2009 – Page 39 – Mind Hacks

2009-02-06 Spike activity

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

Furious Seasons has the curious news that FDA has linked anti-depressants to the development of neuroleptic malignant syndrome. Curious as NMS is traditionally linked to dopamine inhibitors, and serotonin syndrome has several similar symptoms but is already known.

Readers build vivid mental simulations of literary narratives, suggests brain scanning study.

Brain has a interesting commentary on the vascular theory of migraine – ‘a great story wrecked by the facts’.

The wonderful RadioLab has a brief post-season follow-up programme with an excellent section on ‘stereotype threat‘.

USA Today covers an fMRI study on a women with hypermnesia or ‘super memory’ as the paper calls it.

Speed dating as a method for studying the psychology of attraction is discussed by Science News.

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers research suggesting colours affect the mind – red improves attention to detail, blue boosts creativity.

Hypothesis / conclusion confusion hits BBC News, again, as it says Alzheimer’s ‘is brain diabetes’.

Neurophilosophy has a typically excellent article on a study looking at how the age of a memory being recalled is linked to which brain areas are active during remembering.

A study on the epidemiology and prognosis of coma in soap operas is covered by Neurotopia.

Time magazine asks will plastic surgery make you happier? Unlikely, is the answer.

Financial bubbles, economic crashes and cognitive biases are discussed by The Atlantic.

Nth Position reviews an interesting looking new book on the ‘globalisation of addiction‘.

A study on the negative effects of violent video games on social helping is discussed by New Scientist.

BoingBoing notes news that a Hollywood film about amnesic patient H.M. could be in the pipeline.

Activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group, according to a new study covered by New Scientist.

BPS Research Digest asks how much thought do we put into our moral judgements?

There’s only so much science can tell us about human morality, argues Howard Gardner in an article for Slate.

Cognitive Daily has a great piece on how the Kanizsa illusion is being used to study how we recognise shapes.

Never mind the quality, look at the width

The New York Times has a fascinating snippet on how cooperation with others to get a monetary reward is not influenced by the value of the reward, but by the numbers that describe it.

In the study, when the reward was described as rising from 3 cents to 300 cents cooperation increased – but when it was described as rising from 3 cents to 3 dollars, it had no effect.

The experiment was carried by psychologists Ellen Furlong and John Opfer who were interested in comparing how our reasoning is affected by the representation of value.

The researchers asked volunteers to take part in a behavioral test known as the prisoner‚Äôs dilemma, in which two partners are offered various rewards to either work together or defect.

The idea is that in the long term, the participants earn the most money by cooperating. But in any given round of play, they make the most if they decide to turn against their partner while he stays loyal. (The reward is lowest when both partners defect.)

When the reward for cooperation was increased to 300 cents from 3 cents, the researchers found, the level of cooperation went up. But when the reward went from 3 cents to $3, it did not.

We covered a study late last year that also found a similar effect: people were swayed more by higher numbers in adverts even when the alternative described exactly the same thing but using smaller units.

Link to short NYT piece ‘$1? No Thanks. 100 Cents? You Bet’.
Link to academic article on study.
Link to DOI entry for same.

Looking into the mind of God

This week’s New Scientist has an interesting article summarising the current thinking on the psychology of religion.

The research treats religion and belief in God or other supernatural entities as a natural consequence of how the brain works.

This has taken two main strands in the research literature: the first is that these tendencies to believe in supernatural forces have evolutionary benefits for social cohesion and kinship, which is why they have been selected for.

The other is that these beliefs are a side-effect of the actions of other useful cognitive processes we have developed. In other words, we have certain mental abilities, typically attributing intention and desire, which we unwittingly over-apply and hence attribute random uncontrollable events to mysterious but intelligent beings.

The article is not particularly in-depth but is notable for its breadth of coverage and will give you a taste for the direction in which the cognitive science of religion is heading.

Link to NewSci article ‘How your brain creates God’.

NeuroPod on pheromones, neural nets, fMRI and sleep

The latest Nature Neuropod neuroscience podcast has just hit the net, with a great selection of discussions and interviews covering everything from pheromones and sexual attraction to the impact of poor quality sleep on memory.

This final section on an intriguing and recently published study found that even mild disturbance that didn’t wake the sleeper but knocked them out of deeper sleeper into the shallower sleep stages could still disrupt the retention of material learned the previous day.

However, as I am remarkably tired myself I need as much deep sleep as I can get, so I shall leave the rest of the podcast as a voyage of discovery. Enjoy!

Link to Neuropod home page with audio.
mp3 of latest podcast.

The hashish inspired art of Jean-Martin Charcot

While searching for material on the famous 19th Century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, I noticed that a number of online art shops sell drawings he did, apparently while under the influence of hashish – so I’ve been trying to find out more.

The strip above is only part of the image, as despite the fact that it is now in the public domain, most of the online sources deliberately obscure it, presumably in an attempt to get you to buy their posters while pissing off potential customers at the same time.

However, it seems that the picture is likely to be genuine. This is from a book on Charcot’s life where a contemporary recounts their hashish smoking escapades:

As soon as he was under the influence of the narcotic, a tumult of phantasmogoric visions flashed across his mind. The entire page was covered with drawings: prodigious dragons, grimacing monsters, incoherent personages who were superimposed on each other and who were intertwined and twisted in a fabulous whirlpool bringing to mind the apocalyptic visions of Van Bosh and Jacques Callot.

A 2004 article in the medical journal European Neurology discussed his lifelong interest in art and drawing, and contains a sketch of a scene from Hell also apparently created while stoned.

If anyone does know of a high quality online source of these drawings online, do let me know, as I’d particularly love to see the larger image in its full glorious detail.

Link to European Neurology on ‘Charcot and Art: From a Hobby to Science’.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Like tears in the rain

The New York Times has a great short article on the science of crying, covering recent studies that have investigated the common idea that it is a useful way of releasing pent-up emotion.

The idea that crying is cathartic has been researched more than I realised with numerous large scale studies tackling in what situations people cry, as well what impact it has on our emotional state.

Now, some researchers say that the common psychological wisdom about crying ‚Äî crying as a healthy catharsis ‚Äî is incomplete and misleading. Having a ‚Äúgood cry‚Äù can and usually does allow people to recover some mental balance after a loss. But not always and not for everyone, argues a review article in the current issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. Placing such high expectation on a tearful breakdown most likely sets some people up for emotional confusion afterward…

In a study published in the December issue of The Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Dr. Rottenberg, along with Lauren M. Bylsma of the University of South Florida and Ad Vingerhoets of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, asked 5,096 people in 35 countries to detail the circumstances of their most recent crying episode. About 70 percent said that others‚Äô reactions to their breakdown were positive, comforting. But about 16 percent cited nasty or angry reactions that, no surprise, generally made them feel worse.

The science of crying was also covered in a recent BPS Research Digest post that discussed another one of Rottenberg’s studies that focused entirely on females.

Link to NYT piece ‘The Muddled Tracks of All Those Tears’.

Hello, my name is Trouble

Time magazine has an interesting article on links between given names and behaviour, with a new study finding children with unpopular names are more likely to be get in trouble with the law.

This doesn’t mean that being called an unusual name causes criminality – the article notes that boys with unpopular names are likelier to live in single-parent households and be poorer, which are also known to be linked to higher levels of offending.

However, it does add to a growing body of research suggests that our names have a curious influence on our life.

A great review article in The Psychologist from last year covered much of findings, including the fact that people tend to buy products they share initials with, those whose names start with C or D are more likely to receive those grades than are other students, and people called Louis are more likely to live in St. Louis, Mary in Marysville and so on.

The same effect also seems to happen with initials, so Marys are also more likely to live in Manchester.

However, the Time article focuses more on how your name affects how others react towards you and perceive you, which may have a reciprocal impact on your own life chances:

The short answer is that our names play an important role in shaping the way we see ourselves ‚Äî and, more important, how others see us. Abundant academic literature proves these points. A 1993 paper found that most people perceive those with unconventionally spelled names (Patric, Geoffrey) as less likely to be moral, warm and successful.

A 2001 paper found that we have a tendency to judge boys’ trustworthiness and masculinity from their names. (As a guy whose middle name is Ashley, I can attest to the second part.) In a 2007 paper (here’s a PDF), University of Florida economist David Figlio found that boys with names commonly given to girls are likelier to be suspended from school.

And an influential 1998 paper co-authored by psychologist Melvin (a challenging first name if there ever was one) Manis of the University of Michigan reported that “having an unusual name leads to unfavorable reactions in others, which then leads to unfavorable evaluations of the self.”

Link to Time on the effects of names.

If Freud were a woman

I’ve just found this clever short essay that parodies Freud by imagining that he was a woman.

It discusses the work of Phyllis Freud, rather than the better known Sigmund, who puts a female perspective in the centre of his male-centric theories.

As Phyllis observed…there was ‚Äúyet another surprising effect of womb envy, or the discovery of the inferiority of the penis to the clitoris, which is undoubtedly the most important of all…that masturbation…is a feminine activity and that the elimination of penile sensuality is a necessary pre-condition for the development of masculinity.‚Äù

In this way, Phyllis Freud wisely screened all she heard from her testyrical patients through her understanding, still well accepted to this day, the men are sexually passive, just as they tend to be intellectually and ethically. After all, the libido is intrinsically feminine, or, as she put it with her genius for laywoman‚Äôs terms, ‚Äúman is possessed of a weaker sexual instinct.‚Äù

This was also proved by man‚Äôs mono-orgasmic nature.

Apparently it’s taken from one of the many, many feminist critiques of Freud’s work, who famously focused on theories of male psychology because women just seemed too baffling.

Link to ‘What if Freud were Phyllis?’

Peering into the darkness, through the key hole

Locked-in syndrome is a dramatic condition where, after brain stem damage, patients are conscious but paralysed and can only communicate with the outside world by an eye-blink or muscle twitch.

Because of limited communication it has been difficult to assess the impact of the damage on thinking and reasoning, but a French team have created tests that can be completed by simple yes / no movements – allowing the first comprehensive study into the cognition of the locked-in mind.

The syndrome usually occurs after a stroke, where an interruption to the blood supply selectively damages the neurological ‘relay station’ that transmits movement impulses to the rest of the body, leaving an almost total paralysis – classically except for a facial muscle.

It has been assumed that affected people are paralysed but cognitively intact – their thinking isn’t affected.

In one famous example, the editor of Elle magazine, Jean Dominique Bauby, wrote the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly after suffering locked-in syndrome by painstakingly selecting letters with an eye-blink. It’s both stunningly beautiful and eloquent, demonstrating a keen and focused mind.

But because of extremely limited communication, it’s difficult to say whether this level of preserved mental ability is common because traditional neuropsychological tests usually require relatively complex responses.

To address the problem, a French team, led by neurologist Marc Rousseaux, designed tests to assess nine patients that included everything from visual recognition tasks to logical-mathematical reasoning problems, all which could be answered with yes / no responses – just eye-blinks in some cases.

The appendix of their article has the full list of the tests and they are remarkable for their ingenious design.

They team found that while the patients were generally mentally sharp, problems in particular areas were not uncommon, with a significant minority showing selective impairments in areas such as comprehension, understanding meaningful connections, or problem solving.

Sadly, this means that it is unlikely that all locked-in patients share Jean-Dominique Bauby’s remarkably preserved intellect, but the development of these ingenious tests means that we can better understand the impact of the syndrome, and the strengths and weakness of affected patients.

Link to full-text of study on locked-in patients.

Literature and psychiatry

This month’s British Journal of Psychiatry has another one of its fantastic ‘psychiatry in 100 words’ series, with this month’s column focusing on literature.

The short piece is by psychiatrist Femi Oyebode who is the author of a recent book (pictured on the left) on the subject that covers everything from literary accounts of drug abuse to the use of narrative in fictional accounts of mental illness.

Literature and psychiatry ‚Äî in 100 words

Reading works of fiction and attending to the language, the dialogue, the mood is like listening to patients. In both activities, we enter into other worlds, grasp something about the inner life of characters whose motivations may be unlike our own. D. H. Lawrence referring to this aspect of the novel wrote: `It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life’. Is this not also, partly, the task of psychiatry?

Link to ‘Literature and psychiatry ‚Äî in 100 words’.
Link to details of ‘Mindreadings: Literature and Psychiatry’ book.

The long term effects of banging heads on the field

Sportsmen who suffer concussion in early adulthood may experience long-term reduction in brain function well into later life, according to a study released this week.

Although the study had only 40 participants, it is striking as it looked at the effects 30 years after the original concussions and used a wide and diverse range of tests for cognitive and neurological function, the majority of which showed some level of impairment.

This comes in the same week that Boston University School of Medicine reported that former American football player, Tampa Bay Buccaneer Tom McHale, was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by head trauma, when he died in 2008 at the age of 45.

CNN has a good write-up of the news with photos and images of the long-term effects of persistent sports concussion and we covered the work of Dr Bennet Oamlu, who does post-mortems on cognitively impaired American football players, back in 2007.

Repititive sports concussion is now recognised as having a significant neurological impact and has also been found in rugby and boxing.

Interestingly, ex-professional football players (known as soccer players to Americans and other football philistines) probably have higher levels of dementia and there is an ongoing debate about whether this is due to the low level impact of heading the ball.

Some think it is, other think it might be due to the fact footballers consume a lot of alcohol, and so the higher levels of dementia just might be wear and tear from all the booze.

Link to full text of long-term sports concussion study.
Link to CNN on sports concusion and dementia (via NeuronCulture).

Shattered delusions

I’ve just found a fascinating article in the History of Psychiatry about a type of delusion that was widely reported in the 15th to 17th centuries but rarely occurs in modern times. The reports were of patients who believed that they were made of glass and thought they might shatter if they suffered even the lightest of knocks.

In some of the more unusual forms, people struck with this form of madness might even consider themselves to be an oil lamp, a drinking vessel or even trapped in glass bottle.

The belief could even be specific to certain parts of the body:

Reports of glass bones, arms, and legs appeared much later, but Early Modern accounts were particularly rich in allusions to glass hearts/chests, and fragile heads. Tommaso Garzoni, an Italian monk,wrote a series of character sketches of mentally-disturbed people in 1586. In one of these cameos, drawn from Galen, the fragile delusion presents as a man who thought that his body consisted of only a large head, which he protected from injury by avoiding all contact with his fellows.

The delusion was reported in medical and the proto-scientific literature of the time, but also shows up in plays and literature.

Reportedly, one famous sufferer was King Charles VI of France, who allegedly refused to allow people to touch him, and wore reinforced clothing to protect himself.

While we tend to be most interested in how new delusional themes arise in response to cultural developments, we pay much less attention about delusions which were once common but now rarely occur.

This is a lovely example of a very well researched look at the history of no-longer popular delusions.

It’s also worth noting that Wikipedia has a page on the delusion where someone has briefly summarised some of the main points of the article.

Link to ‘Reflection of the Glass Delusion of Europe’.
Link to DOI entry for same.
Link to glass delusion page on Wikipedia.

Legal threat for criticising neurobabble ‘lie detector’

Francisco Lacerda is a professor of phonetics and the author of an academic article criticising the use of the unproven voice analysis ‘life detector’ technology in the legal system. He highlighted “discrepancies between the claims the producers and vendors make and what their products are capable of delivering” and as a result, is now being threatened with a libel suit by a company that makes these devices.

The academic journal received similar threats and, rather disappointingly, has now taken the article offline.

But have no fear, a copy was grabbed from the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law before it disappeared and is now available online for all to read.

The article makes for interesting reading, as it looks at the claims and scientific basis of both specific products and the whole project of using voice stress for ‘detecting’ lies.

The company concerned are Nemesysco, who manufacture devices that supposedly detect lies by analysing speech patterns, despite the fact that there is no conclusive peer-reviewed evidence that the devices reliably detect untruths.

The company claim that their products works like this:

The technology detects minute, involuntary changes in the voice reflective of various types of brain activity. By utilizing a wide range spectrum analysis to detect minute changes in the speech waveform, LVA detects anomalies in brain activity and classifies them in terms of stress, excitement, deception, and varying emotional states, accordingly. This way, LVA detects what we call ‘brain activity traces,’ using the voice as a medium. The information that is gathered is then processed and analyzed to reveal the speaker’s current state of mind.

If that made no sense to you, read it again. It won’t make any more sense but it does get funnier.

Rather than presenting data showing that their devices work, the company is resorting to legal action to silence their critics.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments:

The article is quite unusual for a scientific article. For example, it has a section titled “who is Mr. Liberman?” addressing a private person and claiming that he is a charlatan based on a visit by a friend made to a private company.

Link to report of legal threat from Stockholm University.
Link to copy of pulled article.

2009-01-30 Spike activity

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

The BPS Research Digest reports on how the weather can affect our memory.

Hallucinations, psychosis found as rare side-effect of ADHD drugs in children, reports The Washington Post. Study abstract here.

The New York Times reports that coffee intake is associated with a lower risk of developing <a href="Coffee lower dementia risk
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/health/research/24coffee.html?em”>dementia.

The neuroscience of acalculia, an impairment in understand number and calculation, is discussed in a feature article from New Scientist.

The LA Times reports on a new study finding children who had thimerosal based vaccines are cognitive and neurologically normal later in life. Study abstract here.

There’s a great article over at Computer World on building better CAPTCHAs. Sort of an anti-AI science as it has to require something that computers can’t easily do.

New Scientist reports that video game conditioning spills over into real life, although actually, it would be much more surprising if it didn’t.

Two teenage boys singing about CBT on YouTube. History now officially complete.

Neurophilosophy discusses a lovely study finding that touches to the face when we’re trying to understand speech can affect how we perceive what is being said.

An in-depth article on the ‘connectome‘ and the quest to understand the brain’s wiring appears in Nature.

American Psychologist published the first replication of the Milgram conformity experiments for 30 years and has lots of commentary.

Nintendo brain-trainer ‘no better than pencil and paper’, reports The Times.

Neuroanthropology has a brilliantly written piece on veteran’s experiences of PTSD and combat trauma.

Reviews of books on AI morality and embodied cognition appear in this week’s Nature.

New Scientist reports that overweight seniors who consume fewer calories show improved memory.

An interview with Edward Vul of the ‘voodoo correlations’ controversy is on SciAm Mind Matters. The latest reply from some of the ‘red list’ researchers is now online as a pdf.

The Economist reports that we are more like to procrastinate when asked to think in the abstract.

Pharmacy students also have a negative attitude towards mental health patients, reports Dr Shock MD.

Science News reports on a neuroimaging study finding that key emotion areas are involved in empathetic understanding of others’ pain.

The neuroscience of legal and courtroom decision making is discussed on SciAm Mind Matters.

ABC Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor discusses the neurological impact of viral diseases and the history of rabies vaccination.

The Seattle Times reports on the US Army’s highest suicide rate since records began.

A new paper that might give a ‘theory of everything’ for memory is discussed by Developing Intelligence.

Furious Seasons reports on a new head-to-head metanalysis of which are the best antidepressants.

New SciAmMind on play, placebo, lies and illusion

The new edition of the excellent Scientific American Mind has just hit the shelves and several of the feature articles are freely available online – covering the psychology of play, some fascinating new research on the placebo effect, the quest to build a brain scan lie detector and several other fantastic reports.

I found the article on the cognitive benefits of free play particularly interesting. In this instance ‘free play’ is where kids are playing without set rules or requirements, as are needed when playing structured games or doing tasks.

The article is full of intriguing studies that indicate the immediate and long-term benefits of imaginative play. Even rough-and-tumble seems to be associated with better social skills:

Play fighting also improves problem solving. According to a paper published by Pellegrini in 1989, the more elementary school boys engaged in rough-housing, the better they scored on a test of social problem solving. During the test, researchers presented kids with five pictures of a child trying to get a toy from a peer and five pictures of a child trying to avoid being reprimanded by his mother. The subjects were then asked to come up with as many possible solutions to each social problem; their score was based on the variety of strategies they mentioned, and children who play-fought regularly tended to score much better.

As well as checking out the latest issue of SciAmMind, you may also want to have a look at a fantastic online gallery they’ve put together which captures numerous visual illusions that have been realised as 3D sculpures, some of epic proportions.

If you want to see some of M.C. Escher’s impossible staircases rendered in lego, or several impressive sculptures that change depending on the light or viewing angle, do have a look.

Link to Feb 2009 SciAmMind with plenty of freely available articles.
Link to visual illusions sculpture gallery.

‘Internet addiction’ lacks validity finds another study

Dr Shock covers a new study examining the validity of one of the most popular methods for diagnosing ‘internet addiction’, Young‚Äôs Diagnostic Questionnaire, finding it lacks even the most basic ability to distinguish between frequent and infrequent net users.

Validity is one of the essential components of a psychological measure. It refers to whether it is actually measuring what it says it’s measuring.

One of the most common ways of testing validity is to see whether the scale predicts other aspects of behaviour or psychological functioning that we would expect would go along with the target behaviour.

In this case, we would expect ‘internet addicts’, as identified by a cut-off score on the Young’s Diagnostic Questionnaire, to spend more time on line than ‘non-addicts’, have greater levels of mental distress or behavioural impairment and would be more focused on specific internet activities.

Two psychologists, Nicki Dowling and Kelly Quirk, set out to test this on over 400 students – a group who have been previously highlighted as likely to be vulnerable to excessive internet use.

They found that those students who were clearly identified by the questionnaire as ‘internet addicts’ were no different in time spent online or psychological dysfunction from those students who were just below the cut-off.

What they did find, however, is those students who ticked zero to two items, the lowest ‘risk’ category, on the 8-item questionnaire typically used the internet for fewer hours and were likely to be depressed or anxious than the people who scored above the ‘addiction’ cut-off.

However, as three of the diagnostic items specifically refer to spending longer time online, and three specifically refer to low mood, anxiety or preoccupation, this is hardly surprising.

It’s like finding out people who say they are sad are more likely to be depressed.

What the study did clearly show, however, is that the criteria for distinguishing ‘addicts’ from ‘non-addicts’, which has been the basis of the majority of ‘internet addiction’ research, doesn’t even reliably distinguish between amount of use and psychological distress.

This is important, because the criteria have been offered by proponents as the basis of a possible ‘internet addiction’ diagnosis in the forthcoming updated psychiatric diagnostic manual, the DSM-IV.

This comes only a few weeks after a recent study reported the damning conclusion that previous studies used “inconsistent criteria”, where subject to “serious sampling bias” and usually reported associations rather than doing any sort of work on causal influences.

Link to Dr Shock internet addiction post ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’.
Link to study.
Link to DOI entry for same.