vaughanbell

Psychologist wins world poker championships

Jerry Yang, a 29 year-old psychologist and social worker who works for a fostering agency, has won a cool $8.25 million at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.

Yang put some of his success down to his training in psychology, but do psychologists make better poker players?

There’s no direct evidence that they do, despite what they might try to tell you at the table, but some research suggests they might have an advantage in a few of the key skills.

A study by Paul Ekman and colleagues [pdf] found that clinical psychologists are among the best professions at detecting deception in others, with academic psychologists coming just slightly behind.

In terms of dealing with the interaction between social influence and risky financial decisions, a study by Dr. Andreas Roider found that psychologists made, on average, three times as much money as economists and physicists in an online trading game because they were less swayed by the ‘herd instinct’

The scientific paper [pdf] contains an interesting snippet:

Maybe it does not come as a surprise that when we look at selected fields of study, physicists perform the best in terms of “rationality” (i.e., performance according to theory) and psychologists the worst. However, since “rational” behavior is profitable only when other subjects behave rationally as well, good performance in terms of “rationality” does not imply good performance in terms of profits. Indeed, the ranking in terms of profits is just the opposite: psychologists are the best and physicists the worst.

In other words, psychologists were better at understanding how people actually behave, as opposed to how they should behave if they were choosing the most mathematically correct strategy.

How much this applies to a game influenced heavily by chance, is, of course, another matter.

Link to Forbes article on Yang’s win.
Link to ScienceDaily on psychologists’ skills in lie detection.
Link to Medical News on psychologists as traders.
Link to Science News article on detecting deception.

Parapsychology, laughter and military neuroscience

BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind just broadcast a wonderfully eclectic edition with pieces on parapsychology and why people hold paranormal beliefs, the psychology of laughter, and the military applications of neuroscience.

Dr Caroline Watt and Prof Chris French discuss both the current boom in scientific parapsychology research and the psychology of paranormal belief.

Prof Mark Van Vugt talks about the social function of laughter, something we featured the other day.

Finally, Prof Jonathan Moreno, author of the excellent Mind Wars, discusses the military applications of neuroscience, something he also tackled in a 2006 SciAmMind article.

Ghosts, gags and grunts. What a great combination!

Link to edition of BBC AITM with online audio.

An artistic impression of alcoholic delirium

The picture is from this month’s British Journal of Psychiatry and is entitled ‘Memory image of acute alcoholic delirium’.

It was included in a 1919 book of cases studies of people with alcoholic delirium, otherwise known as delirium tremens or the DTs, and was drawn by a patient to communicate their hallucinatory experiences.

Delirium is a mental state where hallucinations and delusions are present, but unlike psychosis, there are also severe impairments in consciousness and cognitive function.

It typically resolves quickly, usually when the physical disturbance that caused it (e.g. fever, intoxication) subsides.

The author of the book, the Danish psychiatrist Einar Br√ºnniche, explains the image:

‘Finally, I should like to present an image, a reproduction of a coloured drawing, in which a patient, an artist, without words, but none the less very effectively and vividly, describes the memory of his past, alcoholic delirium… It shows us the many facets of hallucinations, their animal imagery, their life and mobility and their partial transformation of real objects; it shows us the air brimming with cobwebs, threads and smoke.

However, I should think that the image illustrates a stage at which the delirium has not yet reached its zenith since the patient is still bedridden. True, the hallucinations seem spooky, but they have not yet filled him with uncontrollable dread; he has not yet been stirred to action, he has not yet taken steps to ward off the danger. Besides, the picture speaks for itself’.

There’s more at in this brief ‘psychiatry in pictures’ article at the link below.

Link to British Journal of Psychiatry full image and article.

Remembered spaces

A poignant short essay from The New York Times on locations that only live in our memories.

It has the lovely image of cities that exist only in our minds, after buildings we knew so well have since been replaced.

Sort of nostalgic landscapes that we carry with us, long after the actual places have ceased to exist.

I‚Äôd might as well be looking at the people on the street and imagining all the buildings that have passed through them ‚Äî places we knew almost by intuition until they vanished, leaving behind only the strange sense of knowing our way around a world that can no longer be found.

Link to NYT article ‘Remembered spaces’.

Encephalon 27 dashes by

A somewhat telegraphic 27th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just been published on the new clean look Neurocontrarian blog.

A couple of my favourites include a brief investigation into a new skin patch to deliver drugs to patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and an article on punishment, morality and game theory, which sounds quite kinky now I come to think about it.

Needless to say, there’s plenty more kinky-sounding but scientifically respectable articles at the link below.

Link to Encephalon 27.

Hand actions fire mirror neurons in handless people

Science reports that people born without hands show ‘mirror neuron’ activity when they view hand actions, but in the area of the brain that controls the feet.

The ‘mirror neuron‘ system is a brain network that activates both when an action is being carried out, and when it is being observed, and has been hypothesised to be involved in perceiving and comprehending others’ actions.

The mirror neuron system is widely hyped but there’s no doubt it is an important brain function.

The researchers in this study were interested what sort of ‘mirror neuron’ activity would be apparent in people who had never had hands, while they watched hand actions.

The study, led by Dr Valeria Gazzola, recruited two people with arm aplasia, a developmental condition where the arms and hands are missing at birth, and sixteen comparison participants with normally developed hands.

The participants were brain scanned while being shown video of hands manipulating various objects (e.g. grabbing a glass or scooping soup out of a bowl) as well as still images of the hands resting behind the same objects.

Scans were also taken while participants completed actions with their lips, feet, and for the control group, with their hands – to see how this matched up with the ‘mirror neuron’ activity when watching the video.

When watching the hand actions, activity in the brain of two handless participants looked more like they were moving their feet.

As both participants use their feet to manipulate objects on a day-to-day basis, the researchers suggest that they are ‘mirroring’ the same goal, but using the brain systems that match how they would actually get the job done in everyday life.

One difficulty is that the activity from the two aplasic participants is quite variable, meaning the study really needs to be replicated to be sure of the effect.

However, if it bears out, it is a fascinating finding. It suggests that the mirror neuron system is much less action-based than we thought, and is, perhaps, equally as wrapped up with perceiving outcomes as movements.

Link to write-up from Science.
Link to abstract of scientific study.

Unconscious beauty primes positive emotions

We can correctly classify faces as attractive or unattractive, even when they appear so quickly that we’re not conscious of seeing them. This is according to a study that also found that subliminal attractive faces also prime positive emotions.

Profs Ingrid Olson and Christy Marshuetz flashed up photos of faces previously rated as either extremely attractive or extremely unattractive.

Each face stayed on-screen for only 13 milliseconds and was preceded by a picture of a scrambled face and was followed by a picture of a cartoon face.

Showing something just before or just after a briefly presented picture is known as ‘masking’ and helps to ensure that after it appears, the picture doesn’t stay in iconic memory – a very brief ‘after-image’ memory that extends our visual experience after something has gone.

Essentially, masking ensures the image doesn’t register consciously, and when participants were asked to classify the flashes as either attractive or unattractive faces they claimed they were just guessing because they couldn’t ‘see’ any photographs of faces.

But, on average, they managed to correctly classify the faces as attractive or unattractive, suggesting that facial attractiveness is something that is something that we process very quickly, so quick, it can happen before we’re consciously aware of it.

In another experiment, the researchers flashed up pictures of attractive and unattractive faces and houses, shortly followed by a word.

The word could either be linked to positive emotions (such as ‘laughter’) or negative emotions (such as ‘agony’) and participants were asked just to hit a button to classify the words as either good or bad.

The idea was to test whether attractive faces made participants react more quickly to positive words – strong evidence that these concepts had been ‘primed‘.

Priming is where one concept activates related concepts in the brain. So if you’re thinking of ‘football’, semantically related concepts like ‘game’, ‘crowd’ or ‘team’ will be made more available to your thoughts.

Psychologists know this because people will react more quickly to related concepts than to unrelated concepts if asked to identify them.

Olson and Marshuetz found that unconsciously presented attractive faces, but not attractive houses, primed positive emotions.

This suggests that attractive faces may have a particular attention and emotion grabbing effect. The effect seems so strong, it seems to work even when a face hasn’t registered in our conscious mind.

pdf of full-text paper.
Link to write-up from Science Daily.

Laugh and the world laughs with you

Discover magazine has an article that looks at the psychology of laughter and humour, noting that the two aren’t necessarily as linked as we’d normally think.

It seems the social context is as powerful as the content of the humour itself in driving our response, because laughter is a communication in itself.

Previous studies of laughter had assumed that laughing and humor were inextricably linked, but Provine’s early research suggested that the connection was only an occasional one. As his research progressed, Provine began to suspect that laughter was in fact about something else‚Äînot humor or gags or incongruity but our social interactions. He found support for this assumption in a study that had already been conducted, one analyzing people‚Äôs laughing patterns in social and solitary contexts.

“You’re 30 times more likely to laugh when you’re with other people than you are when you’re alone‚Äîif you don’t count simulated social environments like laugh tracks on television,” Provine says. Think how rarely you’ll laugh out loud at a funny passage in a book but how quick you’ll be to give a friendly laugh when greeting an old acquaintance. Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch is a response to pain or a shiver to cold. Humor is crafted to exploit a form of instinctive social bonding.

Link to Discover article on laughter.

Brain toast t-shirt

If you’re a fan of toasting your brains, either literally or metaphorically, there’s now a t-shirt especially designed for you.

Belgian t-shirt label Carbone 14 have created some rather natty versions in red and white.

There’s also a skinny fit version if you like your toasted brains, well, skinny.

If on the other hand, you prefer your brains mashed, fried or baked, you’ll have to advertise your preference some other way, as they’ve yet to design shirts for the rest of the culinary range.

Thanks Laurie!

How gene therapy could cure brain diseases

Nature’s neurology journal has a freely available article on a technique that interferes with the translation of genetic information into proteins that may help prevent inherited brain diseases.

DNA has two main functions. The ‘template function’ of DNA is to pass on genes through generations and allow different traits to be inherited.

The ‘transcriptional function’ of DNA is to allow these genes to be expressed at appropriate times and places (and not expressed at others) to allow the cell to do its work.

‘Expression’ just means ‘turned into a protein’ and genes are just blueprints for proteins.

The blueprint gets turned into a protein by messenger RNA, which ‘reads off’ the information, then moves away to assemble the protein from a store of amino acid component parts.

As different cells in the body have different functions, and individual cells need to behave differently depending on what’s happening, different proteins need to be created at different times.

Disorders like Huntington’s disease result from genes that cause damaging proteins to be formed. These lead to the malfunction and death of brain areas that, in turn, leads to cognitive problems, movement difficulties, mental illness and eventual death.

Using a technique called RNA interference, researchers have found they can selectively interfere with the process where messenger RNA assembles proteins from the DNA’s genetic information.

Essentially, small chunks of gene-specific RNA are introduced into the cell, these find the messenger RNA and destroy the information before it gets turned into a protein.

In other words, it prevents specific genes from being turned into proteins.

This has caused a great deal of excitement because it could lead to treatments for disorders like Huntingdon’s by simply ‘silencing’ the rogue Huntingdon’s gene.

While you might have a rogue gene, RNA interference could essentially gag it, meaning it would never have a knock-on effect in the brain.

This has been demonstrated in very limited lab tests, and the Nature article examines the prospects for it being developed into a widespread treatment.

There are still some difficulties to overcome, however. One of which is how to get the interfering RNA into the right cells in the brain, a difficulty with many treatments owing to the filtering effect of the blood-brain barrier.

Another is how to make sure that the technique affects only the disease process. Researchers talk about proteins being involved in ‘chemical cascades’, meaning that they are involved in huge and complex mechanisms in the body.

It’s hard to predict exactly what effect silencing a gene will have, and whether your technique for doing so will also interfere with some other processes that use some of the same mechanisms, some of which we probably don’t even know about at the present.

RNA interference is still an experimental process, but it holds great potential for treating inherited brain diseases. The Nature article is a fantastic guide to the cutting edge of the science in this area.

Link to Nature Clinical Practice Neurology article on RNA interference.
Link to plain language guide to its use in Huntington’s.
Link to Wikipedia page on RNA interference.

Shifting eye therapy successfully treats trauma

A recent study has found that EMDR, a once suspect therapy that involves recalling traumatic memories while moving your eyes, is one of the most effective treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a type of psychotherapy that, among other things, involves thinking about the traumatic event while attending to bodily reactions and moving your eyes left and right, usually following a light or the therapist’s finger.

It sounds bizarre and caused a great deal of suspicion when it first emerged, largely it was pretty much just ‘thought up’ by Dr Francine Shapiro and no-one really knows quite how it works.

However, several studies have found it to be one of the most effective treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, and this new study, one of best to date, has repeated the finding.

This new study, led by Dutch psychiatrist Dr Bessel van der Kolk, compared EMDR, with SSRI drug fluoxetine (aka Prozac) and a pill placebo in a group of patients diagnosed with PTSD.

After the eight week treatment block, fluoextine and EMDR were equally effective,

However, six months later, 75% who had been traumatised in adulthood and were treated with EMDR reported having no symptoms. For people traumatised during childhood, a third treated by EMDR were symptom free by the same point.

In contrast, none of the people in either group treated with fluoxetine managed to free themselves from symptoms.

Most clinicians looking at the study might suspect that eight weeks of drug treatment wouldn’t be long enough as prescriptions are often recommended for six months to a year after stabilisation.

Nevertheless, it’s an impressive result, not least because of the short 8-week treatment time for EMDR and the strong recovery rate.

One of the criticisms of EMDR is that it’s still not clear what part the eye-movement aspect plays in the therapy and exactly how it works.

What this trial didn’t do is compare EMDR to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), a type of recently devised psychotherapy that is known to be one of the most effective treatments for anxiety disorders.

Both of these therapies focus on ‘reprocessing’ the trauma memories – essentially remembering and ‘reliving’ them, which seems to play a major role in preventing the uncontrolled memories and flashbacks that are part of the disorder.

This is also the focus of a recently devised combined drug and ‘reprocessing’ therapy we reported on earlier, which seems to work by dampening down bodily arousal when the memories are recalled due to the action of the drug propranolol.

Link to abstract of clinical trial.

Photographing delusions

Singapore art collective A Dose of Light exhibited some poignant and beautiful photographs by Wu Xiao Kang, a 26 year-old man with schizophrenia who later killed himself.

The show gained international acclaim and only later was it revealed that Kang was fictional, a creation of the collective who had taken the photos themselves.

The project consisted of 36 photos supposedly taken by Kang of an abandoned psychiatric hospital in which he was previously treated.

A Dose of Light designed the whole project as a conceptual artwork to portray the breakdown of reality that sometimes occurs in schizophrenia.

Several galleries and events hosted the exhibition in good faith, and one gallery has now pulled the exhibition in protest.

According to one newspaper report, the group decided to come clean on July 1st when a mental health charity wanted to use the images to promote awareness of mental illness in Singapore.

However, I first saw the photos at Bonkers Fest, an art and music event held in Camberwell, London on June 2nd, that also promotes awareness of mental health issues and is organised by a number of mental health charities.

In this case, there was no admission that the Kang was fictional and the photos were presented as genuine.

One member of the collective, Robert Zhao is a fine art student at Camberwell College of Arts, who were also partly involved in organising the festival.

Link to online ‘Wu Xiao Kang’ exhibition.
Link to Metafilter on the controversy.

Syd Barrett in the American Journal of Psychiatry

From the ‘images in psychiatry’ column from July’s American Journal of Psychiatry, written by Dr Paolo Fusar-Poli:

Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett was both the founding member of one of the most legendary rock bands and probably the most famous rock star to develop psychosis. He formed the band that would become Pink Floyd in 1965, amalgamating the first names of two American bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

Recorded at Abbey Road Studios, inspired by LSD, and driven by Barrett’s songwriting, singing, and otherworldly guitar solos, the first album, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” (1967), alchemized the whimsical bohemian spirit of the “summer of love” and influenced generations of musicians with its sonic inventions and surreal lyrics.

Music journalists have called him “the golden boy of the mind-melting late-60s psychedelic era, its brightest star and ultimately its most tragic victim”. In fact after two haunting solo albums, “The Madcap Laughs” and “Barrett,” which showed the last flickering lights of his genius, his eccentric and creative personality drifted into a psychotic reclusive state, forcing him to withdraw from public view in 1974.

However, Pink Floyd would pay tribute to Barrett and would include madness as an ongoing theme on their best and most successful albums, “Dark Side of the Moon” (1973) and “The Wall” (1979), speaking to Syd directly in the songs “Wish You Were Here” and “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” Barrett spent the rest of his life in his mother‚Äôs house in Cambridge, painting and gardening.

Link to AJP images in psychiatry column on Syd Barrett.
Link to Wikipedia page on Syd Barrett.

2007-07-13 Spike activity

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

For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU. Completely banal title obscures quite an interesting article on ‘human processing‘ in computer tasks.

Research suggests the biggest influence on how responsive we feel our partners are is actually how we respond to our partners.

The Washington Post reports on research linking the decline in criminal activity to a reduction in environmental lead poisoning.

People with autism do <a href="http://sciencenews.org/articles/20070707/fob4.asp
“>far better in certain non-verbal cognitive tests than you might expect from their IQ. Actually, similar findings, showing an advantage for visuospatial tasks, have been reported before.

CNN reports that antidepressants are the most prescribed drugs in U.S.

Dr Jerome Groopman writes in The New York Times about the cognitive biases that can lead to medical errors.

More on the ‘disease model’ of addiction: Dr Nora Volkow talks about the neuroscience of addiction on an NPR radio special.

Can nicotine be modified to make a useful cognitive enhancer? Wired investigates.

Hypnosis redux

Thanks to everyone who came along to discuss the neuropsychology of hypnosis last night. For anyone who wants to investigate further, here’s more on the psychology and neuroscience of hypnotic states.

Scientific American has a fantastic article on ‘The Truth and the Hype of Hypnosis’ that tackles some of the myths and covers some of the key scientific research.

Psychologist and hypnosis researcher Dr Peter Naish did a great talk last year on the science of hypnosis for the Dana Centre which is available online as an archived video webcast.

WNYC’s RadioLab had a special on placebo and the power of suggestion, which, to be fair, is light on science and heavy on anecdote, although it does make for an interesting listen.

And finally, Dr Matt Whalley’s site is a great guide to science of hypnosis. I keep mentioning it, because, well, it’s excellent.

Terrorism fails because we don’t see its purpose

In an article for Wired, security guru Bruce Schneier suggests that the reason terrorism fails is because it falls foul of a cognitive bias in how we understand people’s intentions from their actions.

Schneier bases his conclusions on a recent paper [pdf] by Max Abrahms who applies correspondent inference theory to terrorism and the political objectives of terrorist groups.

‘Correspondent inference theory’ suggests that we try and understand people’s intentions and character based on the most salient effect of their actions.

This can often lead us astray, as demonstrated by a regular plot line in soap operas where someone’s good intentions accidentally misfire and the person on the receiving end assumes they’re being deliberately malicious.

As noted by Schneier and Abrahms, this also leads us to misunderstand the goal that motivates terrorist acts:

The theory posited here is that terrorist groups that target civilians are unable to coerce policy change because terrorism has an extremely high correspondence. Countries believe that their civilian populations are attacked not because the terrorist group is protesting unfavorable external conditions such as territorial occupation or poverty. Rather, target countries infer the short-term consequences of terrorism — the deaths of innocent civilians, mass fear, loss of confidence in the government to offer protection, economic contraction, and the inevitable erosion of civil liberties — (are) the objects of the terrorist groups. In short, target countries view the negative consequences of terrorist attacks on their societies and political systems as evidence that the terrorists want them destroyed. Target countries are understandably skeptical that making concessions will placate terrorist groups believed to be motivated by these maximalist objectives.

In his paper, Abrahms examines the political objectives of terrorist groups and looks at how successful terrorism has been in obtaining them. He reckons, with a generous estimate, that only 7% of the stated goals have been achieved.

But he also notes that the stated goals rarely gets through to the people being targeted and that the political rhetoric of the terrorists’ target is littered with misunderstandings of their intentions.

I’m personally interested in how and why terrorists are labelled ‘mad’. It’s in the terrorists’ interest to be seen as sane, as part of the goal is to force concessions.

There’s no point conceding to someone who you think is unbalanced, because an irrational group might not stop the violence once they’ve achieved their aims.

The fact that violent protestors are so often labelled as ‘mad’ suggests, as per correspondent inference theory, that we assume their is no coherent intention behind their actions, contrary to what they are trying to achieve.

Anyway, an interesting look at the motivations and perception of political violence.

Link to ‘The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail’.
pdf of Max Abrahms’ paper ‘Why Terrorism Does Not Work’