Year: 2009

2009-03-27 Spike activity

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

Brain Hammer is on fire at the moment, lots of great posts on philosophy of mind.

Dodgy fMRI ‘lie detection’ evidence to be submitted as evidence in court, reports Frontal Cortex and piece from Wired. Next in court, lie detection through reading the clouds.

Alzheimer International has an awesome short promo video. In Spanish but you don’t need the language to understand it. Beautiful.

Daniel Dennett discusses the risk of robot war in a short video for Big Think.

Technology Review has an article on an exciting new technology to chart human activity, on city maps, on mobile devices, in real time.

The excellent BPS Research Digest is now on Twitter.

PsyBlog has an excellent, and beautifully illustrated, article on the ‘attention spotlight‘.

The miracle fruit, which changes our taste by interfering with tongue receptors, is discussed on CNN.

Eric Schwitzgebel has more on his compelling exploration over whether philosophical study influences real world behaviour, finding political scientists don’t go to vote differently from most other people.

A fantastic study on the genetics of white matter structure and link to IQ is discussed by NPR. Take the stuff about ‘thinking faster’ with a pinch of salt. They didn’t analyse speed of processing directly, they’re just inferring ‘speed’ from white matter integrity.

The Frontal Cortex has a great piece on male female differences, or the lack of them, in the psychology of decision-making.

Philosopher Alva Noe discusses his new book on consciousness and embodiment in an interview for Salon.

Wall Street Journal Blog reports that the Journal of the American Medical Association has created an inadequate new policy after the editors bullied a neuroanatomy professor who pointed out undeclared conflicts of interest in a paper they published. The Economist covers the fall out, patients’ group call for editors to resign.

“The medial prefrontal cortex exhibits money illusion” reports paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I wondered where magicians get all those coins from.

The New York Times reports depression is linked to thinned brain cortex.

The American Psychiatric Association starts to remove the drug company teat from its mouth by halting industry-funded symposia and free lunches at its conferences – according to Medical News Today.

Where time becomes a loop

New Scientist has an excellent article on the neuroscience of deja vu, tackling how our brain can generate the anomalous feeling that we are reliving an event when it has happened for the first time.

The article tackles both experiments that try to trigger and measure deja vu in healthy participants, as well as in people who experience, sometimes permanent, deja vu because of epilepsy of brain injury.

There is one slightly awkward bit in the article however.

One possibility is that d√©j√† vu is based on a memory fragment that comes from something more subtle, such as similarity between the configuration or layout of two scenes. Say you are in the living room of a friend’s new house with the eerie feeling that you have been there before, yet knowing you can’t possibly. It could be just that the arrangement of furniture is similar to what you have seen before, suggests Cleary, so the sense of familiarity feels misplaced…

Although the familiarity idea appeals to many, Moulin, for one, is not convinced. His scepticism stems from a study of a person with epilepsy that he conducted with Akira O’Connor, now at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. This 39-year-old man’s auras of d√©j√† vu were long-lasting enough to conduct experiments during them. The researchers reasoned that if familiarity is at the root of d√©j√† vu, they should be able to stop the experience in its tracks by distracting the man’s attention away from whatever scene he was looking at. However, when he looked away or focused on something different, his d√©j√† vu did not dissipate, and would follow his line of vision and his hearing, suggesting that real familiarity is not the key. The fact that an epilepsy aura can cause d√©j√† vu at all suggests that it is erroneous activity in a particular part of the brain that leads to misplaced feelings of familiarity, suggests Moulin.

This dichotomy is interesting because it implies that ‘brain activity’ and ‘misplaced familiarity’ are somehow separate, when we know each can just be descriptions of the same thing on different levels of interpretation.

However, it also implies that deja vu can only be caused in one particular way, when it could be caused by many different processes.

For example, think about trying to understand why someone got angry. We could be studying one person who gets angry when his football team loose, another when he is wrongly accused and another when he has a seizure in his limbic system.

You could use each one of these explanations to say that the other explanation is wrong if you believed that anger could only be caused in one way.

However, if we accept that it is an experience described at the level of psychology or behaviour there could be many ways of explaining it, and many paths that lead to the same experience, each cause does not cancel the other out.

Like deja vu and probably many other experiences, there are many causes and ways of explaining causes for the same phenomena.

Link to NewSci article ‘D√©j√† vu: Where fact meets fantasy’.

Much madness is divinest sense

I’ve just found this fantastic poem by 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, where she discusses the link between conformity and madness.

Madness is defined partly in terms of what we consider normal and one of the great critiques of psychiatry is that it is used a method of control over those who do not conform to acting with the acceptable range of behaviour.

To what extent this is necessary or ethical for people who may not have good insight into their extreme states of mind has been one of the key debates in mental health for hundreds of years.

Dickinson describes the 19th method of control (“handled with a chain”) although I can’t say I ever seen an angry person declared sane, as we still have this implicit idea that being able to control your emotions when necessary or in your interest is a sign of sanity.

Dickinson’s poem:

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

Dickinson is probably best known among cognitive scientists for her poem on the brain (‘Wider than the sky’), which is perhaps one of the most beautiful literary pieces on our second favourite organ, and widely quoted by researchers.

Link to Bartleby entry for ‘Much madness is divinest sense’.

Why children don’t make us happy (on average)

Photo by Flickr user carf. Click for sourceThe Psychologist has a counter-intuitive article on research that indicates, contrary to popular belief, that having children tends not to make people happier. In fact, parents reliably report that they feel less happy than in their child free days, and less happy when compared to childless couples.

Over the past few decades, social scientists like me have found consistent evidence that there is an almost zero association between having children and happiness. My analysis in the Journal of Socio-economics (Powdthavee, 2008) is a recent British example of parents and non-parents reporting the same levels of life satisfaction, on average.

But the warnings for prospective parents are even more stark than ‘it’s not going to make you happier’. Using data sets from Europe and America, numerous scholars have found some evidence that, on aggregate, parents often report statistically significantly lower levels of happiness (Alesina et al., 2004), life satisfaction (Di Tella et al., 2003), marital satisfaction (Twenge et al., 2003), and mental well-being (Clark & Oswald, 2002) compared with non-parents.

It’s an interesting article as it tackles not only why having children tends not to make us happier, but also why we think it does in cultures across the world.

Link to ‘Think having children will make you happy?’.

Full disclosure: I’m an occasional columnist and unpaid associate editor for The Psychologist.

Tonic to aphrodisiac to energy drink

Image from Wikipedia. Click for sourceThe journal Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine has an interesting open-access article about guarana, a stimulating Amazonian berry that was used by the local peoples but is now a global ingredient in energy drinks and ‘aphrodisiacs’.

It is often advertised as an ingredient in energy drinks to make them sound more ‘exotic’ or ‘natural’, but the kick is largely from caffeine, and it contains about four times as much as the coffee bean.

Indeed, the article notes that guarana seeds contain more caffeine than any other plant in the world.

Guaran√° (Paullinia cupana H.B.K., Sapindaceae) is a rainforest vine that was domesticated in the Amazon for its caffeine-rich fruits. Guaran√° has long been used as a tonic and to treat various disorders in Brazil and abroad and became a national soda in Brazil about a century ago. In the last two decades or so, guaran√° has emerged as a key ingredient in various ‘sports’ and energy drinks as well as concoctions that allegedly boost one’s libido.

For some time, guaran√°’s high caffeine content was thought to be a detriment because of health concerns about excessive intake of caffeine-rich drinks. But it is precisely this quality, and the fact that it has a mysterious name and comes from an exotic land, that has propelled guaran√° into a global beverage.

The article is fairly brief but is a great guide to this curious plant that is becoming increasingly used as a pick-me-up ingredient.

Link to full-text of article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Encephalon 66 with just the facts, ma’am

The 66th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival was published a few days ago and I’m only just catching up with the world. However, it’s got a great round-up of some of the best mind and brain blogging and is hosted by Ionian Enchantment.

A couple of my favourites include Neurotopia on problems with the popular but wrong serotonin theory of depression, and one from Effortless Incitement on how relatedness influences an individual’s knowledge about whether their sibling is alive or not!

There’s plenty more, so have a browse through this fortnight’s selection.

Link to Encephalon 66.

For the sake of Ritalin

Don’t Believe the Hype by hip hop group Public Enemy has a line which is often misheard as “I don’t rhyme for the sake of Ritalin”, when, in fact, the lyrics say “I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin'”.

I’ve just noticed that The Roots‘ track False Media, gives a clever nod to this perceptual miscue to make a point about the drug itself.

Eleven million children are on Ritalin
That’s why I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’

Link to False Media lyrics.

I would have got away with it…

James Brewer suffered a stroke and, thinking he was dying, confessed to a murder he had committed thirty years earlier in his hospital bed. Like the majority of people who suffer stroke, he recovered and has now been charged with murder.

From BBC News:

A US man who thought he was dying and confessed to having killed a neighbour in 1977 has been charged with murder after making a recovery, US media say.

James Brewer could now face the death penalty over the unsolved killing in Tennessee 32 years ago, reports say.

Convinced he was dying after a stroke, Mr Brewer reportedly admitted to police he shot dead 20-year-old Jimmy Carroll.

The 58-year-old, who had fled Tennessee after the killing, was arrested after his condition improved, reports say.

Lest you find yourself in the same situation, you may like to know that the stroke mortality rates have fallen dramatically in recent decades.

Link to BBC News story.
Link to story in The Telegraph.

Medellín, mi corazón

I leave Medellín and the beautiful country of Colombia today after six fantastic months working at the Universidad de Antioquia and the Hospital Universitario San Vicente de Paúl.

My thanks to the everyone I worked with here for the fantastically warm welcome, the careful tuition in scientific Spanish and the fascinating conversations.

Colombia is a wonderfully friendly and stunningly beautiful country that I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone, visitor or worker alike.

The picture is of one of the many beautiful mountains of Antioquia, in the ‘Paisa’ region.

Apologies for the likely sporadic updates over the next couple of days as I fly back to the UK and fight the jet lag.

Hasta pronto Colombia.

2009-03-20 Spike activity

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

Wired reports that Japanese ‘detergent suicide‘ technique creeps into U.S.

To the bunkers! BBC News has a video of a creepy but strangely seductive <a href="Female robot
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7946780.stm”>fembot from a Japanese tech firm.

Kraepelin´s Grandchildren is an interesting new Spanish-language brain blog.

Daniel Dennett does an interesting TED lecture on the counter-intuitive link between evolution and psychology.

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers a fascinating study finding that musical intervals actually reflect the sounds of our own speech.

I’ve been digging the Phrenologists Notebook blog recently. Looks plain, reads great.

BBC News has a great video clip from a Horizon documentary showing newborns doing ‘maths’ and how experiments test such young kids.

Thank you Neurotopia! Contrary to the popular headlines modafinil triggering dopamine activity in the nucleus accumbens does not make it addictive. People getting addicted to it does (which, so far, hasn’t happened).

BPS Research Digest has an excellent write-up of a review paper on successful non-drugs treatments for schizophrenia.

Completely false headline hides interesting write-up of study on anterior cingulate activation linked to religious belief in New Scientist.

New Scientist has a much better article on the effect of money on decision-making.

Am I normal? A new series of the wonderful BBC Radio 4 series has programmes on post-natal depression and gifted children.

Neurophilosophy reports on a study finding that brain waves predict successful memory for an event before it occurs.

The New York Times has an interesting article on Dr Alice Flaherty who studies the neuropsychology of empathy and has bipolar disorder.

A bill to promote the neurotechnology industry has been introduced into both the House and Senate of US Congress, reports Brain Waves.

Neuroscientist and author of a recent book on loneliness, John Cacioppo, is interviewed by Neuronarrative.

Scientific American has an interesting interview on delayed onset brain injuries with neurosurgeon Keith Black in the wake of Natasha Richardson’s death.

Predicting creditworthiness from photos of faces. The Economist covers another interesting psychological characteristics we can reliably read from the face (if averaged from a group’s responses).

PsyBlog has a piece on the ‘Cocktail Party Effect‘, presumably named in the days when psychologists had cocktail parties. Presumably, if discovered today it would be called the Friday after work down the pub effect.

The control centre of the US Army’s Human Terrain System and the role of the team in tackling military corruption is discussed by Wired.

The Frontal Cortex has a thought-provoking meditation on the value of neuroscience.

There’s been so much eye-opening stuff on Furious Seasons recently, I’ll just direct you to the entire blog.

Get me a mentally ill celebrity

The New Statesman has an interesting article by a press officer from one of the UK’s biggest mental health charities describing how press stories are put together and why it’s almost impossible to get any media interest without a ‘mentally ill celebrity’.

But there’s the rub. Shouldn’t we want to hear about these issues anyway? Do we really need to look to the stars? I started “selling” this campaign to journalists armed with a raft of compelling stories of real-life discrimination – the experienced business analyst who, after six months off with depression, made 150 job applications before an employer would give him a chance; the singer barred from joining a choir because she had had schizophrenia; the Cambridge graduate refused a chance to train as a teacher because of a history of mental health problems.

They’re interesting stories, emblematic of a stigma that still surrounds mental illness, and they matter to a great many people: one in four of us will have a mental health problem at some stage. And journalists know it. “Wow, yes, that is very interesting,” they say. “It’s dreadful, isn’t it? I know someone that happened to, actually, but . . . I was wondering if you could get me Mel C, y’know, Sporty Spice? Or Ruby Wax? Or, even better, do you have any new celebs who’ve had problems in the past?”

Link to New Statesman piece ‘Get me Sporty Spice’.

Permanently altering brain function, outside the skull

A surgical team from Italy have just reported that they’ve altered human brain function through neurosurgery conducted from outside the skull, by using beams of radiation.

The technique is known as radiosurgery and, in itself, isn’t novel. The team used the Cyberknife system, specifically designed to do this sort of operation.

However, the technique is typically used to treat brain tumours, and what is new is that the team have adapted this method to permanently knock out targeted areas to alter overall brain function.

They were inspired by deep brain stimulation and functional brain surgery. These aim to do a similar thing and are most commonly used to treat tremors and movement problems in Parkinson’s disease by altering the movement circuits in the brain.

This new operation aimed to do something similar, but with radiosurgery.

Their report appears in the journal Medical Physics, where they describe the treatment of two patients with, until then, untreatable disorders. One with chronic pain, stemming from nerve damage, and other with dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes certain muscles to painfully contract.

One of the challenges with this sort of operation is hitting exactly the right spot, and to achieve the necessary accuracy the team built a 3D computer model of the key areas from the brain scans which they then used to electronically direct the radiosurgery equipment.

The patient with dystonia had a pallidotomy, where part of his basal ganglia was ablated (destroyed), whereas the patient with chronic pain had a thalamotomy, taking out a section of his medial thalamus.

Both patients recovered well, significantly improved and showed no major side-effects at 15 months.

The image on the left shows where the radiation beams entered the head during the operation on the patient with chronic pain.

Link to research report.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Psychotherapy with the Amish

Photo from Wikipedia. Click for sourceNPR has a fascinating segment on psychotherapist Jim Cates, who works with Amish youth who are experiencing the turbulent time of ‘Rumspringa‘ – a period when they get to experience non-Amish life so they can decide whether they want to commit to their parents’ culture and traditions.

The Amish are a community based around Anabaptist Christianity who, to varying degrees, refuse modern technology and the common social practices of North America.

However, during the time of Rumspringa, the youth are free to wear modern clothes, use technology, and may experiment with drink, drugs and sex – on the basis that the Amish want their youth to freely enter their tradition having had the opportunity to experience the alternative.

For some young people, this causes some difficulties, not least with some who encounter difficulties with drink, drugs or emotional adjustment and Jim Cates is a psychotherapist who helps the young people work through the issues.

He describes how he needs to take a radically different approach when conducting psychotherapy with Amish youth, owing to the markedly different way of thinking, particularly about the role of the individual in society.

Cates notes that while traditional American culture is individualist, Amish culture is strongly collectivist, to the point where talking about yourself is seen as prideful and individual work without the involvement of the family is at best uncomfortable and at worst inconceivable.

In the NPR piece, Cates gives some fascinating insights into his take on Amish psychology and discusses the innovative approach he needs when working with the culture.

It’s one of the most interesting and surprising radio pieces I’ve heard in a while, and is by the excellent Alix Spiegel, who also produced the gripping 81 words.

Link to NPR ‘One Man Tackles Psychotherapy For The Amish’.

Dan Ariely on the psychology of cheating

Behavioural economist Dan Ariely gives a fantastic 15 minute TED lecture on the psychology of cheating that explores numerous fascinating and counter-intuitive influences on how we bend the truth for personal benefit.

Ariely discusses some curious social influences, including the fact that seeing someone else cheat may actually decrease the general cheating of the group, but only if they perceive they are part of a different or rival group. Seeing someone cheat who is part of your ‘in-group’ seems to reliably increase dishonesty.

He also notes various effects of changing the form of the benefit. Simply making the reward tokens that can be exchanged for money, rather than just directly paying, greatly increases cheating, even though the value is identical in both cases.

Ariel does some fascinating research and is the author of Predictably Irrational, an excellent book which I thoroughly recommend.

The talk is similarly enjoyable and Ariely makes links between his own studies on cheating and the current financial meltdown.

Link to Dan Ariely’s TED talk.

Sweet anaesthesia and the mystery of consciousness

Discover Magazine has an excellent article on the science of anaesthesia and why doctors need to struggle with the problem of consciousness to make someone comfortably numb.

If you’re not familiar some of the mysteries of anaesthesia, you may be surprised to know that we don’t actually know how most anaesthetics work and we have no reliable way of telling whether someone is unconscious.

This is important because general anaesthesia usually involves two types of drug, muscle relaxants and hypnotics. It’s possible that the muscle relaxants have their paralysing effect but the hypnotics don’t fully work, so you’re awake and aware, but don’t respond when you’re touched or talked to.

Hence anaesthetists would love a device which says whether someone is concious or not, but unfortunately, divining consciousness from the brain is one of the hardest problems in science. So, they’ve come up with various other methods:

Sometimes the anesthesiologist will use a blood pressure cuff on a patient’s arm to block the muscle relaxants in the bloodstream. Then the doctor asks the patient to squeeze a hand.

This sort of test can distinguish between a patient who is awake and one who is out cold. But at the borderline of consciousness, it is not very precise. The inability to raise your hand, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean that you are unconscious. Even a light dose of anesthesia can interfere with your capacity to keep new pieces of information in your brain, so you may not respond to a command because you immediately forgot what you were going to do. On the other hand, squeezing an anesthesiologist’s hand may not mean you’re wide awake. Some patients who can squeeze a hand will later have no memory of being aware.

Seeking a more reliable measuring stick, some researchers have started measuring brain waves. When you are awake, your brain produces fast, small waves of electrical activity. When you are under total anesthesia, your brain waves become deep and slow. If you get enough of certain anesthetics, your brain waves eventually go flat. Most anesthesiologists monitor their patients using a machine known as a bispectral index monitor, which reads brain waves from electrodes on a patient’s scalp and produces a score from 100 to 0. But these machines aren’t precise either. Sometimes patients who register as unconscious can still squeeze a hand on command.

The article then goes on to discuss some fascinating neuroscience studies that use anaesthesia to try and understand what changes in the brain as someone slips into unconsciousness.

It’s a great read and an interesting look into what you might called ‘applied consciousness research’.

Link to ‘Could a Dose of Ether Contain the Secret to Consciousness?’