Year: 2009

The dialectics of the borderline

Time magazine has an interesting piece on borderline personality disorder (BPD), a sometimes stigmatised diagnosis that implies the patient has unstable impulsive emotional reactions and tumultuous relationships.

In contrast to popular perception, the ‘borderline’ part doesn’t imply the condition is between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ but that the patient is on the borderline between a psychotic and non-psychotic disorder, as low-level distortions of perception (fleeting hallucinated voices for example) and magical or paranoid thinking are not uncommon.

The stigma of the diagnosis comes from the fact that people with the label are widely considered by mental health professionals to be ‘difficult’ or ‘challenging’. The fact that self-harm is common in this group often leads to informal negative labels indicating that the patient is a ‘cutter’ or ‘manipulative’.

This has been borne out by various studies. Two studies have found that the label of personality disorder is associated with staff perceiving the person as less deserving of care, more difficult, manipulative, attention-seeking, annoying, and more in control of their suicidal urges and debts – even when everything else about them is the same.

A study specifically with psychiatric nurses found that they were more likely to offer belittling or contradicting responses to statements from patients with the diagnosis.

Borderline is, perhaps, one of the mythologised conditions in psychiatry.

The fact that many mental health professionals believe that the condition is ‘lifelong’ and ‘untreatable’ is contradicted by studies that have found that the majority of people who have the diagnosis improve drastically. The most comprehensive study has found that 75% of patients with BPD no longer qualify for the diagnosis after six years.

The article also discusses one of the most promising new treatments – a type of psychotherapy called dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) – that has been found in early trials to improve the emotional tolerance, self-control and day-to-day functioning of patients with BPD.

It was invented by psychologist Marsha Linehan (who according to the article, used to be a nun), based in part on the Buddhist techniques of mindfulness and emotion regulation.

The Time piece is a little overly-dramatic in places, but is generally well-written and avoids the usual clichés associated with BPD and is well worth a look.

Link to Time on ‘The Mystery of Borderline Personality Disorder’.

Predictably Irrational and relative value

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind just broadcast an interesting interview with behavioural economist Dan Ariely, where he discusses some of his fascinating work on our cognitive biases and why we find it so difficult to judge what will benefit us most.

I’m pretty sure it’s a repeat, but I mention it as I’ve almost finished the unabridged audiobook of his recent bestseller Predictably Irrational which is thoroughly excellent.

The first thing that strikes me is ‘wow, you’ve done so much interesting research’, as the book is largely about studies he has personally been involved with.

The second thing is ‘damn, I wish I’d thought of that’ as the studies are often cleverly conceived and tackle real-world corners of our reasoning and judgement.

The chapters on anchoring and on decoy options are particularly fascinating and he gives a vivid example of how decoy options work.

He notes that the UK magazine The Economist was offering a web only subscription for $59, a print subscription for $125 dollars, and a print-and-internet subscription also for $125.

It seems no-one would choose the print-only subscription – it seems obsolete – but its mere presence affects our reasoning and boosts the sales the more expensive option.

In a study to test this, Ariely gave participants the choice between these three subscription options, and to another group of participants, the choice only between web-only and print-and-internet subscriptions.

in the three option condition 16 people chose the internet-only subscription, none the print-only subscription and the other 84 chose the print-and-internet option.

As the print-only is obselete, it should make no difference whether it is part of the choice or not, when it isn’t there, in the two choice condition, the reverse pattern emerged. The majority, 68 people, chose the cheaper online option, while only 32 took the print-and-internet option.

In other words, the print-only is a decoy and it makes us think that the print-and-internet option is a better deal because it has something ‘free’, when in reality, this impression is just created because we’ve just been presented with a decoy worse deal

This relates to one of Ariely’s main points that he returns to throughout the book, that we tend to make relative judgements, and manipulating the context can skew our perceptions of value.

It struck me that this is how most people experience pitch and musical notes. A few people have ‘perfect pitch‘ and can label tones without reference to other tones. I wonder if some people have ‘perfect pitch’ with regard to this sort of value judgements.

The Predictably Irrational website is also very good, where Ariely has a regularly updated blog and has created free video summaries of each of the chapters.

All come highly recommended.

Link to AITM interview with Dan Ariely.
Link to Predictably Irrational website.

Personal genomics as a psychological mirror

Psychologist Steven Pinker explores the impact of personal genome sequencing services and how this information may help us understand our behaviours and preferences in an article for The New York Times.

Pinker is known for advocating that many psychological traits and cognitive abilities are highly heritable. He’s recently volunteered to have his entire genome sequenced and made freely available on the internet and so he explores what this information can actually tell us about ourselves.

One aspect of this information is that it can indicate the future course of your life – such as the vastly increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease if you’re the carrier of two ApoE Œµ4 alleles.

Like James Watson, Pinker has opted not to find out his ApoE Œµ4 status, preferring to avoid any additional “existential dread” that the knowledge might cause.

However, other genes predict weaker tendencies and ‘cognitive genetics’, the science of how genes interact with our mental functions, is beginning to blossom:

Dopamine is the molecular currency in several brain circuits associated with wanting, getting satisfaction and paying attention. The gene for one kind of dopamine receptor, DRD4, comes in several versions. Some of the variants (like the one I have) have been associated with “approach related” personality traits like novelty seeking, sensation seeking and extraversion.

A gene for another kind of receptor, DRD2, comes in a version that makes its dopamine system function less effectively. It has been associated with impulsivity, obesity and substance abuse. Still another gene, COMT, produces an enzyme that breaks down dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, the home of higher cognitive functions like reasoning and planning. If your version of the gene produces less COMT, you may have better concentration but might also be more neurotic and jittery.

The article covers a great deal of ground, aiming to educate about some of the basic principles of genetics as well as tackling the implications of knowing more about our own genetic codes.

By the way, if you’re interested in a thorough grounding in the science of behavioural and cognitive genetics, I highly recommend the somewhat expensive but very well written and remarkably comprehensive book Behavioural Genetics.

Link to NYT piece ‘My Genome, My Self’.

The morbid attractions of sweet anaesthesia

The New Republic magazine has an excellent article about drug addiction among anaesthetists. It tracks the story of one rising star in the speciality who became addicted and discusses discussing why opioid dependence is still a problem in the field.

It’s probably worth stressing that while anaesthetists have the highest rates of opioid addiction among doctors, the absolute rates are still actually quite low.

A 2002 study found level of drug abuse in the US to be 1.0% among faculty members and 1.6% among residents (junior doctors), and ‘drug abuse’ here doesn’t entail addiction – it just describes illicit use of controlled substances.

However, the increased rates of drug use are certainly cause for concern, this is from a review article on ‘Addiction and Substance Abuse in Anesthesiology’ published last year:

Anesthesiologists (as well as any physician) may suffer from addiction to any number of substances, though addiction to opioids remains the most common. As recently as 2005, the drug of choice for anesthesiologists entering treatment was an opioid, with fentanyl and sufentanil topping the list. Other agents, such as propofol, ketamine, sodium thiopental, lidocaine, nitrous oxide, and the potent volatile anesthetics, are less frequently abused but have documented abuse potential. Alcoholism and other forms of impairment impact anesthesiologists at rates similar to those in other professions.

The New Republic article is an engaging look at this issue that manages to tackle both the human issues and the view from the medical literature.

If you’re interested in the history of anaesthesia, ABC Radio National’s In Conversation recently had a fascinating discussion with historian Stephanie Snow, who’s just written a book on the subject called Blessed Days Of Anaesthesia.

It has loads of intriguing nuggets of information, such as the fact that resistance to the introduction to effective pain killing was bolstered by moral arguments as to the necessity of pain, but also scientific theories about the nervous system that suggested it was essential during operations to keep the body functioning.

A fascinating insight into early thinking about the value of pain.

Link to The New Republic article ‘Going Under’ (via MeFi).
Link to In Conversation on ‘Blessed Days Of Anaesthesia’.

(28 Dec 2011: updated links – thanks Tom!)

I struggle, fight dark forces in the clear moon light

A study just published online by the journal Schizophrenia Research has found a marked relationship between insomnia and paranoia in both the general public and in patients with psychosis.

The study, led by psychologist Daniel Freeman, was cross-sectional, meaning they just looked at whether the two things were associated and so it can’t say for definite which causes which.

In other words, it’s impossible to say whether lack of sleep triggers paranoia, or whether paranoid thoughts are more likely to keep us up at night.

However, the study also measured anxiety, known to affect sleep, and it accounted for part but not all of the sleeplessness, suggesting that both paranoia and insomnia probably feed into each other.

Sleep has an interesting relationship to mental illness. While sleeplessness and disturbed circadian rhythms have been linked to mood disorders for many years, sleep deprivation is known to have an antidepressant effect and is sometimes used to treat the most severe cases of depression.

By the way, the title of the post is taken from the lyrics to Faithless’ dancefloor masterpiece Insomnia which also gives a wonderful description of insomnia fuelled paranoia – although I suspect it also refers to the after effects of a night of drugs-based clubbing so probably not exactly what the researchers had in mind.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

Full disclosure: Two of the study authors are research collaborators.

2009-01-09 Spike activity

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

A free Critical Neuroscience <a href="http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/11/14/critical-neuroscience-conference-at-ucla/
“>conference is being held in Berkeley UCLA on Jan 30th. Check the link for more information or see this jpg poster.

BPS Research Digest looks at interesting research suggesting that Tetris might work as a ‘cognitive vaccine’ against the development of trauma.

US Government claims futuristic security checkpoints have remarkably terrorist detecting capability on the basis of a Windows desktop shot and an unreleased ‘test’, reports TechFragments.

The Guardian has an extended book review article where neuroscientist Steven Rose discusses the latest theories about the human brain.

The excellent Developing Intelligence finds an interesting <a href="The Science of Mind-Reading: SVMs Extract Intentions from Neural Activity
http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2009/01/svms_decode_intentions_the_sta.php”>video on ‘brain scan mind reading’.

The New York Times profiles Emily Yudofsky who just set up a fledgling ‘neuromarketing’ company.

Children with developmental language disorder are the topic of a recent Health Report programme from ABC Radio National.

Neuroanimations is a site intended for neurosurgeons that describes various brain pathologies with, unsurprisingly, animations.

The UK is suffering a shortage of people who donate their brains after death for essential research into conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, reports BBC News.

RadioLab just broadcast another one of their wonderfully produced shows. This one on <a href="Radiolab diagnosis
http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2008/12/30/diagnosis/”>diagnosis. Excellent apart from the slightly over-enthusiastic brain scans to diagnose psychiatric disorders bit.

An essay discussing why kindness is seen in such a bad light in modern times is printed in The Guardian, looks to be an extract from a forthcoming book.

Cognitive Daily examines research on the pain killing effects of your favourite music.

BBC Radio 4’s Case Notes has a special on the sense of taste.

Neuroskeptic has an excellent takedown of much of the recent misinformed coverage about ‘why men like computer games‘.

Gregory Petsko discusses the coming neurological epidemic in a talk for TED.

Furious Seasons casts a skeptical eye over a recent American Journal of Psychiatry paper trying to explain why there’s such a large placebo response in antidepressant drugs trials in children.

People overestimate their reactions to racist comments, according to new research covered by Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Bullshit Blue Monday a downer on Wikipedia

Image by stock.xchng user soopahtoe: Click for sourceIs this the most incompetent Wikipedia edit ever? Green Communications, the PR company who promotes the Blue Monday ‘worst day of the year’ bullshit festival, recently tried to ‘anonymously’ delete criticism from the Blue Monday Wikipedia page without realising their IP address was a complete giveaway.

This obviously failed, and they just tried to paste on a whole block of text onto the bottom of the article that started with (and I kid you not):

THE FOLLOWING CONTENT IS ALL FACTUALLY CORRECT. IF YOU DISPUTE IT PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR.

Spank me nanny! Spank me!

Actually, they originally tried to do this from an anonymous IP address that didn’t track back to Green Communications, but then blew their cover by using a registered account to reinsert the text – time under the name ‘Honest Green’ and with the added power caps.

Now, I’m going to assume that the information is ALL FACTUALLY CORRECT so I want to address the last line of their bolt-on Wikipedia press release:

The on-going campaign is run by Wakefield-based public relations company GREEN Communications, on a non-commercial basis as part of its own corporate social responsibility activities.

Let’s make this clear. Green Communications – I applaud your efforts for running non-commercial PR campaigns aimed at promoting mental health. It’s a vastly neglected area that gets scant attention in the press.

However, the reason that the ‘Blue Monday’ / worst day of the year formulae rubbish gets the back up of medical doctors, psychologists and researchers is not just that it’s ridiculous.

It’s that promoting the misunderstanding of science and psychology actually harms people’s ability to make informed choices about their mental health.

It devalues genuine evidence-based work in the area and misleads people as to what they need to consider when trying to manage their own emotions, or, if the need arises, decide on what sort of help or treatment they want when things get too difficult to manage their own.

So, I’d like nothing more than next year, you run a non-commercial PR campaign aimed at empowering and informing people about depression that wasn’t based on misinformation.

You’re an award winning PR company, so I’m sure you can find an equally catchy way of grabbing people’s attention that doesn’t involve obvious drivel.

UPDATE: Just a reminder that you can still enter our Bullshit Blue Monday make up your own nonsense formula competition where you could win a prize!

Link to Bullshit Blue Monday antidote from Ben Goldacre.
Link to Bullshit Blue Monday antidote from Petra Boyton.

Inside the mind of an autistic savant

New Scientist has an interesting interview with Daniel Tammet, a young man with with Asperger’s syndrome, synaesthesia and amazing savant memory skills.

Tammet has also been the subject of scientific investigation, with a 2007 study published in the journal Neurocase examining how activity in his brain is related to his exceptional recall.

Tammet is interesting because savantism is usually associated with people with quite profound autism who are not easily able to communicate their experiences. Owing to the fact that Tammet is highly articulate, he describes how his experiences his mind in wonderful detail.

You also excel at learning languages. How do you pick them up so quickly?

I have synaesthesia, which helps. When there is an overlap between how I visualise a word and its meaning, that helps me remember it. For example, if a word that means “fire” in a new language happens to appear orange to me, that will help me remember it. But more significant is my memory and ability to spot patterns and find relationships between words. Fundamentally, languages are clusters of meaning – that is what grammar is about. This is also why languages interest me so much. My mind is interested in breaking things down and understanding complex relationships.

A documentary about Tammet, called The Boy with the Incredible Brain is available on Google Video and shows him at work as well as talking to neuropsychologists about savant skills.

Link to interview with Tammet at NewSci.
Link to documentary The Boy with the Incredible Brain.

Laughing gas increases imagination, suggestibility

A new study has found that laughing gas, a common anaesthetic used by dentists, increases the vividness of imagination and also increases suggestibility, making people slightly more likely to experience hypnosis-like suggestions.

The study, just published in the medical journal Psychopharmacology, stems from the informal observations of dentists that patients under laughing gas (nitrous oxide) sedation are particularly suggestible and the researchers aimed to test this out in more detail.

The researchers randomised patients at a dental surgery to either receive a nitrous oxide and oxygen mix, or just oxygen, with the patients not knowing which they were receiving. Two weeks later they were invited back and given which ever type of gas mix they hadn’t already had.

While inhaling each gas mix, the participants were asked to complete a measure of imaginative ability, rating the clarity and vividness of their visual imagery, as well as being given various suggestions – without the hypnotic induction – from the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale.

This includes suggestions that your hands might move of their own accord, to suggested temporary paralysis, to a suggestion to experience hallucinated sounds – to name but a few.

The researchers found that nitrous oxide boosted imaginative ability considerably, and increased suggestibility modestly but reliably.

The paper discusses the small but interesting literature on which drugs affect suggestibility, and reviews some of the past studies which have tested some quite surprising substances in this way:

Little research has investigated the effects of other drugs upon suggestibility in a controlled manner. Sjoberg and Hollister (1965) administered lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), mescaline and psilocybin separately and in combination to participants and measured imaginative suggestibility before and after drug administration.

Gibson et al (1977) measured the effect of benzodiazepine administration upon hypnotic suggestibility, and Kelly et al (1978) tested the effect of cannabis intoxication upon the imaginative suggestibility of participants initially scoring low to medium on a standardised scale.

Details of these studies and the resulting changes in suggestibility are given in Table 2 [see further down this page for a web version]. The greatest changes in suggestibility, in order of decreasing size, are evident after administration of nitrous oxide, cannabis, LSD, mescaline, combination of [LSD+mescaline+psilocybin] and diazepam.

So it seems that nitrous oxide may have a particular suggestibility boosting effect.

By the way, the study was led by psychologist Matt Whalley, who also runs the excellent Hypnosis and Suggestion website, undoubtedly the best internet resource for scientific information on hypnosis.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to excellent Hypnosis and Suggestion website.

The attractive face unmasked

Science News has an excellent cover article discussing the psychology of facial attractiveness and rounds-up some of the latest cognitive science research in the area.

It covers research on quite well-worn areas, such as symmetry, masculinity and femininity in faces, but also picks up on some of the new developments that have been tackled only recently.

Other missing elements in evaluating beauty have begun to emerge with the use of new technology. Video techniques have allowed for dynamic rather than static interpretations of beauty.

“Real faces move,” says Edward Morrison of the University of Bristol in England. “If you show someone a moving face, they can recognize it quicker. There is more information.”

And it turns out that how faces move may contribute to how good they look. In a 2007 paper [pdf] in Evolution and Human Behavior, Morrison reported that more of the movements known to be indicators of femininity — blinking, nodding and head tilting — made women’s faces more attractive to male and female volunteers.

“Movement can convey important meanings,” Morrison says. “If that person likes you or doesn’t. If that person is being aggressive. If the person is being flirtatious. The face can start to convey these kinds of things.”

Link to ScienceNews piece ‘It‚Äôs written all over your face’.

The science of ‘voodoo’ brain correlations

The Neurocritic has an excellent post explaining the science of why some of the most widely reported brain scanning studies on social interaction are flawed.

The new analysis has been led by neuroscientist Edward Vul and we reported on this bombshell last week, but this new post clearly explains the problems for those not wanting to plough through the original academic text.

The paper stems from the observation that some of the correlations between brain activity and psychological states in some of these headline studies are remarkably high, one as high as .88

A correlation is a test of how much two measures are related. A correlation of 1 means that the two measures are perfectly in sync, every change in one is mirrored by changed in the other, whereas a correlation of 0 means that there is no syncing at all. Any number in between gives a sliding scale of how much ‘syncing’ there is .

So a correlation of .88 is pretty impressive and suggest near-perfect syncing. Except that it’s higher than would be possible based on how accurate the two measures are.

Imagine that you have a 10cm rule than can only measure to the nearest centimetre. It means that the accuracy of your ruler is only 90% because it fudges any part-centimetre length down the nearest centimetre.

It would be almost impossible to get a perfect correlation using this ruler, because there’s 10% randomness – or 10% out-of-syncness, in every measurement.

And once you know how much randomness there is, you can estimate the maximum correlation you can get because you know the randomness is not going to reliably sync with anything else.

Edward Vul and his team did this with these headline social brain imaging studies and found that some produced correlations higher than would be possible from what we know of how accurate the brain scanning and psychological measures are. So something must be up.

It turns out that some studies deliberately picked out brain areas based on which voxels [micro areas] already had high correlations, while others only reported correlations from a spot in an area that was already the most active.

In other words, they were only selecting the cream of the crop but were reporting it as if it was the general picture.

Neurocritic goes into this in more detail in relation to specific studies, and it’s well worth checking out for the gory details.

Importantly, the researchers of the flawed studies weren’t trying to ‘fake’ results, there were using a common method which Vul has discovered is flawed.

He has called for the researchers to use a more representative form of analysis and correct their findings. We’ll see what happens.

Link to Neurocritic on ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’.
pdf of Vul’s paper.

Psychiatry and Big Pharma – in 100 words

GFDL image from Wikicommons: Click for sourceThis month’s British Journal of Psychiatry has another one of its regular ‘…in 100 words’ series – this month giving a concise guide to ‘psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry’.

It’s written by psychiatrist and historian of psychopharmacology David Healy, who’s had more than his fair share of heat from the drug industry.

Psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry – in 100 words

Little Pharma made profits by making novel compounds; Big Pharma does it by marketing. Doctors say they consume (prescribe) medication according to the evidence, so marketeers design and run trials to increase a drug’s use. They select the trials, data and authors that suit, publish in quality journals, facilitate incorporation in guidelines, then exhort doctors to practise evidence-based medicine. Because ‘they’re worth it’, doctors consume branded high-cost but less effective ‘evidence-based’ derivatives of older compounds making these drugs worth more than their weight in gold. Posted parcels meanwhile are tracked far more accurately than adverse treatment effects on patients.

Link to psychiatry and the pharma industry in 100 words at the BJP.

Deodorants boost sexiness by getting men in the groove

I keep running into fascinating articles that The Economist ran over the Christmas period and this one is no exception – it covers research that suggests that men’s deodorants do increase sexual attractiveness, but by increasing confidence and hence the behaviour of the wearer. The smell alone seems to have little impact on women.

Craig Roberts of the University of Liverpool and his colleagues—working with a team from Unilever’s research laboratory at nearby Port Sunlight—have been investigating the problem. They already knew that appropriate scents can improve the mood of those who wear them. What they discovered, though, as they will describe in a forthcoming edition of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, is that when a man changes his natural body odour it can alter his self-confidence to such an extent that it also changes how attractive women find him.

Half of Dr Roberts’s volunteers were given an aerosol spray containing a commercial formulation of fragrance and antimicrobial agents. The other half were given a spray identical in appearance but lacking active ingredients. The study was arranged so that the researchers did not know who had received the scent and who the dummy. Each participant obviously knew what he was spraying on himself, since he could smell it. But since no one was told the true purpose of the experiment, those who got the dummy did not realise they were being matched against people with a properly smelly aerosol.

Over the course of several days, Dr Roberts’s team conducted a battery of psychological tests on both groups of volunteers. They found that those who had been given the commercial fragrance showed an increase in self-confidence. Not that surprising, perhaps. What was surprising was that their self-confidence improved to such an extent that women who could watch them but not smell them noticed. The women in question were shown short, silent videos of the volunteers. They deemed the men wearing the deodorant more attractive. They were, however, unable to distinguish between the groups when shown only still photographs of the men, suggesting it was the men’s movement and bearing, rather than their physical appearance, that was making the difference.

The abstract of the actual study (I don’t have access to the full-text unfortunately) also reports that non-verbal attractiveness (presumably, sexiness of ‘body language’) was predicted by the men’s liking of the deodorant, independent of their facial attractiveness.

The researchers conclude by highlighting the remarkable influence of personal odour on self-perception, and how this can even influence how others perceive us, even when they can’t actually smell the scent.

The Economist article also discusses the link between natural scent, genetic and pheromones, and sexual allure. An intriguing article and an excellent study.

Link to Economist article ‘The scent of a man’.
Link to DOI entry for deodorant and sexual attractiveness study.

Self-destruction lite

The New York Times has a thought-provoking article about self-handicapping – the attempt to actually make yourself worse at something. The idea is that if a bad performance is expected, some people actively try and handicap themselves before hand, for example by not practising or by getting drunk, so they have an excuse already lined up and can preserve their self-esteem when they don’t do very well.

I’m sure we’ve all heard about this sort of behaviour discussed anecdotally, but I didn’t realise it’s actually been quite well researched by psychologists since the late 1970s.

Some snippets from the article:

Psychologists have studied this sort of behavior since at least 1978, when Steven Berglas and Edward E. Jones used the phrase ‚Äúself-handicapping‚Äù to describe students in a study who chose to take a drug that they were told would inhibit their performance on an exam (the drug was actually inert)…

Yet given the opportunity, and a good reason, most people will claim some handicap. In a paper [pdf] published last summer, Sean McCrea, a psychologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, described experiments in which he manipulated participants’ scores on a variety of intelligence tests. In some, the subjects could choose to prepare before taking the test or could join the “no practice” group.

Sure enough, Dr. McCrea found that those told they got bad scores blamed a lack of practice, if they could, and that citing this handicap cushioned the blow to their self-confidence…

As a short-term strategy, self-handicapping is often no more than an exercise in self-delusion. Studies of college students have found that habitual handicappers — who skip a lot of classes; who miss deadlines; who don’t buy the textbook — tend to rate themselves in the top 10 percent of the class, though their grades slouch between C and D.

I wonder how this interacts with the effects of different types of praise and beliefs about intelligence, studied by psychologist Carol Dweck.

She has found that praising a child’s effort on a task (“you’ve worked really hard!”) has a motivating effect, whereas praising the child by attributing their success to a character trait (“you’re really clever”) caused them to become to be more distressed when they encounter failure and lead them to chose easier tasks afterwards.

Her work suggests this is because a belief that intelligence is flexible and effort-related, rather than a fixed character trait, actually makes us more motivated and helps us perform better as we don’t feel we are less intelligent if we fail.

It reflects a likely interaction between performance and self-esteem, mediated by beliefs about competence and I wonder whether self-handicapping is way some people develop to manage this interaction.

Anyway, enough speculation, but I recommend reading the article as it highlights an area that I wasn’t aware of and has many intriguing possibilities.

Link to NYT article on self-handicapping.

Better Living Through Neuroscience

Cod_tectum.pngNew for 2009, mindhacks.com is pleased to announce the development of two lifestyle-enhancing products. These innovations use fundamental features of perception to deliver value to YOU! For pre-ordering details please leave a note in the comments.

Introducing: The Adaptive Stereo

Adaptation is a fundamental feature of perception [see Hack #26, ‘Get Adjusted’, in the book]. Simply viewed it means that your perception adjusts according to what you are experiencing. Adaptation is why you don’t notice the noise of a fan until it turns off, and why everyone shouts at each other when they come out of a club or a loud gig.

Extensive observation by the mindhacks.com team of ethno-psychologists (i.e. me) has led to the theory that adaptation is also behind such perplexing phenomenon as bars where the music is too loud for anyone to talk and people on the bus listening to their headphones so loud that you can hear every note of their music too. Turning the volume up is nice, but once you’ve turned it up you get used to the new level (because of adaptation) and so shortly turn it up again, and so on.

Now the Adaptive Stereo is here to solve this growing problem of noise pollution and associated hearing damage. Psychologists have known for a long time that if you change the magnitude of a stimulus by small amounts it isn’t detectable. The size of the smallest change which you can’t get away with is known in the business as the just noticeable difference (a victory for plain-speak if there ever was one). The Adaptive Stereo takes advantage of this fact, alongside precise calibration according to the human auditory capacity, to continually reduce the volume it plays at, but at a rate below the just noticeable difference. Auditory adaptation ensures that people will adjust to the new volume level, within a reasonable range, so they will be able to hear the music just as well, but simultaneously a) saving their hearing from permanent damage and b) allowing you to continuously turn up the volume on your favourite songs without the music getting any louder on average!

Introducing: The Collicularly-Tuned Bike Light

This innovation solves the urban-cyclist’s annoyance of not being noticed by cars and subsequently being run-over. Although it is easy to think that the purpose of our eyes is to supply information to our conscious, deliberately directed, vision, there is another component of seeing which is unconscious, subcortical and absolutely critical if you are going to notice things on the edge of your vision. A sentinel system, controlled by a subcortical region called the superior colliculus, is responsible for noticing movements and changes in the periphery of your vision and attracting your conscious, cortical, visual attention towards them [See Hack #32 ‘Explore your defense hardware’]. It is this system that lets you find your friends in the theatre when they wave at you. Although your conscious visual system can’t pick them out, when they move their hands rapidly your subcortical sentinel systems alerts your conscious visual system so that you reorientate in their direction and can come to recognise them. Now the colliculus which commands this sentinel is very insensitive to most things – fine detail and colour for example – but it specialises in movement and changes in light levels. And this is why flashing lights are a good idea if you are riding a bike and want to get noticed by drivers who might be focusing their conscious attention on other things (cars, arguing with their passengers, smoking, shaving, etc). The Collicularly-Tuned Bike Light takes advantage of decades of precision sensory neuroscience to flash at the rate which the colliculus is most sensitive too. Drivers will find their attention irresistibly drawn to you as you appear in their peripheral vision (mindhacks.com cannot guarantee that they will then try and avoid you when they notice you). For only an extra ¬£25 an Amygdala-activating extension is available which uses the latest in silhouette technology to project the image of an angry male face directly into the subcortex of unsuspecting drivers.

Blue Monday bullshit competition

Two weeks today will be the annual ‘Blue Monday‘ bullshit festival, where Cliff Arnall and his “formula” are wheeled out in an attempt to make us believe that it tells us about the most depressing day of the year. However, Mind Hacks is running a competition that may prove a useful antedote and you can enter.

To be fair, the day is usually quite depressing, but only because we have to put up with the usual rubbish masquerading as science in the media.

The whole idea is still being pushed by a PR agency, but rather disappointingly, the respected UK charity the Mental Health Foundation have seemingly shelled out hard cash for [see update below] the dubious pleasure of using the opportunity to try and promote mental well-being.

Promoting mental health is, of course, a fantastic idea, but using utter gibberish and pseudoscience to do so is like trying to promote a healthy diet by telling people that apples are particularly bad for us on certain days.

So, to help cheer us all up we want you to come up with a formula that describes what total bullshit these formulas are.

Be creative. As with the original formula, don’t feel you have to be chained by the laws of maths, or even logic.

The most creative entry will win a prize. Sent to you where ever you are in the world.

Be careful not to say nasty things about Mr Arnall himself, rumour has it has he a tendency to threaten legal action against people who say things that could be interpreted as casting aspersions on him directly, although it would be perfectly acceptable to point out that his formula is utter nonsense.

You can either include your entry as a comment to this post, post them to your own blog and send us a link, or email me directly via this web form.

Not only will you be helping the public understanding of science through sarcasm, you could win a prize and get featured on Mind Hacks.

We will print the best entries a few days before the date itself.

The game is afoot!

UPDATE Green Communications commented on a later entry to say that the Mental Health Foundation has not paid for this publicity campaign and that it is being completed on a non-commercial basis.