Mind Hacks: Theory Archives

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.