Month: September 2008

I’ve just got round to listening to ABC Radio National’s two part Health Report special on the drug and alcohol dependence and was pleasantly surprised about how well constructed and informative it was.

These sorts of programmes can be a little dry, if you’ll excuse the pun, but this two-parter in a compelling look into the effects of a number of substances, talks to some addicts in treatment, explores some residential services and discusses the evidence for various treatments.

The interviews are quite revealing and they’re a good demonstration that addiction is not solely about the drug. People who become seriously addicted change their lives to accommodate their addiction, and can live quite precariously as a result.

This often alters people’s behaviour, often in quite an adaptive way considering the unpredictable and dangerous circumstances, but not in a way that is best suited to mainstream life.

For example, one gentleman notes that he had to get out of the habit of lying to people as a short term fix to problems.

This is not a direct effect of the drug, but these sorts of maladaptive behaviours also need to be addressed during treatment for addiction for it to be successful.

Stopping the drug is only a part of the battle – stepping out of an ingrained lifestyle, mindset and pattern of behaviour can be the real challenge.

Addiction is more than just problem with taking too much of a chemical, it’s equally a social and emotional issue and we are often guilty of downplaying this aspect while clumsily trying to avoid the language of blame. The pure ‘disease model’, that says addiction is nothing more than a genetic brain disorder triggered by a particular substance, is a case in point.

It is, of course, possible to highlight individual responsibility without victimising people, but this is a difficult task for many in a society that has many double standards over the issue of drug taking.

The situation was wonderfully described in a 2003 article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy that noted that we often accuse addicts of self-deception while pushing our own self-deceptions about addiction as a substitute:

We frequently accuse heavy drinkers and drug users of self-deception if they refuse to admit that they are addicted. However, given the ways in which we usually conceptualize it, acknowledging addiction merely involves swapping one form of self-deception for another. We ask addicts to see themselves as in the grip of an irresistible desire, and to accept that addiction is an essentially physiological process. To the extent this is so, we, as much as the addicts, suffer from self-deception, and the responsibility for their state is in part ours. Conversely, since addicts are compelled to accept a self-deceptive image of themselves, they are at least partially excused from blame for their self-deception.

Parts one and two of ABC Health Report on drug dependence and treatment.
Link to ‘Self-Deception and Responsibility for Addiction’ article.
Link to DOI identifier for article.

Psychologist Jesse Bering has written a witty and informative post on the science of homophobia, evolutionary theories of homosexuality and why some hypotheses just don’t work without large quantities of strong gin.

Bering notes he’s both gay and an evolutionary psychologist, and some people find it surprising that a homosexual male works in a field that might suggest he’s a biological anomaly.

Needless to say, his whistle-stop tour through the field is both informative and funny. The final bit summarises evolutionary theories of homosexuality and the last paragraph made me laugh out loud:

‚Ä¢ E.O. Wilson’s kin altruism theory states that homosexuality was a rare but functional alternative to traditional routes of increasing inclusive fitness because gay people in the ancestral past, who weren’t burdened with their own kids, helped to raise, care for, and provide resources to their other genetic relatives, such as nieces and nephews. (This one doesn’t quite gel, especially when you consider that a gay person’s resources are usually funneled to their same-sex partners. Also, for most people, being gay doesn’t exactly endear you to your relatives.)

‚Ä¢ Evolutionary psychologist Frank Muscarella’s alliance formation theory proposes that, in the ancestral past, homoerotic behaviours by young men with high status older men would have been an effective strategy for climbing up the social ladder. (Think Ancient Greece, or maybe Mark Foley?)

‚Ä¢ John Maynard Smith is often credited with what is colloquially called the “sneaky f*cker theory,” which argues that gay men in the ancestral past had unique access to the reproductive niche because females let their guards down around them and other males didn’t view them as sexual competitors. (I rather like this one: remember, we’re not infertile, we’re just gay. Although in my case, it’d take a lot of gin to work.)
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To do it in style, presumably you’d be drinking pink gin.

Bering is one of the most inventive researchers working in evolutionary psychology, and his work on our everyday theories of souls, ghosts and the supernatural is fascinating.

One of my favourites is his study [pdf] finding that simply telling people the lab is haunted improves their honesty in a computer task, whereas another creative study [pdf] investigated which mind and brain functions children think continue after death and how this differs by age and religious schooling.

Link to ‘The Sneaky F*cker Theory (and Other Gay Ideas)’.

KQED’s science programme Quest has put some completely fascinating audio and video segments online on the science of emotion and how neurological disorders can lead to almost instant laughing and crying that are not always accompanied by the strong emotions we normally associate with them.

The condition is called ‘pseudobulbar affect‘ by neurologists although virtually the same behaviour in the context of mental illness is usually called ‘labile affect’ by psychiatrists.

If you’re not familiar with the term ‘affect‘ used in this context it refers to anything to do with mood or emotion. Pseudobulbar refers to the fact that the damage can impair the control of ‘bulbar’ cranial nerves VII – XII (although the damage is not to the nerves themselves – hence the pseudo prefix) and labile simply means changeable.

One of the most difficult aspects of pseudobulbar affect is the fact that it can appear inappropriately potentially causing some awkward social situations. For example, the person in the programme, who is affected by the degenerative brain disorder ALS, describes laughing at a funeral and one video shows how easily these reactions can be triggered.

Out of place emotional reactions are not uncommon in neurological disorders. In fact, there is a type of seizure which causes laughter and has the wonderfully evocative name of gelastic epilepsy.

The other video segment is a fantastic introduction to functional neuroimaging studies of emotion. Look out for the explanation of MRI physics using Whirling Dervishes as an example of proton spin!

There’s also a fantastic audio segment specifically on researching emotion in pseudobulbar affect and how the findings might help us understand emotions in depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and PTSD.

It’s a wonderfully made piece that shows how affected people experience this rapid form of emotional weather and does a great job of communicating the scientific research. Good job KQED.

Link to video segment ‘Emotions from the Inside and Out’ (thanks Jennifer!).
Link to video segment ‘Watching the Brain at Work’.
Link to audio segment ‘Decoding the Emotional Brain’.
Link to additional online notes.

If you listen carefully you can hear a distant rumble from over the horizon. It’s the sound of sociologists advancing slowly towards our online data trail, about to release the mother of all data analysis campaigns that will rain from the internet like a storm from above.

Yesterday’s New York Times had a fascinating piece about online social networking tools, discussing how different forms of social relationships are being formed through the use of ‘broadcast to subscriber’ tools like Twitter and Facebook.

These articles pop up quite frequently, discussing how young people live in a ‘post-privacy’ world, or how our personal lives become increasingly public to our friends and acquaintances, but they rarely mention the ways in which these social networks can be used to reveal and exploit the dynamics of social power.

Sociology gets a bad rap in science as being ‘wooly’ or ‘vague’, but it’s often not to do with the methods its uses, but with the way of gathering data.

When attempting to understand social networks, traditional studies may ask people to fill in questionnaires about their social contacts and then the researchers draw inferences about who are the most important players in the community.

Two developments have made this much more powerful. The first is social network analysis, or rather, the application of rigorous mathematical methods from graph theory and network theory to social network analysis.

This allows the quantification of the network in important an interesting ways – such as who is most connected, whether the network is tightly integrated or how fragile it is.

One of the most interesting findings from these studies is that the most connected people, or those with the most explicit status (such as being the boss) aren’t always the most important people in a network.

For example, ‘friend collectors’ on Facebook and MySpace may seem to be the most socially connected, but they’re not necessarily the most influential because many of the connections represent very superficial social connections. Similarly, someone who has only a few connections may be connected to people influential in other subgroups, and so might have a huge knock-on influence. Social network analysis can identify these people.

The second development that has made sociology much more powerful is that the ‘wooliness’ in gathering data is increasingly disappearing because services like Facebook and Twitter mean we are creating the data ourselves, in incredible detail.

One use of this data is to sell to advertising space to marketing companies. Targeted advertising is now common, by location, age, sex or whatever explicit data you enter into your profile.

A much more powerful approach is to target advertising so it appears on the profile of the most influential people on the network. Indeed, Google has just registered a patent that describes exactly this process.

One of the advantages is that it can take advantage of the explicit data, and can identify the key people in a group, and is fairly resistant to friend collectors because it doesn’t just rely on totting up friends, it looks at the network as a whole.

So you could identity the most influential people in the 18-25 age bracket, or the most influential in a small town, or the most influential people that like a certain type of movie.

Online networks can then sell advertising space ranked by influence, like Google sells adwords based on popularity.

Better still, it gives a quantified way of sponsoring highly selected people. You could be the David Beckham of 18-35 year old salsa fans in your town, sponsored to put the latest Latin sounds on your playlist.

Like celebrities, each of us will have an individual worth to advertisers, a price on our profile, and we will be the commodity that technology companies sell to marketers.

These new online social networking tools allow the companies that operate them an insight into the social power structures that run through our lives, and the opportunity to influence them.

Link to NYT piece ‘Brave New World of Digital Intimacy’.