Year: 2007

Encephalon 20 hits the net

The 20th edition of Encephalon has just been published containing the best in the last fortnight’s mind and brain writing.

This edition is hosted by science writer Orli Van Mourik’s blog Neurontic and has everything from a neurologist answering questions on computers and consciousness, to studies suggesting that the brain (particularly in mothers) may be specially attuned to the sound of baby cries.

There’s plenty more similarly interesting science stories at the link below.

Link to Encephalon 20.

Violence linked to price of beer

A research report published in Applied Economics has found that the number of patients with violence-related injuries treated in hospital emergency rooms is related to the price of beer.

The paper is available online as a pdf and is from Cardiff University’s Violence and Society Research Group.

The researchers examined admissions to 58 hospital accident and emergency departments over a five year period and found that as the price of beer increased, violence-related injuries decreased.

In general, studies have found that alcohol consumption increases both the risk of being a victim of violence and the perpetrator of it.

There are three main theories on why alcohol and violence are linked: i) due to the drug effects on the brain; ii) because people use alcohol as an excuse for violent behaviour; iii) because people who use alcohol might be more likely to be violent, perhaps due to personality factors like sensation-seeking, impulsivity or risk-taking.

Of course, these theories are not in competition and all the factors are likely to have some influence, but researchers are keen to find out how they interact to better understand the problem.

Interestingly, the Applied Economics study also looked at a number of other factors linked to violence and found that increases in poverty, unemployment, diversity of ethnic population, the summer months and major sporting events also independently predicted an increase in violence.

This combination of an economic and psychological approach to understand violence is particularly important for designing and implementing government or health service policies.

Cardiff University’s Violence and Society Research Group has an interesting history.

It was started by dentist and surgeon Prof Jonathan Shepherd who noticed the amount of facial glass injuries turning up in hospital.

Many turned out to be due to alcohol-fuelled violence and the Group’s research has shown that everything from glass type to availability of recycling facilities can reduce the number of injuries.

The research extended to include violence in general and now takes a comprehensive look at how both social and individual factors influence violent behaviour.

pdf of paper on price of beer and violence.
Link to Violence and Society Research Group page (with full-text papers).

Yes or No would be very misleading

“We are accustomed to think of any particular response as either learned or innate, which is apt to be a source of confusion in thinking about things… Is the response inherited or acquired? The answer is, Neither: either Yes or No would be very misleading.”

Pioneering neuropsychologist Donald Hebb highlights that fact that all human responses are a result of both inherited attributes and learnt experience.

Hebb is best known for his theory of how learning can be supported by networks of single neurons.

The theory, now called Hebbian learning, is a key aspect of artificial intelligence and neuroscience.

I got this quote from Oliver Sacks’ book Migraine but the source isn’t listed. If anyone knows exactly which of Hebb’s writings this comes from, do let me know.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments: It is from “The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory” – it’s on Google Books. Thanks John!

This Week in the History of Psychology

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

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

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

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

Top 10 influential psychotherapists

Psychotherapy Networker magazine is celebrating its 25th anniversary and has conducted a survey to find out the 10 most influential psychotherapists.

Over two and a half thousand (presumably) American psychotherapists responded to the question “Over the last 25 years, which figures have most influenced your practice?” from which the top ten were compiled.

This list is as follows:

1. Carl Rogers
2. Aaron Beck
3. Salvador Minuchin
4. Irvin Yalom
5. Virginia Satir
6. Albert Ellis
7. Murray Bowen
8. Carl Jung
9. Milton Erickson
10. John Gottman

The article discusses each of these key figures and their contribution to psychotherapy, as well as placing them in the wider context of psychological treatments for mental distress.

As well as outlining the most influential psychotherapists, another article looks at the 10 most influential research findings from the last 25 years that have influenced the development of modern psychotherapy.

Finally, an article on ‘Defining Psychotherapy’ cuts to the core of the debate over what psychotherapy is and what is should be in terms of both theory and everyday practice.

The articles are a fantastic introduction to both the theory behind psychological therapies and to what you might expect if you were to undertake therapy yourself, either as a client or a therapist.

Link to ‘The Top 10 Most Influential Therapists…’
Link to ‘Top 10 Research Findings…’
Link to article ‘Defining Psychotherapy’.

2007-04-06 Spike activity

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

The New York Times has a fantastic article on non-medical ways of dealing with auditory hallucinations and the growing hearing voices movement.

Steven Pinker has been doing talks recently on the psychology of violence and published and article in Edge outlining his main arguments.

The Neurophilosopher has a great post on how the brain makes sense of complex visual scenes and hybrid images.

Frontal Cortex looks just published research suggesting that depression may be overdiagnosed.

The New York Times has an article and video on how families cope with epilepsy and the stigma which is sadly still attached to the disorder.

The Times reviews Zimabardo’s new book The Lucifer Effect.

The Memory Hacker: Popular Science magazine looks at how one man is attempting to develop implantable chips to enhance memory function.

Time magazine is Getting Serious About Happiness in an article on the first PhD programme in positive psychology.

A study in consciousness

This month’s Prospect Magazine has an article by neuropsychologist Paul Broks that takes a recent book on consciousness as a starting point for an exploration of how the brain generates this curious form of self-awareness.

The book in question is Nicholas Humphrey’s Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness (ISBN 0674021797) that takes an evolutionary approach to understanding the ‘hard problem‘.

Broks wrote a fantastic meandering book on the effects of brain injury on consciousness called Into the Silent Land (ISBN 1843540347) and writes in a wonderfully conversational style.

He highlights Humphrey’s novel approach to understanding consciousnes and how this may have arisen through natural selection:

In his 1992 book A History of the Mind, Humphrey argued that consciousness is grounded in bodily sensation rather than thought, and proposed a speculative evolutionary account of the emergence of sentience. Seeing Red is a refinement and extension of those ideas. Put simply, we don’t so much have sensations as do them. Sensation is “on the production side of the mind rather than the reception side.”

The article is both a review and a summary of Humphrey’s ideas and is well worth checking out.

Link to Prospect article ‘The Mystery of Consciousness’.

Is waking a sleepwalker dangerous?

Scientific American has a short article that tackles the common idea that it is dangerous to wake people who are sleep walking. It turns out, it’s often dangerous not to rouse them from their sleep.

The article discusses what causes sleepwalking, and the curious ways in which it can express itself.

Still, more disconcerting than the occasional nocturnal stroll is the potential peril caused by sleepwalking. “Sleepwalkers can harm themselves and others, and even kill themselves and others, and they can engage in highly complex behaviors such as driving long distances, and hurt others with sleep aggression and violence,” Schenck says. “So there are a number of ways that sleepwalkers can be dangerous to themselves and others during their episodes.” For example, Schenck notes, Sandy, a slender female in her teens, tore her bedroom door off the hinges one night. She was unable to replicate that strength when awake. And a young man frantically drove to his parent’s house 10-miles away. He woke to the sound of his own fists beating on their front door. In dramatic cases like these, doctors will prescribe benzodiazepines to ease the patient’s nighttime activity.

Link to article ‘Fact or Fiction?: Waking A Sleepwalker May Kill Them’.

Polonium-210 and psychiatric case histories

BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind has just kicked off a new series with features on the psychological effects of Alexander Litvenenko’s Polonium-210 poisoning and whether there is still value in detailed individual case studies in psychiatry.

Litvenenko’s poisoning made headline news and was a significant public health risk owing to the powerful radioactive poison.

Considering this, and the 2005 terrorist bombings in London, the programme looks at the psychological impact of these scares on the public, and what this tells us about how we react to large-scale risk.

Detailed case studies have been critically important in the history of psychiatry, with Freud making particular use of individual cases on which to base psychoanalytic theory.

They have recently fallen out of fashion, however, with some researchers and clinicians thinking they are no better than anecdotal evidence.

Others have argued that they provide a different sort of evidence to group studies that rely on quantification, and they are complementary to the wider quest to understand and treat mental disorder.

Link to BBC All in the Mind webpage with realaudio archive.

Shining lights, brain cells sparking

So I prescribed her, something to revive
And surprise her, she’s liver and much more wiser
Than the light I shine when my brain cells spark,
Come to me so we can glow in the dark

A curious combination of psychiatric metaphor and romantic storytelling from Eric B & Rakim’s 1990 track Mahogany. The hip hop duo mention the brain surprisingly often in their lyrics.

New Yorker on child bipolar controversy

April 9th’s New Yorker has a cracking article on the current controversy on whether it’s possible (or even valid) to diagnose bipolar disorder in children.

The article comes at a time when the diagnosis of bipolar disorder is being increasingly used for young children with behavioural difficulties.

It has been of particular interest after the tragic case of four-year-old Rebecca Riley, who died, according to the prosecutors, due to an overdose of psychiatric drugs prescribed after being diagnosed with the disorder.

Her parents, who have been accused of causing her death, have denied the charges.

The case is continuing but it has raised a number of questions about whether it is possible to diagnose the condition in children, or whether it even appears so early in life.

The New Yorker piece traces the popularity of the diagnosis to a book called The Bipolar Child, where psychiatrist Demitri Papolos and his wife included a screening questionnaire so parents can ‘diagnose’ their children.

Notably, there are currently no widely accepted diagnostic criteria, and a number of clinicians quoted in the article criticise the book for including vague or otherwise normal experiences (such as ‘irritability’ or ‘boredom’) as part of the diagnosis.

Unfortunately, the article isn’t available in the New Yorker website, but it was written by Dr Jerome Groopman who usually posts all his articles for the magazine online, so hopefully it should appear there shortly.

Otherwise, catch it in the shops or down your local library.

Link to April 9th New Yorker table of contents (via TWS).
Link to Jerome Groopman’s New Yorker articles.

Review: Freedom & Neurobiology by John Searle

John Searle will be known to most cognitive scientists as the man behind the famous Chinese Room thought experiment. This is based around the idea that a man in a room translating Chinese symbols with the aid of a rulebook does not understand Chinese, any more than a computer producing intelligent-like (understanding-like, consciousness-like) behaviour due to programming rules has intelligence (or understanding, or consciousness). Since I found this line of argument confused, and ultimately frustrating, I didn’t expect to enjoy his new book ‘Freedom & Neurobiology: Reflections of Free Will, Language and Political Power’. I didn’t expect to, but I did.

Searle_Freedom.gifThis short book is made up of two separate lectures of Searle’s, originally published in France, along with an extensive introduction. The introduction is Searle’s tour through the history of philosophy, establishing the ‘basic facts’ as it were, to the point where we are now. A point at which we have dealt with many small problems and can now ‘advance very general accounts of mind, language, rationality, society, etc.’. This ‘large-scale philosophy’ is possible, Searle argues, because of the unity of mind with biology, and, secondly and a consequence of this, the new openness within philosophy to accounting for empirical evidence (for a particularly choice quote from the introduction, see here).

True to this manifesto, Searle’s two essays cover lots of ground. The first is ‘Free Will as a problem in neurobiology’, the second ‘social ontology and political power’. Both are very readable, full of strong arguments and interesting observations. IANAP, but there is nothing of a the obtuse Searle of the Chinese Room that I was expecting, in fact ‘Freedom & Neurobiology’ makes me think that I should go back to the original Chinese Room argument and read it again. If this new book is anything to go by there is sure to be more clarity and subtly there than I remember.

Philip Zimbardo speaking in London

Professor Philip Zimbardo, famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment, is speaking in London on Tuesday 17th April where he’ll be giving a talk entitled ‘The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil’.

The title of the talk is also the name of his new book that explores how people can be influenced to commit extreme acts that would otherwise seem out of character but seem sanctioned, or even encouraged, by the system they find themselves in.

He makes particular reference to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, which he has highlighted as an example of the psychology of institutional abuse in action.

The talk is being organised by the London branch of the British Psychological Society, and, unfortunately, only BPS members are allowed to apply for tickets, although they can buy them for non-members:

Tickets cost £5 for BPS members and £10 for non-members (in advance), and may be obtained electronically by using the booking form or by telephoning 01332 227774. Tickets for non-members may only be purchased by members, who may buy up to 5 tickets in total.

If you’re not able to catch him in London, there’s a webpage that lists his upcoming interviews and talks.

UPDATE: Today’s New York Times has a video interview with Zimbardo on this topic. Thanks Dennis!

Link to details and booking for talk.
Link to website for The Lucifer Effect.

Exercise boosts mind, brain and mood

This week’s international edition of Newsweek has several articles on how researchers have found that physical exercise can sharpen the mind and boost brain function.

The first article looks at how scientists came to discover that exercise improves brain function, increases learning and can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

In terms of understanding why this occurs, it seems one factor is that exercise causes the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF, a key substance for promoting neural growth and development.

The second main article looks at the effect of exercise on mood.

It is now known that light exercise seems to be an effective treatment for mild to moderate depression, and, at least in the UK, is being recommended by mental health clinicians as a useful non-drug treatment.

The key, it seems, both for the beneficial effects on mood and mental sharpness, is not the intensity of the workout but whether it occurs regularly or not.

The pieces suggests that regular light exercise seems to be enough to keep the mind and brain trim, so you don’t have to wear yourself out to see the benefit.

The special issue has been put together with the help of Harvard Medical School, who roll out several experts to give advice in addition to a range of researchers interviewed for the main pieces.

Also look out for the embedded audio of an interview with two Harvard clinicians on the topic.

Link to article ‘Stronger, Faster, Smarter’.
Link to article ‘Exercise is a State of Mind’.

Air travel psychosis

BBC News reports on a review paper published in this week’s Lancet on the effects of jet lag – which can include mood changes, cognitive impairments, disruption to the menstrual cycle and psychotic experiences.

Disrupted sleep is often linked to psychosis, and interestingly, both airports and jet lag have been mentioned in the medical literature in relation to this.

In a curious 1982 paper, Shapiro reported a series of cases where individuals with psychosis were found wandering airports, and suggested, rather boldly, that ‘airport wandering’ could be a psychotic symptom.

Nevertheless, some more recent research has suggested this isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds.

A 2001 study by Udo Wieshmann and colleagues looked at people treated for severe mental illness over a four year period at Heathrow Airport.

Although the rate was very low (less than one in a million passengers), for those that did show signs of psychosis, ‘airport wandering’ was one of the most frequent symptoms.

Disruption to our internal ‘body clock’, the circadian rhythm, has been linked to various psychotic disorders over the years and jet lag is known to make mental illness worse in some people.

The fact that being jet lag can also cause temporary or transient psychosis-like experiences in some people, as reported in The Lancet paper, suggests that sleep disruption may play a part in both minor and major reality distortions.

Luckily, this week’s mp3 podcast from The Lancet interviews one of the study authors who talks about the health effects of jet lag, and also gives advice on coping with it as effectively and healthily as possible.

Link to BBC News story ‘Frequent flyers ‘risk own health”.
Link to abstract of Lancet paper.
Link to paper ‘Severe mental illness and airports – the scope of the problem’.
mp3 of Lancet podcast on the effects of jet lag.

The ethnobiology of the Haitian zombi

I just found this study summary on PubMed about the drug which is supposedly used by Haitian priests to ‘create’ zombies:

The ethnobiology of the Haitian zombi

Davis EW.

Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 1983 Nov;9(1):85-104

For many years students of Haitian society have suggested that there is an ethnopharmacological basis for the notorious zombies, the living dead of peasant folklore. The recent surfacing of three zombies, one of whom may represent the first potentially verifiable case, has focused scientific attention on the reported zombi drug. The formula of the poison was obtained at four widely separated localities in Haiti. The consistent ingredients include one or more species of puffer fish (Diodon hystrix, Diodon holacanthus or Sphoeroides testudineus) which contain tetrodotoxins, potent neurotoxins fully capable of pharmacologically inducing the zombi state. The ingredients, preparation and method of application are presented. The symptomology of tetrodotoxication as described in the biomedical literature is compared with the constellations of symptoms recorded from the zombies in Haiti. The cosmological rationale of zombies within the context of Voodoo theology is described. Preliminary laboratory tests are summarized.

The paper is by ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who also wrote a book on the same topic called The Serpent and the Rainbow.

Davis’ book was the only ethnobiology study that I know of that was also turned into a horror film of the same name – directed by Nightmare on Elm Street director Wes Craven!

Link to PubMed entry for ‘The ethnobiology of the Haitian zombi’.