Month: March 2008

Resisting temptation is energy intensive

Cognitive Daily has just published a great write-up and demonstration of a study that illustrates how self-control is an energy intensive process that puts a big drain on the body’s glucose levels.

The article tackles a recent study [pdf] led by psychologist Matthew Gailliot that found that exercising self-control in either conversations or in lab tasks reduces blood glucose levels.

The researchers also found that initial glucose levels can predict how well people do on these tasks and that self-control can be temporarily boosted by giving people a sugary drink.

Cognitive Daily’s have recreated one of the lab tasks. Go and check it out, it’s an excellent demonstration. It makes the task wonderfully clear but also illustrates how even such simple self-control tasks are so difficult.

This sort of ‘self-control’ is heavily linked to attention – in part, the ability to focus yourself on one particular thing and not get drawn into perceptual or emotional distractions.

This study doesn’t tackle brain function, but another recent paper by Gailliot [pdf] does link these findings to what we know about the neuropsychology of ‘self-control’.

This ability is particularly associated with the frontal lobes, which are known to play a key role in inhibiting inappropriate responses.

You can see control break down in interesting ways after frontal lobe damage, which can often lead to a range of impulsive behaviours.

For example, patients with damage to this area might display utilisation behaviour, where they are unable to resist carrying out actions presented by their environment.

The affected person might be unable to walk past a door without trying to open it or sit in front of a coffee cup without sipping it, even when they know it’s too hot to drink.

What’s interesting, is that as the CogDaily article illustrates, we seem to have a mild form of this when we are low on energy or fatigued.

It’s interesting to speculate that the reason we get ‘snappy’ when tired is because we’re less able to control the emotions sparked by small annoyances.

Link to great CogDaily article on self control (try the demo!).

Decorating inner space

The New York Times has a fun article on how psychotherapists decorate their office and what this might portray about the inner life of the shrink.

Psychoanalysts (Freudian psychotherapists) in particular are very careful about what sort of impression they project about themselves, preferring, at least initially, to be as insubstantial as possible so the patient can transfer feelings and impressions onto them, allowing relationship patterns and emotional reactions to be uncovered and worked on.

However, many psychotherapists work from home, using rooms in their house as offices. The NYT piece notes that a recent academic paper in the journal Psychoanalytic Psychology caused a storm by questioning the ethics of this practice, as impressions or even people from the therapists family life might interfere in the crucial relationship forming process.

Of course, the office is also a way of making the patient feel comfortable and at ease and so the tension between how the therapist attempts to express this, and how they express themselves, can be quite revealing.

Freud famously had a painting over his psychoanalytic couch of Jean-Martin Charcot (Freud’s mentor) presiding over the swooning and almost bare breasted young woman ‘Blanche’. No wishful thinking going on there of course.

In the UK, where most psychological treatment happens in the NHS, the rooms are often comfortable but plain outpatient appointment rooms that are shared and booked as necessary.

Occasionally, clinicians will have their own office in which to see patients. In these case, I’ve noticed that psychotherapists and counsellors have a much better sense of interior decoration (all rugs and soft lighting) than clinical psychologists, who tend to go for books and photocopied papers look.

Link to NYT article on therapists’ offices.

2008-03-07 Spike activity

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

Faces in the static. An interesting study looks at brain activation associated with seeing illusory faces in visual noise.

Neuroanthropology discusses recent research looking at the cognitive neuroscience of poverty.

How your name influences your decisions and preferences. The Psychologist has a fascinating article on ‘nominative determinism‘.

The Phineas Gage Fan Club gives a concise summary of the relatively recently discovered ‘grid cells‘.

Industrial psychology may have been invented by mistake. Advances in the History of Psychology tracks down the typo.

Carl Zimmer video interviews neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on how discoveries about the brain are challenging our understanding of law.

PsyBlog discusses why psychology is not just common sense.

The Wall Street Journal asks what makes Finnish kids so smart?

Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder and Time magazine investigates the high suicide rate in people diagnosed with the disorder.

Language Log does another fantastic job of debunking dodgy sex difference research.

Pete Mandik is posting entries from his upcoming book ‘Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind’. The first is ‘emergence‘.

Not Quite Rocket Science has one of the most sensible articles you’re likely to read on the recent interesting but over-interpreted ‘brain scan mind reading‘ research.

After the series of recent studies on unpublished drug company data, the UK government intends to bring in a mandatory trials data register. In contrast, the USA seems largely unconcerned.

The Thinking Meat Project has been really good recently. Check it out.

Drunk on water. Frontal Cortex finds a great example of the fantastically powerful influence of suggestion.

Wired has an article on Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroscientist who wrote about her own stroke.

The Neurocritic takes the biscuit, sorry, doughnut, with a write-up of a new study on the neuroscience of eating Krispy Kremes.

Moses on high article available online

Thanks to Debbie from the My Mind on Books blog who managed to track down the original academic article from psychologist Benny Shanon who argues that Moses’ experiences on Mount Sinai may have been due to a hallucinogenic experience.

Shannon suggests that a mixture prepared from the acacia tree and the bush peganum harmala could have been responsible.

The article is freely available so you can read it in detail for yourself. As well as Shanon’s main idea, it also contains a wealth of information about the use of psychedelic plants in the ancient world.

Link to article ‘Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative Hypothesis’.

Delusional psychiatrists

Of Two Minds have found a classic video of a vintage Fry and Laurie sketch where a two people meet in a doctor’s office, both think they’re psychiatrists and the other is delusional.

It’s a funny sketch but it’s also remarkably clever as much of what passes for psychobabble is actually a satire on psychology and psychiatry for those in the know.

Look out for references to Melanie Klein’s (completely wacky) good breast theory, the Bender-Gestalt Test and Lentizol – the trade name for the aged antidepressant drug amitryptyline.

Interestingly, all of these things, and the idea that psychiatrists were mainly interested in psychoanalysis, were most popular in the 1950s and 60s, harking back to a bygone era of psychiatry.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments (thanks Jimmy!):

Fry and Laurie did a similar sketch about linguists, riffing on their stereotype (and that of sesquipedalian types in general) as pedants who take their adoration of language to mind-numbing excess. They pepper the conversation with a number of allusions to specific ideas in linguistics.

Run down [and video] at “Tenser, said the Tensor“

UPDATE 2: I’ve just discovered another psychiatrist sketch from Fry and Laurie. This one concerns the limits of madness and the practice of putting bread in one’s shoes.

Link to Fry and Laurie psychiatrists’ sketch.

We will please pill

Placebo has its effect through our beliefs and expectations. Because we get many of our assumptions through culture, changing social attitudes could alter how effective it is.

Placebo is sometimes called the ‘expectancy effect’ and describes the fact that our expectations of what the dummy treatment will do can influence the outcome.

We noted before that the colour of the pill can significantly alter its effect, but it’s intriguing to think that we probably get most of these sorts of expectations from our culture.

Bad Science looks at how the strength of the placebo effect has changed over time for different drug trials, suggesting that as our cultural beliefs change, the effectiveness dummy treatments might also change depending on how they’re presented.

Similarly, The New York Times have just published a brief article on a new study that found placebos described as costing $2.50 a dose are more effective pain killers than those presented to participants as costing 10 cents a dose.

In other words, if placebo is a form of faith healing, changes in our collective faith will alter the healing potential of a placebo associated with those ideas.

These social effects on placebo are interesting, because we judge the effectiveness of medications by comparing them to placebo. Furthermore, we know the effectiveness of most medications will be partly explained by the placebo effect.

In other words, changes in our cultural attitudes influence the effectiveness of medication.

While we assume that much of medicine objectively definable, much is only comprehensible by making sense of social issues.

For example, drug side-effects are usually talked about as if they are objectively described properties of the chemical.

However, its easy to see that these actually depend on the person, not the drug.

For example, take the drug terazosin. It lowers blood pressure and shrinks the prostate.

If you have high blood pressure but a normal prostate, the side-effect is a reduced prostate. If you have prostate problems but normal blood pressure, the side-effect is reduced blood pressure. If you have both high blood pressure and prostate problems, it’s potentially side-effect free.

One man’s treatment is another man’s side-effect. This is why the sociology of medicine is as important as biology, chemistry or another other bench-based science in understanding illness and treatment.

Link to Bad Science on placebo.
Link to NYT on price of placebo study.

Moses high on more than Mount Sinai

An Israeli psychologist is asking whether Moses may have been tripping when he saw God on Mount Sinai, suggesting that many of our traditional ideas about the Abrahamic God may have been inspired by hallucinogenic drugs.

Professor Benny Shannon’s apparently cites historical evidence that the religious ceremonies of the Israelites included hallucinogenic plants and further bases his speculation on his own experiences with the reportedly similar psychedelic plant ayahuasca.

Of course, the idea is bound to ruffle a few feathers but as it’s so speculative it’s unlikely to make much of a mark on modern theology.

However, it is not the first nor the wackiest attempt to explain religion as arising from hallucinogenic drugs.

Biblical scholar John Allegro wrote an astounding 1970 book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross where he argued that Jesus was actually an hallucinogenic mushroom.

Bear with me on this one.

Allegro suggests that the word ‘Jesus’ was actually a code word for amanita muscaria, the red and white speckled mushroom often featured in fairy tales.

Amanita muscaria, otherwise known as Fly Agaric, genuinely exists and can cause quite intense hallucinations, owing to its effect on GABA receptors in the brain.

According to the theory, a religious sect were using these mushrooms for spiritual purposes, and their visions resulted in the Christian religion.

The Bible contains many words which have since been misinterpreted but with enough (of Allegro’s) linguistic detective work, they can be seen to explain the mushroom cult, rather than the later orthodox Christian interpretation.

To recoin a cliché: you don’t need drugs to enjoy the book, but it helps.

As an aside, the article in Haaretz says Shannon’s theory is published in a philosophy journal called ‘Time and Mind’, but I’m damned (excuse the pun) if I can find it.

Links to the original article gratefully received.

Link to article on Shannon’s theory about Moses.
Link to 1970 Time article on Allegro’s book.
Link to full text of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

5-MeO-DMT in the Pharmaecopia

Heavy metal noiseniks Mudvayne have a song called ‘Pharmaecopia‘ where they list off a load of drugs in a possibly ironic, possibly celebratory way. It’s a bit of a confused list with serotonin and “dopeamine” listed among a rather odd list of street drugs, hallucinogenic plants and commercial pharmaceuticals.

Curiously though, they mention 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, a drug also known as 5-MeO-DMT that was originally synthesised by legendary psychedelics researcher Alexander Shulgin.

Halcium and morphine,
5-methoxy-n, n-dimethyltryptamine,
Psilocybin, mescaline, aspirin, histomine,
Brushite, darvaset, valium, caffeine, cannabis, and LSD,
Ayahuasca, harmine, give it all to me, I want it

Looking at what’s happened to your hair thus far, it’s probably best not eh?

Presumably, this is the first and only time the full chemical name of a hallucinogenic drug has made it into a song lyric.

Link to audio of song (no, I can’t make out the words either).
Link to lyrics.
Link to Shulgin’s notes on 5-MeO-DMT.

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’.

Laughter and the return of RadioLab

RadioLab, one of the most wonderfully produced radio shows around, has just started a new series with a fantastic edition on the psychology and neuroscience of laughter.

Tuning in to RadioLab is like listening to the enthusiastic daydreams of some slightly stoned but fantastically well informed scientists.

This edition looks at laughter, the behaviour that Aristotle thought was one of the few that were uniquely human.

Most interesting, the programme looks at the social uses of laughter and how it signals dominance and superiority, and how we use it to make others feel safe. But there much more than that, including laughing rats and laughing hysteria.

Another great edition and a pleasure to listen to.

Link to RadioLab on laughter (with streamed and mp3 audio).

Are you experienced? Does it matter?

Time magazine has an article on the counter-intuitive psychology of expertise and experience. It turns out simple experience might not add anything to our competency, it’s how we use our time in attempting to master a skill that counts.

The article notes that research has typically failed to show that experience, on its own, predicts task performance. In other words, old hands often do no better than novices.

Unfortunately for us, it seems the secret to expertise lies within the well-known saying that ‘genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration’.

Research suggests that it is experience of practising the most difficult and laborious aspects of a skill that are key.

Ericsson’s primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion – repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician – that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion “deliberate practice,” by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair-pulling and fist-pounding. You like the Tuesday New York Times crossword? You have to tackle the Saturday one to be really good.

Take figure-skating. For the 2003 book Expert Performance in Sports, researchers Janice Deakin and Stephen Cobley observed 24 figure skaters as they practiced. Deakin and Cobley asked the skaters to complete diaries about their practice habits. The researchers found that Elite skaters spent 68% of their sessions practicing jumps – one of the riskiest and most demanding parts of figure-skating routines. Skaters in a second tier, who were just as experienced in terms of years, spent only 48% of their time on jumps, and they rested more often. As Deakin and her colleagues write in the Cambridge Handbook, “All skaters spent considerably more time practicing jumps that already existed in their repertoire and less time on jumps they were attempting to learn.” In other words, we like to practice what we know, stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity rather than stretching our skills. Those who overcome that tendency are the real high performers.

Link to Time article ‘The Science of Experience’.

Blue Brain Rising

Seed Magazine has a fantastic article on the ‘Blue Brain’ project that aims to eventually create a biologically accurate simulation of the human brain on a supercomputer.

So far, they’ve only managed to simulate a cortical column but this in itself is quite impressive as many thought it could never be done.

The project is currently simulating about 10,000 neurons and a total of about 30 million synaptic connections.

If you’ve heard about artificial neural networks before this might not sound very impressive, but the difference between this project and most others is that it attempts digitally simulate the biological processes of each individual cell.

In contrast, most neural networks are made up of individual elements that are usually little more than metaphors of how neurons actually work.

A huge boost is that the project has shown that their software cortical column spontaneously acts like its biological equivalent when its switched on and stimulated.

It didn’t take long before the model reacted. After only a few electrical jolts, the artificial neural circuit began to act just like a real neural circuit. Clusters of connected neurons began to fire in close synchrony: the cells were wiring themselves together. Different cell types obeyed their genetic instructions. The scientists could see the cellular looms flash and then fade as the cells wove themselves into meaningful patterns. Dendrites reached out to each other, like branches looking for light. “This all happened on its own,” Markram says. “It was entirely spontaneous.” For the Blue Brain team, it was a thrilling breakthrough. After years of hard work, they were finally able to watch their make-believe brain develop, synapse by synapse. The microchips were turning themselves into a mind.

It’s an engrossing article that captures both the science behind the project and some of the personalities involved.

Link to Seed article ‘Out of the Blue’.

Dr Ginger Campbell’s Brain Science Podcasts

I’ve been listening to some of Dr Ginger Campbell’s brain science podcasts recently and am thoroughly enjoying them.

Campbell has been broadcasting for a fair while now (she’s just put her 31st podcast online) but these latest editions are particularly good.

I caught a few of the early ones and found them a little rough around the edges to be honest. I have only recently revisited to discover I’ve been missing out on some great discussions.

Not tied down by the dictates of a radio schedule, the programmes are often wonderfully satisfying and in-depth. She doesn’t like Chomsky’s theories very much though as you’ll discover in a recent edition on the evolution of language!

Campbell has obviously also put a lot of hard work into getting neuroscientists on the show to be interviewed, which make for some of the most interesting exchanges.

Link to Dr Ginger Campbell’s Brain Science podcast.

Maths and the numbers game in the brain

Frontal Cortex has alerted me to a wonderful article in The New Yorker about Stanislas Dehaene’s work on understanding the neuropsychology of number sense.

Like written and spoken language, human numerical abilities are quite astonishing for how they are organised in the brain.

After brain injury, various maths or numerical abilities can be shown to ‘doubly dissociate‘, meaning that parts of the ability can be independently damaged and so it can be inferred that they rely on independent (but, of course, interacting) brain systems.

The surprise comes from the fact that as a species, abilities like complex language, writing and maths are relatively recent cultural innovations.

While some of the core abilities may be inherited, there must be some aspects of the more complex skills which become tied up with the development of brain structure as we grow to account for the way in which they break down in very selective ways after brain damage.

Dehaene is one of the key researchers in understanding the neuropsychology of numerical ability and what he calls ‘number sense’ – a more general intuitive perception of quantity and number.

It has been suggested that this is also linked to other ways of perceiving the world, as can be seen from some strange interactions between number and space that can be seen in experiments:

But the brain is the product of evolution—a messy, random process—and though the number sense may be lodged in a particular bit of the cerebral cortex, its circuitry seems to be intermingled with the wiring for other mental functions. A few years ago, while analyzing an experiment on number comparisons, Dehaene noticed that subjects performed better with large numbers if they held the response key in their right hand but did better with small numbers if they held the response key in their left hand.

Strangely, if the subjects were made to cross their hands, the effect was reversed. The actual hand used to make the response was, it seemed, irrelevant; it was space itself that the subjects unconsciously associated with larger or smaller numbers. Dehaene hypothesizes that the neural circuitry for number and the circuitry for location overlap. He even suspects that this may be why travellers get disoriented entering Terminal 2 of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, where small-numbered gates are on the right and large-numbered gates are on the left. “It’s become a whole industry now to see how we associate number to space and space to number,” Dehaene said. “And we’re finding the association goes very, very deep in the brain.”

The article is a great read and a useful introduction to some of the key findings in the field, as well as containing a whole load of eye-opening findings about number and the brain.

Link to New Yorker article ‘Numbers Guy’.