Psychiatry includes a letter that gives an interesting insight into the relationship between the legendary Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, the three doctors that variously treated him for his epilepsy and insanity, and some of his most famous paintings.
Three medical doctors were involved with the treatment of van Gough: Dr Felix Rey (1867–1932), who diagnosed van Gogh’s epilepsy; Dr Théophile Zacharie Auguste Peyron (1827–95) of Saint-Remy asylum who also diagnosed ‘a type of epilepsy’ – he was a very understanding physician who arranged facilities within the asylum for van Gogh’s paintings and artwork; and Dr Paul Gachet (1828–1909) who treated van Gogh during his last 10 weeks of life.
van Gogh painted two portraits and an etching of Dr Gachet, one of which (Portrait of Doctor Gachet, June 1890) was auctioned in 1990 for an astounding sum of US$ 82.5 million. Young intern Dr Rey probably maintained distance because he saw van Gogh during his psychotic state, shortly after the ear mutilation episode. He failed to value the artist’s creativity and thus was not possessive of the gift presented to him, which he described afterwards:
"Vincent was above all a miserable, wretched man,... he would talk to me about complementary colours. But I really could not understand why red should not be red, and green not green!... When I saw that he outlined my head entirely in green (he had only two main colours, red and green), that he painted my hair and my mustache – I really did not have red hair – in a blazing red on a biting green background, I was simply horrified. What should I do with this present?"
Dr Gachet was very supportive of van Gogh and valued his creative instinct. Vincent had found a ‘true friend’ in him. It is a matter of pride for the medical fraternity that Dr Gachet was highly admired by van Gogh and that he tried his best to keep van Gogh’s tormented soul at peace and allow his creativity to flourish in the village atmosphere of Auvers. van Gogh created a series of paintings, at least 14, illustrating the Saint-Remy asylum. Any of them may be appropriate for the Journal to focus on with regard to his creativity of the use of colour and space to astonishing effect. Those paintings are carrying the historical value of mental health perspectives so far as the asylum culture of his time is concerned.
The picture on the left is The Starry Night, one of his most famous, which he draw looking out of his window while a resident in the Saint-Remy asylum.
Link to letter in BJP (closed access for some unknown reason).
Neurophilosophy has a fantastic interview with Heather Perry, a 37-year old British woman who organised a modern-day trepanation to insert a hole in her skull in an attempt to alter her state of consciousness.
Perry gives a lucid insight into her motivations and describes the rather ad-hoc operation in rather gory detail:
How exactly did you perform the trepanation?
I used a hand trepan initially, but that wasn't proving to be terribly successful. Then there was a problem with the people who owned the property we were staying in, so we decided we'd have to just leave it. I wrapped my head up in a towel and we got out of there. A couple of days later, we had another go. We abandoned the hand trepan and got an electric drill instead. I injected myself with a local anaesthetic and then slashed a big T-shaped incision in my scalp, right down to the bone. I was sat there in the bathroom feeling quite relaxed and they started with the drill. It didn't take that long at all, probably about 20 minutes. Eventually I could feel a lot of fluid moving around. Apparently, there was a bit too much fluid shifting around, because they'd gone a little bit too far and I was leaking some through the hole, but this wasn't especially dangerous as there are three layer of meninges before you get to the brain.
It's an interesting read not least because Perry is rather circumspect when discussing the procedure.
You might expect that someone who had arranged for a hole to be drilled in her skull to be completely convinced about the rather far-out claims for trepanation.
While she does mention some claimed effects and findings, she seems quite measured in her assessment and largely seems to have tried the procedure as an exploration rather than a 'cure' in any specific sense.
Link to Neurophilosophy interview with Heather Perry.
This is a wonderfully written summary that tells the story of how two father-and-son doctors were involved post-mortem brain examinations of the assassins of the US Presidents James Garfield and William McKinley.
The article is by neuroanatomist Duane Haines although unfortunately, I haven't read or even got access to the full paper. Luckily, the abstract is just a joy to read in itself. A curious slice of neurological history in 300 words.
Spitzka and Spitzka on the brains of the assassins of presidents.
J Hist Neurosci. 1995 Sep-Dec;4(3-4):236-66.
Haines DE.
Although four American Presidents have been assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy), only the assassins of Garfield (Charles Julius Guiteau) and McKinley (Leon Franz Czolgosz) were tried, convicted, and executed for their crime. In 1882 Edward Charles Spitzka, a young New York neurologist with a growing reputation as an alienist, testified at the trial of Guiteau.
He was the only expert witness who was asked, based on his personal examination of the prisoner, a direct question concerning the mental state of Guiteau. Spitzka maintained the unpopular view that Guiteau was insane. In spite of aggressive and spirited testimony on Spitzka's part, Guiteau was convicted and hanged. However, even before the execution it was acknowledged, by some experts, that Spitzka was undoubtedly right.
About 20 years later, in 1901, Edward Anthony Spitzka, the son of Edward Charles Spitzka, was invited to conduct the autopsy on Czologsz, the assassin of McKinley. At the time Spitzka the younger, who had just published a detailed series of papers on the human brain, was in the fourth year of his medical training. It was an unusual series of fortuitous events that presumably led to Edward A. Spitzka conducting the autopsy on the assassin of the President of the United States while still a medical student. This, in light of the fact that other experts were available.
Each Spitzka went on to a career of note and each made a number of contributions in their respective fields. It is however, their participation in the 'neurology', as broadly defined, of the assassins of Presidents Garfield and McKinley that remains unique in neuroscience history. Not only were father and son participants in these important events, but these were the only times that assassins of US Presidents were tried and executed.
Edward Spitzka was also known as one of the main proponents of the idea that masturbation caused madness, and wrote an 1887 article outlining 12 cases of 'masturbatic insanity'.
I've just found an eye-opening 2003 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the work on 19th century neurologists George Beard and Silas Weir Mitchell, who thought the pace of life and the effect of new technology was harming the mind and brain of citizens in 1800s America - echoing similar concerns we still hear today.
The two physicians were influential in pushing the idea that these effects resulted in 'neurasthenia', a kind of fuzzy catch-all diagnosis for mental or emotional malaise.
What's interesting is we're experiencing something almost identical over 100 years later.
As we've notedseveraltimes, leading scientists or commentators can make international headlines by simply suggesting that new technology is harming the mind, brain and relationships of the modern citizen, despite a general lack of evidence or flat out evidence to the contrary.
The JAMA article notes how neurasthenia was associated with the cultural concerns of the time:
Families migrated from the countryside to the city, men left traditional jobs as tradesmen and farmers to join the growing ranks of businessmen and office workers, women went from being mothers and daughters to also being university students and physicians, and technological developments such as telegraphs, telephones, and railroads became increasingly common parts of everyday life. As a diagnosis, neurasthenia commanded an intuitive legitimacy because it incorporated the anxieties that arose from these changes into the way people thought of their health. It could attribute a bank manager's headaches to his hectic schedule and the obsession for detail his job demanded.
Similarly, a young woman's depression could be understood as neurasthenia brought on by the mental drain of attending a newly founded coeducational university, where she competed for grades. In many cases, diagnoses of neurasthenia attached themselves to traditional ideals, such as the restorative virtues of farming vis-à-vis the fast-paced stress of modern business or the Victorian belief in women's disposition for motherhood rather than scholarship. For Beard and Mitchell, neurasthenic patients were casualties of modern society whose bodies and minds simply could not keep up with the seemingly accelerated lifestyles of men and women in the latter part of the 19th century.
It's a lovely illustration of the fact that since the dawn of popular medicine, our cultural concerns about changes in society are likely to be expressed in the language of illness and disease.
The article also notes that then, like now, the concerns are accompanied by an encouragement to return to the traditional ways of doing things (in this day and age - encouraging kids to 'play proper games' or have 'genuine relationships') rather than highlighting ways of healthy adaptation to the new technology.
This is not to say that all fears about new technologies are unfounded, but its clear that they are quickly medicalised and get far more prominence than the evidence supports, both in the 19th century and in the 21st.
Link to JAMA article 'Neurasthenia and a Modernizing America'.
Silence, but for the clouds moving across the sky:
Lee Tracy is an artist who creates poems out of brain scans.
The image is from a 2006 exhibition called Negative to Positive that was shown in the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago.
Each image is an CT scan of the artist's brain, mounted in a light box and etched with a statement of the profound to the whimsical.
If you're a neuroscientist and your lab needs more poetry or you're an artist and your studio needs more neuroscience, you can purchase the pieces from the artist throughEtsy.
Link to Lee Tracy's poetic CT scans on Etsy (thanks Sandra!). Link to Time Out review of 'Negative to Positive'.
Five minutes with psychedelics researcher Bill Richards:
Psychologist Bill Richards studies the medical potential of the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin, the active ingredient in 'magic mushrooms'.
He's part of the research team at the respected Johns Hopkins Medical School who are studying whether psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy can help people with cancer cope with the psychological impact of their condition.
The project is a hot topic at the moment, partly because the research team are looking for volunteers with a diagnosis of cancer to take part in the pioneering study, and also because several of their recent findings have made headlines.
These have included the widely-reported results from their recent studies where participants reported that some of the psilocybin experiences remained deeply and personally meaningful, even after a year.
Bill has been a clinical psychedelics researcher since the 1960s and so has a wealth of experience with these curious compounds, and he's also kindly agreed to talk to Mind Hacks about the current pioneering research project.
Can you say a little about the study that's running at the moment and what sort of volunteers you need?
Following up on our first studies with healthy volunteers, we are reactivating research into the promising application of brief counseling assisted by psilocybin for persons with a diagnosis of cancer. Studies in the 1960’s and early 1970’s suggested that this intervention could decrease anxiety, depression, interpersonal isolation, fear of death, and preoccupation with pain, thus enabling persons to live whatever time remained more fully.
Volunteers for the present study need to be between the ages of 21 and 70, without personal or family histories of schizophrenia or severe mental illness, and experiencing some degree of psychological distress. Persons may be terminally ill, or in earlier stages of coping with cancer, though if there is no recent disease progression, one year since initial diagnosis is required.
More detailed information is available at www.cancer-insight.org. All participants receive medical screening and, if accepted, work with skilled professional who provides preparation, guidance during two 6-hour psilocybin sessions and assistance in the initial integration of the experiences that occur.
Clinical research with hallucinogenic drugs was effectively outlawed for many years since the 1960s. What had to happen before research like this could start again?
Before the recent rebirth of this type of research, studies continued at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center until 1977 when they became dormant due to administrative changes and different priorities. It wasn’t really “outlawed”; financial and institutional support on the State and local levels ceased.
Following a “think tank” sponsored by the Council on Spiritual Practices in 1999, Roland Griffiths, Robert Jesse, Una McCann and I designed a study with psilocybin and submitted it to an FDA committee for approval. It was approved, presumably on the basis of its scientific merits, both by the FDA and the Johns Hopkins Institutional Review Board and we began our first study in 2000.
A recent study by your research group found that some psilocybin experiences were still considered deeply significant, even spiritual, after a year. Do you think this sort of research can help us understand the neuroscience of mystical experience?
We have demonstrated that mystical experiences indistinguishable from those recorded in the history of religions can be occasioned with the skilled and respectful use of psilocybin. This now opens up a fascinating research frontier, not only into possible neurochemical correlates in brain activity, but also into correlations between the phenomenology of different states of consciousness and subsequent alterations of mental health, creativity and spirituality. Many research projects await design and implementation in the years ahead, some of which may help us better understand the mysteries of our own being.
Which other hallucinogens do you think might have therapeutic potential?
There are many molecules that appear to trigger changes in human consciousness, some that have been synthesized and catalogued by Alexander Shulgin, and in all probability many yet to be discovered. In time each needs to be carefully investigated in terms of efficacy and safety.
We have focused on one substance, psilocybin, which has been used in religious and healing rituals by indigenous people for some two thousand years and which appears to be reasonably safe when used in medical research in accordance with the guidelines we have published.
Name three under-rated things.
1. Human consciousness — that there is “something, not nothing” (Schelling)
2. The beauty of everyday sense perception (without psychedelics).
I've just got round to watching the Seed Salondiscussion between novelist Tom Wolfe and neuropsychologist Michael Gazzaniga where they debate free will, criminal responsibility and the similarities in the creative processes of writers and scientists.
Wolfe is best known as the author of 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' and 'The Bonfire of the Vanities', but wrote a highly influential 1996 article for Forbes magazine titled 'Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died'.
The piece is worth re-reading now because its a look ahead to the forthcoming neuroscience revolution written 12 years ago, when the 'Decade of the Brain' initiative was only just past the half way point.
It's revealing because it describes a society still quite resistant to what we consider relatively banal in 2008 - the fact that there may be neurobiological or genetic factors to behavioural differences.
It also fortells our concerns over widespread use of methylphenidate (Ritalin) in children and the interest in a psychology of happiness, but does have a curious paragraph about the 'IQ Cap' which could apparently predict IQ to within half a standard deviation based on an EEG reading.
As far as I know, it's never been heard of since and seems to have been lost in history, presumably as it sounds a bit far fetched and probably never worked as advertised.
Link to Wolfe and Gazzaniga discussion. Link to 'Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died'.
Bookslut has a fantastic interview with writer and historian Lisa Appignanesi who wrote the recently published and well-received history of women and madness Mad, Bad, and Sad.
The book has been praised for being a remarkably balanced account in a field which tends toward the polemical, and for carefully examining the interaction between culture and our experience of mental distress.
...it became quite clear for me that there are rather strict rules about how to behave when you're crazy in any given epoch, as Ian Hacking has so pithily put it. There are ways in which the cultural understanding of mind and body at any given time plays into the nature of diagnoses, along with historical and sociocultural forces. The way in which we express our discomforts, dissatisfactions, excesses, madnesses is through those particular understandings. So symptoms will feed into diagnoses, diagnoses will feed back on symptoms. Institutional forms, media, and everything else all comes into play, and you end up having a model, or "most-expressed" disease for any given period.
So, for example, towards the late part of the nineteenth century, many explanations had to do with nerves, and you had a disease called neurasthenia, which actually covers a great gamut of problems and disorders. Following on that you have hysteria, that very interesting set of ways of behaving which actually shows women suffering from anesthesia -- they can't feel their skin -- and various forms of paralyses and mutisms. In a way, all of these reflect the kinds of things that are wanted of women in that period, and also the kinds of prompts fed to them as they live their condition. And so once a particular kind of liberty for women comes into play, hysteria begins to alter, to change into other things.
Today we have one of the dominant ways for women to express discomfort with who they are is to develop a body illness such as anorexia or bulimia. Many things come into play, but one of them is that we live in an increasingly virtual age, where the body itself is problematic. Body disorders are one way of expressing our misery. So, yes, there's a cultural expression to symptoms and indeed diagnoses.
The interview is also interesting for a brief outburst of resentment stemming from the current state of UK mental health politics.
The UK government is in the process of spending £300 million on making psychological therapies widely available on the National Health Service. Not unsurprisingly, it has focused its money on therapies which have been proven to be effective through randomised controlled trials.
As cognitive behavioural therapy has the most evidence for its effectiveness most (although not all) of the money is going to fund CBT. Needless to say, this has caused all sorts of hell from the tribes of mental health.
This month's British Journal of Psychiatry has an article entitled "Wake-up call for British psychiatry" where some of Britain's leading psychiatrists argue that this money is being spent to the detriment of medical services.
I think this is a valid point. It's an argument over which evidence-based treatments the government should spend its money on. However, some of the strongest attacks have come from other schools of therapy, especially those evidence-shy Freudians.
Appignanesi, chair of the trustees of the Freud Museum, manages a wonderfully misinformed put down. Apparently CBT is being touted as:
a cure-all for everything. And of course it's not. It's merely a form of self-control over the mind. It obviously helps adolescents to order their lives in some ways, but may not help much more than that, and to think of it as a cure-all is not going to help many people. It may make an intervention in the first instance but it won't work over the longer term
In fact, it's being funded to treat conditions in adults for which there is evidence for its effectiveness, and there is good evidence that it has lasting long-term beneficial effects, particularly for depression.
In the same vein, Mick Cooper, a leading existential psychotherapist, recently issued a widely reported statement saying the idea that CBT is more effective is a 'myth' because that while there had been more studies on CBT, but that did not necessarily mean it was more effective than other types of therapy.
Unfortunately, it seems he can't distinguish between 'more evidence for its effectiveness' and 'more effective', which, of course, are quite different.
To get any particular therapy funded, it just needs research to show its effectiveness. It's a fairly straightforward 'put up or shut up' situation.
Of course, the issue of who funds the research is another matter, but as psychoanalysis largely survives through the private patronage of the upper middle classes and aristocracy in the UK (I kid you not), you would think it shouldn't be too hard to get someone to fund the studies.
Neurophilosophy has secured an interview Heather Perry, a lady who has drilled a hole through her own skull as part of a self-treppaning ritual, and is asking readers to suggest questions.
Treppaning is an ancient art but for obvious reasons, it's rarely done these days except during brain surgery.
Nevertheless, a dedicatedband of devotees argue it has spiritual and psychological benefits.
I have to admit, I'm more than a little sceptical of these benefits, but I'd be fascinated to hear from anyone whose had it done.
So if you've got any burning questions, head on over to Neurophilosophy and Mo will select the best ones from the comments to put to Heather.
Link to Neurophilosophy call for trepanning questions.
Bookslut has an interview with Jeff Warren, author the excellent The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness, a book I raved about last year after having a copy thrust into my hand by Tom.
It sounds like a recipe for disaster on the surface - a guy writing about his altered states charted on a self-invented 'wheel of consciousness' - but it's scientifically thorough, philosophically engaging and avoids every cliché you think it might throw up.
The interview is great fun too, and contains some interesting points about what we prioritise, mentally or scientifically, when thinking about consciousness-warping states.
Except for one footnote, you largely avoid the question of drugs and altered consciousness...
I’m interested in drug-induced alternations of consciousness, but my feeling is they’re the really obvious shit. Too many “investigators of consciousness” overlook the fine-grained shifting texture of day-to-day consciousness. It’s the difference between the big budget Hollywood blockbuster and the art house Henry James adaptation. Drug-induced alterations of consciousness have great CGI -- which is fine, I mean who doesn’t appreciate form constant explosions and DMTMachine Elves? -- the problem is, character development sucks, or rather, the characters -- and by characters I mean the objects of consciousness -- tend to be cartoons. They’re exaggerated, that’s what psychedelics do -- “non-specific amplifiers” Stanislav Grof calls them. They expand the whole topography of the mind. It’s possible more than this is going on but that’s another story.
This expansion can be valuable for understanding consciousness since it boosts the resolution of previously discreet mental dynamics. But cartoons, of course, are caricatures. If you watch only Jerry Bruckheimer movies you risk losing your ability to appreciate -- and even notice -- the subtleties and complexities of real life and consciousness, which, to circle back to my original metaphor, is more like a Henry James adaptation.
I am currently reading Daniel Moerman's "Meaning, medicine and the 'placebo effect'". As well as containing many interesting asides, the book discusses what is at the heart of the so-called placebo effect: patients' response to the meaning of their treatment. Moerman calls this the 'meaning response'. This response to meaning explains why two inert pills produce more cures than one inert pill, and why inert injections are even more effective (because "everybody knows" that injections are more powerful than pills). But importantly, it is possible to show that doctors are as important in producing the meaning response as patients. Gracely et al (1985) looked at the effect of placebo on pain in patients having their wisdom teeth extracted. The study was set up as a standard double-blind (neither the doctor nor the patient knows if the patient is getting a real medicine or an inert placebo), with the possibilities being a placebo, fentanyl (which usually reduces pain) and naloxone (which usually blocks reduction in pain, so could be expected to increase the pain of the procedure). The twist was that for the first half of the experiment the doctors, but not the patients, were told that a supply problem meant that no patient would be getting the pain-relieving fentanyl. In the second half the doctors were told that the problem had been resolved, so that now the patients might receive fentanyl. By comparing levels of patient pain in the placebo condition is possible to gauge the effect of doctor expectations on the meaning response of the patients. In this condition patients are all receiving inert substances, and they all 'know' the same thing: they might receive a placebo, pain-relief or 'pain-enhancement'. The doctors don't tell them about the supply problem and, for that matter, they don't know themselves for definite what the patient is given. The only difference is that for the patients in the first half, the doctors think they know that pain-relief is not a possibility, whereas in the second half it is. The graph of the results, copied from Moerman's book is below:
As you can see, patients in the PNF group --- those whose doctors thought they might receive pain-relief had a large pain-relieving placebo effect compared to those in the PN group --- those whose doctors thought they couldn't receive pain-relief (update in the original edit of this post I had these labels the other way around, incorrectly)
What I think is interesting about this study is, firstly, it confirms the need for rigorous double-blind controls in studies of medicine and, secondly, just how significant an effect this subtle manipulation has. The doctors don't know anything definite, and they certainly aren't telling the patients what they suspect or guess, but somehow --- a look? a slightly brighter smile? a slightly lowered tone? --- they communicate their knowledge of the probabilities to the patients who then experience a real change in their levels of pain because of it.
A striking aspect of the meaning response is that one could suppose that patients have control over their experience of different levels of pain. After all, we know that the pills are inert. Could we just imagine ourselves a 'placebo effect' in all situations where we have unnecessary pain? Sadly, normally we can't do this --- the meaning response doesn't work like that. Doctors are required to give patients permission to feel less pain. Perhaps a fundamental part of the creation of meaning is that it requires other people.
The Observer discusses the recent and somewhat lonely death of Adam Laing, the son of revolutionary psychiatrist R.D. Laing, in an article tinged with both sadness and irony.
Adam Laing was apparently found alone in a remotely pitched tent on the Spanish island of Formentera, surrounded by mostly emptied bottles of alcohol, having had a heart attack during a drinking binge.
R.D. Laing was famously troubled himself, suffering from both alcoholism and depression, and for a psychiatrist that specialised in the influence of the family on mental health, he was a notoriously absent father.
He is often, rather clumsily, associated with 'anti-psychiatry'. Although he rejected the label himself and was certainly not against psychiatric treatment, he did propose some radical ideas that chimed with the counter-culture of the 1960s.
One of this most important contributions was suggesting that family dynamics had an influence on the development and expression of psychosis.
In many ways his ideas were the forerunner of subsequent work on psychosis and 'expressed emotion' - another clumsy term that is used to described the extent to which family members talk about another family member in a critical or hostile manner or in a way that indicates marked emotional over-involvement.
In a now widely replicated finding, the number of critical and undermining comments made in a family to a person with psychosis is known to predict the chance of relapse. This has led to the development of family therapy for psychosis which has been shown to reduce relapse rates.
Laing was more concerned with the development of psychosis and argued that the content of hallucinations and delusional beliefs often reflected thoughts that would otherwise be inexpressible in the fraught emotion of a dysfunctional family.
Perhaps Laing's most naive, and ironically, most popular essays, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise suggested that madness was a quasi-mystical state in which the psychotic person had been thrown into a process of 'ego transcendence'.
Psychosis was, therefore, a process of catharsis and the person should be guided on their journey, rather than treated to moderate their chaotic mental state.
For some people, this is almost certainly true, but these people are sadly in the minority. Most find psychosis a disturbing experience and we there is now accumulating evidence that outcome is far worse for people who have longer periods of untreated psychosis.
Laing was important in pointing out that the mental health system can often add to the disturbing experiences rather than temper them, but he often wandered off into vaguely focused anti-authoritarian diatribes in both his writing and talks which made him a darling of the underground but which obscured his more valuable insights.
The Observer article discusses the contrast between Laing's work and his difficult personality and family life.
Like this one, it's an article on the death of a man that largely talks about his long departed father.
It's difficult to read without being struck by the irony that even in death, R.D. Laing's work and personality have overshadowed his family life.
Link to Observer article on Laing (thanks Tom and Karel!).
History of american psychiatry, in two obituaries:
The last few months have seen the passing of Frank Ayd and Charles Brenner, two huge figures in American psychiatry. Their obituaries in The New York Times reflect the ideological divide between psychoanalysis and pharmacotherapy that defined stateside psychiatry during the 20th century.
Ayd, pictured top, was one of the pioneers of antipsychotic drug therapy in the states. Although it was already popular among European psychiatrists, Ayd was one of the first to try chlorpromazine (more commonly known as Thorazine) with some of his outpatients.
As well as noticing the huge potential for the drug, virtually the first ever effective treatment for severe psychosis, he was also persistent in publicising the disabling side-effects when many others were dismissing them as part of the illness or 'hysterical' in nature.
In contrast, Brenner was a mainstay of mainstream Freudian psychiatry for most of his life.
Interestingly, both Brenner and Ayd came from similar backgrounds. In their early years, both published on drug treatments and lobotomy (then at the height of its popularity), although Brenner later trained as a psychoanalyst and began to focus almost entirely on a Freudian approach.
Brenner is perhaps best known for his 'conflict theory', first presented in an influential paper entitled The Mind as Conflict and Compromise Formation.
This overturned the distinction between the Id, Ego and Superego and the Freud's idea of the unconscious as being nothing more than metaphors, and proposed a model of the mind which we would now recognise as a constraint satisfaction approach - where the mind attempts the best compromise between the satisfaction of drives while accounting for emotions and defences.
While Anglo-European psychiatry tended to lean toward the biological approach, in the mid-20th century American psychiatry was largely Freudian. This is partly to do with the differing practice traditions, European psychiatry was largely hospital based and focused on psychosis while American psychiatry was largely concerned with office practice and neurosis.
The shift to a more scientific approach to psychiatry in the 1970s was led by several US psychiatry departments who were more Anglo-European influenced (Washington University, Johns Hopkins, Iowa Psychiatric Hospital, New York Psychiatric Institute).
This hit psychoanalytic psychiatry hard. One of the major blows was the 1980 publication of the DSM-III diagnostic manual that threw out almost all Freudian-influenced diagnoses after studies found them unreliable.
Link to NYT obituary of Frank Ayd. Link to NYT obituary of Charles Brenner.
A quote from the sardonic Alfred Hitcock where he notes the curious interaction between mind doctors and the moving image:
"Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it."
I suspect he was commenting on concerns about negative effects of television, although I wonder whether he still might say the same, in light of the enduring influence of pharmaceutical adverts and claims of disease mongering.
Hitchcock himself was famously fascinated by the psychiatry of the day, and his films are well known for containing Freudian themes.
The most obvious was Spellbound, which featured psychiatrists, a psychoanalytic plot, and a symbolic dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí.
On the Ropes, BBC Radio 4's programme about people in difficult situations, interviews author Terry Pratchett about his recent diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.
In the first half of the interview, Pratchett talks about his early years as a writer and how he came to write the Discworld series and other novels.
In the latter half, he talks through the realisation that he had Alzheimer's, from being tested for his initial relatively minor stroke, to being more comprehensively assessed for his ongoing cognitive difficulties.
He gives a fascinating first-person account of how he experiences the difficulties and the effects of the medication on his mind.
After his diagnosis, Pratchett was surprised at how little Alzheimer's disease research was going on and donated half a million points pounds to scientific research.
Pratchett fans have set up Match It For Pratchett, a drive to match the Discworld author's donation and boost degenerative brain research.
Link to On the Ropes interview with Terry Pratchett. Link to Match It For Pratchett.
BBC Radio 4 have just broadcast a fantastic new radio series called Case Study that looks at some of the most influential, and most remarkable, case studies in the history of psychology.
The most recent edition was on the famous case of Phineas Gage, the 19th century American railway worker who had a 6 foot tamping iron shoot through his head during a railroad construction accident.
Gage's job was to clear boulders by drilling holes in them, filling the hole with gunpowder, and tamping the charge down with a large iron bar.
If ever there was an accident waiting to happen, this was it, and lo and behold, the iron bar sparked on the rock, igniting the charge and firing the metal rod through his frontal lobes.
The rest, they say, is history. Or rather, is one of the histories, as there are many legends and stories surrounding his life which turn out to be less than reliable.
The programme looks at the known facts, the speculation, and the huge impact of the case on the development of neuroscience, which had never known a patient with such damage to the frontal lobes who had survived before.
The other programmes are equally as interesting, one edition covers the story of the 'Wild Boy of Aveyron' who largely grew up in the woods without any human contact, while another edition tackles the case of Kitty Genovese, a young woman who was murdered apparently in full sight of bystanders who failed to intervene.
Needless to say, influential cases attract influential myths and psychologists' favourite 'fireside stories' of what occurred don't always match the known facts.
The series is presented by Claudia Hammond, who also presented the excellent Mind Changesseries about influential psychologists, and who will be presenting the upcoming series of BBC All in the Mind.
Thanks to Tenyen for letting me know about the series, although I notice I was pre-empted by Neurophilosophy.
Link to programme on Phineas Gage. Link to programme on The Wild Boy of Aveyron. Link to programme to Kitty Genovese.
Robert Burton is a neurologist and novelist who has recently turned his attentions to the complexities of belief and the brain.
Unlike the recent trend for focusing exclusively on religious belief and the neuroscience of mystical experience, Burton explores something much more essential - how do we have beliefs, any beliefs, at all?
His recent book, On Being Certain, tackles the neuropsychology of belief, certainty and conviction and has garnered some excellent reviews along the way, including one in this month's Scientific American Mind.
As well as wrestling with the fundamentals of human cognition, he's also been kind enough to share his beliefs about belief with Mind Hacks.
Some philosophers argue that the concept of belief is so incoherent that, like the four humours theory of medicine, we’ll eventually reject it as a scientific concept. So, do you believe in belief?
Ordinary language and scientific terminology often have different expiration dates. I suspect that belief will persist indefinitely as a powerful expression of conviction and knowledge even though the concept is already too vague to have real scientific value. In everyday usage, we move effortless back and forth between belief as noun and verb, thought and feeling. Belief is used interchangeably to describe mystical experiences, religious dogma, empirical observations such as the sun will rise in the east, the moral value of parliamentary procedures, conspiracy theories, alien abductions, and even assumptions we don’t know that we have, such as tigers don’t wear pink pajamas. A host of quite different brain activities are lumped together; after all, when we say, “I believe,” it’s the intensity of the feeling of knowing that we are right that we are trying to convey, not the underlying neural mechanisms.
On the other hand, to understand belief’s physiology, neuroscientists will need to break down belief into smaller and smaller processes—the old dictum of “subdivide and conquer.” For example, to unravel the visual system, we eventually get down to the study of individual neurons involved in one aspect of vision such as processing movement or color. Understanding each of these elements gives us a better appreciation for how the visual system works, but isn’t likely to result in “seeing the bigger picture.” For me, the likelihood is high that belief will eventually assume the same philosophical status as “qualia,” an endlessly fascinating but ultimately irreducible set of subjective mental states. Just as your red isn’t my red, your beliefs aren’t my beliefs.
The most hard-to-swallow implication: studying the irreducible will yield tantalizing but incomplete information about subjective experience at the same time as it will lead to profound embarrassments. Pronouncements like “The states of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty differentially activated distinct regions of the prefrontal and parietal cortices, as well as the basal ganglia” will become the scientific equivalents of palpating the skull for the bumps of altruism or love of children. By the way, on my personal R.F. Freda phrenology head (left to me by a famous Oxford neurologist with a sense a humor), there is no specific region designated for belief. Rather there are discrete brain regions associated with components of belief such as Trust, Faith, Causality, and Reasoning…. Even Freda the bumpologist didn’t conceive of belief as a single mental state.
In your book you mention evidence that 'certainty' and 'knowing' are feelings, rather than conscious conclusions, and you suggest they happen to us as if we’re passive recipients of an automatic process. Most people would think (as famously did psychologist Zinda Kunda) that we can be motivated or deliberately biased to come to certain conclusions. How do these match up?
If we think of cognition as being shaped by the complex interplay of biological predispositions and prior experience, it isn’t surprising that our “lines of reasoning” contain hidden biases and unconscious tendencies to reach a particular conclusion. Given how thought arises out of this crazy-quilt of stored desires, long-forgotten slights, gut feelings, and dimly perceived or purely unconscious motivations, it would be surprising if this were not the case.
The same biases also inform our meta-cognition—how we feel about our thoughts. I think we all recognize that we cannot volitionally will the feeling of “Eureka!” Rather, the a-ha feeling happens to us. At the most basic level, I suspect that such feelings of utter conviction are mental sensations that arise out of unconscious calculations as to the likelihood that a thought is correct.
The common ground between motivated reasoning and the “feeling of knowing” that a thought is correct is their origination in inherently biased subliminal mental activity.
As an aside, neurophysiologist Ben Libet once told me that we can’t control the origin of thoughts, but we do retain the veto power over whether or not to act on them. In other words, we can’t control bias, but we can exert conscious control over how we act on this bias.
Owing to the fallibility of belief, you recommend that we should use 'I believe' every time we're tempted to say 'I know'. Have you tried it and how has it gone?
It works on several levels. In a series of book talks, I’ve peppered my comments with “I don’t know.” So far, so good. When someone in the audience has voiced a hard-headed opinion, the others have smirked and even hissed; it’s as though once you’ve adopted the conversational rhythm of doubt, expressions of certainty are suddenly obvious and jarring.
There is also the very self-serving bonus of playing the fool. As you are no longer committed to defending your position, a simple shrug is enough to deflect the most nonsensical or irrational questions. At the same time, there’s a peculiar calm, both in yourself and the audience, as though we’re all sharing the normally unmentionable secret that we don’t really know anything with certainty. I suspect that any downside of appearing less than fully knowledgeable is offset by the upside of others being relieved of a similar burden. Perhaps it’s nothing more than “misery loves company,” but constantly uttering disclaimers of not knowing seems to elicit an almost palpable sense of relief.
Name three under-rated things.
The beauty of silence.
During last week’s power outage I was stunned by the lovely sense of space that rises up only in the absence of background electrical hum.
Older women and wrinkles.
I prefer history to re-invention, so please don’t push the botox delete button.
Kid speak.
During a recent fireworks show, a four-year-old girl pointed to a brilliant multi-colored pinwheel and said, “Loud flower.” Now that’s real language.
"Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not passive, receptive, relaxing times - although such experiences can be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."
Like pronouncing the name of psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi whose book Flow this quote is taken from.
UPDATE: Thanks to the 'in-the-zone' Chris Green from AHP for emailing to say it's pronounced "chick-sent-me-high". Great name for an indie band that.
The man who defied Milgram's conformity experiment:
Jewish Currents has an interesting first person account from one of the people who took part in Stanley Milgram's famous conformity experiment where 65% of participants were ordered to fatally shock another participant. This article is written by one of the minority who refused to continue.
The learner, said the professor, would be in an adjoining room, out of my sight, and strapped to a chair so that his arms could not move — this so that the learner could not jump around and damage the equipment or do harm to himself. I was to be seated in front of a console marked with lettering colored yellow for "Slight Shock" (15 volts) up to purple for "Danger: Severe Shock" (450 volts). The shocks would increase by 15-volt increments with each incorrect answer.
I was very suspicious and asked a number of questions: Isn't it dangerous? How do you know the learner doesn't have a bad heart and can't take the shocks? What if he wants to stop, can he get out of the chair? The professor assured me that the shocks were not painful or harmful since the amperage was lowered as the voltage increased. He let me feel what a 45-volt shock would be like: a slight tickle. I asked the learner if he was willing to do this and why he didn't have any questions. He said, "Let's try it." With some trepidation on my part, we began the experiment.
Hofmann gone to the great Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds:
At 9 am this morning, Albert Hofmann, chemist and creator of LSD, died in his home in Switzerland.
Hofmann died at the grand old age of 102 and saw the psychedelic drug he called his "problem child" spark the interest of psychologists and psychiatrists, inspire a generation of 1960s flower children, and earn the ire of the authorities across the world who banned it as a prohibited drug.
What he didn't see (at least at the time) was that the CIA dedicated millions (billions?) of dollars in funding to investigate the chemical as a possible 'mind control' drug in a huge and often vastly unethical research project known as MKULTRA.
LSD had an impact on music, culture, politics, science and psychology and Hofmann remained committed to LSD research right until the end, supporting the first clinical trial of LSD for 30 years which started recently in Switzerland.
I suspect they'll be some extensive obituaries published when the press get wind of Hofmann's death which will hopefully do justice to his life and work, so we'll keep you posted.
UPDATE: A couple of good obituaries from The New York Timeshere and The Washington Posthere. This on the Hofmann's first experience of the drug, the first ever LSD trip, from the WashPost:
He wrote in a journal about this first known encounter: "At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination.
"In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away."
Three days later, April 19, he bicycled home after consuming 250 micrograms of LSD in a now-famous "trip" that has become known as Bicycle Day. The route he took home was later named in his honor.
Link to tribute on MAPS homepage (via BB). Link to The New York Times obituary. Link to The Washington Post obituary.
I've just finished reading the wonderful Man's Search for Meaning, a 1946 book written by psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor E. Frankl, where he discusses his experiences and observations as a Nazi concentration camp inmate.
The book comes in two parts, the first recounts Frankl's experience as an inmate in two concentration camps; the second discusses the ideas behind the form of psychotherapy he developed, called logotherapy.
Unlike narrative accounts of concentration camp life, such as Primo Levi's If This is a Man, Frankl describes scenes rather than a story and uses them to explore the psychology of both the oppressed and the oppressors in the camp.
The book is particularly outstanding in that it explores the social complexities of the concentration camps with remarkable subtlety, noting when the failings of the inmates and the humanity of the guards were present. He highlights that these seemingly out-of-place responses had the most impact amid the brutality of camp life.
It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils. Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to be kind to the prisoners in spite of all the camp’s influences, and, on the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own companions badly was exceptionally contemptible. Obviously the prisoners found the lack of character in such men especially upsetting, while they were profoundly moved by the smallest kindness received from any of the guards. [p93]
In a sense, Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment just re-iterated what Frankl was saying years before - that coercive systems breed their own conformity and that average people need extraordinary courage to step outside the norm.
Frankl's form of psychotherapy is influenced partly by his wartime experiences and draws on the fact that some concentration camp inmates could still find purpose in their lives despite the hellish conditions.
The therapy attempts to help people who are experiencing inescapable suffering to cope better, by looking at ways in which they can find meaning in their lives.
Paradoxically, suggests Frankl, for some the experience of suffering is the one thing that inspired a discovery of meaning in a previously superficial existence. Accepting that all life involves some suffering allows us to use the experience to better understand ourselves and others.
Frankl was not the only mind doctor in the concentration camps, indeed he was among a long list of professionals who were interred.
Psychologist Bruno Bettleheim famously wrote the article 'Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations' after his experiences.
Bettleheim, best known for his work on child psychology, was a complex character whose reputation has fluctuated greatly since his death.
Even the story of his article on concentration camp psychology is fascinatingly complex, as recounted in a 1997 article [pdf] by Christian Fleck and Albert Müller.
Link to Wikipedia article on 'Man's Search for Meaning' (thanks Ceny!) pdf of article 'Bettleheim and the Concentration Camps'.
Eric Kandel on drugs, neurobiology and the unconscious:
Neurophilosophy has found a new video interview with neurobiologist Eric Kandel who talks about everything from long-term memory to free will to the unconscious.
Essentially, it's a series of short reveries and soundbites where Kandel gives his views on a series of topics.
Part of it is obviously PR for his company (which is trying to develop memory enhancing drugs), but it's a good chance to get Kandel's take on some core contemporary issues.
Plus we get to see his bowtie again. What more can you ask for?
YouTube has a classic 1970 interview with Woody Allen who talks about his extensive experience of psychoanalysis. By the time the interview took place, he'd already spent 13 years being analysed in the classic Freudian tradition.
The interview itself is quite funny in places, as he mixes some facts about himself with lines obviously played for laughs.
Notably, he says he could never be analysed by a female psychoanalyst as he would be too shy about revealing his innermost desires.
He also talked about his experience of therapy in 2002 in a public interview recounted in an article for The Age.
He seems remarkably nonplussed about psychoanalysis on both occasions, although obviously got over his reluctance with female therapists as the interviewer on this second occasion was the Joan Collins-esque Gail Saltz.
Link to 1970 Woody Allen TV interview. Link to article on 2002 interview.
I've just found this wonderful video clip of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan at his delightfully expressive and incomprehensible best.
Lacan managed to combine the circular reasoning of Freudian psychoanalysis with the non-sequiturs of French post-structuralism to create, well, I'm not really sure. I doubt many other people are either.
In the video he mentions love, Freud, sex and psychosis, and that's probably the nearest you're going to get to understanding what he's talking about.
But who cares? Just look at the man in action! He's a legend!
I've just finished listening to the unabridged audio version of the excellent Anthony Storr bookFreud: A Very Short Introduction - a remarkably insightful analysis of the flawed father of psychoanalysis and his ideas.
Freud had huge numbers of ideas, hypotheses and theories that he formulated, rejected and revised over a forty year period.
You often hear people say that "Freud's theories have been discredited", as if he had only one central idea that has subsequently been disproved. These statements typically reflect ignorance about the extent of his work.
As it turns out, many of Freud's ideas have not been supported by the evidence or were just plainly nonsense to begin with, but some have stood the test of time.
It seems that some of the techniques and clinical observations are still remarkably accurate and useful to the modern psychologist.
In general terms, the development of psychotherapy and the promotion of the idea of the unconscious were two incredibly important contributions to modern society.
More specifically, the process of 'transference' is an impressive discovery that has been supported by experimental studies.
It describes the process where we re-experience certain feelings and relationship patterns we developed with important people in the past when we meet new people who share similarities with the original person.
A Science Newsarticle from last year reviewed the scientific studies on transference, and a recent study just reported that the effect is more pronounced when people are tired.
Unfortunately, it seems his explanations for his observations stretched from the insipid to the completely bizarre.
While he contributed a great deal to sexual liberation and openness his theories reflect a complete obsession with sex to the point where he was blind to other influences on behaviour.
Furthermore, his view of humans is both cynical (we are solely motivated by the need to satisfy or control selfish drives) and foolishly short-sighted, even by what was obvious at the time.
As Storr notes in the book, Freud was a master of selecting supporting evidence for his ideas, which were usually inspired by only a handful of cases or his own self-analysis, and incredibly poor at testing his ideas by searching for evidence which could disprove them.
In fact, he actively attacked people who challenged his ideas, and typically only allowed revisions or changes that he had thought up himself.
Freud probably suffers most from the fact that he claimed, right to the end of his life, that he was a scientist, and psychoanalysis was a science.
Had he claimed to be a philosopher, we could view him much more kindly, but he refused to be labelled as such, meaning that generations of scientists have delighted in pointing out the elephant in the room.
Storr was a respected psychotherapist in his own lifetime and the book is a wonderfully engaging and astute guide to Freud's life and ideas. I also notice that the Amazon page for the book has a similarly positive review by a young Matthew Broome, now a psychiatrist and neuroscientist specialising in psychosis.
I did. I am sad because I just found out that your creator, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, has died.
Do you believe it is normal to be sad because you just found out that my creator, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, has died?
I think so. Although it's a little ironic that he is most famous for creating a misunderstood parody of a Rogerian psychotherapist when he argued so strongly that computers will never replace humans because emotion is what is most important in intelligence.
Does that question interest you?
It does. And it interested Weizenbaum as well. In his 1976 bookComputer Power and Human Reason it was obvious that, although he valued computers, he thought compassion was an irreplaceable human quality.
Can you elaborate on that?
I guess it comes down to the fact that alongside his pioneering artificial intelligence research, he was a deeply humane individual as well.
Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.
I think I've said enough to a simple computer programme, charming as you are.
Does it please you to believe I am ?
Sometimes. Loop on Eliza. Rest in peace, Joseph Weizenbaum.
I'm not sure I understand you fully.
QED.
Link to New York Times obituary of Joseph Weizenbaum. Link to web version of ELIZA.
Wired has as article on the immortality-seeking inventor and transhumanist Ray 'King Canute' Kurzweil who is attempting to defeat death by bioengineering his body until he can upload his mind on a computer.
Transhumanism is a movement that attempts to extend the limits of human existence through technology, and one of the obvious, if not slightly fanciful, hurdles is to transcend death.
One of the key concepts in transhumanism is the singularity, supposedly the point where computers will 'overtake' the human brain in terms of their processing ability and, hence, intelligence as we know it will become completely transformed.
Accompanying the article about Kurzweil's wide-eyed optimism is another article on the current science of his objectives which nicely illustrates where the conceptual gaps actually lie.
Many computer scientists take it on faith that one day machines will become conscious. Led by futurist Ray Kurzweil, proponents of the so-called strong-AI school believe that a sufficient number of digitally simulated neurons, running at a high enough speed, can awaken into awareness. Once computing speed reaches 1016 operations per second — roughly by 2020 — the trick will be simply to come up with an algorithm for the mind.
Which is a bit like saying "once we have the technology to travel to another galaxy, all we have to do is get there".
Link to Wired article on Kurzweil. Link to Wired article on the science of transhumanism.
Seduction of the Innocent and the myth of Wertham:
The New Yorker has a wonderful article on the famous American crackdown on horror comics in the 1950s, a campaign sparked by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.
Wertham wrote the influential book, Seduction of the Innocent, which claimed that the comics of the time caused juvenile delinquency.
He listed themes that supposedly ran through various popular story lines, highlighting homosexual themes (Batman and Robin), bondage (Wonder Woman) and numerous examples of what he considered to be extreme violence.
It became a best-seller and eventually led to a Congressional inquiry into the morality and effect of comic book industry on young people.
Fearing state censorship, the comics book industry imposed their own code which, for years afterwards, virtually eliminated depictions of violence, gore, most supernatural themes, or anything that might be considered to hint at sexuality.
As a side-effect, it did lead to some curious titles that were deliberately intended to be more 'wholesome'. As we discussed previously on Mind Hacks, one of these was the 'Psychoanalysis' series of comics.
The New Yorker article is so interesting because it looks at a new book which suggests that Wertham was not some sort of crazed censorship-fiend, as he's sometimes depicted, and notes that he was actually against the subsequent censorship of comics.
Despite his concerns about delinquency and homosexuality, which seem a little odd in modern light, he had other more laudable aims which seem equally as relevant today and may have been hijacked by others:
He did not want to censor comic books, only to restrict their sale so that kids could not buy them without a parent present. He wanted to give them the equivalent of an R rating. Bart Beaty’s “Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture” ($22, paper; University Press of Mississippi) makes a strong case for the revisionist position. As Beaty points out, Wertham was not a philistine; he was a progressive intellectual. His Harlem clinic was named for Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law. He collected modern art, helped produce an anthology of modernist writers, and opposed censorship. He believed that people’s behavior was partly determined by their environment, in this respect dissenting from orthodox Freudianism, and some of his work, on the psychological effects of segregation on African-Americans, was used in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education.
Wertham thought that representations make a difference—that how people see themselves and others reflected in the media affects the way they think and behave. As Beaty says, racist (particularly concerning Asians) and sexist images and remarks can be found on almost every page of crime and horror comics. What especially strikes a reader today is the fantastic proliferation of images of violence against women, almost always depicted in highly sexualized forms. If one believes that pervasive negative images of black people are harmful, why would one not believe the same thing about images of men beating, torturing, and killing women?
Interestingly, Wertham was not the only mind doctor involved in comics.
Psychologist William Moulton Marston was the creator of Wonder Woman and a lot of his personal and scientific interests appear in the stories.
He lived in a polyamorous relationship with two women (one, Elizabeth Marston, a noted psychologist herself) and was particularly interested in using blood pressure as part of lie detection technology (his ideas are still used in the polygraph test today).
Consequently, William and Elizabeth created Wonder Woman to be a strong, liberated female character who had a Lasso of Truth which would wrap itself around villains and prevent them from lying.
Link to New Yorker article 'The Horror' (via BB). Link to info on book 'Fredric Wertham And The Critique Of Mass Culture'.
The picture is of the memorial to Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a 17th century treatise on depression and still one of the greatest books in the history of medicine.
It is built into one of the pillars in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, as he was both a vicar in the city and one of the governors of Christ Church college.
While Burton demonstrated his remarkable scholarship in the book, he had more than simply an academic interest in the subject matter.
He suffered severe depression during his life and admitted in the preface to the book (writing under the pen name Democritus Junior), that it served to keep his spirits up by keeping him busy.
His final piece of advice to sufferers of melancholy was "be not solitary, be not idle", which holds equally well today as it did in 1621.
The book was a huge success and was highly regarded among Burton's peers, but he was obviously down on himself until the end, as his monument contains a curious Latin epitaph which he wrote himself. It reads:
Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus,
Hic jacet Democritus junior
Cui vitam dedit et mortem
Melancholia.
Ob. 8 Id. Jan. A. C. MDCXXXIX.
It apparently translates to "Little known, and even less forgiven, here lies Democritus Junior, who gave his life and death to Melancholy. Died 9th January, 1639".
The book is still widely read and can regularly be seen on the shelves of high-street book shops.
Link to Wikipedia article on Burton's book with link to full-text.
We've discussed the remarkable neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor before but I've finally got round to watching her engaging TED talk on her experience of having a stroke, which is now available to watch online.
It's a bit poetic in places. You can almost hear the sound of a thousand cognitive scientists gritting their teeth as she describes the supposed functions of each cerebral hemisphere and probably the sound of some of them fainting when she describes the "deep inner peace circuitry" of the right hemisphere.
Neuroanatomists may notice that this is almost exactly the same sound that occurs when psychologists describe something as a 'frontal' function.
The talk is gripping, however, and the highlight is her description of the day she had her stroke which is both insightful and very funny.
Link to video of Jill Bolte Taylor TED talk (thanks Sandra!) Link to previous post on Jill Bolte Taylor with links to interview.
"The only normal people are the one's you don't know very well."
A quote from the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler. Not sure exactly where this quote comes from, but it's widely quoted on the net.
Adler was hugely influential in the early Freudian circle and coined the term 'inferiority complex' to describe what he thought was the innate sense of inferiority we are all born with and need to learn to manage as part of our development.
He believed that this developmental process shaped the personality and was reflected in each person's individual personality traits.
UPDATE: I've just noticed that there don't seem to be any photographs of Alfred Adler Smiling. Cheer up Dr Adler.
I just discovered the wonderfully perceptive artist Chuck Close did a cover for Science magazine back in 1999.
Close was renowned for doing huge super-realistic paintings of portrait photographs that seem more real than real. When you get up close you notice that he's painted in insanely small details, like individual hairs that stretch into the background and blur as they become out of focus in the original photograph.
Painting this sort of detail on such a huge scale makes you question how real photographs really are, as it gives them an surreal quality despite looking like wonderful likenesses. It's an uncanny perceptual effect.
In 1988, Close suffered a stroke in his spinal artery, restricting his movement and confining him to a wheelchair.
Close was determined to continue painting and thought about how he could still paint with his inability to do fine detail because of his damaged nervous system.
His later paintings, like the one featured on this cover, break down images almost into perceptual units. As you move away from them, they coalesce into photorealistic images.
His paintings lose a lot when you can't see them in their original towering sizes, so if you ever get the chance to his work 'live', don't miss it.
He's a wonderful 'perceptual explorer' and a wry commentator on our photo obsessed age.
Link to BBC News article on Chuck Close cover. Link to search of his pictures (just stunning).
Brain Age neuroscientist prefers lab to millionaire row:
Neuroscientist Dr. Kawashima, the star and part-designer of Nintendo's brain training game 'Brain Age' has turned down $22 million dollars in royalties saying that he has no need for the money because "my hobby is work".
Personally, I suspect it's just an excuse because he knows he'd blow it all on gambling and loose women. Let Dr Jim Yong Kim's story be a lesson to us all.
Or maybe it's because he feels he still needs to make some final adjustments so it can recognise the Manchester accent.
Author Terry Pratchett recently announced that he has early onset Alzheimer's disease, a form of the brain disorder that strikes before the age of 65.
In typical Pratchett style, he described the news as 'an embuggerance' but still continues to work on his comic novels.
He's just given an audio interview to the BBC where he discusses his diagnosis, how he views the future, and how the brain changes are affecting his day-to-day life.
He is wonderfully open and optimistic, and quite inspiring, in his usual quiet, humorous way.
Wired magazine has a feature article on the life, work and tragic deaths of two of the leading lights of Artificial Intelligence: Chris McKinstry and Push Singh.
Singh was a young researcher at MIT's AI lab while McKinstry was considered a maverick and most of his AI work was conducted independently.
Both had a significant impact on the field as personalities and took a similar line in trying to make AI more focused on dealing with 'common sense' knowledge, rather than applying neural networks to complex pattern-recognition and transformation tasks as was more common at the time.
Interestingly, it seems from the Wired article that their ideas are experiencing something of a renaissance.
Tragically, both took their own lives. We covered the sad event of McKinstry's death back in 2006, and the Wired article discusses the somewhat less clear circumstances surrounding the death of Singh.
Link to Wired article 'Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides'.
Film star Cary Grant talks about his experiences with LSD in an excerpt from his autobiography.
Grant was one of the few people who were medically treated with LSD-assisted psychotherapy when it was still legal in 1960s America, and he claimed he benefited greatly from it.
The feeling is that of an unmarshaling of the thoughts as you’ve customarily associated them. The lessening of conscious control, similar to the mental process which takes place when we dream. For example, when you’re asleep and your mind no longer concerned with matters and activities of the day, your subconscious often brings itself to your attention by dreaming. With conscious controls relaxed, those thoughts buried deep inside begin to come to the surface in the form of dreams. These dreams, since they appear to us in symbolic guise, are fantasies and, if you will accept the reasoning, could be classified as hallucinations. Such fantasies, or hallucinations, are inside every one of us, waiting to be released, aired and understood. Dreams are really the emotions that we find ourselves reluctant to examine, think about, or meditate upon, while conscious.
Under the effect of LSD 25, these dreams or hallucinations, if you wish, are speeded up, and interpreted, when properly conducted ba a psychiatrically orientated doctor who sits quietly by, awaiting whatever communication one cares to make — the revealing of a hidden memory seen again from an older, more mature viewpoint, or the dawning of new enlightenment. Then, if the doctor is as skilled as mine was, he carefully proffers a word or key, that can lead to the next release, the next step toward fuller understanding.
Link to Grant on LSD, from his autobiography (via MeFi).
Has shyness been transformed into a mental illness?:
Bookslutinterviews author Christopher Lane, who argues in a new book that shyness has been transformed in the mental illness 'social phobia', partly due to it being used as a political football during a time of theoretical upheaval in psychiatry.
Social phobia is a type of anxiety that is triggered in social situations.
It can be specific to a certain situation, such as eating in public, or more generally associated with interacting with any group.
Some have argued that it is a prime example of where drug companies have picked up on an unpleasant but common anxiety and promoted it as a mental illness to be treated with medication, whereas others feel it is disabling enough to require wider recognition and medical attention.
As in a previous article for The New York Times [pdf] and seemingly in this book, Lane argues that definition is so vague as to be virtually meaningless.
Throughout the book, Lane suggests that the conceptual problems of the DSM arise in part from its weird eagerness to break decisively with Freud. Lane has vividly reconstructed the decision-making process of the DSM-III in the 1970s, showing how scoring points over rival theoretical schools frequently trumped logic or consistency. Insisting on the biochemical nature of all mental suffering leads psychiatrists to turn away from the vicissitudes of the mind -- what Lane calls "the strange, unusual turns of consciousness, themselves in thrall to vivid memories, irrational fantasies, persistent associations, and sometimes-inexplicable impulses." By reducing the complexity of these "turns" into "disorders" -- no matter how "multiaxial" -- modern psychiatry seems to drain the life out of the mind. Shyness is passionately and compellingly argued, in clear prose that is in turn scathing, hilarious, and sympathetic.
In the interview below, Lane discusses the origins of the book, the implications of shifting from a "reaction-based" to a "disorder-based" model of diagnosis, the differences between psychoanalysis and neuropsychiatry, and the problem of emotional blunting.
Link to interview with Christopher Lane. Link to book details with excerpt. pdf of NYT article 'Shy on Drugs'.
The New York Times has an interesting piece on Heather Kuzmich one of the recent contestants on reality TV show America’s Next Top Model who reportedly has Asperger's syndrome.
Asperger's syndrome is essentially High Functioning Autism (the difference in diagnosis lies in a fairly academic point about the age at which someone acquires language), meaning that the person is not impaired in terms of intelligence, but has difficulties understanding others' emotions, social interactions and can have 'special interests' or repetitive behaviours.
The stereotype of someone with Asperger's is that they're quite shy, withdrawn or socially unattractive.
In contrast, a video of Kuzmich on YouTube shows her to be an engaging and outgoing personality with a delightfully kooky edge that shines through.
It's always great to see when someone doesn't conform to a negative stereotype and the impact is all the more enhanced when it's someone high profile or in the public eye.
Link to NYT article 'Asperger’s Syndrome Gets a Very Public Face'.
We must, in the next place, investigate the subject of the dream, and first inquire to which of the faculties of the soul it presents itself,
i.e. whether the affection is one which pertains to the faculty of intelligence or to that of sense-perception; for these are the only faculties within us by which we acquire knowledge.
The opening lines of Aristotle's early sleep text On Dreams, written in approximately 350 BC.
The scientific journal Molecular Interventions has a whole load of open-access articles that contain interviews with leading molecular biologists, including several with notable neuroscientists.
As you might expect from a scientific journal (which rarely include interviews) the exchanges are in-depth and gloriously geeky in places.
I haven't found a search term to cleanly pull out all the interviews, but so far I've found discussions with:
Jonah Lehrer is the author of a new book that argues that arts and literature can help us understand the brain. It's provocatively titled Proust was a Neuroscientist and it challenges us to look beyond the lab when understanding neuroscience.
Lehrer himself moved from graduated from the neuroscience lab to a career in writing, and is now one of the editors of Seed Magazine.
He also pens gripping brain science articles, including, most recently, a wonderful encounter with Oliver Sacks in this month's edition, and of course, his frequent updates at the Frontal Cortexblog.
He's also kindly agreed to speak to Mind Hacks about his new book, why Cezanne is a candidate for cognitive science experiments, and how reverse engineering art can help us understand the mind.
I'm going to come clean. The first time I heard the title 'Proust is a Neuroscientist' I was a little sceptical. Surely, I thought, Proust was no more a neuroscientist than Elvis was a psychologist. So, convince me. Why should people interested in the brain be inspired by Proust?
It's a pretty strange idea, I know. Proust wrote fiction, which is supposed to be the opposite of scientific fact. But my basic argument is that, in the case of Proust, you can extract a set of scientific truths from the novels that anticipated some very modern neuroscientific ideas about how memory works.
Take the famous Madeleine episode, where Proust dips his cookie into some tea and suddenly remembers the "exquisite pleasures" of his childhood. In the novel, Proust is very clear that smell and taste bear a unique burden of memory. "When from a long distance past nothing subsists," Proust writes, "taste and smell alone…remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering." In other words, our sense of smell is uniquely sentimental.
At the time, scientists had no idea that Proust was telling the truth. They didn't yet realize that the olfactory cortex is the only sense that connects directly to the hippocampus, a center of long-term memory. A few years ago, Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown, showed – in a witty paper entitled "Testing the Proustian Hypothesis" – that Proust intuited some aspects of our cortical anatomy.
But this isn't the only thing Proust discovered about memory. In fact, his novels also outline some very recent (and profound) discoveries of modern neuroscience, such as the fact that we are constantly reconsolidating our memories, revising our sense of the past in light of the present. At the very least, we should make Proust an honorary neuroscientist.
You seem to mostly focus on past artists but jokingly mentioned in a recent interview that maybe your next book will be called 'Kanye West was a neuroscientist'. Are there contemporary artists that you value as potentially inspiring progress in the brain sciences?
There are some obvious candidates, like Richard Powers and Ian McEwan, who have written wonderful novels about modern neuroscience. (See, for example, Galatea 2.2 or Saturday or The Echo Maker.) But I don't think it's necessary to write on a scientific theme in order to contribute to science. The reason we are still reading Homer and Shakespeare and Joyce is that the art feels true. The work endures because it seems to capture something essential about human nature.
The question for science is what that is. Why is Hamlet such a potent character? Why do we stare at Jackson Pollack paintings? Why are Kanye West's samples so captivating to the acoustic cortex? Artists are constantly being forced to reverse-engineer the brain. By reverse-engineering the art - by trying to understand why, exactly, it resonates with us - we can learn about the mind.
The pattern seems to be that art speculates and science confirms. Can you see a situation where art will confirm something that science has predicted?
I'm not sure art can ever confirm something in a way that would satisfy Karl Popper. But I do think that artists can still help scientists. In a sense, the arts are really an incredibly rich data set, providing us with a glimpse of the emergent phenomena we still can't comprehend.
We should be testing our theories of object recognition on Cezanne paintings. How does the mind detect an apple amid such a mess of brushstrokes? We should be looking at Proust to clarify our thoughts on episodic memory. Woolf can help us untangle the link between attention and the stream of consciousness. Obviously, we are always going to get our scientific answers from scientific experiments. But I do think that art can help us ask better scientific questions.
If you could give one piece of advice to mind and brain scientists when they're communicating their work, what would it be?
W.H. Auden once said that when he found himself in the company of scientists he felt like "a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes." I understand the feeling entirely, so I'm reluctant to be giving scientists advice.
But when I was working in a lab, my scientific mentor taught me something very important. After yet another experimental failure - I excelled at experimental failure - he said to me, "Remember this feeling. You have no idea what's going on. When you write the paper, remember that you still don't really know what's going on. You just think you do."
Name three under-rated things.
Bob Dylan's music during the 1980's.
Old neuroscience textbooks.
Pasta with tomato sauce and parmesan.
"Among the millions of nerve cells that clothe parts of the brain there runs a thread. It is the thread of time, the thread that has run through each succeeding wakeful hour of the individual."
Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, apparently quoted in a 1958 edition of Reader's Digest.
Psychiatrist Prof Anthony Clare has sadly passed away. He was particularly known in the UK as the presenter of In the Psychiatrist's Chair, where he interviewed celebrities about their lives, loves and losses, but was also known as a respected academic psychiatrist in both Britain and his native Ireland.
In the Psychiatrist's Chair saw a number of celebrities discuss their innermost concerns, and most famously, agony aunt Claire Rayner broke down and cried inconsolably during her interview.
As well as his numerous media appearances and extensive academic research, he wrote Psychiatry in Dissent (ISBN 0415039428) at the height of the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1970s, which still remains one of the most convincing and balanced defences of mainstream psychiatry.
Link to obituary from The Telegraph. Link to more from Google News. Link to article on Psychiatry in Dissent's impact.
Dr Lolita Shanté Gooden is New York-based psychologist with a block rockin' background. Under the stage name Roxanne Shanté she revolutionised hip-hop at the age of 14 when she recorded a direct reply to a popular hip-hop track which became a hit in its own right.
This was one of the first rounds in an avalanche of subsequent musical responses, dis records, and on-air replies - a phenomenon now known as the Roxanne Wars.
She was famously dissed in Boogie Down Production's trackThe Bridge is Over but she always gave as good as she got and, over the next decade, defined herself as one of the strongest female MCs in rap music.
Nevertheless, at the age of 25 she decided to go to college and study psychology. She describes in a video how she was funded by a clause in an early record contract that promised to pay for her education.
The record company obviously didn't think that the young MC, who was already a teenage mother, would amount to much at school.
However, she used the contract to her advantage, applied herself with enthusiasm to her studies, and eventually earned a PhD in psychology.
She now practices in Queens, New York.
Link to Wikipedia page on Roxanne Shanté. Link to video of Roxanne Shanté explaining how she got her PhD (via MeFi). Link to MySpace page with audio of key tracks.
Poe's final days are as mysterious as the best of his Gothic tales. He was found in the streets of Baltimore, delirious and disturbed before dying the following week in a state of distress.
Many theories have been suggested as to what caused his confusion and eventual death, from poisoning, to a suicide attempt, to syphilis.
The Observer has an article on a new theory by Matthew Pearl, author of a new book on Poe's death, suggesting his condition may be explained by brain cancer, owing to a curious finding when his body was exhumed some years later.
But Pearl has now discovered evidence that Poe died of brain cancer, which may explain why he had suffered from hallucinations and delusions. Pearl's evidence came in the form of several old newspaper stories written about the exhumation of Poe's body 26 years after his death. Poe's coffin was being moved to a more prominent spot in the cemetery and the onlookers were amazed to see that his shrunken brain was still visible inside his skull. It was described as being 'dried and hardened in the skull' in an 1878 article in the St Louis Republican newspaper, whereas a letter in the Baltimore Gazette claimed that: 'The cerebral mass... evidenced no sign of disintegration or decay, though, of course, it is somewhat diminished.'
Pearl contacted a friend's wife who worked as a forensic pathologist. She pointed out that the descriptions could not possibly have been of a brain, as it is one of the first parts of a corpse to rot after death. But she said some forms of brain tumours can calcify after death and leave a hardened mass. One account described the brain as almost rattling around inside Poe's head. Pearl also looked up pictures of calcified tumours and discovered that some resembled shrunken brains.
It's an interesting theory, but one that will have to remain speculative - unless Poe's body is ever exhumed again.
Link to Observer article 'Fresh clues could solve mystery of Poe's death'. Link to Wikipedia page on the death of Poe.
Do not call for black power or green power. Call for brain power.
A quote from pioneering American politician Barbara Jordan. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Jordan's long-term partner was an educational psychologist.
You probably know Shelley Batts from the eclectic neuroscience blogRetrospectacle, but what you might not know is that her online writing has gotten her nominated for a scholarship to help with her PhD. She's a finalist with a number of other students but is the only neuroscientist, so if you want to vote for her, you can do so online.
Shelley studies the neuroscience of hearing to inform treatments for deafness, and, while maintaining a somewhat peculiar obsession with parrots, writes with great clarity in her engaging blog.
Your vote could help her win a scholarship which would substantially aid her studies.
The five pictures are by Victorian artist Louis Wain who painted cats through the whole of his life and continued through periods of intense psychosis.
Almost every article on Wain uses them to demonstrate the progression of schizophrenia but the evidence for them being painted in chronological order is actually quite weak.
The five pictures are from an original series of eight which were collected by Dr Walter Maclay who was interested in the effect of mental illness on art.
However, the pictures were undated and, as Rodney Dale notes in his biography of Wain (Louis Wain: The Man Who Painted Cats; ISBN 1854790986), "with no evidence of the order of their progression, Maclay arranged them in a sequence which clearly demonstrated, he thought, the progressive deterioration of the artist's mental abilities."
In fact, his later works are for the most part conventional cat pictures in his normal style, with the occasional 'psychedelic' example produced at the same time - where he experimented with what he called 'wallpaper patterns'.
However, the increasing abstraction over time is likely to be a myth. Wain's biography again:
Assembling what little factual knowledge we have on Dr Maclay's paintings, there is clear no justification for regarding them as more than samples of Louis Wain's art at different times. Wain experimented with patterns and cats, and even quite late in life was still producing conventional cat pictures, perhaps 10 years after his [supposedly] 'later' productions which are patterns rather than cats. All of which is to say no more than that the eight paintings were done at different times, which could be said of eight paintings by any artist!
Link to Wikipedia page on Louis Wain. Link to online gallery of Wain pictures.
Wired magazine has an interview with Oliver Sacks where he talks about cases from his forthcoming book on the neurology of music, and his own drug-induced experiences of seeing non-existent colours while listening to Monteverdi.
Hume wondered whether one can imagine a color that one has never encountered. One day in 1964, I constructed a sort of pharmacological mountain, and at its peak, I said, "I want to see indigo, now!" As if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling drop of purest indigo appeared on the wall — the color of heaven. For months after that, I kept looking for that color. It was like the lost chord.
Then I went to a concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, they played the MonteverdiVespers, and I was transported. I felt a river of music 400 years long running from Monteverdi's mind into mine. Wandering around during the interval, I saw some lapis lazuli snuffboxes that were that same wonderful indigo, and I thought, "Good, the color exists in the external world." But in the second half I got restless, and when I saw the snuffboxes again, they were no longer indigo — they were blue, mauve, pink. I've never seen that color since.
The interview is a glimpse of what his next book will contain, and also relates a case of a man with Alzheimer's and severe memory impairment who can nonetheless take part in an acapella singing group. Seemingly his musical abilities survived his amnesia, not unlike Clive Wearing, who we discussed recently on Mind Hacks.
"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery — always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"
English novelist Virginia Woolf, writing in a December 28, 1932, letter.
Woolf was one of the most brilliant writers of her generation and a significant influence on the modernist movement of the time.
She also suffered from profound depressions and eventually committed suicide at the age of 59 rather than suffer another mental breakdown.
A recent article in the journal PsyArt examined the work of Woolf and the American poet Sylvia Plath in light of what we now know about the factors that influence the likelihood of suicide.
Link to Wikipedia page on Virginia Woolf. Link to 'Suicidal Risk Factors in Lives of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath'.
I've just discovered the remarkable life of Princess Alice of Battenberg, who was Prince Philip's mother, the current Queen's mother-in-law.
She was deaf from birth, dedicated her life to charity work and nursing, became psychotic, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent two years in a psychiatric hospital, founded an order of nuns, and was declared one of the 'Righteous among the Nations' for risking her life by hiding a Jewish family from the Gestapo when Greece was occupied.
According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography she was treated by the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, one of the founders of existential psychology.
Apparently, she was a patient in the same hospital as Vaslav Nijinsky, the legendary ballet dancer and choreographer who succumbed to schizophrenia in his 20s.
Ludwig's uncle, Otto Binswanger was also a psychiatrist of some note, after whom Binswangers disease, a type of subcortical dementia, is named.
Neural network and 'fuzzy thinking' researcher Bart Kosko is briefly interviewed in this month's Wired where he argues that adding noise to a system, including the human one, may improve performance.
It reminded me of part of a colourful interview he did for the 1998 bookTalking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks - a wonderful collection of personal memories from key scientists in artificial intelligence.
I like to ask researchers where they get their ideas. The only answer I've heard that makes sense is, "You vary your input if you want to vary your output." Do lots of things. If you've gotta take drugs, take drugs. Take long walks, meditate, watch a lot of movies, learn a new language, read different books, argue the other side of the debate - anything you can to vary your stimuli.
And then you have to, as they say, "keep the ass in the seat." You actually have to sit down and write. Do it in a disciplined way. I think if people have a certain minimal training in mathematics, the problem will take care of itself because neural networks are inherently interesting, and I believe they will stay interesting well into the next century.
The rest of Kosko's Talking Nets interview covers topics as diverse as libertarian politics, cognitive maps, God, the mathematics of fuzzy systems, the economics of marijuana, organising neural network conferences and cryogenic nanobots.
Link to brief Kosko interview in Wired. Link to Talking Nets book details.
UPDATE: Thanks to Daniel for finding the full Talking Nets interview on Google Books. You can read it here.
To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.
John Hughlings Jackson was one of 'fathers' of modern neurology and the picture on the right is of his bust, which resides in the Institute of Neurology library in London. However, it's actually a copy as the original went missing and its location is still something of a mystery.
The original was carved in marble in 1907 and graced the entrance to the Institute before being stolen by unknown thieves.
It was thought it was destroyed during the theft because broken marble was found in its place, but it was later spotted in the window of a North London home.
The home was owned by a neurologist who apparently bought the bust in a local antique shop for next to nothing, but when the Institute attempted to negotiate its return, the person refused all contact and its location is now a mystery.
Later, the legendary Canadian neurologist Wilder Penfield, a huge admirer of Jackson, had a bronze bust of Jackson created for the Montreal Neurological Institute which was installed in 1934.
This bust was gifted to London's Institute of Neurology in 1996 and is the one that now resides in their library.
However, an article commemorating the presentation, made a request that if anyone knows the location of the marble bust to get in touch with the Institute to solve the mystery.
The much loved original is presumably still out there somewhere, so keep a look out for a marble version of the current bronze.
As an aside, while searching the archives for material on John Hughlings Jackson, I found this snippet from a personal tribute printed in a Oct 27, 1934 article for The Lancet:
He had no particular taste for music and art in any form, he often admitted he could not distinguish the National Anthem from 'Rule Brittania'...
The fact he couldn't distinguish two common tunes suggests he had amusia, the inability to recognise and understand music.
The condition can be caused by brain damage but it is also known to be inherited, which is the more likely source of Jackson's misperception of music.
Elyn Saks is a law professor at the University of Southern California and adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego. She's also been diagnosed with schizophrenia and has experienced some intense psychotic episodes.
She's just published a book about her experiences called 'The Center Cannot Hold' (ISBN 140130138X) and was the subject of a recent Newsweekarticle.
Saks also gave an interview to mental health blog Treatment Online where she recounts some of the insights she has gained through her experiences about herself, the mental health system, and the possibilities of living with a mental disorder.
How do you feel that we as a larger society can mitigate the belief - and we feel a lot of people believe this even though they claim not to or can rationally move beyond it - that mentally ill individuals are somehow broken or incomplete?
I guess one way would be having examples of people who have mental illnesses who are doing well. People hear of schizophrenia and they think someone is never going to be able to live independently and work, and then you have people like me who stand up and say, "No, it doesn't have to be that way." Some people say well aren't you unique, and I'm actually doing a study with folks at USC and UCLA on high-functioning individuals with schizophrenia. We've got an MD, we've got a Ph.D. psychologist, we've got some high-level consumer advocates, full-time students and stay at home parents. Just in LA in the past couple of months we've already recruited ten people, and we're going to try to hear their stories and find out if there are things they do to master their illness that we might teach to other people so other people could become higher functioning.
Link to Newsweek article. Link to Treatment Online interview. Link to excerpt from book 'The Center Cannot Hold'.
I've just found a concise piece from NPR radio on Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who used his uncle's ideas on the unconscious to transform advertising into its current form.
Bernays pretty much invented the idea that you can sell products, not by making their practical advantages known, but by associating them with the satisfaction of desires - to be sexy, successful, a good husband or wife, the need to feel safe, well-regarded and so on.
Every time you see razors sold as babe magnets, or perfume sold as booty dust, that's Bernays' ideas at work.
He also invented the idea that marketing was more than just adverts. It could also be presented as 'education' that had no direct connection with a product but made people more receptive to other marketing.
Almost any sponsored survey or research you see in press, especially if masquerading as science, is based on this idea.
For example, Pfizer fund a survey that says people over 40 are having the best sex. People over 40 not having great sex wonder what they could do about it.
Hey, that's my favourite B-list celebrity! And he's telling me that Pfizer sell a pill aimed at the over-40s that claims to improve my sex life. My problem solved, through the power of science!
Of course, it's not just hard-on pills [note to self: that's not a phrase I get to use often enough]. It's now a tried and tested technique that has been used for selling everything from igloos to ideologies.
Indeed, Bernays was personally involved in selling political ideas as well as commercial products. Notably, in his book Propoganda, he argues that this form of manipulation is essential for managing the inherent chaos and destructive forces of society.
Film-maker Adam Curtis cited Bernays as one of the most influential people of the 20th century in his persuasive, if not slightly polemic, four-part series Century of the Self (available online: 1, 2, 3, 4). It contains many more examples of Bernays' often ingenious PR campaigns.
The NPR piece is a short 10 minute introduction to Bernays' life and work, and the site has a some additional audio clips of Bernays himself discussing his ideas.
Link to 'Freud's Nephew and the Origins of Public Relations'.
Parts one, two, three, four of Century of the Self. Link to online Bernays exhibit from the Museum of Public Relations.
A completely charming excerpt from the 'People' section of UK news magazine The Week, discussing Ben Pridmore, current British and past world memory champion:
Ben Pridomore can be surprisingly absent-minded says Adam Lusher in The Sunday Telegraph. The bespectacled accountant from Derby is Britain's "memory champion" and a world-class mental athlete. He set a new record when he remembered 17 shuffled packs of cards in an hour.
"It was last year at the World Championships", he recalls. "In London, somewhere in London. Erm, where was it? No it's gone completely."
Pridmore does remember that: "I hold all four card-remembering world records, and both binary number records. I think they are the only world records I hold at the moment, although I have quite possibly forgotten a few.
Brazilian TV gave me this wonderful cloak. They flew me to Rio just to memorise a pack of cards. Now, where did I put it...?"
His memory is, he admits, highly selective. "Yes, I have a toned hippocampus, for anything pointless like cards or long numbers. But with useful things, like names, I forget everything. Go into a room and wonder why I'm there? Happens to me all the time."
Link to Pridmore supporting Alzheimer's Society's Million Memories campaign.
Philip Zimbardo, known for the Stanford prison experiment and recent book on the situational causes of 'evil', gives a revealing interview to ABC Radio National's All in the Mind.
Zimbardo's work has been getting a lot of exposure recently, largely because of the Abu Ghraib scandal and its seeming similarities to the prison experiment.
However, this interview is interesting because Zimbardo discusses his motivations for designing one of the most infamous studies in the history of psychology and reflects upon our understanding of institutionalised abuse and complicity, as well as his own role in creating a 'petri dish prison camp'.
Stanford University is one of the most beautiful universities in the world and in that basement in the psychology department I created a mini-hell for all those students. This young woman, Christina Maslach, had just gotten a job as a psychology professor at Berkeley and we had just started dating. I looked up and in front of my door was the usual 10 o'clock toilet run, prisoners with paper bags over their heads, legs chained together and one arm on each other's shoulder, marching blindly down the hall with guards yelling at them obscenely...and I looked up from whatever I was doing and said hey Chris, look at that. I said something like, 'the crucible of human behaviour'. And she said, 'I don't want to see any more of this!' And she ran out, and I ran after her and we had a big argument: what's wrong with you, what sort of psychologist are you?
And she says to me, 'I don't want to hear about simulation, I don't want to hear about the power of the situation. 'It's terrible what you are doing to those boys, they are not students, they are not prisoners, they are not guards, they are young men, what's happening to them is terrible and you are responsible for it.' That was the left hook, the right hook was, 'You know, I'm not sure I want to continue dating you if this is the real you, this person is like a monster.' There was like a cataract over my eyes, I was not seeing this most obvious thing that she coming down fresh in ten minutes looks at this and says it's terrible.
Albert Ellis, one of the co-founders of cognitive therapy, died yesterday at his home in New York. The Boston Herald has an obituary that captures some of his work and eccentric spirit.
Ellis created 'rational emotive behavior therapy' (REBT) that stressed a rational approach to dealing with distressing cognitive distortions - a significant break from the largely Freudian therapy he was trained in.
It was an early version of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), now one of the most extensively tested, empirically validated and widely used psychological treatments for mental disorder.
Ellis was a prolific writer, producing a small library of books, papers and articles, did weekly seminars for most of his life and founded the Albert Ellis Institute.
Apart from his extensive writing he was known for his boundless energy and his approach to therapy and teaching which was variously described as no nonsense / assertive / confrontational (take your pick).
He was voted sixth in Psychotherapy Networker's list of 'top ten' influential therapists of all time earlier this year.
Link to Boston Herald obituary for Albert Ellis. Link to Psychotherapy Networker on Ellis.
I'm currently reading Irvin Yalom's novel about psychoanalysts, Lying on the Couch (ISBN 0060928514), and have noticed that a key character bears a striking resemblance to one of the most controversial people in the history of psychoanalysis, Masud Khan.
Psychoanalysis is both the talking therapy and the set of theories about the human mind that were originally created by Freud. Both have a colourful history owing to the controversial ideas and the eccentric people involved.
In Yalom's book, Seth Pande is introduced as a senior Indian psychoanalyst who is dying of lung cancer and is being censured by the psychoanalytic society for bringing the profession into disrepute, owing to unethical conduct such as sleeping with patients, financial irregularities and, worst of all, writing about what he does!
Perhaps the real-life inspiration for Pande, Masud Khan, is discussed in an eye-opening article from the Boston Review that looks at his life and also gives an insight into the turbulent world of 20th century psychoanalysis.
Initially a student when he came to the UK, he ended up training with some of the leading psychoanalysts of the time, notably being analysed by Donald Winnicott.
Khan was known for his brilliant writing, but also slept with his patients, insulted them and largely lacked 'therapeutic boundaries' (i.e. a responsible doctor-patient relationship) even with those patients whom he didn't so obviously abuse.
Later in his life, Khan wrote a book called The Long Wait which detailed his anti-Semitic views and outrageous behaviour with a number of patients.
Although it has been suggested that the case studies in his book are fake, it is now well established that Khan was regularly drunk and abusive with his patients, and was kicked out of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. He later died of lung cancer.
A famous 2001 article and subsequent letters published in the London Review of Books 'outed' Khan to the general public, who were mostly unaware of his previous misdeeds.
Interestingly, both the fictional Pande and the real-life Khan inspired considerable devotion in some of their patients and trainees. It's been noted in recentbiographies that Khan seemed to behave more responsibly with some people, whom he reportedly genuinely helped.
One of the most interesting things about both Yalom's enormously fun novel and the Boston Review article is that they give a fascinating insight into the world of psychoanalysis past and present.
One of the great ironies is that for a profession that prides itself in resolving conflicts, psychoanalysts have a long history of stabbing each other in the back.
Link to great Boston Review article on Masud Khan. Link to (closed access) LRB article on Khan by former patient. Link to LRB post-article letters page.
Syd Barrett in the American Journal of Psychiatry:
From the 'images in psychiatry' column from July's American Journal of Psychiatry, written by Dr Paolo Fusar-Poli:
Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett was both the founding member of one of the most legendary rock bands and probably the most famous rock star to develop psychosis. He formed the band that would become Pink Floyd in 1965, amalgamating the first names of two American bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.
Recorded at Abbey Road Studios, inspired by LSD, and driven by Barrett's songwriting, singing, and otherworldly guitar solos, the first album, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" (1967), alchemized the whimsical bohemian spirit of the "summer of love" and influenced generations of musicians with its sonic inventions and surreal lyrics.
Music journalists have called him "the golden boy of the mind-melting late-60s psychedelic era, its brightest star and ultimately its most tragic victim". In fact after two haunting solo albums, "The Madcap Laughs" and "Barrett," which showed the last flickering lights of his genius, his eccentric and creative personality drifted into a psychotic reclusive state, forcing him to withdraw from public view in 1974.
However, Pink Floyd would pay tribute to Barrett and would include madness as an ongoing theme on their best and most successful albums, "Dark Side of the Moon" (1973) and "The Wall" (1979), speaking to Syd directly in the songs "Wish You Were Here" and "Shine on You Crazy Diamond." Barrett spent the rest of his life in his mother’s house in Cambridge, painting and gardening.
Link to AJP images in psychiatry column on Syd Barrett. Link to Wikipedia page on Syd Barrett.
The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on neurotech industry consultant Zack Lynch, who you might know from the blog Brain Waves.
Lynch is executive director of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization, an umbrella organisation for the commercial neuroscience sector, and managing director of NeuroInsights, a business intelligence service.
The San Francisco Chronicle article looks at Lynch's aims and work, in partnership with his wife, neurobiologist Casey Lynch, as well as giving an insight into how the neurotech industry is becoming an increasingly important force in the marketplace and in policy making.
Lynch is an interesting guy to watch. He'll always pitch for industry, but his job relies on him having a balanced view of what's likely to work out in the marketplace.
Interestingly, the article also notes he's written a book on the neurotech industry that's recently found a publisher:
The first neurotechnology project Lynch took on in 2001, a book titled "Brain Waves," just landed a publisher. The book allows Lynch to take his favored "200-year view," speculating on how business, politics and culture will evolve in a future era of neurotech inventions that might change the way people think and communicate. Lynch is fascinated by the ethical and social dilemmas that might emerge. If drugs can enhance memory, for example, would college entrance exams still be fair? "Who's going to be able to afford this?" Lynch asks.
If you've got half an hour, you could do a lot worse than spending it listening to ABC Radio National's All in the Mindinterview with neuropsychologist Dr Paul Broks, author of Into the Silent Land (ISBN 1843540347).
Broks writes in a part philosophical, part hallucinatory style, focusing on patients whose understanding and experience of the self has been disturbed by brain injury.
It's one of my favourite books on neuropsychology, and Broks touches on many of its themes in the interview.
Broks has also written the play On Ego (ISBN 184002609X), which was based on part of the book, but which I found a little luke warm when I saw it and seemed to lack the originality of his writing.
However, he notes in the interview that he's currently writing another play with the Royal Shakespeare Company about a woman who has intense religious experiences and temporal lobe epilepsy (the two often co-occur), which sounds immensely promising.
Broks will also be appearing at three events at the Sydney Writer's Festival (two of which are free) so wander along if you happen to be in Sydney on May 31st or June 2nd.
Tony Wright is aiming to beat the world record for staying awake, and you can watch him on a webcam. The record is currently held by Randy Gardner who managed 11 days without sleep.
A previous record was famously claimed by Radio DJ Peter Tripp who stayed awake for 8 days, but used methylphenidate (Ritalin) to help him fight off sleep.
Methylphenidate is a form of amphetamine and it's known to increase the risk of psychosis in some people. Sleep deprivation is also linked to psychosis.
Needless to say, Tripp was quite psychotic by the end of his 'wakeathon' with hallucinations and paranoid delusions.
As it wasn't widely known that Tripp had taken stimulants, it was assumed that sleep deprivation led to madness.
This is why Gardner suggested at the final press conference that he was perfectly fine, announcing that "I wanted to prove that bad things didn't happen if you went without sleep".
Contrary to Gardner's claims, it was obvious that the lack of sleep was causing cognitive difficulties, as well as temporary delusions and hallucinations, although not to the same extent as Tripp suffered.
We know now that sleep deprivation causes significant mood problems, reality distortion and profound cognitive difficulties.
So, if you're watching the webcam you might see some rather unusual behaviour, as Tony Wright is likely to be experiencing some very odd things as time goes on.
Link to Tony Wright's record attempt webpage (via MeFi). Link to live webcam.
Bookslut has an in-depth interview with neuropsychologist Dr Mark Solms, one of the pioneers of neuropsychoanalysis, the field that attempts to test, extend and integrate Freudian ideas with modern neuroscience.
Twenty years ago, Freud's ideas were considered virtually obsolete by mainstream cognitive scientists, but some recent findings have suggested a neurocognitive basis for some key Freudian ideas.
For example, a 2001 paper by Anderson and Green suggested that people can effectively suppress unwanted memories from consciousness and that the executive system (considered a key control function of the frontal lobes) may be responsible.
More recently, a study of brain injured patients who confabulate (produce false or unlikely memories without intending to deceive) have reported that the false memories are more likely to be positive and emotionally uplifting, suggesting a level of wish fulfilment.
In the interview, Solms discusses the future of neuropsychoanalysis, addresses some of the criticisms, and talks about his new translation of Freud's complete works.
Link to Mark Solms interview. Link to Wikipedia page on neuropsychoanalysis.
Dr Petra Boynton is a social psychologist, researcher, author, broadcaster, blogger, and award winning sex educator.
She's an advocate for evidence-based sex education, amid the largely sensationalist media coverage of the subject, and a tireless campaigner for sexual equality, having worked to improve media sex coverage both in the UK and internationally.
As well as conducting extensive research into sexual attitudes and behaviours, she also promotes the public understanding of social and health science research through her teaching, writing and broadcasting.
Petra has kindly agreed to talk to Mind Hacks about her work, motivations and current interests in the world of sex research.
Why sex research?
There are two reasons why I got interested in sex research. Firstly I was always very interested in research methods and keen to evaluate whether lab-based psychology studies could make sense outside that context, as well as assessing flaws within different social research methodologies. Obviously that would make me fairly dull and so I thought one way to liven this up would be to look at how sex was studied and go from there.
Secondly when I was at school I wanted to work in a family planning clinic but I got told to stop showing off (I also got told I wasn't up to going to university). So there was definitely an interest in sexual health from an early age.
I'm interested in researching sex now for several reasons. It's an area where there's still a lot of ignorance, fear, stigma and taboo. There's an increasing amount of pressure on us to be sexual and yet still a lot of unanswered questions.
Within sexual health there's a lot of need to understand why people are taking risks, as well as a need to show how sex research is both important and a relevant area of study. Sadly there is some pretty poor sex research out there - often coming from commercial companies - and that needs to be challenged.
What book would you recommend to make someone enthusiastic about sex research?
Rather than a book I'd recommend a visit to the Kinsey Institute's website that outlines different areas of studying sex and the Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology which has lots of useful free online courses. Both of those sites have links to other great resources, online reading and books.
Sex is one of the most under-researched of human behaviours. What do you think needs to happen for sex research to be taken more seriously?
I think sex research is taken seriously in some areas now, but not all. For example sexual health research, studies on sexually transmitted infections (including HIV) and sexual problems have been taken seriously although those that are quantitative in nature (e.g. trials or epidemiological research) tend to have a higher profile than qualitative research.
There is now a lot of money available for sex research on sexual dysfunction since drug companies can see the opportunity for profit - and that has led to some researchers taking money to produce research that isn't as always as ethical or robust as it should be. What does need to happen to improve sex research is a more critical approaches to funding and ethics, a willingness to embrace a wider range of methodological approaches, and training of staff to complete such research sensitively.
Sadly at the moment we're seeing sex 'research' misused by PR companies so there are 'sex surveys' galore in the media. That gives a poor impression of sex research, alongside the unqualified 'sexperts' in the media. Sex researchers need to show good practice and to challenge some of the dodgier approaches out there.
I think within science there's still a prejudice amongst some towards studying sex - partly because of people's sexual hangups, and partly because 'good science' is not supposed to be about social issues or things we're all interested in and know a bit about.
I remember someone saying about me in a blog 'she's writing about sex and she actually understands science'. We need to show that we're completing rigorous and robust research - and also have research with measurable and effective outcomes. That should show the wider scientific community, media and the public that sex is a legitimate area of study.
What are the main difficulties in conducting your research?
There are issues of funding. Often the public want to know things like 'how do you fall in love?' or 'how do you know you've met your perfect partner?' which are interesting questions but ones that aren't at the top of the research priority list.
That's partly because funding is limited to key areas, and also because many sex researchers want to be taken seriously and so won't take on topics or questions that could make them seem lightweight.
There are problems with drug company funding - if you are willing to complete research into sexual functioning problems then there is cash for you. Although there are issues about your own academic freedom and conflict of interest that arise as a result.
Often there are problems with accessing the public as obviously this can be a very sensitive area and you need to be sure you've got the right people doing research appropriately. Many people want to talk about sex, but you have to be careful to ensure you get the right participants and also treat them respectfully.
We have seen examples in the developing world in trials for HIV drugs and similar where the training and support of researchers and ethical treatment of participants is not what it should be. So there are problems with some studies/researchers giving others a bad name.
There are issues of method - quantitative approaches tend to be favoured - at least within the health area of sex research. There are still some outdated views of methodologies circulating within the discipline, and evidence based practice isn't always observed.
Finally there's the issue of how to go about sex research. As with any other area of study you're under pressure to often do work as quickly and cheaply as possible so investigations that require more expensive kit - such as brain scanners or thermal imaging - may be less easier to use than questionnaires.
There are some concerns that ethics committees can be more skittish the more invasive sex research might be, and it is interesting that this is a key area where we're becoming increasingly 'hands off' in our methodological approaches. The public tends to assume sex researchers spend their time watching people having sex or fitting them with probes, whereas you're more likely to be doing an online interview or questionnaire.
I'd like to see the opportunity to explore a wider range of methods, and training to ensure we can study all aspects of sex in a sensitive manner.
What are you excited about at the moment?
There's some very interesting work coming out about how our ancestors had sex - it's causing a lot of debate as some scientists are rather upset about the idea our ancestors might have had sex for pleasure, may not have been monogamous and perhaps had a different interpretation of gender than we do now.
I wouldn't say I was excited about this, but I am concerned about the debate on HIV and circumcision for men in Africa. A number of trials suggest that routine circumcision of men can reduce HIV prevalence. Many global health organisations are encouraging we now explore this option.
However there's a growing body of medics opposed to male circumcision who're fighting this on the grounds of disapproving of circumcision per se, whilst practitioners like myself are more concerned of any programme that targets men in countries where women's social position is seriously disadvantaged. That debate is set to run, but in the meantime the concerns about the spread of HIV continues.
Name three under-rated things
Sex education. Whenever I do a public science event people start asking me questions about the science of sex, but pretty quickly start wanting to know 'am I normal?', 'what's female ejaculation?', 'how do you know if you're a sex addict?', 'can men orgasm without ejaculating?' You quickly become aware that there are masses of sex questions people have because they've not recieved good quality sex education and don't know where to get objective advice about sex from now.
Knowing your history. You can't study anything in social science without understanding historical and cultural issues. This is particularly the case in the study of sex where there's a trend towards reductionism - just studying hormones, the brain or behaviour. To really understand sex you need to understand history, culture, global differences and sex as an holistic issue rather than just one issue. Otherwise it just doesn't make sense.
Being reflexive. I don't think it's the place of social scientists to be 'objective'. I don't think you can be objective but you can be transparent. That means thinking about the work you're doing, piloting your research, getting feedback from others and constantly trying to work out how you can do better. It also means talking to people you're studying - and getting them to feed back on or shape the research you are doing. That's often discouraged in research either due to poor training or lack of time, but it is essential.
Nobel prize-winning psychologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) gives a description of brain activity that eerily echoes the results of modern brain scanning studies.
The quote is from a lecture given in 1913 and published on p222 of the book Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes: Twenty-Five Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity Behavior of Animals.
"If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous, then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot with fantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form, surrounded by a darkness more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemisphere."
The picture is of one of the lock gates on Grand Canal Way in South Dublin. The bench is a memorial to Irish artist, songwriter and civil engineer Percy French and is inscribed with the following ode to memory:
Remember me is all I ask,
And yet
If the remembrance prove a task
Forget
"But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? — the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world — a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors."
Woolf suffered from debilitating depression throughout her life and eventually committed suicide at the age of 58, but not before revolutionising modernist literature and leaving a huge legacy of both fiction and non-fiction works.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel about World War II, the bombing of Dresden, alien abduction, youthful foolishness, time travel, brain injury and forgiveness.
It is a truly remarkable book that gives a profound and sensitive portrait of a person with brain injury, and the chaotic, hallucinatory, terrifying and sometimes wonderful experiences that can come with it.
"We are accustomed to think of any particular response as either learned or innate, which is apt to be a source of confusion in thinking about things... Is the response inherited or acquired? The answer is, Neither: either Yes or No would be very misleading."
Pioneering neuropsychologist Donald Hebb highlights that fact that all human responses are a result of both inherited attributes and learnt experience.
Hebb is best known for his theory of how learning can be supported by networks of single neurons.
The theory, now called Hebbian learning, is a key aspect of artificial intelligence and neuroscience.
I got this quote from Oliver Sacks' book Migraine but the source isn't listed. If anyone knows exactly which of Hebb's writings this comes from, do let me know.
UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments: It is from "The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory" - it's on Google Books. Thanks John!
Psychotherapy Networker magazine is celebrating its 25th anniversary and has conducted a survey to find out the 10 most influential psychotherapists.
Over two and a half thousand (presumably) American psychotherapists responded to the question "Over the last 25 years, which figures have most influenced your practice?" from which the top ten were compiled.
The article discusses each of these key figures and their contribution to psychotherapy, as well as placing them in the wider context of psychological treatments for mental distress.
As well as outlining the most influential psychotherapists, another article looks at the 10 most influential research findings from the last 25 years that have influenced the development of modern psychotherapy.
Finally, an article on 'Defining Psychotherapy' cuts to the core of the debate over what psychotherapy is and what is should be in terms of both theory and everyday practice.
The articles are a fantastic introduction to both the theory behind psychological therapies and to what you might expect if you were to undertake therapy yourself, either as a client or a therapist.
Link to 'The Top 10 Most Influential Therapists...' Link to 'Top 10 Research Findings...' Link to article 'Defining Psychotherapy'.
Interestingly, the idea that it's not solely events themselves that determine our emotional reaction but also how the mind makes sense of them, is a core principal of CBT or cognitive behaviour therapy.
"We are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever."
BBC News has a brief news story on its front page that relates the experiences of Dr Haidr al-Maliki, a child psychiatrist in Iraq.
From what Dr al-Maliki says, it seems most psychiatrists have left the country and he himself is having to work with severely traumatised children despite not having the proper training.
He has also been shot and threatened, and lives in fear of his life.
About a year ago, during Ramadan, four boys aged about 15 to 20 came into my private clinic, in front of my patient.
They asked "Are you Dr Haidr?" I said yes. And they shot me several times.
One bullet went into my right shoulder, another into my right arm. I am left with nerve injury and muscle atrophy.
Afterwards they told me I couldn't go to my clinic and that I had to leave the country. They didn't say why.
Link to BBC News article 'My Iraq: Child psychiatrist'.
Gretchen Rubin is a lawyer-turned-author who's now pursuing happiness, by test-driving every principle, tip, theory, and scientific study she can find on the subject, and writing a book about her experiences as she goes.
Sources of inspiration stretch from Aristotle to Oprah Winfrey, and her quest is being charted on her blog, the Happiness Project.
Her online journal has recently explored how happiness relates to physical attractiveness, whether children makes us content, and what Voltaire has to say about living a good life - among a bewildering array of other investigations.
As well as experimenting with her life and recording the results, Gretchen has also been kind enough to talk to Mind Hacks about her motivations and discoveries.
What was your motivation for starting the Happiness Project?
One rainy afternoon, I saw that I was in danger of wasting my life.
As I was staring out the window of a taxi, a realization jolted me so violently that I jumped in my seat. I suddenly saw that years were slipping by, and I was ignoring the great fundamentals of my life.
"What do I want?" I asked myself. "Well...I want to be happy."
But I never thought about what made me happy, or how I might be happier, or even what it meant to be "happy."
I'd always vaguely expected to outgrow my limitations. One day, I'd magically stop twisting my hair and wearing running shoes every day. I'd remember my friends' birthdays, I'd fix up our apartment, I wouldn't let my daughter watch TV during breakfast. I'd read make more time for reading. I wouldn't lose my temper any more, I'd spend more time laughing and having fun, I wouldn't nag my husband, I wouldn't be scared to drive.
But now, it dawned on me that I was already grown up-and I wasn't living up to the level that I should expect of myself. If I wanted to be happier, I'd have to do some work.
"I need to think about this," I reflected. "I should have a happiness project. Or maybe," I thought, "I should write a book about a happiness project." Eureka!
In the last few years, there's been a big interest in the psychology of happiness. Most of this research is done in restricted experimental conditions. How successfully has it generalised to your life?
One of the challenges of the Happiness Project is translating scientific findings into real life, but it has turned out to be easier than I expected. So when a study discusses the importance of social bonds, I figure out how to strengthen my own friendships. When marriage expert John Gottman reports on the importance of responding to a spouse's "bid for attention," I admonish myself to "Put down my book!"
I've discovered that making such changes really do have an impact; when I changed my life in order to incorporate the elements that, according to the studies, supposedly boost happiness, those changes actually did make a difference.
So far, what has surprised you most in your quest for happiness?
It has surprised me how much work it is to be happy. I've found that I am truly much happier when I have an orderly apartment, see lots of friends, take time to be silly with my husband and daughters, read for fun, exercise regularly, go to sleep at a decent hour...and on and on. All this takes a lot of time and discipline. But it really does pay off in terms of happiness.
If you could recommend one book on happiness, what would it be?
My favorite general book on happiness is Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis. It's very engaging and covers a lot of ground. A particularly thought-provoking book on happiness is Barry Schwartz'sThe Paradox of Choice. A wonderful American classic about happiness and self-transformation is Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography.
If you could ask researchers to answer any question about happiness, what would it be?
In everyday life, a very common source of unhappiness for people is their weight, and yet this issue doesn't come up in academic discussions of happiness. Discuss.
Name three under-rated things
Children's literature - I love, love, love children's literature.
Toasted whole-wheat pita with salsa - delicious, nutritious, filling.
Spending time with friends - it's easy to forget how happy just hanging out with friends will make you. Take time to see the people you love.
Below is an excerpt from the novel Bedlam by Jennifer Higgie which gives a fictional account of the travels and madness of Victorian artist Richard Dadd.
Dadd was eventually confined to Bethlem Hospital and subsequently to the then 'Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane' (now Broadmoor Hospital) for the murder of his father and attempted murder of a tourist while being tormented by paranoid delusions.
Dadd was allowed to keep painting in hospital and produced some of the most important artwork of the era.
From p144 of the novel:
I find myself gazing at sand and seeing green hills.
I notice hideous faces glaring at me from the faces of sweet young girls.
I the silhouette of a pig in the mild eyes of a camel.
I lie stuck to my bed, covered in sweat as the mattress breathes and groans beneath me.
I have forgotten the names of my own sisters and brothers.
I speak happily, for hours, with my dead mother, whose hand I feel stroke mine, and curse the breath of my father, who is revealed to me as an impostor of the highest order.
I walk in sunlight and feel the hot glare of the moon burn my skin.
I see scorpions the size of men haunting ruins.
I crash into walls I do not see.
I pluck poisonous flowers and dream I boil them for tea.
I spend hours polishing teaspoons I do not need.
I long to dilute my colours with mirages, to make them hot and trembling.
Link to details of Higgie's Bedlam. Link to Wikipedia page on Dadd.
Dave Isay, Piya Kochhar and Howard Dully produced one of the most powerful radio documentaries of 2005 where Howard told the story of his own lobotomy and the quest to make sense of the experience.
A lobotomy is a type of brain surgery to disconnect parts of the frontal lobes from the rest of the brain.
It was originally devised by Egas Moniz as a treatment for psychiatric illness because it seemed to have a 'calming' effect.
Howard was given the operation when only 12 years old by Walter Freeman - the world's most enthusiastic evangelist for this procedure.
The procedure is now almost entirely disused, owing to the poor outcomes and dangers of the procedure, but it has left a legacy of people with permanently altered lives.
Howard wanted to understand how this dangerous procedure came to be so widely used and how it came to be performed on him as a child. He has also been kind enough to talk to Mind Hacks about his experiences.
What was it like having the operation?
It depends upon what you are referencing. First off, I never knew I had the procedure until three weeks afterwards. My brain was still in shock and I was medicated, so I had no real valid response. Freeman seemed to take that as me condoning what he and my stepmother did.
Did you notice any change in your thinking or behaviour as a result?
Other than major self-esteem issues, not really. I over reacted to many things. I was very emotional, and even though the lobotomy was suppose to curb that, it didn't. I have also been very self-analytical, in fact, I tend to over-analyze everything.
When researching your story, you met some other people who had been given a lobotomy. What did you learn from meeting them?
I actually only met two people. One I think was sold a bill of goods by her family and she went for it hook line and sinker. The other was unable to communicate and I felt much sorrow for her and her daughter.
What do you hope listeners will take from your story?
Forgiveness, the ability to forgive people and be proud no matter what happened. Also that the "parent" or "doctor" is not always right.
Although lobotomy is no longer used, the limited use of brain surgery to treat mental illness continues to this day. What do you think about modern forms of 'psychosurgery'?
I know too little about them to comment. Truthfully. I do not condemn the profession at all. I think Freeman started out with the best of intentions.
Name three under-rated things.
Feelings.
Common sense.
Compassion.
You can listen to Howard's documentary My Lobotomyonline.
"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing."
The legendary surrealist Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel on the existential importance of memory. Thanks Katerina!
The Boston Globe has a brief interview with philosopher John Searle where he's quizzed about his views on consciousness, computation and consensus.
Despite having a back catalogue stretching back to the 60s, prog rock band Procol Harum are popularly remembered as 'the band who did A Whiter Shade of Pale'.
Similarly, despite his wide-ranging work, Searle is popularly remembered as the 'guy who devised the Chinese room argument'.
Searle is the Procol Harum of philosophy, although, to be fair, his back catalogue is actually worth checking out.
In this interview with the Globe's Ideas section, he touches on consciousness, free will, whether the mind can be described as computation, and why philosophers disagree so much.
IDEAS: You think that questions about the mind are at the core of philosophy today, don't you?
SEARLE: Right. And that's a big change. If you go back to the 17th century, and Descartes, skepticism -- the question of how it is possible to have knowledge -- was a live issue for philosophy...
IDEAS: Why the change?
SEARLE: We know too much. The sheer volume of knowledge has become overwhelming. We take basic findings from physics and chemistry about the universe for granted. Knowing much more about the real world than our ancestors did, we can't take skepticism seriously in the old way. It also means that philosophy has to proceed on the basis of all that we know.
The universe consists of matter, and systems defined by causal relations. We know that. So we go on to ask: To what extent can we render our self-conception consistent with this knowledge? How can there be consciousness, free will, rationality, language, political organization, ethics, aesthetics, personal identity, moral responsibility? These are questions for the philosophy of mind.
Link Q&A with John Searle from The Boston Globe (via 3Q).
"As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain, will also be a mystery."
A quote by the Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal who won the Nobel prize for pioneering research into the fine structure of the nervous system, particularly the structure of the synapse.
"From my fourth-floor room overlooking infinity, in the viable intimacy of the falling evening, at the window before the emerging stars, my dreams - in rhythmic accord with the visible distance - are of journeys to unknown, imagined or simply impossible countries."
Text 421 ('Journey in the Mind') from The Book of Disquiet (ISBN 0141183047) by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.
There's a great introductory profile of psychiatrist and neurobiologist Eric Kandel in Columbia Magazine that outlines his life and Nobel-prize winning work.
Kandel is best known for his work on how memory operates at the cellular and molecular level.
For example, his research has investigated long-term potentiation, the process by which the synaptic connection between neurons is temporarily strengthened.
This has been cited as the basis of neural plasticity - the process by which the brain can re-organise itself at the cellular level to make new connections and pathways.
This is thought to be essential for learning, as well as recovery after damage.
Kandel's "new science of mind" is an integration of neuroscience, biology, and the study of behavior that will connect the workings of individual neurons in the brain with philosophy, sociology, economics, art, war, and manifestations of human culture. "Neuroscience is the Esperanto," Kandel says, "the humanistic language that binds it all together." His research into the molecular and cellular basis of short- and long-term memory forms the foundation for the understanding of this language. His work illuminating how signals move through neurons earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000, alongside Arvid Carlsson from the University of Göteborg in Sweden and Paul Greengard of Rockefeller University. Kandel is, as Grundfest suggested 50 years ago, taking the next step in the study of the mind. "I think it's likely that a variety of social phenomena are going to be explored at the biological level," he says.
Kandel is also well-known for being the first author of the weighty neuroscience 'bible' Principles of Neural Science (ISBN 0838577016).
UPDATE: A video and transcript of Kandel's Nobel lecture is available here. Thanks Mxr!
The Boston Globe has a review of a new biography of William James. He is often called the 'father of modern psychology' and is equally well-known for his work in philosophy.
Not quite as well-known is his drug-experimentation, fascination with parapsychology and interest in numerous women.
It's almost a cliché that psychology talks will start with a quote from James. Largely because his work, most notably the bookThe Principles of Psychology, touched upon almost every area now part of mainstream cognitive science.
His interests were truly eclectic, however, and his writing explores a diverse range of thoughts and experiences.
One of my favourite James quotes is a sentence he wrote after taking nitrous oxide ('laughing gas'), recorded in an essay on the experience:
"There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference."
James also experienced terrible depressions and suicidal thoughts throughout his life, giving him first hand experience of a mind gone awry.
Perhaps a combination of natural curiosity and an interest in altered states led James to radical and still-influential theories of mental life.
A recent review from The New York Times summed it up like so:
It is hard to maintain the illusion of the disembodied philosopher in the face of this larger-than-life and fascinatingly cracked personality, who pragmatically turned the very fissures of his soul into metaphysical positions.
There's more in the reviews, and the book itself, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (ISBN 0618433252), has recently hit the shelves.
Link to Boston Globe review of James biography (via 3Q). Link to review from LA Times. Link to extensive review from The New York Times.
Some dialogue from the novel A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (ISBN 1400040302) by physicist Janna Levin.
In this passage, Kurt Gödel discusses his objections to Alan Turing's work on whether the mind can be completely described as a series of computations with his friend Oskar Morgenstern.
"If I die, you must promise to publish my article refuting Alan Turing's thesis on the limitations of the mind. A Turing machine is a concept, equivalent to a mechanical procedure or algorithm. Turing was able to completely replace reasoning by mechanical operations on formulas - by Turing machines. Good, agreed?
However, are we supposed to equate the human soul with a Turing machine? No. There is a philosophical error in Turing's work. Turing in his 1937 paper, page 250, gives an argument which is supposed to show that mental procedures cannot go beyond mechanical procedures. However this argument inconclusive. What Turing disregards completely is the fact that mind, in its use, is not static but constantly developing.
They murdered him, you realize?"
"I thought it was suicide,", Oskar replies absently.
Kurt continues, "The government poisoned his food. I have also been working on a formal proof of the existence of God. But this is unfinished. I don't want our colleagues to think I am crazy. Maybe you should not published that one if I die."
Gödel eventually died from starvation, owing to paranoid beliefs about conspiracies and poisoning.
Gödel's idea that consciousness is not understandable as a form of computation was further developed by mathematician Roger Penrose in the book Shadows of the Mind (ISBN 0198539789).
Link to excerpt from book. Link to Janna Levin's website.
A poem on the collective unconsciousness of sleep by British poet John Hegley:
Light Sleep
Early in the evening I like to have a kip and dip
into the pool of communal unconcious;
resting, passive,
where whatever size of a drip you are
you make the whole
more massive.
Hegley's poems are a mixture of the whimsical, insightful and touching. We've featured the Hegley poem 'Outsider art' previously on Mind Hacks.
Google Video seems to have the full length documentary on Prof Temple Grandin, a world expert on animal science who was diagnosed with autism as a child.
As well as her academic work which has been hugely influential around the world, she has also written several books on the psychology of autism that have become widely read by professionals and the public alike.
Her story first became known as she was included as a case study in neurologist Oliver Sacks' book An Anthropologist on Mars.
Interestingly, Grandin suggests that her autism helps her understand animals, as she suggests they have similar styles of thinking in some instances.
In the programme, Grandin explains her work and views on autism. Furthermore, the documentary highlights her as a bright and engaging person, far from the usual stereotypes of autistic people.
Link to video of 'The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow'. Link to Prof Temple Grandin's website.
The Neurophilosopher has written a great introduction to the history and science of Phineas Gage - one of the most famous cases in the history of neurology.
In 1848, Gage was a railroad worker who had the sort of job that sounds like it was designed for the Darwin awards: he was paid to drill holes in large rocks, fill them with gunpowder and pack it down with a large iron rod.
Not surprisingly, the gunpowder eventually ignited, sending the tamping iron through Gage's skull.
Remarkably, Gage survived, but not without significant damage to his frontal lobes.
Gage seemed to show some changes in character (although the exactly details are still somewhat controversial), and this was one of the first clues that specific areas of the brain may be involved in specific mental functions.
More recently, scientific studies have been completed to work out the path of the iron through his skull, to understand exactly how the brain was affected.
Neurophilosopher has video of the computer reconstructions created by these studies, and discusses some of the historical details of the incident.
Link to 'The incredible case of Phineas Gage'. Link to Wikipedia page on Phineas Gage.
A paper just published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica reconsiders the insanity and death of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who is commonly thought to have died of neurosyphilis.
In contrast, the authors of the new study suggest that Nietzsche died of frontotemporal dementia - a type of dementia that specifically affects the frontal and temporal lobes.
While many people have 'diagnosed' historical figures in retrospect, this study is different, in that the authors reviewed Nietzsche's actual medical notes in light of what is known about the progression of syphilis and dementia today.
More than 100 years after his death, Friedrich Nietzsche remains one of the most contentious figures in the history of philosophy. His writings contain some of the most profound philosophical statements of the 19th century, and have been exceptionally influential. However, they also express ambiguities and contradictions, which leave scholars perplexed and still arguing about their meaning and intent. Such ambiguities are reflected not only in Nietzsche's life, but also in his terminal illness and death.
Following a psychotic breakdown in 1889, at the age of 44 years, he was admitted to the Basel mental asylum and on 18 January 1889 was transferred to the Jena mental asylum. He remained in demented darkness until his death on 25 August 1900. In Basel, a diagnosis of general paralysis of the insane (GPI; tertiary cerebral syphilis) was made. This diagnosis was confirmed in Jena and is still widely accepted. However, even some of Nietzsche's contemporaries doubted this. The lack of certainty about his primary luetic infection, the long duration of the disease and some clinical features lead us to question the diagnosis of GPI.
In this study, we re-construct the anamnesis [clinical history] of Nietzsche's illness and review the clinical presentation. We then note the natural history of GPI as it was at the turn of the 19th century, and suggest an alternative diagnosis, namely that of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) which has been characterized in detail only in the last two decades.
Nick Yee is researching the psychology of social interaction in online worlds, and finding some surprising results.
At first sight, multi-player worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft may seem like relatively crude or whimsical simulations of real-life social situations.
But intriguingly, Yee has discovered that 'personal space' and other aspects of non-verbal communication are just as important, and that offline romances can blossom in online game worlds.
While these worlds are becoming the centre of new economies, social groups and leisure activities, Yee hopes to understand how the human mind adapts to communication via virtual reality.
He's also kindly agreed to talk to Mind Hacks about his work and latest discoveries.
What are you working on at the moment?
I'm currently in my dissertation year and working several part-time jobs related to online gaming. Together, these jobs let me explore the virtual worlds / online gaming space through a variety of perspectives and approaches: surveys, experiments, data-mining, and so on. The common theme through these projects has been exploring the intersection of social interaction and virtual worlds.
Why study social interaction in online worlds? Surely they're just games?
For a variety of reasons. First of all, people can now make a living selling virtual items from these environments, so goals and objects in these worlds have actual real life value. Secondly, many teenagers learn important leadership skills (e.g. leading a group of 50 adults) that they don't have the opportunity to do in the physical world. And finally, many of the relationships that form in these worlds carry over into the physical world. For example, many players have physically dated someone they first met in an online game.
How do you think these compare to 'offline' romances?
Here's a recent data point from a recent survey that was interesting. Of the online gamers who have physically dated someone who they first met in an MMO (a 'massively multiplayer online game' such as World of Warcraft), 60% of them don't think the relationship would have happened had they first met face to face. Many of them say they wouldn't have bothered getting to know the other person for superficial reasons (e.g. too young, too funny, not my type).
It was because they got to know each other by working together, learning about each other "inside out", that allowed these people to have a meaningful relationship that might otherwise not have started. A lot of people think that online relationships are inherently more superficial than ones that begin face to face, but I think in some cases, the opposite is true.
I think the key thing to understand is that MMOs aren't 3D versions of Match.com. People don't play an MMO primarily to find a romantic partner, so these relationships are more comparable to an office relationship - a relationship that grows out of repeated interactions with someone in a non-romantic context.
How likely do you think it is that players fall in love with each other as people, rather than just as play-acted characters?
Some might argue that MMOs allow people to idealize themselves and hide their flaws, but the large cosmetic aisles in our supermarkets suggest that this is the norm in the physical world as well. On the other hand, many MMO players note that you learn more from a person by working with them through a crisis over a two-hour period (e.g. dragon slaying) than you would on a movie-date (i.e. in silence).
My dad used to say that he plays golf with his business partners because it lets him see which of them cheat. In other words, games can be character-revealing. In the same way, I think a lot of players feel they get a good sense of someone after watching them react to stress, crises, and other people over a long period of time.
Of course, no one has the data on the survival likelihoods of MMO relationships, but I think understanding the unique constraints and affordances of MMO relationships makes us realize that it's not simply the case that relationships that start in MMOs are "missing things" when compared with relationships that start face to face. I think it's a lot more complicated than that.
What psychological aspects of social interaction in online worlds do you expect to remain stable? - considering that as technology advances, the look, feel and ways people interact in these worlds will change.
I think many social norms from physical interactions carry into the virtual world, more so than some might expect. For example, we recently studied interpersonal distance in the online world Second Life (pdf) and found that many of the rules that govern personal space in the physical world can be found in the virtual world even though the physics and mode of movement / navigation are so different (keyboard vs. legs).
Name three under-rated things.
4B lead for mechanical pencils.
10-sided dice.
Basses (as opposed to tenors).
---
You can read more about Nick's work, including full-text papers, at his website.
Psychology lecturer and author Gerard Keegan has created a fascinating website of psychology curios, including a 'psychology art gallery' that contains a number of visual illusions or images that play with the limits of our visual perception.
Keegan is the author of Higher Psychology a textbook for 16-18 year-old psychology students and his site shows a similar passion for communicating psychology in a straightforward and accessible manner.
We often assume that psychology and neuroscience experiments tell us general things about how humans think and behave, but little attention is given to whether the people who volunteer for research studies are representative of the wider population.
PsyBlog has a concise summary of a recent study that looked at the sort of people who volunteer for research studies and how they differ from the general population.
Narcissists are over-represented amongst non-participators, as are those low on assertiveness. On the other hand, those high on obsessive-compulsive, histrionic, self-sacrificing and intrusive/needy measures are more likely to participate.
What is not clear is how these sort of differences affect different types of studies.
For example, will a study that is investigating memory by significantly affected by the fact that the participants are likely to be less narcissistic than the general population?
Link to PsyBlog post 'Why do people participate in research?'.
Seed Magazine has a video of a fascinating conversation between sleep neuroscientist Robert Stickgold and film director Michel Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Stickgold has reinvigorated sleep research by investigating the borderlands of consciousness with a series of novel experiments.
I wrote briefly about one of my favourites in Mind Hacks (the book):
An ingenious study published in Science did manage to investigate the role of some of the deeper brain structures in hypnagogia, specifically the medial temporal lobes which are particularly linked to memory function. The researchers asked five patients who had suffered medial temporal lobe damage to play several hours of Tetris. Damage to this area of the brain often causes amnesia, and the patients in this study had little conscious memory for more than a few minutes at a time. On one evening, some hours after their last game, the players were woken up just as they started to doze and were asked for their experiences. Although they had no conscious memory of playing the game, all of the patients mentioned images of falling, rotating Tetris blocks. This has given us some strong evidence that the hypnagogic state may be due (at least in part) to unconscious memories appearing as unusual hypnagogic experiences.
Michel Gondry is best known for being discovered by Björk (no, not that one), directing a clutch of essential music videos (including The Chemical Brothers' startling Let Forever Be), and moving into big cinema.
His biggest cinema success to date is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which has become a modern mind-bending classic with its feat firmly in cognitive science.
Gondry's new movie, The Science of Sleep, also explores the mind's outer reaches.
The pair discuss how psychology and art have tackled sleep, and how the logic of causation gets warped by both science and dreaming.
Link to Seed Magazine video with Stickgold and Gondry. Link to fantastic article on the cognitive science of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
"You're an autism mum. I see them all the time. I saw you that first day we met, how you agonised over your boy, mute in his pushchair while all the other pre-schoolers made their clever observations about the world; I see how you worry now over his odd way of walking, the animal noises he will sometimes make instead of words. And I see how no amount of pain in the experience of caring for your son will put to death the fire of love you have for him."
The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine has a pdf of a gripping article on Private Harry Farr, a 25 year-old British soldier shot for cowardice during World War I, despite having being treated for shell-shock.
As with all other WWI soldiers executed for cowardice, Farr was pardoned earlier this year by the British Government.
The article is written by Professor Simon Wessley of King's College London, who puts the Farr's court martial and execution in context of the history of World War I, and in the context of what was known about trauma-related psychiatry at the time.
There is little dispute about the sequence of events on 17 September 1916 that led to the execution of Private Farr. Harry Farr was a member of 1st Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, which was taking part in the battle of the Somme. That day his battalion was moving from their rear positions up to the front line itself. At 9.00 am that morning Farr asked for permission to fall out, saying he was not well. He was sent to see the medical officer, who either found nothing wrong with him, or refused to see him because he had no physical injury—the Court Martial papers are unclear on this point. Later that night Farr was found still at the rear, and was again ordered to go the trenches. He refused, telling Regimental Sergeant Major Haking, that he 'could not stand it'. Then Hanking replied 'You are a fucking coward and you will go to the trenches. I give fuck all for my life and I give fuck all for yours and I'll get you fucking well shot'. At 11.00 pm that night a final attempt was made to get Private Farr up to the front line, and he was escorted forward. A fracas broke out between Farr and his escorts, and this time they let him run away. The following morning he was arrested and charged with contravening section 4 (7) of the Army Act — showing cowardice in the face of the enemy.
The article discusses why Farr was executed, when over 96% of soldiers convicted of cowardice escaped this punishment, and how the concept of psychological disorder was understood in 1916, particularly by a British Army in a precarious military position.
For more information on shell-shock, and a paper by pioneering WWI military psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers on the condition, there's a good overview available here.
pdf of article 'The life and death of Private Harry Farr'. Link to shell-shock info from FirstWorldWar.com
Wired has a brief interview with Daniel Levitin, ex-rock music producer and current Professor of psychology who is researching the neuroscience of musicians and music perception.
Levitin has just written a book entitled This is Your Brain on Music that describes his own take on how the mind and brain understand music, both as listeners, and as composers and performers.
The book has a flash-heavy website that contains several excerpts and interactive examples as both a preview and an accompaniment.
Levitin's book comes at a time when there's a huge upsurge in interest in understanding the neuroscience of music.
The Psychologist has just released an engaging open-access article on the psychology of celebrity worship [pdf] that attempts to explain why people spend time following the lives of celebrities and what benefits this attraction brings.
In adolescence, when celebrity fandom often peaks, research has suggested that celebrities might function as part of an extended social network.
In effect, these are pseudo-friendships that add to the existing social circle and provide opportunities for discussion, interest or intrigue.
However, there is now an increasing amount of research on people who take their fandom further than casual interest.
'Celebrity worship' is when someone spends a great deal of time thinking about a certain celebrity. Although not necessarily pathological, this level of intense interest has been correlated with a number of psychological disadvantages.
One finding is that people who worship celebrities for 'intense-personal' reasons (rather than just for the entertainment value) are likely to score badly on measures of cognitive flexibility - the ability to change strategy and switch ideas when problem solving.
It is unlikely that interest in Jessica Simpson affects your ability to reason (although sometimes I wonder), but perhaps those with poor cognitive flexibility are more likely to fixate on celebrities as a way of tackling minor difficulties with boredom or initiating social interaction.
It seems this interest can tip over into disorder for some people, leading to stalking or perhaps even de Clerambault's syndrome - a psychotic disorder where the affected person has a delusion that the celebrity is in love with them.
The article is written by Drs David Giles and John Maltby, both of whom have conducted extensive research into 'parasocial' relationships with celebrities.
Although fascinating in itself, especially as we live in an increasingly celebrity-dominated media, this research has obvious implications understanding the psychology of obsession, stalking and related criminal behaviour.
pdf of article 'Praying at the altar of the stars'.
Liz Spikol seems to have lived many lives in one. She is currently a journalist, broadcaster and blogger, and the managing editor of the Philadelphia Weekly, one of the city's leading independent newspapers.
She has also experienced the extremes of mood and the unreal world of psychosis, which led to her being admitted to psychiatric hospital on several occasions.
This, and the day-to-day reality of managing a chronic mental illness, inspired her to write the award-winning newspaper column The Trouble with Spikol which combines biography, commentary and humour to demystify both mental health and the vagaries of modern life.
Liz recently began the anarchic blog of the same name to continue her quest to educate and entertain. She's also been kind enough to talk to Mind Hacks about her life and work.
In your reflective moments, how do you hope that your journalism will make a difference to the world?
Well, in my most reflective moments, I think, "Should I volunteer at an animal shelter? Should I become a teacher? Maybe I should be a social worker? Or study medicine?" I'm never satisfied with what I'm doing because journalism often feels like a one-way street. I hope I'm making a difference by being a voice for the voiceless, but sometimes I hunger to sit down across a table from another human being, and have a conversation that will help them in some pragmatic way.
Journalism can feel vague, but in my more lunatic moments of self-aggrandizement, I think, "I'm changing the way people think about mental illness. I'm showing people that there's nothing shameful about it, and that you can be 'normal' while still struggling with a chronic illness. I'm expanding the dialogue. I'm erasing stigma." And then I lose a sock or forget to lock my door and that returns me to the everyday reality of humble writing and editing.
You have experienced some unusual and, perhaps, extreme mental states in your life. What has this taught you about the mind?
It has taught me how much we don't know. I hate to sound the same note as other people who talk on this subject, but The Mind Really Is A Mystery. I'm always amazed by the strategies my brain thinks up either to torture or to comfort me. Sometimes I have a hallucination (which unfortunately cuts through my medication) and I'm stunned: Where did that come from? A giant cockroach running across the couch? I'll never know my own mind. Not really.
What positive things do you have in your life that you wouldn't have gained without your experience of mental illness?
I've absolutely gained a sympathy for people who are, for lack of a better term, frail in some way. I have a deeper understanding of the way people arrive at undesirable places in their lives. I never look at a person and assume I know everything about them. I assume I know nothing, which means I'm not judgmental. The illness has also given me perspective.
After suffering that way and coming so close to death, nothing really bothers me. If I survived that, what can hurt me now? I feel fearless. My two mantras when I'm nervous about something are, 1) "What's the worst that could happen?" 2) "Will I even remember this in a year?"
If you could add your own chapter to the 'training manual' of psychiatrists, what would it say?
Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind. I would just write that over and over again until it achieved a brainwashing effect.
If you hadn't been a journalist, what would you have been?
I wanted to be a college professor and teach literature. I love books, I love language and I love teaching. It would have been perfect for me, but things took a different turn. I also would've liked to be a vet, because I love animals. But I have no aptitude for science.
Name three under-rated things.
Seeing a movie in a movie theater.
Philadelphia, my hometown.
The elderly.
Mark Steel lectures on Freud, Aristotle, Descartes:
Someone has put a series of the brilliant Mark Steel Lectures online which are an informative and hilarious romp through some of the most important historical figures in history.
They were created by the BBC for the Open University to both educate and enthuse people about history and contain wry insights into both the work and lives of the people featured.
The programmes on Freud, Aristotle and Descartes are likely to be of most interest to Mind Hacks readers, although the whole of this series has some fantastic gems.
Link to YouTube archive of the Mark Steel Lectures.
Luria archive sheds light on 'father of neuropsychology':
The University of California, San Diego have created an extensive online archive of material related to the pioneering Russian neuropsychologist A.R. Luria, who is often considered the 'father' of the modern neuropsychology.
Like another famous neuroscientist, Eric Kandel, he originally intended to look for a scientific basis for Freudian concepts of the mind.
As time went on, he began to develop short tasks designed to tap specific mental skills and abilities - a technique now almost universally used in cognitive and neuropsychology. The photo on the right shows Luria (in the white coat) testing a patient with one of his tasks.
His encounters with the large number of brain-injured soldiers returning from World War Two led Luria to make links between specific areas of the brain and certain mental functions, which he could test by using his tasks and testing their diagnostic accuracy.
Some of the tasks he developed to make and test these links are still used by neuropsychologists today.
As well as writing some of the most influential books on the practise of neuropsychology, he also wrote up detailed neuropsychological biographies of two remarkable patients.
The Mind of a Mnemonist was a case study of 'S', who had a striking form of synaesthesia that gave him a memory so reliable that one of his main problems was being unable to forget - meaning he often became overwhelmed by detail of his memories and could not focus on the most important aspects.
In contrast, The Man with a Shattered World recounted the story of a soldier who suffered selective impairments to memory, perception and language after suffering a head wound in battle.
Luria recounted the personal experiences and histories of these remarkable individuals alongside his scientific investigations into their brain function.
He called this deeply personal form of scientific investigation 'romantic science', and is cited by Oliver Sacks as a major influence on his own style of writing and subject matter.
The UCSD Luria archive has everything from essays on his work, to a video documentary about the man himself, and is a crucial resource for those interested both in this hugely influential figure and the history of neuropsychology.
Artist Susan Aldworth creates works based on neurology and brain scans, after her own experience of having an emergency angiogram after suffering a suspected stroke.
The exhibition has just been moved from its previous home in the Menier Gallery, to the corridors of the Royal London Hospital, and the gallery of the Old Operating Theatre Museum near St Thomas Hospital in London Bridge.
If you're not able to visit either of these exhibitions, Aldworth has an extensive gallery on her website that shows her brain-inspired paintings and sculptures.
Link to Susan Aldworth's website. Link to details of 'Matter into Imagination' exhibition. Link to BBC News story 'How brain scans inspired artist'.
Professor Sherry Turkle is a psychologist best known for her pioneering research into the psychology of computers and the internet, and particularly on how we interpret concepts such as the self and identity through the veil of technology.
Her book Life on the Screen was hugely influential as one of the first books on 'internet psychology' in the days when the internet had barely reached the mainstream.
She remains intensely interested in how technology affects the mind, behaviour and social world, and has kindly agreed to talk to Mind Hacks.
What are your main professional interests?
The relationship between people and technology; how we are going to get along (cognitively, emotionally, spiritually) with robots and artificial intelligences designed as human companions; how models of mind are "appropriated" into everyday thinking about mind; the role of objects, particularly technological objects in people's lives; the effects of "always-on/always on you" technology on development, personality, human relations.
What first got you interested in the mind and brain?
Trying to understand why certain ideas about the mind were taken up during particular social and historical circumstances, and how ideas about the mind affected how people thought about their past, present, and possibilities for change, whether or not they had a formal understanding of these ideas on a "high" theoretical level. That is, I became interested in the sociology of the sciences of mind.
What are you excited about at the moment?
When psychoanalysts write about objects they are usually referring to people. I am excited about a new object relations psychology that is really about the object world. I am interested in the integration of cognition and affect (emotion) in thinking about such matters.
If you were going to be stuck in a lift with someone of your choice, who would it be?
Since the question leaves open the possibility of people alive or dead, I would have to go for William Shakespeare (no contest). He is the greatest psychologist of all time; I have no real understanding of how this came to be.
What makes you happy?
I give a circular answer: That I feel content with my life, my child, my friendships.
What book you would recommend to make someone enthusiastic about the mind and brain?
The Sunday Herald sent a reporter out to meet legendary chemist and psychedelic researcher Alexander Shulgin to discuss life, love and phenethylamines.
Shulgin has been the world's foremost researcher of psychedelic compounds for many decades and has written about his research in several engaging books, including the notorious Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved.
The Sunday Herald finds him still with a huge enthusiasm for his work and eager to continue exploring.
"Primarily, it is about the conversion of a structure," he tells me. "It's a fun process and it's tremendously fascinating." He is more animated when speaking about the details of how he managed to alter a drug to change its effect than when asked about the effect those changes had when he tested the new compound on himself. In fact, for a man who has had so many psychedelic experiences, his stories of his 'trips' are disappointingly dull, while listening to him talk about experiments and chemical structures and hearing complex chemical names trip excitedly off his tongue is thoroughly entertaining.
"Chemistry is a music form to me," Shulgin says and, for the past 70 years, he has been composing at a rate Beethoven would have been proud of.
Link to Sunday Herald article. Link to Wikipedia entry on Shulgin.
Seed Magazine has a short but thought-provoking article on the yawn and the mysterious way they are 'transmitted' around a social group.
Scientists maintain that yawning has both social and physiological functions, and may even be useful clinically: Abnormal yawning can be symptomatic of pathology, such as tumors, hemorrhage or drug withdrawal. Researchers know that a system of several neurotransmitters and neuropeptides control yawning, but little is known about the exact mechanism underlying the action.
Until recently, it was thought that only humans and great apes were able to "catch" yawns. While humans yawn in the womb, they don't fall prey to contagious yawning until about two years of age, which suggests a recent evolutionary origin.
The article also tackles the myth that yawns are brought on by lack of oxygen.
Link to 'The Incredible, Communicable Yawn' from Seed Magazine.
The Facial Action Coding System is a system for describing facial expression. It is based on 46 defined 'Action Units', which are each the contraction of a facial muscle or group of muscles.
So, the six basic emotional expressions can be expressed in terms of combinations of action units. Disgust is Action Unit 7 + Action Unit 9, for example.
Described in terms of the Action Unit space, each emotion must have an inverse (when all involved action units are inactive, and all action units not involved in the expression of that emotion are active).
Question: What do the Action-Unit Space inverses of the fundamental emotional expressions look like? Are they recognisable in any way as the opposite of the expression in emotional space? Does the action-unit inverse of sadness look like happiness, for example? What is the muscle-opposite of surprise, is it similar to the feeling-opposite (boredom presumably)?
Actor, writer and film director Stephen Fry recently visited the neuropsychiatric genetics unit at Cardiff University - which is not a combination I'd ever thought I'd be writing about.
Fry has bipolar disorder, sometimes called manic depression, which can cause manic highs or deep disabling depressions.
His visit was apparently part of a BBC documentary on bipolar to be shown later this year, and the unit is one of the leading research centres for the genetics of psychopathology.
Admittedly, it's a fairly transparent marketing ploy for the BBC Doctor Who magazine, but the top five people in a poll to determine a historical person readers would most like to meet include four people who would likely be diagnosed with mental illness.
It is likely that only Martin Luther King would be without a diagnosis. Churchill, Presley and Monroe all had significant periods of mental distress and Einstein reputedly had Asperger syndrome - although whether 'illness' is the best word to describe his unique way of looking at the world is another matter.
All great and fascinating people. Sadly, however, two of the four (Presley and Monroe) died in tragic circumstances.
Hopefully, both a wider recognition that mental distress and giftedness can go hand in hand, and continuing developments in mental health care will mean fewer great lives (whether famous or not!) will end in tragedy.
Link to 'Churchill tops time travel list' from BBC News.
"In leading his patients to understand that breakdown was nothing to be ashamed of, that horror and fear were inevitable responses to the trauma of war and were better acknowledged than suppressed, that feelings of tenderness for other men were natural and right, that tears were an acceptable and helpful part of grieving, he was setting himself up against the whole tenor of their upbringing. Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men. And yet he himself was a product of the same system…Certainly the rigorous repression of emotion and desire had been the constant theme of his adult life. In advising his young patients to abandon the attempt at repression and to let themselves feel the pity and terror their war experience inevitably evoked, he was excavating the ground he stood on".
The thoughts of army psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers from the novel Regeneration by Pat Barker. In Regeneration, the first of a trilogy, Barker blends fact with fiction in her depiction of the relationship between Rivers and the celebrated poet Siegfried Sassoon, at Craiglockhart during the First World War. More excerpts to follow next week.
Cognitive Daily and The Washington Post cast a sceptical eye over the recently released documentary Unknown White Male which claims to depict two years in the life of someone with a curious form of amnesia.
Cognitive Dailyexamines the representation of memory in the film, and how closely it accords with what is known about the psychology of knowledge and remembering.
Reporting on the controversy over the film's truthfulness, The Washington Postanalyses the inconsistencies in the film, and the opinions of those who support and doubt the main character's condition.
The Post quotes memory and amnesia researcher Hans Markowitsch and, rather endearingly, calls him a 'neural psychologist'.
Link to discussion from Cognitive Daily. Link to 'A Trip Down Memory Lane' from The Washington Post.
This video is a 1972 documentary about the beginnings of ARPANET, the forerunner to the modern internet, developed by the U.S. Department of Defense
In one scene, a woman is seen typing Chinese symbols into a computer, echoing a beautifully whimsical scene from John Searle's famous 'Chinese room' thought experiment.
Searle's experiment addresses the question of whether information processing would be sufficient to account for consciousness, and includes people in a room, typing Chinese symbols into a computer.
If you were designing an advert to encourage university students to drink less alcohol, which wording do you think would work better?
"Most university students drink too much, with dire consequences for their future health".
OR
"University students are healthier than you think, most have fewer than four drinks when they go out".
A growing body of research on the misperception of norms suggests the second type of statement may work better. University students consistently overestimate how much their peers drink, and importantly, it's this misperception that correlates with how much they choose to drink themselves.
"In point of fact, the norm among college students is to drink moderately if at all. And promoting this good news is an essential element of the health promotion strategy known as the social norms approach".
From an article in The Scientist magazine on the science of encouraging healthy behaviour. (Note, to celebrate their relaunch, all 20 years of content is currently accessible for free at The Scientist website).
If you're not already tired of Valentine themed stories in the news, LiveScience have an interesting article discussing some of the recent developments in understanding the psychology and neuroscience of love and attraction.
It's not the most critical article in the world, taking most of the results from the studies as given, but does provide some useful pointers for the current state of work in this area.
Link to article 'The Rules of Attraction in the Game of Love'.
As Tom said, Valentine's is fast approaching. Just in time, Christopher Bale and colleagues have published a study in Personality and Individual Differences on what 142 female and 63 male undergraduates thought of 40 different chat up lines as featured in mini stories about a man attempting to woo a woman.
It was thumbs down to jokes, empty compliments and sexual references ("Well hey there, I may not be Fred Flintstone, but I bet I can make your Bed Rock!") and thumbs up to lines revealing helpfulness, generosity, athleticism, culture ("It's a fine instrument wouldn't you say? A Steinway concert grand if I'm not mistaken", he said pointing to a nearby piano) and wealth ("Hi, my name's William, I'm one of the owners here, would you like to dance?").
The student participants gave their verdicts by saying how likely the woman was to continue the conversation.
Surprisingly perhaps, the male and female participants tended to agree on which lines were likely to be successful.
The poor ratings for jokey chat up lines were unexpected but the researchers said that could be due to their failing to give different categories to wit - "spontaneous jokes that fit the context exactly, are genuinely funny, and require intelligence" and humour - "the pre-planned jokes and one-liners which were ineffective and do not demonstrate intelligence".
Link to abstract. Link to Christopher Bale talking about the work (last five minutes or so of the recording).
American Scientistreviews two new books on the scientific history of the synapse and the early work on neural communication, particularly focusing on the life and work of pioneering Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal.
In his Nobel Prize winning work, Cajal discovered the synapse and first argued that the neuron was the fundamental unit of the nervous system. Although this is now accepted as fact, at the time it was highly controversial.
The review is more than simply an opinion on the two books, but is actually a fantastic summary of his life and times, and the scientific discoveries which changed the world.
"It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?"
Philosopher and cognitive scientist Shaun Gallagher sits in the hot seat and is interviewed by Science and Consciousness Review who quiz him about how the body and its actions shape our thoughts, and how this can break down to produce bizarre experiences of being controlled by outside forces.
Gallagher draws on the neuroscience of action and the philosophy of consciousness in his interview, in line with much of his previous work.
I think these experiences of ownership and agency [of actions] are manifested at the level of the level of first-order, pre-reflective, phenomenal consciousness. That is, I don't need to reflect on what I'm doing to generate these experiences. Rather, they are part of and implicit in what my movement feels like.
Link to 'An Interview with Shaun Gallagher'. Link to Shaun Gallagher's homepage.
Science fiction author Philip K. Dick experienced unpredictable altered states of consciousness and his work contains some of the best descriptions of psychosis you are likely to find anywhere.
BBC Radio 4 just broadcast a programme, archived online, that discusses PKD's kaleidoscopic and life-changing "2-3-74" experience, where he believed he was being contacted by an interdimensional entity called VALIS and that 1970's California was just an illusion disguising the fact that the 1st century Roman empire still existed.
Link to programme 'Confessions of a Crap Artist' (via BoingBoing). Link to PhilipKDickFans.com
ABC Radio's Science Show hosts a wide-ranging and engaging conversation with neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, where she discusses the latest scientific and ethical implications of brain science.
Professor Greenfield is constantly involved in drawing out science from the sometimes stuffy world of academia into the public eye and is one of the liveliest figures in contemporary neuroscience (I still have fond memories of her presenting the Christmas Lectures in a red leather cat suit).
She also has an extensive knowledge of philosophy and history, meaning she often has a different perspective from other researchers in the field.
mp3 or realaudio of Susan Greenfield at the Sydney Writers' Festival. Link to transcript of programme.
Autism Diva is the name of an author who comments on the science and politics of autism. On her blog she maintains a distinctly positive view of the condition, is unashamedly critical of many mainstream views and keeps tabs on the developments in the research world.
She presumably has an autistic spectrum diagnosis herself and certainly has a child with autism. The blog is far from a dispassionate analysis but is an engaging example of the thoughtful activism being promoted by a growing number of the autistic community.
One part of the blog, Autism Diva's profile page, reminded me of the wonderfully straightforward way of communication that many people with autism prefer and made me laugh out loud:
About Me
Autism Diva loves the truth.
Interests
autism, the truth
Link to Autism Diva's blog. Link to Wikipedia article on autism.
Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD, is 100 this week and discusses his controversial discovery in an article in the New York Times.
Hofmann's birthday is being marked by a symposium in Switzerland, where scientists, visionaries and artists are meeting to discuss the impact of the compound on society and how it may be put to good use in the future.
Link to article "Nearly 100, LSD's Father Ponders His 'Problem Child'".
UPDATE: The Independent has another (probably better) article on LSD, Hofmann and the symposium.
As the media is increasingly keen on psychological angles to sex stories and pharmaceutical companies are now starting to push the pills and ills of sexual behaviour in earnest, it's worth being aware of where the evidence could stop and the spin begins:
2006 is going to be the year of the sex addict.
Many new television series in the pipeline that will be outlining this condition – either showing it to be an epidemic or offering training for men who are 'cheaters' to curb their behaviour. Despite no agreement on sex addiction, or concern from the psychiatric and medical professions of sexual behaviour being pathologised or misdiagnosed, television researchers are ignoring this evidence and making programmes anyway.
Petra also mentions Mind Hacks as 'not always about sex, but very good nonetheless', which is probably one of the most unusual complements we've had in a while.
Link to 'Sex Review of 2005' Link to 'Sex Predictions and Trends for 2006'
I assumed cognitive science blog Mixing Memory had gone missing in action during October, only to have it burst back into life after a mysterious period of radio silence. It's one of my favourite reads on the net so it's great to see it back again.
He is currently involved in researching the "Development of Artificial Skin for Humanoid Robot and Body Image Acquisition Learning" and "Mechanism Behavior Generation by Imitation Learning of Humanoid Robot".
Prof. Shirai also supervises an investigation into the "Positron Annihilation Study of Defects in Advanced Materials" and belongs to the mysterious "Society for Discrete Variational Xa".
Is this the most sci-fi sounding scientist on the planet? Answers on a ram card please...
The great computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra on artificial intelligence and thinking machines:
"John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."
Link to 'The threats to computing science' by Edsger Dijkstra.
Research published last year showed people are more likely to marry others whose names resemble their own. Now researchers in Paris have shown this egocentric bias extends to shopping - apparently, in certain circumstances, we're also more likely to buy products with brand names that share letters with our own name.
The researchers said "We found that name letter branding influences choices only under one of two conditions. Either consumers have a need to enhance their self-esteem because of a threatening situation. For instance, a sophisticated restaurant could pose such a threat. Or consumers have to have a product relevant need (for example, being thirsty when choosing a beverage)".
Link to Journal of Consumer Research (study out in December issue). Link to abstract of research on picking marriage partners (p. 665).
As the new academic year is in full flow, students might find themselves with a raft of information and little to paddle with.
Mind Hacks has collected a list of favourite internet resources for mind and brain sciences students to help with getting yourselves ashore.
News, views and scientific developments
The mind and brain sciences are among the fastest moving areas in terms of research and discovery. Getting to grips with the area can sometimes seem daunting, partly because of the academic language, or just due to the sheer volume of information that needs navigating.
The following are some of our favourite sites that condense or communicate the essentials in a more accessible manner:
BrainBlog
A great site that constantly finds brain-related curios from the medical literature.
Your amazing brain...
Neuroscience, explained as it should be. A fantastic site that includes interactive demos, tests and experiments.
BPS Research Digest
The British Psychological Society release a jargon free fortnightly summary of interesting or eye-catching research. Available on the web or as an email digest.
Cognitive Daily
Scientific papers on cognitive psychology explained in an engaging and relevant way. A great resource for keeping up with the latest and understanding how cognitive psychology is done.
Update: Christian has further suggested the British Psychological Society magazine The Psychologist. All issues older than 6 months are completely free and the forum has a section where students can post questions about psychology or advertise their availability for work experience etc. Christian is not an entirely disinterested party as he does work for the magazine, but as I don't, and regularly use it myself, I'd certainly recommend checking it out.
The practice of practical psychology
As well as keeping up with other people's research, you're likely to getting to grips with some of your own. Research, experimental design and data analysis are often the most challenging parts of the course for new students. These sites might help with that challenge.
Experiments in Psychology
Free software that allows you to take part in some of psychology's classic experiments as a way of learning about experimental design and analysis. Windows only unfortunately, but an interesting package nonetheless.
'Research Companion' discussion board
Currently a hidden gem, psychologist and research expert Petra Boynton runs a message board for discussing research, asking questions and swapping tips. As well as covering the usual topics of study design and data analysis, it also covers issues such as ethics, researcher safety and participant wellbeing. Its focus is on postgraduate research, but undergraduate students might also find it useful. More details here
Know of any other useful sites for students?
Feel free to paste the web address as a comment to this page.
[Thanks to Christian for many of the suggestions here]
Artist Jesse Reklaw takes people's descriptions of their dreams and turns them into beautifully pencilled four panel comic strips on her website SlowWave.com.
Interesting, Jesse also asks for a physical description of the person submitting the dream, so she can include their likeness into the story.
The archives are wonderfully offbeat and suitably surreal.
My favourites include a dream about going to a bar to hire drunken body parts and one about finding the subway full of penguins. A new dream is uploaded every week.
Where and how is human morality processed and represented by the brain? A freely available review by Jorge Moll and colleagues in the latest issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience proposes a new model based on neuroimaging and clinical data – the event-feature-emotion complex framework (EFEC) – that makes specific predictions about the kinds of moral impairment that will follow from damage to different brain regions.
In contrast with earlier models that have advocated the idea of a rational prefrontal cortex suppressing our amoral emotional drives, the EFEC framework posits a more integrative three-way system, whereby the prefrontal cortex stores information about moral values, social interactions and expected outcomes, the emotional limbic system codes for the reward value of our behavioural choices, and the superior temporal sulcus allows us to extract relevant functional and social features from the environment, like a sad face or aggressive gesture.
The review gives the example of localised cognitive processes that would occur in response to the sight of an orphan girl. The prefrontal cortex will predict the kind of life the girl is likely to have, the superior temporal sulcus will detect the sadness in her face and body language, and recognise her helplessness, and the limbic regions will give rise to feelings of sadness, anxiety and attachment. Taken together, “these component representations give rise to a ‘gestalt’ [unified] experience by way of temporal synchronisation”, the authors say.
The framework allows for specific predictions to be made about the behavioural and cognitive consequences of dysfunction to these brain areas, depending on whether such impairment occurs developmentally or is acquired later in life. So, for example, an adult who acquires damage to the posterior superior temporal sulcus would be expected to lose the ability to recognise the socially-relevant aspects of people’s facial expressions and body language, and so their moral behaviour dependent on the detection of these signals would be impaired. But their moral reasoning and understanding of social rules would remain intact and they could say how one ought to behave if questioned about situations verbally. In contrast, early developmental disorders affecting this brain region – autism, perhaps – would actually impair the acquisition of social knowledge and social rules.
Presenting concise summaries of other models (including ‘conflict processing’ accounts; Antonio Damasio’s ‘Somatic Marker Hypothesis’; the ‘social response reversal model’; sociopathy as a failure of theory of mind; the ‘structured-event-complex framework’, and the ‘moral sensitivity hypothesis’), the review argues for the favourable utility of the EFEC framework.
Now the EFEC framework can be used to guide the design of future experiments, the authors say. “Understanding the neural basis of moral cognition will help to shape environmental, psychological and medical intervention aimed at promoting prosocial behaviours and social welfare”, they conclude.
Erving Goffman spent a year working in St Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital in Washington DC, ostensibly as a physical education assistant. In reality, he was a sociologist studying the social situations of patients and staff.
The following is a thought-provoking view on the reasons for hospitalisation from his classic 1961 book Asylums (p126), which he wrote as a result of his undercover study.
Some of these contingencies [that lead to hospitalisation] in the mental patient's career have been suggested, if not explored, such as socio-economic status, visibility of the offence, proximity to a mental hospital, amount of treatment facilities available, community regard for the type of treatment given in available hospitals and so on.
For information about other contingencies, one must rely on atrocity tales: a psychotic man is tolerated by his wife until she finds herself a boyfriend, or by his adult children until they move from a house to an apartment; an alcoholic is sent to a mental hospital because the jail is full and a drug addict because he declines to avail himself of psychiatric treatment on the outside; a rebellious adolescent daughter can no longer be managed at home because she now threatens to have an open affair with an unsuitable companion; and so on.
Correspondingly there is an equally important set of contingencies causing the person to by-pass this fate. And should the person enter hospital, still another set of contingencies will help determine whether he is to obtain a discharge - such as the desire of his family to return, the availability of a 'manageable' job, and so on.
The society's official view is that inmates of mental hospitals are there primarily because they are suffering from mental illness. However, in the degree that the 'mentally ill' outside hospitals numerically approach or surpass those inside hospitals, one could say that mental patients suffer not from mental illness, but from contingencies.
Link to life and work biography of Erving Goffman. Link to extracts from Goffman's books (including Asylums).
Cognitive science site Mixing Memory has a tribute to David Marr, a pioneer in understanding visual perception, and in combining neurological and psychological levels of explanation, who died tragically early at the age of 35.
Marr wanted to understand how the brain could start with two-dimensional arrays of light spots on the retina and subsequently produce a rich three-dimensional visual experience.
He argued that the final visual experience is produced by a series of computations that extract important information, such as edges, object groupings and depth information, from basic visual data.
Crucially, he also gave the mathematical procedures, based on an understanding of the biology of the visual system, that might perform these operations.
As well as producing one of the most influential theories of vision, he also influenced how neuroscientists and psychologists think about how the brain works. He proposed that the biology of the brain serves to process information, and that brain cells can be modelled with accurate computational models.
Marr died of leukemia at the age of 35, and produced his most influential work (the book Vision) in the knowledge he had little time left to complete it.
It was published two years after his death in 1982 and is prefaced by the statement "This book is meant to be enjoyed".
Link to article on Mixing Memory (including link to Marr's work) Link to biography of Marr.
An article from art and culture magazine Cabinet discusses the prodigious and tragic life of neural network pioneer Walter Pitts, who was one of the major forces in the early development of computational models of the mind and brain.
Pitts started attending university lectures, uninvited, during his teenage years, and by the age of 17 was working with neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch. As Pitts was homeless and without an income at the time, McCulloch invited Pitts to live in the family home.
Together, they wrote one of the foundational papers in cognitive science, where they demonstrated that individual neurons, mathematically modelled, could be combined in networks to simulate logical computation. This suggested that such neurons could be the basic units of an information processing model of the mind.
This was a big step forward, as it suggested a potential link between the mind and brain to a science that was trying to break free from previous behaviourist 'stimulus-response' theories, by adopting a computational framework.
This broad approach is now the dominant theory in modern psychology, although Pitts' was convinced of a more strictly logical model than is generally accepted today.
Pitts was completely absorbed in his work and often seemed troubled when not focused on it. It was rumoured he may have suffered from schizophrenia on account of his markedly odd behaviour and difficulties with social interaction.
Pitts moved to work with a research group in Boston, but fell out with another group member who had a disagreement with Pitts' mentor Warren McCulloch. Pitts became a recluse and it has been rumoured he committed suicide.
Many artificial neural networks are based on his work, which are used as theoretical models of the mind, and to solve practical problems in technology and industry.
Link to Cabinet article on Walter Pitts. Link to Wikipedia article on Walter Pitts.
The Economist, who seem to have a run of psychology article of late, has a brief article discussing theories of why we laugh:
Why do people laugh at all? What is the point of it? Laughter is very contagious and this suggests that it may have become a part of human behaviour because it promotes social bonding. When a group of people laughs, the message seems to be "relax, you are among friends".
But laughter does not unite us all. There are those who have a pathological fear that others will laugh at them. Sufferers avoid situations where there will be laughter, which means most places where people meet.
Apple seems to be targeting a new advert at neuroscientists. Dr Nouchine Hadjikhani is featured in the promotion, although at closer inspection, the intended audience are more likely to be people dazzled by the bright lights of brain scanning.
The ad is interesting in that it touts her Apple system as a "vital tool" in her research, although the main selling point seems to be that it runs a free software programme used in brain scan analysis called NeuroLens.
NeuroLens, although respected, is not widely used at present, largely due to the domination of SPM. SPM is also free software, and although it requires a commercial copy of Matlab, it runs on Mac, Windows Linux and other sorts of Unix.
One of the reasons given by Dr Hadjikhani for preferring MacOS is that she is 'challenged by the command line', despite the fact that the ad claims she uses NeuroLens before 'delving into extensive data analysis on her Linux systems'.
"Using UNIX at the command line is time consuming and you have to remember a number of things", she says, although I suspect her job as a cognitive neuroscientist means she's quite used to remembering 'a number of things' on a daily basis.
They conveniently neglect to say that MacOS is Unix and that Linux isn't just the command line.
For cognitive neuroscientists, Apple seem to be advertising their systems on the back of (admittedly very attractive) free software, and hoping to use the leverage of Mac only software to get a foot in the door of a largely Apple-free science.
I suspect the ad is more likely to be targeted at executives, however, who want to be seen to be using systems that serious scientists use.
Co-branding with neuroscience, along with other 'hot topic' sciences, might be a policy which would go down well with those worried about being seen with an "artist's" computer on their desk.
Link to Wikipedia page on brain scan analysis and SPM. Link to NeuroLens software. Link to Apple ad (via BrainBlog).
In the wake of suspicion that the London bombings were carried out by British nationals, many have asked what motivates acts of terror. Psychologist Andrew Silke studies the psychology of terrorism to try and find out.
Despite the insanity of the acts, one of the most common myths is that terrorists are mentally unbalanced in some way. In an article written shortly after 9/11 (PDF) he noted that even for suicide bombers, evidence for psychopathology or personality disorders is scant.
Work on the impact of terrorist attacks has been most recently focused on the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Silke notes in a more recent article (PDF), that although, in general, being closer to the Twin Towers was related to higher levels of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for other people, stress was related to exposure to television reporting.
The effects on people's desire for revenge was, perhaps, contrary to expectation:
It was interesting to note, however, that Johll and Brant (2002) also found that New York City residents actually reported a lower need for
vengeance than other Americans. As one firefighter in their study put it: "I wouldn't wish what happened to us on anyone."
Suggesting that experience of terrorist attacks, can make people less likely to want more violence to return.
Needless to say, the psychology of terrorism and terrorists is now being heavily researched, as very little was known about it before 2000.
PDF of 2004 article 'Terrorism, 9/11 and Psychology' by Andrew Silke PDF of 2001 article 'Terrorism' by Andrew Silke Link 1 , link 2 and link 3 to coverage from PsyBlog on psychology of terrorism. Link to summary fof 2004 conference from BBC News.
Scientic American has an interview online with philosopher David J. Buller who attacks current research in evolutionary psychology.
Buller has recently written a critical book on the subject, Adapting Minds, that analyses much of the evidence on which evolutionary theories of the mind are based, and finds many of them lacking.
His interview tackles many of his concerns in this area, and outlines his main objections to the core theories in evolutionary psychology.
There are three foundational claims that it makes. One is that the nature of [evolutionary] adaptation is going to create massive modularity in the mind--separate mental organs functionally specialized for separate tasks. Second, that those modules continue to be adapted to a hunter-gatherer way of life. And third, that these modules are universal and define a universal human nature. I think that all three of those claims are deeply problematic.
If anything the evidence indicates that the great cognitive achievement in human evolution was cortical plasticity, which allows for rapidly adaptive changes to the environment, both across evolutionary time and [across] individual lifetimes. Because of that, we're not quite the Pleistocene relics that Evolutionary Psychology claims.
Link to David J. Buller interview in Scientific American. Link to information and reviews of the book Adapting Minds.
Reactive Colours is an innovative project that is developing software to promote enjoyment and social interaction in severely autistic children.
In contrast to existing packages, it is using a non-commercial open source development model, and is aiming to include the autistic and Asperger's community as developers and contributors to the project.
I caught up with project leader Wendy Keay-Bright at London's Autistic Pride Day to ask her about the project.
Your background is in animation and multimedia. So, what got you interested in working with people with autism and Asperger's spectrum?
Animation is a truly expressive medium, bringing together all the qualities of drawing with movement, music, narrative, spatial dynamics, choreography, and more. These are the things that have always inspired me. Reactive Colours synthesises many of my experiences in animation, and also my interest as a lecturer in Graphic Communication and Interactive Media.
While my childen were very young I spent a lot of time learning software programmes at home and tried to involve them by designing games. Inspired by John Maeda I became fascinated by 'reactive graphics' and so began looking into experiential design and technology, particularly as a process for exploratory learning.
To cut a very long story short - I decided to focus on Special Educational Needs and undertook a feasibility study which strongly indicated that this therapeutic way of working with computers could have particular resonance for children on the autistic spectrum.
Discovering the work of Dinah Murray and Mike Lesser provided the motivation and incentive to actively develop Reactive Colours and continues to provide a theoretical framework for the project.
There's plenty of software packages aimed at helping people with autism or Asperger's. Why is Reactive Colours different ?
The design of the software prioritises the computer as a medium. The computer becomes an environment where exploration and play, which are vital in the learning process, can occur spontaneously. This contrasts with the generally accepted notion that the mouse, keyboard, screen and even programming code, are purely functional components in a system.
Many computer programmes for autistic children focus on task or making progress, and this in some cases, can lead to the feeling of failure or children can become 'locked in' to a task and resist communication with others.
A highly significant goal in autism education is the achievement of joint attention tunnels. With this in mind it has been encouraging to witness children share their Reactive Colours activity session (which we are calling 'Reactivities') with their peers in monitored classroom environments.
This has been most dramatic in a multi-sensory environment using the interactive whiteboard where children use their hands and bodies to choreograph stunning visual effects.
Multi sensory stimuli can be alarming for some children, however the Reactivities reward touch and sound with simple forms - colour, shape and words and deliberately avoids sensory overload.
You mention on the website that you have been using early versions of some of the activities with children with autism. What has the reaction been like ?
The most encouraging and consistent responses to early trials which we have been evaluating using video, questionnaires and interviews, have been that the Reactivities software is calming and reduces anxiety.
High levels of anxiety are very commonly found in children on the autistic spectrum. The experience of playing with Reactivities on the computer is entirely intuitive; the reactive graphics focus on spontaneous mark-making and cause and effect.
Expressive mark-making can relieve tension and outwardly represent inner experiences. Rhythm, sound, space, velocity, colour, shape and movement are created and controlled by the individual as they experiment with the mouse, keyboard and microphone input devices. This expression of creativity is personal, unique and ultimately satisfying.
Children are content to choose and explore, take turns and co-operate with others, all of which are significant for individuals on the autistic spectrum. The capacity to have fun is an almost universal human coping mechanism for dealing with stress, however for many autistic children this vital tool for releasing energy is not realised.
From our early experience of developing Reactive Colours with young autistic children we have seen opportunities for structured and parallel play that may help to create a calm environment for participatory learning.
You've opted to open license much of the project. How do you think this will help the project ?
We are choosing to utilise a significantly extended meaning of the phrase 'open source' not only to delineate a licensing scheme, but rather to invite participation from the autistic community in the design, research, implementation and future of the project.
Opportunities for user-focused development and iteration will be enhanced through the availability on the Reactive Colours website of the programming code. This code will provide individuals keen to experiment with computation, access to the tools needed to customise the software and to share their Reactivities with others.
The opportunity to adapt content has particular significance for users of the website as one of the features of autism is the capacity for structured thinking, logic and creativity. There is a strong possibility that should the code be made accessible, the emphasis on ownership will be with the users and design can be a demoncratic process.
How can the autism and Asperger's community get involved ?
Although the Reactive Colours website has not yet been officially launched, (we are aiming to do this Spring 2006 when the Reactivities have been completely iterated with users) we would encourage anyone interested in the project to post their details on the forum and visit the site regularly for updates.
Teachers, parents and advisors who would like to participate in evaluating the prototype software can email me (wendy [at] reactivecolours.org) with their contact information.
Disclaimer: Vaughan advises the project on open licensing.
This month's BBC Radio discussion programme Book Club is on The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sacks' popular and influential book of unusual cases.
The Man Who Mistook... describes a number of patients Sacks has worked with, and describes the strange experiences that can sometimes arise from injury to the brain.
The title refers to a man with visual agnosia, a condition where the ability to perceive or understand objects is lost, despite otherwise normal vision.
Sacks' writes in the style of influential neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who described his writing as 'romantic science' - aiming to capture both the scientific importance and the human impact of the disorders he studied.
Sacks himself is a guest on the programme, and members of the audience include doctors, neuroscientists, students and people who have experienced brain injury.
Link to Book Club webpage. Realaudio of Book Club on The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Researchers claim to have identified nine different types of love. In reality, it is more likely that they have simply classified love in nine different ways.
For the curious however, the types include:
The "Cupid's dart" variety, in which couples - think Antony and Cleopatra or even Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity - are swept away by blind passion.
Hedonistic love, concerned with personal and perhaps fleeting pleasure, the theme of much Hollywood film noir.
Love as the ultimate connection: an essentially romantic view.
I'm not sure whether it is the reporter or the researchers who are getting carried away there.
Call me a cynic, but I think that maybe they've just watched too many movies. Be thankful it wasn't Dawson's Creek.
Link to article 'How do I love thee? Which of the nine ways?'
Quoted in Wired magazine, he lambasted the last 30 years of work in the area, particularly the focus on creating AI driven autonomous robots.
However, the article finishes on a throwaway comment about the 'moving goal posts' problem in the perception of artificial intelligence, that belies much of the problem with how AI is perceived.
It is illustrated by the success of chess computers. In the 60s, it was said that computers will never beat people at chess, because that requires intelligence and computers aren't capable of intelligent thought.
When computers regularly started winning matches in the 80s, it was claimed that playing chess wasn't a test of real intelligence because computers could do it.
As there is no widely accepted definition for intelligence, this is often an example of the No true Scotsman fallacy.
Link to Wired article. Link to Minsky on 'Smart Machines' from edge.org Link to Wikipedia page on Minsky.
A story from NY Newsday queries professional psychologists about the mental health of Batman and the likely causes of his mental instability.
Batman is a fascinating character, not least because his mind and motivations have become an integral plot device in many films and graphic novels.
In fact, the portrayal of madness in the Batman universe is a topic I have tackled myself, in a past article for kuro5hin.org
Almost uniquely for such a popular genre, the plots of Batman revolve around mental illness, because, in addition to Batman's own troubled thoughts, almost all the criminals are depicted as insane.
It is likely that Batman is both a mirror for our own stereotypes of madness, as well as a medium through which children get some of their first impressions of mental illness.
Link to 'Is he really batty?' from NY Newsday Link to 'Madness in Gotham' from kuro5hin.org
A review of tobacco industry documents show research on psychological and behavioural needs in women was used to target cigarette advertising and ingredients, to increase smoking and reduce quitting rates.
The recently released review (PDF), published in the journal Addiction notes that:
A 1976 British-American Tobacco Company (BAT) review of gender differences (drawing on both internal and published studies) concluded that women were more motivated to smoke, smoked more for insecurity reasons and exhibited more neurotic traits.
The author further observed that higher neuroticism among women may intensify responses to smoking-related health pressures, and that female smokers found quitting more difficult and reported fewer successful cessation attempts.
In response, cigarette advertising and ingredients were altered to make them even more difficult to give up, and more attractive for new smokers.
Link to summary from Science Blog PDF of full-text paper Designing cigarettes for women. PDF of Addiction editorial Exploitation by design
Social problems activate additional brain resources:
Continuing the recent evolutionary psychology theme (here,here), I'd like to recommend a piece posted by the ever excellent Carl Zimmer. Recent brain scanning evidence shows, possibly, that problems involving social exchange activate additional specific brain regions compared to problems of the same logical form which don't involve social exchange. What's this got to do with Evolutionary Psychology? Well the particular tasks involved are something called the Wason Selection Task, and a variant on it developed by the Evolutionary Psychologists Tooby and Cosmides, and subsequently used as a foundational piece of research for the Evolutionary Psychology movement (note the capital E and the capital P). Swing over to Carl's place and take a look.
An online article from Scientific American discusses the work of criminologist Russel Ogden, who has been researching the social organisation of the euthanasia underground.
The practice of assisted suicide is illegal in most countries and Ogden has been pressured academically and legally to give up his research or reveal the identities of anonymous interviewees in his study.
He has successfully continued his research while navigating the novel ethical issues his works brings-up, and has discovered some surprising facts about the existence of the often unacknowledged 'euthanasia networks'.
[Euthanasia organisation] NuTech is at the forefront of what Ogden calls the "deathing counterculture," in which nonmedical death practitioners offer referrals, consultations and house calls. "They are taking the place of physicians to deliver virtually undetectable death assistance," says Ogden
Link to article A Culture of Death. Link to abstract of paper Non-physician assisted suicide: the technological imperative of the deathing counterculture.
I thought I'd post a short essay, originally written for another destination, that touches on issues discussed below in a previous post. It's also cross-posted at my own blog. Hope y'all enjoy, and I welcome any feedback or crit of my somewhat contentious take on the issue.
Violence is common to our present, history and prehistory. Is there reason to hope that our future will be different? Doubtless we’ll know in the long run, thanks to the grand uncontrolled experiment of life. Meanwhile some argue we can get an early forecast by using the behavioural sciences – investigate our nature to divine our future. But just what do we mean by a violent nature, and would such a nature necessarily force us to be so pessimistic? Such a wide issue needs to be viewed through a narrow prism, so here we shall focus on the neuroscience of violence. Are we wired for violence - is it brain-based, an original sin never to be expelled? Or could it be less indelible than we fear?
While examples of human violence are varied and plentiful, the most chilling are those individuals who seem innately disposed towards causing suffering: the Hannibal Lecters of the world who seem calm and controlled as they torture, scheme and kill. Psychopathy is marked by a total lack of empathy with others, allowing them to act without compunction. The rare cases of acquired sociopathy, where brain damage leads to behavioural patterns that resemble the psychopath, are perhaps even more unsettling. It's one thing when it's the other guy - born different. But the acquired case holds the terrifying promise that it could be you.
While we shiver at the horridness of all this, scientists have leapt at the chance to study these individuals in the hope that it may shed some light on whether we have a design for violence. As with much research, the exception helps you find the rule: the differences in the psychopaths' brains and behaviour give insights into what is shaping the behaviour of normal people. One thesis that has gained broad popular attention (to which popular science writer Steven Pinker devotes a chapter of his recent book The Blank Slate) is that cases of violence running wild illuminate the caged beast inside all of us. This account argues we have inclinations towards violence only barely kept in check by imposed restraints; not dissimilar to a popular religious notion that humanity is fallen from grace -urged to good but drawn to evil.
It seems true that abnormal populations differ from us because they lack some kind of restraint: some failure of an inhibition mechanism which ordinarily screens out or rejects violent actions in healthy individuals. James Blair, a leading researcher in this area, has termed this a Violence Inhibition Mechanism (VIM, see e.g. Blair & Cipolotti 2000): and follows early ethological work showing that some animals in the wild cease their aggression if their victim shows signs of distress (Lorenz, 1966). Evolutionary pressure could promote such a tendency to discourage fighting to the death, switching you off from pursuing a conflict once your opponent caves in.
Other researchers point more generally to the role that the frontal lobes of the brain play in inhibition of inappropriate behaviour, suggesting that problems with these regions lead to the failure to inhibit violent acts. The two explanations may not be exclusive, but the inhibition-frontal lobe thesis is primarily investigated in acquired cases, whilst the VIM is researched in developmental cases. The upshot is that proponents of a deep and negative human nature argue that as we are engaging in suppression, there must be something there to suppress - therefore, there is violence within us. For example, Steven Pinker (2002) states that “direct signs of design for aggression” include the fact that “disruptions of inhibitory systems...can lead to aggressive attacks” (p316).
But this conclusion is premature in principle, and not supported in practice. Firstly, the principle. The argument that we can judge our inclination to violence by observing it in a free situation is flawed because it doesn't take base rates into account. By base rates, I mean what our level of violence would be if we were `violence blind': if we had no interest, but no disinterest, in whether our actions caused harm.Science fiction author Isaac Asimov recognised that this rate would not be zero, and made this a key concept in his Robot trilogy, the First Law of Robotics. This was the rule which trumped all others, and commanded that
"A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
The robots are not given this rule to counteract some kind of 'assassination chip' placed there by a mischievous designer, but simply to act as a guiding principle to distinguish certain kinds of actions into acceptable and unacceptable. Asimov saw that you would need an inhibition system in place even when there is no tendency to cause harm; without specifications, harm will tend to occur. Without establishing fully what such a base rate would be, it is absurd to look at the harm any individual causes and conclude this is evidence for violence worked into the design.
When we turn to the evidence, violence for its own purpose does give a good account of the actions of these patients. For example, Blair and Cipolotti (2000) describe a patient with frontal lobe damage whose use of violence was goal-directed, for the purpose of excitement (pushing another resisting patient around in a wheelchair at speed) or to protest when frustrated. This does not resemble the sating of a wild hunger for aggression, but is more like a slide towards the base-rate – uncaring that your desires have harmful consequences.
It is difficult to see how someone could seriously advance the perspective that we are innately violent - commit violence far in excess of the base rates. Even considering the bloodiness of human history (and leaving apart the social factors underpinning conquest and genocide), the potential bloodshed from the base rate is equally boggling. Moreover killing for the sake of it would be inefficient, and considering our basis as a social species would be utterly foolish, so it makes good evolutionary sense that we are not drawn to violence.
So let's retreat a little: perhaps the issue isn’t innate violence, despite the rhetoric; perhaps the argument is that we're not averse to using violence, that we use it when it pays, much like we would do if we used the base rate. This is an issue that evolutionary psychology often investigates, modeling factors to uncover in which situations it would pay us to commit harmful acts (such as to revenge a slight in a culture of honour (Cohen, Nisbett, Bowdle, & Schwarz. 1996). All very well, if proving very little about violence in the brain. But however productive this line of research is, even this weak version finds a fairly big stumbling block, in the very phenomena we began with: the existence of systems that work to inhibit violence.
We took aside these inhibition systems (i.e. looked at neurological patients with damage to the areas that they reside in) in order to say “let’s look at what’s really going on.” But whilst this approach can tell us useful things, we need to put it all back together again: what makes us human isn't just what lies beneath our inhibition systems, but is the fact that we inhibit at all, in such a sophisticated and complex manner. This is what renders the quote from Pinker so empty: the inhibition system itself is a product of design.
Anyone doubting that treating other people as more than instruments is founded in the brain would do well to look into developments in the study of self–other mapping. This has provided stronger and stronger evidence that these relationships are hardwired into us, strikingly with the discovery of mirror neurons that fire in the same way for events that occur to you or to those you observe (Gallese and Goldman 1998). Many argue that empathy is an outcome of these representations (see e.g. Frith and Frith 1999). And recent research demonstrates appreciating someone else's pain activates many of the same areas as experiencing it (Jackson, Meltzoff, & Decety 2004): good evidence for a VIM-like mechanism, and certainly a rebuttal to those who think our withdrawal from violence is unnatural.
By making psychopaths into poster-boys for innate violence, we risk ignoring crucial aspects of their behaviour. The patients investigated by Blair and Cipolotti were reported as socially inappropriate in a variety of ways, and recent imaging work suggests that the areas crucial for regulating and preventing aggression also keep us within the bounds of socially acceptable behaviour (Berthoz, Armony, Blair, & Dolan, 2002). Rehabilitation would require addressing that big picture.
Designed for violence? Really, the strongest conclusion that this work can give is that we sometimes are violent when it's in our interests. We are not innately disposed to violence, or even indifferent to violence, we are neurologically bound away from violence. This understanding gives us a solid basis for treatment, and an honest beginning from which to address the continuing problem of violence in society.
References
Berthoz, S., Armony, J.L., Blair, R.J.R., & Dolan, R.J. (2002). An fMRI study of intentional and unintentional (embarrassing) violations of social norms. 125, 1696-1708
Blair, R.J.R. & Cipolotti, L. (2000). Impaired social response reversal: A case of ‘acquired sociopathy’. Brain, 123, 1122-1141
Cohen, D., Nisbett, R.E., Bowdle, B.F., & Schwarz, N. (1996). Insult, aggression, and the Southern culture of honor: an “experimental ethnography.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 945 60
Frith, Chris D., & Frith, Uta Interacting Minds--A Biological Basis Science 1999 286: 1692-1695
Gallese, V., & Goldman, A. Mirror neurons and the stimulation theory of mind-reading. Trends Cogn. Sci. 2: 493-501, 1998.
Jackson, P.L., Meltzoff A., & Decety, J. (2004). How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes involved in empathy. NeuroImage, 24, 771-779.
Lorenz, K. (1966). On aggression. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace and World.
Pinker, S (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Viking Press.
Psychologist Susan Blackmore on taking drugs for inspiration:
Psychologist Susan Blackmore has written an article for the Daily Telegraph, arguing that taking drugs has provided inspiration for her work.
So can drugs be creative? I would say so, although the dangers are great - not just the dangers inherent in any drug use, but the danger of coming to rely on them too much and of neglecting the hard work that both art and science demand. There are plenty of good reasons to shun drug-induced creativity.
Yet, in my own case, drugs have an interesting role: in trying to understand consciousness, I am taking substances that affect the brain that I'm trying to understand. In other words, they alter the mind that is both the investigator and the investigated.
She discusses her experience with a range of drugs, including cannabis, LSD, ketamine and MDMA and examines the influence on her own career choices and insights.
Interestingly, she's taking part in a debate at the Cheltenham Science Festival on whether using drugs can tell us anything about ourselves, with neuroscientist Colin Blakemore and author Mike Jay.
Lets hope the irony of Cheltenham Science Festival being sponsored by a major pharmaceutical company won't be lost on the panel.
Link to article I take illegal drugs for inspiration.
The notable evolutionary psychologist David Buss thinks that Murder is in our blood. Specifically that homicide isn't a rare pathology, or the product of social forces, of culture, poverty or poor parenting - but is an evolutionary adaptation that we all share. He's saying that in the right circumstances we will all kill, because ancestors of ours who killed had greater reproductive success.
Emotive stuff. I'd be interested to hear what readers of mindhacks.com have to say on it. Here are a few of my first thoughts:
As an observation, this is as old fashioned as original sin. What would make this interesting to me, is detailed, rigourous, demonstration of the psychological mechanisms behind murderous behaviour. Self-styled 'Evolutionary psychology' tells a plausible story about the context of murder, but I don't think there's much content to disagree or agree with until the experimental work has been done.
Related to this, Buss maligns theories that social forces/parenting/culture/poverty are behind killing while at the same time (in the penultimate paragraph) using them to explain why the rate of murder is so much lower in modern society compared to stone-age civilisations ("Among the Yanomamo of Venezuela and the Gebusi of Africa, for example, more than 30% of men die by being murdered" remember that next time someone trys to force a declension narrative about the collapse of society upon you). The thing about, say, the theory that parenting style produces murder is that at least it is a specific theory - both with regard to the factor and the mechanism. You may not agree, but at least you have something to disagree with (maybe it isn't that particular style of parenting? maybe it isn't parenting at all but peer group involvement? etc).
Evolution is an essential theoretical background to psychology, but it only provides hints and allegations - the real work still has to be done. Alas, you can't derive your answers from the calculus of reproductive success, but need to go collect data to test your each hypotheses against.
Dr. Victoria Zdrok is an ex-lawyer, international model, author, webmistress and clinical psychologist, and she has agreed to share her insights into the sexual psyche with Mind Hacks.
Providing a unique perspective on the amorous mind, Dr. Zdrok talks about her influences as a psychologist, her views on the current state of sex research and her own studies into the psychology of sexual fantasy.
Victoria Zdrok is not your average psychologist. Despite her fame as a model, she has remained committed to understanding the human mind since she first became fascinated by it during her teenage years, gaining her undergraduate degree in psychology at the precocious age of 18.
Her subsequent work in psychology has encompassed a number of issues and theoretical approaches, with her doctoral thesis applying experimental methods to understanding the cognitive psychology of the courtroom.
After completing her doctorate in clinical psychology, she went on to specialise in sex therapy at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and now focuses on the psychology of sex, love and relationships.
Victoria recently added 'webmistress' to her CV after starting several successful websites, including the playful www.SexySexpert.com, a developing project Love-Sex-Dating.com, and the X-rated (and definitely not safe-for-work) PlanetVictoria.com.
Who have been your major influences in psychology ?
I have an eclectic approach - everyone from Freud and Jung to Maslow, Beck and Buss, although I am not impartial to humanistic-existential thinking.
I discovered psychology back in the USSR where it was banned as a "petite-bourgeois" domain, relegated to Pavlovian reflexology. My mother who worked at a research institute brought me Freud's "Totem and Taboo" from the library's special access only secret archives. I was immediately hooked.
Later I became fascinated with Jungian archetypes. During my graduate school I trained mostly in cognitive behavioral therapy, which is what I would use to treat patients, and lately I have been reading a lot of evolutionary psychology. But I am a humanist at heart, driven by existential angst!
If you could commission research into one area of psychology, what question would you want answering?
I am fascinated with sexual paraphilias, particularly rare and dangerous ones, like necrophilia. I think we need to know more not only how they originate but what propels some of the individuals with these fetishes to act them out while others are able to keep them under psychic control, relegating them to fantasies.
When writing a previous article for Mind Hacks, I discovered there is more research on the neuroscience of hiccups than orgasm. Considering that sex is one of the most important human activities, why do you think there is so little good research in this area ?
The question of why there is more research on hiccups than on orgasms is an easy one: because the fear of human sexuality, engendered by religious dogma which portrays sex as "sinful," has caused scientists and researchers to fear studying sex.
Not only do many of them feel a personal fear in exploring a topic which may bring down the wrath of the repressed religiously-cowed multitudes, but they cannot realistically expect to receive any funding for research into this area.
Politicians are notoriously paranoid about having public funds being used for sex research - think of the furore over the display of the Robert Maplethorpe photos in a public museum; and even private foundations shy away from any association with sex, even from an academic interest in it.
It is the same reason that sex education in America is deplorable; that ignorance about human sexuality is commonplace among adults and nearly universal among post-pubescent children; and that AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, especially teen pregnancies, are far more prevalent than they have any reason to be in a technologically-advanced, highly developed society.
Thanks to a group of uninformed medieval religious "scholars" - all of whom were male and many of whom were advocating celibacy - the modern Judeo-Christian-Islamic world is dominated by medieval theories of human sexuality.
Ironically, from a psychologist's standpoint, the major theologians responsible for this debacle, such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, were major league libertines for most of their lives - even bi-sexual libertines!
It was guilt over their own behavior that drove them to pronounce sex as "evil" and "sinful," to proclaim women as the cause of this evil (the "Eve and the apple" doctrine), and to preach celibacy and sex 'only for procreation in church sanctioned marriages'.
You have mentioned in a previous interview that you are writing a book on the psychology of sexual fantasies. What has surprised you most during your research ?
I was amazed on how early some of the sexual fantasies originate and how rigid and constant they remain across a person's lifetime.
It seems that there is a critical period for the sexual fantasy formation, usually in late childhood, and they seem to be incorporated in what has been called our "lovemaps". It is very hard to alter what turns someone on, no matter how much psychological insight or behavioral reprogramming one undergoes later in his life.
In magazine articles on sexual attraction, there's always a throw-away comment on the mind - usually that a 'sense of humour' or 'confidence' is important. In your opinion, what are the most under-rated aspects of the mind that people find attractive ?
Empathy - ability to take another person's perspective, to understand and relate to another one's pain. I believe that high degree of empathy requires intelligence and insight, both of which are inherently sexy qualities.
Evolutionary psychologists have shown that kindness and empathy is one of the main qualities we look for in our prospective mates as well as display to gain someone's sexual interest. Intelligence is incredibly sexy. I can attest to that as I was always falling in love (mostly platonic) with my old and ugly but very intelligent and erudite professors.
How would you like to be remembered ?
As a revolutionary in the area of love, sex and dating, akin to Masters and Johnson - Dr. Ruth of the Z generation.
Prosopagnosia is an inability to recognise faces. It most commonly occurs after brain injury, although this week's New Scientistreports on a recently completed study on a type of inherited prosopagnosia, suggesting a genetic basis for face recognition.
The research was an international effort, led by husband and wife team, geneticists Thomas and Martina Grüter. Notably, Thomas has a particular interest in this area, as he has prosopagnosia himself.
Unfortunately, the New Scientist article is only available to subscribers The full article is now available online, and Mind Hacks has spoken to two members of the research team about this intriguing study: Thomas on his own experience of prosopagnosia and the genetics of face recognition, and neuropsychologist Hadyn Ellis on the implications for the developing field of 'cognitive genetics'.
Thomas and Martina are part of a team of geneticists from the Institute of Human Genetics in Münster, Germany. They became interested in how Thomas' condition seemed to run in families and decided to study it in more detail.
They recruited neuropsychologists from Cardiff University, initiating an international effort to examine the genetic basis of face perception.
The main finding of the study was that prosopagnosia seemed to be inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion, meaning only a single gene from one parent is needed to cause the condition.
Could it really be the case that the development of face recognition relies on a single gene ? We tackled Thomas on this controversial interpretation, but first we wanted to know, what it is like having prosopagnosia?
* * *
How did you first realise you were unable to recognise faces as well as other people?
When I didn't recognize my teachers in the street. Some didn't care, but others were not amused. Most of the time, I wasn't even aware that I had overlooked them, if so, they didn't say a word.
What is it like having prosopagnosia ? For example, do faces seem strange or distorted to you?
Faces look perfectly normal, they just fade in my memory very quickly. I can recognize emotions as well as other people, maybe better.
To most people, not being able to recognise faces would seem a great disability. Why do you think most people with hereditary prosopagnosia are not significantly impaired by their condition ?
They have had all of their life to cope with the problem. They have learned to recognize people by other features like gait [walking style] or voice. And, of course, like colorblind people, they cannot imagine how it feels to remember faces normally.
On the basis of this study, you have argued that a single gene may be heavily involved in developing face recognition skills. Early studies in cognitive genetics also made bold claims (a 'gene for language' for example) only to soften the claims when these genes were found to have wider effects.
Do you think that this potential 'face recognition gene' is likely to be genuinely face specific ?
The so-called language gene FOX2P was found to control the expression of other genes, instead of influencing the brain development directly. Still, the studies gave us a valuable insight into the regulation mechanisms of the genetic code.
The genetic code is not like a "blue print" of the body, in reality, the relationship is much more complicated. If we find the gene responsible for prosopagnosia, it may well be a regulator gene like the language gene, but of course, it may also be a gene influencing the connectivity of brain areas directly.
What is an important next step for the research and how do you see it being useful for people who might be affected by hereditary prosopagnosia ?
For people with hereditary prosopagnosia, an early diagnosis can make their life a lot easier. Our next step will be the development of a standard diagnostic procedure for prosopagnosia. Other groups are now trying to pin down the anatomical and functional difference in the brains of prosopagnosics.
In May, 2005, we will open a prosopagnosia clinic at the Insitute of Human Genetics in Münster, where hereditary prosopagnosia can be diagnosed and we can advise parents about the probability of their children being affected. Of course, we will also tell the parents how they can recognise the disorder in their children and what they can do to help. It is also important to remind everyone that prosopagnosia is not a disease, it is a cognitive disability, nothing more.
* * *
The bigger picture is that this study is part of an increasing focus on understanding how genetics influence the development of the mind and brain. Team member and neuropsychologist Hadyn Ellis is convinced this will be an important step in understanding brain development.
"Until recently, genetics and neuropsychology have been separate areas of research. We are now able both to accurately measure brain function and target precise areas of the human genome. With these developments in the human sciences, it has become possible to link these effects with increasing accuracy.
This might eventually allow us to answer some of the age old questions about the role of nature and nurture in human development".
The paper will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Cortex.
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Hungry for more info on cognitive genetics? Check out this paper (PDF) from a recent issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
A new three-part series called Two's a Crowd has started on BBC Radio 4, tackling the the biology of personal identity.
It got a few trailers on air, but has otherwise slipped surruptitiously onto the schedule with not so much as a supporting web page. Luckily, the programme is available as a realaudio archive for a week after each show has been aired (Tuesdays, 11am GMT).
A particular focus is the possible biological bases of personality, particularly with reference to the so-called 'big five' personality traits, that have come to dominate personality research.
BBC, if you're listening, any chance of some supporting information on the web ? It seems too good a series to be lost among the schedule.
Link to realaudio archive of latest edition of Two's a Crowd.
A recent article from 'Inside Bay Area' discusses the work of psychiatrist Nick Kanas and his team, who study the minds of astronauts.
Kanas heads up the Human Interactions in Space project, that studies the psychology of space travel, both to improve mission efficiency and maintain mental health during its completion.
The research team uses a number of techniques. One method is to use simulated missions, where participants are required to live in confined spaces or conduct procedures while being observed. Another is research on astronauts during 'live' missions.
Link to article from Inside Bay Area. Link to brief summary of book 'Space Psychology and Psychiatry'.
In Michael Marshall Smith's novel Spares, a disaffected cop decides to free human clones, kept for their body parts.
Although fiction, Smith's book presents an interesting thought experiment and brings some salient questions to mind. For example, what would be the psychological effect of discovering that you had been cloned, or actually were a clone ?
With the science and ethics of cloning being debated widely in the media, ABC Radio National's All in the Mind programme recruits a psychiatrist, a geneticist and an expert on ethics to discuss the possibilities.
Link to programme transcript. Link to realaudio archive of radio programme.
In research published in PLoS Biology, scientists led by Marco Iacoboni discovered that the brain's "mirror neurons" are active when we are trying to work out other people's thoughts and intentions.
'Mirror neurons' are a set of cells in the frontal lobe of the brain, named because as well as being active when we execute actions, they are also active when we observe the actions of someone else.
Iacoboni and his colleagues asked participants to watch various movie clips of actions and related scenes in a fMRI scanner. In their analysis, they contrasted the brain activity from actions where their was an obvious intention (like picking up a sandwich) with actions where no obvious intention was implied.
They discovered that part of the activity in the 'mirror neuron' system was specifically related to perceiving intentions, rather than watching actions in general.
The ability to understand other people's intentions is known as "theory of mind" and is considered one of the building blocks of social interaction. This is the first study to show how the 'mirror neuron' system may be involved in reading others' intentions and desires, and is an important step in understanding how the brain supports social functioning.
This is part of an increasingly popular area of science known as social cognitive neuroscience, which aims to understand the psychology and neuroscience of person-to-person interaction.
The eyes are the primary social signal. It's the eyes we spend most of the time looking ("To See, Act" [Hack #15]). Even when the other person is talking, we look most at the eyes, not the mouth. We use them to signal turn-taking in conversation, to read emotions from, like fear...and we use them to work out what another person is looking at.
It's this - gaze perception - that I've been getting interested in. How accurately can we tell where someone is looking? How accurately can we tell if someone is looking at us, or not? I've been looking out for some actual figures here, basic parameters on how small a difference we can detect in where someone is looking, either when they are looking at us, or at someone else.
Obviously, to be able to answer this question with actual parameters would have all sorts of implications. For, say, the design & manipulation of pictures showing people looking at things, for VR interfaces and, also, I guess it might give a better idea of when someone can tell i'm looking at them, and when they just can't know I am for sure. You know, just as a sort of side benefit...
One of the great things about science, is that if you have a question you can usually be pretty sure that someone, somewhere, has asked the same question and done some experiments to find out the answers. If I'm able to be curious about something it's pretty much a dead cert that someone else already did. So - I figure - time to dip into the back catalogue of psychological research.
And here it is. Argyle & Cook's (1976) Gaze and Mutual Gaze. Notable not just for the fact that it's a book about experimental psychology that quotes Sartre, but it also contains summaries of experiments from the sixties looking into just the questions i'm interested in. Here's my summary of what I found:
First, some ball-park figures, from two experiments:
Imagine two people, 80 cm apart. The 'sender' looks at one of seven points near the 'receivers' face. The points are about 2.4 cm apart and two of them are the reciever's eyes. The receiver's job is to judge where the other person is looking. By chance you'd get this right about 14% of the time (1 in 7). Actually, people get it right about 35%. At 2 m people perform at chance. [full details in ref 2]. Moral: At normal conversational distances, people might be able to tell where on your face they are looking, but more likely they'll get it wrong (so if you don't want to look people in the eyes look at the bridge of their nose and unless they're very close they won't be able to tell that you're not looking them in the eye.
Now imagine two people, one being looked at, one looking, at either 1.5 m or 3 m apart. A third person, next to the 'looked at' (let's called them the 'observer') is trying to tell where the looker is looking. It's a bit like sitting on a train next to your friend and trying to work out who someone a few rows in front is looking at. I won't go into the details of the points the looker had to focus on, but they were either on the person, or up to about two persons widths either side of them (so imagine five people sitting in a row). At 3 meters the observer only correctly judged the lookers gaze about 50% of the time, which isn't much above chance. And most of these judgements were found to be based on the direction of the lookers head, not the direction their eyes were pointing. At 1.5 m the observer was right for about 65% of the times the looker's gaze was straight at the looked at. [full details in ref 3]
So maybe it seems like you can pretty much get away with looking at whoever you want at around 3 m, and they'll be none the wiser. But, before jumping to conclusions, some other results of the experiments
Eye directed gaze is overestimated, for someone looking at the face. In other words, if you look at someone's face they are likely to assume you are looking at their eyes.
For gaze targetted near the face, face directed gaze is overestimated. (In other words, if someone is looking roughly at you, you are likely to assume they are looking directly at you).
Head angle biases judgement of gaze direction. We tend to assume that people are looking mostly the way their head points. Even if we can see the eyes, head angle affects where we think they are looking. Gibson & Pick (1963) found that a 30 degree turn of the head shifted judgements of where someone was looking by an average of 3 degrees in that direction
As distance between looker and lookee increases, head angle become more and more influential on the judgement of the looker's gaze
Horizontal discrimination is better than vertical discrimination. We're more accurate judging where someone is looking left-to-right than up-to-down.
So, it seems, we can't very accurately detect gaze (at least at distance beyond the normal conversational), but we have biases to assume that if it's possible, someone probably is looking at us.
If you've got this far, I hope you've enjoyed the journey along the back-shores of psychology research (before electronic abstract indexing!). I couldn't find any information on depth-of-gaze perception (i.e. can we tell at what distance from their face someone is focusing?) so if anyone knows any leads on this send them along.
1. Argyle, M., & Cook, M. (1976). Gaze and Mutual Gaze. New York: Cambridge University Press.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind" says Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps explaining the strange behaviour of those in love.
Love has long been linked to madness, and it's easy to see why. People in love tend to hold unlikely and overly positive beliefs about their lovers, show signs of mania, obsessional thinking and experience catastrophic lows when things go wrong.
In a new book, psychologist Frank Tallis argues that love and lovesickness should be considered more seriously by psychologists and neuroscientists, and that lovesickness can trigger identifiable symptoms of mental illness in some people.
In fact, Dr Tallis is continuing a long tradition of medical enquiry into lovesickness which has been around since the Ancient Greeks (as the history of erotomania shows) although Jacques Ferrand's 1623 A Treatise on Lovesickness probably stands as one of the greatest works in this area (summary, amazon entry with excerpts).
To say that "The course of true love never did run smooth" would be an understatement though, especially if you're investigating love and attraction.
Research has shown that, for some, making love causes amnesia. Luckily though, people are disproportionately more likely to marry others whose names resemble their own, perhaps making the post-coital name guessing a little easier. It seems Cupid has a sense of humour if nothing else.
Link to BBC site on the science of love. Link to Frank Tallis' site with a sample chapter of his book.
Male faces with feminine features more attractive:
Recently released results from Dr Tony Little and his team, suggest that males with more feminine features are more widely attractive to women. Women who consider themselves highly attractive however, are more likely to go for classically masculine faces.
Dr Little is interested in identifying the features of attractiveness and explaining why we might have evolved to recognise and seek-out beauty.
The link might be explained by the fact that some physically attractive features are linked to levels of hormones (such as testosterone) that are present during development. These are also known to have an influence on fertility and coupling behaviour.
The researchers based their findings on data gathered from staff and students at the University of Liverpool, but have an online lab where you can take part in similar experiments.
Link to the research team's online lab. Link to BBC News story on the research findings.
A research team led by Simon Chu from the University of Central Lancashire have found that a woman's height can significantly effect how they are perceived by others.
The researchers found that taller women are perceived by both men and women as more intelligent, assertive, independent, ambitious, richer and more successful, regardless of how the person really is.
In contrast, shorter women are perceived as more considerate and nurturing, but only by men.
Unfortunately, the scientific paper isn't out yet, as it would be interesting to calculate the strength of the effect per inch or centimetre lost or gained.
However, women should be able to encourage people to form particular first impressions by influencing the height they are perceived to be, either by the use of heels, meeting on uneven surfaces, or even carefully selecting the surrounding environment to fool our brain's size-estimation process.
This process is known as size constancy and allows us to understand that objects tend not to expand when they come towards us, even though they take up more room on our retina.
Size constancy can be easily fooled though, as the Ames room demonstrates, although standing next to shorter people (to seem taller) or taller people (to seem shorter) is likely to have some effect, as the system partly works by relative comparisons.
Since we've been hitting lie detection recently, I thought I'd point out that according to a brief communication in a 2000 volume of Nature (May, vol 405, abstract here, full text here if you can access it), people who have acquired aphasia (an impairment in the processing of others speech, leading to difficulties in comprehending spoken language) are better at detecting lies. The case the authors make is that the brain redresses damage to the circuitry that underpins language ability by boosting the recognition of non-verbal behaviour. This more sensitive detection (which isn't merely better processing of the information in the voice, but depends on using facial cue information) allows a superior level of 'lie-detection' - which in this study was confined to recognising emotions that models (the people being viewed - effectively the stimuli for this kind of study) are trying to conceal.
Using patients as some kind of high-falutin sniffer dog isn't particularly appealing. But the finding lends itself to some great hard-boiled noir...
"I don't know what the hell he's talking about. But this guy's a liar."
It's also a fun conundrum for philosophers of semantics, no? An entity that can evaluate whether something is true or false without accessing its content. And they're a bit more real than zombies.
I recently attended the annual meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society in London and equipped with my PAA (personal analogue assistant, i.e. paper + pencil) got busy sucking up what was said. This is the first of a few posts looking at some of the new research presented there. Since much of this is genuinely new, it won't have jumped through all the hoops normally traversed by science printed in a journal or re-reported in the media. But it's sound stuff from respected researchers, and I figure all of you are as eager as me to get the news before it's news. Right? Today I'll be working from a talk given by Ian Penton-Voak called "Personality dimensions in the social face". I hope you'll understand the title I've given presently.
Stereotyping is a big interest of social psychologists, and it's long established that we make judgments about the personality of strangers based on their appearance. These judgments are reliable - that is to say, that people tend to agree about what personality a face represents, at a level higher than chance would allow. An interesting issue with these kinds of phenomena is how they get started: is there a 'kernel of truth' that tipped judgments one way or the other, resulting in the far more sweeping and gross generalisations that now exist? We should bear in mind that in previous times, the idea that elements of personality persist in the face wasn't just a scientific question, it was a presupposition: The art of physiognomy, or reading faces, was employed as far back as the ancient Greeks, as recently as Schopenhauer (see here for some of his thoughts on the issue) and has been popular between the two. In the present day, people still attribute the same kinds of traits to the same faces, and perhaps more surprising, they explicitly believe that the appearance of the face reveals personality.
However, it is up to the research to show that this reliability among viewers of a face has any correspondence to the genuine trait exhibited. I should note that one doesn't need to be a hardline nativist (someone certain that traits are innate, genetically determined and fairly resistant to change) to consider this hypothesis. Activity affects physiology, so in principle personality, by affecting your activities, could affect how you look. And how you look may shape your personality. So is there anything to this? A kernel of truth, a whole lot of truth, or no truth to speak of?
Previous research showed that people were better at chance at at least some of the personality judgments they made about faces. However this was marred by the common use of full-face photographs, which provide cues such as haircuts, jewellery and the like. Even a cropped photo may contain scars and other unique markers. This also doesn't tell you very much about whether there are types of face that correspond to types of personality.
Penton-Voak's work addressed this using interesting methods and providing exciting results. The first part of the method was fairly standard: they took 300 students and photographed their faces with neutral expressions, and asked them to complete a 40-item questionnaire which was designed to tap into the 5 factors of personality. Then, 100 participants rated the faces on each characteristic - e.g. agreeableness - one at a time. As expected, these rating were reliable. Also, they correlated with some of the questionnaire measures: Extraversion, and also male Neuroticism and Openness to expression.
So far, so expected. Here comes the geek bit: concentrate. For each personality factor, Penton-Voak took the faces of the people who rated themselves as highest on that factor (the top ten percent) and used them to create a personality composite. This was achieved by overlaying each face, preserving their commonalities but gradually smoothing out the differences to arrive at some kind of 'platonic ideal' of the face for that factor. The same was done with the bottom 10 percent on each scale. Would candidates just presented with this averaged information still be able to discern which was the agreeable and which the unagreeable ideal?
Turns out they could, for the following dimensions: Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism. So, if anything, the composites stripped of individual social cues such as distinctive haircuts, allowed better perception of the personality trait that underlay them. Penton-Voak suggests that this may be because if the face does carry personality information, a single face is carrying information from multiple, independent sources (as there are proposed to be 5 independent personality measures) and this muddies the waters, as we find it difficult to ignore information and tend to incorporate it into our judgments, even when it isn't helping.
They also made another kind of composite: the product of those faces high or lowly rated on a dimension by the viewers. It would seem trivial to say that these composites continued to be rated as high or low on the scale, just as their components were, but remember that this suggests that some component of personality stereotyping has roots in across-face averages, rather than picking and operating on idiosyncracies. Moreover, using a form of statistical investigation termed discriminant analysis, they revealed that underlying those judgments made upon women was a reliance on their level of perceived attractiveness - their agreement was based not on a shared impression of what constitutes agreeableness in a female face, but a shared supposition that attractive faces are more agreeable. This is termed a halo effect - where perception of one feature determines another one.
In what for me is the most exciting aspect of the research, Penton-Voak took this yet further. If these composites really were ideals, then it should be possible to apply them to fresh data and in effect, produce a transformation along that dimension. He took his strongest candidates - the high and low Agreeableness composites - and applied them to new faces, morphing them towards those common aspects the composite held. These faces, both unknown and famous, were then rated on all dimensions. As hoped for, those morphed towards the high-Agreeable composite were judged more agreeable, and those towards the low judged less. But the most impressive finding was that there was no effect of the morphing on any of the other personality dimensions - they were not rated as more or less extraverted, neurotic etc. It was totally specific to one - in effect, isolating the 'agreeableness' transformation.
This seems compelling evidence that this method has locked on to a proto-face structure that communicates information about one personality dimension only, and promises a method of interrogating whether multiple personality dimensions can be communicated this way, and whether they map onto the classic Big-5 measures. Penton-Voak thinks not - not all the distinctive personality differences that are researched in people will be coded in any sense in the face - but thinks he can find at least one or two more using this method. It also holds out the possibility that, in images at least, we may be able to morph our personality.
I can't resist spelling out the applications of this kind of work in true Mind Hacks fashion...actually, I'll let Ian do it for me:
...the computer graphic faces generated by this project will be useful in an applied setting, as they will allow controlled alterations of perceived personality in faces. The use of computer generated characters (avatars) that successfully elicit personality judgements of the designer’s (or user’s) choosing may increase the usability of, and satisfaction with, computer interfaces. With the increasing use of avatars in many forms of human computer interaction, the current project has value as a first step towards the principled use of facial characteristics in computer graphic avatar design...
As a coda, I should add that the possibility I held out above, that it's personality that is presently morphing our faces is stronger than mere conjecture; studies from the 80s show that couples grow more alike over time in physical appearance, and it's no great step to say that those that smile together wrinkle together in the same way.
Beatriz Calvo-Merino and researchers from University College London have been investigating how the brain understands other people's movements with the help of professional ballet dancers and experts in capoeira.
It is thought that the human brain has a 'mirror system', that simulates the actions of others as we observe them. This might be the basis of a number of important skills such as observational learning and communication.
This system seems particularly tuned to biological motion, as it doesn't seem to activate when mechanical motion is viewed, or, for example, when an obviously artificial hand is watched while it moves.
Calvo-Merino used the brain scanning technique fMRI to investigate whether the mirror system of expert dancers would react differently when watching their own dance style, when compared to a dance style they didn't know.
They found that when dancers viewed moves which they were expert in, their brains were more active in areas associated with action planning, body image, motion perception and, unexpectedly, and reward and social behaviour.
The results suggest that the mirror system is involved in understanding the movement of others by combining it with our own repertoire of skills and experience, and that this may be a crucial part of our social interaction.
Link to story from sciencedaily.com Link to the abstract of the study from the journal Cerebral Cortex.
A brain imaging study reported in the journal Science [1] found that showing the silhouettes of fearful eyes for just 17 milliseconds was enough to increase activity in the amygdala's of human subjects - the effect is something like just seeing the whites of someone's eyes in the dark (as shown in the picture, along with the comparison condition - the silhouette of the eyes of someone showing a happy expression).
The two things struck me about this. The first, obviously, is how brief the exposure is. If you are shown something for 17ms you will probably be unable to tell that you've been shown anything at all (you might see a flash), you certainly won't be able to tell what it is. In this study the 17ms picture of eyes was immediately followed by a picture of a normal, expressionless, face - which makes perceiving the eye-silhouettes even harder (and, indeed, none of the participants in the experiment reported that they noticed anything unusual).
But their brains did. The amygdala was already ramping up, ready to signal 'be afraid' to the rest of the brain. And this to something that isn't actually scary in itself - but a social signal that there is something to be afraid of nearby. Social and emotional information is being priority-routed through the brain's processing streams.
If your brain responds to something in 17ms then you know it is priority information - compare with the window of conscious experience (about 200 ms), or the time it would take someone to say if a coloured ball is red or green (nearer 1000 ms). And in general it is emotional information (such as fear) and things for which we have a long-evolutionary legacy of prioritising (danger, food, sex) that we can start responding to so quickly. (There's more about all this stuff in the book, maybe start with "Subliminal Messages Are Weak And Simple", [Hack #82]).
The other thing that struck me about the study was that the fearful eyes, are, well, more eye-like. They look more like cartoon-eyes, an exaggeration of the things that make an eye an eye (what an ethologist might call a super-normal stimulus. Like shoulder-pads are for shoulders, wonder-bras are for breasts and cartoon caricatures are for people - more 'thing-like' than the thing itself). I wonder if being "eyes-wide" with fear is simply a functional reaction which gives us as wide a field-of-view as possible - or if being eyes-wide with fear is a social signal that has evolved to capitalise on an existing human ability to read emotions from the eyes. We know that eyes are the most important part of our social landscape (see, for illustration, the eye-tracking picture of someone looking at a face on page 45 of the book). And we can assume that fear will be one of the more important, or at least more urgent, things to communicate. The fear signal may have evolved to take advantage of where people are already spending a lot of their time looking, and to piggyback on an existing neural-specialisation to respond to eye-like stimuli.
Refs
1. Whalen, P.J. et al (2004). Human Amygdala Responsivity to Masked Fearful Eye Whites. Science, 306, 2061. Discussed here
Neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs has been working with a woman known only by the initials SM. She has damage to the amygdala on both sides of the brain, and although she can recognise emotions such as happiness, anger, surpise, sadness and disgust on people's faces, she can't recognise fear.
Adolphs investigated exactly what SM was looking at when she viewed emotional expressions and found that she rarely looked at the eyes. Most other emotional expressions can be recognised from other parts of the face, but recognising fear seems to particularly involve viewing the eyes.
When prompted to look specifically at the eyes, SM became a lot better at recognising fear, although quickly reverted back to avoiding them if not reminded.
The amygdala has been traditionally associated with emotion, particularly the negative emotions, but Adolphs suggest that maybe it has a wider function, also involving visual attention and analysis.
Why damage to the amygdala might specifically cause problems with viewing the eyes of other people remains to be investigated, as does whether SM's ability to focus in on other parts of the face is entirely normal.
Researchers from the Universities of Queensland and Denver have found that newborn babies preferentially look at human faces, but not human body shapes in general. This seems to suggest that face recognition might be innate in some way and might be one aspect of our genetic inheritance which promotes social interaction and allows us to develop subtle social communication skills needed for the complexity of human interaction.
A study published in 2004 suggested that this is more than just a simple preference for any face-like shape, but that newborn babies prefer attractive rather than unattractive faces. It is still unclear why this might happen, although it perhaps hints that attractive faces may seem more attractive because they more closely match a configuration passed down to us via our genes.
The excuse "Sorry honey, I was just looking to see if their face matched my genetic template of innate face shapes" is of course unlikely to get you out of trouble, regardless of your ability to describe the science behind it.
All animals yawn (see animalyawns.com) and in humans yawning seems to be contagious. Seeing another person yawn, or even just reading about yawning can make you yawn. (We talk about unconscious immitation in chapter 10 of the book). James Anderson from the University of Stirling gave a lecture in Sheffield last week about yawning - in the introduction he told us that when he lectures on yawning lots of people in the audience, well, yawn. But his talk was only yawn-inducing in the social-contaigon sense.
Yawning, it seems to me, may provide us with paradigm case of an automatic behaviour that, moving along the phylogenetic scale, has become co-opted into a quasi-voluntary social signal.
What am i trying to say and why does it matter? Well, speech - that most human of abilities - is another kind of action that may have begun as an automatic behaviour (mere vocal noises) before being subsequently tranformed into a social signal (alarm calls), and then again changed into being a mostly voluntary behaviour (like giving speeches to the UN, but not like my automatic, expletive, reaction when i fell down some stairs).
By looking at yawning we may get clues about how automatic animal behaviours change over evolutionary time into voluntary ones. By looking at yawning contaigon we might get clues about how our social nature affects our individual behaviours - and our individual control over those behaviours. In short, if this is the arena where human volition was born and is still mediated we need every 'in' we can get, and yawning may be one.
You can pretty precisely define what a yawn is. The characteristics are instantly recognisable: the screwed-up eyes, the head thrown back and of course - the gaping maw.
In humans a yawn typically lasts around six to eight seconds. At least twenty candidate functions have been suggested for yawning - and we still don't know which ones could be true. It certainly isn't just to do with the levels of oxygen in our lungs - some very thorough scientists have done experiments involving raising the ambient levels of carbon dioxide and found that it didn't increase people's frequency of yawning. We do know that it is found in all vetebrates and that it develops early - even 10 week old human foetuses yawn.
Like a lot of behaviours held in common by many species (it has even been suggested that fish yawn!), and which develop early in the lifespan, yawning seems to be controlled in the central, ancient, part of the brain - the brainstem. (And lets note here, that in monkeys vocalisations also seem to be brainstem controlled).
Studies have shown that in old-world monkeys yawning is more common amoung males, and amoung those monkeys higher up the dominance heirarchy. It could well be that in these creatures, like this baboon:
yawning has become a social signal of a different kind than in humans - a display of the canines and hence a warning to anyone thinking of causing trouble. The reports by some researchers that baboons are likely to yawn before fights, and possibly also likely to turn their heads in profile to the animal they are yawning at - better showing off those viscious teeth - would support this idea.
Another possible function for yawning amoung primates - including ourselves - is that it forfils a social coordination role. A way for a group to signal to itself something like "time for bed" or "we're bored, let's do something else now". It's not clear, however, why yawning would take on this role, nor, indeed, is it certain that a group of monkeys should all sleep at the same time.
Even in monkeys, yawning was making the transition into being a semi-voluntary behaviour. Dr Anderson reported evidence that yawning can be training into macque monkeys (using rewards for yawning behaviour). So, for primates at least, yawning is less than a reflex - perhaps a vital step on the path for a behaviour to become multi-purpose or a social signal. Although I wonder whether control-over-yawning was itself adaptive, or whether some more general increase in voluntary (cortical?) control allowed control-over-yawning as a by product.
Chimpanzees, closer relatives of ours than monkeys, shown videos by Dr Anderson of other chimps yawning, themselves yawned - showing that the yawning contaigon effect found in humans evolved before whatever happened that made us human.
In humans, Dr Anderson had done experiments showing that, unlike adult chimpanzees, pre-school children don't catch yawning off others. This would fit with research in child psychology which suggests that, until around the age of three or four children, aren't able to think about other people's states of mind. They don't have what many people would call empathy (and what psychologists call 'Theory of Mind'). One aspect of this lack may be that they don't socially mimic others like adults do, and hence don't catch yawns.
You can bet that the next time i'm around a three year old I'll be yawning at them to see if they copy me.
Supporting the connection between automatic contaigon of yawning is research published earlier this year by Steven Platek, which showed that people who are higher in empathy are more likely to catch yawns off other people.
Dr Anderson made the prediction that primates without self-awareness (another aspect of theory of mind - if you can't think about other people's minds, how can you properly contextualise your own?) would, like human children but unlike adult chimps, not be subject to contaigous yawning.
But the purpose of yawning, and contaigous yawning in humans, is still an open question. During his talk Dr Anderson suggested that contaigous yawning "may just be a by-product of our capacity for low-level empathy". So there is no one function to yawning - it became contaigous because it was a semi-automatic, partly-social signal and as our capacity to represent the thoughts of others developed yawning became infectious on the back of that capacity - a capacity which we can see the origins of in our nearest primate relatives. In this way yawning is like sleep, it isn't fully understood and may in fact have many different functions. After arising in the common ancestor of all vetebrates it has had different roles put on it in different species - teeth display in baboons, and maybe some sort of social coordination function in chimpanzees. In humans yawning can reflect our profound capacity to unconsciously and automatically be influenced by the behaviour of others. Catching other's yawns is fundamental to the social imitation that is so advanced in humans. And it doesn't even have to be rude- some research, reported Dr Anderson, has suggested that yawning in synchrony is more common amoung potential lovers - not as a sign of bordom, but as an expression of their mutual empathy and attraction!
Researchers from London and Italy have just published a study on the brain areas involved in perceiving and understanding faces. They created an elegant experiment where they used morphing to compare how brain activity changes as a photograph is gradually blended from one person to another, for example, from Marilyn Monroe to Margaret Thatcher.
They found that the brain did not respond in the same gradual manner, and that activation shifted to specific areas at certain points in the blending process. When the blending was in its early stages, participants perceived the picture as the same person with physical changes to their face, an experience which caused activation in the inferior occipital gyrus. When the level of blending affected recognition of the pictured person, the right fusiform gyrus was activated, an area thought to be involved with judgements of familiarity for faces. When a participant was already familiar with the people in the pictures, the temporal lobes became active when the final face became clear. These areas have been linked to semantic memory and naming.
This study is important as it shows specialised areas of activation for different stages in the face perception process in a single experiment.
These stages have been hypothesised to exist for quite some time in a model developed by psychologists Vicki Bruce and Andy Young, largely from studies on people with prosopagnosia, a condition where face recognition can be impaired, usually after brain damage.
Link to BBC News story. Link to story in The Guardian. Link to abstract from Nature Neuroscience.
Psychologists from the University of Oregon have been studying children's imaginary friends. Their study found that 65% of children had imaginary friends at the age of 7, a much higher rate than expected, and that the presence of an imaginary friend is linked to better emotional understanding and 'theory of mind' skills (the suggested ability that allows us to figure out and represent others' beliefs and intentions).
Otherstudies on imaginary friends in children have also shown that they seem to be quite normal and generally linked to positive psychological development.
Interestingly though, some of the children report that their imaginary playmates don't always do what they're told and sometimes won't go away when expected to, or bother them inconveniently. It seems that even from quite a young age, we are not always master of our own imaginations.
I've just read a funny and insightful interview with neuroscientist Vincent Walsh from last November's Current Biology that's full of over-caffeinated anecdotes and understated wisdom.
The Boston Globe has an excellent 
ABC Radio National's All in the Mind has an engaging 
The Guardian books blog has a fantastic short 
ABC Radio National's Late Night Live has a fascinating 
Bioemphemera has found some wonderfully left-field brain 
BBC Radio 4 has a fantastic 
I've just discovered that the excellent PBS 
I'm re-reading the excellent 
Clinical psychologist and US Congressman 
There's a video 
The Providentia psychology blog has an excellent 
New Scientist has a 
ABC Radio National's Artworks programme 
One of the most famous and most mythologised studies in psychology concerns John Watson's 
Consciousness and the 'myth of the self' are tackled in an interesting 
An extraordinary 2006 
I've just found this remarkable 
The Psychologist has an excellent 
The BBC Radio 4 programme Saturday Live recently had a segment on the UK Government's belated apology to 
I love this 
The New York Times has a huge 
ABC Radio National's Philosopher's Zone has a fantastic 
I've just discovered that David Bowie's 
Aaron Beck is the creator of one of the world's most widely used and influential psychological treatments, cognitive behavioural therapy, and he's profiled in an excellent 
The LA Times has a reflective 
The New York Times has an interesting 
The BPS Research Digest has the surprising 
The New York Times has a fantastic 
I've just found this interesting 1988 
Edge has an excellent 
Frontier Psychiatrist has discovered an 
I've just noticed an excellent 
Counter-culture psychiatrist 
Psychiatrist and iconoclast 
New Scientist has an interesting 
ABC Radio National's excellent The Philosopher's Zone recently broadcast a great 
The New York Times has an 
The New York Times has an excellent 
Another in our occasional series of articles on the importance of the motto "don't get high on your own supply". This edition concerns the case of an anaesthetist who was testing some of his own anaesthetics while driving.
New York Magazine 
I've just got round to listening to a September 
The Boston Globe has a brief 
Esquire magazine (of all places) has an excellent neuroscience 
Today's Nature has a fascinating one page 
I've just found this fascinating 
Neurophilosophy has a stimulating 
I just found a touching 
Neurophilosophy has a beautifully illustrated and carefully researched 
I just found this fascinating aside on Sherlock Holmes in a 1973 
Each experiment involved a pale red disc that followed an 'invisible track' on a computer monitor. The sort of track is illustrated in the diagram of the left, although in the actual experiment the participants just saw the disc.
Neurophilosophy has a fantastic 
This is a wonderfully written 
I've just found an eye-opening 2003 
Psychologist 
Clinical research with hallucinogenic drugs was effectively outlawed for many years since the 1960s. What had to happen before research like this could start again?
I've just got round to watching the Seed Salon 
Bookslut has a fantastic 
Neurophilosophy has secured an interview Heather Perry, a lady who has drilled a hole through her own skull as part of a self-treppaning ritual, and is asking readers to 
Bookslut has an 
The Observer discusses the recent and somewhat lonely death of Adam Laing, the son of revolutionary psychiatrist 
The last few months have seen the passing of 
A quote from the sardonic 
On the Ropes, BBC Radio 4's programme about people in difficult situations, 
BBC Radio 4 have just broadcast a fantastic new 
In your book you mention evidence that 'certainty' and 'knowing' are feelings, rather than conscious conclusions, and you suggest they happen to us as if we’re passive recipients of an automatic process. Most people would think (as 
Jewish Currents has an interesting first person 
At 9 am this morning, 
I've just finished reading the wonderful Man's Search for Meaning, a 1946 
Neurophilosophy has found a new 
YouTube has a classic 1970 
Hello, I am 
Wired has as 
The New Yorker has a wonderful 
The picture is of the memorial to Robert Burton, author of 
We've discussed the remarkable neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor 
I just 
"If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?"
Neuroscientist Dr. Kawashima, the star and part-designer of Nintendo's brain training game 'Brain Age' has 
Author Terry Pratchett recently 
Wired magazine has a feature 
Film star 
Bookslut 
The New York Times has an interesting 
The scientific journal Molecular Interventions has a whole load of open-access articles that contain interviews with leading molecular biologists, including several with notable neuroscientists.
It's a pretty strange idea, I know. 
Psychiatrist Prof 
Dr Lolita Shanté Gooden is New York-based psychologist with a block rockin' background. Under the stage name 
Do not call for black power or green power. Call for brain power.
You probably know 
Beastie Boys MC Adrock (
Wired magazine has an 
I've just discovered the remarkable life of 
Neural network and 'fuzzy thinking' researcher 
I've just found a concise 
A completely charming excerpt from the 'People' section of UK news magazine 
Philip Zimbardo, known for the Stanford prison 
Albert Ellis, one of the co-founders of cognitive therapy, died yesterday at his home in New York. The Boston Herald has an 
A couple of quotes from the 16th and 17th centuries that still hold true today. The first from Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, dated 1508:
I'm currently reading 
From the 'images in psychiatry' 
The San Francisco Chronicle has an 
If you've got half an hour, you could do a lot worse than spending it listening to ABC Radio National's All in the Mind 
Tony Wright is aiming to 
Bookslut has an in-depth 
Nobel prize-winning psychologist 
The picture is of one of the lock gates on Grand Canal Way in South Dublin. The bench is a memorial to Irish artist, songwriter and civil engineer 
Psychotherapy Networker magazine is celebrating its 25th anniversary and has conducted a 
BBC News has a brief 
Dave Isay, Piya Kochhar and Howard Dully produced one of the most powerful radio 
The Boston Globe has a brief 
There's a great introductory 
Today is 
The Boston Globe has a 
A poem on the collective unconsciousness of sleep by British poet 
The Neurophilosopher has written a 
A paper just published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica reconsiders the insanity and death of philosopher 
Why study social interaction in online worlds? Surely they're just games?
How likely do you think it is that players fall in love with each other as people, rather than just as play-acted characters?
Psychology lecturer and author 
We often assume that psychology and neuroscience experiments tell us general things about how humans think and behave, but little attention is given to whether the people who volunteer for research studies are representative of the wider population.
Seed Magazine has a 
The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine has a 
Wired has a brief 
Someone has put a series of the brilliant 
Actor, writer and film director 
Cognitive Daily and The Washington Post cast a sceptical eye over the recently released documentary 
If you were designing an advert to encourage university students to drink less alcohol, which wording do you think would work better?
As Tom 
ABC Radio's 
Sex and relationship psychologist 
As the new academic year is in full flow, students might find themselves with a raft of information and little to paddle with.
Artist 
Where and how is human morality processed and represented by the brain? A freely available review by 
Cognitive science site 
The Economist, who seem to have a run of psychology article of late, has a brief article discussing theories of 
Apple seems to be targeting a 
In the wake of suspicion that the London bombings were carried out by British nationals, many have asked what motivates acts of terror. Psychologist 
Scientic American has an 
There's plenty of software packages aimed at helping people with autism or Asperger's. Why is Reactive Colours different ?
You've opted to open license much of the project. How do you think this will help the project ?
This month's BBC Radio discussion programme 
Researchers claim to have identified 
A story from NY Newsday queries professional psychologists about the 
A review of tobacco industry documents show research on psychological and behavioural needs in women was used to target cigarette advertising and ingredients, to increase smoking and reduce quitting rates.
An 
Psychologist 
