Author: vaughanbell

April’s issue of Scientific American has a couple of concise articles that are freely available online: one on the neuroscience of moral decisions, and the second on the science of lasting happiness.

In the first article, author Michael Shermer argues that moral decision-making is implemented in the brain in a similar way to most other forms of decision-making, and is likely a long-standing evolutionary trait.

The second article focusses on the work of psychologist Prof Sonja Lyubomirsky who has spent the best part of a decade studying lasting happiness.

The previous decade has seen an increased interest in ‘positive psychology‘ although many studies have focused on short-term happiness and satisfaction.

Lyubomirsky seems to be following a slightly different tack by looking at what influences long-term contentment.

Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and another psychologist, David A. Schkade of the University of California, San Diego, put the existing findings together into a simple pie chart showing what determines happiness. Half the pie is the genetic set point. The smallest slice is circumstances, which explain only about 10 percent of people’s differences in happiness. So what is the remaining 40 percent? “Because nobody had put it together before, that’s unexplained,” Lyubomirsky says. But she believes that when you take away genes and circumstances, what is left besides error must be “intentional activity,” mental and behavioral strategies to counteract adaptation’s downward pull.

Lyubomirsky has been studying these activities in hopes of finding out whether and how people can stay above their set point. In theory, that is possible in much the same way regular diet and exercise can keep athletes’ weight below their genetic set points.

Link to article ‘Free to Choose’.
Link to article ‘The Science of Lasting Happiness’.

Almost two years ago we covered the launch of the Blue Brain Project an ambitious research programme to create the largest computer simulation of the brain yet created.

Now, Spiegel has an in-depth article looking at how the project is progressing.

The simulation runs on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer and aims to simulate enough individual neurons to create virtual brain networks.

Brain researchers can use it to reproduce functions from the real organ and test their theories. As they build in new processes, the model grows ever more detailed — a sort of wiki project of the mind. It also offers an important advantage over a natural brain, since it lets researchers monitor each and every (simulated) mental activity in the machine.

But — has there been mental activity?

The newborn “Blue Brain” surprised the designers with its willfulness from the very first day. It had hardly been fed electrical impulses before strange patterns began to appear on the screen with the lightning-like flashes produced by cells that scientists recognize from actual thought processes. Groups of neurons started becoming attuned to one another until they were firing in rhythm. “It happened entirely on its own,” says Markram. “Spontaneously.”

The project has is limitations of course. Single neurons are frighteningly complex, and neuroscientists are still some way from understanding their neurochemistry in sufficient detail to create an adequate working model.

Much computer simulation of the brain (a field known as neuroinformatics) only attempts to simulate approximates of the total complexity, yet has provided some fascinating insights into how mental processes might emerge from the interaction of networks of individual neuron-like units.

Link to Spiegel article ‘Growing a Brain in Switzerland’.
Link to Blue Brain website.

Dr Petra Boyton has spotted another psychologist who seems to have sold out his good name by pushing a Cliff Arnall-like nonsense formula: this time for the ‘perfect breast’.

It all seems to be part of a promotion for a UK Men’s magazine which, in a press release, “reveals the formula for the perfect breast” developed by “University Psychologist Dr. David Holmes”.

I’ve emailed a possible culprit to confirm who it might be and am currently waiting for a response.

Needless to say, the formula itself is complete rubbish. Quite predictably, and rather insultingly, it gets described as ‘science’ in the press release.

There’s more analysis in Petra Boyton’s post if you want the full gory details.

Link to analysis from Petra Boyton.

New Scientist is reporting on a new study that questions the definition of post-traumatic stress disorder, based on the fact that a group of severely depressed patients seem to experience PTSD symptoms despite never having suffered a significant trauma.

PTSD is one of the only psychiatric disorders that includes a specific cause in its definition: a traumatic experience that involved likely death or injury to self or others, which was strong enough to cause fear, helplessness or horror.

If this experience results in intrusive memories of the event, persistent arousal and avoidance or dissociation, a person can be diagnosed with PTSD.

This new study, led by psychiatrist Prof Alexander Bodkin, found that almost 80% of a group of severely depressed patients experienced enough symptoms to be diagnosed with PTSD, despite never having been in a traumatic incident.

This suggests that the mental disorder thought to be specific to PTSD may, in fact, not be specific to trauma.

This is not the first time that the validity of PTSD has been questioned. Indeed, it has been a controversial diagnosis since it was first introduced.

As described by some excellent histories of military psychiatry, the acceptance of PTSD as a psychiatric diagnosis was in no small part due to pressure from Vietnam war veterans’ groups who wanted the military and state to provide treatment for the effects of traumatic combat stress.

Although PTSD is often described as the modern diagnosis of what used to be called ‘shell shock’, records from Word War I show ‘shell shock’ to be quite different in many respects, more closely resembling conversion disorder – a condition where emotional trauma can be expressed as physical symptoms such as paralysis and convulsions.

Before ‘shell shock’, combat stress was often diagnosed as ‘soldiers heart’. It’s interesting to note how the concept of combat stress has become more psychological and less physical as time has progressed.

However, most diagnoses of combat stress, in whatever form they have taken, have usually been strongly opposed by the military – who see it as taking soldiers away from the front line, and the government – who are reluctant to compensate soldiers for the inevitable consequences of life-threatening missions.

Many clinicians will, perhaps, not be concerned on a day-to-day basis if the symptoms of PTSD are found not to be specific to the disorder, as they can still treat the symptoms, regardless of how they are classified.

Nevertheless, the implications for research and health care provision (which often relies on confirming a specific diagnosis) could be more profound, particularly if the definition is changed or rejected as a result.

However, this is not likely to happen in the near future, although no one really knows what modifications to the definition of many mental disorders are due in the next edition of the DSM diagnostic manual.

Link to NewSci article ‘Doubt cast on definition of PTSD’.
Link to study abstract.
Link to excellent review of Shephard’s book War of Nerves.