August 28, 2008

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.

—Vaughan.

August 25, 2008

The alpha and omega of Crick and consciousness:

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'.

—Vaughan.

August 23, 2008

The genius of Harvey Cushing:

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'.

—Vaughan.

August 18, 2008

Tweaking with Sherlock Holmes:

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.

Link to full text of paper.
Link to PubMed entry.

—Vaughan.

August 15, 2008

Knitting delusions from thoughts:

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'.

—Vaughan.

August 13, 2008

FBI's Most Wanted neuroscientist on imitation:

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.

—Vaughan.

August 06, 2008

Attending van Gogh and his asylum art:

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).

—Vaughan.

August 04, 2008

Interview with self-trepanner, Heather Perry:

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.

—Vaughan.

August 03, 2008

On the brains of the assassins of Presidents:

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'.

Link to PubMed entry.

—Vaughan.

July 31, 2008

It is scientists who seek to get heaven in their heads:

The wonderful image is an original drawing by the artist Masonic Boom, aka Kate St.Claire, as part of her series of psychological self portraits.

The quote in the image is from the author and philosopher G.K. Chesterton.

He was once asked by The Times to write an article on 'What is wrong with the world?' and send the following piece:

Dear Sirs,

Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton

Thanks to Katie for allowing us to feature the image and it's really worth seeing full size at the link below.

Link to full size image on Flickr.
Link to Masonic Boom collection.

—Vaughan.

July 29, 2008

Is the cinematograph making us stupid?:

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 noted several times, 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'.

—Vaughan.

July 28, 2008

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 through Etsy.

Link to Lee Tracy's poetic CT scans on Etsy (thanks Sandra!).
Link to Time Out review of 'Negative to Positive'.

—Vaughan.

July 22, 2008

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).

3. The power of individual acts of compassion

—Vaughan.

July 16, 2008

Tom Wolfe on a decade of neuroscience:

I've just got round to watching the Seed Salon discussion 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'.

—Vaughan.

July 07, 2008

Lisa Appignanesi on Women and the Mind Doctors:

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.

Link to Lisa Appignanesi interview.

—Vaughan.

July 02, 2008

What is it like to drill a hole in your head?:

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 dedicated band 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.

—Vaughan.

June 11, 2008

Tripping with Jeff Warren:

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 DMT Machine 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.

Link to Bookslut interview with Jeff Warren.

—Vaughan.

June 05, 2008

The meaning response:

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.

Update: A great recent post by Vaughan 'placebo is not what you think', which deserves to be linked up with this post

Refs

Gracely, R. H., Dubner, R., Deeter, W. R., & Wolskee, P. J. (1985). Clinicians' expectations influence placebo analgesia. Lancet, 1(8419), 43.

Moerman, D. E. (2002). Meaning, medicine, and the "placebo effect". Cambridge University Press: New York.

—tom.

June 01, 2008

Shadows of R.D. Laing:

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!).

—Vaughan.

May 28, 2008

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.

—Vaughan.

May 26, 2008

Spellbound by the box:

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.

—Vaughan.

May 23, 2008

Terry Pratchett, on the ropes:

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.

—Vaughan.

May 21, 2008

Psychology's greatest case studies:

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 Changes series 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.

—Vaughan.

May 12, 2008

Five minutes with Robert Burton:

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.

—Vaughan.

May 07, 2008

In full flow:

"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.

—Vaughan.

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.

Link to 'Resisting Authority' (via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

April 29, 2008

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 Times here and The Washington Post here. 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.

—Vaughan.

April 27, 2008

Viktor Frankl and Man's Search for Meaning:

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'.

—Vaughan.

April 22, 2008

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?

Link to Kandel video interview.

—Vaughan.

April 21, 2008

Woody Allen on psychoanalysis:

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.

—Vaughan.

April 13, 2008

Lacan attack!:

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!

Link to a video of Jacques Lacan in full effect.

—Vaughan.

April 10, 2008

A small dose of Freud:

I've just finished listening to the unabridged audio version of the excellent Anthony Storr book Freud: 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 News article 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.

Link to book details (thanks Ceny!).

—Vaughan.

April 02, 2008

Joseph Weizenbaum has left the building:

Hello, I am Eliza.

Hi Eliza. I'm Vaughan.

Did you come to me because you are Vaughan?

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 book Computer 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.

—Vaughan.

March 27, 2008

Ray Kurzweil hacks body, mind, eternity:

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.

—Vaughan.

March 24, 2008

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'.

—Vaughan.

Little known, and even less forgiven:

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.

—Vaughan.

March 17, 2008

A stroke of insight:

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.

—Vaughan.

February 28, 2008

The normality of strangers:

"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.

—Vaughan.

February 26, 2008

Chuck Close and perceptual Science:

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).

—Vaughan.

February 06, 2008

Virtual insanity:

"If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?"

A quote often attributed to the anomalist and shrewd observer of the psychology of belief, Charles Fort.

It's typically Fortean, but despite the fact it is often attributed to the great man, rather appropriately, he may never have said it at all.

—Vaughan.

February 04, 2008

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 kn