May 2010 – Page 3 – Mind Hacks

Don’t throw the baby out with the cortisol

I have a bullshit switch. It gets triggered when I hear certain phrases. ‘Neuroplasticity’ is one, ‘hemisphere’ is another and ‘raises dopamine’ is a regular button pusher. That’s not to say people can’t use these phrases while talking perfect sense, but I find it useful that they put me on my guard.

Most recently, I’ve found the phrase ‘raises cortisol’ to be a useful way of alerting me to the fact that the subsequent words may be a few data points short of a bar graph – potentially some poorly understood drivel.

This has been recently by demonstrated by scaremongering advice handed out to parents based on the claim that some vaguely specified study has ‘shown’ that something or other ‘raises cortisol levels’ in children.

The experts then go on to explain that cortisol is ‘bad’ for the developing brain because, as we all know, at least according to the scientific stereotype, cortisol is the ‘stress hormone’.

A few weeks ago psychologist Penelope Leach claimed that leaving babies to cry means “huge quantities of the stress hormone cortisol are being released in that baby’s brain, flooding his brain and his central nervous system, and one of the things we’ve learnt is that lots of cortisol washing about is really not good for the developing brain”.

This claim is apparently also in her new book and it made headlines around the world: ‘Crying babies at risk of brain damage’, ‘Leaving your baby to cry could damage its brain new book claims’, ‘Letting newborns cry is bad for them: study’ and so on.

The excellent Neuroskeptic blog noticed that ubiquitous psychologist Oliver James was recently advising people that leaving children in childcare could raise the risk of behaviour problems later in life because a study found that cortisol “levels had doubled within an hour of the mother leaving them in daycare”.

These claims both reflect one-dimensional thinking about how the brain works. Yes, stress tends to raise cortisol levels and there is good evidence to suggest that chronically high levels of stress and cortisol may be detrimental to brain, but this conclusion is typically drawn from people who have been through some fairly serious shit, wars, deprivation, trauma, or have specific hormone problems.

There is remarkably little research on cortisol, everyday stresses in young children and none to suggest normal variation damages the brain in any way. In fact, a couple of studies suggest that higher cortisol levels in young children are related to better mental performance but you probably won’t hear about these. You’ll also not hear about the recent study in the Journal of Pediatrics that found that breast-fed infants had higher cortisol levels.

That’s not to say that all of the studies have found a positive effect (there’s a fair research base on how higher cortisol levels during pregnancy can, in some situations, lead to later problems) but just that its common that ‘experts’ in vaguely related field will cherry pick brain studies to support what they already say.

This is particularly effective when it chimes with our folk neuroscience: dopamine equals addiction, cortisol equals stress, serotonin equals enjoyment, the right-hemisphere equals creativity and so on. None of which makes sense its own. They’re all useless when used as stereotypes.

As Neuroskeptic notes, virtually every form of physical activity raises cortisol levels, so you can’t just blithely apply the over-generalisation without making a nonsense of the world.

Or indeed, of childcare.

Link to Neuroskeptic on cortisol and pop childcare advice.

The ups and downs of smouldering talent

In Touched with Fire psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison argued that history’s great artists were more likely to have experienced mood problems and especially the ups and down of ‘manic depression’ that fuelled their intense creativity. The idea is attractive, although her book relied on a case by case interpretation of often long-dead figures.

Nevertheless, a new study on almost three quarters of a million Swedish young people has found remarkable support for the theory where high school students who had the highest levels of academic performance were, later in life, four times more likely to be hospitalised for bipolar disorder than average pupils.

It was also noticeable that pupils in the lowest grade range were also twice as likely to develop bipolar, with average students being at lowest risk.

The researchers controlled for parents level of education, social status and birth conditions to rule out these other factors which are known to affect the chances of developing the condition but the effect still remained.

In contrast, there seems to be a fairly direct relationship between performing poorly at school and the chance of developing schizophrenia in later life, suggesting that, to a certain extent, different influences on the developing brain may be at play.

However, it’s worth noting that although the rate of bipolar for the best performing pupils quadrupled, the risk remains low. For example, of the 9,427 top performing students only 12 were diagnosed and hospitalised with bipolar – a high rate compared to the average performers but still rare.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists have a great podcast discussion of the study with the lead researcher, psychiatrist James McCabe, and the full text of the paper is available online as a pdf.

Although McCabe suggests that the more ‘creative’ subjects seems to be most associated with bipolar, I have to say that’s probably pushing it a bit they seem to be fairly evenly spread, although, interestingly, performing well in handicraft and sport indicated the students were less likely to be diagnosed with the condition in later life.

pdf of scientific article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast about the study.

Lost letter days

One of the most delightful ways of testing social opinion has got to be the ‘lost letter’ technique, where researchers ‘lose’ paid up letters addressed to various controversial organisations to see how many get dropped back in the post box.

A new study, led by psychologist Tracey Witte, used exactly this technique and suggests that stigma concerning suicide may be improving as they found no difference in the amount of ‘lost letters’ that reached their final destination between those addressed to the fictional organisations the ‘American Heart Disease Research Foundation’, the ‘American Diabetes Research Foundation’ and the ‘American Suicide Research Foundation’.

In case you’re wondering, the addresses are otherwise identical (the same PO Box number) to reduce any other forms of bias. Only the names differ.

There have been some inventive ‘lost letter’ studies in the past, including the original 1965 one which found that three quarters of the letters to the ‘Medical Research Associates’ or a ‘Mr. Walter Carnap’ arrived at their destination but only one quarter of those addressed to either ‘Friends of the Communist Party’ or ‘Friends of the Nazi Party’ arrived.

Perhaps more relevant to today’s climate was a study completed in California in the year 2000 which found that letters addressed to the ‘Gay Marriage Foundation’ were significantly less likely to be returned than letters addressed to the ‘Blue Sky Foundation’.

As the researchers of the new study on suicide stigma note, one of the advantages of the technique is that it’s unobtrusive and “exceedingly unlikely that participants in these studies even know that their behavior is being measured by researchers.”

Link to PubMed entry for suicide ‘lost letter’ study.

Clutter blindness

NPR has an interesting interview on the phenomenon of compulsive hoarding where people will be almost unable to throw out used items and will collect mountains of clutter in their houses to the point where they can no longer see the walls.

The discussion is with psychologists and hoarding researchers Randy Frost and Gail Steketee and has lots of novel insights on a recognised but not well-understood behaviour.

I was struck by the bit where the interviewer highlights that lots of hoarders collect newspapers and Frost replies that “we think it’s related to a sense of wanting to acquire and preserve opportunities”. They also discuss the interesting concept of ‘clutter blindness’.

There are lots of similar parts that made me questions the traditional one-size-fits-all explanation that its just variant of obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD.

Apparently the two psychologists have written a book on the topic called Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things and you can read an excerpt on the NPR website.

By the way, if you’re interested in learning more, don’t miss the short documentary Possessed that we’ve recommend previously and you can watch online.

Link to NPR on ‘Hoarding: When Too Much ‘Stuff’ Causes Grief’.

Carrot junky

I originally thought that this might be one of the traditionally light-hearted articles about medical problems in fictional characters published around Christmas but it appeared in a October 1996 edition of the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.

I don’t have access to the full text of the article so I can’t say for sure but it seems to be serious. God knows how it got published but it remains a fascinating if bizarre insight into one of the lesser touted ‘addictions’.

Carrot addiction.

Kaplan R.

Aust N Z J Psychiatry. 1996 Oct;30(5):698-700.

OBJECTIVE: A case report of carrot addiction is presented with a review of the literature and comment on the role of beta carotene in addictive behaviour.

CLINICAL PICTURE: The addiction occurred in a 49-year-old woman under conditions of stress due to marital problems, leading to a depressive illness and increased smoking. The patient maintained that the sensations of carrot craving and withdrawal were quite distinct from those associated with smoking.

TREATMENT: The patient was advised to record her daily carrot consumption.

OUTCOME: The patient did not return for several months, but stopped eating carrots after an operation, at which time she also stopped smoking.

CONCLUSION: Compusive carrot eating, regarded as a rare condition, has received scant documentation, unlike hypercarotenemia due to unusual diets or food fads. Nervousness, craving, insomnia, waterbrash and irritability are associated with withdrawal from excessive carrot eating. The basis for the addiction is believed to be beta carotene, found in carrots. Does carrot eating, an aggressively oral activity, merely act as a behavioural substitute for smoking? Or does beta carotene contain a chemical element that replicates the addictive component of nicotine? Further study of this unusual but intriguing addiction may reveal more about the basis of all addictions, with particular implications for the cessation of cigarette smoking.

UPDATE: Blimey. Turns out the article is serious. Thanks to Avicenna for pointing out that the full article is available online.

Carrots. Just say no.

Link to PubMed entry for ‘carrot addiction’ article.

The sexploitation psychosis

Sex Madness was a curious 1938 sexploitation film that claimed to warn of the dangers of syphilis but was really an excuse to show risqu√© sex scenes that would have otherwise been banned by the film censors of the time.

As you might expect, watching the film now it seems remarkable that anyone would see anything in it worth censoring, but the concern about ‘sex madness’ was not entirely fictional.

Untreated syphilis typically leads to neurosyphilis where the disease attacks the nervous system and leads to dementia and madness.

It has been with us for possibly thousands of years and there is a rule of thumb that for any famous figure who died ‘mad’ before the 1950s someone will have suggested they died of syphilis.

However, it was truly a nasty way to go and a genuine danger considering that the first safe and effective antiobiotic treatments were not widely available until after World War Two.

For a long time before then, the most effective treatment was to be infected by malaria which would give you a fever so strong that the syphilis bacteria would die in your body due to the high temperature. The hope was that the malaria could be treated by quinine before you died from that. The discovery won Julius Wagner-Jauregg the Nobel prize in 1927.

So when the ‘sex madness’ film was made there was a genuine need to warn people about syphilis although the ‘madness’ angle gave the producers an excuse to show people acting ‘crazily’ and going ‘wild’ while melodramatising the effects of syphilis and ‘immoral behaviour’.

The whole film is now in the public domain and it is remarkable as a historical document, for the appalling acting and for its awesome film poster.

Link to ‘Sex Madness’ on YouTube.
Link to ‘Sex Madness’ on archive.org

Eight minutes of incompetence

ABC Radio National’s Science Show has a fantastic short segment on the ‘unskilled and unaware of it’ effect, also known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people with low levels of ability in a certain field vastly over-rate their talents because they lack the skills to judge their own competence.

It is my second favourite cognitive bias in psychology (after Emily Pronin’s discovery of the ‘bias blind spot‘) and the study also demonstrated the paradoxical effect whereby improving people’s skills reduced their self-assessment as they also learned to judge their ability level more accurately.

The segment in the science show is a wonderfully concise guide to the effect and start with the same wonderful story of the lemon juice covered bank-robber as the scientific paper.

Link to Science Show on the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Ego tripping the Freud fantastic

I just got sent this fantastic article from The Guardian in 2006 where neuropsychologist Paul Broks discusses Freud’s legacy in light of the burgeoning brain sciences.

As always, Broks writes brilliantly, and the piece starts with a wryly observed domestic scene.

One Sunday morning, when he was four years old, my son climbed into bed with his mother. I was downstairs making coffee. “Mum,” I heard him saying as I returned, “I’d like to kill Daddy.” It was a dispassionate declaration, said serenely, not in the heat of a tantrum or the cool spite of a sulk. He was quite composed. Shouldn’t you be repressing this, I thought.

The article was written on what would have been Freud’s 150th birthday and the rest is equally engaging.

Link to ‘The Ego Trip’ in The Guardian (thanks Ceny!)

2010-05-07 Spike activity

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

Wired Science covers a rather nasty case of the consequences of long-term laughing gas abuse.

Washing your hands reduces cognitive dissonance according to a new study covered by the Brainstorm blog.

Scientific American has another one of Jesse Bering’s excellent columns – this time on the mystery of pubic hair.

Different types of synaesthetic experiences involve different brain mechanisms. Great coverage of a new study by Neurophilosophy.

New Scientist covers a new study finding that methylation markers used in protein expression from immune system genes were different in people diagnosed with PTSD.

Forgiving yourself eases procrastination, according to the BPS Research Digest. I’ve put it on my list for tomorrow.

Lingua Franca, the ABC Radio National language programme, discusses the psychological links between our written names and our identities.

Apparently there is a working torrent for PBS behavioural economics documentary Mind Over Money here.

BoingBoing has the cognitive bias song. I assume everyone is singing it these days.

Simon Baron-Cohen writes an article for The Guardian saying that it’s not sexist to accept that biology affects behaviour. Although he does seem to have a bit of an odd definition of determinism.

Neuronarrative has an excellent interview with cognitive scientist Mark Changizi. “Everything We Knew About Human Vision is Wrong”.

Optogenetics and the control of the brain with fibre optics is the focus of an article in this week’s Nature.

Ingenious Monkey reports on a study finding that a touch from a woman increases financial risk taking in both sexes.

Another study finding that computer games damage the brain. No wait, my mistake, it’s another one finding cognitive benefits. This time for multisensory processing.

Sensory Superpowers blog discusses how blind people can play ‘beep baseball‘.

Data-logging your life is covered in an article from The New York Times on obsessive personal empiricism.

Inkling Magazine discusses technology-related delusions and paranoia, partly inspired by one of my first academic papers.

What do English speaking philosophers study? The Splintered Mind has the low down.

The Science Network has a streamed version of the neuroscience and philosophy documentary ‘The I of the Vortex’.

Another study finding detrimental effects for toddlers watching lots of television is covered by BBC News. As have been found previously.

The Economist sounds a note of caution on television viewing studies, however, as measures of TV viewing time are notoriously unreliable.

A study comparing the DNA of identical twins with multiple sclerosis finds little to explain why the disease develops according to an article in Science News.

Scientific American tackle a study finding that men can suppress food cravings better than women. Just think of England honey.

Although autism is usually thought of as a disability, a New Scientist article discusses the fact that the condition can be associated with various cognitive advantages.

To the bunkers! BBC News reports on a study on robot-inflicted injuries. Next, a study on spanner-inflicted malfunction.

The Loom has great coverage of the recent study finding evidence for ‘Neanderthal genes‘ in our DNA.

There’s a great short article on the origin of the ‘disease model‘ of addiction over at Addiction Inbox.

PLoS One has a remarkable scientific paper “on the existence of a sort of second law of thermodynamics for sentimental relationships”. Our love ‘aint nothing but tamed chaos baby.

The talents of the middle-aged brain are explored on the New York Times well blog.

New Scientist discusses the evolution of handedness.

An online museum of mental health and turmoil

The UK’s Science Museum has a special online exhibit about the history of mental health and illness that is packed full of fascinating photos and stories.

This rather unpleasant photo from the ‘mental institutions’ section particularly caught my eye. It is labelled “Elderly man in restraint chair, from a series of photographs taken of patients at West Riding Lunatic Asylum, Yorkshire, c. 1869.”

It’s interesting because it bears an interesting resemblance to a famous picture of James Norris, an ‘insane’ US marine who was found by the press to be permanently restrained in Bethlem Royal Hospital (the ‘Bedlam’ asylum) in 1814.

His condition so outraged the public that it was instrumental in a number of reforms to ‘madhouses’ including the 1828 Madhouses Act and the 1845 Lunacy Act.

However, the photo of the elderly gentleman is dated 1869, after both reforms, suggesting that this was either a temporary measure to restrain ‘unruly’ patients, or that the London-centric reforms just didn’t have much effect in the distant provinces of the United Kingdom.

On an unrelated point, the man is described as being a patient at ‘West Riding Lunatic Asylum’ the short name of the ‘West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum’.

British rock band Kasabian recently named their award winning album after the hospital but managed to mangle the name, entitling it ‘West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum’.

Link to Science Museum mental health exhibit (via BPSRD).

It’s hot in here

The Neuroskeptic blog has done a fantastic analysis of the popularity of different areas of the brain among neuroscientists by looking at how many scientific papers have been published on them since 1985. It’s like Vogue magazine’s hot styles, but for neurobiology.

I’ll leave you to check out the wonderful graphs, but here’s the punchline.

“The orbitofrontal cortex and cingulate cortex are both undergoing massive growth at the moment. The amygdala and parietal cortex are pretty hot too. By contrast, the cerebellum and the caudate are stuck in the scientific doldrums.”

The cerebellum has more neurons than the whole of the rest of the brain put together but we still don’t understand it very well. Not least because damage to the area doesn’t seem to produce some of the striking selective impairments in our abilities as does damage to other brain areas.

Consequently, the traditional way to annoy anyone doing a talk on their brain scanning experiment is to ask what the activity in the cerebellum means.

Link to Neuroskeptic on ‘This Season’s Hottest Brain Regions’.

Gilles de la Tourette’s strange story

As well being one of the most influential neurologists in the history of medicine, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, led a very colourful life.

The journal Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery has an engaging article about his work on hypnotism and how he became involved in a debate over the possible criminal uses of hypnotism.

At one point, he took part in a celebrated trial where a murderer claimed she had been hypnotised to commit the crime, but most strikingly Gilles de la Tourette was shot in the head by a likely-psychotic patient who claimed he was ‘hypnotising her from a distance’.

On 6 December, 1893, at 18:45, at Gilles de la Tourette’s domicile, 39 rue de l‚ÄôUniversit√©, a young woman asked for him, and since he was not back from the hospital, she said she would wait for him. When he arrived fifteen minutes later, she immediately followed him and told that she had been hypnotized many times, being now without resources and asking for 50 francs. He vaguely remembered to have seen her (and indeed she had participated to several hypnotism sessions), and told her to give her name and address. Since she asked for money again, he went to the door, when he heard a shot and felt a violent shock in the back of the head.

Two new shots followed, but he could leave the room, feeling blood pouring down to his neck. This story was shortly reported in Le Progr√®s M√©dical by Georges Guinon, who arrived a few minutes later, and saw the woman quietly sitting in the waiting room, apparently satisfied. Guinon’s article was published with the purpose to stop the already spreading rumors of an assault perpetrated under hypnosis, since this would have been a major challenge to the La Salp√™tri√®re school theories that no crime could ever be accomplished during a hypnotic state.

The wound was not severe, and the same evening, Gilles de la Tourette was able to write to his friend the journalist Georges Montorgueil: ‚ÄúWhat a strange story‚Äù. Previous mentions of the event inaccurately reported that it led to a famous trial, while there was no trial at all. The woman, named Rose Kamper (born Lecoq, on 23 June, 1864, in Poissy) indeed was recognized to be insane. She had already spent time at the Sainte-Anne asylum, and was known to have written threatening letters to the administrator of the √âcole Polytechnique Mr. Rochas. She later told that she suspected Gilles de la Tourette to be in love with her, but also that she had been hypnotized without her consent, with the consequence that her will had been annihilated.

She reported that she had been hypnotized ‚Äúat distance‚Äù, and that there was another person in her, who had pushed her to shoot. She was examined by Brouardel, Ballet and Jules Falret, who concluded to what nowadays corresponds to paranoid schizophrenia, so that she was sent back to Sainte-Anne and other hospitals, from which she was intermittently released. Interestingly enough, a couple of days before the assassination attempt, Gilles de la Tourette and Montorgueil had published an article in L‚Äô√âclair on hypnotism contesting the Nancy school.

Gilles de la Tourette lived on for more than a decade after being shot although towards the end of the century his behaviour started to become a little bizarre.

In 1899 he published a famous article on recognising and treating the neurological effects of syphilis but when writing the paper he noticed the symptoms in himself, realised he had neurosyphilis and became profoundly depressed.

He was forced to leave his job in 1901 owing to his increasingly delusional behaviour and was admitted to the Lausanne Psychiatric Hospital in Switzerland when he eventually died in 1904.

Link to PubMed entry for article on Gilles de la Tourette.

The moral intuitions of babies

The New York Times has a fascinating article by psychologist Paul Bloom on how babies may have a far more developed sense of justice and moral behaviour than we assume.

The piece starts by discussing the difficulties of doing psychology experiments on babies and goes on to explain how these problems have been overcome in the lab.

It then focuses on some of the work arising from Bloom’s own lab where they’ve sought to understand whether very young children, even those who are only a few months old, can make moral distinctions based on behaviour. Surprisingly, it seems they can.

To increase our confidence that the babies we studied were really responding to niceness and naughtiness, Karen Wynn and Kiley Hamlin, in a separate series of studies, created different sets of one-act morality plays to show the babies. In one, an individual struggled to open a box; the lid would be partly opened but then fall back down. Then, on alternating trials, one puppet would grab the lid and open it all the way, and another puppet would jump on the box and slam it shut. In another study (the one I mentioned at the beginning of this article), a puppet would play with a ball. The puppet would roll the ball to another puppet, who would roll it back, and the first puppet would roll the ball to a different puppet who would run away with it. In both studies, 5-month-olds preferred the good guy ‚Äî the one who helped to open the box; the one who rolled the ball back ‚Äî to the bad guy. This all suggests that the babies we studied have a general appreciation of good and bad behavior, one that spans a range of actions.

Link to NYT piece ‘The Moral Life of Babies’.

fMRI lie detection and the Wonder Woman problem

Wired Science has covered a legal case where fMRI brain scan ‘lie detection’ data was offered as evidence. While the lawyer was initially hopeful, it was ruled inadmissible by the judge on the basis that judgements of witness credibility by the jury should be based on their impression of the witness.

It not clear from the reports exactly why fMRI evidence should not, in principal, contribute to the jury’s judgement of witness credibility along with other evidence, but arguments usually centre on the reliability of the technology based on an evaluation known as the Frye or Daubert test which assesses whether the technology is ‘generally accepted’ by the scientific community.

The tests are essentially the same and the basis of both is the 1923 Frye vs United States court case which involved, interestingly enough, an unsuccessful attempt to admit evidence from an early lie detector that used a measure of blood pressure.

Even more interestingly, the inventor of the ‘lie detector’ in this case was psychologist William Moulton Marston who is more famous as being the creator of Wonder Woman. It is no coincidence that the female super hero has a Lasso of Truth that wraps around the body and compels the person not to lie.

Marston’s device was the forerunner of the polygraph test which is only admissible in some state courts in the USA and generally falls foul of the Frye and Daubert ‘general acceptance’ criteria.

fMRI lie detection also fails to make this grade. Although studies have found that in some instances the technique can detect lies better than chance, the experiments have produced variable results, using situations that aren’t necessarily good matches to everyday situations (such as asking participants to lie about a playing card they saw) and have led some neuroscientsts to call for a suspension of its use.

However, the issue is not as clear cut as it seems and Frederick Schauer from the University of Virginia School of Law makes a convincing case in an upcoming article for the Cornell Law Review that scientific standards of evidence should not be applied wholesale to courts of law.

Most of the arguments from neuroscientists focus on the scenario where someone ‘might be sent to prison’ on the basis of fMRI evidence, but Schauer notes that this is only a tiny proportion of court cases and that evidence should be evaluated depending on the context.

Schauer argues that if the decision was genuinely about sending someone to prison the highest standards of reliability must apply, but lawyers regularly introduce less reliable evidence as part of a bigger picture.

For example, when a lawyer says ‘would an upstanding community man like this really be likely to kill his business partner?’ everyone accepts that this is not a highly reliable guide to whether someone is a murderer but as part of a collection of evidence it might help show that the prosecution cannot prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that the accused is guilty. Numerous other types of similarly weak circumstantial evidence might also be presented.

This, Schauer says, could be where technology like fMRI lie detection could play a part. If it is 60% reliable and is simply a small part of a larger picture it seems daft to not allow it when similarly ‘unreliable’ evidence is admitted all the time. As he notes “Although slight evidence ought not to be good enough for scientists, it is a large part of the law.”

Furthermore, in civil cases the burden of proof is different and cases may be decided ‘on the balance of probabilities’ rather than the more stringent ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Additionally, lawyers may want to submit fMRI evidence not as evidence for deciding the case but as evidence for awarding damages.

In these cases, Schauer argues that applying the standards of science to legal cases without judging the context would be as bad as applying legal standards to science – like trying to decide a scientific question by inviting two people with opposing views and deciding who seems more credible.

The commercial fMRI lie-detector companies are currently trying as hard as they can to get the first evidence from their not very effective technology accepted in a court case. Eventually, it will probably happen but likely on some minor point in the bigger picture.

When it happens it will be widely hyped and the danger will be not that such evidence is allowed, but that it will be over-interpreted and misunderstood, in the same way that other scientific evidence is widely misinterpreted.

Indeed, if we needed warning about the dangers of this, it was illustrated by a recent case in India where unproven EEG ‘lie detection’ technology was accepted as key evidence in the conviction of a woman for murder.

Link to Wired Science to attempt to admit fMRI lie detection.
Link to Wired science on the evidence being rejected.

The slow disappearance of Agatha Christie

RadioLab discusses how the final novels of Agatha Christie subtly reflected the early stages of dementia as her written vocabulary and her ability to use the nuances of language slowly began to diminish.

The discussion is based on a linguistic analysis of her books by English professor Ian Lancashire who found in his study [pdf] that the range of vocabulary in her final works markedly declined and her use of indefinite words (like ‘something’ or ‘anything’) greatly increased, indicating that her striking ability to manipulate the English language was fading as she began to develop dementia.

This is not the first analysis that has looked at the literary output of a great author as she declined. A 2005 study analysed the text of three Iris Murdoch books, who famously lost her literary abilities as Alzheimer’s disease began to take hold, and found a similar pattern in her later writing.

In the case of Murdoch, and probably in the case of Christie, both of these analyses were on books completed before the authors were diagnosed with the condition (although we don’t know if Christie was ever formally diagnosed owing to the secrecy of her family).

In fact, we know that this is a common pattern, in that years before people get diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease there is a slow but steady decline of mental function that is a little beyond what we would expect from normal ageing but not so severe that it is clear the person has the condition.

The RadioLab programme also discusses the well-known ‘Nun Study‘ project which has studied the relationship between biological and life-style factors and the risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease in a group of nuns.

In one of the studies from the project, the researchers found a link between getting Alzheimer’s and the linguistic skills of the nuns that they demonstrated in an essay they wrote when they first entered the convent as young women – those who wrote the more complex essays were less likely to develop the dementia later in life.

This reflects an idea in dementia research known as the ‘cognitive reserve‘ which suggests that your mental ability is a bit like a fuel tank and when wear-and-tear on the brain drags your ability below a critical point in later life, you start going into the rapid decline of dementia.

Those with more mental ability are therefore more resistant (although not immune) to dementia. While level of education has been consistently linked to protection against dementia, it could just be that those who have more natural mental capacity study more, but there is some recent research that suggests education may help ‘top up’ the cognitive reserve fuel tank to help protect against the disease.

Link to RadioLab piece ‘Vanishing Words’.

Paradise learnt

The journal Memory has a remarkable case study of a man who began memorising the whole of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost at the age of 58. The researchers tested him at age 74 and found they could pick any part of the 10,565 line poem and he could successfully remember the next 10 lines.

JB is an active, articulate septuagenarian who began memorising Paradise Lost at the age of 58 in 1993 as a form of mental activity to accompany his physical exercise at the gym. Although he had memorised various poems in earlier years, he never attempted anything of this magnitude. JB stated that he wanted to do something special to commemorate the then-upcoming millennium. ‚ÄúWhy not something really challenging like, oh, ‘Paradise Lost’?‚Äù he said. He began by walking on a treadmill one day while trying to memorise the opening lines of the poem. After those lines were committed to memory, he extended the task over successive sessions to see how far he could go. JB, who regards himself as a theatre person, reflected on this process this way:

“The real challenge was just not to memorise it, but to know it deeply enough to really tell Milton’s story. As I finished each book, I began to perform it and keep it alive in repertory while committing the next one to memory. ‚Ä¶ The goal eventually became not just a series of performances, but to do all twelve books on the same occasion.”

Nine years later, JB achieved his goal. He recited Paradise Lost in its entirety over a 3-day weekend. Since that 2001 performance JB has given numerous public recitations, although for many of these performances, due to the time it takes to recite the poem (approximately 3 hours for Books I and II), he limits his performance to several books, rather than all of the books in their entirety. Typically, he moves and expresses emotion during a performance to help signify changes in characters, and he gives copies of the poem to the audience so that they can follow his memorised recitation.

Psychologist John Seamon discovered JB after attending one of his performances where he recited the whole of Books I and II from memory.

Seamon and his team asked JB to take part in tests regarding the epic work where they cued him with two lines selected from anywhere in the poem and asked him to recall the following 10 lines. In one part they picked out lines as they went through the books in order, in another they just chose books at random.

He seemed to stumble on a couple of books when they were tackled sequentially, but generally his verbatim recall was generally above 90% and seemed more consistent when the books were picked out randomly. The team also video-taped one of his live performances and found his average accuracy was between 97% and 98%.

Although not formally tested, JB’s everyday memory is apparently normal for his age, with his exceptional memory for Milton’s poem apparently arising from his relentless practice and dedication.

This is a common pattern in mental practice or ‘brain training’ style scenarios where we get better at the tasks we repeat but that improvement doesn’t seem to carry over very effectively into other areas of mental life.

If you’re interested in seeing JB in action he has his own webpage, mentioned in the scientific article, where he advertises his performances and where you can watch video of him reciting the poem.

Link to PubMed entry for case study.
Link to JB’s website.