Author: vaughanbell

The latest edition of Scientific American Mind has just been published, and as is customary, two of the feature articles are freely available online.

The first is on the psychology of teams and how science is attempting to understand what makes a successful and productive working party.

The article describes effective team learning strategies and how emotions help groups bond during work.

These researchers trained college students to assemble transistor radios either alone or in groups of three. A week later the subjects were tested with their original group or, for people who received solo training, in newly formed groups. Members of groups that had trained together remembered more details, built better-quality radios and showed greater trust in fellow members’ expertise. People in newly formed groups were less likely to have the right mix of skills to complete the task efficiently and knew less about one another’s strengths.

The second article looks at the controversial topic of prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and evidence that the use of psychiatric drugs alters the growing brain.

This is weighed up against the evidence that in children with serious mental illness, an untreated disorder may alter the growing brain.

It’s a difficult topic because it often boils down to picking the lesser of two evils, although, because of lack of research, it’s often not easy to tell which will have the least negative effect for any given child.

It’s a fascinating article on one of the major issues facing psychiatry today.

There are also articles on expertise and the role of mirror neurons in stroke recovery in the full edition, as well as all the regular features.

Link to article ‘The Science of Team Success’.
Link to article ‘Kids on Meds — Trouble Ahead’.

The New York Times has a review of a new book on how people have overcome brain damage through neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to re-organise itself.

While this is nothing new, the brain has always had this ability, the discovery is relatively recent and rehabilitation is increasingly designed to take advantage of this process.

The book is called The Brain That Changes Itself and is apparently a series of case studies of how people’s lives have been improved by technology, psychotherapy or behavioural changes.

I suspect much of the excitement about neuroplasticity has been generated by the popularity of ‘cognitive fitness’ games, books and video games, all of which are based on the idea that you can ‘train your brain’ like a muscle.

While there is some truth in this, the effects are much less than many people might expect and certainly, most people don’t completely recover from brain injury.

I wonder if this book, like Peter Kramer’s 1994 book Listening to Prozac (ISBN 0140266712), will showcase the success stories, while most people’s experience will be much more modest.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with presenting the highlights of new and exciting therapies, but I wonder whether it raises some people’s expectations unrealistically.

Anyway, I’ve not read the book yet so I will have to see how it is tackled when I get a copy, and we’re certainly crying out for an accessible treatment of the subject.

Brain Damage, Brain Repair (ISBN 0198523378) is a great academic text, but it’s hardly something you’d take to the beach with you.

Link to NYT review.
Link The Brain That Changes Itself book / author’s website.

Wired and The New York Times have just each published an article about the use of virtual reality to simulate the experiences of schizophrenic psychosis. This is a PR success for its creator, Janssen-Cilag Pharmaceuticals, but its hardly news, as they’ve been showing the system since 2000.

The system originally had the appalling name ‘Paved With Fear’ and was unveiled in September 2000.

The company, who manufacture the antipsychotic drug risperidone (aka Risperdal), toured the world with the ‘Paved with Fear’ truck.

The rig allows users to put on the VR goggles and explore a virtual world, while the software is programmed to simulate hallucination-like experiences – abusive voices, visual scenes transforming into sinister images and so on.

It was covered in 2002 by an NPR radio show that has some audio and images from the simulation.

In one simulation, a schizophrenic has auditory and visual hallucinations while trying to refill a prescription, and sees the word “poison” on a bottle of pills.

Its not often you meet psychotic patients who hallucinate drug company PR, but Janssen seem to think that refusing their product is a sign of madness.

The system has been taken around the world and show to police, psychiatrists and families of people with mental illness.

The system has since been re-branded with the less stigmatising name ‘Virtual Hallucinations’ and continues to make the headlines, despite the fact that many other people have used VR to simulate psychosis.

I wrote an article in 2004 about some of the systems and talked to their creators, and got some feedback from a programmer and a psychologist who have experienced psychosis themselves.

They concluded that while VR simulations might be a useful simulation of the perceptual disturbance in psychosis, it also involves distortions of meaning and thinking that can’t be captured.

The systems covered in the article were based on experiences taken from patient interviews and were made independently.

Psychiatrist Dr Peter Yellowless recently published a paper on the system he developed, and one system has been built in online virtual word Second Life. There are instructions online so you can try it yourself.

Link to NYT article ‘A Virtual Reality That’s Best Escaped’.
Link to 2004 article on using VR for psychosis simulation and research.
Link to summary of Yellowlees’ paper on psychosis simulation.
Link to instructions for Second Life simulation.

NeuroInsights have released a report on the neurotechnology industry that uncovers the growing market for brain-based goods and services.

The 350 page report will set you back $4,500 (that’s almost $13 dollars a page!), but has been summarised by Zack Lynch, the company’s managing director, on his blog.

Some of the highlights include:

2006 venture capital investment in neurotechnology rose 7.5% to $1.666 billion

Neurotech industry revenues rose 10% in 2006 to $120.5 billion; this includes neuropharmaceutical revenues of $101 billion, neurodevice revenues of $4.5 billion, neurodiagnostic revenues of $15 billion

The Neurotech Index of publicly-traded neurotechnology companies was up 53% from its December 31, 2003 conception to March 31, 2006, outpacing the NASDAQ Biotech Index which gained 7% during the same period

In other words, the brain is big money, and it’s only likely to get bigger.

Needless to say, this makes us, the brain-owning public, equally blessed and cursed.

Commercial companies want us to spend our money on their products, meaning as well as developing technologies, they are likely to promote new ideas of well-being or ill-health to motivate us to use them.

This also tends to mean that problems faced by those with money (i.e. people in developed countries) get priority over the problems more typical of less developed countries.

So, treaments for diseases endemic in the developing world, like sleeping sickness, caused by trypanosoma infection and leading to brain disorder and eventual death, will likely be slow in coming.

However, we can be sure that some new advances in commercial neuroscience will be of huge benefit to many people.

The difficulty for us, and the investors, is that sometimes it is only clear which of the advances is significant with the benefit of hindsight.

Link to NeuroInsights industry report with free executive summary.
Link to Zack Lynch’s summary and comments.