The picture is of one of the lock gates on Grand Canal Way in South Dublin. The bench is a memorial to Irish artist, songwriter and civil engineer Percy French and is inscribed with the following ode to memory:
Remember me is all I ask,
And yet
If the remembrance prove a task
Forget
Psychiatrist and psychotherapist Irvin Yalom discusses some of the thinking behind his therapeutic approach on p154 of Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (ISBN 0140128468).
Yalom is known for his work in developing existential psychotherapy, group therapy and his engaging and exciting books and novels on the psychotherapeutic process.
To my mind “good” therapy (which I equate with deep, or penetrating, therapy, not with efficient or even, I am pained to say, helpful therapy) conducted with a “good” patient is at bottom a truth-seeking venture. My quarry when I was a novitiate was the truth of the past, to trace all of life’s coordinates and, thereby, to locate and to explain a person’s current life, pathology, motivation and actions.
I used to be so sure. What arrogance! And now what kind of truth was I stalking? I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
But there is timing and judgement. Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer. Beware of stripping a patient who can’t bear the chill of reality. And don’t exhaust yourself by jousting with religious magic: you’re no match for it.
Link to Irvin Yalom’s website (thanks Annie!).
No sooner than we post something about psychedelic drug research becoming mainstream than a newspaper reports on a psychologist being barred entry to the US because he wrote an article on a 1967 LSD experience.
Dr Andrew Feldmar (pictured right) is a Vancouver based psychologist and psychotherapist who was attempting a regular cross-border visit, this time to meet a friend in Seattle.
When crossing the border, he was stopped for a random check and security typed his name into Google – bring up a link to a 2001 paper on the hot topic of psychedelics and psychotherapy.
The official said that under the Homeland Security Act, Feldmar was being denied entry due to “narcotics” use. LSD is not a narcotic substance, Feldmar tried to explain, but an entheogen. The guard wasn’t interested in technicalities. He asked for a statement from Feldmar admitting to having used LSD and he fingerprinted Feldmar for an FBI file.
Then Feldmar disbelievingly listened as he learned that he was being barred from ever entering the United States again. The officer told him he could apply to the Department of Homeland Security for a waiver, if he wished, and gave him a package, with the forms.
Feldmar trained under R.D. Laing, the radical psychiatrist and psychotherapist who himself took LSD in an attempt to better understand psychosis and altered states.
As a curious aside, the article notes that Feldmar first tried LSD after being offered a 900 microgram dose (that’s one big hit of acid), not by Laing, as you might have guessed, but by cognitive neuroscientist par excellence Zenon Pylyshyn, who was his collaborator at the time.
Pylyshyn had reportedly tried LSD out of curiosity but had since become interested in other things and had some of the compound left over.
Link to article ‘LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US’ (via BB).
Link to Feldman’s article ‘Entheogens and Psychotherapy’.
Time magazine has recently published two articles on psychedelic drugs: the first on the recent publication of successful psychedelic treatment studies and the other suggesting LSD was first taken up by the cultural and business elite before becoming a staple of the 60s underground.
We covered some of the research investigating the therapeutic potential of various psychedelic compounds in December last year if you want an idea of what sort of studies are being conducted.
The first article notes the slowly changing attitude of the authorities towards doing scientific studies on these drugs, and name checks MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organisation who have done much to promote trust between government and scientists on the issue.
The second article uncovers a few interesting anecdotes about key establishment figures (including one of the Time Inc. founders!) trying psychedelics when they were first being discovered by the USA in the 1950s.
Link to Time article ‘Was Timothy Leary Right?’.
Link to Time article ‘When the Elite Loved LSD’.
Link to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
The 21st edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just been published on neurobiology of aging blog Ouroboros.
A couple of my favourites include Dr Deborah Serani discussing a to-be-released psychotherapy game for the Nintendo DS, and Neurophilosopher with a wonderfully in-depth article on Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy.
There are many more fantastic articles in this edition, and it looks beautiful. Head on over.
Link to Encephalon 21.
ABC Radio National’s Health Report had a recent programme in two halves, one looking at how eating disorders manifest in childhood and adolescence and another on girls diagnosed with ADHD.
Unexpectedly, the guest for the second section, psychologist Prof Steve Hinshaw, is asked about his work on stigma and mental illness and has some interesting comments to make about how scientific models of mental illness can influence how stigmatised someone feels after being given a particular diagnosis.
As well as this interesting detour, the programme examines how ADHD and eating disorders can start, and are treated, in childhood.
mp3 of whole programme.
Link to transcript of eating disorders section.
Link to ADHD in girls section.
Shirt and t-shirt site Hide Your Arms has just reviewed a fantastic t-shirt that has a wonderful exploded brain picture on the front and a recent neuroscience news story on the back.
The shirt is from a company called T-Post who send subscribers a new t-shirt every six weeks based on a recent news story.
This t-shirt is based on the findings of a research study that found that activation in an area of the right temporal lobe when viewing others’ actions was associated with self-reported altruism.
A new edition of Scientific American Mind has arrived with two freely available articles online: one on the distortion of body image in eating disorders and the other on whether brain scans could be a communication channel for people in coma-like vegetative states.
Perhaps the key feature of eating disorders such as anorexia is not just that the person wants to be thin, but that they have a disturbance in their body image so they think they are fat, even when dangerously undernourished.
The SciAmMind article looks at research which attempts to understand how and why body image becomes disturbed and how this can contribute to disorded eating patterns.
This second article discusses the implications of a study [pdf] published recently by Adrian Owen and colleagues suggesting that some patients in a persistent vegetative state or PVS might actually have conscious awareness which they can’t outwardly express (see previously on Mind Hacks).
The first step is getting a general understanding of the patient’s state of mind. Clinicians divide disorders of consciousness into three categories: coma, in which a patient is neither awake nor responsive; vegetative, in which a patient is awake but unresponsive; and minimally conscious, in which a patient is awake and responds to stimuli but has limited capacity to take willful actions. Typically doctors make these categorizations by observing a patient at the bedside. By this method alone, a patient thought to be vegetative could actually be aware.
“It’s really a conundrum. The way that consciousness is typically measured is by basically asking somebody to tell you that they are conscious,” Owen says. “So if someone wasn’t unconscious but couldn’t respond and tell you that, they would be classed as unconscious.” In Owen’s team’s case study, reported in the September 8, 2006, issue of the journal Science, the researchers asked the vegetative patient to imagine herself doing various tasks, including walking through the rooms of her home, while they scanned her brain using fMRI. The resulting images showed that her response matched that of healthy test subjects – she understood the commands and intentionally decided to comply.
Other articles available in the print edition or to subscribers tackle food addiction, brain development in adolescence, perceptual integration, the psychology of stalkers, lithium in the treatment of neurological disorders, pain disorders and implanted ‘brain chips’.
Link to contents for April 2007 issue.
Link to article on body image and eating disorder.
Link to article on communicating in vegetative state.
The Independent on Sunday has the dubious honour of publishing one of the worst pieces of science journalism I have ever read on today’s front cover – claiming to ‘reveal’ that children are at risk from Wi-Fi computer networks because of their developing nervous systems.
The headlines include “Children at risk from electronic smog”, “Revealed: radiation threat from new wireless computer networks”, “Fears rise over health threat to children from wifi networks” and “Danger on the airwaves”.
This is despite the fact that not one single study has found a health risk for wifi networks.
In fact, a recent study that measured wifi emissions found “In all cases, the measured Wi-Fi signal levels were very far below international exposure limits (IEEE C95.1-2005 and ICNIRP) and in nearly all cases far below other RF signals in the same environments”.
Personally, I’m more concerned about the smog that comes from whatever they’ve been smoking at the Independent on Sunday.
Link to abstract of recent study on wifi exposure.
Being at St Clements is a one night only art event being held in London on the night of Tuesday 24th April to showcase a project combining the talents of dedicated artists and patients from a psychiatric hospital.
The event will present some brand new multimedia works, including a never before seen video and animation projects, sound installations and an exhibition of digital prints.
It will also include a live show to keep you entertained throughout the evening.
The event is being held at the SPACE Gallery, 129-131 Mare Street, London, E8 3RH. 6 – 9pm (Live show @ 7pm).
Link to details of event (thanks Tenyen!).
BBC Radio 4 recently broadcast a documentary on the effects of the new generation of anti-sleep drugs on health and society.
Drugs, such as modafinil and adrafinil, seem to remove the need for sleep and promote alertness while having minimal side-effects in most users.
Unlike older drugs which prevent sleep, such as amphetamine, these drugs typically don’t feel pleasurable and have few other effects, meaning they are less likely to be used recreationally or lead to compulsive use.
Originally used to treat sleep disorders, there is now a large grey market for these compounds, as people use them to extend their work or play time.
The BBC documentary tackles the possible effects on society of being able to easily manipulate and delete the need for sleep at will, as well as investigating the possible mind and brain consequences of not sleeping for long periods.
Link to The Defeat of Sleep webpage with embedded audio.
I returned from lunch and was surprised to find an email from The Mind Lab giving details of the ‘chocolate vs kissing’ study we reported on earlier and dismissed as rubbish. So, is it junk?
Well, it certainly wouldn’t get published in an academic journal, but it’s certainly not as far-fetched as it seemed from the press releases.
Notably, it’s described as a ‘pilot study’ which is often a test-run study done by scientists to try out methods, equipment, ideas or get some initial data.
The email from Dr David Lewis noted that it was for a larger piece of research investigating the role of certain food stuffs in enhancing vigilance in groups whose performance often seriously, and sometimes fatally, affected by fatigue – such as long distance drivers and combat troops.
After reading the report, the premise still seems a bit daft (melting chocolate vs kissing? why?), the number of participants low (only 12), the methods not as robust as they could be and the data presented as summary graphs only with no statistical analysis.
But, for the first time ever for a ‘PR study’, I was provided details of the study when they were requested, so at least I can see that for myself.
Whether it’s healthy that research labs should be ‘selling’ pilot studies (which can’t really be used to draw any firm conclusions) for the advertising industry to promote as science is another matter.
The report is available from The Mind Lab on request.
Link to The Mind Lab.
Yahoo! News is reporting that psychology has been ranked the 9th most satisifying job in America.
The ranking is from a project from the University of Chicago called the ‘General Social Survey’ which monitors changes in attitude and behaviour across various populations.
I can’t actually find the original research online, but any pointers would be gratefully received.
For a list of the most and least satisifying jobs, follow the link below.
Link to Yahoo! News story ‘Survey Reveals Most Satisfying Jobs’.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Cognitive Daily investigates the curious psychological effects of self-refilling bowls.
The San Francisco Chronicle discusses OCD from the perspective of a popular radio broadcaster and author who experiences the condition.
OmniBrain finds three auditory illusions you can try yourself.
Recent find of an old paper: Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities.
Does having more children make you happier? Frontal Cortex investigates.
BBC News looks at pharmaceutical drugs that may boost your brain power.
The Neurophilosopher commemorates the 64th birthday of LSD.
SciAm Mind Matters has a good review of a recent Science paper on visual processing. Scroll down to section entitled ‘Selective Vision‘ (can’t seem to link to individual entries).
Developing Intelligence looks at research on whether children understand time.
Consciousness in the single neuron. A new feature article on Science and Consciousness Review
Madame Fathom investigates part of why smoking may be so attractive despite the health risks: it’s cognitive effects on the brain.
Independent artificial intelligence researcher Jeff Hawkins has an article in this month’s IEEE Spectrum magazine asking the question ‘why can’t a computer be more like a brain?’.
Hawkins argues that while we hope that machines will be able to simulate human intelligence, we ignore the thing that makes us so – the brain.
He suggests that we need to create artificial intelligence systems that closely match the architecture of the brain to achieve this task.
Hawkins has outlined his arguments, and his own theories of simulated brain architecture, in his book On Intelligence, but if you want a whistle-stop tour of his theories, this article is a great summary.
Link to Hawkin’s article ‘Learn Like a Human’.
You wait all day for a neuroscience version of an 80s pop song with scientifically accurate lyrics, and two come along at once.
Hot on the heels of the occipital lobe remix of Britney’s Baby One more Time… comes a re-working of Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now.
This time, some medical students who have obviously spent a little too much time in lab class, bring you the video extravanganza that is I Think With My Brain Now.
The lyrics are very special.
Link to YouTube video of ‘I Think with My Brain Now’.
Mind Hacks 