December 2015 – Mind Hacks

Cognitive Sciences Stack Exchange

Cognitive Sciences Stack Exchange is a question and answer forum for Cognitive Science. The Stack Exchange model works well for computer programming and now cogsci.stackexchange.com is one of the 150+ sites in their family, which includes topics as diverse as academia, mythology and pets.

There’s a dedicated community of people answering questions and voting on answers, producing a great resource patterned around the questions people have on Cognitive Science topics. Three examples:

So head over, if you have questions, or if you can lend an evidence-based, citation-supported, hand in working on answers:

Link: Cognitive Sciences Stack Exchange

The underground smart drug amendment

Last week, some amendments were quietly slipped into the disastrous Psychoactive Substances Bill that’s currently going through parliament. Surprisingly, a new list of permitted substances has been added. Almost all are poorly evidenced substances used informally as ‘smart drugs’.

The bill is an embarrassingly bad piece of legislation that aims to ban all psychoactive substances by relying on the scientific impossibility of adequately defining ‘psychoactive’. It allows for a ‘whitelist’ of approved drugs which until last week, only included alcohol, nicotine and caffeine.

On December 15th, an amendment was added that greatly increases that list. It now includes:

Racetams
Pramiracetam, Oxiracetam, N-phenylacetyl-L-prolylglycine ethyl ester, Phenylpiracetam, Nefiracetam

Cholinergics
L-Alpha glycerylphosphorylcholine, Citicoline, Meclofenoxate

Miscellaneous
L-Theanine, Oxitriptan, Tongkat Ali, Resveratol, Trans-resveratol, Sulbutiamine

The list is followed by a note which says:

The substances in this amendment are commonly used to improve individuals’ cognitive performance and have been found to have positive effects in a number of academic studies.

The list almost entirely consists of drugs that are widely used by smart drug or nootropics enthusiasts. But to imply that there is good evidence that they have ‘positive effects’ on cognition is entirely misleading.

While some studies have claimed these effects we simply do not have the quality of evidence needed to demonstrate this. Most of the studies that have shown benefits are small and poorly designed.

We know that some of the substances are likely to be low risk in small doses. Oxitriptan, for example, is better known as 5-HTP and is a precursor to the neurotransmitter serotonin and is present in, among other things, bananas. Sulbutiamine is essentially a slightly tweaked version of vitamin B₁.

But several of the others are actually quite poorly researched in terms of safety. Typically, few side-effects were reported in the not-very-good-quality studies, but we really know very little about their long-term effects.

What is most striking about this sudden addition to the bill is how odd it is. Suddenly, a list of poorly tested and little understood drugs have been exempted from a ban if the bill becomes law.

The backers of the bill claim that it is needed to protect us from an influx of new poorly tested substances from grey market labs, and then have just exempted a bunch of them based on poorly evidenced claim that they improve cognition.

It’s like someone read the pop-up banner ads for a dodgy internet ‘smart drug’ store and decided to change the proposed law as a result.

The Psychoactive Substances Bill has gone from bizarre to baffling.

Link to December 15th bill amendments (via @JonBuchan)

The Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative

“The Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative” is a grassroots attempt to promote open science by organising academics’ work as reviewers. All academics spend countless hours on peer review, a task which is unpaid, often pretty thankless, and yet employs their unique and hard-won skills as scholars. We do this, despite misgivings about the current state of scholarly publishing, because we know that good science depends on review and criticism.

Often this work is hampered because papers don’t disclose the data upon which the conclusions were drawn, or even share the materials used in the experiments. When journal articles only appeared in print and space was limited this was excusable. It no longer is.

The Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative is a pledge scholars can take, saying that they will not recommend for publication any article which does not make the data, materials and analysis code publicly available. You can read the exact details of the initiative here and you can sign it here.

The good of society, and for the good of science, everybody should be able to benefit from, and criticise, in all details, scientific work. Good science is open science.

Link: The Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative

Spike activity 18-12-2015

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

12% of women have eyes with four colour-detecting cone cells instead of three. Why don’t they all have superhuman colour vision? Fascinating piece from great new blog Neurosphere.

The BMJ has a genuine but wonderfully sarcastic fMRI study on a Christmas spirit network in the brain. “Further research is necessary to understand this and other potential holiday circuits in the brain”

In a mass of tissue as densely packed and hard-working as the brain, even the holes among the structural elements have jobs to do. Good piece from American Scientist.

The Maudsley Psychedelic Society launched this week with an inaugural lecture by Professor David Nutt. Visuals are suitably blurry in places but great talk.

Trying to simulate the human brain is a waste of time and energy. Critical piece in Aeon.

The Atlantic has an excellent piece on the emotional impact of working with traumatised patients if you’re a therapist. Ignore the daft headline on ‘PTSD being contagious’.

Good piece in MIT Tech Review. Can This Man Make AI More Human? One cognitive scientist thinks the leading approach to machine learning can be improved by ideas gleaned from studying children.

The Lancet has an excellent piece on hallucinated voices, identity, and meaning-making.

A Brief History of New York City’s Heroin Scene. Excellent Vice article from someone who was there.

Neurocritic covers ‘This Week in Neuroblunders: fMRI Edition’.

Why human sleep is an evolutionary anomaly. Fascinating piece in The New York Times.

Alzheimer’s from the inside

There’s an excellent short-film, featuring journalist Greg O’Brien, who describes the experience of Alzheimer’s disease as it affects him.

It’s both moving and brilliantly made, skilfully combining the neuroscience of Alzheimer’s with the raw experience of experiencing dementia.

I found it in this Nautilus article, also by O’Brien, who has taken the rare step of writing a book about the experience of Alzheimer’s disease before it affected his ability to write.

Link to short film Inside Alzheimer’s on vimeo.
Link to Nautilus article.

Drug control through fantasy neuroscience

I’ve got an article in today’s Observer about the disastrous Psychoactive Substances Bill, a proposed law designed to outlaw all psychoactive substances based on a fantasy land version of neuroscience.

“The bottom line is, the only way of knowing whether a mystery substance alters the mind is to take it. You simply can’t tell by chemical tests, because there is no direct mapping between molecular structure and mental experience. If you could solve the problem of working out whether a substance would affect the conscious mind purely from its chemistry, you would have done Nobel prize winning work on the the problem of consciousness. A second-rank approach is just to see whether a new substance is similar to a known family of mind-altering drugs, but even here there are no guarantees. A slight tweak can make a similar drug completely inactive and about as much fun as Theresa May at a techno night.”

Although I talk about the scientific problems of the Psychoactive Substances Bill, the whole process has been a farce.

From the minister in charge clearly not understanding his own legislation to the Government having to reassure churches that incense won’t be banned.

It’s been criticised from everyone from the Royal Society of Chemistry to traditional Tory supporters stalwarts like The Spectator.

The Medical Research Council have expressed concerns that it could “inhibit worthwhile research and/or potential new therapeutics”.

Just as the rest of the world is turning away from the failed ‘war on drugs’ approach to drug legislation, the UK has decided to make up its own scientific impossibilities to support it.

Normally, scientific impossibilities would be the death knell for proposed regulation but for drugs laws I have long since stopped believing that scientific incompetence was any barrier to enacting legislation.

Link to article ‘Theresa May’s futile war on psychoactive drugs’

5 classic studies of learning

I have a piece in the Guardian, ‘The science of learning: five classic studies‘. Here’s the intro:

A few classic studies help to define the way we think about the science of learning. A classic study isn’t classic just because it uncovered a new fact, but because it neatly demonstrates a profound truth about how we learn – often at the same time showing up our unjustified assumptions about how our minds work.

My picks for five classics of learning were:

Bartlett’s “War of the Ghosts”
Skinner’s operant conditioning
work on dissociable memory systems by Larry Squire and colleagues
de Groot’s studies of expertise in chess grandmasters, and ….
Anders Ericcson’s work on deliberate practice (of ‘ten thousands hours’ fame)

Obviously, that’s just my choice (and you can read my reasons in the article). Did I choose right? Or is there a classic study of learning I missed? Answers in the comments.

Link: ‘The science of learning: five classic studies‘

A temporary blindness during a wrongful conviction

I’m just reading Clinical Psychology in Britain: Historical Perspectives which is a wonderful book if you are a clinical psychologist but probably about as exciting to non-clinical psychologists as you might expect. However, it does contain a few gems of wider interest.

This is a remarkable story from the chapter on the history of forensic clinical psychology which concerns the case of Barry George during the original trial that wrongfully convicted him for the murder of television journalist Jill Dando.

On 26 April 1999, Jill Dando, the presenter of BBC programme Crimewatch, was shot dead outside her home in Fulham, London. On 2 July 2001 Barry George, who lived nearby, was convicted of her murder. Prior to the trial, three defence experts, Gisli Gudjonsson, Susan Young and Michael Kopelman, had reported that Mr George’s fitness to stand trial was contingent on his receiving clinical psychological support in court throughout the trial, which lasted from 23 April to 2 July 2001.

Mr George had a complex presentation, including a long history of primary generalised epilepsy (first identified at age two or three), severely abnormal EEG, intellectual deterioration, significant cognitive and executive deficits, rigid and obsessive personality structure, hypochondriacal preoccupations, and an extreme reaction to stress in the form of anxiety and panic attacks, which increased the frequency of absence epileptic seizures. The court appointed Susan Young, a forensic clinical psychologist, who initially sat in the dock with Mr George and provided him with the required assistance. On 26 April 2001, on the fourth day of the legal arguments and prior to swearing in the jury, Mr George turned to Susan Young and declared, ‘I can’t see’. Prior to this Mr George had been observed having difficulties concentrating on the legal arguments and he claimed to be experiencing petit mal epileptic seizures in the dock.

The trial before the jury was due to commence on 2 May, but the court determined that the trial could only proceed if Mr George’s eyesight could be restored. On the morning of 1 May, all three defence experts were asked to meet Mr George and try to restore his eyesight by 2pm (when the court commenced that day). Michael Kopelman conducted a medical examination and informed Mr George that there was no physical explanation for his blindness. All attempts to persuade Mr George that it was in his interest to to regain his eyesight proved fruitless; he simply kept saying ‘I can’t see’.

At 12.30pm Gisli Gudjonnson, who was trained in hypnosis techniques, suggested that hypnosis might prove successful in bringing back his sight. Mr George agreed to this approach. After an initial induction to the process, Mr George was asked to imagine that he was being taken through a tunnel, accompanied by suggestions that his eyesight would gradually return during the journey and improve further during the lunchbreak (i.e. posthypnotic suggestion). After being brought out of the hypnosis, Mr George said he could see but his eyesight was blurred. He was reassured that it would continue to improve and by 2.00pm his eyesight had fully recovered and after the final legal arguments that afternoon, the trial commenced before a jury.

The defence experts construed Mr George’s blindness as being psychogenic in origin caused by the inability to cope with the stress generated by the legal arguments (i.e. putting a physical barrier between himself and the court), which was unlocked by the process of hypnosis. This was not the first time Mr George had presented with psychogenic symptoms as he had presented with a functional aphonia (i.e. nonorganic loss of speech) following a stressful environmental event in 1994. Psychogenic blindness and psychogenic aphonia are both a form of ‘conversion disorder’ and are often caused by stress that manifests itself as physical symptoms.

Gisli Gudjonnson was originally a policeman in his native Iceland but became interested in the psychological aspects of the crimes he was investigating, moved to the UK to study psychology, and has been massively influential in the development of forensic psychology.

He has been involved in some of the most high profile cases in the country and, TV producers, is the likely subject of your next Nordic detective drama.

Link to details of Clinical Psychology in Britain: Historical Perspectives.

Spike activity 04-12-2015

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

Sleep Paralysis’ Demons: Influenced by Culture and Fed by Our Fears. Interesting piece at Brain Decoder.

The Telegraph has an excellent piece on artist Alice Evans, her work and her experience of schizophrenia.

What we can learn about the latest epidemic of opioid drug abuse from the opium wave of 100 years ago. Good piece in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Aeon has a good piece on the possibilities of stem cell therapy for fixing neurodegeneration in dementia.

Beard-envy, Freud and the gentleman’s excuse-me. Amusing look at facial furniture by neuroscientist Sophie Scott in Standard Issue.

Neuroskeptic has a fascinating piece on whether bilingual people have a cognitive advantage.

Felton et al. ranked the relative hotness quotients of professors in 36 different fields. The Monkey Cage has the data.

The New Yorker has a typically brilliant piece from Rachel Aviv on war, refugees and mental health. One of the best writers on mental health anywhere.

Was the counterculture’s favourite psychiatrist a dangerous renegade or a true visionary? The Independent has an extended piece on R.D. Laing.

TechCrunch has an excellent piece on decision science – an increasingly important area in cognitive science.

Neuroimaging in 20 minutes

Neuroscientist Matt Wall did a fascinating talk on all things neuroimaging at a recent TEDx Vienna event. It’s a gently funny, engrossing talk that both introduces brain imaging and discuss some of the cutting-edge developments.

He particularly talks about some of the recent fMRI ‘mind reading’ studies – which are more complex, limited, and interesting than many people assume.