Month: June 2010

The New York Times has an important article about how animal cruelty is being increasingly recognised as part of a wider pattern of behaviour including anti-social violence and criminality.

Cruelty to animals has been implicitly recognised as being a sign of behavioural problems in children for some time as it forms part of the diagnosis of conduct disorder, characterised somewhat glibly as ‘kiddie psychopathy’.

However, research has been slowly accumulating over the last few years that animal cruelty is related to lower levels of general empathy and is a signal that the person concerned may have abusive tendencies that extend towards other people.

The link between animal abuse and interpersonal violence is becoming so well established that many U.S. communities now cross-train social-service and animal-control agencies in how to recognize signs of animal abuse as possible indicators of other abusive behaviors. In Illinois and several other states, new laws mandate that veterinarians notify the police if their suspicions are aroused by the condition of the animals they treat. The state of California recently added Humane Society and animal-control officers to the list of professionals bound by law to report suspected child abuse and is now considering a bill in the State Legislature that would list animal abusers on the same type of online registry as sex offenders and arsonists.

The article is an extensive investigation into the cross-over between criminal psychology and forensic veterinary science and, although disturbing in places, is an important and in-depth look at how the two types of abusive behaviour share common roots.

Link to NYT on ‘The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome’.

Neurology journal Brain had a wide-ranging review of the book ‘Insomnia: A Cultural History’ last year which has this wonderful part about Darwin, Duchenne and how he electrocuted the face to study emotional expression.

In the same era and acting on the same beliefs, many experiments were done to study the effect of electricity on sleep and on the nervous system. Beard and Rockwell (1871) claimed that the tendency to insomnia could be removed by electricity, thus galvanizing and causing contraction of the cerebral circulation, and Charles Darwin illustrated his book on the expression of the emotions with many illustrations taken from Duchenne’s work (Darwin, 1904) [see image]. However, some of Darwin’s conclusions, such as that terror and grief were accompanied by automatic contraction of the forehead muscles, may not have been entirely justified by the apparent results since Duchenne’s subjects were admitted to be actors (Duchenne, 1871).

Duchenne was a doctor who studied the link between nerves, electrical activity and muscles. He’s probably best known in medicine for his work on what is now called ‘Duchenne muscular dystrophy‘, a muscle wasting disease caused by inherited problems with muscle protein.

However, his work on the link between facial muscles and emotions, partly researched by electrically stimulating muscles to see what expressions could be created, was groundbreaking and Darwin included Duchenne’s pictures in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Even now, psychologists talk of the ‘Duchenne smile‘ which involves raising the corners of the mouth and, crucially, raising the cheeks and wrinkling the eyes through the use of the orbicularis oculi muscle.

A ‘Duchenne smile’ is often regarded as the most genuine display of spontaneous joy or happiness, due to the fact that parts of the orbicularis oculi muscle cannot be controlled voluntarily and so this specific type of smile can’t be easily faked.

Sadly the whole review of the book ‘Insomnia: A Cultural History’ is locked, which is a pity as it works equally well as an article on its own and covers some fantastic ground.

The book itself look fascinating, and I note that the Wall Street Journal made the whole of Chapter 6 available online which is well worth a read in itself.

Link to locked review for ‘Insomnia: A Cultural History’.
Link to more info about the book.
Link to Chapter 6 at the WSJ.

New Scientist has an intriguing article on how the study of people who have been trained to have lucid dreams may help us understand the neuroscience of consciousness.

Lucid dreams are where the sleeper becomes aware that they are dreaming inside the dream. My first thought was that the combination of these and consciousness sounded a bit gimmicky but the justification seem like an interesting bit of lateral thinking with potentially valuable results:

Surprisingly, given the irrationality of the dream experience, many of the frontal areas of the brain involved in advanced cognition such as reasoning and forward planning were also active in the dreamers. But there was one notable exception: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was remarkably subdued in REM sleep, compared with during wakefulness. To Hobson, that strongly suggests that this particular area, above other frontal regions, is crucial for the critical reflective awareness present in waking, and therefore secondary, consciousness (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 6, p 475).

Could this one brain region alone explain our secondary consciousness? It’s here that lucid dreams enter the picture. With their increased self-awareness, lucid dreams share certain aspects of secondary consciousness, so researchers are now vying to observe what happens in the brain when someone “wakes up” within their dream, and whether they exhibit any further signatures of consciousness. “It’s a very interesting leap because it can show you exactly what occurs if you jump from limited consciousness to very high consciousness,” says Victor Spoormaker of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, Germany. “This should be one of the main themes of lucid dream research.”

The article also has some tips on making lucid dreams more likely while you sleep.

Almost every guide to lucid dreaming has the core advice that you need to get into the habit of constantly checking and asking yourself while awake ‘am I dreaming?’ presumably based on the principle that dreams often contain things we’ve experienced during the day.

One of my favourite ‘reality checks’ comes from the FAQ of the Lucidity Institute, a commercial training course set up by neuroscientist Stephen LaBerge.

It says to wear a digital watch and get used to checking it regularly at two close intervals to see if the numbers have changed as expected. If they haven’t or the numbers don’t make sense, you’re probably dreaming. Apparently checking light switches work is another technique.

No idea how rigorously these specific ideas have been tested but there is good evidence that lucid dreaming can be successfully practised and the typical lab technique to confirm it is happening is to ask participants to make specific horizontal eye movements when they become lucid.

As your eye muscles aren’t paralysed during sleep, it allows the dreamer one of the few ways they can signal to the researchers.

Link to NewSci on dreaming and consciousness (via @researchdigest).

Sleeping people are difficult to engage but easy to monitor, meaning that we know a great deal about what happens in the body and brain during our restful hours but little about the actual psychology of slumber.

One of the most interesting stages is the transition into sleep, where we can sometimes detect that our mind is changing as we slip into unconsciousness. These changes are known as the hypnagogic state and are when hallucinations are particularly common because the mind starts to ‘free up’ in poorly understood ways.

A new study has taken an interesting approach to try and understand the nature of this twilight period by using the biological measures to monitor how ‘far gone’ people are as they drift off, and then gently waking them to ask how their mind has changed.

The research team, led by Chien-Ming Yang from the National Chengchi University in Taipei, asked 20 participants to have an afternoon nap in the sleep lab while they were wired up to an EEG machine to measure electrical activity in the brain, with additional electrodes to measure eye movements, heart rate and muscle jerks.

As the participants drifted off they were awakened at different times: either just after eye-closing, the onset of ‘stage 1’ sleep where you’re still aware of the external world, the onset of ‘stage 2’ sleep where awareness starts to diminish, and after five minutes at ‘stage 2’ where awareness should have largely disappeared.

After wakening, participants were asked questions about their perception of being asleep and the experience of their own minds: “Did you fall asleep?”, “Did you see any visual images?”, “Were you able to control your perceptual experiences?”, “How real did any of the experiences seem to you?”, “How well were you able to control your thoughts?”, “Were your thoughts logical?” and several questions to try and capture the conscious experience of sleep onset.

The experience of having control over your own thoughts and how coherent and logical they seemed to begin to change almost as soon as the participants closed their eyes and they continued to seem slightly more unusual and autonomous as time went on.

However, as soon as ‘stage 2’ sleep began there was a step change into a state of mind where thoughts became markedly freewheeling, illogical and seemed to have a life of their own.

In contrast, awareness of the outside world remained largely present until ‘stage 2’ kicked in, at which point it quickly dropped off.

Most interestingly, the perception that ‘I was asleep’ when woken was most associated not with a reduced awareness of the surrounds, but instead largely relied on the experience that the sleeper no longer had control over their increasingly illogical thoughts.

In other words, we seem to know when we’ve been sleeping because we’re quickly drawn back into the world of controlled, logical thought after gently drifting in fantasy.

Link to DOI entry and summary for study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.