November 16, 2008

The dance of consciousness:

Edge has a fascinating video interview with philosopher Alva Noë who discusses his work on the philosophy of consciousness, arguing that we will be led astray if we think of consciousness solely as a brain process that happens within us without reference to how we act in the world.

Noë is primarily arguing for a form of embodied cognition which argues that the mind and brain can only be understood as situated in the world in which we interact. The function of the mind is inherently connected to the sorts of tasks we need to do to survive on a day-to-day basis.

This view has been bolstered by experimental work which has shown that we perceive the world differently depending on the task we are doing or how we intend to act.

For example, in one of my favourite studies, psychologist Dennis Proffitt and his colleagues found that we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand, but only when we intend to use it.

Noë uses the fantastic analogy of dance to highlight how we can only understand this practice by considering the dancers, the world and the mind together. Dance does not exist solely between our ears.

Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.

A much better image is that of the dancer. A dancer is locked into an environment, responsive to music, responsive to a partner. The idea that the dance is a state of us, inside of us, or something that happens in us is crazy. Our ability to dance depends on all sorts of things going on inside of us, but that we are dancing is fundamentally an attunement to the world around us.

And this idea that human consciousness is something we enact or achieve, in motion, as a way of being part of a larger process, is the focus of my work.

Experience is something that is temporarily extended and active. Perceptual consciousness is a style of access to the world around us. I can touch something, and when I touch something I make use of an understanding of the way in which my own movements help me secure access to that which is before me. The point is not that merely that I learn about or achieve access to the world by touching. The point is that the thing shows up for me as something in a space of movement-oriented possibilities.

Noë goes on to talk about how perception represents meaning, how we can be led astray in neuroscience if we artificially separate action and perception, and how our definition of 'life' can help us understand consciousness.

Link to video interview and transcript of Alva Noë interview.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on embodied cognition.

—Vaughan.

September 15, 2008

Roots of neuroscience in the Bible and Talmud:

The July issue of Neurosurgery had a fantastic article that discusses where the brain, nervous system and neurological illness are mentioned in the Bible and Talmud.

In some places the nervous system is specifically mentioned, such as where the Bible and Talmud specifically prohibit eating the sciatic nerve from slaughtered animals apparently in deference to the fact that Jacob is described as having a sciatic nerve injury in Genesis.

The article also discusses various forms of neurological illness that appear. Not all the cases are clear cut, and the article carefully examines where historians have suggested specific incidences may have been describing neurological disorders.

However, there are clear references to early forms of neurosurgery, and the piece makes this interesting aside on the Roman emperor Titus:

Interestingly, it is said that Titus (AD 39–81), who crushed Jewish rebellion with brutality and burned the Temple of Jerusalem in AD 70 (Fig. 6), underwent trephination of his cranium for chronic headache (possibly tinnitus) and, during this procedure, in which he lost his life, a tumor was found that resembled a sparrow or swallow and was two selas in weight. The sela coin was approximately one-third the width of a hand and was, interestingly, the size of the hole made with the aforementioned trephination tool. Some have posited that, based on the weight and size of such a mass, the differential diagnosis would include a hemangioma, meningioma, andacoustic neuroma. Multiple cranial trephinations aredescribed as a treatment for seizure disorders in the Talmud (Hullin 57a).

Another bit that caught my eye was the possible description of the effects of stroke in Psalm 137: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy”.

Along with Matthew Wilder's 80s hit Break My Stride, Psalm 137 is the basis for the song Jerusalem by Hasidic reggae star Matisyahu.

Which, as far as I know, makes Matisyahu the only person to have written a track that makes a combined tribute to 80s synth-reggae, a Biblical verse about the holy city of Jerusalem and the cerebro vascular accident.

By the way, the image on the left is a medieval depiction of Cain smiting Abel through the grisly and fatal act of giving him a traumatic brain injury. And they say TV makes kids violent.

Link to Neurosurgery article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

September 09, 2008

Drugs for optimising morality:

This month's British Journal of Psychiatry has a fascinating essay by psychiatrist Sean Spence who argues that while most attention has been focused on 'smart drugs' and cognitive enhancement, medication is already been subtly used to improve ethical behaviour and we should prepare for a revolution in 'moral pharmacology'.

Spence argues that the cognitive enhancement debate has an undertone of smarter = better, but that people with high IQs can still conduct atrocities, so perhaps we need to start thinking about focusing on 'humane drugs' rather than 'smart drugs'.

Crucially, the argument does not concern medicating people against their will, an area of constant moral debate. Spence is talking about people taking medication willingly, knowing that it will improve their future behaviour towards others and improving their social responsibility.

Recent considerations of the ethics of cognitive enhancement have specifically excluded consideration of social cognitions (such as empathy, revenge or deception), on the grounds that they are less amenable to quantification. Nevertheless, it would be regrettable if this limitation entirely precluded consideration of what must be an important question for humanity: can pharmacology help us enhance human morality? Might drugs not only make us smarter but also assist us in becoming more ‘humane’?

When voiced in such a way, this proposal can sound absurd, not least since we may suspect that such mental manipulation would render us ‘artificially’ moral. Where would be the benefit of being kinder or more humane as a consequence of medication? This is an understandable (though reflexive) response. However, if we stop to consider what is actually happening in certain psychiatric settings, then we may begin to interrogate this proposal more systematically. I shall argue that within many clinical encounters there may already be a subtle form of moral assistance going on, albeit one that we do not choose to describe in these terms. I argue that we are already deploying certain medications in a way not totally dissimilar to the foregoing proposal: whenever humans knowingly use drugs as a means to improving their future conduct.

For example, someone who may be prone to impulsive actions may take a medication to make them less likely to take irresponsible decisions, or perhaps decides on a drug that reduces their level of aggression.

Indeed, this is part of what psychiatrists assist with at the moment, but Spence suggests that the moral aspect is often couched purely in medical terms when it is clear we need to consider morality to fully make sense of the ethical implications.

Link to essay 'Can pharmacology help enhance human morality?'.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

September 04, 2008

Is the behavioural economics bubble about to burst?:

The BPS Research Digest has alerted me to a fantastic debate in this month's Prospect magazine about whether behavioural economics is the savour of the dismal science or just fad in the boom and bust of economic theories.

It's presented as a sarcastic exchange of letters between Pete Lunn (author of Basic Instincts: Human Nature and the New Economics) and Tim Harford (author of The Logic of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of Everything) and makes some powerful points on both sides of the discussion.

The main thrust of the criticism is that behavioural economics has some interesting lab findings but hasn't really changed any of the large scale theories of how the economy actually works, while the main line of defence is that this is not a sign of scientific bankruptcy, just the result of it being a young science.

It's a great complement to the recent Economist article that took a critical look at neuroeconomics.

Link to Prospect debate on behavioural economics.
Link to BPSRD commentary.

—Vaughan.

August 13, 2008

Hypnosis addiction: the scourge of the Victorian lady:

I'm currently reading the wonderful but very long book The Discovery of the Unconscious which I shall post more about later.

However, I noticed this little gem about hypnosis in the late 1800s which just smacks of the current hand-wringing over the non-existent (or rather can't-existent) 'internet addiction'.

The problems described are so obviously not addiction, and, in fact, like the internet, there's no specific activity to be addicted to that is defined by the term 'hypnosis'. After all hypnosis is just where you concentrate and someone makes suggestions - can you be addicted to concentration and listening? Obviously not.

Nevertheless, the concerns got framed in the language of addiction as a placemarker for a fear of the unknown and as a fig leaf for other social problems (from p118):

Deleuze and the early mesmerists also described the evils resulting from too frequent or too prolonged hypnotic sessions. Such subjects gradually became addicted to hypnosis: not only did their need for frequent hypnotization increase, but they became dependent on their particular magnetizer, and this dependency could often take on a sexual slant. This well-known fact was rediscovered by Charcot, who gave an account of a woman who had been hypnotized five times within three weeks and who could think of nothing but her hypnotist, until she ran away from her home to live with him. Her husband took her back, but she fell into severe hysterical disturbances that necessitated her admission to a hospital.

Link to Wikipedia page on The Discovery of the Unconscious.

—Vaughan.

August 11, 2008

Parapsychology in a nutshell:

Today's featured article on Wikipedia is a rather splendid article on parapsychology - the scientific study of the supposed paranormal phenomena of the mind.

Academic parapsychology is notable for the exceptional quality of the experiments it conducts and the inconclusive nature of its findings - at least to mainstream science.

Large reviews of many studies (meta-analyses) tend to find that 'psi' effects are statistically significant but of small effect. The disagreement comes in over whether this small effect is a genuine reflection of paranormal ability or just an artefact of research - such as negative findings being published less often.

The history and process are fascinating though, with some of the great luminaries of psychology, such as William James, having been interested in experimental studies of psychic powers.

Link to Wikipedia page on 'parapsychology'.

—Vaughan.

August 02, 2008

Constraining the ancient mind:

As part of Seed Magazine's on innovative thinkers in science, they published a podcast interview with archaeologist Lambros Malafouris who is pioneering the study of ancient cultural artefacts as a way of constraining theories in evolutionary psychology.

One of the criticisms of some evolutionary psychology is that it too often involves over-interpretation and 'just so' stories - explanations of why we have certain psychological attributes that are stories rather than hypotheses that can be easily tested.

Malafouris has taken the novel approach of using the findings from archaeology to systematically generate and test theories of the evolution of the mind. He seems particularly interested in embodied cognition, the idea that the mind can only be understood in relation to how it interacts with the world through body and action.

The mainstream approach to cognition holds that it happens in the mind and that material culture is nothing more than an outgrowth of our mental capacities. Archaeologist Lambros Malafouris is challenging this deep-seated idea with a radical new notion: the hypothesis of extended mind, which posits that material culture is not a reflection of the human mind but an actual part of it. Take, for instance, a blind man's stick. "Where does the blind man end and the rest of the world begin?" he says. "You might see the stick as something external, but it plays a very important role in the perceptual system of this person. It extends the boundaries of this human—the stick becomes an integral part of the cognitive architecture."

If material culture is an extension of human cognition, our engagement with it has actively shaped the evolution of human intelligence, Malafouris argues. For example, ancient clay tablets that allowed people to actually write down records were not mere objects, he says. Instead, they became integral adjuncts of the human memory system. The invention of such a technology "changes the structure of the human mind," says Malafouris, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge. Rather than happening wholly in the head, he argues, cognition develops and evolves through the interplay between intelligence and material culture.

In fact, there's an increasing focus on related ideas. Some of my favourite studies have been done by psychologist Dennis Proffitt who has found numerous effects of tool use on thinking and perception.

One of my favourite studies is where he found that we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand, but only when we intend to use it.

Malafouris is using these ideas and adds to the relatively new but exciting field of cognitive archaeology.

Link to Seed interview with Lambros Malafouris.

—Vaughan.

August 01, 2008

Cognitive restructuring and the fist bump terrorists:

The recently satirical New Yorker cover depicting Obama and his wife as fist-bumping Islamic terrorists comes under fire in an article for The Chronicle by psychologist Mahzarin Banaji who argues that it irresponsibly creates an implicit association between "Obama and Osama". Banaji is almost certainly right, but neglects higher levels of cognition which can make this ineffectual.

Banaji is most known for her extensive work on the implicit association test (IAT), which we discussed only the other day. What this and other work has shown is that despite our conscious thoughts ("hair colour has no association with intelligence") we still might have an unconscious bias that associates certain concepts ('blonde' and 'dim').

Along these lines, Banaji suggests that the artist, Barry Blitt, who created the picture has harmed the political debate by unintentionally strengthening an inappropriate link:

The brain, Blitt would be advised to understand, is a complex machine whose operating principles we know something about. When presented with A and B in close spatial or temporal proximity, the mind naturally and effortlessly associates the two. Obama=Osama is an easy association to produce via simple transmogrification. Flag burning=unpatriotic=un-American=un-Christian=Muslim is child's play for the cortex. Learning by association is so basic a mechanism that living beings are jam-packed with it — ask any dog the next time you see it salivating to a tone of a bell. There is no getting around the fact that the very association Blitt helplessly confessed he didn't intend to create was made indelibly for us, by him.

It is not unreasonable, given the inquiring minds that read The New Yorker, to expect that an obvious caricature would be viewed as such. In fact, our conscious minds can, in theory, accomplish such a feat. But that doesn't mean that the manifest association (Obama=Osama lover) doesn't do its share of the work. To some part of the cognitive apparatus, that association is for real. Once made, it has a life of its own because of a simple rule of much ordinary thinking: Seeing is believing. Based on the research of my colleague, the psychologist Daniel Gilbert, on mental systems, one might say that the mind first believes, and only if it is relaxing in an Adirondack chair doing nothing better, does it question and refute. There is a power to all things we see and hear — exactly as they are presented to us.

It strikes me that Banaji is perhaps being a little disingenuous here. Certainly the advert does strengthen that unconscious association, but, as as the intention of most satire, it attempts to include another association into the mix - that of absurdity.

In other words, the idea of the cartoon is presumably to trigger the association Obama = terrorist, but also include another so it becomes Obama = terrorist = absurd. It's the humourists equivalent of the reductio ad absurdum argument.

Of course, this can rely as much on the same implicit associations as Banaji mentions, but it can be also seen to work very effectively through a process of reinterpretation that alters the impact of automatic connections through changing their meaning.

In fact, this process so can be so powerful that it is used to treat psychiatric problems.

In clinical work it is called 'cognitive restructuring'. For example, in panic disorder, people begin to interpret normal bodily reactions (increased heart rate, temperature etc) as a sign of impending heart attack or other danger, which leads to more anxiety, further interpretations and a spiral of terrifying anxiety.

Cognitive restructuring teaches people that these bodily changes and worried thoughts aren't signs of an impending heart attack, they're normal reactions, and the spiral of anxiety is not a risk to your health, just a pattern you've got into. In other words, they begin to believe something different about the significance of the link.

Humour also relies on a process of reinterpretation. Most theories of humour stress that it usually requires the reframing of a previously held association.

However, the key to good satire is that this reframing should be obvious and we might speculate that the reframing effect should be more powerful than the effect of simply reviving the old association.

We can perhaps wonder then, whether the controversy over the New Yorker cover is not that it made an association between Obama and terrorism, but that it was not effective enough in making it obviously absurd.

I suspect one of the difficulties is that the cartoon was actually attempting to satirise not Obama, but the media discussion of him. This is always a risky strategy because it requires so much cognitive abstraction that the automatic association is far more apparent.

Link to Banaji's article in The Chronicle.

—Vaughan.

July 31, 2008

The theatre of hysteria:

I'm currently reading Elaine Showalter's book Hystories, a cultural history of the concept of 'hysteria', a term which has variously described the supposed effects of a 'wandering womb', unexplained neurological symptoms, panic, nervousness or just 'making a fuss'.

She describes where medicine and media have collided, and highlights how popular interest in the condition has driven a long-standing tradition of fictional interpretations that have developed alongside medical understanding.

Showalter has a feminist angle although is generally even handed with the evidence and is not shy in highlighting the excesses of some past feminist writing on the subject.

One particularly interesting part is where she discusses how theatre was interpreted the work of 19th century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot as it was happening.

Charcot is perhaps most famous for his work on hysteria and held regular Tuesday lectures at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris where he would theatrically demonstrate the symptoms of hysteria in favourite female patients who apparently 'performed' with an equal flourish.

As we mentioned in an previously, one of the reasons Charcot's work was so widely known is because he used the newly developed technology of photography to create striking and sometimes pseudo-erotic portraits documenting the bodily contortions of his (largely) female patients. The picture on the right is of Augustine, one of his 'star patients'.

These have been the inspiration for numerous contemporary plays, ballets, exhibitions and novels.

What I didn't know was that these are not a modern phenomena, shows based on Charcot's work work were popular since Charcot first began publishing his work and giving lectures (from p100):

As Charcot's clinic achieved celebrity in the 1890s, images of hysteria cross over to theatre and cabaret. At the Chat Noir and Folies Bergère, performers, singers, and mimes who called themselves the "Harengs Saurs Épileptiques" (The Epileptic Sour Herrings) or "Hydropathes" mimicked the jerky, zigzag movements of the hysterical seizure...

The poses of grande hystérie enacted at the Friday spectacles of the Salpêtrière closely resembled the stylized movements of French classical acting. Indeed, hysterical women at the clinic and fallen women in melodrama were virtually indistinguishable; the theatre critic Elin Diamond comments that both displayed "eye rolling, facial grimaces, gnashing teeth, heavy sighs, fainting, shrieking and choking; 'hysterical laughter' was a frequent stage direction as well as a common occurrence in medical asylums"...

Arthur Symons regarded the Moulin Rouge dancer Jane Avril as the embodiment of the age's "pathological choreography." These resemblances were not coincidental: writers, actresses cabaret performers and dancers like Avril attended Charcot's matinees and then worked the Salpêtrière style into their own performances.

An interesting twist is that Avril was actually treated by Charcot as a young girl after she ran away from an abusive mother and was admitted to the Salpêtrière for 'insanity'.

Link to details of Showalter's book Hystories.
Link to first chapter.

—Vaughan.

July 26, 2008

Whatever happened to symptom substitution? :

Symptom substitution is at the core of Freudian psychology but according to a new article in Clinical Psychology Review there is virtually no evidence for its existence and the concept should be abandoned.

The idea is that if you treat a symptom, say a phobia of social situations, without addressing the underlying conflict, another symptom will just appear because the core problem is unchanged. It is based on the Freudian theory that all symptoms of mental illness are simply a reflection of an underlying unconscious conflict.

Freud was inspired by the first law of thermodynamics that says that energy cannot be created or destroyed just turned into another form. His psychology, and much Freudian-inspired psychodynamic psychotherapy that follows, applies a similar idea to emotions.

In this model, a conflict is caused by a forbidden unconscious impulse being held back by our conscious ego. Supposedly, we want to banish them from our conscious mind to maintain a positive self-image, so we repress them into our unconscious. But because they can't just disappear they are expressed in other ways - i.e. as neurotic symptoms.

However, this model also plays an important symbolic role in the politics of mental health. It suggests that psychoanalysis is the only truly effective treatment, because it supposedly deals with the 'root cause', while drugs, behaviour therapy and CBT just alleviate symptoms and leave the patient open to further suffering.

Rather unusually for a Freudian idea, it leads to a directly testable hypothesis. Psychoanalytic treatment should lead to a better long-term prognosis, whereas we should see other other symptoms appear after treatment with other approaches.

Psychologist Warren Tryon decided to look at the medical literature to see whether other approaches were more likely to result in the appearance of other symptoms, and found no evidence from relevant empirical studies.

In fact, Tryon found only two cases studies that claimed to provide direct evidence for symptom substitution and one of them didn't even fulfil the definition, it just reported that the same symptoms came back - therefore describing a relapse rather than a substitution.

Despite their being a lack of evidence so far, he does note that not many studies have directly addressed the issue, but proposes a direct test:

The following experimental design could identify genuine psychoanalytic symptoms. Form two groups of demographically matched patients displaying a hypothesized symptom. Provide psychoanalytic treatment to one group and symptomatic treatment to the other group. The hypothesized symptom can be considered to be a bone fide psychoanalytic symptom if patients receiving psychoanalytic therapy get better and symptom substitution occurs in patients receiving symptom oriented therapy. Helping these patients to get better by providing psychoanalytic therapy would provide additional supportive evidence and be ethically responsible. The literature review reported above indicates that the presence of bona fide psychoanalytic symptoms has yet to be demonstrated.

Link to 'Whatever happened to symptom substitution?' (thanks Karel!).
Link to PubMed entry for article.

—Vaughan.

July 02, 2008

Impossible experiments:

Psychology Today have asked a group of leading thinkers to discuss their 'impossible experiment', if the impractical, unethical or unattainable was not an obstacle to the ultimate mind and brain study.

Presumably riffing on the BPS Research Digests' search for the 'most important psychology experiment that's never been done', they've gathered proposals that involve everything from brain swapping to behavioural mega-economics.

My favourite is from psychologist Bella DePaulo who has come up with a cunning way of studying the psychological effects of marriage:

I'd like to take couples who are living together and randomly assign half of them to marry and the others to stay unmarried. Then we could really know something about the implications of co-habitation vs. marriage. More outrageously, take people who are not in a serious romantic relationship, and assign half of them, at random, to marry. Single people are randomly assigned to a spouse who is chosen at random, or to a spouse who fits their description of their perfect partner, or to stay single. Who do you think would end up the happiest a decade later? Same for divorce. If married parents are already at each other's throats, is it better for the children if they divorce, or stay together? Randomly assign half of them to divorce, and half to stay together; then we'll see. Now take married couples who say they are happy and are not considering divorce. Randomly assign half of them to divorce! Now who will be happier ten years hence?

There's plenty more blue sky thinking, and a curious video involving a mannequin.

Link to 'Impossible Experiments'.

—Vaughan.

July 01, 2008

Intuitions about phenomenal consciousness:

Illustrating how this 'experimental philosophy' idea has really struck a chord, Scientific American Mind has an article on our intuitions about whether things can have mental states, whether that be animals, humans, machines or corporations.

The piece is by philosopher Joshua Kobe and contains lots of fascinating examples of how we tend to be comfortable attributing mental states likes 'beliefs' to corporations, but not emotions.

The same goes for robots, it turns out, but one key factor seems to be not what we think about its thinking 'machinery' but how human the body seems.

In one of Huebner’s studies [pdf], for example, subjects were told about a robot who acted exactly like a human being and asked what mental states that robot might be capable of having. Strikingly, the study revealed exactly the same asymmetry we saw above in the case of corporations.

Subjects were willing to say:
• It believes that triangles have three sides.
But they were not willing to say:
• It feels happy when it gets what it wants.

Here again, we see a willingness to ascribe certain kinds of mental states, but not to ascribe states that require phenomenal consciousness. Interestingly enough, this tendency does not seem to be due entirely to the fact that a CPU, instead of an ordinary human brain, controls the robot. Even controlling in the experiment for whether the creature had a CPU or a brain, subjects were more likely to ascribe phenomenal consciousness when the creature had a body that made it look like a human being.

Link to 'Can a Robot, an Insect or God Be Aware?'
pdf of draft Huebner paper.

—Vaughan.

Dan Gilbert on the importance of social psychology:

Dan Gilbert has a brief interview in this month's (paywalled) Psychologist magazine. From which the following nugget of wisdom:

Psychologists have a penchant for irrational exuberances, and whenever we discover something new we feel the need to discard everything old. Social psychology is the exception. We kept cognition alive during the behaviourist revolution that denied it, we kept emotion alive during the cognitive revolution that ignored it, and today we are keeping behaviour alive as the neuroscience revolution steams on and threatens to make it irrelevant. But psychological revolutions inevitably collapse under their own weight and psychologists start hunting for all the babies they tossed out with the bathwater. Social psychology is where they typically go to find them. So the challenge for social psychologists watching yet another revolution that promises to leave them in the dustbin of history is to remember that we’ve outlived every revolutionary who has ever pronounced us obsolete.

Link Gilbert Lab
Link Psychologist Magazine (sorry, subscribers only, but you can browse issues older than six months for free)

—tom.

June 24, 2008

The science of theory:

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has written an excellent piece on experimental philosophy, the practice of testing out philosophical ideas by using experiments or gathering data.

Now, the more astute of you might be thinking, "isn't that just science?", and, you'd be right. Sorta.

Schwitzgebel makes the important point that lots of the things that are taken for granted in the philosophy of mind, like what it is like to have have certain conscious experiences, haven't actually been examined to see how widely these assumptions or experiences are shared.

Partly, he notes, because psychology is too scared about being called unscientific to start returning to introspection, and partly because philosophers are the ones most concerned about these issues.

In the philosophy of perception, there’s a long-standing dispute between those who think that our concepts and categories thoroughly permeate and infect even the most basic perceptual experiences and those who hold that people with very different understandings of a scene may still have exactly the same perceptual experience of it...

Such phenomenological claims have two things in common with claims about what’s intuitive that make them ripe for inclusion under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”: First, it is mainly philosophers who make such claims; and second, there is no substantial tradition outside of philosophy dedicated to the empirical evaluation of the claims.

These facts may be mere historical accident: Back in the days of introspective psychology, psychologists loved to dispute issues of this sort. But fortunately or unfortunately, psychology still has not sufficiently rebounded from the behaviorist revolution that such general phenomenological claims are broadly discussed by mainstream psychologists.

If you consider tradition of phenomenological philosophy, which aims to describe the subjective structure of the mind, it's striking that it's been almost entirely based on philosophers' own intuitions about their mental states, which they then extrapolate to everyone else.

Schwitzgebel also suggests that experimental philosophy could be used for exploring an anthropology of philosophy. In other words, how culture affects our general assumptions about how the mind works.

I have looked at the relationship between culture-specific metaphors and the prevalence of certain views about conscious experience. To highlight some of my own work: Are people (including philosophers) more likely to say that dreams rarely contain colored elements if the film media around them are predominantly black and white? Are people more likely to say that a circular object (such as a coin) viewed obliquely looks elliptical if the dominant media for describing vision are media like paintings and photographs that involve flat, projective distortions?

Of course, there's a big overlap with psychology here, but the fact is, psychologists just aren't that interested gathering the data that philosophers would often find most useful, and so they're setting about gathering it themselves.

The first book on experimental philosophy was recently published, and Schwitzgebel's article is a fantastic introduction, as well as an eye-opening look at the possibilities of philosophers armed with clipboards.

Link to article 'The Psychology of Philosophy'.

—Vaughan.

June 03, 2008

Back to the future, but this time with data:

IEEE Spectrum Online magazine has a special and rather splendid feature on the 'singularity' - the supposed point when technology will outpace the human brain and we'll be catapulted into a time of intelligent machines, neurologically enhanced humans and never ending life.

If you think this sounds like science fiction, then you're probably right. Loathe as they are to admit it, transhumanists are essentially pining for the future as depicted in late 20th / early 21st century speculative fiction.

This is not necessarily such a bad thing. Like science fiction itself, some of it obviously stretches credibility to the point of self-parody, while some tackles the limits of technology and human experience in a profound and sophisticated way.

One notable difference is that some of the biggest names in science are involved in the transhumanist movement, and so despite their somewhat, let's say, 'ambitious' aims, the discussions tend to start from what is already possible.

IEEE Spectrum calls the singularity the technological rapture and it's hard to escape the quasi-mystical aspect of some transhumanism, although perhaps more akin to 21st century alchemy than any explicit belief in the tenants of mainstream religion.

Nevertheless, this new feature sticks largely to the science and contains a wealth of articles, interactive features and video interviews that focus mainly on neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Consequently, there are many highlights to absorb and enjoy.

There's even a wall chart which tells you "who's who" in the movement, which is handily illustrated by the disembodied (presumably cryogenically frozen) heads of some of the key thinkers in the field.

UPDATE: It wouldn't be transhumanism without a mention of Ray Kurzweil! Never fear, for today's New York Times fills the gap with a piece noting that, like Christmas, the singularity will be here sooner than you think.

Link to 'The Singularity: A Special Report'.

—Vaughan.

May 31, 2008

Do Bayesian statistics rule the brain?:

This week's New Scientist has a fascinating article on a possible 'grand theory' of the brain that suggests that virtually all brain functions can be modelled with Bayesian statistics - an approach discovered by an 18th century vicar.

Bayesian statistics allow the belief in the hypothesis to shift as new evidence is collected. This means the same evidence can have a different influence on certainty, depending on how much other evidence there is.

In other words, it asks the question 'what is the probability of the belief being true, given the data so far?'.

The NewSci article looks at the work neuroscientist Karl Friston, who increasingly believes that from the level of neurons to the level of circuits, the brain operates as if it uses Bayesian statistics.

The essential idea is that the brain makes models upon which it bases predictions, and these models and predictions are updated in a Bayesian like-way as new information becomes available

Over the past decade, neuroscientists have found that real brains seem to work in this way. In perception and learning experiments, for example, people tend to make estimates - of the location or speed of a moving object, say - in a way that fits with Bayesian probability theory. There's also evidence that the brain makes internal predictions and updates them in a Bayesian manner. When you listen to someone talking, for example, your brain isn't simply receiving information, it also predicts what it expects to hear and constantly revises its predictions based on what information comes next. These predictions strongly influence what you actually hear, allowing you, for instance, to make sense of distorted or partially obscured speech.

In fact, making predictions and re-evaluating them seems to be a universal feature of the brain. At all times your brain is weighing its inputs and comparing them with internal predictions in order to make sense of the world. "It's a general computational principle that can explain how the brain handles problems ranging from low-level perception to high-level cognition," says Alex Pouget, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Rochester in New York.

Friston is renowned for having a solid grasp of both high-level neuroscience and statistics. In fact, he's was the original creator of SPM, probably the most popular tool for statistically analysing brain scan data.

Needless to say, his ideas have been quite influential and 'Bayesian fever' has swept the research centre where he works.

I was interested to see that his colleague, neuroscientist Chris Frith, has applied the idea to psychopathology and will be arguing that delusions and hallucinations can be both understood as the breakdown of Bayesian inference in an upcoming lecture in London.

This edition of NewSci also has a great article on how cosmic rays affect the brains of astronauts, so it's well worth a look.

Link to NewSci article 'Is this a unified theory of the brain?'.
Link to article 'Space particles play with the mind'.

—Vaughan.

May 28, 2008

Review: "Why the mind is not a computer":

"Why the mind is not a computer: A pocket lexicon of neuromythology"
Raymond Tallis (2004, originally published 1994).

Neuromythology is the shibboleth of cognitive science that the mind is a machine, and that somehow our theories of information, complexity, patterns or representations are sufficient to explain consciousness. Tallis accuses cognitive scientists, and philosophers of cognitive science such as Chalmers, Churchland and Dennett, of the careless use of words which can apply both to thinking and to non-thinking systems ('computing', 'goals', 'memory', for example). This obfuscation "provides a framework within which the real problems can be by-passed and the illusion of progress maintained". At his best Tallis is a useful reminder that many of the features of the brain which are evoked to 'explain' consciousness really only serve as expressions of faith, rather than true explanations. Does the mind arise from the brain because of the complexity of all those intertwined neurons? The processes inside a cell are equally complex, why aren't cells conscious? Similarly for patterns, which depend on the subjective perspective (yes, the consciousness) of the observer rather than having an objective existence which is sufficient to generate consciousness; and for levels of description, which, with careless thinking are sometimes reified so that the mind can 'act' on the brain, when in fact, if you are physicalist, the mind and brain don't have separate existences. Moments of the argument can appear willfully obstructive. Tallis maintains that there is no meaningful sense in which information can exist without someone being informed, any more, he says, than a watch can tell the time without someone looking at it. He's right that we should be careful the word information, which has a very precise technical meaning and also colloquial meanings, but if you suppose that subjective consciousness is required to make information exist (and rule-following, representation and computation to pick a few other concepts about which he makes similar arguments) then you effectively disallow any attempts to use these concepts as part of your theory of consciousness. The disagreement between Tallis and many philosophers of cognitive science seems to me to be somewhat axiomatic --- either you believe that our current models of reality can explain how matter can produce mind, or you don't --- but Tallis is right to remind us that the things we feel might eventually provide an answer don't in themselves constitute an answer.

In essence what this book amounts to is a vigorous restatement of the 'hard problem' of consciousness --- the stubborn inadequacy of our physical theories when faced with explaining how phenomenal experience might arise out of ordinary matter, or even with beginning to comprehend what form such an explanation might take.

Disclaimer: I bought this book with my own money, because I needed something to read at the Hay Festival after finishing Ahdaf Soueif's wonderful 'Map of Love' (200) and because Raymond Tallis's essay here was so good. I was not paid or otherwise encouraged to review it.

—tom.

May 02, 2008

Uncanny valley of the dolls:

Human-computer interaction scientist Karl MacDorman has produced a fantastically illustrated video lecture on the psychology of the 'uncanny valley' - the effect where androids become creepy when they're almost human.

It comes in seven 3-4 minute sections, each of which is packed with some completely fascinating science and some wonderful examples of humanoid androids in action and how people react to them.

It's a bit hard to navigate the YouTube links between sections, so I've collected the links to all the parts of the talk, entitled 'Charting the Uncanny Valley', below:

1. Introduction
2. Form Dynamics Contingency
3. Human Perception
4. Do Looks Matter?
5. Android Science
6. Explanations
7. What makes a robot uncanny?

While reviewing the whole area of android - human interaction, MacDorman seems to have done some fascinating research himself, often taking paradigms from existing psychology studies and seeing how androids alter the experience.

For example, in one study [pdf] he morphed android faces with human ones (using Philip K Dick as the human face!) and measured how the images trigger differing feelings of familiarity, eeriness and the like.

A very well spent 20 minutes and a great introduction to a fascinating area.

pdf of MacDorman's paper on the Uncanny Valley.
Link to MeFi post which alerted me to the lecture.

—Vaughan.

April 30, 2008

Does economics make you selfish?:

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has been investigating whether ethics professors are more moral than other people, and it turns out, they're possibly less. He's now turned his attention to economics and wonders whether too much exposure to 'rational choice theory' - that says it's always rational to maximise profit - makes people more selfish.

Surprisingly, there have been several studies on exactly this topic, several which seem to suggest that economics students are more selfish than other students, but these all seem to be flawed in quite important ways.

They either use exactly the same sorts of tasks that students study in class to demonstrate that 'selfish' actions are the most economically rational strategy, or they rely on self-report - something also potentially biased by the association between 'selfishness' and irrationality.

Apparently, only three studies have looked at the link between studying economics and real-world selfishness, and none provide good evidence for the link.

Schwitzgebel has a bigger issue in mind than simply investigating the personal habits of economists, however.

This is part of his project to question the utility of certain types of theory. For example, if studying ethics makes people no more ethical and studying economics makes people no more economically rational, how useful are they?

Link to post 'Does Studying Economics Make You Selfish?'.

—Vaughan.

April 21, 2008

Language and schizophrenia make us uniquely human:

ABC Radio National's science programme Ockham's Razor just had a fascinating edition on a maverick theory about schizophrenia and the evolution of language.

It purports to discuss the history of schizophrenia but is really a great summary of psychiatrist Tim Crow's theory that schizophrenia is the consequence of the human evolution of language.

Crow is a professor of psychiatry at Oxford University who heads up a large research group so is quite mainstream to be a maverick, but his theory ruffles a lot of feathers.

He tries to address the puzzle over why schizophrenia has survived in the population if it is strongly influenced by genetics, particularly as it markedly reduces chances of reproduction. Surely it would have been 'bred out' of the population?

His theory [pdf] suggests that schizophrenia is the breakdown of the normal left-sided brain specialisation for language, owing to the disruption of genes that are involved in making the left hemisphere dominant.

Like other theories that attempt to account for the puzzle, it suggests that the risk is increased by pathological combination of usually important genes.

Crow has amassed a great deal of evidence that people with schizophrenia show less left-sided dominance for language and have altered patterns of brain asymmetry that can be seen in brain structure as well as in functional tasks.

He is also highly critical of a lot of the current molecular genetic work in schizophrenia, and argues that epigenetic variation is key and that its possible to see where the genes altered in human evolution to make us more likely to have language and consequently develop schizophrenia.

If you want a great brief guide to his theory, this edition of Ockham's Razor is a great discussion of the main points.

Link to Ockham's Razor on Crow's evolutionary approach.
pdf of scientific paper by Crow outlining his theory.

—Vaughan.

April 15, 2008

Neuroweapons, war crimes and the preconscious brain:

A new generation of military technology interfaces directly with the brain to target and trigger weapons before our conscious mind is fully engaged.

In a new article in the Cornell International Law Journal, lawyer Stephen White asks whether the concept of a 'war crime' becomes irrelevant if the unconscious mind is pulling the trigger.

In most jurisdictions, the legal system makes a crucial distinction between two elements of a crime: the intent (mens rea) and the action (actus rea).

Causing something dreadful to happen without any intent or knowledge is considered an accident and not a crime. Hence, a successful prosecution demands that the accused is shown to have intended to violate the law in some way.

This concept is based on the theory that the conscious mind forms an intention, and an actions follows. Unfortunately, we now know that this idea is outdated.

In the 1980s, pioneering experiments by Benjamin Libet demonstrated that activity in the brain's action areas can be reliably detected up to 200ms before we experience the conscious decision to act. In other words, consciousness seems to lag behind action.

Although with only limited reliability (just 60%), a recent fMRI study found that areas in the frontal lobes were starting to become more active up to seven seconds before the conscious intention to act.

While these sorts of study raise interesting questions about free will, their effect on the courts has been minimal, because it is assumed that, at least for healthy individuals, we have as much control over stopping our own actions as starting them.

The US government's defence research agency, DARPA, is currently developing new military technologies, dubbed 'neuroweapons', that may throw these assumptions into disarray.

The webpage of DARPA's Human Assisted Neural Devices Program only mentions the use of brain-machine interfaces in terms of helping injured veterans, but p11 of the US Dept of Defense budget justification [pdf] explicitly states that "This program will develop the scientific foundation for novel concepts that will improve warfighter performance on the battlefield as well as technologies for enhancing the quality of life of paralyzed veterans".

In other words, the same technology that allows humans to control computer cursors, robot arms or wheelchairs by thought alone, could be used to target and trigger weapons.

Even if only part of the process, such as selecting possible targets, is delegated to technology that reads the unconscious orienting response from the brain, that still means that part of the thought process has automatically become part of the action.

Notably, international law outlaws indiscriminate weapons and aggression, but if the unconscious thought becomes the weapon, how can we possibly prosecute a war crime?

White reviews the current state of the technology from the unclassified evidence and carefully examines the ethical and legal issues, ultimately arguing that we need a new legal framework for 21st century 'neurowarfare'.

The first preconsious war may soon be upon us.

pdf of 'Brave New World: Neurowarfare and the Limits of International Humanitarian Law'.

—Vaughan.

April 14, 2008

The shifting sands of the 'autism epidemic':

The Economist has a short but telling article on whether the so-called 'autism epidemic', occasionally touted in the media, may simply be a change in how developmental problems are diagnosed.

It covers a new study that did something really simple - it tracked down 38 people who, years ago, had been diagnosed with a delay in language and re-assessed them using the latest diagnostic interviews.

They used the ADOS (an activity and observation schedule) and the ADI (an interview for parents). This combination is often considered the 'gold standard' for a reliable and comprehensive diagnosis.

All the people were originally diagnosed with a problem in the development of language, so it was clear they weren't without difficulties. Language delay is part of the autism diagnosis, so the researchers wondered whether we'd just classify them differently now.

Despite the fact that none were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders when they were first assessed, when re-assessed using modern methods, a third were classified as on the spectrum.

It's only a small study, but matches with the findings of previous research that found that while the narrow diagnosis of autism is at less than 0.4% in the UK, the newer, wider definition of the less severe 'autism spectrum' diagnoses, unsurprisingly, is much more prevalent (just over 1%).

In other words, the looser the diagnosis becomes the more people get the diagnosis and more good evidence that the increase in cases of autism is due to wider classification rather than new 'narrow definition' cases.

Link to Economist article 'Not more, just different'.
Link to Ben Goldacre on last autism epidemic media scare.

—Vaughan.

April 12, 2008

Neuroaesthetics my arse:

Physician and philosopher Raymond Tallis has written a scorching article in The Times berating art critics for using poorly understood ideas from neuroscience when reviewing or interpreting literature, art or film.

He particularly focuses on an article by famed novelist A.S. Byatt where she suggests that the reason John Donne's poetry is so compelling is because it engages particular brain processes.

Byatt is an interesting focus for criticism because she is probably one of the modern writers who is most engaged with cognitive and neuroscience.

She often does talks with psychologists and neuroscientists and has contributed to a Cambridge University Press book with a number of distinguished memory researchers and has just released a new jointly edited book charting similar territory.

However, Tallis takes Byatt to task for using neuroscience as little more than window dressing, and suggests the whole field of literary criticism is simply jumping on the brain science bandwagon to make up for the declining popularity of Freudian, Marxist, and postmodern theories that it used to be based on.

Implicitly, Tallis is suggesting that if Byatt can't get it right, what hope is there for the rest of the critics:

A. S. Byatt’s neural approach to literary criticism is not only unhelpful but actually undermines the calling of a humanist intellectual, for whom literary art is an extreme expression of our distinctively human freedom, of our liberation from our organic, indeed material, state.

At any rate, attempting to find an explanation of a sophisticated twentieth-century reader’s response to a sophisticated seventeenth-century poet in brain activity that is shared between humans and animals, and has been around for many millions of years, rather than in communities of minds that are unique to humans, seems perverse. Neuroaesthetics is wrong about the present state of neuroscience: we are not yet able to explain human consciousness, even less articulate self-consciousness as expressed in the reading and writing of poetry. It is wrong about our experience of literature. And it is wrong about humanity.

Ouch!

It's also notable that Tallis reserves some of his criticism for neuroscientists who oversell their work in the media, perhaps leading the public to justifiably think that they have explained some central human attribute when they've really done an interesting but limited lab experiment.

Link to Times article 'The neuroscience delusion' (via 3QD).

—Vaughan.

April 02, 2008

Cocktails with Cajal:

Cocktail Party Physics is running a series on neuroscience and the first article is a fantastic look at how legendary neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal laid the foundations for the modern understanding of neurobiology.

What I didn't know, is that Cajal and Camillo Golgi, another great neuroscientist of the time with whom he shared the Nobel Prize, were rivals, and they often bickered in public and included jibes in their Nobel acceptance speeches!

The two men ended up sharing the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It seems fair. After all, Golgi invented the staining technique used by Cajal to form his hypothesis, and used it to produce the first descriptions of the different types of neurons, and the structure of glial cells, as well as the branches given off by the axon. Also, there are those in the field who argue that if you take into account the later discovery of electrical synapses, Golgi was at least partially correct that the central nervous system is a vast interconnected network -- it's just not the cells themselves that are connected.

It made for an interesting pair of Nobel lectures, though: the two men contradicted each other in their talks, each espousing his own theory of the organization of the central nervous system. For all the intensity of their scientific disagreement, the two men nonetheless respected each other's work. Writing about his Nobel honor, Cajal observed: "The other half was very justly adjudicated to the illustrious professor of Pavia, Camillo Golgi, the originator of the method with which I accomplished my most striking discoveries."

Of course, if you do go to a cocktail party to discuss neuroscience, or even physics, don't forget to experiment with your selective attention.

Link to article on Cajal and the history of neurobiology (via Neurophilo).

—Vaughan.

April 01, 2008

This delusion is false:

The psychiatrist and philosopher Bill Fulford describes a patient who was the living embodiment of the logical paradox "this statement is false" during a discussion on the difficulties in assuming delusions are false beliefs, as described in the standard definition.

[There is an] even more fundamental sense in which delusions may not be false beliefs, namely that for some patients this would present us with a paradox.

I have reported one such case that occurred in Oxford... The patient, a 43-year-old man, was brought into the Accident and Emergency Department following an overdose. He had tried to kill himself because he was afraid he was going to be "locked up". However, this fear was secondary to a paranoid system at the heart of which was the hypochondriacal delusion that he was "mentally ill".

He was seen by the duty psychiatrist and by the consultant psychiatrist on call, neither of whom were in any doubt that he was deluded. Indeed, both were ready on the strength of their diagnosis to admit him as an involuntary patient.

Yet had their diagnosis depended on the falsity of the patient's belief, as in the standard definition, they would have been presented with a paradox: if the patient's belief that he was mentally ill was false, then (by the standard definition) he could have been deluded, but this would have made his belief true after all.

Equally, if his belief was true, then he was not deluded (by the standard definition), but this would have made his belief false after all. By the standard definition of delusion, then, his belief, is false, was true and, if true, was false.

From p211 of the book Philosophical Psychopathology (ISBN 9780262071598).

Link to Wikipedia article on the vagaries of delusion.

—Vaughan.

March 25, 2008

Why do some people sleepwalk?:

I just found this short-but-sweet explanation for why sleepwalking occurs by neurologist Antonio Oliviero. It appears in this month's Scientific American Mind:

People can perform a variety of activities while asleep, from simply sitting up in bed to more complex behavior such as housecleaning or driving a car. Individuals in this trancelike state are difficult to rouse, and if awoken they are often confused and unaware of the events that have taken place. Sleepwalking most often occurs during childhood, perhaps because children spend more time in the “deep sleep” phase of slumber. Physical activity only happens during the non–rapid eye movement (NREM) cycle of deep sleep, which precedes the dreaming state of REM sleep.

Recently my team proposed a possible physiological mechanism underlying sleepwalking. During normal sleep the chemical messenger gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) acts as an inhibitor that stifles the activity of the brain’s motor system. In children the neurons that release this neurotransmitter are still developing and have not yet fully established a network of connections to keep motor activity under control. As a result, many kids have insufficient amounts of GABA, leaving their motor neurons capable of commanding the body to move even during sleep. In some, this inhibitory system may remain underdeveloped—or be rendered less effective by environmental factors—and sleepwalking can persist into adulthood.

As a bonus, the page also has an explanation of why we experience the painful 'brain freeze' sensation when we eat ice cream too quickly.

UPDATE: Thanks to Danielle for sending this fascinating snippet:

I used to have a VERY SEVERE sleepwalking problem. This past summer, I researched the use of GABA for mild anxiety. Although there was a great deal of question over whether it could cross the blood-brain barrier, I thought it was worth a try. It didn't work for anxiety at all - but I was surprised to notice that it cured my sleepwalking, which was completely unexpected! Now that I know more about the connection between GABA, slow-wave sleep, & sleepwalking, it makes sense. I think there may be real treatment or research potential there, but I have no idea to whom I should report this. Maybe you can do something with it?

Link to SciAmMind sleepwalking and brain freeze explanations.

—Vaughan.

March 15, 2008

Medical model behaviour:

Journalist and campaigner Liz Spikol has written an excellent piece for the Philadelphia Weekly on the influence of the 'medical model' on how we understand and treat mental illness.

To simplify a little, the 'medical model' approach involves classifying mental distress or impaired behaviour as cut-and-dry diagnoses and assumes that these disorders are best understood at the level of neurobiological changes in individual patients.

Alternative approaches might consider that mental disorders are not always adequately described as by making a clear dividing line between mental illness and mental health and probably exist as a spectrum of differences (the continuum model), and that you need to understand more than just the brain to understand why people become distressed or disabled (such as social influences).

Needless to say, drug companies have a vested interest in promoting medical model because it implies drugs are the best treatment.

At the other end of the spectrum, some groups completely reject the medical model and any attempt to classify distressing mental states or research the neuroscience of mental disorders, often because they feel it upholds existing social orders or power structures with which they disagree.

What each of these extremes miss, however, is that the 'medical model' is a tool, a conceptual approach. In some situations it will be useful, in others misleading, and most importantly, it can be questioned and revised where necessary and can exist alongside other approaches.

Beware of any group that pushes a conceptual tool as an ideology. They are usually trying to sell you something.

This applies equally for drug companies and pressure groups.

Liz Spikol's article is so good because it evaluates the medical model in context. In this case, in terms of attitudes, advertising and the law concerning mental illness.

Link to Liz Spikol's Philadelphia Weekly article.

—Vaughan.

March 12, 2008

Undercover psychiatry:

An interesting historical snippet from p48 of psychiatrist Giovanni Stanghellini's book on the phenomenology of psychosis, Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies:

The German psychiatrist Karl Willmanns, who would later be director of the Heidelberg Clinic until the rise of the Nazis, published a book [in 1906] on the disenfranchised. He had been following them around at night in the outskirts of town, dressed as one of them, often inviting them into his own home, and 'lending' them money.

In his book, Zur Psychopathologie de Landstreichers, Willmanns sought to show how many of the homeless were schizophrenic. His university post, then the most important in German psychiatry, was taken from him, apparently because he diagnosed a form of hysterical blindness in Adolf Hitler.

The book itself is concerned with exploring psychosis using the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, which attempts to carefully describe and understand the structure of subjective consciousness.

Needless to say, this is particularly important so scientific studies can aim to understand what it is important to try and measure in conscious experience, not just attempt to study what is easily measurable.

However, not everyone believes that our own subjective experience is necessarilly a reliable guide to even the conscious mind.

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel is a particularly strong critic, suggesting that 'naive introspection' is inherently flawed. His debate with psychologist Russell Hurlburt, who disagrees, was recently published as a book.

Link to review of Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies.
Link to details from publisher.

—Vaughan.

March 04, 2008

Are animals autistic savants?:

Animal behavourist Temple Grandin has a theory that animals are like autistic savants, they think in images and have highly specialised cognitive skills.

Grandin's theory has been influential partly owing to her expertise in animal behaviour and cognition, and partly because she has Asperger's syndrome herself, a condition on the autism spectrum.

This month's edition of PLoS Biology has an essay which argues against the theory, suggesting that the apparent similarity with autism is doesn't account for the neuropsychological findings in both humans and animals:

Autistic savants show extraordinary skills, particularly in music, mathematics, and drawing. Do animals sometimes show forms of extreme (though, of course, different) cognitive skills confined to particular domains that resemble those shown by autistic savants? We argue that the extraordinary cognitive feats shown by some animal species can be better understood as adaptive specialisations that bear little, if any, relationship to the unusual skills shown by savants.

It has also been argued that autistic savants “think in detail”, and that this is the key to their extraordinary skills. Do animals have privileged access to lower level sensory information before it is packaged into concepts, as has been argued for autistic humans, or do they process sensory inputs according to rules that pre-empt or filter what is perceived even at the lowest levels of sensory processing? We argue that animals, like nonautistic humans, process sensory information according to rules, and that this manner of processing is a specialised feature of the left hemisphere of the brain in both humans and nonhuman animals. Hence, we disagree with the claim that animals are similar to autistic savants. However, we discuss the possibility that manipulations that suppress activity of the left hemisphere and enhance control by the right hemisphere shift attention to the details of individual stimuli, as opposed to categories and higher-level concepts, and can thereby make performance more savant-like in both humans and animals.

It's probably worth noting that one of the authors is neuroscientist Allan Snyder and the article essentially argues that the similarity is unlikely because it doesn't fit with Snyder's own theory on savant abilities.

Snyder has a bold but still evidence lite theory that savant-like skills can be created in normal people by reducing the function of the left fronto-temporal lobe.

He argues that this reduces the competition with the equivalent area on the right. The right fronto-temporal is apparently specialised for dealing with sensory details so when it is unopposed by the area of the left, details-based savant like skills emerge.

Unfortunately, neither side of the debate has enough evidence to make a definitive case, but it makes for a fascinating discussion about different forms of thought and perception.

If you want to know more about Grandin's theory, it's described in her book Animals in Translation and it's covered by a documentary about her that's available to view online.

The PLoS essay also contains a commentary by Grandin herself.

Link to PLoS Biology essay 'Are Animals Autistic Savants?'.
Link to documentary 'The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow'.

—Vaughan.

February 13, 2008

Will the PTSD diagnosis disappear?:

Psychiatrist Gerald Rosen argues that the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) should be abandoned because it just re-describes emotional reactions that would otherwise be diagnosed as depression or anxiety, and is increasingly used where there was never any clear trauma in the first place.

He's made his case in an editorial for the British Journal of Psychiatry and debates his ideas in an engaging discussion in a BJP podcast.

PTSD is the only psychiatric diagnosis where a clear cause forms part of the diagnosis. The person must have experienced a life-threatening event to themself or others, and must have experienced intense fear, helplessness, or horror at the time.

If this is followed by intrusive memories of the event, increased arousal (feeling 'on edge'), avoidance of any reminders and these are long-lasting and they interfere with everyday life, the disorder can be diagnosed.

The trouble is, all of these can be found in people who have not experienced classical 'trauma'. Some people, including Rosen, are arguing that many of the normal reactions to negative events are now being described in terms of mental illness and the concept of PTSD is becoming meaningless:

Peer-reviewed articles have even discussed the possibility of developing PTSD from watching traumatic events on television. It has been suggested that rude comments heard in the workplace can lead to PTSD because a victim might worry about future boundary transgressions: the conceptual equivalent of pre-traumatic stress disorder. New diagnostic categories modeled on PTSD have been proposed, including prolonged duress stress disorder, post-traumatic grief disorder, post-traumatic relationship syndrome, post-traumatic dental care anxiety, and post-traumatic abortion syndrome. Most recently, a new disorder appeared in the professional literature to diagnose individuals impaired by insulting or humiliating events – post-traumatic embitterment disorder. Even expected and understandable reactions after extreme events, such as anxiety and anger, are now referred to as 'symptoms'.

This does not mean that anyone who becomes disturbed after a negative experience shouldn't be helped, just that PTSD is not a useful way of guiding the treatment. Critics argue that the existing categories of depression and anxiety are more than adequate.

In the podcast, Rosen discusses the possibility that PTSD may be 'popular' as a diagnosis because it's perfectly suited to the legal system.

It defines a cause and an effect, a compensation lawyer's dream. This is more important for the American health care system where mental health treatment is often only reimbursed by the insurance companies if a doctor can make a diagnosis.

PTSD might be the only way for a doctor to get insurance companies to pay for treating someone who is having difficulty adjusting to a bad experience.

Interestingly, the diagnosis of PTSD was largely accepted into the diagnostic manuals due to pressure from campaigners wanting the US government to treat Vietnam veterans' mental health needs on their return from the conflict.

A recent study checked the service records of Vietnam veterans who were being treated for PTSD and found only 41% had been exposed to combat, despite their being no difference in the symptoms between 'combat' and 'no combat' troops.

This isn't to suggest that some veterans were 'faking', just that there isn't always a clear connection between a traumatic event and the symptoms of PTSD.

With these points in mind, Rosen makes for an interesting guest on a diagnosis that we now tend to take for granted.

Link to BJP podcast 'Problems with the PTSD diagnosis'.
Link to PubMed entry for editorial.

—Vaughan.

February 11, 2008

Tieing knots with booze:

An excerpt from Knots, a book of poetry by the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, that attempted to capture some of the traps, maladaptive thinking patterns and emotional bonds that we find ourselves in, usually in relationships with others.

Some of the poems describe simple but powerful vicious circles, others are complex and almost algorithmic labyrinths of self-justification and denial.

She has started to drink
  As a way to cope
  that makes her less able to cope

the more she drinks
the more frightened she is of becoming a drunkard

the more drunk
the less frightened of being drunk

Apparently, the book was made into a film, although I know very little else about the screen version. Luckily though, most of the poems are now available online.

Perhaps some of Laing's insight was due to the fact that he was not without his own troubles. He suffered from depression and drinking problems during his life - infamously appearing on Ireland's Late Late Show drunk and incoherent.

Link to poems from Knots by R.D. Laing.

—Vaughan.

February 09, 2008

Researching the sublime:

Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust was a Neuroscientist, is a guest on this week's All in the Mind, where he discusses why he thinks the arts are an essential complement to the sciences in the attempt to understand human experience.

Lehrer argues that some artists aim to explore, capture or communicate aspects of our subjective experience that are otherwise indefinable.

Perhaps most controversially, he suggests that through these explorations some artists have glimpsed the functional organisation of the brain - even though we've only come to realise this in more recent lab work.

Nevertheless, Lehrer argues that art is more than just a reconnaissance mission for science.

Although some of its 'discoveries' can stimulate research or be validated by experiments, it also communicates what science cannot, and so is essential as part of the wider attempt to understand ourselves.

It struck me while listening to the programme that Lehrer talks about art in the same way many clinical scientists talk about working with patients.

In neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry particularly, clinicians will constantly be trying to integrate the empirical research and objective medical tests with the patient's subjective account of their experience.

The patient's narrative (soliloquy perhaps?) also helps direct a scientific approach to their individual problems, and raises broader scientific questions about the course of the disorder or the function of the normal system, now gone awry.

While clinicians are trained to draw these reflections from their patients with careful questioning, artists are like evangelists for the subjective - making their first-person experience available to all.

Moreover, these experiences often come in such fine and exquisite detail that not even the most skilled clinician could provoke such insights.

Link to AITM with Jonah Lehrer.

—Vaughan.

February 05, 2008

Neurotic AI has video game edge:

Austrian AI researchers wanted to find out whether giving an 'autonomous agent' emotion-like reactions would make it more successful at playing a fight-to-the-death strategy game. It turns out, neurotic bots have the edge when it comes to video game war.

The study was designed by the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence and was presented at an AI conference in Paris. Luckily for us, they've just put their slides online as a pdf file.

They used the popular strategy game Age of Mythology and created four software 'bots' to play the computer which were loosely based on the 'big five' personality traits.

When they compared their successes, the version designed to simulate 'neurotic' personality traits came equal first in number of games won, but was the clear winner when the average time to victory was compared.

It was deliberately designed to overestimate the value of current resources and had a tendency to resort to extreme playing styles - tending at times towards aggressive play, and at other times, overly defensive strategies.

The research team note that human players typically only face computer opponents that act 'rationally', and suggest that simulating 'emotions' may make playing computers more realistic, potentially more challenging, and distinctly more fun.

Link to NewSci Tech Blog piece on the research.
pdf of research presentation.

—Vaughan.

February 04, 2008

Simulating the Mafia:

I've just found this fascinating paper that used game theory to model why a Mafia protection racket inevitably leads to violence that neither the mob nor the shopkeepers can keep a lid on.

It turns out, fakers who pretend to be the Mafia to extort additional money throw a spanner in the works, as it reduces 'trust' between the real Mafia and the small business owners.

The full paper is available online as a pdf file but the abstract is reproduced below:

Payment, Protection and Punishment: The Role of Information and Reputation in the Mafia

Rationality and Society, 2001, 13(3), 349–393.

Alistair Smith and Federico Varese

A game theoretic model is used to examine the dynamics governing repeated interaction between Mafiosi running extortion rackets and entrepreneurs operating fixed establishments. We characterize the conditions under which violence occurs. Entrepreneurs pay protection money to the Mafia because they fear the Mafia's ability to punish. However, the entrepreneurs' willingness to pay encourages opportunistic criminals (fakers) to use the Mafia's reputation and also demand money. We show that two phenomena drive the repeated interaction between criminals and entrepreneurs: reputation-building and readiness to use violence on the part of the Mafiosi, and attempts to filter out fakers on the part of entrepreneurs.

These two phenomena lead to turbulence: as entrepreneurs filter out fakers by not paying some of the times, some real Mafiosi are not paid and punish non-payment to establish their reputation. As Mafia reputation is re-established, fakers have again an incentive to emerge, setting in motion a spiral of never-ending filtering and violence. We also show how external shocks to this relationship, such as changes in policing practices, succession disputes within the Mafia or inflation, often lead to violence until beliefs are re-established. We conclude that a world where mafias operate is inherently turbulent. This conclusion goes against the widespread perception that racketeers are able to perfectly enforce territorial monopolies.

pdf of full-text paper.

—Vaughan.

January 30, 2008

False trails in the pursuit of consciousness:

Seed Magazine has an excellent article by Nicholas Humphrey on understanding consciousness and why current attempts may be failing because we're asking the wrong questions.

Humphrey suggests four questions which he feels are more relevant to the problem, and, with a rhetorical flourish, suggests some answers to them.

However, one of the most interesting parts is where he discusses philosopher Jerry Fodor's interest in what consciousness is useful for:

Fodor has stated this aspect of the problem bluntly: "There are several reasons why consciousness is so baffling. For one thing, it seems to be among the chronically unemployed. What mental processes can be performed only because the mind is conscious, and what does consciousness contribute to their performance? As far as anybody knows, anything that our conscious minds can do they could do just as well if they weren't conscious. Why then did God bother to make consciousness?"

Fodor is undoubtedly asking the right question: "Why did God—or rather natural selection—make consciousness?" Yet I'd suggest the reason he finds it all so baffling is that he is starting off with the completely wrong premise, for he has assumed, as indeed almost everyone else does, that phenomenal consciousness must be providing us with some kind of new skill. In other words, it must be helping us do something that we can do only by virtue of being conscious, in the way that, say, a bird can fly only because it has wings, or you can understand this sentence only because you know English.

Yet I want to suggest the role of phenomenal consciousness may not be like this at all. Its role may not be to enable us to do something we could not do otherwise, but rather to encourage us to do something we would not do otherwise: to make us take an interest in things that otherwise would not interest us, or to mind things we otherwise would not mind, or to set ourselves goals we otherwise would not set.

Even if you don't agree with Humphrey's take on consciousness (of course, in consciousness research, it's de rigeur to disagree with almost everyone) it's a thought-provoking and clearly written piece.

As an aside, the cover story on the same issue of Seed Magazine is a piece by Jonah Lehrer on IBM's large-scale low-level brain simulation project Blue Brain. It's not freely available online, however, so you'll need to hit the news stands or the library to have a read.

Link to Seed article 'Questioning Consciousness'.

—Vaughan.

January 29, 2008

The significance of day dreams:

From p353 of The Psychology of Day-Dreams by Dr J. Varendonck, published in 1921:

Like nocturnal dreams, day dreams betray preoccupations with unsolved problems, harassing cares, or overwhelming impressions which require accommodation, only their language is not as sibylline as that of their unconscious correspondents...

But they all strive towards the future; they all seem to prepare some accommodation, to obtain some prospective advantage to the ego; in fine, they are attempts at adaptation: such is their biological meaning. They complete the functions of consciousness without our mental alertness.

Varendonck was attempting to apply Freud's theory of dreaming to daydreams, and, as was customary at the time, largely based his theories on ideas generated from his own daydreams.

I had to look up 'sibylline'. Apparently it relates to the Sibylline oracles and in this context it means 'knowledge giving'.

—Vaughan.

January 22, 2008

Not seeing the wood for the dendritic trees:

The LA Times has an article by Jonah Lehrer arguing that we can't solely understand the mind and brain by reductionism - the process of working out smaller and smaller components of what we're trying to study.

He argues that an approach that uses only measurement will never capture the complexity of subjective experience and that cognitive science needs to rediscover the value of first-person experience if it is to truly capture human thought and behaviour.

Lehrer suggests that the arts might be a way of re-addressing the balance:

The question, of course, is how neuroscience can get beyond reductionism. Science rightfully adheres to a strict methodology, relying on experimental data and testability, but this method could benefit from an additional set of inputs. Artists, for instance, have studied the world of experience for centuries. They describe the mind from the inside, expressing our first-person perspective in prose, poetry and paint. Although a work of art obviously isn't a substitute for a scientific experiment -- Proust isn't going to invent Prozac -- the artist can help scientists better understand what, exactly, they are trying to reduce in the first place. Before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together.

Virginia Woolf, for example, famously declared that the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day ... [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness."

In other words, she wanted to describe the mind from the inside, to distill the details of our psychological experience into prose.

Woolf and her fellow 'stream of consciousness' writers, however, were latecomers to this particular challenge.

The phenomenologist philosophers, most notably Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl, were attempting to chart the subjective structure of the mind in the early 1900s.

While scientific psychology has been the dominant research paradigm for the past century, there has been a small but dedicated band of psychologists, psychiatrists and philosophers who have attempted to continue the project.

In particular, psychiatry and clinical psychology involve the application of science to help patients who report disturbances in their subjective mental states, so this area has always been particularly influential in these areas.

In fact, it's seeing something of a resurgence, with special issues of scientific journals being published on the topic.

Of course, Lehrer's main point, that we ignore subjective experience at our peril, is exactly the thinking that led to the eventual death of behaviourism in the first half of the 20th century.

That's not to say that behaviourism was worthless. Far from it. Many of the theories are still as valid today, but as with reductionism, beware when any tool becomes an ideology.

Art is another way of approaching an understanding of first-person experience of course, which is why Lehrer is arguing its benefit to cognitive science.

As it goes, I'm working on something similar at the moment, as I'm going to be co-teaching a course on cinema and the phenomenology of psychosis with psychiatrist Andrea Raballo and psychologist Frank Laroi at the next European Congress of Psychiatry, so look out for some musings on the topic in the coming weeks and months.

Link to LA Times article 'Misreading the mind'.
Link to previous Lehrer article on art and science.

—Vaughan.

January 20, 2008

Power and consciousness with John Searle:

Philosopher John Searle, most widely known for his 'Chinese Room' thought experiment, is profiled in an article for The Times.

The article is partly a review of his new book Freedom and Neurobiology, and partly a look back at the work and experiences which have shaped his current views on mind, brain and society.

Searle, like Daniel Dennett, tries to avoid the technical jargon that haunts some philosophical literature and is known for penning accessible material even when writing for academic journals.

The article is written by fellow philosopher David Papineau who doesn't seem awfully keen on Searle's new ideas.

Link to Times review and article on Searle.

—Vaughan.

January 18, 2008

Questioning the cognitive:

American Scientist has two great reviews that tackle books on perhaps the most important theory of psychology: that the mind can be understood as an information processing system.

This theory is known as the 'cognitive approach' and it assumes that the mind and brain can be usefully described as systems that transform and interpret different types of information.

For example, information from light that falls on the 2D surface of the retina is processed to allow us to recognise objects and judge depth in 3D.

The advantages this approach is that it easily allows for a scientific experimental approach (unlike some Freudian ideas) and accepts that we have internal mental states and are not just our behaviour (unlike behaviourist theories).

You can see from the success of cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive linguistics and so on and so on that it's been a very widely adopted idea.

The first review is of the epic book Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science by Margaret Boden (sample chapter available online as a pdf).

I'm a firm believer in history telling us as much about a theory as the empirical evidence and this book looks at the development of the information processing approach.

One of my favourite analyses in this area is from Douwe Draaisma who noted in his book Metaphors of Memory that we borrow ideas from technology to explain the mind.

Past models of the mind used fluids, pressures and vapours (Freud's psychodynamic theories were inspired by thermodynamics), whereas now we use metaphors related to computers.

The other book review tackles Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure, a new book by Ray Jackendoff.

Cognitive ideas generally describe how the mind works, and while everybody assumes that the brain is the organ that supports the mind, how these two map together is the subject of much debate.

One approach is functionalism, which suggests that anything that functions like the mind is the mind, regardless of what supports the function - be it a biological brain or digital computer.

In other words, the mind is just information processing, and is not solely a type of information processing that can only be completed by a brain.

The book under review defends a functionalist approach to the mind and language, while the reviewer, George Lakoff (known for his own theories about how metaphors shape thought), gives it a hard time.

More importantly though, both are informative reviews in their own right.

Link to Harman review