Language is a skin. I rub my language against the other. It is if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
From p73 of A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (ISBN 0099437422) by Roland Barthes. In the book, Barthes analyses the components of love and the relationship of lovers.
HacksZine is hosting a video by Brian Sawyer who riffs on the Mind Hacks book entry on the McGurk Effect and shows how this is used in movies.
The McGurk effect is, for example, where when you hear the sound of someone saying ‘Ba’ at the same time as you see them saying the sound ‘Ga’, you hear the second, because the information from your vision shapes how you perceive the sound.
Sawyer notes that this is commonly occurs in movies when they’re dubbed, so despite the character saying ‘You lousy melon farmer!’ when this was obviously not what was said in the original, the dubbing doesn’t seem completely out of whack.
Link to ‘Hear with Your Eyes: The McGurk Effect’ from HacksZine.
A new version of Peter Shaffer’s Equus has just opened in London and there was an interesting discussion about the role of psychiatry and mental illness in the play on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, which you can hear as a realaudio stream.
Equus is both a coming-of-age play about a mentally disturbed young man, and a detective story, as the psychiatrist tries to work out what led the young man to blind several horses.
It’s incredibly powerful, both in its content and staging, and was written after Shaffer heard of a case where a boy seemed to senseless attack a number of horses and wondered how someone might get to that point in their life.
The realaudio archive of Front Row only stays online for a week, so will only be available for five days or so more days. Catch it while you can!
The discussion is in the first 10 minutes of the programme.
realaudio of Front Row.
Link to Wikipedia page on Equus.
Link to website of London production of Equus.
Part of the footnote to ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’, a chapter from J.G. Ballard’s chaotic and sometimes confusing novel The Atrocity Exhibition.
In Springfield Mental Hospital near London a few years ago, while visiting a psychiatrist friend, I watched an elderly woman patient helping the orderly serve the afternoon tea. As the thirty or so cups were set out on a large polished table she began to stare at the bobbing liquid, then stepped forward and carefully inverted the brimming cup in her hand.
The hot liquid dripped everywhere in a terrible mess, and the orderly screamed: ‘Doreen, why did you do that?’, to which she replied: ‘Jesus told me to.’ She was right, though I like to think what really compelled her was a sense of the intolerable contrast between the infinitely plastic liquid in her hand and the infinitely hard geometry of the table, followed by the revelation that she could resolve these opposites in a very simple and original way.
She attributed the insight to divine intervention, but the order in fact came from some footloose conceptual area of her brain briefly waking from its heavy sleep of largactil.
The novel also contains a chapter entitled ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ which is a fake psychoanalytic interpretation of experiments that supposedly study the sexual attractiveness of Reagan to potential voters.
Ballard writes in a footnote to this chapter: “At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco a copy of my Reagan text, minus its title and the running sideheads, and furnished with the seal of the Republication Party, was distributed to delegates. I’m told it was accepted for what it resembled, a psychological position paper on the candidate’s subliminal appeal, commissioned from some maverick think-tank.”
Presumably, Ballard was not a fan of the Reagan or the Republican Party.
Link to Wikipedia page on The Atrocity Exhibition.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
PBS has a TV programme, with online video, about stimulating the brain through nanowires implanted into blood vessels.
Neuroscientist, artist, author and stroke survivor Dr Jill Bolte Taylor is interviewed on Neurofuture.
The brain’s visual system can adapt and develop later in life, even if cataracts block all visual input during childhood, reports BBC News.
Mixing Memory reports on a curious study suggesting that the suggestion of a ghostly presence makes people less likely to cheat.
The Washington Post wonders whether teenage multi-tasking and ‘flitting from task to task’ could affect their long-term ability to focus.
Neural Development is a new open access journal, which is reviewed by Neurophilosopher.
Lack of sleep may impact upon moral judgement, reports New Scientist.
The BPS Research Digest examines research that suggests childhood experiences could increase the risk for PTSD later in life.
Do voters based their choice on facial features rather than message? The Toronto Star considers some recent research that suggests this might be the case.
Edge features Marvin Minsky with an essay on artificial intelligence and the psychology of love.
Another great demo from Cognitive Daily: using word prompts to help change blindness.
As a follow up to our recent post reporting that the UK’s Ministry of Defence conducted ‘remote viewing’ experiments, the documents from these experiments are now available on the MoD’s own website.
The documents were requested by someone under the Freedom of Information Act.
There’s lots of blanked out areas, but the observational logs make for intriguing, if not somewhat bizarre, reading.
The subject [blanked] recorded only two ‘images’. The first being the head of a bear or a baboon and the second the word RATS in the style of street graffiti in white…
Though the subject recorded detailed images it was clear from analysis of the target in terms of the descriptions given by the subject that the target was no accessed.
A curious case of government parapsychology research.
Carl Zimmer has written a fascinating piece on a study that simulated the evolution of communication in artificially intelligent robots.
The robots were small and mobile, were controlled by artificial neural networks, and could send and receive signals via infrared.
A group of robots was put into an arena with a light-emitting ‘food source’ and a ‘poison source’. The robots could only tell the difference when they got close enough to see coloured paper that the ‘sources’ were resting on.
Robots gained a point when they found the ‘food’ and lost a point when they stumbled across the ‘poison’.
Crucially, the researchers could electronically ‘breed’ the robots to improve their neural networks, so they could compare how the offspring of different combinations of best and worst performing robots would behave.
Zimmer notes some of the interesting results:
Here, however, is where the experiment got really intriguing. Each robot wears a kind of belt that can glow, casting a blue light. The scientists now plugged the blue light into the robot circuitry. Its neural network could switch the light on and off, and it could detect blue light from other robots and change course accordingly. The scientists started the experiments all over again, with randomly wired robots that were either related or unrelated, and experienced selection as individuals or as colonies.
At first the robots just flashed their lights at random. But over time things changed. In the trials with relatives undergoing colony selection, twelve out of the twenty lines began to turn on the blue light when they reached the food. The light attracted the other robots, bringing them quickly to the food. The other eight lines evolved the opposite strategy. They turned blue when they hit the poison, and the other robots responded to the light by heading away.
Two separate communication systems had evolved, each benefiting the entire colony.
The researchers have made some Quicktime video available if you want to see this in action and the scientific paper is available as a pdf file.
The research was led by Prof Laurent Keller, a biologist who specialises in understanding the evolution of communication networks.
There’s much more about this fascinating experiment and the other surprising types of behaviour that emerged from it over in Zimmer’s article.
Link to article Carl Zimmer’s article ‘Evolving Robotspeak’.
pdf of scientific paper.
ABC Radio’s Science Show just had a special edition on the evolution of the brain and the development of social intelligence.
The programme talks to some of the leading researchers in social intelligence whose research interests range from comparing the behaviours of animals across species, to neuroimaging humans, to building robots to mimic social interaction.
In particular, the programme tackles the ‘social intelligence hypothesis’ that suggests that our increase in brain size during evolution has been driven by the need to work in groups and make sense of complex relationships.
Prof Steven Mithen explains:
There seems to be two key figures of brain expansion, and I think this is where the social intelligence hypothesis becomes very interesting. The first was around two million years ago, and at that time brains expanded perhaps about 50%. So we went from brain size of around 450cc to a brain size of around 1,000cc by 1.8 million years ago. What’s interesting during that time is that we don’t see dramatic changes in human behaviour as represented by the archaeological remains….
So archaeologists asked; why are brains getting larger and what is it providing? Brains wouldn’t get larger just for any reasons because brain tissue is metabolically very expensive, so it’s got to be serving a really important purpose. I think the social intelligence hypothesis suggests to us that that expansion of brain size around two million years ago was because people were living in larger groups, more complex groups, having to keep track of different people, a larger number of social relationships which we simply required a larger brain to do.
Link to Science Show special on ‘The social intelligence hypothesis’.
Below is an excerpt from the novel Bedlam by Jennifer Higgie which gives a fictional account of the travels and madness of Victorian artist Richard Dadd.
Dadd was eventually confined to Bethlem Hospital and subsequently to the then ‘Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane’ (now Broadmoor Hospital) for the murder of his father and attempted murder of a tourist while being tormented by paranoid delusions.
Dadd was allowed to keep painting in hospital and produced some of the most important artwork of the era.
From p144 of the novel:
I find myself gazing at sand and seeing green hills.
I notice hideous faces glaring at me from the faces of sweet young girls.
I the silhouette of a pig in the mild eyes of a camel.
I lie stuck to my bed, covered in sweat as the mattress breathes and groans beneath me.
I have forgotten the names of my own sisters and brothers.
I speak happily, for hours, with my dead mother, whose hand I feel stroke mine, and curse the breath of my father, who is revealed to me as an impostor of the highest order.
I walk in sunlight and feel the hot glare of the moon burn my skin.
I see scorpions the size of men haunting ruins.
I crash into walls I do not see.
I pluck poisonous flowers and dream I boil them for tea.
I spend hours polishing teaspoons I do not need.
I long to dilute my colours with mirages, to make them hot and trembling.
Link to details of Higgie’s Bedlam.
Link to Wikipedia page on Dadd.
What do you do with a psychotic astronaut? If you’re not sure, the Houston Chronicle notes that you can look it up in NASA’s manual for dealing with psychiatric emergencies in space.
Despite being surrounded by billions of dollars of high technology, the procedure is pragmatic and definitely low-tech:
The guidelines were developed to respond to an attempted suicide or severe anxiety, paranoia or hysteria aboard the international space station. Astronauts are instructed to bind the stricken flier’s wrists and ankles with duct tape, restrain the torso with bungee cords and administer strong tranquilizers.
There’s actually a project, named Human Interactions in Space, which specifically studies the psychological impact of space travel, headed up by psychiatrist Dr Nick Kansas.
There are further details of NASA’s policies for psychiatric emergencies in the Houston Chronicle article.
Link to story in Houston Chronicle.
NPR Radio has a fantastic programme that charts the story of famous amnesic patient HM and how research into his impairments have revolutionised the way we understand human memory.
HM became densely amnesic after an operation removed the hippocampus on each side of the brain to treat his otherwise untreatable epilepsy.
Epilepsy can often be triggered by disturbances in the hippocampus, and removing the site of this disturbance is one way of treating life-threatening seizures.
We know now, largely because of HM, that removing one hippocampus has relatively small impact on memory, while removing both causes a profound antereograde amnesia.
This means HM cannot remember new information, meaning that he has relatively normal memory for the time before his operation, but can remember virtually nothing since.
This was one of the first and only times the operation to remove both hippocampi was conducted because of the effects that were discovered.
However, because the removal of the brain areas was done surgically, it allowed a very precise understanding of how the removed areas might contribute to normal memory processes.
A discipline called cognitive neuropsychology studies damage to the brain to work out normal function, by matching up which areas are damaged by what patients can no longer do.
Using these methods, HM has provided a huge insight into the neuropsychology of memory.
The first study on HM was published way back in 1957 [pdf] by brain surgeon William Scoville and neuropsychologist Brenda Milner.
He has been anonymous and kept from the public eye, but his family has now agreed to release audio tapes of him made in the 1990s.
The NPR programme is their first broadcast.
HM is still alive and has been the focus of studies on the neuropsychology of memory until the last paper [pdf] in 2002 although now has reportedly ‘retired’ from research.
Link to ‘H.M.’s Brain and the History of Memory’ with audio.
pdf of first paper on HM by Scoville and Milner.
pdf of 2002 review on HM’s contribution to memory research.
An excerpt from the entry for the psychedelic drug 4-TASB from the book Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved (otherwise known as PiHKAL).
The drug was one of many developed by chemist and psychedelics researcher Alexander Shulgin. As with hundreds of other compounds, the chemical structure and effects of this new drug are described in the book.
From the experiences of testing this compound, it seems 4-TASB was not a success:
Music was lovely during the experiment, but pictures were not particularly exciting. I had feelings that my nerve-endings were raw and active. There was water retention. There was heartbeat wrongness, and respiration wrongness. During my attempts to sleep, my eyes-closed fantasies became extremely negative. I could actually feel the continuous electrical impulses travelling between my nerve endings. Disturbing. There was continuous erotic arousability, and this seemed to be part of the same over-sensitivity of the nervous system; orgasm didn’t soothe or smooth out the feeling of vulnerability. This is a very threatening material. DO NOT REPEAT.
Link to 4-TASB entry from online PiHKAL.
CBC News is reporting that Ontario’s gambling regulator has removed almost 90 slot machines from use because they appear to show subliminal jackpot displays every time the game is played.
Information displayed very quickly, or within a sequence of other images (known as ‘masking’ in psychology), can be found to have a detectable effect on the brain and measurable mental processes, despite the fact that people may be unaware of seeing them.
For example, one study found that images of fearful faces displayed at a rapid rate changed activity in a brain area called the amygdala, despite the participants having no conscious experience of seeing the fearful expressions.
It is not clear how much this sort of thing actually changes anyone’s behaviour, although the practice is outlawed in many countries as being dishonest.
Link to CBC News story on subliminal slot machines with video segment (via BB).
The LA Times has an interesting article on evolutionary theories of depression that also discusses how these might lead to new and improved treatments for the condition.
The fact that mental illness is both widespread and disabling is a puzzle in evolutionary terms, if you believe that a vulnerability to psychological disorder is strongly inherited.
Indeed, the evidence suggests that there is a significant inherited component in mental illness, although the extent of this influence is debated.
If this is the case, the question arises ‘why do we still have mental illness if inheriting the risk for it makes you much less likely to reproduce?’. Surely it should have been ‘bred out’ of the population?
Some use this as an argument to suggest that the role of genetics in mental illness has been overstated, and that the majority of risk arises from environmental factors, particularly those that cause stress and trauma.
Others suggest that the same inherited attributes that increase risk for mental illness can be beneficial when they don’t result in serious impairment.
For example, research has suggested that people who are at high risk for schizophrenia, or have slight or fleeting psychosis-like thoughts, are more likely to be creative or original thinkers [pdf].
More recently, it was reported that a gene called DARPP-32 increases risk for schizophrenia as well as being linked to the more efficient use of a key brain circuit in the frontal lobe.
This might explain why genes that increase these tendencies are still in the gene pool, and only when too many of these traits are inherited is the person very likely to suffer ill-effects when confronted by severe life stresses.
A similar theory was put forward by the late Dr David Horrobin is his book The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity (ISBN 0593046498).
As an aside, Horrobin was famously the subject of a controversy after a critical obituary was published in the British Medical Journal, leading to an angry reaction and the journal publishing an apology.
The LA Times article is a great overview of evolutionary theories of depression that might help answer questions about why someone might inherit a tendency to be depressed.
If this tendency is understood as an exaggerated form of something that might be beneficial in small doses, it may give clues to new treatments, and the article looks at what treatments researchers are considering with this in mind.
Link to LA Times article ‘The mind, as it evolves’.
The latest edition of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon has been been published, this time ably hosted by Pure Pedantry.
A couple of my favourites from this curiously pirate-themed edition include a demonstration of an effect known as ‘boundary extension’ and an article on the sometimes paralysing effects of choice.
Head on over if you want more of the latest articles from the online mind and brain community.
Link to Encephalon 17.
As an intriguing follow-up to our recent story on using virtual reality to treat battle-related PTSD, BBC News is reporting on a relatively low-tech solution for earthquake-related PTSD – a house on a shaking platform.
The research, led by Dr Metin Basoglu, has just been published in the journal Psychological Medicine and reports that the simulator was used to effectively treat earthquake survivors in Turkey.
One component of psychology treatments for anxiety disorders, including PTSD, involves safely introducing the person to the anxiety-inducing situation in a gradual and controlled manner so they can habituate to the stress.
This is obviously easier for trauma caused by dogs or cars than it is for earthquakes or war, and so researchers are starting to develop novel ways of simulating these conditions.
This is an excerpt from the research paper on how the simulator was used:
The earthquake simulator consisted of a small furnished house based on a shake table that could simulate earthquake tremors on nine intensity levels. The participants controlled the tremors (using a mobile control switch), stopping or starting it whenever they wanted to, and increasing the intensity whenever they felt ready for it. If the participant’s anxiety related more to the tremors, they were asked to focus on this sensation and the sight and sound of the moving objects. If their distress related more to re-experiencing trauma events, they were encouraged to talk about these events to facilitate imaginal exposure. The session was terminated when the survivors felt in complete control of their distress or fear.
What’s great about Basoglu’s method is that it could be easily and cheaply used in areas hit by earthquakes, even if the affected doesn’t have access to high technology.
It is even conceivable that hand operated version of the ‘earthquake’ simulator could be built.
Link to BBC News story “Simulator ‘conquers quake stress'”.
Link to summary of research paper on PubMed.
Mind Hacks 