Author: vaughanbell

Creationists unaware of past, doomed to repeat it

New Scientist has an article on a group of creationists who are attempting to argue that we have a soul based on the difficulty of reducing mental events to neurobiology. The article makes out that this is a new front on the ‘war on science’ but I wouldn’t be manning the barricades quite yet, as the issue has been around as long as neuroscience itself.

The creationist-affiliated researchers suggest that the ‘mind-body problem‘ – the difficulty in explaining subjective mind states in terms of objective biological processes – means that the mind must be partly non-material and, therefore, have some spiritual aspect to it (i.e. the soul).

What’s interesting in this debate as many scientists respond by simply denying there is a problem and suggesting that this is just a issue of progress and eventually we will be able to explain every mind state in terms of brain function.

This is unlikely, however, owing to the fact that the mind and brain are described with different properties and so cannot be entirely equivalent. Therefore, one will never be completely reduced to the other.

This does not imply that there must be a soul or non-material mind at work. If this doesn’t seem obvious to you, try this example.

Why does Elvis not want you to step on his blue suede shoes? You buy a copy of the track on CD but analysing the physics of the sound waves in the song will not fully answer your question.

You might find out that the volume or pitch increases at specific points to highlight certain key phrases, but you can’t fully understand why Elvis is so protective of his new shoes through physics alone.

In other words, you can’t explain everything about the song through objective scientific methods. This does not mean your CD, or the sound waves, have a soul.

The same goes for the mind and brain. There are some things we talk about in terms of experience, mental events and thoughts that will not be adequately explained at the level of objective biological measures. Similarly, this does not imply the existence of a soul.

Importantly, it doesn’t disprove the existence of a soul either, because unless you make specific falsifiable statements about what a soul actually does in the brain in an empirically testable way, science can’t test it one way or another. It can only make inferences.

On the basis of the fact that no proposed ‘soul effect’ has ever been detected, most neuroscientists think that a non-material aspects to the mind doesn’t exist. The mind, like Elvis songs, are just part of the world, even if we need to use different levels of meaning to fully explain them.

However, some neuroscientists think different, and have done for as long as neuroscience has been around, and this is why this ‘new’ development is unlikely to be a big threat.

In fact, Nobel-prize winning neuroscientist Sir John Eccles believed until his dying day that there was a non-material aspect to the mind. Dana Magazine has a great article on Eccles’ dualism which is well worth reading if you want a summary of his views.

But this just illustrates the point that the recent claims by creationist-affiliated researchers are neither new nor particularly threatening. Neuroscience has not come crashing to the ground, and science seems remarkably untroubled.

UPDATE: The Neurologica Blog also has some great coverage of the NewSci piece and has more of an in-depth analysis.

Link to NewSci piece ‘Creationists declare war over the brain’.
Link to Dana article on Eccles’ dualism.

2008-10-24 Spike activity

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

Being altruistic makes you hot, finds new research covered by Medical News Today.

Neuronarrative is a high-quality new mind and brain blog. Highly recommended.

The San Franciso Chronicle has an excellent piece on the place of brain scans in the courtroom.

In light of the recent controversy over a murder conviction in India where ‘brain scan lie detection’ was admitted as evidence, Wired covers the aftermath and the protest of Indian scientists.

BBC News has a video on research looking at the link between dancing style, attractiveness and ‘fitness’ as a potential mate.

Hypnosis, memory and amnesia are discussed by one of the leading hypnosis research groups in the Scientific American Mind Matters blog. This see post for our own coverage of the this fascinating study.

BBC News covers new research that finds mentally demanding jobs may protect against Alzheimer’s. More evidence that staying active keeps the brain healthy.

Creationist ‘fossilised brain‘ ridiculousness is covered by Pharyngula. Looks more like a cauliflower to me.

But wait, brain found inside watermelon. The final nail in the coffin for evolutionary theory.

Alternet has an extended article on the Johns Hopkins research into the medical benefits of the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin (thanks Sandy!).

Neuroanthropology previews an upcoming conference on the ‘encultured brain‘.

The Top 10 Bipolar Blogs of 2008 are presented by PsychCentral.

Being a <a href="
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article4962480.ece”>daddy makes you kinder and smarter, reports the Times. Presumably, this helps make up for the sleep deprivation.

New Scientist reports that a computer circuit has been built from brain cells. NetBSD port to follow shortly.

Paul Bloom is interviewed by The Boston Globe about the psychology of believing in the soul. Presumably it refers to the eternal soul rather than Marvin Gaye.

The BPS Research Digest covers an interesting study on social norm violations in fans queuing for a U2 gig.

A funky guide to all things dopamine is provided by Neurotopia.

Submit your entries for Encephalon, this Monday

The next edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival will be hosted here on Monday 27th October, so submit your best mind and brain writing from the last fortnight if you’d like it featured.

You can email me directly via this web form or you can email your links to encephalon.host [at sign] gmail.com.

Please put the word ‘Encephalon’ in the subject line. I look forward to reading all the submissions!

False advertising statistics effective, say 9 out of 10 cats

Ars Technica has a fantastic article on a recent study that found that numerical specifications in adverts have a huge effect on our choices, even when they’re meaningless.

The numbers can be ratings, technical details, supposed representations of quality – it doesn’t seem to matter. In general, bigger is better and the study found that we tend to be swayed by the numbers even when it directly contradicts our experience.

The first test involved megapixels. The authors took a single image, and used Photoshop to create a sharper version, and one with more vivid colors; they told the students that the two versions came from different cameras. When told nothing about the cameras, about 25 percent of the students chose the one that had made the sharper image. But providing a specification reversed that. When told that the other model captured more pixels using a figure based on the diagonal of the sensor, more than half now picked it. When it comes to specs, bigger is better, too, even if the underlying property is the same. Given the value in terms of the total number of pixels captured, the preference for the supposedly high-resolution camera shot up to 75 percent.

The researchers thought this might be a problem with the fact that not everyone is technically minded, so they tried various other experiments with everything from scented oil to ice-cream – all with the same effect.

To quote the researchers “even when consumers can directly experience the relevant products and the specifications carry little or no new information, their preference is still influenced by specifications, including specifications that are self-generated and by definition spurious and specifications that the respondents themselves deem uninformative.”

Link to Ars Technica write-up of study.
Link to study paper.
Link to DOI.

Pentagon requests robot packs to hunt humans

New Scientist reports on a new Pentagon request to develop a pack of robots “to search for and detect a non-cooperative human”.

I am a strong believer in the fact that everyone who takes a course in artificial intelligence should be made to watch post-apocalyptic film The Terminator as a stark warning, in the same way that everyone who works with MRI scanners is made to watch serious videos about ‘what can go tragically wrong and how you can prevent it’.

I also suspect though, that the students who come out of those lectures rooting for the robots are recruited into military research teams.

From the Pentagon document:

Typical robots for this type of activity are expected to weigh less than 100 Kg and the team would have three to five robots.

PHASE I: Develop the system design and determine the required capabilities of the platforms and sensors. Perform initial feasibility experiments, either in simulation or with existing hardware. Documentation of design tradeoffs and feasibility analysis shall be required in the final report.

PHASE II: Implement the software and hardware into a sensor package, integrate the package with a generic mobile robot, and demonstrate the system‚Äôs performance in a suitable indoor environment. Deliverables shall include the prototype system and a final report, which shall contain documentation of all activities in this project and a user’s guide and technical specifications for the prototype system.

PHASE III: Robots that can intelligently and autonomously search for objects have potential commercialization within search and rescue, fire fighting, reconnaissance, and automated biological, chemical and radiation sensing with mobile platforms.

PHASE IV: Die puny humans die!

PHASE V: To the bunkers! Run for your lives! Arggghhhhh!

PHASE VI: Sarah Connor, we’re going to send you back in time to make a movie to warn everybody about the coming annihilation of the human race. Recruit a political leader so people will take it seriously – like Governor Schwarzenegger, for example.

Earlier this year, Israel announced that they want to develop an AI-controlled missile system that “could take over completely” from humans. If you’re still chucking, the UK military satellite system is called Skynet.

Link to NewSci on Pentagon opening Pandora’s box.
Link to Pentagon solicitation request.

Towards a neuropsychology of religion

This week’s Nature has a fascinating essay by anthropologist Pascal Boyer discussing the quirks of spiritual belief and how they may result from the evolution of our mind and brain.

Boyer is best known for his book Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought where he argued that religion can be understood as where the cognitive abilities we’ve developed through evolution are applied to things like group identity, ritual, or the explanation of otherwise mysterious things, such as weather or disease.

Essentially, Boyer argues that there are cognitive restraints on religious practice and belief, which he illustrates by pointing out some interesting inconsistencies in our intuitive ideas about spiritual agents. According to Boyer, this suggests that our mental capacities define what are supposed to be all-powerful or all-knowing entities.

This clip of Boyer being interview by Jonathan Miller is fascinating because he points out, contrary to popular belief, what most religions are concerned with. He notes most religions do not concern themselves with the creation of the world or the afterlife, while the presence of unseen agents is almost universal.

There is now a growing interest in the cognitive science of religion and one of my favourite articles is by psychiatrist Quinton Deeley who discusses how different form of religious ritual may influence specific cognitive functions to pass on religious teachings and commitments (full disclosure: Deeley is a friend and research collaborator).

Deeley argues that the well-known distinction between ‘doctrinal’ rituals which are frequent and low intensity (such as everyday prayers or practices), and ‘imagistic’ high-intensity, less-frequent rituals (such as exuberant religious celebrations) serve different psychological purposes.

‘Doctrinal’ rituals help create semantic memories of key concepts and emotional response through associative learning, while ‘imagistic’ rituals help create episodic memories of specific situations that may involve altered states of consciousness and the experience of other realities.

Deeley also did a fascinating talk on ‘Ritual, Possession Trance, and Amnesia’ where he discusses some of the neuropsycholgical mechanisms that might underlie trance and possessions states.

Link to Boyer’s Nature essay ‘Religion: Bound to believe?’.
Link to brief interview with Boyer on religion.
Link to Deeley’s article ‘The Religious Brain’.
Link to video of talk ‘Ritual, Possession Trance, and Amnesia’.

Neuropsychiatry in Venezuela

Apologies for the lack of posts, but I’ve just arrived in Punto Fijo in Venezuela, as I’ve kindly been invited to be a guest of the Venezuelan Psychiatric Society at their annual conference, where I shall be talking about the cognitive neuropsychiatry of psychosis later in the week.

Unfortunately it’s dark and I’ve been travelling since yesterday, so all I know about Punto Fijo is that it is supposed to be remarkably beautiful and it’s incredibly humid.

However, I spent a fantastic day in Caracas with Jorge, a superb colleague from Medellín, and Jose and Claudia, a Venezuelan psychiatrist and psychologist couple who graciously toured us through the city and showed two weary travellers some warm Venezuelan Hospitality.

Updates to follow shortly (after some well deserved sleep).

Monochrome dreaming

Watching black and white television as a child may explain why older people are less likely to dream in colour than younger people, according to new study reported in New Scientist.

The study is from psychologist Ewa Murzyn, who was interested in how early experience could affect our dream life.

She first asked 60 subjects – half of whom were under 25 and half of whom were over 55 – to answer a questionnaire on the colour of their dreams and their childhood exposure to film and TV. The subjects then recorded different aspects of their dreams in a diary every morning.

Murzyn found there was no significant difference between results drawn from the questionnaires and the dream diaries – suggesting that the previous studies were comparable.

She then analysed her own data to find out whether an early exposure to black-and-white TV could still have a lasting effect on her subjects dreams, 40 years later.

Only 4.4% of the under-25s’ dreams were black and white. The over-55s who’d had access to colour TV and film during their childhood also reported a very low proportion of just 7.3%.

But the over-55s who had only had access to black-and-white media reported dreaming in black and white roughly a quarter of the time.

It’s an interesting study because, as we recently discussed, philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel argued that exposure to TV was an unlikely explanation for the effect where we’ve tended to report more coloured dreams in modern times and suggested this actually showed we’re not very good at introspecting into our own minds.

This study provides some evidences that the effect may be more reliable than we think.

However, I’m still puzzled by why television would seem to have such a big influence so many years later when most of the visual experience the person would have received as a child, even if a heavy TV watcher, would be from the ‘real’ coloured world.

Curious.

Link to NewSci on black and white dreams study (thanks Laurie!).
Link to scientific paper.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Colombian Congress of Psychiatry report

I recently got back from the Colombian Congress of Psychiatry and was incredibly impressed both by the high standard of scientific work and the wonderfully welcoming people I met.

I have to say, I didn’t see quite as much of the conference as I normally would owing to the rather relentless pace of partying that seems to occur in Bogot√° (things I haven’t seen at UK psychiatry conferences: the president of the national psychiatric association stood atop a table getting everyone to wave their hands in the air like they just don’t care).

For me, one of the academic highlights was actually from a Spaniard, Julio Sanju√°n, who talked about some innovative research he’s doing on auditory hallucinations.

In one elegant study, Sanju√°n and his team decided to look at what sort of brain activation is triggered by neutral and emotional words in patients with schizophrenia who hear voices.

It’s remarkably how many studies in schizophrenia have been done of changes in visual perception when one of the major problems for many people with the diagnosis is that they hear intrusive and unpleasant hallucinated voices.

Sanju√°n came up with the idea of simply looking at how the brains of people with schizophrenia react to hearing emotional words (such as swear words) compared to neutral words – matched for word type and frequency.

The image on the right shows the remarkable difference, whereby emotional words cause a much larger response in the brain. In fact, they found they triggered much greater frontal lobe, temporal cortex, insula, cingulate, and amygdala activity, largely on the right.

It’s a ‘why didn’t I think of that’ study that might help explain why people with schizophrenia often find their voices so disabling when other people in the population can hear voices and remain undisturbed.

In terms of drug company ridiculousness that often appears as part of the ‘educational effort’ in European Conferences (i.e. models on bikes), it was remarkably muted in comparison.

However, one particular lowlight was finding out the session I was speaking at was being used by Janssen to advertise their ‘new’ antipsychotic paliperidone – which is actually little more than a repackaged risperidone.

Did I mention risperidone has just gone out of patent and can now be produced much more cheaply by other drug companies? Obviously nothing at all to do with Janssen having a newly patented drug to sell I’m sure.

Wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care.

Link to Sanju√°n study on emotional word reactivity.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

The sexual distractions of cheese crumbs

Another fantastic quote from Bonk, a book about sex research by science writer Mary Roach, this time about the effects of distraction on female sexual arousal (from p251):

A thousand images can play on a woman’s mind: work, kids, problems with Ultrasuede. One nonpharmaceutical solution is to teach women to redirect their focus and pay more attention to physical sensations – a practice called mindfulness.

A pilot study – meaning it’s a preliminary investigation with no control group – by Lori Brotto and two colleagues at the University of British Colombia had promising results. Eighteen women with complaints about their ability to become aroused participated in mindfulness training. Afterward, there was a significant jump in their ratings of how aroused they’d been feeling during sexual encounters.

If it’s any solace, even female rats have trouble focusing. I give you a sentence, my favourite sentence in the entire oeuvre of Alfred Kinsey, from Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female: “Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male”.

Full disclosure: I was sent a free copy of the book by the publishers about six months ago but I’ve only just got round to reading it.

Link to Mary Roach’s website.
Link to previous Mind Hacks review of Bonk.

Looking for the mind in a haystack of words

The New York Times has an article on the simple but effective idea that a statistical analysis of word frequency in written text can be a guide to the psychological state of the author. It’s a technique that’s been pioneered by psychologist James Pennebaker who has conducted a considerable amount of intriguing research to back up his technique.

In fact, he’s completed a huge number of studies looking at word frequency in everything from bereavement to suicidal and non-suicidal poets.

However, some of his most impressive work has focused on the benefits of getting distressed or ill people to write, finding that it benefits recovery from trauma, but perhaps more surprisingly seems also to boost immune system function in HIV patients.

The evidence and theory behind the work was described in a great 2003 review article which notes that the importance lies not so much in the subject or action words, but in the ‘bitty’ parts of speech, such as the use of pronouns (I, you, we and so on).

These seem to relate to the focus of the thoughts and Pennebaker was asked by the FBI to apply the technique to the communications of Al Queda:

Take Dr. Pennebaker’s recent study of Al Qaeda communications — videotapes, interviews, letters. At the request of the F.B.I., he tallied the number of words in various categories — pronouns, articles and adjectives, among others.

He found, for example, that Osama bin Laden’s use of first-person pronouns (I, me, my, mine) remained fairly constant over several years. By contrast, his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, used such words more and more often.

“This dramatic increase suggests greater insecurity, feelings of threat, and perhaps a shift in his relationship with bin Laden,” Dr. Pennebaker wrote in his report [pdf], which was published in The Content Analysis Reader (Sage Publications, July 2008).

Interestingly, the FBI have their own in-house text analysis technique but I’m damned if I can remember the name or find it on the net. Answers on an encrypted telegram please…

Link to NYT piece ‘He Counts Your Words (Even Those Pronouns)’.
Link to review article ‘Psychological aspects of natural language’.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Ice age

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind recently had an excellent programme on amphetamine, discussing its varying uses from its original selling point as a widely abused nasal decongestant to its modern popularity as a kiddie behavioural control agent in the age of methylphenidate (Ritalin).

One of the most fascinating parts is where the guest, history of science professor Nicolas Rasmussen, discusses how after amphetamine was discovered in the 1930s the drug companies desperately tried to find an illness which it could be prescribed for.

Smith, Kline & French wanted to find a big market and so they looked at common diseases that you know might plausibly be treated by an adrenaline derivative and they tried it out on a huge range of conditions. Menstrual cramps, bed wetting, you name it — it turns out actually to work for bed wetting if you give it to little kids who have that problem, probably by making them sleep shallower — but also in psychiatry for depression, and that’s what really caught on.

They tried it for an enormous range of conditions through medical experts and the clinical trials where the drug didn’t work out well weren’t published, because that was already the arrangement then, when a drug company funded a trial unless it fit their marketing needs the results wouldn’t be published.

Great to see the spirit of the 1930s is still with us today.

The programme also discusses how the subculture use of the drug interacted with its ‘official’ uses in the mind of the public and policy makers to give speed the image it has today.

It seems the programme is based on a new book by Rasmussen called On Speed and I love the link at the bottom of the book’s website which says ‘Purchase On Speed’. I’ve drunk a lot of coffee. Will that do?

If you’re interested in a book on the science of amphetamines, Leslie Iverson’s book Speed, Ecstasy, Ritalin is simply wonderful and just so much fun to read, as I noted in an enthusiastic review last year.

The AITM programme is a fantastic introduction to the fascinating story of amphetamine, so a great place to begin.

Link to ‘Wakey Wakey! The many lives of amphetamine’.

2008-10-17 Spike activity

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

The Waves of Mu art project is reviewed by The Neurocritic. Looks as beautiful as it sounds.

BBC News says internet use ‘good for the brain’? The scientific article has not yet appeared and the guy has a book out on, er, how good the internet is for your brain. I remain suspicious until I see the hard data.

Fantastic Neurophilosophy piece discusses a new study where a man with a surgically re-attached hand shows brain re-organisation to its pre-amputation state.

The New York Times has another one of its great features on the personal experience of mental illness – this with stories of men and women with eating disorders.

Another fascinating study on the effect of death salience (reminding people of their mortality) finds it can influence environmental concerns – in either direction, according to the BPS Research Digest.

M’Lady, PsyBlog has a short but sweet piece on a study that has found romantic thoughts increase male chivalry.

A conversation between BBC News and a robot – who happens to be the winner of the 2008 Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence. You can have a conversation with the same robot yourself.

H+ Magazine launches for the transhumanist in your life. Full of slightly unrealistic but commendable neuroscience speculation.

Robert Burton, neurologist and author of ‘Being Certain’, is interviewed by SciAm Mind Matters.

Neuroanthropology has a video segment on what archaeology can tell us about early behaviour (sometimes called ‘cognitive archaeology’).

A patient left in the coma-like persistent vegetative state after a car crash recovers some function after magnetic brain stimulation, reports BBC News.

My Mind on Books previews an interesting looking tome called ‘Obsession: A History’.

The ever-excellent Cognitive Daily tackles whether love and sexual desire are the same.

Memory, brainwashing and the Cold War

I’ve just watched part two of Adam Curtis‘ series on the relationship between memory and the history of the 20th century where he explores the link between brain washing, the emergence of cognitive science and the politics of the cold war.

Curtis is a documentary maker who is particularly interested in the link between psychology and history and creates gripping programmes that are always thought-provoking even if you don’t agree with all of his analysis.

He has a gift for finding archive material and this programme is no exception where he finds film footage from previously secret research programmes.

The programme is actually from his 1995 series The Living Dead which tackles the relationship between memory and the political manipulation of history.

The first part is about how the ‘official’ memory of the Second World War was created – a process psychologists call ‘social remembering‘. Essentially, the social psychology of how we construct history, either on the scale of cultures, subcultures or families.

However, the second part focuses specifically on the rise of cognitive science and how theories of memory during the 50s and 60s were key to some of the Cold War efforts to research and create ‘brain washing’ and other mind manipulation techniques.

Curtis is probably best known to psychologists for his remarkably 2002 series Century of the Self where he tracked the Freudian idea of the self as one of the major social influences of the 20th century.

Virtually all of Curtis’ programmes are available on Google Video and they’re fantastic viewing. One of the few people who can genuinely said to be making powerful intellectual arguments on psychology through the medium of video.

Link to part two of The Living Dead.

The Lazarus sign: a slight return

Occasionally, brain-dead patients make movements, owing to the fact that the spinal reflexes are still intact. The most complex, and presumably the most terrifying, is called the Lazarus Sign. It is where the brain-dead patient extends their arms and crosses them over their chest – Egyptian mummy style.

About 20% to 40% of brain dead patients can show spontaneous movements particularly when the body is pricked with sharp objects.

While these movements are usually brief twitches, occasionally the movements can be in an extended sequence, as reported in this 1992 Journal of Neurosurgery case study about a 67-year-old lady who died from a brain haemorrhage.

At 11:15 am on February 20, brain death was declared and consent for final respirator removal was obtained from the patient’s family. The possibility of the appearance of Lazarus’ sign was explained to the family, and a video recording was made.

Five minutes after respirator removal, respiratory-like movements occurred three times; both shoulders adducted and slow cough like movements were identified. Lazarus’ sign immediately followed these respiratory-like movements. The forearms were pronated and the wrist joints extended bilaterally. Fingers on the left hand were extended, but those on the right were flexed as if grasping. Subsequently, flexion and extension in the knee and foot joints were repeatedly observed. Slow supination of both feet occurred. Finally, the left forearm was adducted to the side of the body, and the right hand pronated.

The movements continued for about 3.5 minutes, during which time blood pressure was 46/35 mm Hg and pulse rate was about 90 beats/min with a regular sinus rhythm. Cardiac arrest occurred at 11:35 am.

Link to PubMed entry for case study.
Link to brief popular article on Lazarus sign.