Author: christianjarrett

Christian Antonioli and Michael Reveley at the University of Leicester recruited 30 mildly or moderately depressed people via adverts in America and Honduras. They allocated half of them to a two week course of swimming with dolphins in Honduras and the other half to two weeks of snorkelling and having fun in the sea without dolphins. Afterwards they found the participants who swam with dolphins had recovered from their depression significantly more than the control group. Seventy-seven percent of the dolphin group no longer met the threshold for depression on the Hamilton scale compared with 25 per cent in the control group.

The researchers said “The echolocation system, the aesthetic value, and the emotions raised by the interaction with dolphins may explain the mammals‚Äô healing properties”.

The findings support the concept of biophilia – the idea that “human health and wellbeing are strictly dependent on our relationships with the natural environment”. The term was first coined by Erich Fromm but has since been championed by and become associated with E.O. Wilson.

The dolphins weren’t available to comment.

Link to the study published in BMJ

Link to dolphin swimming holidays

Mind Hacks already told you about Jabberwacky, the winner of this year’s Loebner prize for the chatbot that comes closest to passing the Turing Test (to pass, a judge must be unable to tell whether she’s talking to the chatbot or another human).

Now you can meet the chatbots and their creators at an informal one-day meeting at Surrey University’s Digital World Research Centre on November 25.

Dr. Richard Wallace, creator of three-times Loebner prize-winning chatbot ALICE, will be there. So too will Rollo Carpenter, creator of Jabberwacky, and Dr. Hugh Loebner himself, sponsor of the annual Loebner prize.

Nancy Andreasen, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, says her profession have become overly dependent on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the industry’s diagnostic bible that’s now in its fourth edition, and which Andreasen helped write an earlier version of.

Speaking to New Scientist magazine, Andreasen says the book was never meant to be “the absolute truth” and that there’s a tendency in psychiatry today to “make diagnosis through checklists, with less emphasis on the interesting uniqueness of each individual patient and on the humanism that lay at the heart of early psychiatry”.

Citing the example of schizophrenia, Andreasen says that following the recommendations of a working party she chaired, DSM IV keeps things simple and lists 8 general symptoms for the illness. But she says “This is not a complete description. You have to know much more than just those DSM criteria before a patient can be reliably diagnosed”.

Link to New Sci interview (requires subscription).
Link to Critical Psychiatry Network

They say mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery, now the Editors at New York based review journal Nature Neuroscience have launched a blog called ‘Action Potential‘.

In their words:

Action Potential is a blog by the editors of Nature Neuroscience – and a forum for our readers, authors and the entire neuroscience community. We’ll discuss what’s new and exciting in neuroscience, be it in our journal or elsewhere. We hope for spirited conversation! To contact the editors directly with confidential questions or feedback, please e-mail actionpotential@natureny.com

It’s early days but hopefully the blog could offer readers a fascinating insight into the minds of the people steering one of the most influential journals in neuroscience.

Link to Action Potential blog

Does an alcoholic have a disordered brain or a flawed character? The latest issue of Nature Neuroscience contains a special focus supplement on addiction that is freely available online for the next three months.

The Focus contains the latest reviews and commentaries on the neuroscience of addiction, including discussion of the changes caused by drugs to brain circuits and synapses; the cortical and sub-cortical brain areas that mediate the reinforcing effect of drugs; how drugs affect people’s decision making, tipping the balance in their consideration of immediate rewards weighed against future costs; the genetic influences on personality traits that predispose people to addiction; as well as consideration of the social stigma of addiction and the difficulties of developing effective treatments.

Link to Focus table of contents (all free until Jan’ 06)

Is yours a box or a Swiss army knife? Last Saturday’s Guardian carried an essay by Charles Fernyhough comparing the use of mind metaphors by psychologists and novelists.

In fiction, the mind is often conceived as a container, be it an aviary confining the wildlife of human cognition, as in Plato’s Theaetetus, or the ante-rooms and winding passages of a character’s mind in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But, Fernyhough writes, the mind as container metaphor fails to account for the idea of inaccessible procedural knowledge, such as the ability to ride a bike, or to capture the dynamic, flowing nature of thought. By implying a fixed boundary between what is in mind and what is not, the container metaphor also fails to encapsulate the idea of embodied cognition “which sees mental processes as shaped by the mutual interactions of mind, body and world” Fernyhough says.

Fernyhough suggests the mind as container metaphor continues to appeal despite its failings because “it fits with our cherished beliefs about the primacy of the unitary, indivisible self”, in contrast with cognitive psychology’s conception of the mind as a “Swiss army knife bristling with separate information-processing modules”.

Novelists have, however, adopted cognitive psychology’s metaphor of the mind as a machine. Fernyhough gives the example of a passage from Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore: “I crunch along the gravel, the mercury light beating down on me, and try to get my brain in gear. Throw the switch, turn the handle, get the old thought processes up and running. But it doesn’t work – not enough juice in the battery to get the engine to turn over”.

Fernyhough ends by suggesting that imperfect metaphors are better than none. The tendency for contemporary novelists to write in the first-person allows them to convey thoughts as they would speech “rather than getting to grips with its dynamics and complex simultaneities” he says, before concluding: “When thought becomes no more than unspoken speech, fiction’s gleaming reputation as a mirror of human consciousness will inevitably begin to tarnish”.

Link to full Guardian essay
Link to online databank of mind metaphors

The latest issue of Prospect magazine features a juicy debate – “Will science explain mental illness?“, with Peter McGuffin, director of the social, genetic & developmental psychiatry centre at King’s College London, arguing ‘yes’, and Steven Rose (pictured right), director of the brain and behaviour research group at the Open University, arguing ‘no’.

McGuffin opens the debate by outlining how science has led to some major advances in the treatment of mental illness, including the development of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), anti-depressant medication and anti-psychotics. He also points to the potential of new technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging, and the promise of psychiatric genetics, with at least one gene implicated in the uptake of serotonin (a neurotransmitter that depressed people don’t seem to have enough of) already identified. “Real advances have been made, and the pace is quickening”, McGuffin says.

But in his initial retort, Rose takes aim at the fuzziness of psychiatric diagnoses and argues that finding treatments for an illness doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve explained it. “Aspirin alleviates toothache, but we don’t conclude that the cause of toothache is too little aspirin in the brain”, he says. Rose is particularly unconvinced of the value in looking for genes implicated in mental illness. “Today’s attempts to locate causes in genes will, in 100 years, seem as misguided as Freud’s classifications”, he predicts.

Non-subscribers can click here to purchase online access to the debate.

What were you doing for the 38 weeks before you were born? A hell of a lot actually, according to Professor Peter Hepper at Queen’s University, Belfast, who’s written about the nascent field of fetal psychology in the latest issue of The Psychologist magazine.

The article is packed full of fascinating observations including the fact that the fetus demonstrates handedness by 10 weeks of gestation – before any signs of hemispheric asymmetry, thus suggesting a predilection for movements on one side might lead to brain lateralisation, rather than the other way around.

Hepper also mentions the controversy surrounding whether or not the fetus feels pain. Of course it can’t be asked, but by 23 weeks gestation, the fetus does show a biochemical stress response to a needle puncture (during a blood transfusion), which suggests it hurt.

Doctors have no way of directly assessing the brain function of a fetus, but advances in fetal psychology mean aberrant patterns of behaviour can increasingly be used to identify neural problems the fetus may have.

The article is locked to subscribers but will be freely available after six months.

Link to The Visible Embryo
Link to videos of the fetus

The U.K.’s Office of Science and Technology Foresight programme has published a free report “Drugs Futures 2025?” that seeks answers to how we can best manage the use of psychoactive substances in the future for the betterment of society. The report points to three areas that will be affected by our rapidly growing understanding of how substances act in the brain: treatment for mental health, drug addiction and the use of cognitive enhancers like modafinil and ritalin. The report draws on 15 state-of-the-science reviews, from experimental psychology, to genomics, to social policy that are also free to download.