Year: 2009

Psychologist says

I’ve discovered that if you search for “says psychologist” on Google, you get a giant avalanche of wtf. I encourage you to try it for yourself, but here are a few of the highlights, all taken from headlines of news stories.

Twitter makes you dumb, says psychologist
Boys have it worse, says psychologist
Faith schools breed terrorism, says psychologist
Change is possible for gays, says psychologist
Music tugs at monkeys’ hearts, says psychologist
Pakistan no longer fear failure, says psychologist
Killer of 4 feared loss of love, says psychologist
Britney has lost control and needs help, says psychologist

You get the idea. There are plenty more where they came from.

As has been noted by Dr Petra for a while now, you can get virtually anything, and anyone, into the media just by describing them as a psychologist, even when they aren’t.

We are at a point in history where there is a huge popular interest in the mind and brain and so psychological sounding explanations are given huge weight and plenty of airtime.

If you have a look at the stories brought up by the “says psychologist” search you’ll notice that they range from charlatans giving their opinion on celebrities they’ve never met to the results of research published in the scientific literature, and everything in between.

But no matter, because it can all be condensed into the handy format of “…says psychologist”. This seems to be such a pervasive format that even the American Psychological Association use it for press releases.

Actually, I’ve just discovered that if you search Google Images for the same you get a stream of random images with “says psychologist” underneath. It’s kind of poetic in a surreal sort of way.

Link to “says psychologist” search.

The mind and brain in 2010

The latest issue of Wired UK has a cover feature on breaking ideas for 2010. Mind and brain innovations feature strongly and several are freely available online.

I might immodestly recommend the piece on ‘neurosecurity‘ and how researchers are having harden neural implants against hackers, as it was written by me. Regular readers will know we broke the story back in June, although it was great to have it selected as one of the ‘ideas of the future’ by Wired UK.

There’s also a fascinating piece on ‘hyperopia‘ – a cognitive bias where people falsely assume they’ll be happier in the future by forgoing an indulgent pleasure and doing something ‘sensible’ that will benefit the long-term.

It was described by psychologists Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz and their original paper is available online as a pdf. It’s a lovely flip-side to the self-control research, that has shown the ability to delay gratification predicts success in a number of areas of life. Hyperopia demonstrates that this ability can make people worse off if used in excess.

There’s also a couple of great pieces on the interface between psychology and technology.

The article on ‘bionic noticing‘ discusses how portable networked devices both allow us to be passively alerted to things in our environment through location specific information sources but also how simply having the technology can change of awareness: for example, the ability to instantly post pictures online from mobile devices can change how we look at the environment.

There’s also a piece on ‘digital forgetting‘, arguing that the ability to permanently store photos, conversations and social network interactions is a bug, not a feature, and we need to build in forgetting processes to facilitate to the traditional social practice of ‘putting things behind us’.

The print version has lots of other breaking ideas for 2010 which are not available online, including a piece by me on ‘networked drugs’.

Link to Wired UK neurosecurity article.
Link to Wired UK hyperopia article.
Link to Wired UK bionic noticing article.
Link to Wired UK digital forgetting article.

Full disclosure: I’m contributing editor at Wired UK and my neural implant has no password.

Dr Smile

The Philip K. Dick novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch features a portable device which allows patients to consult with the virtual psychiatrist Dr Smile. If I’m not mistaken, the system seems to have re-invented by this research team:

Virtual patient: a photo-real virtual human for VR-based therapy

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2004;98:154-6.

Kiss B, Benedek B, Szijártó G, Csukly G, Simon L, Takács B.

A high fidelity Virtual Human Interface (VHI) system was developed using low-cost and portable computers. The system features real-time photo-realistic digital replicas of multiple individuals capable of talking, acting and showing emotions and over 60 different facial expressions. These virtual patients appear in a high-performance virtual reality environment featuring full panoramic backgrounds, animated 3D objects, behavior and AI models, a complete vision system for supporting interaction and advanced animation interfaces. The VHI takes advantage of the latest advances in computer graphics. As such, it allows medical researchers and practitioners to create real-time responsive virtual humans for their experiments using computer systems priced under $2000.

Link to PubMed entry for Dr Smile re-invention.

I only read it for the articles

The Economist has a delightful article on how we self-justify our dubious behaviour after the event using spurious reasons. It turns out we often deceive ourselves into believing that our hastily constructed justifications are genuinely what motivated us.

The article riffs on a recent study by marketing researchers Zoë Chance and Michael Norton, who asked male students to choose between two specially created sports magazines.

One had more articles, but the other featured more sports. When a participant was asked to rate a magazine, one of two magazines happened to be a special swimsuit issue, featuring beautiful women in bikinis.

When the swimsuit issue was the magazine with more articles, the guys said they valued having more articles to read and chose that one. When the bikini babes appeared in the publication with more sports, they said wider coverage was more important and chose that issue.

This, as it turns out, is a common pattern in studies of this kind, and crucially, participants are usually completely unaware that they are post-justifying their choices.

This may not seem surprising: the joke about reading Playboy for the articles is so old Ms Chance and Mr Norton borrowed it for the title of their working paper. But it is the latest in a series of experiments exploring how people behave in ways they think might be frowned upon, and then explain how their motives are actually squeaky clean. Managers, for example, have been found to favour male applicants at hypothetical job interviews by claiming that they were searching for a candidate with either greater education or greater experience, depending on the attribute with which the man could trump the woman. In another experiment, people chose to watch a movie in a room already occupied by a person in a wheelchair when an adjoining room was showing the same film, but decamped when the movie in the next room was different (thus being able to claim that they were not avoiding the disabled person but just choosing a different film to watch). As Ms Chance puts it: “People will do what they want to do, and then find reasons to support it.”

Further compounding the problem, Ms Chance and Mr Norton’s subjects, like the subjects of the similar experiments, showed little sign of being aware that they were merely using a socially acceptable justification to look at women in swimsuits. Mr Norton reports that when he informs participants that they were acting for different reasons than they claimed, they often react with disbelief.

I recommend reading the original study. It’s very accessibly written, and if you read nothing else, skip to page 9 (page 10 of the pdf file) and read the section entitled ‘Are People Aware That They are Justifying?’.

One of the key insights from psychology and one of the most practically applicable findings (particularly in clinical work) is that people’s explanations for why they do something are not necessarily a reliable guide to what influences their behaviour.

This also goes for ourselves and there are probably many areas in our life where we justify our actions, good or bad, with comfortable, plausible, fantasies.

 
Link to Economist piece ‘The conceit of deceit’.
Link to study text.

Brain wave furniture

The Neurocritic has found this wonderful designer sofa made around EEG or ‘brain wave’ data captured from artist Lucas Maassen, who also created the wonderful piece of furniture.

There’s more about the construction of the piece on a page on Maassen’s website, but it’s running a bit slow at the moment, so you may need to be a bit patient for it to load.

However, there’s more about the piece at The Neurocritic who also picks up on an update to the neuroscience of EEG alpha wave activity, stereotypically thought to reflect nothing more than a ‘state of relaxation’ in times past, but now known to be involved in a much wider rage of active brain processes.

Link to The Neurocritic on The Electroencephalographer’s Couch.
Link to Maassen’s Brain Wave Sofa page.

Johnson and the Nutt Sack

As regular readers will know, we often note the passing of the regular British ritual where the UK government asks a group of scientific advisers to give evidence on the harmfulness of drugs and then ignores them.

The unwritten rule is that everyone feigns mild exasperation and then goes about their business as if nothing had happened, but the Home Secretary Alan Johnson has gone and spoiled the party by firing neuroscientist David Nutt, the head of the drugs advisory committee, for, well, waving that damned evidence about.

The home secretary’s officially sacked the chief adviser for breaking what turns out to be a non-existent rule about discussing government policy in a recent lecture – using the carefully mischosen words “I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy”.

Subsequently, two other scientists from the advisory committee have resigned and both the government’s Chief Scientific Advisor and the Science Minister expressed their dismay.

An evidence free drugs policy isn’t a British speciality, unfortunately, as shown by a recent World Health Organisation study that showed that severity of drug laws around the world have virtually no relation to the drug use of the population.

So why did the home secretary break the unwritten rule about quietly ignoring the evidence in the service of some pointless sabre rattling? Surely nothing to do with the fact that a general election is coming up.

Rare ‘shell shock’ footage online

One of the most important films in the history of psychiatry, depicting treatment of ‘shell shocked’ British soldiers during World War One, has just been made freely available online by UK medical charity the Wellcome Trust who are currently releasing lots of their archive footage.

The film was made by Sir Arthur Hurst in 1917 when large numbers of soldiers with ‘shell shock’, later to be called ‘war neurosis’, were returning from the front – in this case to a make-shift military hospital in South Devon, England, which was previously an agricultural college.

Time and time again you’ll read in news articles that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the new name for what used to be called ‘shell shock’ but this is false and you can easily see why in the film.

The most prominent symptoms of the World War One patients are ‘hysterical’ symptoms. These are symptoms that appear to be due to nervous system damage (such as paralysis, tremor or blindness, to name but a few) despite the fact that it is possible to demonstrate that the parts of the nervous system involved in the seemingly impaired ability are working perfectly fine.

A long-standing idea is that these impairment are caused by the subconscious mind ‘converting’ emotional distress into physical symptoms, but there is little good evidence to say whether this is likely or not.

These conditions are now diagnosed as ‘conversion disorder‘ or ‘dissociative disorder‘ and, while it is accepted that trauma may play a role in triggering them it is not a requirement.

This makes it quite different from PTSD, which requires the patient to have experienced a traumatic event and that includes symptoms of hyperarousal (feeling ‘on edge’), having intrusive memories of the event, and avoiding reminders of the trauma.

As we’ve discussed before on Mind Hacks, PTSD was a direct result of the Vietnam war (indeed, it was originally called ‘post-Vietnam’ syndrome) and was partly introduced as a way of allowing veterans to get treatment for their war-trauma-related psychiatric difficulties.

The 1917 film was hugely important because it unequivocally showed to a wide audience that mental stress could lead to dramatic physical difficulties, highlighting the importance of psychiatry which was often considered to be a ‘second rate’ medical speciality.

It is also an important historical document because it shows some dramatic symptoms that rarely appear in such a stark form and also outlines the treatments of the day.

The first patient seen is Pte. Meek, age 23. He has complete retrograde amnesia, hysterical paralysis, contractures, mutism and universal anaesthesia. There is a shot of him in a wheelchair with a nurse, and the intertitles explain that he is completely unaware of the efforts to overcome the rigidity of his ankles, and a man is seen trying to bend his feet. He had a sudden recovery of memory nine months later, with gradual recovery of body functions. Seven months after this we see him teaching basket-making, which was his peacetime job. Two and a half years after onset he makes a complete recovery, and there is a shot of him running up and down stairs waving his arms.

The next patient is Pte. Preston, who has amnesia, word blindness and word deafness, except to the word ‘bombs’, and his response to this is shown. When a doctor says ‘bombs’, he dives under a bed. Pte Ross Smith is also seen, who has a facial spasm. The spasm ceases under hypnosis, but return on waking. He has a lateral tremor of the head, treatment being relaxation and passive movements. There is a shot of him lying in bed having his head moved around.

You can watch the film at the Wellcome website, or they’ve uploaded it as five parts to YouTube. The first part is here and you can click through the rest.

Link to film and info from the Wellcome Trust.
Link to first part on YouTube.

Final destination, Golden Gate Bridge

Photo by Flickr user yuzu. Click for sourceThere’s a remarkable article on the world’s most popular suicide spot, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, in the latest American Journal of Psychiatry.

The article has several case studies of people who have died from jumping from the bridge and some fascinating quotes from one of the few people who have survived their attempts.

It is full of curious snippets of information, and one of the clearest things to come through from the article is that the bridge has a sort of iconic attraction for those wanting to kill themselves (indeed, in hindsight, the name itself seems darkly ironic).

This is not just a morbidly romantic statement, it seems to be backed up by research:

Evidence that the Golden Gate Bridge serves as a suicide magnet is provided by Seiden and Spence’s study of individuals who jumped from either the Golden Gate Bridge or the Bay Bridge, both of which connect to San Francisco. The bridges were built within 1 year of each other, have similar heights, and are similarly lethal to jumpers. Seiden and Spence looked at individuals who drove onto either bridge to kill themselves. (They excluded suicides in which the person walked onto either bridge, as the Golden Gate Bridge has pedestrian access while the Bay Bridge does not.)

They found that between 1937 and 1979, 58 people drove across the Bay Bridge to commit suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge. However, no one drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to commit suicide from the Bay Bridge. This suggests that the Golden Gate Bridge has a powerful association with suicide in the minds of some individuals, to the extent that they would drive over one potentially lethal bridge to die at another.

The article also mentions some other facts: the idea that the death is painless is a myth – jumpers die from massive heart, chest or nervous system injuries or by drowning; jumping from the bridge has a 99% fatality rate; there are only 28 known survivors; the suicide rate is counted solely on recovered bodies, bodies washed out to sea, jumpers witnessed but not found, and unclaimed cars in the parking lot are not counted.

The article reminds me of the uncomfortable 2006 film The Bridge about people who jumped from the bridge.

It’s uncomfortable viewing because it is one of the few documentaries to address the life history, psychological state, motivations and final moments of people who committed suicide (akin to the ‘psychological autopsy‘ used by professionals), but also because it was made in quite an unethical way.

The filmmakers asked permission to place cameras near the bridge to capture the landscape, but instead filmed jumpers. They then contact the families of those who had died and interviewed them about the persons’ life but without informing them that they’d got film of them dying.

The result is a equally fascinating, insightful, tragic and disturbing and I’ve never settled how comfortable I am with the final product.

The American Journal of Psychiatry article finishes by recommending, on the basis of good evidence, that a suicide barrier would prevent deaths at the bridge.

One of the clearest findings in suicide research is that reducing access to lethal methods reduces suicide (going against the myth that ‘if someone wants to kill themselves, they’ll always find a way’).

Apparently, after much discussion a barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge has been agreed, but it is stalled while surveys are carried out and no final completion date has been agreed.

Link to PubMed entry for Golden Gate Bridge article.

Liberation psychology graffiti

I’ve just seen my first genuine piece of psychology graffiti. The picture is from a wall in Universidad de Antioquia and the graffiti is promoting a conference on the application of ‘liberation psychology’ to preventing violence and helping the victims of violence in Colombia.

The text in Spanish is roughly translated as “We propose a scientific endeavour committed to historical reality and the problems and aspirations of the people” and is a quote from social psychologist and Catholic priest Ignacio Martín-Baró.

Martín-Baró was working in El Salvador during its bloody civil war and was using social psychology to research the opinions and views of the people and was producing results contrary to the propaganda of the army and government.

He was murdered by the El Salvadorian army in 1989 but he has had a massive influence on psychology and public policy in Latin America.

This in part was due to his strong belief in social psychology as an applied discipline to improve the society and the conditions of the poorest and most deprived.

While liberation psychology itself is typically associated with the left, one of Martín-Baró’s legacies is the practice of using social psychology for social improvement, something which is widely accepted in Latin America, regardless of political orientation.

It may seem strange that a conference is being advertised through graffiti, but political graffiti is common on the university campus and ranges from spray painted slogans to huge colourful murals.

If you’re interested in learning more about liberation psychology, The Psychologist had a 2004 article discussing both the discipline and Martín-Baró.

Link to The Psychologist article on liberation psychology.

2009-10-30 Spike activity

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

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

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind has an interesting discussion on addiction and free will. I recommend the extended version here.

The New York Times has an excellent personal account of psychosis.

There’s an awesome post on a new study about how phantom limbs can contort into impossible configurations at Neurophilosophy.

New York Magazine covers songs used in ‘war on terror’ torture and musicians’ protests over the use of their material.

How do we perceive speech after 150 kisses? Talking Brains covers an interesting conference poster.

BoingBoing reviews a new book on the use of psychedelic drugs throughout history.

There’s an in-depth review of ‘The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better’ in the London Review of Books.

Furious Seasons covers a new study [pdf] in JAMA on how atypical antipsychotics cause massive weight gain in children.

A slide show from Discover Magazine outlines the social factors in obesity or ‘how to make your friends fat’.

Scientific American Mind has a short report on a randomised controlled trial on how empathy in doctors reduces the duration of the common cold.

The excellent Neuroskeptic has a careful analysis of recent studies and discussion on the best antidepressant.

NeuroPod has just released it’s latest podcast. Direct mp3 link here.

Philosopher Gordon Marino writes an excellent piece on melancholy thinker S√∏ren Kierkegaard and issues of despair, depression and meaning in The New York Times.

Dr Petra has a fantastic sex research Q&A that covers a range of unquestioned or misreported pieces of ‘common knowledge’ and the evidence from the scientific literature.

The mighty BPS Research Digest discusses a fascinating study where a patient had an unexpected panic attack while being brain scanned, allowing an insight into the neural processes of panic.

Scientific American discusses asexuality, people who simply aren’t interested in sex. Another great piece from Jess Berring’s regular column.

An intriguing study on whether self-deception is genuinely possible is discussed by PsyBlog.

Language Log discusses the hypothesis that words for mother and father (e.g. mama and papa) are so similar across languages because it’s the first sounds children make and parents just assume their children are referring to them. As always, read the comments.

There’s a good piece on the neuroscience of obesity over at Dana’s excellent online magazine Cerebrum.

The New York Times has a good piece on the role of dopamine in motivation and wanting, dismissing the ‘reward system’ clich√© as old hat. Although it is seemingly unaware that this theory is not new and that the media have been mainly responsible for the gross dopamine = pleasure oversimplification.

Recent studies on the inaccurately named ‘brain scan mind reading’ approach are discussed by New Scientist.

Monkey brain surgeon

Online t-shirt company Psycho Reindeer have this fantastic monkey brain surgeon t-shirt with which you can proudly display your brain tinkering tendencies.

It’s only $14 and looks kinda funky.

If you do have a monkey by the way, it’s best not to let them do neurosurgery with a screwdriver as the t-shirt suggests.

I always make sure that they’re involved purely in an advisory capacity.

Link to monkey brain surgeon t-shirt.

Apply a female pigeon

The first neurology book printed in English was called ‘De Morbis Capitis’ and appeared in 1650. An old article from the Archives of Neurology discusses the book and has a lovely excerpt where it discusses numerous bizarre-sounding cures for brain diseases.

The full title of the book is the wonderful “DE MORBIS CAPITIS; Or, Of the chief internal Diseases of the HEAD. With Their Causes, Signes, Prognosticks, and Cures, for the benefit of those that understand not the Latine tongue”.

It was written by the country physician Robert Pemell who outlines the best rural neurological knowledge of the time.

This part from the Archives of Neurology article that discusses some of the ‘cures’ is both delightful and frightening in equal measure:

Ingredients in other remedies are marjoram, hyssop, lavender (a stimulant), rosemary, thyme, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Animal extracts included the brain of a hare, “much commended as having a peculiar property for the Paralyticall.” Diet is an important component in both the treatment and prevention of disease. Patients with paralysis, a disorder caused by an overabundance of thick humors, are counselled to “abstain from all gross and flegmatic meat…”

Physical remedies are also described by Pemell. Some are simple. “Make a noise in the ears of the (epileptic) party; for hereby the faculties are more stired up.” “Let the soles of the feet be well rub’d, and bathed with salt and vinegar.” Some are more elaborate. Apply “a female pigeon (the fethers being first leptick; for hereby the fit is abated, and the venomous vapours are drawn away.”

Link to PubMed entry for Archives of Neurology article.

Five minutes with Meg Barker

Meg Barker is a psychologist who specialises in understanding non-conventional sexuality and relationships. As well as being a researcher, Meg is also a psychotherapist where she puts her research into practice to help people overcome sex and relationship difficulties.

Having completed a great deal of research on bisexuality and ‘BDSM’ culture, Meg also has a particular interest in ‘polyamory‘ and non-monogamous relationships and has recently co-edited a forthcoming book on the topic with psychologist Darren Langdridge which attempts to understand the diverse experiences of non-monogamous relationships.

She’s also been kind enough to talk to Mind Hacks about her work and interests.

Continue reading “Five minutes with Meg Barker”

Social networks of murder

Photo by Flickr user dhall. Click for sourceI’m just reading a long but gripping study that used social network analysis to look at murder as a social interaction between gangs in Chicago to understand how stable networks of retaliation are sustained over time.

However, I was struck by this bit in the introduction, which really highlights the social nature of murder:

But we know that murder is not in fact such a random matter. It is first and foremost an interaction between two people who more often than not know each other: approximately 75% of all homicides in the United States from 1995 to 2002 occurred between people who knew each other prior to the murder (Federal Bureau of Investigation, selected years).

We also know that the victim and offender tend to resemble each other socially and demographically (e.g., Wolfgang 1958; Luckenbill 1977). Young people kill other young people, poor people kill other poor people, gang members kill other gang members, and so on. Thus, contrary to stratification theories, a particular murder is not so much the outcome of the differential distribution of attributes as it is an interaction governed by patterns of social relations between people similar in stature and status.

It’s an amazing paper which combines a social network analysis drawn from police murder records with field work that involved talking to gang members to understand their perception and use of violence.

Link to PubMed entry for ‘Murder by structure’.
Link to DOI entry for same.

An illusory interlude

I just found a some curious case reports on two people who had hallucinations in everyday life owing to unrecognised narcolepsy, but not realising it, they assumed their hallucinated episodes had genuinely occurred.

Unlike in psychosis, where affected people often believe that their hallucinations are real, people who have narcolepsy and have hallucinations are usually able to realise they were triggered by the condition.

In this case, the people were unaware that they had a tendency to hallucinate and so the boundaries between hallucination and reality began to blur.

The 45-year-old technical manager had a multi-year history of daytime sleepiness… He frequently had curious experiences during the day ‚Äì the neighbour throwing litter into the patient’s bin; his wife throwing precious objects away. Sometimes he saw himself trying to clean dirt on the side of a ditch. These memories and experiences were confusing. They gave rise to a surprised and suspicious state of mind.

Improbable and incomprehensible things happened, leaving him in doubt. Sometimes he gave sensitive-paranoid interpretations to the events, he also denounced the neighbour for filling his bin. His paranoidity drove his psychiatrist to the diagnostic conclusion of a delusional psychosis.

Recently he had a severe conflict with his chief on account of a vivid experience of having had sexual intercourse with the chief’s wife, which he mentioned to colleagues. Remembering every detail, he was convinced that his story was true, but the reactions of those around him gradually convinced him that this experience could be a hallucination.

The man was eventually referred to a sleep clinic, diagnosed with narcolepsy and successfully treated.

The other case is of a young woman who hallucinated that she had been sexually assaulted on a bus – an experience so vivid that she reported it to the police with numerous details of the offender.

She later realised that that she could have been wrong and as part of the court case for making a false police report she was medically assessed and also diagnosed with narcolepsy after a sleep lab assessment.

Link to PubMed entry for case reports.