Year: 2007

Harnessing the brain’s power to reorganise after injury

The online Dana magazine Cerebrum has a great article on neurorehabilitation – the art and science of helping someone to recover from brain injury both by harnessing the brain’s natural ability to adapt, and by teaching the injured person new skills and abilities.

The article discuss both rehabilitation medicine, the practice of training patients to adapt and improve, and the neuroscience techniques which are being developed to try and tackle the problem at the cellular level.

One of the key processes which science is trying to understand and optimise is ‘neuroplasticity‘, the process by which the brain makes new connections, reorganises and routes around damage.

The article sets out six key questions for neuroscience that, when answered, should revolutionise who we can treat brain injury:

1. Since so much of what we think we know about regeneration is derived from experiments on immature nerve cells, are the mechanisms of regeneration in the injured mature nervous system the same as those that apply to the developing embryonic nervous system?

2. Since the vast majority of experiments in regeneration of nerve pathways have been done in rats and mice, how predictive are these experiments for results in human patients? Apart from molecular differences, rodents are much smaller than we are. Nerve fibers may have to regenerate much farther in humans in order to achieve the same level of reconnection that underlies functional improvement in smaller animals.

3. Even if sufficient nerve regeneration can be achieved, will the connections made be specific enough to underlie real function?

4. How helpful are stem cells? Can they survive after transplantation into the human spinal cord or will they be rejected? Can they replace damaged neurons or will they serve only as sources of chemical substances that support survival and growth of the brain’s own nerve cells?

5. Will we be able to identify a single approach that is so fundamental that it can yield dramatic improvements in recovery from brain injury, or will we need to develop a cocktail approach, using multiple treatments simultaneously?

6. Will approaches that enhance regeneration in one circumstance, for example spinal cord injury, also work in other situations, such as stroke or traumatic brain injury?

On a related note, Sharp Brains has picked up on the fact that American TV channel PBS will shortly be broadcasting a special on brain fitness and neuroplasticity.

It’ll probably focus on normal ageing and brain fitness rather than brain injury, but hopefully should tackle some of the neuroscience behind brain changes in general.

There’s a trailer available online.

Link to article ‘Harnessing the Brain’s Power to Adapt After Injury’.
Link to Sharp Brains on PBS neuroplasticity programme.

War, social networks and ethical minefields

Wired has an article in its latest edition that discusses why understanding human networks are becoming key to the US Military’s mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the article seems to do little more than uncritically echo military enthusiasm for this new approach while telling us little about the actual science behind the techniques.

But the most interesting story is not the strategy itself, which is hardly new, but how it is causing a rift among anthropologists to the point where conference speakers have been heckled and left in tears for their participation.

The debate centres on the US Military’s Human Terrain System, a project that aims to understand the culture, society and social networks in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a view to using this information to further military objectives.

In contrast, the NYT managed to do a brief but considerably more balanced article and video segment on the project last May, noting that the crux of the matter is that the project has employed numerous anthropologists, as anthropology now plays a key role in US military strategy.

Concerns centre over whether co-operating with the military violates the strict codes of ethics that compels anthropologists to ‘do no harm’ to the cultures they are studying, and to ask for informed consent from the people that are observing to make them fully aware of the purpose of the research.

Critics believe that aiding a military occupation is unethical, as it will inevitably lead to deaths prompted by the intelligence they provide, and requires a level of secrecy – violating both of the ‘do no harm’ and ‘informed consent’ principles.

This has caused an angry rift with accusations of ‘mercenary anthropology’ and, in an interesting parallel to the ethical dilemmas faced by the American Psychological Association, the American Anthropological Association has been forced to issue a report and statement on the issue; disapproving of the project while refusing to ban its members from participating.

Last Thursday, at a panel session on the issue at the American Anthropological Association conference, Zenia Helbig, an ex-Human Terrain System researcher, cried when she was heckled by the audience.

Wired describes the scene as ‘ugly’ and quotes Helbig as implying the hecklers were being driven by conspiracy theories, while Inside Higher Education gives a more nuanced account, suggesting audience reactions were mixed.

The overarching issue is that the military has cottoned-on to the fact that its in-house ‘psyops’ services are inadequate for the complexity of new forms of warfare, and are seeking the collaboration of academic disciplines which have been founded on principles of non-coercion.

The debate essentially centres around whether these principles should be universally applied to all people, or whether they are trumped by loyalty to the national interests of a researcher’s country.

Link to NYT article ‘Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones’.
Link to abstract of Human Terrain System paper.
Link to Inside Higher Ed article on panel discussion.

Encephalon 37 arrives

The 37th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just pulled into town and is hosted on A Blog Around the Clock.

A couple of my favourites include a post on whether smiling actually makes you feel better, and one on some of the hidden motivators for our voting behaviour.

There’s much more great mind and brain writing in the mix (including a raft of new student writers), so have a browse and see what catches your eye.

Link to Encephalon 37.

SciAmMind on Smart Kids, Sex Bias and Psychopaths

The latest Scientific American has just hit the shelves and two of the feature articles are available online: one with tips for raising hard-working and motivated children from developmental psychology research, and another on whether neuropsychology helps us understand the gender bias in fields like maths and physics.

However, there is another, stand out article on psychopaths that describes what the term actually means in psychology.

It’s something that’s commonly but wrongly confused with psychosis, largely because they’re both unfortunately shortened to ‘psycho’, despite them being completely different.

This month, the articles in the print edition look particularly good. They cover everything from people who want to be amputees, to the psychology of terrorism, to psychedelic drug therapy, to phantom limbs and more.

Link to article on raising smart kids.
Link to article on gender and scientific achievement.
Link to article on psychopaths.

No eye deer – an amazing brain injury

Retrospectacle has found an amazing case of a five year-old boy who impaled his left frontal lobe on a deer antler after he tripped and fell while carrying it.

The business end of the antler (which was thankfully no longer attached to a deer) went through his eye socket and into his brain.

Luckily, the young lad made a full recovery with no loss of eyesight and no long term brain damage.

Brains of children (particularly those under the age of 8) can make recoveries from injuries that would be much more serious in adults.

This is because young brains are still very ‘plastic’. In other words, they are still growing and re-shaping.

These recoveries can sometimes be quite astonishing. For example, as we’ve reported previously, some young kids can make a full recovery even when they’ve had half their cortex removed.

Interestingly, this child’s injury from the deer antler is similar to an ‘ice pick lobotomy’, detailed in a fantastic Neurophilosophy article.

One difference, however, is while both the ice pick and the deer antler have entered the brain the same way, the ice pick would be moved side to side to cause damage over a much wider area.

Link to Retrospectacle on amazing deer antler injury.

How to Good-Bye Depression

It’s rare than someone comes up with a truly novel treatment for mental illness, but Hiroyuki Nishigaki’s book may be a genuinely original contribution to the field.

It’s entitled How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?

Needless to say, it’s contribution to psychiatry is only equalled by its contribution to the development of the English language.

The description of the book is a wonderful read in itself and the reviews are absolutely priceless.

I feel better already.

Link to book details on Amazon.

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.

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.

2007-11-30 Spike activity

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

The Washington Post has an article on the ongoing trial using MDMA (‘Ecstasy’) assisted psychotherapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

Babies learn how to make social evaluations in the first few years of life, according to a new study reported by BBC News.

The Guardian has an article on combining a high-flying career with ongoing mental illness.

For men the brain activation in the ventral striatum is dependent not only on the size of reward, but also how it compares to other people’s rewards.

Google in your brain? PageRank as a semantic memory model: Developing Intelligence examines an interesting view on memory for facts.

Is the beauty of a sculpture in the brain of the beholder? Stupid headline, interesting study.

A great post from Mixing Memory on a favourite experiment: research on schema (like mental frameworks) for memory.

Is the famous Christian poem ‘Footprints’ a case of cryptomnesia: the unconscious copying of another creative work? Rachel Aviv for the Poetry Foundation investigates.

Cognitive economics comes to the aid of football goalkeepers, via the BPS Research Digest.

The University of Virginia has a great ‘Psychedelic Sixties‘ online exhibit.

Neurophilosophy finds a wonderful image generated from a supercomputer simulation of brain microcircuitry.

The Dana Foundation has an excerpt from Sandra and Matthew Blakesee’s new book ‘The Body Has a Mind of Its Own’ available online.

Are rocks conscious? Arguing no is harder than you think, and the New York Times covers controversy.

Probably one of the most important emerging fields in biology is epigenetics. Corpus Callosum tackles a new study on the epigenetic transmission of PTSD risk markers.

Trippin’

I’m just reading a book called The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness which sounds like some stoned hippy opus, but is actually a wonderfully written travel book into the neuroscience of naturally occurring altered states of consciousness.

It was recommended to me by Tom, who got sent a copy to review, and was so enthusiastic about it, he sent it to me afterwards. And I’m very glad he did.

The author, Jeff Warren, wants to experience various altered states of consciousness that are described in the scientific literature, like the hypnagogic state – the hallucinatory period when dropping off, or lucid dreaming, when you’re aware that you’re dreaming, or hypnosis.

So he travels the world meeting researchers, taking part in experiments, trying things out on himself, and explaining the science along the way.

And this he does very well. He manages to capture some of the key debates in the literature, explain some tricky concepts, as well as introducing us to often curious and compelling characters who research these phenomena.

He skilfully compares the myths, claims and speculation with what is known from scientific studies, and what he managed to experience himself.

There’s quite a large section of the book dedicated to sleep and dreaming, and if ever you thought sleeping was the uninteresting third of your life you spend unconscious, this is the book which will make you think again.

Just great fun, and, if you’ll excuse the slightly awkward metaphor, wonderfully eye-opening as well.

In the meantime, if you want a quick fix on the science of dreaming, the Washington Post had a recent brief article that discussed the topic.

Link to book’s website.
Link to Washington Post article ‘Dream on…’

A subconsciousness raising exercise

This week’s New Scientist has a cover story on the psychology that goes on behind the scenes, in the subconscious.

Or you could call it the unconscious, or the pre-conscious. Despite the differences in terminology it’s much the same idea. Essentially, it’s the work the brain does that we’re not conscious of.

Unfortunately, the article has a bit of an excruciating tag-line:

Subconscious thought processes may play a crucial role in many of the mental facilities we prize as uniquely human, including creativity, memory, learning and language.

Next week: Sea contains water! Don’t be put off though, the article’s actually a good guide to some of the latest theories on how information crosses the consciousness divide.

What’s more, non-conscious thinking may actually work best in some cases where you might imagine rational, conscious thought is the best tool for the job. In situations where people have to make difficult choices based on large amounts of hard-to-assess information, psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands has found that they are happier with their decision when acting on gut instinct than when forced to try to think the choice through rationally (New Scientist, 5 May 2007, p 35). Dijksterhuis is convinced that subconscious thought processes are superior in many situations – including most social interactions – because they allow us to integrate complex information in a more holistic way than can be managed by rational thought processes.

Something similar sometimes happens in problem solving, according to Jonathan Schooler from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. By asking subjects to explain their reasoning as they go, he has found that verbalising what they are doing has no effect on people’s ability to solve analytical, mathematical or logic problems but actually hinders performance on insight problems, such as solving a riddle – those for which the solution seems to pop out of the blue in an aha! moment. Remember that subconscious thought processes differ from conscious ones in that we are unable to articulate the former. So here, it seems, is experimental evidence for something we all instinctively know: that subconscious thinking is the source of our inspiration – it is central to creativity.

Rather ironically, for an article on the unconscious, it’s been hidden behind a pay wall. So you’ll need to get a copy from your newsagent, or if you want to expand the subconscious mind, photocopy it in the library.

Link to table of contents for this week’s NewSci.

The subject of the dream

We must, in the next place, investigate the subject of the dream, and first inquire to which of the faculties of the soul it presents itself,

i.e. whether the affection is one which pertains to the faculty of intelligence or to that of sense-perception; for these are the only faculties within us by which we acquire knowledge.

The opening lines of Aristotle’s early sleep text On Dreams, written in approximately 350 BC.

Ministry of Memory Distortions

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth retouching photographs to remove people from the record of history. A recent psychology study suggests that these manipulations may change more than the historical record, they could affect our collective memories of what actually happened.

In the study, led by Italian psychologist Dario Sacchi, participants were shown two photographs; one from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and another from a 2003 protest in Rome against the Iraq war.

What they didn’t know was that some participants saw doctored versions of either one or both of the photographs. The image on the left demonstrates that a crowd was added to the Tiananmen Square image. With the Rome photo police and aggressive-looking demonstrators were added to the image of peaceful protesters.

To test whether people perceived the photos as genuine or not without giving the game away, the researchers asked participants how familiar they were with the image.

Both groups rated the Tiananmen Square photo as equally familiar, suggesting few picked up on the changes.

Interestingly, participants rated the altered Rome photo as less familiar, but when given a chance to comment, no-one suggested it was fake, with some suggesting that their memory of the protest being peaceful, rather than the photo, must be mistaken.

The participants were then asked to answer questions about the events from their memories of what happened.

Those who saw the altered Tiananmen Square image remembered more people being there, those who saw the Rome image remembered it as more violent, more negative, and recalled more property being damaged and confrontations with the police.

When the experiment was run again, participants additionally rated themselves as less likely to attend a demonstration in future.

The study has obvious implications for propaganda and the paper spends much time discussing the possible impact of doctored photos on public opinion.

Combined with some earlier studies that suggest that people often believe initial false news reports even when they’re aware of them being falsified, you can see how the media has a powerful influence over our remembered realities.

Link to study abstract.
Link to write-up from LiveScience.

Enduring error

The BBC has a curious article about author Ian McEwan that makes an interesting error about his novel Enduring Love. In fact, the truth is much more subtle.

The article notes that:

McEwan made up a medical condition for the stalker and wrote a spoof article from a psychiatric journal explaining the illness and included it in the book.

His description of De Clerambault’s Syndrome fooled reviewers and psychiatrists alike.

In fact, De Clerambault’s Syndrome (where someone has the delusional belief that another person is in love with them) is well known in the medical literature and McEwan’s description is quite accurate.

Nevertheless, his book concludes with what looks like a reprint of an article from the British Review of Psychiatry that describes a case study which the book seems to be based upon.

Although also fiction (the British Review of Psychiatry doesn’t exist), its style is convincing and it’s properly referenced with studies from the real medical literature.

So convincing, in fact, that it fooled several reviewers, including those in top medical journals, into thinking the novel was based on a real case report.

A clue as to why McEwan was able to successfully imitate the medical literature is given in the acknowledgements. He thanks “Ray Dolan, friend and hiking companion, for many years of stimulating discussion”.

Dolan is a professor of neuropsychiatry at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Functional Imaging Lab in London.

Interestingly, Dolan also played a key part in Saturday, another of McEwan’s books – which tackles a dramatic day in the life of a neurosurgeon.

As mentioned in an article in the British Medical Journal, McEwan shadowed neurosurgeon Neil Kitchen while researching the book. The article notes the pair were introduced by Dolan.

Link to Wikipedia page on De Clerambault’s Syndrome.
Link to Salon article ‘Ian McEwan fools British shrinks’.
Link to BMJ article interviewing neurosurgeon Neil Kitchen.

Mind snacks

Exploratorium has a gallery of try-it-yourself perception experiments. There’s plenty of great material here, not least because of the the slightly bizarre photos of people with distracting 80s haircuts.

There are quick projects on everything from proprioception to taste, and you can tell which are the good ones because they list ‘adult help’ as one of the materials.

Think of it as the Mind Hacks that time forgot.

Link to groovy gallery of Exploratorium perception ‘snacks’.