Month: January 2009

I’ve just found pages from a 1941 French hypnotism manual on the (tastefully NSFW) Au carrefour √©trange blog that has some wonderful illustrations of hypnotism ‘in action’.

A few are particularly curious because they seem to be directly mimicking famous images of hysteria from the 1800s.

Hysteria is the presence of neurological symptoms without any detectable neurological damage that could account for it (see previous) and the top image on the right is taken from a late 1800s book ‘Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System’ by Jean-Martin Charcot who argued that patients with hysterical epilepsy can show this type of body posture he called the ‘Grande Hysterie Full Arch’.

It’s an iconic image and can be seen to the left of the famous painting entitled ‘A Clinical Lesson with Doctor Charcot at the Salp√™tri√®re’ by Andr√© Brouillet that Freud had hung above his couch. You can still see it there in fact, in Freud’s old house, now the Freud Museum in London.

The image below is taken from the 1941 French hypnotism manual. In fact, all the images of the woman mimic Charcot’s famous photos or drawings of hysterical patients.

For example, here’s the Charcot original of a woman between two chairs, and here’s the image from the manuel d’hypnotisme.

Unfortunately, the Au carrefour √©trange website doesn’t have text from the book, but the images suggest that it is encouraging practitioners to simulate these famous poses.

Interestingly, Charcot was the first to suggest that hypnotism and hysteria may rely on similar neurological and psychological processes owing to the fact that it is possible to temporarily simulate hysteria with hypnosis.

Over 100 years later, there is growing evidence that this is the case, as neuroimaging studies have shown that hysterial paralysis and hypnotically-induced paralysis activate remarkably similar brain areas.

However, his classifications of the different body postures of hysteria are now thought to useless, and likely caused by Charcot’s own suggestions to his patients.

The pages from the hypnotism book are on a site with tasteful but NSFW images, so be cautious at work, or be ready with your excuse about a historical interest in Charcot.

UPDATE: The same blog has images from another French hypnotism book called Nouveau cours pratique d’hypnotisme et de suggestion from 1929. Dig that cover!

Link to pages of ‘Manuel pratique d’hypnotisme’ (via MorbidAnatomy).

Singularity Hub has reviewed the best commercial and research lab robots from 2008 and has videos of each and every one.

It’s a fantastic collection that has everything from exoskeletons, to violin playing humanoids, to ultra-lightweight robots that fly by flapping gossamer-thin wings.

The most curious is probably the robot self-reassembling chair or maybe the robo-shapes from the ISI Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory.

Anyway, a fascinating collection and great to see how AI and mechanical engineering are being applied to create the latest in cutting-edge robotics.

Link to ‘A Review of the Best Robots of 2008’ videos.

Monsters existed in the 1800s. They were not mythical creatures, but children born with birth defects who were widely discussed in the medical literature and sometimes cruelly paraded in the travelling freak shows of the time. Curiously, one of the most popular explanations for these congenital deformities concerned the psychology of the expectant mother.

If you had asked a 19th century doctor why some children were born with unusual bodies, or even fairly common birthmarks, you might have been told that they were caused by a frightening incident experienced by the mother during pregnancy.

The theory, known as ‘maternal impression‘, suggested the trauma could symbolically imprint itself on the foetus. The 1896 book Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine described many such cases in their chapter on obstetric anomalies, and this is a fairly typical example:

Parvin mentions an instance of the influence of maternal impression in the causation of a large, vivid, red mark or splotch on the face: “When the mother was in Ireland she was badly frightened by a fire in which some cattle were burned. Again, during the early months of her pregnancy she was frightened by seeing another woman suddenly light the fire with kerosene, and at that time became firmly impressed with the idea that her child would be marked.’

In another case history, a child with hydrocephalus with a “small and rabbit-shaped” face and deformed eyes is explained by the fact that a rabbit jumped at its mother during pregnancy where she was frightened by its ‘glare’.

Perhaps one of the most curious cases was published in 1817 and concerned a recalcitrant father who denied being responsible for an unwanted pregnancy, causing the mother a great deal of distress. The child was later born, reportedly with the name of date of birth of his father clearly visible in his eyes.

This is a curious mirror of the first, probably mythical, case of maternal impression, where Hippocrates reportedly saved the honour of an adulterous princess by explaining her dark skinned child as due to her having a portrait of a ‘negro’ in her room.

Although the theory enjoyed a long and colourful life, it peacefully passed away in the late 19th century when it became clear that the mind of the mother had no influence on birthmarks or congenital deformities.

For many years the psychological state of the expectant mother was thought to have virtually no effect on the developing child.

But then the Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939, and that all began to change.

The quickly assembled Finnish force was vastly outnumbered and ominously outgunned but, unlike their Soviet counterparts, they were quick and comfortable in the Artic conditions and made swift and deadly attacks.

In one of history’s great military victories, they defeated the Russians but suffered heavy losses. Many of the dead were young men, and many of the grieving were young pregnant women.

Nearly 40 years later, two Finnish psychiatrists decided to look at the mental health of the children who grew up without fathers. They compared children born to women who grieved during pregnancy, to those born to women who lost their husbands after the child had been born.

Their study, published in 1978, found that mothers who had lost their husbands during pregnancy were much more likely to have children who later developed schizophrenia.

Many similar studies have found that severe maternal stress during pregnancy affects the developing brain of the child, increasing the risk of cognitive or psychiatric problems later in life, possibly due to the effect of the hormonal response of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system.

Thankfully, we no longer think of people as monsters, whatever their size, shape or mental state, and we have long banished the monstrous myths of ‘maternal impression’.

But we do know that the mind of the mother is connected to the development of the unborn baby, and that maternal experiences can still echo through the life of the child.

Our perception of how mentally sharp we are has more to do with how we’re feeling emotionally than how our cognitive functions are actually working.

In other words when someone says, ‘I think my memory has become much worse recently’, research suggests that this tells us almost nothing about how their memory is working, but reliably indicates that their mood has been low.

It’s quite amazing to think that we have such poor insight into the functioning of our own minds that we ‘mistake’ low mood for a bad memory, poor concentration or impaired problem solving but it’s a finding that has been widely replicated in healthy people, both young and old, in psychiatric patients, and most recently in patients with epilepsy – to mention but a few of the studies.

Anosognosia is a condition that can occur after serious brain injury where the patient is unaware of their disability.

In the most striking cases, a patient may be paralysed, amnesic or even blind, but be completely unaware of the fact.

In these cases, we think that the brain damage has impaired our ability to have insight into our own mental functioning, but these studies suggest that we’re actually not very good at this to start with.

Link to one of the many studies in the area.

I’ve just discovered that the eScholarship Editions site that has 500 academic books freely available online, several psychology and psychiatry books among them, including the excellent book ‘Hysteria Beyond Freud’ which takes a historical look at this fascinating and curious condition.

‘Hysteria’ has meant many things in medical history and originally the Ancient Greeks used it to describe what they thought was a ‘wandering womb’. Its modern meaning implies the presence of what seem like neurological symptoms, such as paralysis, seizures or blindness, but without any detectable neurological damage.

Borrowing an idea from Pierre Janet, Freud popularised the idea that these symptoms were physical manifestations of psychological distress or trauma as a way of diverting the psychological pain from the conscious mind – essentially ‘converting’ the emotional energy to something else.

Although the idea of hysteria ‘psychological defence’ or ’emotional conversion’ has not been well supported by the evidence, it certainly seems the case that striking physical impairments can be unconsciously triggered.

Which is amazing if you think about it.

You could go blind, despite all your visual systems seeming to work perfectly, and you’d have no conscious control over it.

Recent evidence suggests this is possibly due to attentional systems in the brain impairing perceptual functions that occur early in the stream of consciousness, but it’s not clear why this happens.

The modern diagnostic manuals label hysteria as ‘conversion disorder’ or ‘dissociative disorder’ but they’re not necessarily good names because there’s still debate about whether the disorder actually involves ‘dissociation’ or ‘conversion’.

Many clinicians and researchers still use the term hysteria, or describe the symptoms as ‘functional’ or ‘psychogenic’, or perhaps even the more mysterious ‘medically unexplained’.

The picture on the left is called ‘The hypnotized patient and the tuning fork’ and was taken in the Salp√™tri√®re Hospital in Paris in 1889, where much early work on hysteria was conducted by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his colleagues.

It’s featured in a chapter of ‘Hysteria Beyond Freud’ about artistic and photographic depictions of the ‘hysteric’ which contains many such striking images.

Owing to the fact that hysteria is at once a ‘psychological’ and ‘bodily’ condition, images were an early way of studying the condition and popularising it among doctors.

Interestingly, although hysterical symptoms are not consciously produced, they can respond to suggestion. If you’re puzzled by how suggestions can have unconscious effects on the body, think placebo.

‘Hysteria Beyond Freud’ is a fascinating book that tracks the condition through history and there are several other freely available psychology and psychiatry books also available.

Link to chapter ‘The Image of the Hysteric’.