Ultra marathon for the mind

An extraordinary 2006 article from The New York Times profiles ultra-endurance cyclist Jure Robiƒç who apparently regularly loses his sanity during his races – literally becoming psychotic as he pushes himself to the limit.

The craziness is methodical, however, and Robic and his crew know its pattern by heart. Around Day 2 of a typical weeklong race, his speech goes staccato. By Day 3, he is belligerent and sometimes paranoid. His short-term memory vanishes, and he weeps uncontrollably. The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. Occasionally, Robic leaps from his bike to square off with shadowy figures that turn out to be mailboxes. In a 2004 race, he turned to see himself pursued by a howling band of black-bearded men on horseback…

In a consideration of Robic, three facts are clear: he is nearly indefatigable, he is occasionally nuts, and the first two facts are somehow connected. The question is, How? Does he lose sanity because he pushes himself too far, or does he push himself too far because he loses sanity? Robic is the latest and perhaps most intriguing embodiment of the old questions: What happens when the human body is pushed to the limits of its endurance? Where does the breaking point lie? And what happens when you cross the line?

It’s a wonderfully written article that touches on the man himself, the physiology of fatigue and the psychological strain of intense athletic feats.

Link to NYT article on Jure Robič.

Classic Sacks

I’ve just found this remarkable TV interview with Oliver Sacks from 1986, only a year after the publication of his famous book A Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

It’s a fascinating discussion, not least because it’s something you don’t see much these days – an extended interview that focuses solely on a neuroscientist and his work.

There are no gimmicks or attempts to jazz it up with fancy editing and graphics. We see everything during the discussion, including Sacks’ many ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and even hear a telephone going off half way through!

Still, it’s a really wide ranging discussion which covers everything from the effects of brain injury to the role of doctors in exploring their patients’ lives.

From what I can make out, the interviewer is Harold Channer who did the piece for a Manhattan-based public access TV network probably before Sacks became well-known.

The video quality is a bit ropey but Sacks has a spectacular beard and is as chaotically engaging as ever. Classic stuff.

Link to Oliver Sacks interview from 1986.

No research, no problem

Time magazine has a remarkably one-sided article on America’s first ‘internet addiction’ clinic. The clinic turns out to be a few rooms in someone’s house, but the article gives away an interesting if not depressing gem about the likely status of the ‘internet addiction’ diagnosis in the DSM-V, the next version of the psychiatrists’ diagnostic manual:

“The central issue is the absence of research literature on this,” says Dr. Charles O’Brien, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Studies in Addiction and the current chair of the DSM-V committee to revise the manual, adding that with the backdrop of the health-care debate, now is a precarious time to introduce new disorders that will require more money to treat.

“At this point I think it’s appropriate that it’s not considered an official disease,” says O’Brien. “We are probably going to mention it in the appendix.”

The appendix refers to Appendix B, which is a list of diagnoses worthy of future study, and yes, that’s the head of the DSM addiction committee saying that an “absence of research literature” makes something worthy of future study.

In which case, I might write to him and ask to have my own diagnosis of “impulsive diagnosis inclusion syndrome” listed on the same basis.

But not only is his reasoning rather odd, he’s also wrong. There’s quite a sizeable literature on the ‘internet addiction’ diagnosis and, as noted by a meta-analysis published last year, it turns out to be rubbish.

If you’re interested in reading something a little more balanced, I get to spar with Kimberley Young, one of the long-standing ‘internet addiction’ promoters, in an article in this month’s Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Link to Time on America’s first ‘internet addiction’ clinic.
Link to ‘internet addiction’ scrap in CMAJ.

Encephalon 76 slides home

The 76th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience carnival has just appeared on the Neuroskeptic blog and is packed full of mind and brain goodness.

A couple of my favourites include an excellent piece from Providentia about the violin prodigy Josef Hassid whose career was cut short by a brain tumour, and another is a great post on AK’s Ramblings about counter-intuitive labels in neuroscience.

A whole lot more mind and brain writing awaits, all bang up-to-date and hot off the press.

Link to Encephalon 76.

Where the wild things are

The Psychologist has an excellent article on the psychology behind the classic children’s book Where The Wild Things Are. It turns out that the author, Maurice Sendak, was heavily interested in psychoanalysis and intended the book to explore the inner life of children.

The article is by psychoanalyst Richard Gottlieb who examines some of the influences on the book and Sendak’s other works, noting that the author was in analysis himself and had an analyst as his life partner.

There is a remarkable thematic coherence to much of Sendak’s work, and this coherence links creative efforts that are decades apart and, additionally, links these works to what is known about his early life and formative years. Sendak himself has commented on his single-minded focus, saying, ‘I only have one subject. The question I am obsessed with is How do children survive?’ But it is more than mere survival that Sendak aspires to, for his children and for himself. He asks the question of resilience: How do children surmount and transform in order to prosper and create? It is tempting to imagine that Sendak conceives of the trajectory of his own life and art as a model for the way he has handled these questions in his works.

By the way, the whole issue of The Psychologist is freely available online, albeit as a slightly unwieldy Flash application.

It’s one of the best issues I can remember for a long time. You may want to check out an excellent article on the default network, an interview with Chris Frith, a piece on the psychology of storytelling or a review of recent discussions on the next big questions in psychology.

Link to The Psychologist on Where The Wild Things Are.

Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor and occasional columnist for The Psychologist. I read Where The Wild Things Are as a child and loved it.

Human, All Too Human

I’ve just discovered that probably one of the best series ever produced on philosophy is available on Google Video. The BBC series Human All Too Human includes three fantastic programmes on Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger – a trio of controversial thinkers who massively influenced 20th century philosophy.

It’s an interesting choice as all had fascinating and turbulent lives – Nietzsche ending his life in insanity, Heidegger a unrepentant Nazi defended by a Jewish ex-lover, and Sartre who walked the line between free love and womanising.

All had a huge influence on psychology at various stages, and you can clearly see how many struggled with concepts of mind and society.

The programmes tackle both the characters and their theories and are some of the most engaging and gripping programmes I’ve ever seen on philosophy, an essential subject that usually gets little more than satire or lip service from mainstream media.

They’re an hour each and worth every minute. Put some time aside, find a comfy chair and enjoy.

Link to programme on Jean Paul Sartre.
Link to programme on Martin Heidegger.
Link to programme on Friedrich Nietzsche.

From Stroboscope to Dream Machine

Photo from 10111.org‘From Stroboscope to Dream Machine: A History of Flicker-Induced Hallucinations’ is a wonderful article that has just appeared in medical journal European Neurology. It charts how an early finding in visual neuroscience was adopted by the Beat writer William Burroughs and became a fixture of the psychedelic sixties.

Flicker induced hallucinations have been noted throughout history and typically occur when a strong light flashes between 8 and 12hz, also known as the alpha rhythm. They most commonly trigger a type of hallucination called a form constant that comprises of geometric shapes and patterns.

Alpha rhythms have been heavily linked to the function of the occipital lobe and, as we suspect from recent research, ‘inputting’ alpha waves into the visual system via flickers seems to cause hallucinations by knocking a deep brain structure called the thalamus and the occipital lobe out of sync.

As both are part of the visual system, the effect is a bit like knocking a conversation out of sync – misperceptions occur.

Burroughs happened upon the phenomenon and set about creating a machine to produce these hallucinations:

The flicker phenomenon reminded Burroughs of a story he had recently been told by his soul mate Brion Gysin (1916-1986). At the time they both inhabited a cheap hotel in 9, rue Gît Le Coeur, a small alley in the middle of the Latin Quarter of Paris. The place has been known as the Beat Hotel ever since. Gysin was a man with many skills; he was a painter, a poet, a calligrapher, a musician and a cook, all in one lifetime.

On December 21, 1958, as his diary reports, he had been travelling on a bus in southern France. He had fallen asleep, leaning with his head against the window pane. On passing by a row of trees, sunlight came flickering through and Gysin started to hallucinate:

‘an overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multi-dimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. The vision stopped abruptly when we left the trees. Was that a vision?’.

Gysin knew by experience what neurophysiologists like Walter were talking about. Burroughs was able to hand him the theoretical framework.

The next step was to manufacture a stroboscope for private use. Gysin persuaded one of his friends, Ian Sommerville (1940-1976), to make one. Sommerville, who was originally a mathematician, came up with a simple but effective design

This was later developed into the commercially produced dreammachine, essentially a light with a rotating slotted lampshade designed to produced flickers in the alpha range. It became popular as both a way of inducing hallucinations on its own and as an aide to hallucinogenic drug trips.

There are plans online from a company who still make the machines to order.

The hallucinations don’t occur in everyone (in fact, I’ve probably spent a few hours of my life in front of a frequency controlled strobe trying to trigger the effect with no luck) and in people with photosensitive epilepsy the flickers can trigger seizures.

The effect is almost unknown in the psychedelic circles circles in which it was once popular, but has now been adopted by neuroscientists wanting a lab-based method to research hallucinations.

If you’re interested in reading more about the whole fascinating story, I can’t recommend the short but fascinating book Chapel of Extreme Experience enough.

Link to full-text of article on flicker hallucinations.
Link to DOI entry for same.

2009-09-25 Spike activity

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

<img align="left" src="http://mindhacks-legacy.s3.amazonaws.com/2005/01/spike.jpg&quot; width="102" height="120"

Is the Internet melting our brains? asks Slate of author Dennis Baron who says no, it’s just another cycle in the human history of technology distrust.

Neurophilosophy discusses recent research on how patients in the coma-like persistent vegetative state can show conditioned learning and that those that day are more likely to show recovery.

Psychoanalyst Susie Orbach discusses the psychology and politics of the body on ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra.

TED Blog has an interesting interview with Oliver Sacks relating to his recent talk on hallucinations.

Thank you Developing Intelligence for being of the few places not to fall for the ‘fMRI of dead fish is an example of a voodoo correlation’ red herring. They’re different effects and the DevIntel post discusses the difference.

Neuroanthropology has an excellent and somewhat philosophical post on mind body duality in the treatment of combat-related PTSD.

Free will is not an illusion after all, much to the surprise of New Scientist who report on new research suggesting an alternative interpretation to Libet’s famous brain activation before conscious intention to move study.

The BPS Research Digest covers research on how your personality type affects the situations you place yourself in. One of many excellent post from the BPSRD this week.

ABC Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor discusses the many illness of dictionary creator Dr Samuel Johnson. You may be interested to know that another major contributor was William Chester Minor who wrote many definitions as a patient in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

PsyBlog has an excellent post on how long it takes to form a habit.

A photograph of your loved one can reduced pain intensity according to a study covered by Neuronarrative.

New Scientist <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17837-gene-for-memory-and-iq-gives-students-low-grades.html
“>covers research on how different alleles of the COMT gene are associated with exam performance. Ignore the ‘gene for x’ nonsense and it’s actually quite an interesting article.

Welcome to the rehab center from the future via a humorous photo gallery from Wired.

Neuroskeptic covers a fascinating case study of a man with a missing limbic system.

Another interesting advance in the still limited field of ‘brain scan mind reading‘ is covered by Wired.

Cognition and Culture has a short piece on how to think, say, or do precisely the worst thing for any occasion.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on the shocking news that treating your employees well increases their productivity.

When does consciousness emerge? The Splintered Mind has a brilliantly thought-provoking post on the emergence of the conscious mind in individuals and species.

The Neurocritic has a piece on a recent but necessarily speculative paper on the neuroscience of torture and the negative effects on accurate memory recall.

It always seems worse than you think

There is a clich√© in media stories where figures for a disease or condition are quoted followed by a statement that “the true figures may be higher”. Sampling errors mean that initial figures are equally as likely to be under-estimates as over-estimates but we only ever seem to be told that the condition is under-detected.

For example, this is from a recent (actually pretty good) New Scientist article about gender identity disorder (GID) in children, a condition where children who are biologically male feel female and vice versa:

It is unclear how common GID is among children, but many transsexual adults say they felt they were “in the wrong body” from an early age. The incidence of adult transsexualism has been estimated at about 1 in 12,000 for male-to-females, and around in 1 in 30,000 for female-to-males, although transsexual lobby groups say the true figures may be far higher.

These estimates are usually drawn from prevalence studies where a maybe a few hundred or thousand people are tested. The researchers extrapolate from the number of cases to make an estimate of how many people in the population as a whole will have the condition.

These estimates are made with statistical tests which give a margin of error, meaning that within a certain range, typically described by confidence intervals, the real figure is likely to be between a range which equally includes both higher and lower values than the quoted amount.

For any individual study you can validly say that you think the estimate is too low, or indeed, too high, and give reasons for that. For instance, you might say that your sample was mainly young people who tend to be healthier than the general public, or maybe that the diagnostic tools are known to miss some true cases.

But when we look at reporting as a whole, it almost always says the condition is likely to be much more common than the estimate.

For example, have a look at the results of this Google search:

“the true number may be higher” 20,300 hits

“the true number may be lower” 3 hits

You can try variations on the phrasing and see the same sort of pattern emerges. I’m curious as to why this bias occurs, or whether there’s another explanation for it.

The English Surgeon online

Last year I posted about a wonderful film called The English Surgeon, a sublime documentary about the work of neurosurgeons Henry Marsh and Igor Kurilets in the Ukraine. It turns out you can now watch it for free online at the PBS website until 9th October.

As I mentioned last time “to say the film was just about brain surgery would be vastly under value its significance, and to describe it as a meditation on the humanity of medicine would be to confine it to a clich√©.”

As far as I can work out, it should be available wherever you are in the world.

By the way, it turns out that Henry Marsh is the husband of social anthropologist Kate Fox who wrote the book Watching the English that we discussed earlier, so interesting to see that Marsh embodies many typical English traits.

Link to The English Surgeon online (via @mocost @balajajian).

Love outside the lines

The BBC Radio 4 programme Saturday Live recently had a segment on the UK Government’s belated apology to Alan Turing for his 1952 conviction for homosexuality. The programme’s resident poet, Matt Harvey, penned this short but poignant poem to mark the occasion:

here’s a toast to Alan Turing
born in harsher, darker times
who thought outside the container
and loved outside the lines
and so the code-breaker was broken
and we’re sorry
yes now the s-word has been spoken
the official conscience woken
– very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –
and the story does suggest
a part 2 to the Turing Test:
1. can machines behave like humans?
2. can we?

 
Link to programme details. Scroll down for poem.

Transhuman nature

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind has just had an excellent programme on ‘the singularity‘, the idea that at some point in the future computer power will outstrip the ability of the human brain and then humanity will be better off in some sort of vague and unspecified way.

The idea, is of course, ludicrous and is based on a naive notion that intelligence can measured as a type of unitary ‘power’ which we can adequately compare between computer and humans. The discussion on All in the Mind is a solid critical exploration of this wildly left-field notion as well as the community from whence it comes.

It’s a popular theme among transhumanists who, despite seeming to have a mortal fear of human limitations, I quite like.

Transhumanists are like the eccentric uncle of the cognitive science community. Not the sort of eccentric uncle who gets drunk at family parties and makes inappropriate comments about your kid sister (that would be drug reps), but the sort that your disapproving parents thinks is a bit peculiar but is full of fascinating stories and interesting ideas.

They occasionally take themselves too seriously and it’s the sort of sci-fi philosophy that has few practical implications but it’s enormously good fun and is great for making you re-evaluate your assumptions.

By the way, there’s loads of extras on the AITM blog, so do check it out.

Link to All in the Mind on ‘the singularity’.
Link to extras on AITM blog.

Migraine as inspiration

Photo by Flickr user Auntie P. Click for sourceI’ve just found a brief but interesting study finding that migraines are much more common in neurologists than the general public which inspired an interesting reply by Oliver Sacks.

The prevalence of migraine in neurologists

Neurology. 2003 Nov 11;61(9):1271-2.

Evans RW, Lipton RB, Silberstein SD.

To assess the prevalence of migraine among neurologists and neurologist headache specialists, the authors performed a survey of neurologists who attended a headache review course. The 1-year and lifetime prevalences of migraine in the 220 respondents were as follows: male neurologists, 34.7%, 46.6%; male headache specialists, 59.3%, 71.9%; female neurologists, 58.1%, 62.8%; and female headache specialists, 74.1%, 81.5%. Migraine is much more prevalent among neurologists than in the general population.

Sacks later wrote to the journal to mention an earlier study finding much higher levels of migraine-related visual disturbances in doctors than other people. He also wonders:

Speculating on the possible reasons for the prevalence of migraine in neurologists, and particularly headache specialists, Evans et al. wonder, among other possibilities, whether “a personal history of migraines might stimulate an interest in neurology and headache as a subspecialty.” For myself, with a personal history of classical migraines (and, more often, isolated visual ones) going back to childhood, the extraordinary phenomena of the aura (which for me included transient or partial achromatopsia, akinetopsia, as well as visual agnosias, alexias, etc), excited an interest in the brain, and especially in visual processing, at an early age. These migraines were certainly one of the reasons I was attracted to neurology, why I chose migraine as the subject of my first book, and why I devoted a large part of this book to illustrating the varied presentations of visual auras in my patients

However, he gets short shrift from the researchers who curtly point out that their survey asked whether neurologists’ experience of migraine had influenced their career choice and they said no, so it can’t be true.

This is clearly not the finest psychological reasoning in the world and I remain fascinated by whether personal experience shapes the specialisation of clinicians.

It only happens in some cases of course. It’s probably rare that neurologists had their interest sparked after major brain damage or oncologists after experiencing cancer.

We do know, however, that psychiatrists are more likely to have experienced mental illness than other doctors and I wonder how many other links between clinical speciality and illness experience there might be.

Link to PubMed entry for study (via @anibalmastobiza)

Seeing the mind amidst the numbers

Photo by Flickr user Koen Vereeken. Click for sourceI’ve just a read a fantastic New York Times article from last year on the ongoing $1,000,000 Netflix challenge to create an algorithm that will predict what unseen films customers will liked based on their past preferences.

As well as an interesting insight into how companies are trying to guess our shopping preferences it is also a great guide to one of the central problems in scientific psychology: how we can reconcile numerical data with human thought and behaviour.

The Netflix prize teams have a bunch of data from customers who have rated films they’ve already seen and they have been challenged to write software that predicts future ratings.

Part of this process is hypothesis testing, essentially an experimental approach to find out what might be important in the decision process. For example, a team might guess that women will rate musicals higher than men. They can then test this prediction out on the data, making further predictions based on past conclusions, theories or even just hunches.

The other approach is to use mathematical techniques that look for patterns in the data. To use the jargon, these procedures look for ‘higher order properties’ – in other words, patterns in the patterns of data.

Think of it like looking at the relationship between different forests rather than thinking of everything as individual trees.

The trouble is, is that these mathematical procedures can sometimes find reliable high level patterns when it isn’t obvious to us what they represent. For example, the article discusses the use of a technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) to categorise movies based on their ratings;

There’s a sort of unsettling, alien quality to their computers’ results. When the teams examine the ways that singular value decomposition is slotting movies into categories, sometimes it makes sense to them — as when the computer highlights what appears to be some essence of nerdiness in a bunch of sci-fi movies. But many categorizations are now so obscure that they cannot see the reasoning behind them. Possibly the algorithms are finding connections so deep and subconscious that customers themselves wouldn’t even recognize them.

At one point, Chabbert showed me a list of movies that his algorithm had discovered share some ineffable similarity; it includes a historical movie, “Joan of Arc,” a wrestling video, “W.W.E.: SummerSlam 2004,” the comedy “It Had to Be You” and a version of Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House.” For the life of me, I can’t figure out what possible connection they have, but Chabbert assures me that this singular value decomposition scored 4 percent higher than Cinematch — so it must be doing something right. As Volinsky surmised, “They’re able to tease out all of these things that we would never, ever think of ourselves.” The machine may be understanding something about us that we do not understand ourselves.

In these cases, it’s tempting to think there’s some deeply psychological property of the film that’s been captured by the analysis. Maybe all trigger a wistful nostalgia, or perhaps each represents the same unconscious fantasy.

It could also be that each is under 90 minutes, or comes with free popcorn. It could even be that the grouping is entirely spurious and represents nothing significant. Importantly, the answer to these questions is not in the data to be discovered, we have to make the interpretation ourselves.

Experimental methods go from meaning to data, while exploratory methods go from data to meaning. Somewhere in the middle is our mind.

The Netflix challenge is this problem on steroids and the NYT piece brilliantly explores the practical problems in making sense of it all.

Link to NYT piece ‘If You Liked This, You‚Äôre Sure to Love That’

Going under

I’ve just found a curious historical article discussing the early debates over whether anaesthesia could trigger sexual dreams in patients. As this was Britain in the 1800s, much of the fuss was centred on whether the Victorian lady was actually capable of such things:

In January, 1849, a discussion of ‚ÄúChloroform in Midwifery‚Äù occurred during a meeting of the Westminster Medical Society in England. One of the physicians, Dr. G. T. Gream (Obstetrician, Queen Charlotte‚Äôs Lying-In Hospital, London, England) enumerated several reasons why he did not think that chloroform was appropriate for obstetric use, and in so doing, he ‚Äúalluded to several cases in which women had, under the influence of chloroform, made use of obscene and disgusting language. This latter fact alone he considered sufficient to prevent the use of chloroform in English women‚Äù…

In a subsequent issue of The Lancet, notes from the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh of February 7, 1849, were published. Sir James Young Simpson (Obstetrician, Edinburgh, Scotland, developer of chloroform anesthesia, and President of the Royal College of Physicians in 1849; 1811–1870) stated that after 15 months of use in thousands of cases, “he had never seen, nor had he ever heard of any other person having seen, any manifestation of sexual excitement result from the exhibition of chloroform…. The excitement, he was inclined to think, existed not in the individuals anesthetized, but was the result of impressions harbored in the minds of the practitioners, not in the minds of the chloroformed.”

Of course, there are some cases of criminal clinicians who have used sedation to attack their patients, but we now know that some modern anaesthetics, particularly midazolam and propofol, really do seem to be involved in causing sexual hallucinations and imagery in patients.

As far as I know, the reason why certain anaesthetics spark sexual imagery is still a mystery.

As we discussed earlier this year, the introduction of anaesthesia was controversial, partly because of the belief that pain was useful in keeping people alive and partly because experiencing pain was considered morally virtuous.

Link to PubMed entry for paper.

Lifetime blindness prevents schizophrenia?

Rather mysteriously, no one can find anyone who has been blind from birth and has later been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I found this interesting snippet from a short article from Behavioral and Brain Sciences:

Five independent searches, varying considerably in scope, methods, and population, failed to identify even one well-defined co-occurrence of total blindness and schizophrenia (Abely & Carton 1967; Chevigny & Braverman 1950; Feierman 1982; Horrobin 1979; Riscalla 1980). We dedicated portions of 2000 and 2001 to e-mail and postal mail surveys of relevant professionals; e-mail and telephone discussions with officials of health, mental health, blindness, and schizophrenia organizations and research institutes; and extensive keyword probes of Medline, PsychINFO, and ScienceDirect databases. Some ambiguity was introduced by very low return rates for our surveys, but the consistent result of all these inquiries was that no instance of totally blind/schizophrenic co-occurrence was found.

The authors give a speculative hypothesis that this is because visual experience during development helps to shape brain pathways heavily reliant on the neurotransmitter glutamate and the NMDA receptor.

It is widely accepted that this system plays a role in the development of psychosis but the idea that it is shaped by visual experience to the point where schizophrenia is impossible is just an interesting idea at the present time.

That’s not to say no-one with schizophrenia is blind (in fact, there are numerous tragic cases of self-blinding) but it is still the case that no-one has yet produced an example of someone who has been blind from birth who later has become psychotic.

If you do hear of anyone, get in touch, contact your nearest cognitive scientist, or if you are a researcher yourself, write up a case study, as it’s an interesting anomaly in the medical literature.

Link to summary of paper on blindness and schizophrenia.