July 02, 2009

Eight way distortion:

Petra's written up her barnstorming talk she gave last night at the Troublemaker's Fringe where she discussed 'eight problems with science/health journalism and what we can do about it' from her perspective as a social psychologist specialising in sex and relationships.

It's a fantastic guide to how health stories get badly spun and why sexual health material is most likely to be misrepresented as it is considered 'light' and so not worthy of serious attention.

One of the main culprits seem to be the reliance on PR surveys which are intuitively easy to understand but are specifically designed to push a certain angle.

I was interested to hear that they are often designed not with journalists so much in mind, but the picture editor - see Clairol's recent 'survey' finding that women are happiest at 28. Women like 28-year-old Jessica Alba and Gisele Bundchen by any chance? Bingo. Free celebrity tie-in reported as science in the national press.

Petra has plenty more media gems and it makes for a great insight into the thinking behind the sex and relationship stories that makes the media.

Link to Petra's on science and health reporting.

—Vaughan.

June 27, 2009

In our wildest dreams:

In the latest of his excellent columns for Scientific American psychologist Jesse Berring reviews the current theories that try and explain why we've evolved to have dreams.

One of the most interesting is the 'Threat Simulation Theory' which argues dreams are a form of night-time survival training, based on research that found that dreams often put us in scenarios of personal danger:

In a 2006 study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, Zadra, Desjardins, and Marcotte performed a content analysis on a set of 212 recurrent dreams reported by participants ranging from 18-81 years of age.

Among their findings, escape and pursuit themes were the most frequent type of threat found in their sample (25.9 percent), followed by accidents and misfortunes (19.7 percent), aggression and violence (19.0 percent), physical difficulties (17.0 percent), emotional difficulties (7.5 percent), and disasters (3.4 percent).

Furthermore, in nearly all cases the dreamer him- or herself (rather than a stranger or loved one) was the specific target of the threat and usually the dreamers actively participated in some way to resolve, escape, or combat the threat.

The article covers a whole stack of alternatives and is written in Berrings' usual engaging style.

Link to 'Dreaming of Nonsense: The Evolutionary Enigma of Dream Content'.

—Vaughan.

June 21, 2009

Into the ancient mind:

Newsweek has an interesting critique of evolutionary psychology that tackles some of the main areas of contention.

The article claims to question the whole field of evolutionary psychology but really only deals with specific studies, largely because has quite a limited view of the approach and is strangely wed to biological determinism.

From the biological determinism angle, contrary to what the article implies, even if specific antisocial traits have evolved this doesn't excuse the behaviour or suggest that it is inevitable, as the history of violence tells us.

The article is clearly influenced by the work of philosopher David Buller, who has been a long-time critic of the field.

But what the article also doesn't mention is that it is largely addressing a certain form of thinking on evolutionary psychology - namely an approach chiefly promoted by Buss, Tooby and Cosmides, sometimes called the 'Santa Barbara' approach.

This view is characterised by the idea that we have evolved specific mental modules (like individual 'units' of behaviour or thought) that have been shaped by selection pressures to address problems most important for survival over the time span of human existence - typically characterised as the 'stone age'.

This is only one form of thinking however. In its weaker form, evolutionary psychology is much less controversial in that we know that genetics, and even single genes, can influence cognition and behaviour, and that selection pressures are equally likely to have been exerted on these genes.

The difficulty is deciding in what cases selection pressure is working through mind and behaviour and at what psychological level the selection pressure manifests itself.

For example, is it best to think of selection pressure as operating on low level cognitive mechanisms such as speed of processing, visual perception and working memory, or on more complex processes such as perception of beauty, relationship style or emotional range.

The critics of evolutionary psychology usually focus on the latter. David Buller clearly specifies this in a recent and recommended article that he wrote for Scientific American but this is not clear in the Newsweek piece.

Buller himself has his critics and there is an excellent page with rebuttals of his claims from the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, many of which focus on his use of evidence to support his arguments.

Recently, a new twist in the tale has come from a study just published in Science that used computational modelling to suggest that major changes in human behaviour during the stone age could be entirely accounted for by cultural changes and there is no need to suggest a fundamental change in the structure of our minds.

The Newsweek article is definitely worth reading, but it's not the whole story and is best supplemented with responses from some of Buller's critics.

Link to Newsweek article 'Don't blame the caveman'.
Link to Buller's article for SciAm.
Link to Buller rebuttals.
Link to Science paper on culture and cognitive changes.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

June 18, 2009

Unloaded dice:

A new edition of the beautifully produced RadioLab has just hit the airwires with an excellent programme on the science of randomness.

The hour long science trip largely focusses on how we make sense of random or unpredictable events, from coincidences to statistical white noise.

There's a wonderful part where the presenters visit statistician Deborah Nolan who has a neat party trick to demonstrate the properties of random sequences to her students.

She asks one group of students to write down the results of 100 coin flips, and another to write a list of imaginary coin flips. She then leaves the room, waits while each sequence is written down, returns, and tells the students which sequence was imaginary.

It works because humans are bad random number generators. Nolan looks for longer runs of heads or tails which are not included in imaginary sequences because we underestimate the variation in randomness.

In fact, there's been quite a bit of research on how we generate 'random' number sequences, and it turns out that far from being a messy and effortless function of the brain, it requires some heavyweight intervention of the frontal lobes.

Brains are very good at stereotyped routines but it's breaking these learned patterns which takes the real effort. To generate 'random' sequences, we need to check we're not repeating ourselves and match the sequence against a model of randomness in our heads.

In fact, asking people to generate a sequence of random numbers is a good test of frontal lobe function, the more mathematically random it is, the better functioning the frontal cortex. And if we dampen down frontal cortex function using electromagnets, we see a drop in actual randomness of the numbers.

There are plenty more fantastic insights into the science of the unpredictable in the programme with the constantly surprising RadioLab team.

Link to RadioLab on randomness.

—Vaughan.

June 13, 2009

I've hidden the drugs inside this political football:

The BBC World Service broadcast an interesting programme on the effect of Portugal's 2001 policy to decriminalise all illicit drugs, from cannabis to heroin. Far from what you might expect from your local politician, the effect was rather positive. As also recounted in a recent article for Time magazine, drug use has actually dropped.

Recreational drugs are a fascinating area precisely because the political view and the health view are so completely out of whack in most countries.

As we have reported several times in the past, the UK has a regular public ritual where the government commissions a panel of scientists to report on the health dangers of drugs, and then completely ignores them when they point out that the current policies make no sense and don't reflect the actual impact of the substances.

This week's Bad Science column has another example, where a now leaked 1991 World Health Organisation report [pdf] on the impact of cocaine was suppressed by the US government because it pointed out that it's not as intrinsically poisonous to health or society as it's made out by drug war propaganda.

This political double book-keeping is probably why the severity of drug laws around the world have virtually no relation to the drug use of the population.

I'm morbidly curious about how we've arrived at this odd situation where one of the culturally universal human activities, modifying our consciousness with drugs, must be looked down on publicly to the point where our politicians are free to ignore evidence when it suits them.

It's a conspiracy of ignorance that would be unthinkable if it was applied to swine flu but perfectly acceptable for something that already kills thousands upon thousands of people every year.

Link to BBC World Service on Portugal drug decriminalisation.
Link to Time 'Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?'
Link to Bad Science on suppressed WHO cocaine report.

—Vaughan.

June 07, 2009

Obscuring the horror of war:

A sardonic paragraph from Lt Col Dave Grossman's excellent book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. It discusses the psychology of ending another's life, the history of how the military have dealt with the natural reluctance to kill and the personal impact of doing so.

From p36:

Even among the psychological and psychiatric literature on war, "there is", writes Marin, "a kind of madness at work." He notes, "Repugnance toward killing and the refusal to kill" are referred to as "acute combat reaction." And psychological trauma resulting from "slaughter and atrocity are called 'stress,' as if the clinicians... are talking about an executive's overwork." As a psychologist I believe that Marin is quite correct when he observes, "Nowhere in the [psychiatric and psychological] literature is one allowed to glimpse what is actually occurring: the real horror of war and its effect on those who fought it."

Link to more info on the book.

—Vaughan.

May 10, 2009

The story of our lives:

We live our lives in fragments, but make sense of them as stories. Scattered islands of experience are drawn together in personal travelogues that attempt explain how our erratic journeys brought us to the present moment.

This is perhaps our most natural and chaotic form of self-understanding but also one of the most vexing for psychology. We know our life stories are mostly fiction, despite their personal force, and much modern psychology has demonstrated how we tend to unknowingly self-justify rather than critically self-appraise.

But it is also the area where personal meaning is its strongest, and where our our lab studies fail most obviously in bridging the chasm between evidence and experience.

Nevertheless, some psychologists are trying to make the leap, and Jesse Bering unravels the yarn in a thought-provoking article for Scientific American.

Traditionally, the psychology of life history has a bad reputation. Known as psychobiography, it was originally created by the neurologist Paul Möbius who wrote biographies that not only described the events in the lives of great people, but also attempted to explain their psychological drives and motivations.

It was quickly picked up by Freud, who wrote a series of psychoanalytic biographies, on Moses, da Vinci, Dostoyevsky and Woodrow Wilson, that are widely regarded as his poorest works.

Replete with factual errors and implausible interpretations, he nevertheless spawned a tradition of indulgent psychobiography that sullied the practice for years to come.

In recent years, attempts at psychological biographies have re-emerged in more measured and more successful forms. Alan Elms' 1993 book Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology carefully coaxed the practice into the light, and contains some wonderfully sensitive biographies, including, ironically, of Freud himself.

Bering's article is interesting because he touches on psychologists who are attempting to understand how personality influences our personal storytelling styles, and how our knowledge of autobiographical memory integrates into this process.

In a wonderfully recursive twist, researchers are now trying to integrate the fragments of lab-based knowledge into the fabric of personal narrative, because everything, ultimately, is a story.

Link to Bering on 'The Psychological Science of Life History Research'.
Link to details of Elms' awesome book Uncovering Lives.

—Vaughan.

March 14, 2009

Is psychiatry a religion?:

The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine just published a recent, and, presumably, slightly tongue in cheek article, drawing parallels between psychiatry, clinical psychology and traditional religious practices.

In reality, it's not really attempting to address the question of whether psychiatry is a form of religion. Instead, it's really asking whether psychiatry is now fulfilling some of the social roles that, for many people, were previously occupied by religion.

These include parallels between confession and therapy, proselytization and mental health campaigns, religious hierarchy and medical authority, sacraments and medication, and holy texts and diagnostic manuals.

The 'psychiatry is a religion' argument is weak, however, as despite similarities in some functions, none of these are core features of religion. As identified by cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer, the single common feature of all religious is a preoccupation with unseen sentient beings, of which psychiatry says nothing.

In fact, mainstream psychiatry remains firmly materialist - usually re-explaining experiences that many people attribute to spirits, forces or unseen influences as biological dysfunction. So, in the most fundamental sense, the practice of psychiatry is typically contra-religious.

You could argue that this is 'replacing' religion through colonising the spiritual sphere of explanation, but this makes it no more a religion than physics or evolutionary biology.

However, the article is interesting as it reflects an almost extinct genre in mainstream medical debate - a Thomas Szasz style view of psychiatry as a medical intrusion into an essentially social phenomenon. Namely, the classification and regulation of deviance, and the easing of distress caused by social maladjustment and existential crises.

The piece is probably better read as a concern about how medical theories have become the standard explanation for problems of human living, to the point where we assume that psychiatry can be an organising force in society.

Link to article 'Is psychiatry a religion?'
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

March 03, 2009

Memory loss at the movies:

Neurophilosophy has a great post about how amnesia is represented in cinema, concluding that there's only three movies that accurately represent memory loss.

The post is based on an article from the British Medical Journal by clinical neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale who has written a number of excellent articles on topics such as epilepsy in music, at movies, and in the saints.

The three films mentioned as accurate depictions of amnesia are the masterpiece Memento, Spanish language film Sé Quién Eres, and, surprisingly, the Disney animated feature Finding Nemo.

The Neurophilosophy article is also illustrated with video clips so you can see some of the films under discussion.

Link to Neurophilosophy on 'Amnesia at the movies'.

—Vaughan.

February 26, 2009

The future of experimental philosophy:

March's Prospect magazine has an excellent article on 'experimental philosophy' that gives a good overview of an exciting new branch of philosophy as well as picking up on some of the growing criticisms and detractors.

The first half of the article covers the current methods and strands of thought in the field, discussing brain scans, trolley problems and intentionality. If you're familiar with the 'x-phi' movement this is really just a well-written recap.

However, the second half tackles criticisms of the field by more established philosophers and is a useful counter-point to much of the unfettered enthusiasm which has gripped the recent media reports.

Points of disagreement include relying on the fuzzy data of brain scans, the fact that the field aims to find out about what people think in general rather than building the soundest conceptual solutions, and the accusation that it's "a cynical step by researchers to appear cutting edge and to tap into scientists’ funding".

Ouch. If you're not wincing already, it's probably worth noting that this is the philosophical equivalent of saying your girlfriend looks fat in her new dress.

The piece finishes on the interesting idea that perhaps one of the field's main contributions is to develop a context dependent philosophy that isn't so swayed by the world view of academic thinkers.

Link to Prospect article 'Philosophy’s great experiment'.

—Vaughan.

February 24, 2009

Reigning in the extended mind:

Philosopher Jerry Fodor has written a sceptical and entertaining review of a new book on the extended mind hypothesis - the idea that that we use technology to offload our mental processes and that such tools can be thought of as extensions of the mind itself.

The book in question is by fellow philosopher Andy Clark and is entitled Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension.

It's a development of the original idea, described in Clark and Chalmer's 1998 article called 'The Extended Mind', and it's clear that Jerry Fodor is not a fan.

However, it's probably true to say that Fodor starts from a definition of the mind which already excludes any form of information recording technology, be it a computer or a notepad, whereas the extended mind argument argues that we should rethink exactly these sorts of definitions.

The review gets a bit muddy in the middle as Fodor tries unsuccessfully to explain the difference between the confusingly similar but subtly different philosophical concepts of intentionality and intensionality in a paragraph but the article remains enormously good fun throughout.

Link to London Review of Books article 'Where is my mind?' (thanks Paul!)

—Vaughan.

February 10, 2009

Formerly schizophrenia:

The February edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry has a thought-provoking editorial by psychiatrist Jim van Os, arguing that we should reject the diagnosis of schizophrenia owing to its lack of validity and replace it with a concept of a 'salience dysregulation syndrome'.

If you're not familiar with the use of the term salience, it is used widely in cognitive science to describe the attention grabbing quality of things and psychosis is widely thought to involve, at least in part, a problem with the regulation of salience so normally unremarkable things seem important or alarming.

Although this idea has been kicked around for many years, it was popularised in recent years by an influential article by psychiatrist Shitij Kapur called 'Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience', as differences in dopamine function are regularly found in studies on delusions and hallucinations.

Importantly, disturbance in dopamine-regulated salience does not seem specific to schizophrenia, but is common across all psychotic disorders.

Consequently, van Os reviews the scientific literature that has repeatedly found that the diagnosis of schizophrenia does not seem to be a cut-and-dry category and that psychosis appears in various forms to differing degrees throughout the population.

He particularly argues for the importance of explicitly naming the problem as a 'syndrome', as despite that fact that most people accept that it is not a single disorder, it can get treated as such simply out of habit:

First, although criticisms about the diagnostic construct of schizophrenia may be deflected with the argument that it is merely a syndrome (the association of several clinically recognisable features that often occur together for which a specific disorder may or may not be identified as the underlying cause), the problem is that its very name and the way mental health professionals use and communicate about the term results in medical reification and validation through professional behaviour rather than scientific data, exposing psychiatry to ridicule and hampering scientific progress. It may be argued, therefore, that if it is a syndrome, calling it as such may serve to remind professionals (and downstream of these, the rest of the world) of the relatively agnostic state of science in this regard.

Second, given the fact that maximum utility in terms of conveying clinical information may be obtained by combining categorical with dimensional representations of psychopathology, DSM–V and ICD–11 may be best served by creating separate categorical and dimensional axes of the psychopathology of psychotic disorders.

Link to article 'A salience dysregulation syndrome'.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

January 29, 2009

'Internet addiction' lacks validity finds another study:

Dr Shock covers a new study examining the validity of one of the most popular methods for diagnosing 'internet addiction', Young’s Diagnostic Questionnaire, finding it lacks even the most basic ability to distinguish between frequent and infrequent net users.

Validity is one of the essential components of a psychological measure. It refers to whether it is actually measuring what it says it's measuring.

One of the most common ways of testing validity is to see whether the scale predicts other aspects of behaviour or psychological functioning that we would expect would go along with the target behaviour.

In this case, we would expect 'internet addicts', as identified by a cut-off score on the Young's Diagnostic Questionnaire, to spend more time on line than 'non-addicts', have greater levels of mental distress or behavioural impairment and would be more focused on specific internet activities.

Two psychologists, Nicki Dowling and Kelly Quirk, set out to test this on over 400 students - a group who have been previously highlighted as likely to be vulnerable to excessive internet use.

They found that those students who were clearly identified by the questionnaire as 'internet addicts' were no different in time spent online or psychological dysfunction from those students who were just below the cut-off.

What they did find, however, is those students who ticked zero to two items, the lowest 'risk' category, on the 8-item questionnaire typically used the internet for fewer hours and were likely to be depressed or anxious than the people who scored above the 'addiction' cut-off.

However, as three of the diagnostic items specifically refer to spending longer time online, and three specifically refer to low mood, anxiety or preoccupation, this is hardly surprising.

It's like finding out people who say they are sad are more likely to be depressed.

What the study did clearly show, however, is that the criteria for distinguishing 'addicts' from 'non-addicts', which has been the basis of the majority of 'internet addiction' research, doesn't even reliably distinguish between amount of use and psychological distress.

This is important, because the criteria have been offered by proponents as the basis of a possible 'internet addiction' diagnosis in the forthcoming updated psychiatric diagnostic manual, the DSM-IV.

This comes only a few weeks after a recent study reported the damning conclusion that previous studies used "inconsistent criteria", where subject to "serious sampling bias" and usually reported associations rather than doing any sort of work on causal influences.

Link to Dr Shock internet addiction post 'Garbage In, Garbage Out'.
Link to study.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

January 02, 2009

More on secrecy behind the new book of human troubles:

Advances in the History of Psychology has just alerted me to a new programme on NPR Radio about the debates over the 'in revision' version of the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual that defines mental illness for significant parts of the world.

It covers some of the most contentious potential diagnoses in the to-be-released DSM V and doesn't have the most balanced discussion in some cases (e.g. the guy claiming that people against the diagnoses of gender identity disorder - transexualism - just 'see the stigma' of the condition).

Most interestingly though, it quotes part of the non-disclosure agreement that members of the DSM committee have had to sign, making a legally binding restriction against discussing:

All work product unpublished manuscripts and draft and other prepublication materials, group discussions, internal correspondence, information about the development process and any other written or unwritten information, in any form, that emanates from, or relates to, my work with the APA task force or work group.

Yes, there is a legal restriction banning members from discussing the development of one of the most important documents in medicine.

The DSM committee vice-chair Darrel Regier says this is a good thing because otherwise "it would just be cacophony and mass confusion" - presumably referring to the annoying tendency of public debate to raise points that you hadn't thought of before.

Diagnoses decided by an unelected committee in secret sessions that are legally prevented from discussing their work. Science marches on.

Link to NPR Radio on DSM-V development (via AHP).

—Vaughan.

December 30, 2008

Is this the end of the mystery of self-awareness?:

Edge has an interesting essay by V.S. Ramachandran arguing that while we may not be any closer to understanding consciousness, an understanding of the neuroscience of 'the self' may be within our grasp as demonstrated by studies showing how our perception of self-awareness breaks down in curious ways after brain injury.

There are lots of wonderful examples of how the self can become warped, but I'm not sure that it is entirely held together with Ramachandran's long held enthusiasm for the explanatory power of mirror neurons.

However, it's an entertaining and provocative read and well worth your time despite, and probably because of, the somewhat expansive tone in places.

There is one odd section though, the second section of bullet-pointed text, where he refers to the "anterior cumulate" which almost certain should refer to the frontal brain area the 'anterior cingulate', as the anterior cumulate doesn't exist (an example of Bell's Frontal Nomenclature Hypertrophy syndrome I wonder?).

Following that paragraph is another where he suggests akinetic mutism is the lack of visual consciousness, which is exactly what it isn't. In fact, it's the inability to independently initiate action without external prompting, linked to anterior cingulate damage, and one of the defining features is that the problems are not caused by visual impairments.

Link to Edge on 'Self Awareness: The Last Frontier'.

—Vaughan.

December 18, 2008

Exploring the extended mind:

The Philosopher's Magazine has an interesting interview with David Chalmers on the extended mind hypothesis - the idea that the mind exists not only in ourselves but is extended out to the technology we use.

However, the technology does not have to be computers and digital technology, something as simply as a notebook is enough:

“The central example in our original paper was an Alzheimer’s patient. We called him Otto. Like a lot of Alzheimer’s patients, to get around, he uses external tools to manage his life. In particular, he carries a notebook around everywhere with relevant information and consults it whenever he needs it. So, when a normal person thinks, 'I want to go to the museum,' they recall, 'OK, the museum’s on 53rd Street' and off they go. When Otto wants to go to the museum, he looks it up in his notebook, reads the museum is on 53rd Street and off he goes.

“We argue this is part of his memory all along. We would say that even before the ordinary person recalled the information, they believed the museum was on 53rd Street. Why? Because that stuff was there in their memory, available, so to speak, for them. Exactly the same is true of Otto: that information was there in his memory, in the notebook, available for him there when he wants it. So we argue even before he read the information from the notebook, he believed that the museum was on 53rd Street.”

It's interesting to note that language, is, of course, a technology, despite the fact we tend to think of it as something largely internal.

Chalmers also goes on to discuss the limitations of the theory and discusses what the idea implies for our concepts of the mind as they relate to the brain and the material world.

Link to Philosopher's Magazine interview 'A Piece of iMe'.
Link to original Clark and Chalmers extended mind paper.

—Vaughan.

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 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 of Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science.
Link to Lakoff review of Language, Consciousness, Culture.

—Vaughan.

January 09, 2008

'Stress': from buildings to the battlefield:

Sometimes we don't realise how much the vocabulary of psychology has become part of everyday language.

I was surprised to learn that the use of the term 'stress' to mean psychological tension, rather than just physical pressure, has only been with us since the mid-1930s and was popularised by the major wars of the 20th century.

And it turns out, the person who coined the new usage did it by accident, owing to a mistaken translation.

Akin to 'distress', 'stress' meant 'a strain upon endurance', but it was also used in a more specialist way by engineers to denote the external pressures on a structure - the effects of 'stress' within the structure became known as 'strain'.

Then in 1935 the Czech-Candian physiologist Hans Selye began to promote 'stress' as a medical term, denoting the body's response to external pressures (he later admitted that, new to the English language, he had picked the wrong word; 'strain' was what he had meant).

Academic physiologists regarded the concept of stress as too vague to be scientifically useful, but Selye's determined self-promotion, coupled with the upheaval and distress brought by the [Second World] war to many millions of ordinary people, popularised the term.

By the time of Vietnam, 'stress' had become a well-established part of military medicine, thought to be a valuble tool in reducing 'wastage'. In the military context, it was an extension of the work done at the end of the First World War on the long-term effects of fear and other emotions on the human system...

'Stress', writes the historian Russell Viner, 'was pictured as a weapon, to be used in the waging of psychological warfare against the enemy, and Stress research as a sheild or vaccination against the contagious germ of fear.'

From p349 of A War of Nerves, a book on the history of military psychiatry, which we covered previously.

—Vaughan.

December 28, 2007

A War of Nerves:

I've just started reading Ben Shephard's stunning book A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists that tracks the history of military psychiatry through the 20th century.

Even if you're not interested in the military per se, the wars of the last 100 years have been incredibly important in shaping our whole understanding of mental breakdown, mind-body concepts and clinical treatment.

For example, the effects of trauma stemming from World War I were so shockingly obvious and happened in such large numbers that the medical establishment could no longer deny the role of the mind in both the theories and practice of treating 'nervous disorders'.

In effect, it made psychology not only acceptable, but necessary, to a previously sceptical medical establishment that were largely focused on an 'organs and nerves' view of human life.

One of the big concerns during World War I was 'shell shock', a confusing and eventually abandoned label that was typically used to describe any number of physical problems (such as paralysis, blindness, uncontrollable shaking) that arose from combat stress.

The original name came from early theories that suggested these symptoms arose from the effect of 'shock waves' on the nervous system.

However, it became clear that only a small percentage of cases actually resulted from actual brain injury (interestingly, a recent article in the American Journal of Psychiatry notes parallels between 'shell shock' and concerns over the effects of Improvised Explosive Devices or IEDs in Iraq).

It turns out, many of the symptoms were triggered or exacerbated by unbearable stress and were shaped by beliefs and expectations.

This was clearly demonstrated when a 'gas shock' syndrome emerged during World War I when gas attacks became more frequent.

Like 'shell shock', it arose from a combination of extreme stress and was shaped by expectation and fear (the descriptions of death by mustard gas are truly horrifying) even when no gas injury could be detected.

An eye witness recalled that: "When men trained to believe that a light sniff of gas meant death, and with nerves highly strung by being shelled for long periods and with the presence of not a few who really had been gassed, it is no wonder that a gas alarm went beyond all bounds. It was remarked as a joke that if someone yelled 'gas', everyone in France would put on a mask. Two or three alarms a night was common. Gas shock was as common as shell shock."

The military managed (and still manage) these forms of combat stress reactions by rest (stress and fatigue play a great part) but also by managing expectations.

Soldiers are typically treated briefly and near the front line, with the expectation they'll rejoin their unit. In effect, instilling the belief that the effects are unfortunate but transient. As a result, they usually are.

Shephard's book is full of fascinating facts, quotes and insights on every page as he's used some incredibly in-depth historical research to bring not only the scientific and medical issues alive, but also the culture and attitudes of the time.

He's interwoven military records and scientific research with press commentary and personal letters to make the book really quite moving in places.

I'm sure I'll be posting more gems as I read more.

Link to book details.
Link to abstract of 'Shell shock and mild traumatic brain injury: a historical review.'

—Vaughan.

December 17, 2007

Cognitive dissonance reduction:

Following on from my earlier post about the way psychologists look at the world, let me tell you a story which I think illustrates very well the tendency academic psychologists have for reductionism. It's a story about a recent paper on the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, and about a discussion of that paper by a group of psychologists that I was lucky enough to be part of.

Cognitive Dissonance is a term which describes an uncomfortable feeling we experience when our actions and beliefs are contradictory. For example, we might believe that we are environmentally conscious and responsible citizen, but might take the action of flying to Spain for the weekend. Our beliefs about ourselves seem to be in contradiction with our actions. Leon Festinger, who proposed dissonance theory, suggested that in situations like this we are motivated to reduce dissonance by adjusting our beliefs to be in line with our actions.

Obviously after-the-event it is a little too late to adjust our actions, so our beliefs are the only remaining point of movement. In the flying to Spain example you might be motivated by cognitive dissonance to change what you believe about flying: maybe you come to believe that flying isn't actually that bad for the environment, or that focussing on personal choices isn't the best way to understand environmental problems, or you could even go all the way and decide that you're not an environmentally responsible person.

The classic experiment of dissonance theory involved recruiting male students to take part in a crushingly boring experiment. The boring part was an hour of two trivial actions --- loading spools into a tray, turning pegs a quarter-turn in a peg-board. At the end of this, after the students through the experiment was over, was the interesting part of us. The students were offered either $1 or $20 to tell the next participant in the experiment (actually the female accomplice of the experimenter) that the experiment she was about to do was really enjoyable. After telling this lie, the participants were then interviewed about how enjoyable they really found the experiment. What would you expect from this procedure? Now one view would predict that the students paid $20 would enjoy the experiment more. This is certainly what behaviourist psychology would predict --- a larger reward should produce a bigger effect (with the effect being a shift from remembering the task as boring, which is was, to remembering it being enjoyable, which getting £20 presumably was). But cognitive dissonance theory suggests that the opposite would happen. Those paid $20 would have no need to change their beliefs about the task. They lied about how enjoyable the task was to the accomplice, something which presumably contradicted their beliefs about themselves as nice and trustworthy people, but they did it for a good reason, the $20. Now consider the group paid only $1. They lied about how enjoyable the task was, but looking around for a reason they cannot find one --- what kind of person would lie to an innocent for only $1? So, the theory goes, they would experience dissonance between their actions and their beliefs and reduce this by adjusting their beliefs: they would come to believe that they actually did enjoy the boring task, and this is the reason that they told the accomplice that it was enjoyable. And, in fact, this is what happened.

At this point I want you to notice two things about cognitive dissonance. Firstly, it requires the existence of quite sophisticated mental machinery to operate. Not only do you need to have abstract beliefs about the world and yourself, you need to have some mechanism which detects when these beliefs are in contradiction with each other or with your actions, and which can (unconsciously) adjust selective beliefs to reduce this contradiction. The second thing to notice is that all this sophisticated mental machinery is postulated to exist from changes in behaviour, it is never directly measured. We don't have any evidence that the change in attitudes really does result from an uncomfortable internal state ('dissonance') or that any such dissonance does result from an unconscious perception of the contradiction between beliefs and actions.

So, to the recent paper and to reductionism. The paper, by Louisa Egan and colleagues at Yale [ref below] is titled 'The Origins of Cognitive Dissonance', and represents one kind of reductive strategy that psychologists might employ when considering a theory like cognitive dissonance. The experiments in the paper (summarised here and here) both involved demonstrating cognitive dissonance in two groups which do not have the sophisticated mental machinery normally considered necessary for cognitive dissonance --- four year-old children, and monkeys. The reductionism of the paper, which the authors are quite explicit about, is to show that something like cognitive dissonance can occur in these two groups despite their lack of elaborate explicit beliefs. Unlike the students in Festinger's classic experiment we can't suppose that the children or the monkeys have thoughts about their thoughts in the same way that dissonance theory suggests.

To demonstrate this the authors employed an experimental method that could be used with subjects who did not have language, but would still allow them to observe the core phenomena of dissonance theory --- the adjusting of attitudes in line with previous actions. The method worked like this. For each participant --- be they a child or a monkey --- the experimenters identified three items (stickers for the children, coloured M&M's for the monkeys) which the participant preferred equally. In other words, if we call the three items A, B and C then the child or monkey liked all of the items the same amount. Then the experimenter forced the participating child or monkey to choose between two of the items (lets say A and B), so that they only got one. Next the child or monkey was offered a choice between item C and the item they did not choose before. So, if the first choice was between A and B and the participant chose A, then the next choice would be between B and C. What does dissonance theory predict for this kind of situation? Well, originally the three items are equally preferred --- that's how the items are selected. After someone is forced to make a first choice, between A and B, cognitive dissonance supposedly comes into play. The participant now has a reason to adjust their attitudes, and the way they do this is to downgrade their evaluation of their unchosen item. This will is known as being happy with what you got or "I must not like B as much, because I chose A". So on the second choice (B vs C) the participants are more likely to choose C (more likely that chance, and more likely than a control group that goes straight to the 'second' choice). This prediction is exactly what the experimenters found, in both children and monkeys, and the startling thing is that this occurred despite the fact that we know that neither group was explicitly talking to themselves in the way I outline the dissonance theory prediction above ("I must not prefer B as much...etc"). Obviously something like cognitive dissonance can be produced by far simpler mental machinery than that usually invoked to explain it, conclude the experimenters. In this way, The paper is a call to reduce the level at which we try and explain cognitive dissonance.

How far should you go when trying to reduce the level of theory-complexity that is needed to explain something? Psychologists know the answer to this immediately --- as far as possible! So when our happy band of psychologists got to discussing the the Egan paper it wasn't long before someone came up with a new suggestion, a further reduction.

What if, it was suggested, there was nothing like dissonance going on in the Egan et al experiments? After all, there was no direct measurement of anxiety or discomfort, so why suppose that dissonance occurred at all --- perhaps, if we can come up with a plausible alternative, we can do away with dissonance all together. Imagine this, see if you find it plausible: all of us, including monkeys and children, possess a very simple cognitive mechanism which saves us energy by remembering our choices and, when similar situations arise, applying our old choices to new situations, thus cutting down on decision time. That sounds plausible, and it would explain the Egan et al results if you accept that the result of the first, A vs B, decision is not just "choosing A" but is also "not choosing B". So, when you get to the second choice, B vs C, you are more likely to choose C because you are simply re-applying the previous decision of "not choosing B", rather than performing some complicated re-evaluation of your previously held attitudes a-la cognitive dissonance theory.

At this point in the discussion the psychologists in the room were feeling pretty pleased with themselves --- we'd started out to with cognitive dissonance, reduced the level of complexity of mental processes required to explain the phenomenon (the Egan et al result) and then we'd taken things one step further and reduced the complexity of the phenomenon itself. At this point, we had a discussion of how widely the 'decisional inertia' reinterpretation could be applied to supposed cognitive dissonance phenomena. Obviously we'd have only been really satisfied with the reinterpretation if it applied more widely than just to this one set of experiments under consideration.

But further treats were in store. What if we could reduce things again, what if we could make even simpler the processes involved? We'd already started to convince ourselves that the experimental results could be produced by simple cognitive processes rather than complex cognitive processes, perhaps we could come up with a theory about how the experimental results can be produced without any cognitive processes at all! Now that would be really reductive.

Here's what was suggested, not as definitely what was happening, but as a possibility for what could potentially be happening --- and remember, if you are sharing a table with reductionists then they will prefer the simple theory by default because it is simpler. You will need to persuade them of the reasons to accept any complex theory before they abandon the simple one. Imagine that there is no change at all going on in the preferences of the monkeys and the children. Instead, imagine --- o the simplicity! --- that any participant in the experiment merely has a set of existing preferences. These preferences don't even have to be mental, by preferences all I mean are consistent behaviours towards the items in question (stickers for the children, M&Ms for the monkeys). From here, via a bit of statistical theory, we can produce the experimental result with out any recourse to change in preferences, cognitive dissonance or indeed anything mental. Here's how. Whenever you measure anything you get inaccuracies. This means that your end result reflects two things: the true value and some random 'noise' which either raises or lowers the result away from the true value. Now think about the Egan et al experiment. The experimenters picked three items, A, B and C, which the children or monkeys 'preferred equally', but what did this mean? It meant only that when the experimenters measured preference their result was the same for items A, B and C. And we know, as statistically-savvy psychologists, that those results don't reflect the true preferences for A, B and C, but instead reflect the true preferences plus some noise. In reality, we can suppose, the children and monkeys actually do prefer each item differently from the others. Furthermore this might even be how they make their choice. So when they are presented with A vs B and choose A it may be because, on average, they preferred A all along. Now watch closely at what happens next. The experimental participants are given a second choice which depends on their first choice. If at first they chose A over B then the second choice is B vs C. But if they chose B over A then the second choice is A vs C. We know the results: they then choose C more than the unchosen option from the first choice, be it A or B, but now we have another theory as to why this might be. What could be happening is merely that, after the mistaken equivalence of A, B and C, the true preferences of the monkey or child are showing through, and the selective presentation of options on the second choice is making it look like they are changing their preferences in line with dissonance theory. Because the unchosen option from the first choice is more likely to have a lower true preference value (that, after all, may be why it was the unchosen option), it is consequently less likely to be preferred in the second choice, not because preferences have changed, but because it was less preferred all along. In the control condition, where no first choice is presented, their is no selective presentation of A and B and so the effect of the true values for preferences for A and B will tend to average out rather than produce a preferential selection of C.

Now obviously the next step with this theory would be to test if it is true, and check some details which might suggest how likely this is. Did Egan et al assess the reliability their initial preference evaluation? Did they test preferences and then re-test them at a later date to see if they were reliable? These and many other things could persuade us that such an explanation might or might not be very likely. The important thing, for now, is that we've come up with an explanation that seems as as simple as it could possibly be and still explain the experimental results.

For psychologists, reductionism is a value as well as a habit. We seek to use established simple features of the mind to explain as many things as possible before we get carried away with theories which rely on novel or complex possibilities. The reductionist position isn't the right one in every situation, but it is an essential guiding principle in our investigations of how the mind works.

Link: to earlier post about how psychologists think.

References

Egan L. C., Santos L.R., Bloom P. (2007). The Origins of Cognitive Dissonance: Evidence from Children and Monkeys. Psychological Science, 18, 978-983.

Festinger, L. and Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Festinger/">Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203-211.

—tom.

From the nose to the genitals and back again:

Recently, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine has had some interesting letters on a theory from times past - the nasogenital reflex theory - that says that the nervous system makes a direct link between the erectile tissue in the genitals and the nose.

The nose has tissue which, like the genitals, can become engorged with blood, which is part of the reason we get a stuffy nose. To counter this, most nasal decongestants contain a drug which acts as a vasoconstrictor to reduce blood flow (sometimes this is a type of amphetamine).

The possible link between nose and genital tissue was first proposed by American surgeon John McKenzie in 1883:

Over one hundred years ago, neurological reflexes emanating from the nose — termed the nasal reflex neurosis — were considered to be the cause of many symptoms, including symptoms related to the genitalia. In 1883 McKenzie, an otolaryngologist from Johns Hopkins Hospital, proposed a nasogenital reflex responsible for symptoms such as dysmenorrhea, pelvic pain, etc. and described improvements following nasal treatments.

In other words, he argued that problems with the nose could also results in problems with the genitals and vice versa.

Later, Wilhelm Fleiss, a German ear, nose and throat specialist and a close friend of Freud's elaborated the theory, and suggested that nasal tissue could be the cause and cure of a number of illnesses in body and mind:

In 1893 Fleiss published his monograph on 'The Nasal Reflex Neurosis', in which he claimed that back pain, chest tightness, digestive disturbances, insomnia and 'anxious dreams' could all be attributed to nasal pathology. He also claimed that temporary relief of these symptoms was possible with the topical application of cocaine, of which Freud had published the first account of local anaesthetic properties.

Gradually the list of conditions grew to include migraine, vertigo, asthma and then gynaecological conditions such as dysmenorrhoea and repeated miscarriages.

Freud became quite influenced by this theory at one time, and referred a patient to Fleiss for nasal surgery to cure her depression. Sadly, surgical complications nearly cost the patient her life and Freud became disenchanted with the theory.

While it is now clear that the nose isn't a major cause of other disturbances in the body and mind, and the nervous system has no major pathway that connects the tissues of the nose and the genitals, there are some clues that they might both be affected by similar things.

Reports of 'viagra nosebleeds' and 'honeymoon rhinitis' (a stuffy nose and sneezing after sex) suggest that they may react similarly in some instances.

Link to JRSM letter (not open-access yet).
Link to second JRSM letter (not open-access yet).

—Vaughan.

December 11, 2007

How do psychologists think?:

I believe that the important thing about psychology is the habits of thought it teaches you, not the collection of facts you might learn. I teach on the psychology degree at the University of Sheffield and, sure, facts are important here --- facts about experiments, about the theories which prompted them and about the conclusions which people draw from them --- but more important are the skills which you acquire during the process of learning the particular set of facts. Skills like finding information and articulating yourself clearly in writing. Those two things are common to all degrees. But lately I've been wondering what skills are most emphasised on a psychology degree? And I've been thinking that the answer to this is the same as to the question 'how do psychologists think?'. How does the typical psychologist[*] approach a problem? I've been making a list and this is what I've got so far:

1. Critical --- Psychologists are skeptical, they need to be convinced by evidence that something is true. Their default is disbelief. This relates to...

2. Scholarly --- Psychologists want to see references. By including references in your work you do two very important things. Firstly you acknowledge your debt to the community of scholars who have thought about the same things you are writing about, and, secondly, you allow anyone reading your work to go and check the facts for themselves.

3. Reductionist --- Psychologists prefer simple explanations to complex ones. Obviously what counts as simple isn't always straightforward, and depends on what you already believe, but in general psychologists don't like to believe in new mental processes or phenomena if they can produce explanations using existing processes or phenomena.

I am sure there are others. One of the problems with habits of thought is that you don't necessarily notice when you have them. Can anyone offer any suggested additions to my inchoate list?

Footnote:
* I'm using the label 'psychologists' here to refer to my kind of psychologists --- academic psychologists. How and if what I say applies to the other kinds of psychologists (applied, clinical, etc) I'll leave as an exercise to the reader.

—tom.

December 09, 2007

Gathering data for thought experiments:

The Idea Lab section of The New York Times has an article on experimental philosophy - a new branch of philosophy where, for example, answers to philosophical thought experiments are tested on members of the public to find the most common answers and possible contradictions in everyday reasoning.

But now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments. The newborn movement (“x-phi” to its younger practitioners) has come trailing blogs of glory, not to mention Web sites, special journal issues and panels at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. At the University of California at San Diego and the University of Arizona, students and faculty members have set up what they call Experimental Philosophy Laboratories, while Indiana University now specializes with its Experimental Epistemology Laboratory. Neurology has been enlisted, too.

More and more, you hear about philosophy grad students who are teaching themselves how to read f.M.R.I. brain scans in order to try to figure out what’s going on when people contemplate moral quandaries. (Which decisions seem to arise from cool calculation? Which decisions seem to involve amygdala-associated emotion?) The publisher Springer is starting a new journal called Neuroethics, which, pointedly, is about not just what ethics has to say about neurology but also what neurology has to say about ethics. (Have you noticed that neuro- has become the new nano-?) In online discussion groups, grad students confer about which philosophy programs are “experimentally friendly” the way, in the 1970s, they might have conferred about which programs were welcoming toward homosexuals, or Heideggerians. Oh, and earlier this fall, a music video of an “Experimental Philosophy Anthem” was posted on YouTube. It shows an armchair being torched.

Some of the highest profile work uses neuroimaging to look at the brain areas involved in making moral and ethical decisions, but some of my favourite are the most simple.

As we've discussed previously philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel's work on whether being a professional ethicist makes you behave any more ethically is amusing, but also asks questions about the use of moral philosophy if it doesn't seem to have any personal impact.

He's recently taken this a step further and has begun to investigate whether political scientists vote more often than other people.

In a way, everything has come full circle. Before the word was invented 'science' was called 'natural philosophy', because it was the philosophy of how the natural world worked. It was distinguished from the rest of philosophy because it used experiments.

Link to NYT on 'The New New Philosophy'.
Link to Schwitzgebel on whether political scientists vote more often?

—Vaughan.

December 01, 2007

In search of evidence-based bullshit:

Monday morning is not the best time to be told to 'bridge the quality chasm' and 'identify your value stream'. I was having the misfortune of starting my week with a talk that introduced new health-service management ideas based on psychological sounding ideas such as 'lean thinking' and 'connected leadership'.

Now, I've got no problem with things sounding like bullshit, as long as they work. After all, medicine is one of the few places where you can get away with calling the practice of squirting cold water in the ear 'vestibular caloric stimulation'.

No-one minds that much, because it's been very well researched and is known to have a profound, albeit temporary, effect on a number of neurological conditions.

So if I wanted to find out whether any of these new management techniques made an organisation more efficient, the first thing I'd do is find out what the research says.

In health and medicine, the 'gold standard' for finding our whether an intervention has an effect is the randomised controlled trial or RCT.

It's a simple but powerful idea. You get a group of people you want to study. You measure them at the beginning. You randomly assign them to two groups. One gets the intervention, the other doesn't. You measure them at the end. If your intervention has worked, one group should be different when compared to the others.

Of course, it gets a bit more complex in places. Making the comparison fair and deciding what should be measured can be tricky, but it's still a useful tool.

After my traumatic Monday morning experience I went to see what randomized controlled trials had been done on management techniques.

To my surprise, I found none. Not a single RCT in any of the business psychology literature.

Now, this may be because I know little about organisational psychology, and literature searches are as much about knowing the key words as knowing what you want. So maybe RCTs are called something completely different, or I'm just looking in the wrong places.

So, if you know of any RCTs done on leadership and management techniques, please let me know, I'd be fascinated to find out.

I could completely wrong, but if I'm not, I want to know why are there no randomised-controlled trials in organisational psychology?

And as a corollary, are we spending millions on organisational interventions to supposedly help patients that have been tested no further than the pseudoscience we reject for every other area of medicine?

UPDATE: Some interesting comments from organisational psychologist Stefan Shipman:

It may be that the complexity lies in that organizational research is always secondary to doing business. I can remember in some of my early research that I attempted to implement a new human resources program in one department. The program was successful in its early stages and was (despite my suggestions) implemented company wide.

I think your post absolutely speaks to the frustration of all organizational psychologists because the zeal of organizations to find "new" ways of doing business that are hopefully more effective. This zeal often reduces the "completeness" of research. As organizational psychologists we accept the conditions under which real world research can be done. We encourage the assignment of conditions but accept that some ideas or programs might "leak" into other parts of the organization.

—Vaughan.

November 30, 2007

Lies, lesions and medical mysteries:

Hysteria, or conversion disorder as it is now known, is when neurological symptoms such as blindness or paralysis are present but no neurological problems or brain abnormalities can be found.

The issue of whether such patients are 'faking', whether the neurological abnormality just hasn't been found yet, or whether the problem is best understood in psychological terms, has been vexing clinicians for the best part of 200 years.

This is a fascinating quote from the introduction to Contemporary Approaches to Study of Hysteria (ISBN 019263254X) by Halligan, Bass and Marshall:

...how can we discover if someone is indeed faking it? (We use ordinary language here rather than the more obviously psychiatric terms such as factitious disorder and malingering: clarity and logic are best served by calling a spade a spade.) The simple but totally impractical solution would be 24-hour surveillance on audio- and video-tape unbeknownst to the patient. Anyone who behaved perfectly normally when alone but who invariably developed the 'disability' when in company might be plausibly thought to be feigning.

Short of this Big Brother solution, investigators have tried to devise catch-trials and catch-tests to detect the cheater. For example, it is sometimes assumed that a patient who 'guesses' a randomized stimulus sequence (touch, touch, no touch...) significantly below chance must be faking it.

But the existence of such phenomena such as blindsight, unfeeling touch, unconscious perception in visual-spatial neglect and priming in amnesia show how misleading it can be to assume that odd relationships between behaviour and verbal report necessarily constitute evidence of cheating.

We do not impinge on the honesty of patients who perform visual discriminations at above chance level while claiming to have seen nothing. Why should we perforce distrust those who score below chance? In short, the detection of lying in the neurology clinic is at least as difficult as it is in a court of law.

Link to book details.
Link to previous Mind Hacks article on hysteria.
Link to great NYT article on hysteria.

—Vaughan.

November 26, 2007

Freud widely taught, except in psychology departments:

The New York Times discusses an upcoming study that has found that Freud and psychoanalysis form a key part of the teaching in the humanities, while being virtually extinct in psychology departments in the same universities.

As some of the psychologists in the article suggest, many of the problems with psychoanalysis are because those who believe in the theories have been reluctant to submit the ideas to rigorous empirical testing.

Where this has been done, the results have been fascinating. As we reported in June, empirical work has supported some of Freud's ideas on transference (how feelings from one relationship can affect another if the two people share similarities).

Moreover, an upcoming London conference aims to get the hard nosed cognitive and neuroscientists talking to the psychoanalysts to thrash out ways of separating the wheat from the chaff and to inspire research with new ideas.

These are largely the exceptions, however, and more often than not, psychoanalysis has continued developing its ideas without much recourse to outside testing.

Psychology now runs on the mantra of 'evidence-based practice', which has meant the science-flimsy Freudian ideas have been largely rejected.

However, subjects like film, literature and history have no such restrictions and have found psychoanalysis a useful discussion point.

Interestingly, there are some moves to introduce cultural analysis based on cognitive science into these subjects.

Buckland's book The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (ISBN 9053561315) investigates whether its possible to understand how we interpret film using cognitive linguistics and the science of perception.

Link to NYT article 'Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department'.

—Vaughan.

November 22, 2007

Sad, mad or dangerous to diagnose?:

The New York Review of Books has a wonderful article that ostensibly reviews three books about mental illness but is also a powerful summary of some of the most important criticisms of modern psychiatry.

One of the key points of debate is the extent to which distressing yet common mental states such as shyness or feeling low are being classified as mental illnesses such as social phobia or depression.

This is currently a hot topic. The British Medical Journal hosted a recent debate on whether depression is overdiagnosed with Ian Hickie arguing that it needs to be recognised more widely to stop people missing out on lifesaving treatment and Gordon Parker arguing that normal sadness is being excessively labelled as a medical disorder.

Drug companies have an obvious interest in getting more people diagnosed, but less obviously, although equally as pervasive, is their interest in pushing for new diagnoses.

On the level of the individual patient, medicalising a problem often shifts people's thinking so they feel less empowered to make a difference to their lives - it becomes an illness to be dealt with by medical experts.

In the US, however, where insurance payments are often only guaranteed when a medical diagnosis is made, people might only be able to get relief from their mental distress if their problem is medicalised.

Unlike in socialised health systems, insurance-based healthcare can pressure professionals not to help people with non-specific or difficult to diagnose problems, meaning the existing categories are often stretched to allow such people to be treated.

Treatment has traditionally been medication, which means drug companies have a strong financial incentive to push for the changes to the classification of mental illness and promote theories which best support their treatments.

In contrast, cognitive behavioural therapy, a type of psychological therapy, is known to be as effective as drugs (the most effective treatment is both medication and therapy), and is better at preventing relapse.

However, because it isn't a 'product', there is no corporate marketing machine behind it, meaning it is typically under-recognised and under-used.

The 'promotion' of psychological therapies is left to mental health charities (such as the recent We Need to Talk campaign) which pales in comparison to the billions spent by drug companies.

So, the extent to which mental and emotional distress should be treated as a medical disorder effects everything from the personal to the political.

The New York Review of Books article does a fantastic job of covering how these processes work, both at the medical and corporate level, and how they impact on our individual health care.

Link to article 'Talking Back to Prozac' (via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

November 19, 2007

The ethical psychiatrist:

ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone had a fascinating discussion recently on the ethics of psychiatry, tackling some of the challenges of this unique medical speciality.

Perhaps the most obvious aspect of psychiatry which distinguishes it from other medical specialities is that it more commonly involves treating people against their will.

The laws on involuntary treatment vary, but most include the principle that someone who is judged to have their lost their insight into their own condition because of mental illness, is at risk to themselves or others, and who refuses voluntary treatment can be treated against their will.

Of course, this relies on a huge amount of other assumptions, such as the ability to distinguish between normal and abnormal mental states, and an idea of what constitutes insight.

It also relies on a presumption that psychiatrists can distinguish between potentially foolish but reasoned refusal of treatment, and a refusal driven by pathological thinking.

The programme tackles many of these issues and discusses how these decisions are affected by cultural norms and political influence, as well as how they fit in with the wider ethical approach of medicine.

Link to the Philosopher's Zone on the ethics of psychiatry.

—Vaughan.

November 16, 2007

Reflections on the brain of an idiot:

I've just discovered that the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology have all their past issues freely available online all the way back to 1867. I came across a curious article entitled 'Description of the Brain of an Idiot' in the 1871 issue and it made me think about how names for brain disorders have been rejected and changed throughout history.

Back in 1871, the term 'idiot' was a proper medical term. It referred to someone we would now describe as having learning disabilities or intellectual impairment.

As the word became used as an everyday form of abuse, it left the realms of medicine because it was deemed inappropriate, and has been replaced by seemingly more appropriate terms. There is a long history of this process and it continues to this day.

For example, wildly abnormal or problematic sexual behaviours used to be called sexual deviancy. 'Sexual deviancy' described something beyond the presumed normal range, but it was thought to be inappropriate because it branded people as outsiders.

Now we use the term 'paraphillia' which means, well, exactly the same - someone who has desires outside the norm - but because it's Greek, everyone is much happier.

It's also interesting when the terminology differs between countries. In America, 'mentally retarded' is a common description in medicine, but in Europe it's considered an outdated insult - similar to the previously official words imbecile and idiot.

However, it's always struck me as a little curious why our words for intellectual disabilities have changed so much throughout history, but the word for epilepsy (despite there being many commonly used nicknames) has been maintained since the time of Ancient Greece.

Presumably, there's something about the Greek language which just makes us feel better about our difficulties.

Link to 1871 article 'Description of the Brain of an Idiot'.

—Vaughan.

October 13, 2007

Plain talking:

An excerpt from Prof Nick Craddock's no-nonsense review of the book 'The Overlap of Affective and Schizophrenic Spectra' in this month's British Journal of Psychiatry:

If this book is not of interest, the reader has no business being a psychiatrist.

I think he likes it.

With Michael Owen and Michael O'Donovan, Craddock has been instrumental is completing genetic research into bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

The research has shown that these disorders are unlikely to be distinct conditions, but just different points on a spectrum of problems with mood and thinking.

Link to BJP review of 'The Overlap of Affective and Schizophrenic Spectra'.

—Vaughan.

October 08, 2007

Biting the mind:

Ten-minute philosophy podcast Philosophy Bites has an interview with Prof Tim Crane where he gives an excellent summary of one of the most important topics in contemporary cognitive science - the mind-body problem.

The problem asks how we can reconcile the biological properties of the brain with the subjective mental properties of the mind, because intuitively they seem like quite different things.

One of the most important points often gets lost when people think about this: it is perfectly possible to believe that mind cannot be fully reduced to the function of the brain while still being a materialist - i.e. while thinking that the brain is the only thing that supports the mind and without needing to believe in souls, ghostly spirits, or other non-material things.

How can this be? The key to understanding this is the word 'reduced' - i.e. reduction - where one phenomenon is equally well explained by its smaller components.

Importantly, this is a process of fitting theories together. Our idea of heat is equally well explained by our ideas about atoms.

For two things that are understood physically to begin with (e.g. heat and atoms) it works well, but for things that are described using quite different properties, such as thought and the brain, it doesn't.

Here's an analogy: when someone plays a recording of a song, everything you experience is carried in the sound waves.

However, you won't understand why the singer is so in love by looking at the physics of sound, because what is meaningful about the song cannot be fully reduced to physics.

This isn't a problem of missing detail in the sound. We can measure the sound waves in minute detail. But still, meaning is lost.

The same holds for the mind: even if we could track every single atom in the brain when we have a thought, we might lose meaning when we map the two together.

And if we lose meaning, it means we cannot fully reduce to the mind to the brain. No ghosts, spirits or souls, just a problem of connecting different levels of explanation.

One school of thought, eliminative materialism, argues that this problem highlights the fact that mind-level explanations are inherently unscientific and we should solve the issue by only taking about neuroscience - our subjective experience of the mind is simply wrong and misleading.

Probably the most popular approach at the moment is property dualism - which argues that both mind-level and brain-level explanations may explain how we think and behave but at different levels that may not always be reducible.

This is where there are two type of theories that both attempt to explain something, but in different ways. You can see where, in places, they connect, but they're not always compatible.

This is different from 'substance dualism', famously invented by Descartes, which says there are two types of substances - the brain, and the soul.

In the recent debates about religion, it's interesting to see that some people argue that being unable to reduce the mind to the brain is evidence for the God, spirit or soul; while others opposed to religion see any mention of the problem as an indication of support for a non-materialist view.

The key point is that this issue is about how we map theories, not about what sorts of things exist in the universe.

The Philosophy Bites podcast discusses exactly these sorts of issues, particularly with regards to consciousness, perhaps the most well-known example of a problem with mapping the mind to the brain.

Link to Philosophy Bites on the mind-body problem.

—Vaughan.

October 04, 2007

A rough guide to philosophy and neuroscience:

Philosophy is now an essential part of cognitive science but this wasn't always the case. A fantastic new article, available online as a pdf, describes how during the last 25 years philosophy has undergone a revolution in which it has contributed to, and been inspired by, neuroscience.

The article is by two philosophers, Profs Andrew Brook and Pete Mandik, and it's a wonderful summary of how the revolution occurred and just how we've benefited from philosophers turning their attention to cognitive science.

But it also notes how evidence from psychology and neuroscience is being used by philosophers to better understand concepts - such as perception, belief and consciousness - that have been the concern of thinkers from as far back as the Ancient Greeks.

It's an academic article, so it's fairly in-depth in places, but if you want a concise introduction to some of the key issues philosophy of mind is dealing with, and how this directly applies to current problems in the cognitive sciences, look no further.

The scope is wonderfully broad and there's a huge amount of world-shaking information packed into it.

It's particularly good if you're a psychologist or neuroscientist and want a guide to how philosophy is helping us make sense of the mind and brain.

The article will shortly appear in the philosophy journal Analyse and Kritik but the proofs are available online right now.

pdf of article 'The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement' (via BH).

—Vaughan.

September 27, 2007

Daniel Kahneman 'masterclass' online:

Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman recently gave a two day masterclass on his work. It's now been made available on Edge as transcripts and video clips.

Kahneman has done a huge amount of work on cognitive biases - the quirks of mind that make us deviate from rationality, sometimes in quite surprising and interesting ways.

For example, with his colleague Amos Tversky, he discovered the availability heuristic, which is the process by which we tend to judge an event as more likely to happen in the future the more easily it can be brought to mind.

This is why we vastly overestimate the chances of vividly spectacular but unlikely things like terrorism, but underestimate the mundane but consistently lethal things like driving.

Kahneman has been involved in identifying many of these sorts of biases, and cleverly, applying them to economic decision making to inform economic models of financial behaviour.

As a result, experimental psychology is now a key part of economics to understand how people actually behave as opposed to earlier models which assumed that people will always act more-or-less rationally to maximise their profits.

The Edge 'masterclass' is quite a comprehensive guide to his work and covers work which has been influential in many areas of psychology.

Link to Edge Daniel Kahneman 'masterclass'.

—Vaughan.

September 22, 2007

Seeking free will: a debate:

The Dana magazine Cerebrum has just published a debate between a psychiatrist and neurologist on how we can make sense of free will in the age of neuroscience.

The choice of professionals is an interesting one because each typically deals with what are assumed to be quite different disruptions in free will.

Neurologists often treat patients who have problems controlling their movements, cognition or consciousness - owing to clear, identifiable brain damage to the systems involved in these processes.

Someone with Parkinson's disease, for example, seems to have little conscious control over their tremor or rigid movements.

Psychiatrists on the other hand, typically deal with people who don't have clear brain damage, but whose brain's are nonetheless functioning in such as way that they experience unstable moods, odd perceptions, or come to hold seemingly impossible beliefs.

Here the idea of free will is a bit more conceptually tricky. We can clearly say that someone who has Parkinsonian tremor is not 'willing' their movements, but what about someone whose brain disturbance means they hear voices?

Some people who hear voices can have conversations with them. In this situation, the person would seem to be exercising some influence over their hallucinations, because the voices respond to what's being said, but many people can't 'will' the voices away.

One particularly interesting phenomenon in this regard is 'command hallucinations' - usually hallucinated voices that command the person to do something.

Often, the commands are pointless - touch the table, cross the street, take off your hat - but sometimes they can be terrifying instructions - for example, that the person must harm themselves.

In some cases, these commands seem irresistible, the person feels completely compelled to follow their hallucinated instructions.

We don't really have a good understanding (or, to be fair, even a bad understanding) of why some command hallucinations are distressing but impotent, while others seem to compel the person to comply.

There are many more examples of how free will is affected in both psychiatry and neurology. In both specialities, there are conditions where the boundaries of free will cover a big grey area, and all of them raise really quite profound questions about our freedom to act as we want.

The Cerebrum debate tackles exactly these sorts of issues by two people who undoubtedly have to deal with them on a daily basis.

Link to Cerebrum article 'Seeking Free Will in Our Brains: A Debate'.

—Vaughan.

September 21, 2007

Advancing the history of psychology:

I've been enjoying the Advances in the History of Psychology blog lately, which is full of interesting snippets about the past and often digs into the historical background of contemporary hot topics.

For example, here's an interesting bibliography about psychoactive drug use in psychology, and here's another about Benjamin Franklin's interest in 'electrotherapy'.

It's run by the same people who produce the completely invaluable Classics in the History of Psychology archive, that has a huge website with some of the most important texts from psychology's colourful past.

Both are excellent, and I look forward to reading more.

Link to Advances in the History of Psychology blog.
Link to Classics in the History of Psychology archive.

—Vaughan.

Want fries with that?:

Neurophilosophy discusses a recent study that suggests that the inclusion of large amounts of starchy foods into our diet helped fuel the evolution of the brain.

It's interesting because it's not the first study to suggest that specific changes in diet improved nutrition and brain development:

According to one theory, increased consumption of meat by our ancestors provided the additional energy needed for brain expansion. (Cooking would have further increased the amount of calories obtained from meat.) Another holds that a switch to a seafood-rich diet would have provided polyunsaturated fatty acids which, when incorporated into nerve cell membranes, would have made the brain function more efficiently.

And now, a study published in Nature Genetics adds starchy tubers to the smorgasbord of foodstuffs that may have contributed to the expansion of the human brain.

These theories tend to be quite controversial and tend to cause numerous back and forth arguments in the literature, partly because they're quite hard to test, largely owing to the fact that the brain has the consistency of toothpaste and so doesn't leave much of a fossil record.

The study picked up by Neurophilosophy is interesting because it tracks a gene that codes for a starch enzyme, needed to break down starch into glucose.

It's a relatively new approach to an old problem, although as the article mentions, the link to brain evolution is still circumstantial.

However, it's an interesting areas and the Neurophilosophy article is a great brief guide to some of the thinking behind these theories.

Link to Neurophilosophy on 'Diet and brain evolution'.

—Vaughan.

September 13, 2007

Moral psychology and religious mistakes:

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written a thought-provoking essay for Edge which charts the recent revolution in the psychology and neuroscience of moral reasoning and suggests that the current critiques of religion have mischaracterised its true nature, based on these new findings.

Haidt summarises the main tenants of the new science of morality as four main principles:

1) Intuitive primacy but not dictatorship. This is the idea, going back to Wilhelm Wundt and channeled through Robert Zajonc and John Bargh, that the mind is driven by constant flashes of affect in response to everything we see and hear.

2) Moral thinking is for social doing. This is a play on William James' pragmatist dictum that thinking is for doing, updated by newer work on Machiavellian intelligence. The basic idea is that we did not evolve language and reasoning because they helped us to find truth; we evolved these skills because they were useful to their bearers, and among their greatest benefits were reputation management and manipulation.

3) Morality binds and builds. This is the idea stated most forcefully by Emile Durkheim that morality is a set of constraints that binds people together into an emergent collective entity.

4) Morality is about more than harm and fairness. In moral psychology and moral philosophy, morality is almost always about how people treat each other. Here's an influential definition from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel: morality refers to "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other."

The essay then goes on to discuss how the recent findings in then area apply to the ongoing debate between the 'new atheists' (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and the like) and religion.

In particular, Haidt suggests that the recent criticisms of religion don't always reflect the best psychological understanding of what are primarily social, rather than ideological, institutions, and notes research findings showing that religious people tend to be happier and more altruistic than others.

As a self-professed non-believer and high-profile social psychologist, Haidt makes some interesting points that are bound to cause controversy.

Link to essay 'Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of religion'.

—Vaughan.

August 28, 2007

Statistical self-defence over at idiolect.org.uk:

Readers of mindhacks.com might be interested to read my review of the last chapter of Darrell Huff's classic How To Lie With Statistics, over at my personal blog idiolect.org.uk. The last chapter gives Huff's rules of thumb for interrogating statistics and I've provided some slim commentary on the workings of science, reason and whatnot. See you there!

—tom.

August 24, 2007

Dennett on chess and artificial intelligence:

Technology Review has published an article by philosopher Daniel Dennett looking at what the development of computer chess tells us about the quest for artificial intelligence.

AI and chess have an interesting and intertwined conceptual history.

It used to be said that if computers could play chess, it would be a genuine example of artificial intelligence, because chess seemed to be a uniquely human game of strategy and tactics.

As soon as computers became good at chess, it was dismissed as a valid example because, ironically, computers could do it. A classic example of moving the goalposts.

Similarly, I've recently heard a few people say "If computers could beat us at poker, that would be a genuine example of artificial intelligence". Recently, a poker playing computer narrowly lost to two pros.

Presumably, 'genuine intelligence' is just whatever computers can't do yet.

Dennett is a big proponent of the "if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck" school of behaviour.

In other words, if something can perform a certain task (like playing chess), then objections about it not using the same mechanism as humans to do the task are irrelevant as to whether its doing the task 'genuinely' or not.

One of his related ideas is the intentional stance. It says that things like belief, intention and intelligence are not properties of a creature, computer or human, they're just theories we use to understand how it works.

So if it makes sense for us to interpret a chess computer as having the belief that "taking the queen will give an advantage", then that's a good theory for us to work on, but it doesn't necessarily tell us anything about how that behaviour is implemented in the system.

Link to TechReview article 'Higher Games' (via BoingBoing).

—Vaughan.

Ancient Egyptian post-mortem neurosurgery:

Retrospectacle has a great post that describes how the Ancient Egyptians removed the brains of the dead before mummification and notes some of their neurological knowledge.

The Ancient Egyptians described a range of neurological and psychiatric disorders in their writing that would be recognisable today.

One major source is the Edwin Smith papyrus, another is the Ebers papyrus which has quite a significant section on psychiatric disorders, including what we would now class as depression, dementia and psychosis.

Needless to say, the remedies were often magical in nature, but the observation of the clinical features can be quite astute.

The article on Retrospectacle has some great brain scan images and a link to a video of how embalmers would remove the brain through the nose, using a metal tool to go up into the frontal lobes.

Link to Retrospectacle article.

—Vaughan.

August 21, 2007

Psychological continuity and the problem of identity:

Philosophy Now magazine has an interesting article on the problem of identity - how we have the impression that we are the same person, despite the fact that our personality, preferences and even cognitive abilities may change from moment to moment.

It's a problem that was most famously tackled by 17th century philosopher John Locke but is still relevant for understanding the issues of identity and the self in contemporary cognitive science, as well as for informing complex judgements on free will and responsibility.

Suppose a man has committed a crime whilst drunk or undergoing temporary amnesia. Suppose also, that because of his mental state at the time of the offence, he genuinely cannot remotely remember a thing about it. Clearly on the evidence of witnesses – and perhaps he was caught in the act – it was his own body, the same man who now stands in the dock, who did it. But was it the same person? Should the present person be found guilty of the crime if the drunkenness or amnesia had so changed his psyche that, at the time, he 'wasn't his true self'? Can he rightly claim that at the time of the incident the occupant of his body was a different person altogether; or perhaps some fractured component of his own psyche that couldn’t rightly be described as ‘himself’?

Psychological continuity was, Locke claimed, the answer to the question. The accused, considered as a man, the physical being, is certainly guilty. His own hand struck the blow, his own voice had risen in anger. But if the person, the psychological being, cannot remember one atom of it, then he is not guilty.

But though Locke's theory answered the question, it’s not certain that it solved the problem; for it raises a paradox that will try the wits of the jurists: the man in the dock may be guilty, but not the person in the man! And if the man is punished, he will experience the pain, but the wrong person will suffer it.

Link to article 'A Question of Identity' (via Thinking Meat).

—Vaughan.

July 12, 2007

Terrorism fails because we don't see its purpose:

In an article for Wired, security guru Bruce Schneier suggests that the reason terrorism fails is because it falls foul of a cognitive bias in how we understand people's intentions from their actions.

Schneier bases his conclusions on a recent paper [pdf] by Max Abrahms who applies correspondent inference theory to terrorism and the political objectives of terrorist groups.

'Correspondent inference theory' suggests that we try and understand people's intentions and character based on the most salient effect of their actions.

This can often lead us astray, as demonstrated by a regular plot line in soap operas where someone's good intentions accidentally misfire and the person on the receiving end assumes they're being deliberately malicious.

As noted by Schneier and Abrahms, this also leads us to misunderstand the goal that motivates terrorist acts:

The theory posited here is that terrorist groups that target civilians are unable to coerce policy change because terrorism has an extremely high correspondence. Countries believe that their civilian populations are attacked not because the terrorist group is protesting unfavorable external conditions such as territorial occupation or poverty. Rather, target countries infer the short-term consequences of terrorism -- the deaths of innocent civilians, mass fear, loss of confidence in the government to offer protection, economic contraction, and the inevitable erosion of civil liberties -- (are) the objects of the terrorist groups. In short, target countries view the negative consequences of terrorist attacks on their societies and political systems as evidence that the terrorists want them destroyed. Target countries are understandably skeptical that making concessions will placate terrorist groups believed to be motivated by these maximalist objectives.

In his paper, Abrahms examines the political objectives of terrorist groups and looks at how successful terrorism has been in obtaining them. He reckons, with a generous estimate, that only 7% of the stated goals have been achieved.

But he also notes that the stated goals rarely gets through to the people being targeted and that the political rhetoric of the terrorists' target is littered with misunderstandings of their intentions.

I'm personally interested in how and why terrorists are labelled 'mad'. It's in the terrorists' interest to be seen as sane, as part of the goal is to force concessions.

There's no point conceding to someone who you think is unbalanced, because an irrational group might not stop the violence once they've achieved their aims.

The fact that violent protestors are so often labelled as 'mad' suggests, as per correspondent inference theory, that we assume their is no coherent intention behind their actions, contrary to what they are trying to achieve.

Anyway, an interesting look at the motivations and perception of political violence.

Link to 'The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail'.
pdf of Max Abrahms' paper 'Why Terrorism Does Not Work'

—Vaughan.

June 29, 2007

Can't compute the wood for the trees:

Computer scientist David Gelernter has written an in-depth article for Technology Review where he criticises the possibility of creating artificial consciousness, but has high hopes for unconscious artificial intelligence.

My case for the near-impossibility of conscious software minds resembles what others have said. But these are minority views. Most AI researchers and philosophers believe that conscious software minds are just around the corner. To use the standard term, most are "cognitivists." Only a few are "anticognitivists." I am one. In fact, I believe that the cognitivists are even wronger than their opponents usually say.

But my goal is not to suggest that AI is a failure. It has merely developed a temporary blind spot. My fellow anticognitivists have knocked down cognitivism but have done little to replace it with new ideas. They've showed us what we can't achieve (conscious software intelligence) but not how we can create something less dramatic but nonetheless highly valuable: unconscious software intelligence. Once AI has refocused its efforts on the mechanisms (or algorithms) of thought, it is bound to move forward again.

Gelernter is a a great writer and an interesting guy, not least because of his brush with death, courtesy of disturbed anti-technologist Ted Kaczynski aka 'The Unabomber'.

Link to TechReview article 'Artificial Intelligence Is Lost in the Woods'.

—Vaughan.

June 23, 2007

Mind the gap: science and the insanity defence:

Reason Magazine has an excellent article on why our knowledge about the psychology and neuroscience of mental illness doesn't really help when trying argue for or against the insanity defence in court.

The insanity defence concerns whether a person accused of a crime should be considered legally responsible.

Some of the first legal criteria for judging someone 'not guilt by reason of insanity' are the M'Naghten Rules created after Daniel M'Naghten tried to assassinate the British Prime Minister Robert Peel in 1843.

He ended up killing Peel's secretary, but when caught was found to be suffering from paranoid delusions and it was judged that his crime was motivated by his unsound mind and he didn't understand the 'nature and quality' of what he did.

Most Commonwealth law in this area is still based on these criteria, and most US law was too, until shortly after John Hinckley shot US President Ronald Reagan and was found not guilt by reason of insanity.

This caused a backlash against the insanity defence and many US states have variously abolished it or made it much more difficult to prove (near impossible in some cases).

The Reason Magazine article examines why, when it does arise, the evidence is largely based on descriptions of the person's mental state and why recent advances in understanding mental illness don't really help very much.

One of the main reasons is that studies that find differences between people with mental illness and those without, do so on the group level. The same differences might not be present when comparing any two individuals.

In other words, on average, there are mind and brain differences between people affected by mental disorders and unaffected people, but the individual variation is so great that you couldn't reliably say it would be present in one particular person.

As these criminal trials are focused on the actions of one individual much of the objective science goes out the window because it can't reliably indicate an diagnosis, state of mind or reasoning abilities on the individual level.

This means that the most relevant evidence is usually the testimony of a psychiatrist or psychologist who is giving his or her clinical, descriptive judgement of the person's state of mind.

The Reason Magazine article examines what sort of dilemmas this causes, and considers how developments in psychology and neuroscience are likely to impact on the legal judgement of insanity.

It's an excellent guide to some of the key issues and the difficulties of making legal judgements on subjective states of mind.

Link to article 'You Can't See Why on an fMRI'.

—Vaughan.

June 22, 2007

Are we computers, or are computers us?:

Philosopher Dr Pete Mandik has published an interesting thought on his blog that questions whether the common 'computer metaphor' used to describe the human mind is really a metaphor at all.

Cognitive psychology typically creates models of the mind based on information processing theories.

In other words, the mind and brain are considered to do their work by manipulating and transforming information, either from the senses, or from other parts in the system.

It is therefore common for scientists to talk about the mind and brain in computer metaphors, as if they are information processing machines.

Mandik questions whether this is really a metaphor at all:

There is a sense of the verb "compute" whereby many, if not all, people compute insofar as they calculate or figure stuff out. Insofar as they literally compute, they literally are computers. Further, the use of "compute", "computing", and "computer" as applied to non-human machines is derivative of the use as applied to humans.

It strikes me as a bit odd, then, to say that calling people or their minds "computational" is something metaphorical.

Indeed, the term 'computer' was originally a name for a person who did mathematical calculations for a company.

Calculating machines were then given the supposedly metaphorical name 'computers' as they did equivalent work to the human employees.

Mandik questions whether we should think of any of these examples as genuine metaphors, since they're describing the same operations.

However, a key issue for cognitive science is whether there are reasonable limits in describing mind, brain and behaviour in mathematical terms.

The fact that we can adequately describe some things mathematically doesn't solve this problem, because there may be things that are impossible to describe in this way which we simply don't know about.

Often though, we just assume that we haven't found the right maths yet, when the reality may be far more complex.

Link to Pete Mandik post with great discussion.

—Vaughan.

June 21, 2007

Next step brains: Evolution or optimisation?:

This week's edition of ABC Radio National's opinion programme Ockham's Razor has Dr Peter Lavelle speculating about a future when computers will match or outstrip the human brain.

Taking a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach, Lavelle looks to a time when we'll extend our capabilities with electronics and cybernetic expansions.

But he doesn't stop there. He continues way past where most futurists stop and thinks about the possible end points for the human race if our trend for technological integration continues.

A fun and wildly speculative way to spend 15 minutes if you like your neuroscience with a touch of wide-eyed wonder.

Link to programme details and audio.

—Vaughan.

June 20, 2007

Profiling serial killers and other violent criminals:

I just noticed that the January edition of the Journal of Forensic Sciences is freely available online, which contains psychological case reports on two serial killers and a football hooligan.

The journal is always a fascinating read, as it combines academic papers on everything from molecular analysis to psychological profiling.

The psychology case reports are often more influenced by a Freudian, interpretive style of explanation than in many other areas of psychology.

This is perhaps because the reports are largely from the USA which was historically most influenced by Freudian ideas and still retains a stronger influence in clinical and forensic psychology.

It is possibly also because it's quite hard to do controlled studies on violent criminals, and so single case studies are more likely to draw on interpretive ideas that were specifically developed to delve into the mind of individuals.

For example, the FBI's Behavioural Science Unit will partly analyse a crime scene using interpretive methods to link the symbolism of certain actions (e.g. covering a victims face after the murder) with the emotional state of the killer (e.g. shame).

The APA Monitor has an intriguing article on FBI profiling if you want to know more, and if you want some examples of the sorts of thinking that goes into criminal profiling, the case reports in the January edition are a good place to start.

Link to 'Paths to Destruction: The Lives and Crimes of Two Serial Killers'.
Link to 'The Hooligan's Mind'.
Link to 'Criminal profiling: the reality behind the myth'.

—Vaughan.

June 01, 2007

Identity disorder and the future of technology:

Polymath physician Dr Ray Tallis has written an optimistic article in the latest edition of Philosophy Now magazine arguing that human technological enhancement is over-hyped but no reason for fear.

Tallis is a professor of geriatric medicine, so it's no surprise that he sees some of the most applicable benefits of technological advances for diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Critics have suggested that using technology to enhance human abilities, whether by drugs, implants or genetics, will lead to an erosion of our sense of identity.

Tallis looks back on past promises and argues that this is unlikely to be the case:

The most often repeated claim is that we are on the verge of technological breakthroughs – in genetic engineering, in pharmacotherapy and in the replacement of biological tissues (either by cultured tissues or by electronic prostheses) – which will dramatically transform our sense of what we are and will thereby threaten our humanity. A little bit of history may be all that is necessary to pour cooling water on fevered imaginations.

In 1960, leading computer scientists, headed by the mighty Marvin Minsky, predicted that by 1990 we would have developed computers so smart that they would not even treat us with the respect due to household pets. Our status would be consequently diminished. Anyone seen any of those? Smart drugs that would transform our consciousness have been expected for 50 years, but nothing yet has matched the impact of alcohol, peyote, cocaine, opiates, or amphetamines, which have been round a rather long time.

As well as making some telling philosophical points, the article is quite funny in places, as Tallis uses some of his literary skills to good effect.

Link to Philosophy Now article 'Enhancing Humanity'.

—Vaughan.

May 24, 2007

Narrative self, split brain:

If you liked our recent post on what the stories of our lives say about us, Philosophy Now has an article on how the self might be based on our ability to create narratives.

The article looks at how the self has been related to our ability to make narratives out of the disconnected events in our lives, and particularly focuses on the theories of philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur.

MacIntyre emphasises that the concept of personal identity is not only logically dependent upon the concept of a narrative, but it's also the other way round. In other words it is meaningless to talk about a character biography unless one presupposes that its subject has a personal identity. The biography must be about a continually-existing thing. Conversely, it is pointless, meaningless, to state that some being has a personal identity through time, and at the same time deny that this being has a possible biography.

...

[In Ricoeur's theory] narratives, or more precisely plots, synthesise reality. A plot fuses together intentions, causal relations, and chance occurrences in a unified sequence of actions and events. Ricoeur seems to think that the plot creates a unified pattern in a chaotic series of events, ties them together, making them meaningful wholes.

This idea has also been taken up by more cognitive science-oriented philosophers, most notably, Daniel Dennett.

In his paper 'The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity', Dennett argues that the main function of consciousness is to generate a sense of narrative for our experiences.

He references experiments on 'split-brain' patients, whose cortical hemisphere's cannot directly communicate because their main link, the corpus callosum, has been severed.

In some situations, these patients seem to show a self which isn't a unified whole, where some knowledge and experience is accessible to some parts (like perception) but not others (like speech).

Despite these obvious divisions, the patients report that they still feel like an apparently unified "sole inhabitant" of the body, as if their narrative is maintained.

Link to Philosophy Now article 'Don Quixote and The Narrative Self'.
Link to Dennett's article 'The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity'.

—Vaughan.

May 21, 2007

Jerry Fodor's aunt:

Many thanks to Ulrich Mohrhoff for reminding me of the Jerry Fodor article I was trying to remember where he explains his theory of mental representation to his aunt.

The article is called "Fodor's Guide to Mental Representation: The Intelligent Auntie's Vade-Mecum", published in Mind, (New Series, Vol. 94, No. 373, Jan., 1985, pp. 76-100) and reprinted in Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (ISBN 0262071533).

The whole article doesn't seem to be available online, but the first page does seem to appear on JSTOR.

The opening paragraph is wonderful:

It rained for week and we were all so tired of ontology, but there didn't seem to be much else to do. Some of the children started to sulk and pull the cat's tail. It was going to be an awful afternoon until Uncle Wilfred thought of Mental Representations (which was a game we hadn't played for years) and everyone got very excited and we jumped up and down and waved our hands and all talked at once and had a perfectly lovely romp. But Auntie said she couldn't stand the noise and there would be tears before bedtime if we didn't please calm down.

Link to first page of 'Fodor's Guide to Mental Representation'.

—Vaughan.

May 15, 2007

Hume on the perversions of John Locke:

18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume makes a dig at John Locke in the footnote to one of his most famous books - A Treatise of Human Nature.

Hume wrote that completing the Treatise, at the age of 26, affected his mental health, causing 'philosophical melancholy and delirium'.

Footnote 1. I here make use of these terms, impression and idea, in a sense different from what is usual, and I hope this liberty will be allowed me. Perhaps I rather restore the word, idea, to its original sense, from which Mr LOCKE had perverted it, in making it stand for all our perceptions.

Link to Wikipedia page on David Hume.
Link to online copy of A Treatise of Human Nature.

—Vaughan.

May 14, 2007

Minds and computers:

ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone just had an excellent edition on artificial intelligence and whether a computer could ever simulate the mind.

The guest on the show is philosopher Matt Carter, who's also just written a book on the subject called Minds and Computers (ISBN 0748620990).

For half an hour, the programme is a remarkably comprehensive guide to some of the key issues in the philosophy of artificial intelligence and computational models of mind.

Alan Saunders: Is it an interesting question because we think that perhaps we could develop computers that are like us in some intellectual respect and to whose rights we will perhaps have to give recognition? Or is it because we think that the computational model will tell us something about our own minds?

Matt Carter: It's an excellent question, and I think the answer is both. There's a sense in which we really hope to understand our own minds better through this kind of computational understanding, and certainly the computational theory of mind is currently by far the most dominant theory in the philosophy of mind and the culture of sciences broadly. But there are also a number of people working on strong artificial intelligence projects, and the ultimate goal of those projects is to produce man-made artifacts that have minds in precisely the same sense, or some very similar sense, in which we take ourselves to have minds.

Link to Philosopher's Zone on 'Minds and Computers'.

—Vaughan.

April 17, 2007

Bongo-bongoism:

A curious term from anthropology describing the tendency for someone to come up with a counter-example from some usually obscure and remote tribe when anyone makes a general claim about human culture.

Bongo-bongoism: the venerable but ultimately sterile anthropological practice of countering every generalization with an exception located somewhere at some time.

Apparently, it was first used by anthropologist Mary Douglas in her book Natural Symbols.

Link to the culture evolves! blog (where I found the definition).

—Vaughan.

April 07, 2007

This Week in the History of Psychology:

Christopher Green, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto produces a weekly podcast that examines crucial events in the history of psychology.

Each episode of This Week in the History of Psychology looks at a significant development that happened in the same week during the past.

Prof Green also runs the fantastic Classics in the History of Psychology website that has an archive of some of the most important documents in the field.

Link to This Week in the History of Psychology podcast (via BPSRD).
Link to Classics in the History of Psychology website.

—Vaughan.

March 29, 2007

Quirky little flames:

Pat: I once heard a funny idea about what will happen when we eventually have intelligent machines. When we try to implant that intelligence into devices we'd like to control, their behaviour won't be so predictable.

Sandy: They'd have a quirky little "flame" inside, maybe?

Pat: Maybe

Chris: So what's so funny about that?

Pat: Well, think of military missiles. The more sophisticated their target-tracking computers get, according to this idea, the less predictable they will function. Eventually you'll have missiles that will decide they are pacifists and will turn around and go home and land quietly without blowing up.

Characters in a whimsical coffee house conversation tackle the idea that artificial intelligence may actually make devices less, not more, reliable.

From p90 in Douglas Hofstadter's chapter in The Mind's I (ISBN 0465030912) by Hofstadter and Dennett.

—Vaughan.

March 23, 2007

Neither fools nor rogues:

A quote from a recent paper by psychiatrist Dr Paul Mullen on the difficulties with diagnostic manuals for mental illness, such as the DSM and ICD.

Mullen argues that the definitions of mental illnesses are designed in an open-minded way to aid diagnosis and stimulate debate but end up trapping us into a narrow definition of mental distress:

Those who create these manuals are neither fools nor rogues. They know that classificatory systems grow and develop. They welcome research, debate, and change. They are often painfully aware of the compromises and hopeful approximations which go to create the final authoritative text.

But this intellectual honesty does not translate into the practices and ideologies which DSM and ICD sustain in the cities of psychiatry and psychology. In today's field of mental health if you seek research funding or publication, you are forced into the languages of DSM or ICD.

To claim rebates for clinical work or to present expert testimony to courts and tribunals, increasingly, the language of these diagnostic manuals is imposed upon you. To even contribute to the professional debates on nosology you are constrained within the premises which sustain the manuals.

Link to PubMed entry for paper.

—Vaughan.

March 13, 2007

How neurolaw is shaping the courtroom:

The New York Times has an in-depth article on the increasing use of neuroscience evidence in court cases and how this is shaping concepts of justice and responsibility.

The article examines the science and technology which is being used as the basis of this evidence and questions whether courts are competent to use the knowledge.

It also looks at whether the notion of free will is being eroded by excusing criminal acts on the basis of disturbed brain function.

To suggest that criminals could be excused because their brains made them do it seems to imply that anyone whose brain isn't functioning properly could be absolved of responsibility. But should judges and juries really be in the business of defining the normal or properly working brain? And since all behavior is caused by our brains, wouldn't this mean all behavior could potentially be excused?

...
Proponents of neurolaw say that neuroscientific evidence will have a large impact not only on questions of guilt and punishment but also on the detection of lies and hidden bias, and on the prediction of future criminal behavior. At the same time, skeptics fear that the use of brain-scanning technology as a kind of super mind-reading device will threaten our privacy and mental freedom, leading some to call for the legal system to respond with a new concept of "cognitive liberty."

If you want to keep track of developments in this area, you could do a lot worse than reading a great new blog called The Situationist from the Harvard Law School's Project on Law and Mind Sciences.

It's got some fantastic contributors and, so far, has published some great articles.

Finally, if you want a good academic review of the area and have access to the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the feature article from the March edition is on 'Cognitive Science and the Law'.

Unfortunately, neither of the authors have put the full version online, but the abstract is listed on PubMed.

Link to NYT article 'The Brain on the Stand'.
Link to blog The Situationist.
Link to abstract of TiCS article 'Cognitive Science and the Law'.

—Vaughan.

March 11, 2007

A critical view of transhumanism:

ABC Radio's All in the Mind just had an edition on transhumanism, where evolutionary psychologist Prof Leda Cosmides gives a critical commentary on the movement which seeks to to extend human abilities and lifespan through technology.

The programme is particularly interesting, as transhumanism is still on the scientific fringe, and it's rare to see one of the scientific mainstream make a serious attempt at a critique.

Cosmides takes the movement to task for what she sees as an oversimplification of psychology to fit with technological developments, and a naivety in assuming that human instincts can be engineered without wider consequences.

If you want more of a background to transhumanism, George Dvorsky recently published a transhumanist dictionary, as we reported recently on Mind Hacks.

Link to All in the Mind on 'Prospects for a Transhuman mind?'.

—Vaughan.

March 10, 2007

Neuroscience, know thyself:

The New English Review has a thought-provoking article by Theodore Dalrymple (the pen name of psychiatrist Anthony Daniels) who argues that modern neuroscience will not be able to provide a perfect self-understanding, and even if it could, disaster would follow.

Dalrymple is an interesting character, as he's one of the few conservative writers in the area of mind, brain and mental health who has both experience of working in psychiatry across the world, and a vast academic knowledge.

His writing is distinctly against the mainstream of much modern medicine, particularly in the field of addiction, which, he argues, is often explained by social factors that minimise personal responsibility and disempower the patient.

In this article, Dalrymple argues against the enthusiasm for neuroscience as the 'great new hope' which has captured popular imagination in recent decades.

Those who say that we are on the verge of a huge increase in self-understanding are claiming that enlightenment will suddenly be reached under the scientific bo tree. The enlightenment will have to be sudden rather than gradual because, if it were gradual, we should already be able to point to an increase in human contentment and self-control brought about by our already increased knowledge. But even the most advanced societies are just as full of angst, or poor impulse control, of existential bewilderment, of adherence to clearly irrational doctrines, as ever they were. There is no sign that, Prozac and neurosurgery notwithstanding, any of this is about to change fundamentally.

Link to article 'Do the Impossible: Know Thyself' (thanks Karel!)

—Vaughan.

March 05, 2007

Patricia Churchland - mind, body and brain:

Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland is interviewed on ABC Radio's In Conversation where she talks about her work on understanding how our concepts of the mind can map on to the developing field of neuroscience.

Churchland is particulary known for eliminative materialism, which argues that our everyday understanding of the mind is generally false and won't ever map onto the brain as neuroscience understands it.

It's been a powerful, influential but controversial argument in cognitive science.

I mean my idea was something like this: consider the follow analogies. Suppose that you were in a time capsule and you were able to go back to, let's say the 12th century, and say to a monk who was puzzling deeply about the nature of fire. And you said to him, Look, let me tell you what it is; it's rapid oxidation and you would go on to talk about how exactly that occurred. Now the thing about it is that, since he does not even know about elements, he still thinks there's just earth, air, fire and water, it isn't going to make much sense to him. So you've given an answer, but lacking the surrounding theoretical context it would be very hard for him to make sense of it.

And my point about the brain now is that if I were given, in an analogous way, the answer to what it is that makes for conscious states in the brain, given that how much we don't know about fundamentals in neuroscience, I would likely not be able to make sense of the answer.

Link to In Conversation with Patricia Churchland.

—Vaughan.

February 27, 2007

The benefits of inheriting despair:

The LA Times has an interesting article on evolutionary theories of depression that also discusses how these might lead to new and improved treatments for the condition.

The fact that mental illness is both widespread and disabling is a puzzle in evolutionary terms, if you believe that a vulnerability to psychological disorder is strongly inherited.

Indeed, the evidence suggests that there is a significant inherited component in mental illness, although the extent of this influence is debated.

If this is the case, the question arises 'why do we still have mental illness if inheriting the risk for it makes you much less likely to reproduce?'. Surely it should have been 'bred out' of the population?

Some use this as an argument to suggest that the role of genetics in mental illness has been overstated, and that the majority of risk arises from environmental factors, particularly those that cause stress and trauma.

Others suggest that the same inherited attributes that increase risk for mental illness can be beneficial when they don't result in serious impairment.

For example, research has suggested that people who are at high risk for schizophrenia, or have slight or fleeting psychosis-like thoughts, are more likely to be creative or original thinkers [pdf].

More recently, it was reported that a gene called DARPP-32 increases risk for schizophrenia as well as being linked to the more efficient use of a key brain circuit in the frontal lobe.

This might explain why genes that increase these tendencies are still in the gene pool, and only when too many of these traits are inherited is the person very likely to suffer ill-effects when confronted by severe life stresses.

A similar theory was put forward by the late Dr David Horrobin is his book The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity (ISBN 0593046498).

As an aside, Horrobin was famously the subject of a controversy after a critical obituary was published in the British Medical Journal, leading to an angry reaction and the journal publishing an apology.

The LA Times article is a great overview of evolutionary theories of depression that might help answer questions about why someone might inherit a tendency to be depressed.

If this tendency is understood as an exaggerated form of something that might be beneficial in small doses, it may give clues to new treatments, and the article looks at what treatments researchers are considering with this in mind.

Link to LA Times article 'The mind, as it evolves'.

—Vaughan.

February 18, 2007

The human is the only animal that...:

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert on the unwritten vow taken by psychologists. From p3 of Stumbling on Happiness (ISBN 9780007183135).

Few people realise that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter or at least an article that contains the sentence: 'The human being is the only animal that...' We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words.

Most of us wait to relatively late in our careers to fulfil this solemn obligation because we know that successive generations of psychologists will ignore all the other words that we managed to pack into a lifetime of well-intentioned scholarship and remember us mainly for how we finished The Sentence.

We also know that the worse we do, the better we will be remembered. For instance, those psychologists who finished The Sentence with 'can use language' were particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate with hand signs.

And when researchers discovered that chimps in the wild used sticks to extract tasty termites from their mounds (and to bash each other over the head now and again), the world suddenly remembered the full name and mailing address of every psychologist who ever finished The Sentence with the words 'uses tools'.

So it is with good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they might just die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.

—Vaughan.

Why psychologists study twins:

The BPS Research Digest has a concise article on a key way of determining how much genetics influences the expression of a psychological trait - the twin study.

The article is part of a new series where professional researchers are asked to write short articles on key topics.

This one is by Dr Angelica Ronald from London's Institute of Psychiatry who researches the autism spectrum.

Twin designs address the nature-nurture question. Behaviour geneticists compare how alike one twin is with the other twin on whatever variable they are interested in; in my case this is autistic behaviours. If genes influence variation in autistic behaviours, identical twin pairs who share all their genes will be highly similar in their degree of autistic behaviours whereas fraternal twins will be much less similar. This is what we have found.

Twin studies have been essential in understanding the effects of genetics but are controversial with some researchers as there are various ways of determining the outcome which may not always be in agreement.

Link to BPSRD article 'Why psychologists study twins'.

—Vaughan.

February 14, 2007

A transhumanist dictionary:

George Dvorsky has published a guide to the terms and buzzwords of transhumanism - an optimistic movement that seeks to apply current and future scientific discoveries to extending human experience and abilities.

Transhumanists are interested in neuroscience as a way of improving on the natural human range, either through optimising the biological systems already present or extending them with technological interfaces.

They are variously treated with excitement, suspicion and amusement by mainstream scientists who tend to be conservative by nature.

However, the movement has attracted some leading lights in the sciences who are not put off by the sometimes science-fiction focus of the transhuman mission.

You may see lots of references to the Singularity, a key concept in transhumanist thought.

It's exact meaning differs depending on the context, but one of the most influential definitions is from Ray Kurzweil who uses it to describe the notional point when computers will overtake the abilities of the human brain.

Needless to say, this puts the back up of many philosophers and cognitive scientists who believe that computers will never be able to fully emulate human intelligence or consciousness.

There's plenty more of these thorny issues touched on by Dvorsky's dictionary, so have a look through if you want to know what the dreamers of neuroscience are thinking about.

Link to 'Must-know terms for the 21st Century intellectual: Redux'.

—Vaughan.

January 04, 2007

Melodies of thought:

"The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain, just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes."

Playwrite and author W. Somerset Maugham with a wonderful analogy on the relationship between mind and brain. From his 1949 book A Writer's Notebook (reissue ISBN 0140186018).

—Vaughan.

Cognitive biases and the start of war:

Foreign Policy magazine has an article by Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon on the role of cognitive biases in the decision to go to war.

Kahneman is a nobel prize winning psychologist known for his work on decision making and Renshon is a political scientist and author of the book Why Leaders Choose War: The Psychology of Prevention (ISBN 0275990850).

Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks. Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics. For example, people are prone to exaggerating their strengths: About 80 percent of us believe that our driving skills are better than average. In situations of potential conflict, the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war. Such a predisposition, often shared by leaders on both sides of a conflict, is likely to produce a disaster. And this is not an isolated example.

The article is an interesting attempt to apply knowledge of cognitive biases to understanding political decision making in high stress, high stakes situations.

This is an area which is becoming increasingly important in military psychology. Both to understand how individual soldiers might make battlefield decisions, and how leaders might make strategic choices during conflict.

Link to article 'Why Hawks Win' (via Frontal Cortex).

—Vaughan.

December 30, 2006

the society of mind:

Marvin Minksy, one of the founding figures in Artificial Intelligence, in his Society of Mind (1985):

People ask if machines have souls. And I ask back whether souls can learn. It does not seem a fair exchange - if souls can live for endless time and yet not use that time to learn - to trade all change for changelessness. And that's exactly what we get with inborn souls that cannot grow: a destiny the same as death, an ending in a permanence incapable of any change and, hence, devoid of intellect.

...

We start as little embryos, which then build great and wonderous selves - whose merit lies entirely within their own coherancy. The value of a human self lies not in some small, precious core, but in its vast constructed crust

What are those old and fierce beliefs in spirits, souls, and essences? They're all insinuation that we're helpless to improve ourselves. To look for our virtues in such thoughts seems just as wrongly aimed a search as seeking art in canvas cloths by scraping off the painter's works.

—tom.

December 22, 2006

Social networks and counter-insurgency:

The New Yorker has a fascinating article on a new generation of anthropologist military strategists, such as David Kilcullen and Montgomery McFate, who argue that social networks, not ideologies, are key to understanding terrorist campaigns.

Like Kilcullen, [McFate] was drawn to the study of human conflict and also its reality: at Yale, where she received a doctorate, her dissertation was based on several years she spent living among supporters of the Irish Republican Army and then among British counterinsurgents. In Northern Ireland, McFate discovered something very like what Kilcullen found in West Java: insurgency runs in families and social networks, held together by persistent cultural narratives...

Similarly, Kilkullen has drawn on his own military experiences and research on the role of social groups in insurgencies, and is now responsible for writing counter-insurgency guidelines for deployed soldiers.

One of the most influential sociology papers ever written was Mark Granovetter's The Strength of Weak Ties (review article at this pdf) which looked at how people were connected in social networks and how this facilitated information exchange, and, consequently, individual goal attainment.

Granovetter demonstrated that 'strong ties' (i.e. family and close friends) were actually less important in social networks for getting things done than 'weak ties' (i.e. acquaintances) because 'weak ties' tend to be people who have different and diverse resources that aren't in the immediate social group.

This led to the realisation that group structure was important, and, crucially, that these could be analysed using the mathematical tools of graph theory.

Social network theory is now an important and growing area of social psychology and understanding how information flows through social network is thought to be key for making sense of how groups work, co-operate, expand and influence others.

Importantly, this has meant the individualist approach of traditional social psychology ('how do social groups influence the individual') and the computational approach of social network theory ('how does social structure influence information flow') can be powerfully combined.

Kilkullen argues that terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda need to be understood in terms of how their information strategy is being implemented through their social networks, and how they are attempting to recruit collaborators to further their routes of communication.

The article discusses how this has affected US counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency strategy - from global policy to field manuals for company captains.

Perhaps, one take-away message from the piece is just how important social science is becoming to military forces of all persuasions as they increasingly fight through communities rather than for them.

Link to New Yorker article 'Knowing the Enemy'.

—Vaughan.

December 16, 2006

Inside the mind of a psychopath:

The cover story in this week's Science News is an in-depth investigation into the science of psychopaths and psychopathy.

The article is a fantastic round-up of much of the most recent work on the neuroscience and psychology of psychopathy, and clarifies exactly what is meant when someone is diagnosed as being a 'psychopath'.

One psychopathic offender murdered his ex-girlfriend to stop her from interfering with his new relationship. Another psychopathic inmate arranged and committed the murder of his wife to cash in her life insurance policy.

In contrast, a large majority of the nonpsychopathic prisoners had killed someone in the heat of the moment or upon reaching an emotional breaking point.

Porter measured psychopathy using a tool called the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). This clinical-rating scale, devised by psychologist Robert D. Hare of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, has served as the gold standard of psychopathy tests for about 20 years.

In this approach, a psychologist or psychiatrist interviews a person and reviews his or her criminal record. The rater then judges whether any of 20 psychopathy-related traits applies to that person. These traits include being superficial, acting grandiosely, lying frequently, showing no remorse, lacking empathy, refusing to accept responsibility for misdeeds, behaving impulsively, and having committed many crimes.

The article also looks at an increasing area of research - non-criminal psychopaths.

These are supposedly people with many of the psychopathic personality traits who don't come in contact with the law or legal system. Many supposedly thrive in business, where socially underhand but lawful tactics can be an advantage.

If you want a good overview of the current state of psychopathy research, the Science News article is a remarkably good summary, although the recent study on the recognition of facial emotion in psychopaths was too new to be included.

Link to Science News article 'The Predator's Gaze' (via BB).
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on 'The Mask of Sanity'.

—Vaughan.

December 12, 2006

How economists measure happiness:

Slate has a short article on the intriguing question of how economists measure happiness.

This has become a key issue this year, as the two leading political parties in the UK, and the kingdom of Bhutan, have cited 'happiness' as a national goal.

Happiness, otherwise known as 'subjective well-being' (sounds more scientific doesn't it?), is actually quite a tricky thing to measure.

Despite it being fairly prominent as a human desire throughout history, only recently has it been studied in earnest by psychologists.

This has been linked to the 'positive psychology' movement that has begun to specifically focus on human strengths and virtues, after hundreds of years of psychology being dominated by the study of mental distress or reasoning abilities.

In fact, the idea that psychologists were studying happiness caused enough of a stir to make the front cover of Time magazine in 2004. The pdf of the article is available online if you want to have a look.

The Slate article briefly describes the current approaches to measuring happiness: essentially, either by judging overall 'life satisfaction' or by recording day-by-day emotions and working out an average.

If you want a bit more on the emerging science of happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote a good summary for Edge which is still available online.

Link to Slate article 'The Not-So-Dismal Science' (with mp3 version).
pdf of Time article 'The New Science of Happiness'.
Link to Edge discussion with Daniel Gilbert.

—Vaughan.

December 06, 2006

Hobbes, the first functionalist?:

If you thought that the founders of the Artificial Intelligence movement were the first to think that intelligence was just the product of computation, think again:

When man reasoneth, he does nothing else but conceive a sum total, from addition of parcels....For reason, in this sense, is nothing but reckoning

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 5 'Of Reason and Science'

—tom.

December 04, 2006

Metaphors of mind in the history of the novel:

The Psychologist has just made an article available online that examines the history of how novelists have used metaphors to describe the human mind. The article also tackles how this has reflected our understanding of the mind itself.

Mind-metaphors have always reflected dominant scientific ideas, and psychologists and cognitive scientists have always used metaphors in building their theories (Leary, 1990). During the heyday of behaviourism, when theorising about internal states was more-or-less taboo, the incidence of metaphors of mind in published psychological research dropped away accordingly (Gentner & Grudin, 1985). Metaphors of mind, both literary and scientific, can act as ‘guide fossils’ in reflecting the prevailing scientific orthodoxies of the eras in which they are found (Draaisma, 2000). What if these metaphors turn out to be wrong? What if the mind doesn’t work that way?

A book that has looked at metaphors for psychology in more detail is Metaphors of Memory by dutch psychologist Prof Douwe Draaisma.

He notes that psychological theories have often been inspired by technology, so we understood the mind as being a system of pneumatic and hydraulic forces in the 1800s, while we now use metaphors of information processing as computers have become the dominant technology.

It's interesting to think that our understanding of ourselves might be limited by our ability to build technology.

It's also interesting to wonder whether the move to incorporate more biological function into technology will mean we are less bound by restrictive metaphors in future cognitive science.

In The Psychologist article, Charles Fernyhough argues that fiction may be a rich source of metaphors, and work in developing more poetic approaches to understanding the mind may make important contributions to theory building in psychology.

Link to article 'Metaphors of Mind'.

—Vaughan.

November 27, 2006

The Myth of Thomas Szasz:

Controversial psychiatrist Thomas Szasz is the subject of an in-depth article in The New Atlantis magazine that re-examines his legacy and impact on psychiatry.

Szasz has made some of the most important and cutting criticisms of modern psychiatry but is now largely ignored by both academia and patients' rights groups.

This is partly because the classical liberal philosophy that motivates many of his arguments has become less popular and partly because he's been associated with Scientology - known for its wild-eyed anti-psychiatry.

It is also true to say that while making some pertinent and uncomfortable observations, he's also made some rather less impressive and sometimes, downright insulting, accusations.

One of his most well-known arguments is that mental illness is a 'myth'. This is widely misunderstood to mean that Szasz is arguing that there is no such thing as mental suffering or bizarre behaviour, or that it shouldn't be treated, which is not the case.

Szasz would argue that these things are labelled as mental illnesses because of society's willingness to medicalise, and often control, people who behave abnormally.

He argues that while these things occur, they are not diseases in the same sense that, say, AIDS, is an disease, because there is no clear biological marker for mental distress.

In a sense, modern psychiatry is cursed only to deal with disorders that do not have a discrete biological cause.

As soon as a clear biological cause is found, the disorder is often taken out of the hands of mainstream psychiatry and becomes the domain of neurology or neuropsychiatry, as has happened with neurosyphilis, epilepsy, Huntingdon's disease and many others.

In a way then, Szasz is right, because psychiatry necessarily applies medical concepts only to fuzzy human phenomena.

As science advances, the concepts become less fuzzy, and so Szasz's arguments might apply to a smaller and smaller number of disorders.

This would be the case, perhaps, if it weren't for the fact that other unpleasant experiences and behaviours are increasingly included in psychiatry's remit. Extreme shyness can now be diagnosed as social phobia, for example.

The New Atlantis article examines some of the motivations behind Szasz's 40 year crusade, the hubris of 60s psychiatry, and why he is now less relevant in modern psychiatric practice when he was once centre stage.

Link to article 'The Myth of Thomas Szasz'.

—Vaughan.

November 24, 2006

B Fred Skinner:

In some circles behaviourism is associated with a kind of fascism, or at the very least an austere puritanism (to contrast it with its nemesis, the literary/humanistic psychoanalysis). B.F. Skinner particularly suffers from this association, because of his pivotal role in the development of the science and philosophy of behaviourism, and perhaps because of some of his political writings (e.g. 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity', 1971). There's even an entirely false story that he applied behaviourist control techniques to his family, with disastrous results.

Skinner As Self-Manager by Rober Epstein, a student and later colleague of Skinner, gives an account of Skinner, and his style of life, which is in stark contrast to the disempowering, mechanistically-clinical, image some might have of behaviourist psychology:

Each day of our collaboration brought new projects and new excitement, and, as I got to know Skinner better, my awe began to subside. He insisted, for one thing, that I call him ‘Fred,’ and it’s hard to be in awe of someone named Fred (his full name is Burrhus Frederic Skinner)... Fred’s manner was casual and far from intimidating. He often leaned back in his chair as he spoke, and his eyes sparkled with the energy of a man in his 20s, even though he was past 70. He told jokes and recited limericks, and he loved to hear new ones.

...

To my knowledge, and all of the rumors notwithstanding, Fred did not rely on ‘behavior modification’ techniques to ‘control’ people. Quite the contrary. He was relaxed, natural, and gentle in most of his dealings with other people. His interpersonal style was made milder, if anything, by the scientific principles he helped to develop, because his research convinced him that punishment was a poor tool for changing behavior, so he avoided using it in his everyday life.

...

Life, to Fred, was a series of joys to relish and challenges to overcome, and he did both extremely well...Fred was the most creative, most productive, and happiest person I have ever known.

—tom.

November 20, 2006

Hijacking intelligence:

Many of the big websites use the 'wisdom of crowds' to make meaning out of chaotic data. Now, new software technology allows the automated use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.

As complex data-processing becomes a commodity, biological intelligence is becoming assimilated into the network as just another software application. As this commodity increases in value, your mind will become a prime target for cognitive hijackers.

Do you want to see naked celebrities? If you do, you may have become an unwitting worker in a distributed data-processing workforce.

CAPTCHAs are the boxes of distorted text that you are asked to identify when you enter data or register with some websites. There's an example on the left. The idea is that they prevent automated sign-ups and spamming because it is relatively easy for humans to identify the distorted letters, but beyond the capabilities of most software.

Rogue advertising is big business on the net, and CAPTCHAs have become a significant barrier for people who rely on spam to make a quick buck selling dodgy Viagra, penis enlargement pills or grey-market imports. One way of getting round such security measures would be to enlist large numbers of people who type in the solutions. This is where the naked naked celebrities come in.

According to news reports, porn sites have been set up which require the user to solve a CAPTCHA to view the content. The CAPTCHAs, of course, are taken from other websites, and every user who provides the correct answer in their bid to see naked flesh also opens a door for spammers to automatically register another account or post another advert.

In this context, humans become mechanised problem solvers trained to present the results of their mental effort in a standard format. The software sees human intelligence as just another subroutine.

This form of cognitive outsourcing has recently been taken further by leading online businesses such Amazon and Google, who, instead of recruiting human intelligence through deception, are paying people to perform tasks that would otherwise stretch cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) to the limit - such as choosing which words best describe a picture - key information for a photo database.

This is a task that computers are very bad at, as it requires not only the ability to identify objects, but also an understanding of the social world. 'Birthday' is an excellent keyword for a picture of children looking excitedly at a candle-topped cake. While a computer could feasibly identify the objects in the photo, divining social meaning is way beyond the scope of commercial AI. Humans, in contrast, find this trivial.

People are being used to plug gaps in the software, which is being used by other people to solve information problems. Increasingly, data is being processed over a hybrid human-digital network, suggesting an uncanny 21st century symbiosis.

Human cognition is becoming both a market force and a unit-based commodity, and this trend is set to continue as companies develop more efficient ways of interfacing the minds of willing workers with automated systems.

As the market value of this commodity increases, so will attempts to hijack moments of human cognition, as spammers are already doing with their CAPTCHA-laden porn sites.

While many reputable companies will inform their users of the underlying purpose, the data cowboys will just want you working, however they can motivate you and whether you understand what's involved or not.

Online games provide a perfect way of disguising lucrative problems as entertaining puzzles, while other work can be packaged into small chunks and put in the way of users wanting, well, almost anything, as long as they want it hard enough.

Advertisers have long battled for our attention, but a new generation of cognitive hijackers are attempting to deceive us into being momentary, but unwitting, employees.

Link to article on integration of artificial intelligence into web services.
Link to Wikipedia page on Amazon's 'Mechanical Turk' service.

UPDATE: I've discovered that the design of games to harness human intelligence is the research area of Luis von Ahn from Carnegie Mellon University. There's a Google video of a fantastic talk by him explaining how some of the more respectable software is developing to harness users' intelligence. Thanks jswolf19!

—Vaughan.

November 07, 2006

Searching for emotional truth:

PsyBlog has posted the first of a new series entitled 'Emotional Truth: The Search Starts Here' that will examine how much control we have over emotions and how they link to our thoughts and experiences.

Many people would say their emotions only come when they will and not when they want. So how do thoughts and emotions interact in everyday life and in therapeutic processes like cognitive behavioural therapy? Do we really have any control over our emotions or are they things that just happen to us?

The first part looks at the work of the philosopher Robert Solomon who attempts to unpick 'common sense' psychology to show that our everyday understanding of emotions poorly describes how they affect our thoughts and behaviour.

Further parts in the series will analyse some of the latest findings from emotion science that are helping us make sense of our chaotic feelings.

Link to Part 1 of 'Emotional Truth: The Search Starts Here' from PsyBlog.

—Vaughan.

November 01, 2006

Who was the Wolf Man?:

ABC Radio's The Philosopher's Zone has an edition on one of Freud's most famous cases, named 'The Wolf Man', because the patient had a dream about a tree full of white wolves outside his bedroom window, waiting to eat him.

That's a picture of the dream on the right (click for larger version) painted by the patient himself, whose real name was Sergei Pankejeff.

Pankejeff was a member of the Russian upper-classes whose sister and father had committed suicide and personally suffered from a debilitating depression.

Freud analysed Pankejeff and interpreted his current emotional turmoil as being due to a disruption in his early sexual development.

His 'wolf dream' was thought to be a masked expression of his disturbance at accidentally seeing his parents have sex when he was a child. Freud thought the wolves were an expression of seeing this 'primal' act.

This edition of The Philosopher's Zone looks at the importance of the 'Wolf Man' for the development of psychoanalysis, but also looks at wider issues of how evidence is used in building theories of the mind.

Freud is often criticised for the validity of his theories, and the programme discusses whether he was justified in drawing these conclusions when there was little other evidence on the function of the mind to work with.

Link to audio and transcript of 'Who was the Wolf Man?'.

—Vaughan.

October 11, 2006

Science special on 'Modelling the Mind':

Science has a special online collection on computational neuroscience - the science of creating computer models of the mind and brain to test theories and develop treatments.

The collection is a mixture of freely available and closed access articles, but all the summaries are freely available so you can get a taster of this exciting field just by skimming the abstracts.

If you can't get access through a college or subscription, your local library might subscribe to Science as it is one of the most widely read science journals.

Link to Science special issue 'Modeling the Mind'.
Link to introduction to special collection.

—Vaughan.

September 26, 2006

Dreaming of the philosophy of Freud:

ABC Radio's The Philosopher's Zone has just had two special editions on Freud and his relevance to modern day thinking.

The programmes look at two contrasting areas of his wide-ranging theories.

The first is on Freud's contribution to philosophy and the second contrasts Freud's theories of dreaming with modern dream science derived from neuroscience.

The discussion picks out theories which were seminal in igniting research, and those which have not stood the test of time.

For those wanting an almost entirely critical take on Freud, the Times Literary Supplement has a review of a Frederick Crews' new book entitled Follies of the Wise (ISBN 1593761015), which attempts to show that even many of Freud's more popular ideas are fundamentally flawed.

Taking pot shots at Freud is quite fashionable in this day and age. However, as Freud wrote so much and about so many different topics, it is easy to find something to criticise but difficult to dismiss all his ideas at once.

Link to Philosopher's Zone on Freud the Philosopher.
Link to Philosopher's Zone on The Dream Debate.
Link to TLS book review.

—Vaughan.

September 18, 2006

Berkeley's Cherry:

I see this cherry, I feel it, I taste it: and I am sure nothing cannot be seen, or felt, or tasted: it is therefore real. Take away the sensations of softness, moisture, redness, tartness, and you take away the cherry, since it is not a being distinct from sensations. A cherry, I say, is nothing but a congeries of sensible impressions, or ideas perceived by various senses: which ideas are united into one thing (or have one name given them) by the mind, because they are observed to attend each other. Thus, when the palate is affected with such a particular taste, the sight is affected with a red colour, the touch with roundness, softness, &c. Hence, when I see, and feel, and taste, in such sundry certain manners, I am sure the cherry exists, or is real; its reality being in my opinion nothing abstracted from those sensations. But if by the word cherry you mean an unknown nature, distinct from all those sensible qualities, and by its existence something distinct from its being perceived; then, indeed, I own, neither you nor I, nor any one else, can be sure it exists.

George Berkeley Three Dialogues Between Hylas And Philonous

—tom.

September 07, 2006

defining the field of psychology:

Several decades ago, an eminent psychologist defined the field of psychology as ‘a bunch of men standing on piles of their own crap, waving their hands and yelling “Look at me, look at me!”’ Fortunately, things have changed quite a bit over the years, and the field is no longer composed entirely of men.

Daniel Gilbert, Are psychology’s tribes ready to form a nation?, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol.6 No.1 January 2002.

—tom.

August 26, 2006

PsyArt for the psychology of art:

PsyArt is an online journal dedicated the use of psychology in understanding the impact and meaning of art.

It's a peer-reviewed journal which has been publishing quality analyses of the art-psychology borderlands for almost a decade now.

The full-text articles are freely available online, meaning you can pass on the links and read the full papers without a subscription.

Recent article include The Silence of Madness in 'Signs and Symbols' by Vladimir Nabokov [link] and Perspectivism — A Powerful Cognitive Metaphor [link].

Link to PsyArt journal.

—Vaughan.

August 18, 2006

interested in words:

A classic quote from R.D. Laing of anti-psychiatry fame:

I am very interested in words, and what we have words for and what we haven't got words for. For instance, the word "paranoia." It always seems very strange to me that we have this word which means, in effect, that someone feels that he is being persecuted when the people who are persecuting him don't think that he is. But we haven't got a word for the condition in which you are persecuting someone without realizing it, which I would have thought is as serious a condition as the other, and certainly no less common.

—tom.

August 17, 2006

Grand unifying theories in psychology:

PsyBlog has just started a series looking at whether the different findings, concepts and predictions of the various schools of psychology could ever be explained by one 'grand theory'.

By drawing on excerpts from the existing literature, the series gives us a tour through a radical rethinking of how we explain the action of the mind.

Alternatively, perhaps a search for a 'grand unifying theory' is just physics envy at its most ridiculous, where psychology is just trying to ape the most absurd aspects of modern theoretical physics.

Whether it sounds like a grand vision or navel gazing to you, the series covers all angles, and there is more to come in the series.

Link to 'Unity in Psychology: The Search Starts Here' from PsyBlog.

—Vaughan.

July 12, 2006

Measuring depravity:

Depravity is a concept often used in criminal trials when making decisions on the seriousness or gravity of a particular crime. The depravity scale is a project to develop a measure of depravity, and is asking members of the public to help develop it.

It is the brainchild of forensic psychiatrist Dr Michael Welner who wants the concept of depravity to be more rigorous and psychometrically sound, so it can be measured reliably.

The depravity scale website asks members of the public to rank specific scenarios for how depraved they are, to get an estimation of how people understand and use the concept of depravity.

The scale has not been without controversy, however, with some professionals questioning whether psychiatry should become involved in making moral decisions.

Forensic psychiatry is particularly interesting in this regard, as it attempts to distinguish 'bad' from 'mad'.

This project is also interesting in light of the history of psychiatry and madness. The idea that mental illness is the result of the breakdown of the mechanisms of mind and brain is a relatively new idea, and traditionally mental illness was seen as a moral failing.

Psychiatry (or mad-doctoring as it was known then) brought madness into the medical realm, where previously it was the domain of the church. Just like today, there were accusations that doctors were interfering in moral issues.

Link to The Depravity Scale website.
Link to story on the project from Psychiatric News.
Link to NY Daily News story on the scale.

—Vaughan.

July 11, 2006

The theft of humanity:

An article in American Scientist bemoans the division of research into schools and traditions in modern universities as counter productive, and argues that the cognitive and biological sciences are now at the forefront of combining science and art practice.

I would probably argue philosophy has always had a similarly broad outlook, but the author argues that science is where the new action is.

...but while humanistic scholars have been presuming core facts about human nature, human capacities and human being, scientists have been getting to work. One of the most striking features of contemporary intellectual life is the fact that questions formerly reserved for the humanities are today being approached by scientists in various disciplines such as cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, robotics, artificial life, behavioral genetics and evolutionary biology.

Link to article 'Science and the Theft of Humanity' (via 3Quarks).

—Vaughan.

July 02, 2006

The politics of expedience:

Harvard Magazine has an article on the increasing willingness of psychiatrists to prescribe medication for distressing but relatively common life problems and whether this is blurring the boundaries between mental illness and mental health.

Using an ever-expanding arsenal of neurochemical drugs, physicians now treat variants of mood and temperament that previous generations viewed as an inescapable part of life. In an earlier era, James’s fears might have forced him to change professions. Today, the exceptionally shy and the overly anxious, the hyperactive and the chronically unhappy can seek relief from their suffering though medical intervention. And the parameters of what constitutes a “mental disorder” have swelled. An estimated 22 million Americans currently take psychotropic medications—most for relatively mild conditions.

This widespread embrace of biological remedies to life’s problems raises troubling questions for psychiatry. Paradoxically, even though psychopharmaceutical sales have soared in the United States during the past 20 years, only half of those with severe disorders receive adequate treatment. Clinicians and researchers disagree over what the priorities of the field should be and whom they should count as mentally ill. Are we over-treating the normal at the expense of the truly disturbed? Can we adequately distinguish illness from idiosyncrasy, disease from discontent? And are we allowing pharmaceutical companies and insurers to define the boundary between illness and health?

Freud famously made a distinction between unhappiness and mental illness, and wanted his therapy to transform "hysterical misery into common unhappiness".

As with many medical treatments (such as plastic surgery), mind-altering drugs are now being used on those without previously recognisable medical problems in an attempt to improve quality of life.

So-called 'smart drugs', 'cognitive enhancers' and the use of psychiatric drugs to help with life stresses are examples of something psychiatrist Peter Kramer has called "cosmetic pharmacology".

The Harvard Magazine article looks at whether this trend is actually negatively affecting the understanding and treatment of major mental illness, and warping the diagnostic systems upon which psychiatry relies.

Link to article 'Psychiatry by Prescription' via (3Quarks).

—Vaughan.

June 24, 2006

Evo-psychiatry:

Brain Ethics has just picked up on the recent development of "evolutionary psychiatry" (evo-psychiatry for short) that aims to understand mental disorder in terms of how we have evolved to become susceptible to disabling thought and behaviour patterns.

Evolutionary approaches to disease - including mental disease - is an attempt to describe and explain the design characteristics that make us susceptible to the disease (from Nesse & Williams, 1996). The evolutionary trajectories of humans is far from a travel towards perfection. We are full of errors and somatic and mental shortcomings - and the appendix, near-sightedness, and a bottleneck attentional system and the like are examples of this.

Another important issue is that the border between normal and abnormal psychology is becoming increasingly muddled. That may sound as a problem, but it’s actually caused by a change in our understanding of how our minds come to be, and especially how normal variation extends into pathological domains. In this sense, it’s hard to draw waterproof boundaries between normal and abnormal psychology. We work on a continuum, and the branch of modern evolutionary psychiatry makes a good case for such an approach.

The post discusses a recent special issue of the journal Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry (snappy title!) that discusses the various approaches in the field, and how they could help better understand mental illness.

Link to Brain Ethics on evo-psychiatry.

—Vaughan.

June 21, 2006

Psyche on consciousness and self-representation:

A new issue of respected online consciousness journal Psyche has just been published with a special issue on self-representation and consciousness.

The issue debates the idea that mental states are only conscious when they are structured both to represent a particular object of thought and themselves.

Take the ticking of a clock. The brain will support a mental representation of this sound, even when you're not conscious of it.

The self-representation hypothesis argues that for the ticking to be consciously available, the mental representation must 'describe' both the sound, and itself ("I'm a mental state of a ticking clock") so the rest of the conscious mind can access and manipulate it.

However, some have argued that this theory requires an infinite number of descriptions and redescriptions and so can't be plausible.

The various articles in the issue are written by some of the most active philosophers of mind and make for fascinating reading.

By the way, the use of 'iff' in the introduction is not a typo, it's a shorthand used by philosophers for if and only if.

Link to Psyche journal.
pdf of introduction to special issue.

—Vaughan.

June 02, 2006

Mind-brain link questioned:

The idea that the mind is the result of the function of the brain is so widely accepted within neuroscience as to almost be its defining statement. It's suprising then when you find someone who's arguing against this idea in a coherent and thoughtful manner.

The blog Science is a Method not a Position keeps tabs on the world of the cognitive and neurosciences and puts forward alternative interpretations that suggest there may be more to the mind than the firing of neurons.

Even if you don't buy the main argument, the blog highlights how our simple assumptions aren't always as watertight as we believe them to be.

Link to Science is a Method not a Position.

—Vaughan.

May 31, 2006

Understanding consciousness easier than we think:

Philosopher Alex Byrne writes about the problem of consciousness in the Boston Review. Against the current trend of labelling it 'the hard problem', Byrne argues that it may be easier to understand than we think.

Byrne does a fantastic job of touring us through some of the classic problems and thinkers in the area, using Thomas Nagel's famous article on consciousness 'What is it like to be a bat?' as a starting point.

The problem centres around the link between our own subjective conscious experience and the biological function of the brain, and whether it is possible to explain one in terms of the other.

You'd be hard pressed to find a better introduction to the area, and Byrne does a great job of telling an engaging story.

Link to article 'What mind-body problem?' (via 3QuarksDaily).
Link to Alex Byrne's webpage (with publications online).

—Vaughan.

May 24, 2006

John Searle on the question of consciousness:

John Searle, one of the most important and controversial philosophers of mind, is featured on this week's ABC Radio The Philosopher's Zone discussing the question of consciousness.

Searle has been active since the 1960s and has made some of the most influential contributions to cognitive science, including the famous Chinese room thought experiment that addresses the question of whether information processing would be sufficient to account for intelligent thought.

Understandably, this has been used in arguments about the possibilities of artificial intelligence and machine consciousness.

Searle has long argued that machines cannot be conscious, and that conscious states can only be supported by biological systems.

In the programme, Searle talks about his own approach to solving the problem of consciousness, the importance of understanding neurobiology, and the dangers of getting in bed with Descartes.

mp3 or realaudio of programme.
Link to transcript.

—Vaughan.

May 17, 2006

Philosophy of Mind on Wikipedia:

The Wikipedia article on the Philosophy of Mind is featured on the online encyclopaedia's front page today, demonstrating how the philosophy articles have greatly improved during the last year.

The article gives a clear and comprehensive overview of this key field and is beautifully illustrated throughout.

Philosophy has a bit of an image problem among scientists. Some dismiss it as self-indulgent, but nowhere could it be farther from the truth than in cognitive science.

Philosophers now make up essential team members in many neuropsychology research groups, valued for their critical insight and knowledge of how certain types of difficult conceptual problems can be overcome.

I'm most familiar with the work of Professor Martin Davies who works with the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science and usefully makes all his work available online.

This is a good place to start if you want an introduction to how philosophy can contribute to the understanding of brain-injury, mental illness and the neuropsychological function of the health individual.

If you want a general introduction to the field, the Wikipedia article is your first port of call.

Link to Wikipedia article on Philosophy of Mind.
Link to Martin Davies' publications.

—Vaughan.

April 26, 2006

Fast Artificial Neural Network Library:

The Fast Artificial Neural Network Library is a programming library that takes much of the pain out of constructing artificial intelligence and cognitive modelling projects.

It is free software, incredibly professional, well documented, fully supported, and available for a number of programming languages both mainstream and obscure.

There's also a concise introduction to neural networks (pdf) which covers some of the operating principles for those wanting to know how they work.

Neural networks are used both as software tools for completing otherwise difficult tasks, and in cognitive science for simulating cognitive processes.

In neuropsychology, neural networks are often created to simulate a certain cognitive task, and then the network is 'damaged' to see whether the network can predict the effects of brain injury or impairment.

This connectionist approach to cognitive science was made particularly popular by the 1986 book Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition (ISBN 0262631121) by David Rumelhart and James McClelland.

Link to Fast Artificial Neural Network Library.
pdf of 'Neural Networks Made Simple'.
Link to Wikipedia page on 'connectionism'.

—Vaughan.

April 25, 2006

The Age of Neuroelectronics:

Technology and society magazine The New Atlantis has a comprehensive article on 'neuroelectronics' - the science of interfacing digital components with neural wetware.

The potential merging of mind and machine thrills, frightens, and intrigues us. For decades, experiments at the border between brains and electronics have led to sensationalistic media coverage, vivid science fiction portrayals, and dreams of cyborgs and bionic men. But recently, this area of science has seen remarkable advances—from robotic limbs controlled directly by brain activity, to brain implants that alter the mood of the depressed, to rats steered by remote control. Adam Keiper explores the peculiar history and present directions of this research, and considers the challenges of staying human in the age of neuroelectronics.

Link to article 'The Age of Neuroelectronics'.

—Vaughan.

April 07, 2006

Art and consciousness:

Like a neuropsychological tag-team, the other half of the Brain Ethics blog duo has followed up his partner's recent Science and Consciousness Review article, with his own on Art and the Conscious Brain.

Martin Skov specialises in neuroaesthetics, the science of understanding how art and beauty is understood by the mind and brain.

Critics sometimes ask if the illumination of neurobiological mechanisms adds anything important to old-fashioned – i.e., philosophical – aesthetic inquiry. I think that already Plato and Aristotle already answered that. As they pointed out, works of art are created with the express purpose of provoking a mental representation in the brains that experience them. Thus, to understand the nature of art you also have to understand the cognitive processes responsible for turning the perceptual properties of any art object into a mental representation. How colour, lines, etc. are magically transformed into Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile is very much a question of how the brain works.

Neuroaesthetics is becoming an increasingly popular field in contemporary neuroscience, with an increasing number of books and even regular conferences now devoted to the field.

Update: It looks like Science and Consciousness Review are having some minor connection issues at the moment. Hopefully, normal service should be resumed shortly.

Link to Art and the Conscious Brain by Martin Skov.

—Vaughan.

April 03, 2006

Six impossible things:

Several recent reviews have tackled biologist Lewis Wolpert's new book on the biology of belief Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (ISBN 0571209203).

In his book, Wolpert tackles religious belief in some detail, joining the fray with Daniel Dennett who has recently been promoting his own book on religion Breaking the Spell (see previously).

John Gray's review in the New Statesman is most skeptical about both Dennett and Wolpert, arguing that they're "of interest chiefly to anxious humanists seeking to boost their sagging faith".

The review in Time Magazine tackles the scientific arguments in more detail, as does the review in The Times, and are both more positive in their appraisal - with The Times going as far as saying it has "beautiful and sometimes breathtaking clarity".

Link to review in the New Statesman.
Link to review in Time Magazine.
Link to review in The Times.

—Vaughan.

March 23, 2006

Freud's not dead:

Newsweek has a special edition on the legacy of Sigmund Freud and its relevance for the modern mind and brain sciences.

The issue includes several articles and takes a comprehensive approach, looking at Freud's early life as a neurologist, and interviews Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel about the influence of Freud on modern psychiatry.

The issue is also accompanied by a podcast interview with Kandel and psychoanalyst Leon Hoffman (section on Freud start's 18 minutes 40 seconds in).

Link to 'Freud in Our Midst' (via Anomalist).

—Vaughan.

March 22, 2006

Neuroessentialism:

I'm a bit late to the neuroword party with this one, but here goes:

Neuroessentialism - the belief in, or tactic of, invoking evidence, or merely terms, from neuroscience to justify claims at the psychological level. See also neuromysticism, neurobollocks.

There's a mild example of this in George Lakoff's Don't Think of An Elephant which is an otherwise excellent book:

"One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors - conceptual structures like those we have been describing. The frames are in the synapses of our brains, physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don't fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored."
(p73, which you can also view here)

He's talking about frames (psychology). He's advancing a claim that frame-incompatible facts get rejected (psychology). What do the statements 'The frames are in the synapses of our brains, physically present in the form of neural circuitry' add to the argument? Nothing. They do not provide any evidence nor do they even provide any information - everything psychological is represented somehow in the brain, and knowing that conceptual frames exist in neural circuits doesn't help us figure out anything about their properties. The statements are contentless.

There's no need to pick on Lakoff particularly, it is just what I'm reading today. Far more offensive examples of neuroessentialism abound (Brain Gym springs to mind). This is in part because neuroscience is a technical and sexily complicated discipline, and in part because of the mistaken belief that evidence at a lower level of description somehow has explanatory precedence over that at a higher level of description (cf physics envy). Many claims about human psychology are adequately and entirely addressed at the level of behaviour with no need to invoke neuroscientific evidence. Indeed, for many psychological claims neuroscience can add little or nothing to our assessment of their truth. Taking for example this claim that frame-incompatible facts get rejected, knowing that frames are embedded in brain tells us nothing, but even knowing how frames are embedded in the brain may not be as useful as it first appears. Whatever neuroscientific facts we discovered about frames, the final judgement of the truth of this claim would rely on answers to questions such as is it true that frame-incompatible facts tend to get rejected? In what range of circumstances is this true and how can it be affected? The last word would be behavioural evidence, regardless of what information was provided by neuroscience.

—tom.

March 10, 2006

Post-traumatic growth:

Trauma has been traditionally considered as intrinsically pathological. Some psychologists are now arguing that although damaging, the experience of trauma can also inspire some people to change in positive ways.

The concept has been named 'post-traumatic growth' and is the subject of significant debate among contemporary researchers and clinicians.

The debate is covered in a recent article for Psychology Today where proponents of both sides of the argument make their case.

The article relates the experience of trauma to activities such as ultra-marathon running where competitors may run hundreds of miles and push themselves to physical and psychological exhaustion in an attempt to achieve new goals.

A slightly more weighty article on the topic appeared in a 2004 article in the Psychiatric Times where psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun aimed to explain how such personal development could occur after extreme experiences.

One thing which is still not clear, is how many people experience 'post-traumatic growth' and whether it is more than optimistic thinking after the event, as research into the phenomenon is still relatively thin on the ground.

Link to Psychology Today article "The Hidden Side of Happiness".
Link to Psychiatric Times article "Posttraumatic Growth: A New Perspective on Psychotraumatology".

—Vaughan.

March 03, 2006

Consciousness exists to make itself unnecessary:

While we're thinking about the nature of free conscious choice, this is extremely relevant. John Bargh, in this chapter - Bypassing the Will: Towards Demystifying the Nonconscious Control of Social Behavior [1] - takes evidence from several different subdisciplines and argues that consciousness - that thing which gives us our experience of deliberate control - exists exactly to make automatic, 'unwilled', behaviours possible.

Bargh talks about cases where the individual’s behavior is being “controlled” by external stimuli, not by his or her own consciously-accessible intentions or acts of will. and they are not aware of the true causes of their behavior. These exist, he says, not despite conscious control, but because of it

In a very real sense, then, the purpose of consciousness -- why it evolved -- may be for the assemblage of complex nonconscious skills. In harmony with the general plasticity of human brain development, people have the capability of building ever more complex automatic “demons” that fit their own idiosyncratic environment, needs, and purposes. As William James (1890) argued, consciousness drops out of those processes where it is no longer needed, freeing itself for where it is...Intriguingly, then, one of the primary objectives of conscious processing may be to eliminate the need for itself in the future by making learned skills as automatic as possible. It would be ironic indeed if, given the current juxtaposition of automatic and conscious mental processes in the field of psychology, the evolved purpose of consciousness turns out to be the creation of ever more complex nonconscious processes.

[1] Bypassing the Will: Towards Demystifying the Nonconscious Control of Social Behavior by John Bargh (2004), in The New Unconscious; ed. R. Hassin, J. Uleman, & J. Bargh. Oxford University Press.

—tom.

March 02, 2006

Does advertising erode free will:

Ah...now here's the nub of the argument: advertisements erode free will, they are manipulations designed to subvert conscious judgement (I paraphrase Clay Shirky at Edge.org). Shirky mentions one particular judgement bias, that of super-sizing, but the general form of bias should be familiar to anyone who has been reading Mind Hacks, and/or my recent posts about avertising (like this one). Quoting Shirky

Consider the phenomenon of 'super-sizing', where a restaurant patron is offered the chance to increase the portion size of their meal for some small amount of money. This presents a curious problem for the concept of free will — the patron has already made a calculation about the amount of money they are willing to pay in return for a particular amount of food. However, when the question is re-asked, — not "Would you pay $5.79 for this total amount of food?" but "Would you pay an additional 30 cents for more french fries?" — patrons often say yes, despite having answered "No" moments before to an economically identical question. Super-sizing is expressly designed to subvert conscious judgment, and it works.

Shirky believes this is much more serious than just unfair advertising.

Our legal, political, and economic systems, the mechanisms that run modern society, all assume that people are uniformly capable of consciously modulating their behaviors...[These] days are now ending, and everyone from advertisers to political consultants increasingly understands, in voluminous biological detail, how to manipulate consciousness in ways that weaken our notion of free will.

In the coming decades, our concept of free will, based as it is on ignorance of its actual mechanisms, will be destroyed by what we learn about the actual workings of the brain

Previously I argued that creating changes in people's behaviour didn't necessarily mean that people were being coerced, or that their will was being taken away from them. The demonstration of influences on behaviour doesn't knock down any strong version of free will - the kind of free will which is entirely unaffected by anything else doesn't seem like a variety of free will worth wanting.

People faced a similar dilemma in the nineteenth century when statistics were first compiled of suicides. If we can predict from census records that the number of suicides in a parish in a year will be around seven, where does that leave the free will of those who 'choose' to kill themselves that year? Are you taking away the freedom of the seven people who now have to die to fulfill your prediction? (Philip Ball discusses the science and philosophy of this in his book, Critical Mass). Most people, now, would probably be happy to say that just calculating the statistic doesn't effect anything. But with the case of interventions - either marketing strategies or psychology experiments - which have the explicit purpose of changing behaviour, it isn't so clear that we can happily say that individual freedom isn't being unfairly manipulated. Cialdini's point about suicide contaigon makes me worry that there is no clear line between persuasion and coercion, between biasing people's judgements in small ways, over unimportant decisions, and fundamentally changing the way people make decisions about some of the most important things in life.

I'm happy to throw my hands up at this point and say I've no idea what the right way to resolve this is. Free will seems to dissolve as you draw away from it - as an individual I don't feel manipulated, but when i look at other people - especially groups of other people, it seems like I can see manipulation going on. Has anyone got any useful conceptual structures I can borrow to see me through this?

—tom.

February 27, 2006

Cognitive psychology of belief in the supernatural:

The current issue of American Scientist has an excellent feature article on 'The Cognitive Psychology of Belief in the Supernatural'.

It argues that our ability to reason about other people's intentions underlies many common supernatural beliefs. In other words, we have a tendency to see intentions and consciousness even in mechanical aspects of the world.

The author is psychologist Dr Jesse Bering who has been using cognitive psychology to try and understand areas that are traditionally tackled by philosophy, such as belief in souls, causation and existential meaning.

In one experiment, Bering used puppets to describe a story in which a mouse is eaten by an alligator. Children of different ages were then asked to describe the mouse's ability to feel or know things after its death.

Younger children were more likely than older children to attribute thoughts, desires and even biological states to the mouse, suggesting that the idea of an afterlife is more likely to be intuitive and not one that is learned through ongoing cultural experience.

Jesse is interested in how some of the beliefs surrounding these issues might be influenced or related to common aspects of the mind that have evolved to solve other, more practical problems of life and survival.

The article is only available in the print edition, or online to subscribers, but Jesse has kindly offered to provide a copy of the article to anyone who contacts him by email.

Link to summary of article from American Scientist.
Link to homepage of Dr Jesse Bering.

—Vaughan.

February 20, 2006

Reasons why you don't exist:

The band of reality skeptics over at The Huge Entity have finished their series of Reasons Why You Don't Exist.

As we mentioned previously, there's a contribution from our very own Christian Jarret, and a number of other authors pushing their own brand of mind altering concepts.

Gerry Canavan questions the concept of 'you' as a unitary conscious experience and Thomas Herold takes aim at free will.

Jaime Morrison argues with himself on the reliability of information provided by perception and comes to the conclusion that neither of him exists, and Daniel Rourke questions whether the world as we experience it is just another reality-bending trick the brain has evolved to use.

...and there's more where those came from.

Link to 'Reasons Why You Don't Exist'.

—Vaughan.

February 13, 2006

Internet mind control and the diagnosis of delusions:

A recent paper in the medical journal Psychopathology has analysed the links between websites of likely-delusional people who publish their experiences of 'mind control' on the internet, and has concluded that they challenge the psychiatric criteria for the diagnosis of delusions.

One of the defining features of a delusion is that it should not be a belief "ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture". Nevertheless, some researchers have noted that there is no clear measure of what is 'ordinarily accepted'.

It is also possible that cultures or subcultures could be based around beliefs that would otherwise be diagnosed as delusional. Until now, however, there have been no obvious examples of such subcultures identified.

In the Psychopathology paper, ten websites reporting psychosis-like 'mind control' experiences were identified. The reports were anonymised and independently blind-rated by three psychiatrists who confirmed that they reflect experiences stemming from psychosis.

The links between the websites were then analysed using a technique called social network analysis that allows the social network of the authors to be inferred.

This analysis suggested that the authors of the reports were part of a 'small world' social network, based around the content of likely-delusional beliefs (click here to see the network structure in a popup window).

This contradicts the current definition of a delusion, suggesting that it is becoming increasing redundant as technology shapes and re-shapes social networks.

It also suggests that, according to the current definition, anyone can 'cure' themselves of a delusion by using the internet to find or form a community of others who share the same belief!

Importantly, however, the researchers make clear that this research does not imply that all of the internet 'mind control' community are psychotic, as reports were chosen to specifically reflect psychosis-like experiences.

It is interesting, however, that the identified authors are also likely to be an active part of a wider, non-psychotic community, who may have similar, although differently motivated, concerns.

Link to abstract of study.
PDF of paper.

Disclaimer: This paper is from my own research group.

—Vaughan.

February 09, 2006

Existential crisis:

All this week over at the Huge Entity - Reasons YOU don't exist, including a brief contribution by moi based on fundamental attribution error.

—christian.

February 06, 2006

Cognitive science café:

Psychologist Tania Lombrozo has collected suggestions for the menu of the fictional (but delicious sounding) cognitive science café. It's both full of psychology in-jokes and gives a lighthearted crib-sheet for some of the most influential thinkers in the field.

Some of my favourites include:

The Turing Tester
Half Brie with apricot jam on a French roll, half vegan alternative — we bet you won't know which is which!

The Wason Cheese Selector
Grilled Portobello mushroom with cheese. If cheddar, then sesame bun. (Please check your order carefully.)

The Piagetian
A sandwich in four stages: sensational baguette, quantities of Swiss cheese that are anything but conservative, the concrete crunch of walnuts, and a dash of Cayenne pepper lead to this sandwich’s formal elegance.

PDF of 'Shepard's Tables: A Cognitive Science Café' (via Mixing Memory)

—Vaughan.

February 03, 2006

Cognitive psychology & advertising:

Here's another approach to understanding how adverts work - cognitive psychology, as discussed in this Wired article from 2002 (thanks Lauren!)

You'll probably not be surprised that I've lots of sympathy for experimenal psychology as a method for understanding adverts (as opposed to, say, semiotics). A conventional experimental cognitive psychology approach to understanding something about advertising would be:

1. Have an idea, e.g., I think Factor X makes people buy more stuff
2. Come up with an experiment which involves two situations which are identical except for the presence/absence of Factor X.
3. Include some measure which is a good enouch approximation for the behaviour 'buying' (it could be actual purchases, or it could be something like memory for the product, or extent of positive feelings for the product, which we just assume will convert into sales)
4. Do the experiment, write up the results, let the rest of the (psychology) world criticise your experiment
5. Do follow-up experiments to re-test your idea and counter criticisms.

Or something like that anyway. Here's an example from the Wired article:

One example: At the University of Texas at Austin, cognitive science professor Art Markman gave a group of hungry people a few bites of popcorn. Another group got no food. Then he showed his volunteers pictures of products – DVD players, shampoo, cars, French toast. The group whose appetite had been whetted with popcorn had a harder time concentrating on the nonfoods. One obvious implication, Markman says: Food samples may actually hurt nongrocery sales.

Now the strength here is that you both check if there is an effect at all, and you narrow down the possibiliies so that you have a rough idea what is causing it (again, cf a semiotic approach). The weakness is that even though you've shown an effect in the lab, you're not sure it will operate outside of the lab (the problem of generalisability), and you're not going to be sure that, even if it does operate, it isn't made irrelevant by some other factor that you weren't looking at with your experimental lens. So, for example, maybe wetting people's appetites does make it harder for them to concentrate on non-foods, but maybe in real life most people don't wet their appetites before shopping for non-foods, so the finding is irrelevant. Or maybe everyone wets their appetites, so the supermarket needn't worry about giving away samples - we're all peckish anyway. Or maybe we're more likely to buy non-foods when we're not concentrating (concentration being the thing actually measured in the experiment), so being peckish actually helps non-food sales.

Anyway, so lots of things could be true, and it takes more than a simple lab study to work out which factors are dominating, but the great virtue of the experimental method is that it gives strong hints as to what sorts of things can be operating and - just as important - what sort of things can't affect behaviour.

—tom.

February 02, 2006

Decoding Advertisements:

Judith Williamson's 'Decoding Advertisements' is a classic look at the semiotics of advertising - about how adverts construct and promolgate meaning, necessarily involving the customer in a system of signs and symbols, as a token in that system. It's a great book and, in some sense, a forerunner of Naomi Klein's book on Brands, No Logo

I'm going to talk about it because it is exactly not what I am interested in in terms of advertising and psychology.

The first advert discussed in the book (shown below, p18 in the book) is an advert for car tyres. The advert shows a car stopped just before the end of a jetty; the text reports how they drove the car 36,000 miles and then did an emergency stop to test the quality of the tyres. They stopped fine - in other words, 'these are good tyres'. But - aha! - says Judith Williamson - that is just the overt message of the advert. The covert message of the advert is captured in the image

The outside of the jetty resembles the outside of a tyre and the curve is suggestive of its shape: the whole jetty is one big tyre...The jetty is tough and strong, it withstands water and erosion and does not wear down: because of the visual resemblance we assume that this is true of the tyre as well. In the picture the jetty actually encloses the car, protectively surrounding it with solidity in the middle of dangerous water: similarly, the whole safety of the car and driver is wrapped up in the tyre, which stands up to the elements and supports the car. Thus what seemed to be merely a part of the apparatus for conveying a message about braking speed, turns out to be a message in itself, one that works not on the overt but almost on the unconscious level; and one which involves a connection being made, a correlation between two objects (tyre and jetty) not on a rational basis but by a leap made on the basis of appearance, juxtaposition and connotation.

Is this true? Do the qualities of the jetty occur to us and transfer to the tyres? Does this happen covertly, on an 'almost unconscious level'. Does this magic bypass the normal rational monitoring of our thoughts? Well, it could be true, maybe. But also, something like it could be true - maybe the image really plays the role of a phallic symbol and suggest to the viewer thoughts of masculine strength and durability. Or maybe something contradictory but similar in style is true - does the image suggest danger, when the tyres are meant to make you feel safe, so that really it is a bad advert. Or maybe people just like to look at a nice picture of a jetty in the sea. Or maybe they like the curves of the jetty, and this makes them feel positive about the thing they see at the same time (the logo of the tyre manufacturer). All of these things could be true - I don't believe Judith Williamson has any more idea than us which are true, and this is why I'm not interested in the semiotics of advertising at the moment.

The argument advanced in 'Decoding Advertisements' misses a critical step. Can it be shown that covert visual imagery affects consumer's buying behaviour? I don't doubt that covert visual imagery exists, nor even that in some circumstances has an effect, but does it have an effect in adverts? Till the whole class of influences talked about is demonstrated to be in operation, why should I believe these analyses of adverts are any more than psychoanalytic-spook stories?

So, while I'm alive to the use of decoding adverts using semiotics, the first stops on my investigation into adverts will be

the experimental evidence which shows that adverts do have an effect

the experimental evidence on what sorts of things affect behaviours

By 'sorts of things' I mean general categories like 'new information', 'social influence', 'status', 'sex appeal', 'positive emotions' - all things that at first glance seem more likely to be factors in adverts' success. I'll leave the fine, critical-theory, detail for later, and until I can be persuaded that, in an advert, a jetty is more than just a jetty.

Ref:

Williamson, Judith. (1978). Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Boyars. You can get a flavour for the book from this discussion, which includes examples. Judith Williamson is a flag on the fantastic semiotics black run.

—tom.

January 28, 2006

Cracking the neural code:

There's a piece in this month's Adbusters magazine on 'cracking the neural code' as part of a feature on 'Big Ideas of 2006':

Chances are you have never heard of the neural code. And yet, from both a practical and philosophical perspective, the neural code is the most important remaining scientific mystery. Analogous to the machine code of a digital computer, the neural code is the software, set of rules, syntax, that transforms electrical pulses in the brain into perceptions, memories, decisions. A solution to the neural code could – in principle – give us almost unlimited power over our psyches, because we could monitor and manipulate brain cells with exquisite precision by speaking to them in their own private language.

The article is full of sci-fi speculation, but notes that it is grounded in current scientific developments and particularly the developing field of neuroprosthetics.

Link to 'We're Cracking the Neural Code, the Brain's Secret Language'.

—Vaughan.

January 18, 2006

I want my NTV:

To follow on from a recent post on videos of neuroscience talks available online, the National Institutes of Health have an additional 129 neuroscience lectures available as streaming video.

The topics cover everything from Dopamine and Motivated Behaviors to A Different View of the Primary Visual Cortex.

Some of the talks are on topics completely new to me, like one on 'ghrelin' - which sounds like something you'd find in a health food shop - but I'm sure all will become clear.

Link to NIH Neuroscience Videocasting.

—Vaughan.

December 30, 2005

Handbags at 40 paces:

"Clinical syndromes are not God's gift to cognitive neuropsychology: a reply to a rebuttal to an answer to a response to the case against syndrome-based research."

Caramazza and Badecker get their slap-down in early during a heated 1991 debate on whether it is best to study the symptoms or syndromes of brain injury when attempting to theorise about normal cognitive function.

Link to PubMed entry for Caramazza and Badecker paper.

—Vaughan.

December 28, 2005

The Mind-Body Problem - Who Cares?:

Guy Claxton said this a few years ago in the Journal of Consciousness Studies:

Any discussion of the causal status of conscious experience has to start, therefore, with the recognition that what appears to be a dispassionate enquiry is actually a question of life and death importance to which there is only one permissible answer.

The preceeding context is given below the fold...

(quoting Claxton)

Just so with myself. There is abundant evidence that I impute causal relationships between bits of my experience — my imagining a calm meadow and a physical feeling of relaxation; the thought ‘I’d better get up now’ and the act of getting out of bed — on the basis of a sufficient tightness of coupling between the events, and whether their conjunction makes sense in terms of the causal narratives through which I habitually interpret my experience. I ask myself, preconsciously for the most part, a number of questions, and on the basis of the answers, I either do or do not make that causal attribution. Is A reliably followed by B? Do

the delays between A and B fall within a range that I can interpret causally, given the kinds of folk psychological stories with which my culture has equipped me?

...

And especially: what key aspects of those stories might be jeopardised if I were to withdraw the imputation that A is the cause of B?

The answer to the last question, for many people much of the time, is: ‘my sense of self’. The existence of a causal relationship between conscious states, especially thoughts and intentions, and physical states or actions — taking the cello out of its case and beginning to practise; refraining from taking the last piece of cake—is one of the axioms of the garden-variety self. If I acknowledge that this causal relationship does not obtain, or not enough, then I have to conclude that I am ‘broken’: mad, out of control, or the plaything of impersonal forces. While the axiom remains unchallenged, the mind–body causal relationship is not neutrally discovered; it is mandatorily imposed. I am obliged to find it whether it is there or not. I will rig the evidence if I have to, and shamelessly deny that I have done so. Any discussion of the causal status of conscious experience has to start, therefore, with the recognition that what appears to be a dispassionate enquiry is actually a question of life and death importance to which there is only one permissible answer.

Source: Claxton, G. (2003). The mind-body problem: who cares? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, 35-8. PDF here

—tom.

December 14, 2005

Racism, mental illness and the limits of diagnosis:

The Washington Post reports that a group led by psychologist Edward Dunbar are pushing to get extreme prejudice, such as intense racism or homophobia, diagnosable as a mental illness.

It may seem a little ridiculous to medicalise what are essentially extreme opinions, but the move is interesting for what it says about psychiatric diagnosis in general. In particular, it cuts to the very idea of what defines a mental disorder.

For example, the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia are based around two ideas:

The first is that there are behaviours and experiences present that are atypical or culturally anomalous (e.g. 'hearing voices' or delusions), the second is that the disorder involves some form of disability - in the case of schizophrenia, the criteria specify social or occupational dysfunction.

It could be argued that extreme racism could involve both. Extreme racism is indeed uncommon, and in today's multicultural society, might involve a significant social deficit if contact with other races or cultures is consistently avoided or becomes distressing.

In fact, considering that about 11% of healthy adults score above the average of delusional inpatients on measures of delusional thinking, it could be argued that extreme racism (at least in some countries) might be more atypical than the sort of beliefs that are typically diagnosed as signs of mental disorder.

In other words, it's quite hard to refute the idea that extreme racism isn't a mental disorder within the general philosophy of the current diagnostic system.

This highlights the social relativity of the diagnostic system, which you might either use to argue for the inclusion of a new diagnosis of 'racist disorder', or, perhaps, more realistically, to draw attention to the fact that the current system does not adequately define mental pathology in all cases.

Link to article 'Psychiatry Ponders Whether Extreme Bias Can Be an Illness'.

—Vaughan.

December 01, 2005

How to read a paper:

Via Ben 'Bad Science' Goldacre (here) comes this hot tip: Trisha Greenhalgh's How to read a paper. Although it focusses on medical research, many of the principles apply to all scientific papers. Although it's great when science can be expressed in everyday language, the ability to go direct to the original research, as reported by the researcher themselves, is an invaluable skill (and one hopefully this link, and the Mind Hacks book, can give you some handles on).

—tom.

November 28, 2005

Walking zombie syndrome:

Antonio Melechi explores one of the bizarre corners of the medical literature in his book Fugitive Minds (p211, ISBN 0099436272):

In 1979, the Journal of the Tennessee Medical Association announced that the 'Walking zombie syndrome' - a condition in which depression and withdrawal led individuals to unconsciously believe that they were dead - was on the increase. Illness, coma, high fever, operations performed under partial anaesthesia, and bereavement were, it claimed, just some of the situations through which a 'death suggestion' could be unwittingly assimilated.

Fortunately, there was, according to the hypnotherapists who 'discovered' the condition, one simple and effective cure: age regression. By returning patients to the event which triggered the 'death suggestion', the 'symptoms of death' could, it was claimed, be at once relived and remedied.

Although most physicians remained unaware of the diagnosis or treatment, the pseudo-illness continued to claim factitious casualties. By the late 1980s, the United States had apparently overtaken Haiti as the zombie capital of the world. According to one estimate, there were 'thousands of walking zombies on the streets of every city'.

Link to PubMed entry for 'The Walking Zombie syndrome in depressive disorders'.
Link to review of 'Fugitive Minds'.

—Vaughan.

November 21, 2005

Voting causes happiness? Really?:

I love the New Economics Foundation and I think they do great work, but at first glance this report on Britain's democractic deficit looks like it makes the classic correlation-is-not-causation blunder:

'There is significant evidence that the democratic deficit at the heart of the British electoral system is making us unhappy. The 2001 post election survey shows that there is a strong link between levels of personal well-being, the health of communities and voting behaviour. People who voted in the election tended to be more trusting, have higher levels of civic duty, were more engaged in their local communities and were happier than people who didn’t vote.'

More here

—tom.

November 20, 2005

Stingy Materialism:

Geoffrey Miller, in an essay on the future of neuroscience, has this to say about the relationship of mind to brain:

Too many of us have become Stingy Materialists. A Stingy Materialist takes the view that subjective experiences may not be real if they have not yet been associated with particular brain areas, neurotransmitters, or genes. They suppose that if we have found the brain area for pain, then pain is a real emotion; but if we haven’t yet found the brain area for sexual jealousy or existential dread, they are probably not real emotions. Likewise, if we have found neurotransmitter deficits in schizophrenia, then it is a real disorder; but if we have not found such deficits in irritability, then perhaps it is not a real disorder.

Stingy Materialists lack confidence in their doctrine and in their consciousness, with the result that they fetishize neuroscience, and seek its approval for all things subjective. Since neuroscience is still in its infancy, this results in an infantile view of human nature, in which people are portrayed with crude outlines and primary colors, like stereotypes from a Jerry Bruckheimer action film.

Read the rest:
Miller, G. F. (2002). The science of subtlety. In J. Brockman (Ed.), The next fifty years, pp. 85-92. New York: Vintage. Link (MS Word doc, sorry)

—tom.

November 02, 2005

Bad science on autism vaccine link:

The Guardian's Bad Science column, written by doctor Ben Goldacre, is an excellent resource for anyone who wants scientific straight talk on fashionable nonsense, and often references core ideas of the philosophy of science (which is a neat trick to pull off in a few hundred words in a newspaper column). This week Ben fires off both barrels at the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Philips for utterly misunderstanding the implications of a systematic review of studies investigating a link between the MMR vaccine and autism (there most probably isn't one). Philips takes criticsms of existing research showing no connection between MMR and autism to jump to the opposite conclusion, supported by flimsy evidence for there being a link(Creationist watchers, does this bad science syllogism feel familiar?). Ben's recommendation is strong, but justified:

Either learn how to interpret data yourself, or trust those who can do it for you

Details in the full article

—tom.

September 07, 2005

An Intelligently Designed Brain:

A letter in the Economist (27th of August) on Intelligent Design:

SIR – The human brain has 100 billion extremely complex neurons connected by 1,000 trillion synapses. It is mathematically impossible for anything this unimaginably complex to have been the product of an unguided evolution, even over limitless aeons. One doesn't have to know the rules of mathematical probability to recognise this. The brain could only have been created by a limitless intelligence, call it what you may.

Aside from the fact that the letter writer is out by a factor of ten on the number of neurons in the brain (there are 1,000 billion neurons, with an average of 1,000 synapses) he is also advancing a fallacious argument. The human brain may be tremendously complex, but it isn't a complexity designed by God. You start your life with exactly one cell, and it's not even a brain cell. In the womb this cell turns into the 1,000 billion cells of the brain and all the other body cells besides, all without the intervention of God at any stage. The complexity of the brain, a staggering complexity which develops under the guidence of natural laws, is actually an argument against 'Intelligent Design', not for it.

—tom.

August 27, 2005

Death to common sense:

Online science think-tank Edge has a discussion about the role of common sense theories in explaining physics and cognitive science.

Science writer John Horgan bemoanes the fact that scientific theories have become so complex and fantastical that common sense has gone out of the window.

He cites various examples in the physical and 'mind sciences' which, he claims, demonstrates that theories are becoming useless and untestable.

In reply, Horgan's comments are met with a robust response, with psychologist Daniel Gilbert going as far as saying "such a silly trifle that it doesn't dignify serious response"!

Link to 'In Defense of Common Sense'.

—Vaughan.

August 18, 2005

Evolutionary psychology: The fightback:

A piece by Amanda Schaffer on Slate charts the growing opposition to evolutionary psychology. Although this opposition has always been present, it is being increasingly based on scientific rather than political arguments.

Previous criticisms of evolutionary psychology (EP), such as Rose and Rose's 'Alas Poor Darwin', have not always been received well, with some reviews suggesting they were attacking a straw-man version of EP and using politically motivated arguments.

Defenders of EP have sometimes relied on the angle that critics are not well-versed in biology (notably, not a criticism that could be used against 'Alas Poor Darwin') and misunderstand the scientific evidence.

A recent book by David Buller (mentioned previously on Mind Hacks) has gained most publicity for dissecting the evidence used to back up EP, and showing that it is not as strongly supported as some of its champions claim.

One recent review, by philosopher Jerry Fodor, applaudes Buller's careful analysis of the data, but disagrees with some of Buller's conclusions.

In particular, Fodor feels his acceptance of a form of evolutionary adaptation for mental states is misguided, a finished with some advice for would-be gamblers on successful theories:

Over the years, people keep proposing theories that go: "what everybody really wants is just . . ." (fill in the blank). Versions fashionable in their times have included: money, power, sex, death, freedom, happiness, Mother, The Good, pleasure, success, status, salvation, immortality, self-realization, reinforcement, penises (in the case of women), larger penises (in the case of men), and so on. The track record of such theories has not been good; in retrospect they often look foolish or vulgar or both. Maybe it will turn out differently for "what everybody really wants is to maximize his relative contribution to the gene pool". But I don’t know any reason to think that it will, and I sure wouldn’t advise you to bet the farm.

Link to article 'Cave Thinkers: How evolutionary psychology gets evolution wrong'.
Link to review of 'Adapting Minds' by Jerry Fodor.

—Vaughan.

August 02, 2005

How culture shapes illness:

Media analysis magazine Stay Free! has an interview with medical historian Edward Shorter on how psychiatric symptoms have changed over the years, showing, he claims, how we subconsciously express culturally acceptable distress.

The interview was conducted in June 2003, which I missed it at the time, but Shorter's work is usually too good to pass up when you get the chance.

Author of the acclaimed A History of Psychiatry, he is not easily pigeon-holed into the simple labels usually given to those who pitch into the psychiatry debate.

Although a strong believer in the reality of mental illness, he presents evidence for the influence of culture on how symptoms express themselves, and how doctors' expectations affect what they diagnose and treat.

In contrast to the usual tempered and cautious claims made by academics, he is not afraid to state his point of view in clear terms, making provocative points, even if you don't agree with him.

STAY FREE!: You wrote about how some of the most fashionable people have the most cutting edge symptoms, the ones that are most medically up to date. Can you give me an example?

SHORTER: If we're talking about today, new illnesses appear first among educated people simply because they are more plugged into medical media. These middle- and upper-class people are the first to begin monitoring themselves or their children for evidence of peanut-butter allergies or excessive tiredness. It is from these relatively small social groups that the symptoms radiate out.

Shorter reflects a growing trend in understanding the social dimensions of psychopathology.

Anthropologist Roland Littlewood's Pathologies of the West, and sociologist Robert Bartholomew's Exotic Deviance both examine the issue from different angles with refreshing insight.

Link to interview with Edward Shorter from Stay Free! magazine.
Link to article 'Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness: From possessed nuns to chemical and biological terrorism fears' from the British Journal of Psychiatry.

—Vaughan.

July 27, 2005

Psychology's top 10 misguided ideas:

Here's one we can all join in on. Psychology Today magazine has a column from earlier this year on The Loose Screw Awards which gives out (notional) prizes for 'psychology's top 10 misguided ideas'. This includes "The P.T. Barnum Medal for Mass-Market Potential" (which goes to the Mozart effect), "The Idea That Launched a Thousand Suits" (recovered memories) and "Most Bureaucratic" which goes to the idea that terminally ill people go through five distinct stages of dying (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) and that any deviation from this strict pattern is detrimental to the patient. It has been claimed that the theory was based on interviews with patients who hadn't been told that they were terminally ill. Which would explain their anger and denial - they were being lied to by the very people who were supposed to be looking after them!

Fun as the list in the article is, I can't help feeling that there are a few ideas that missed out on prizes, or at least on honourable mentions. What about a "Scientific Gold-Rush Prize" (Neuroimaging?). Or a "Delusions of Grandeur Trophy" (Evolutionary Psychology? Psychoanalysis? Could be a close race...). Maybe the "Restating the Obvious in Esoteric Jargon Medal" (we'd probably need a gold, silver and bronze for this one).

A few years ago a poll of 200 psychiatrists produced a similar list of bad ideas in mental health. The Independent ran an article on it ('Ten Things That Drive Psychiatrists To Distraction') and there's quite a few items (psychosurgery, electroshock therapy) that I'd put in my top ten. All in all, a sharp reminder of the sad history of ideas in psychology. Anyone got any other nominations?

—tom.