Month: September 2006

Today has been designated as World Hearing Voices Day to raise awareness of the experience of hearing voices.

Although the stereotype is that hearing voices is associated with mental illness, the majority of people who hear voices do not have mental illness and are never in need or help or assistance because of their experiences.

There is now a world-wide hearing voices movement that aims to provide an alternative to the medical model (which has traditionally seen ‘voices’ as symptoms) and reframe them as part of the rich tapestry of human existence.

The movement has a curious beginning. Dutch psychiatrist Marius Romme was challenged by one of his patients who had found that her own explanation of her voices gave her far more relief than the psychiatric explanation.

Romme discovered that many other voices hearers had this experience, and, consequently, he and a voice hearer discussed this experience on a Dutch television chat show.

The show was flooded with callers who also heard voices, the majority of whom had never needed medical help.

From this, the Hearing Voices Network was founded in the UK to support voice hearers, and Romme has written a number of books on the subject.

Accepting Voices (ISBN 9781874690139) was co-written with journalist and now psychiatric researcher Sandra Escher and provides advice and information for those who experience voices.

Many voice hearers who do find their voices distressing, will often use both psychiatric help, and the help of non-psychiatric support groups to manage their experiences.

ABC Radio’s All in the Mind recently had a special on the science and culture of hearing voices and the transcript of the show is available online.

Link to Wikipedia article on Hearing Voices Movememt.
Link to transcript of All in the Mind on hearing voices.
Link to recent research on hearing voices (via BB).

NERO is an award-winning futuristic computer game where the player trains squadrons of android soldiers, to be released and pitted against soldiers trained by another player.

Crucially, the android soliders learn using a neural network that adapts via a genetic algorithm.

For the NERO project we are using a specific neuroevolutionary algorithm called NEAT, Neuro-Evolution of Augmenting Topologies. Unlike most neuroevolutionary algorithms, NEAT starts with an artificial neural network of minimal connectivity and adds complexity only when it helps solve a problem. This helps ensure that the algorithm does not produce unnecessarily complex solutions.

In NERO we are introducing a new real-time variant of NEAT, called rtNEAT, in which a small population evolves while you watch. (Most genetic algorithms use generation-based off-line processing, and only provide a result at the end of some pre-specified amount of training.)

The neural network is based on published research and the documentation page contains a raft of information on game play and the science behind the software.

There’s screenshots and video of the game in action, and it’s free to download.

Link to website for NERO.

UK epilepsy support charity Epilepsy Action has created a MySpace profile – the first neuro charity I know that has a page on the social networking site.

It’s part of an drive to increase the availability of epilepsy information to young people.

The page has updates on the latest news from the charity, as well as advice so you can educate yourself on what to do if you find someone having a seizure.

On a related note, the BBC has an interview with well-known UK author and speaker Rabbi Lionel Blue on his own epilepsy diagnosis.

Link to Epilepsy Action MySpace profile.
Link to interview with Rabbi Lionel Blue.

It seems the story about the sleeping-pill zolpidem potentially helping people in a persistent vegetative state has turned up again, virtually unchanged from when it first broke in May.

The Telegraph reports that Professor Robert Winston has criticised the recent British Association Festival of Science for allowing an ‘unbalanced’ discussion of parapsychology as “I know of no serious properly done studies which make me feel that this is anything other than nonsense.”

This is a little ironic, as Winston recently had adverts for ‘clever milk’ pulled from newspapers by the advertising standards authority for being misleading.

In the adverts, he claimed that a brand of Omega-3 fortified milk boosted children’s intelligence. The authority did not find evidence to support this claim.

Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column in The Guardian summarises the evidence as follows:

Contrary to what the pill-peddlers would tell you, the evidence for omega 3 pills being beneficial in children is really rather thin: only a handful of small trials have been published in proper journals, and at last count 3 were positive, 2 were negative, and none were in mainstream children.

The conclusion of these studies is about as strong as that drawn from a recent review in Psychological Bulletin on psychokinesis.

The review concluded by saying that the evidence was weakly positive in support of this ‘psi-ability’, but they couldn’t be sure that the effect wasn’t due to a reporting bias.

In contrast to the Omega-3 studies, however, the authors of the review found that the psychokinesis studies were generally of a high standard.

One of the ironies of this debate is that parapsychology studies are often some of most rigorously conducted in science, largely to avoid accusations of ‘pseudoscience’.

The fact that they tend to find a weak effect at best (and most commonly no effect) doesn’t make them bad science.

Furthermore, as pointed out by a 2004 New Scientist article, (pdf) the studies are typically better conducted and can produce greater supporting evidence than the often notoriously-biased pharmaceutical drug trial reports.

To quote psychologist William James “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices”.

Link to Telegraph article “Festival attacked over paranormal ‘nonsense'”.
Link to Times article “‘Misleading’ Winston milk ads pulled”.
pdf of New Scientist article ‘Opposites Detract’.

The 6th edition of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon is now available on Retrospectacle.

A curious news report from what sounds like a difficult court case:

A man has been acquitted of raping a woman – because she had at least 14 personalities.

In a bizarre case, a jury was told that the 40-year-old man was accused of sexually assaulting the woman 11 times in her home in 2004 while some of her alter egos looked on and at times intervened.

During the District Court trial that finished last Tuesday, the court was told three of the 33-year-old woman’s personalities were present at one of the alleged incidents.

The complainant said two identities had been at other incidents.

Top WA criminal lawyer Judith Fordham, who watched the case, said it was the strangest she had seen.

“Although there have been many cases in our courts where the accused has a mental illness, and some where victims or alleged victims suffer from mental illness, in 20 years as a lawyer I have never seen anything quite like this,” she said.

Multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder, is a controversial diagnosis that generally causes confusion whenever it appears in a legal case.

In one famous case, Kenneth Bianchi (the ‘Hillside Strangler’) claimed that he could not be held responsible for a series of murders as another ‘evil’ personality committed the crimes.

He was suspected to be faking and was caught out when a psychologist deliberately fed him the false information that MPD “always” involved more than two personalities.

Another personality ‘appeared’ shortly after and Bianchi was convicted of the murders.

Link to news report from News.com.au (via anomalist).
Link to BBC info on the Bianchi case.

There’s a curious article from The Guardian on the work of two researchers who are investigating the link between beauty and intelligence, and who argue that a genuine link exists.

Are beautiful people more intelligent than the rest of us? Satoshi Kanazawa and Jody Kovar think so. In a 17-page study called Why Beautiful People Are More Intelligent, they explain bluntly: “Individuals perceive physically attractive others to be more intelligent than physically unattractive others. While most researchers dismiss this perception as a ‘bias’ or ‘stereotype’, we contend that individuals have this perception because beautiful people indeed are more intelligent.”

The full paper is available online as a pdf and there’s a previous write-up from the Washington Post.

It seems the research is largely on the link between beauty and intelligence in females, however.

Link to Guardian article ‘Pretty smart’.
Link to Washington Post article.
pdf of research article.