“From my fourth-floor room overlooking infinity, in the viable intimacy of the falling evening, at the window before the emerging stars, my dreams – in rhythmic accord with the visible distance – are of journeys to unknown, imagined or simply impossible countries.”
Text 421 (‘Journey in the Mind’) from The Book of Disquiet (ISBN 0141183047) by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.
Science and Consciousness Review has a short but interesting piece by neuroscientist Bernard Baars on recent findings on the neuroscience of buying.
An fMRI brain-scanning study published earlier this year in science journal Neuron [pdf] reported that when someone was making a decision to buy something or not, the brain activity could be reliably tracked through the buying process.
Crucially, when the product was first presented, activity in the nucleus accumbens was strongest. This area is often typecast as the ‘pleasure centre’ of the brain.
Later, other areas in the brain seemed to inhibit the nucleus accumbens when other factors, such as price, were considered to override the desire to buy.
However, Baars notes that there are other interpretations of the data as the method for brain scanning, fMRI, only gives an indirect measure of brain activity.
For example, the brain activity could be equally related to attention or anxiety.
This is a typical problem with new findings in cognitive neuroscience. With potentially important findings, much later work will try and determine to what extent these other factors are involved.
Link to SciCon Review article ‘Shopping Centers in the Brain’.
Link to SciAm write-up of original study.
pdf of full-text of scientific paper.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Make Beautiful Brain Music. Wired covers the creation of brainwave-based music. Even better it’s touring!
MSNBC visits the Newberg lab to discover how researchers are studying the neuroscience of spiritual experience.
The New York Times discusses the psychology of email spam.
Furious Seasons keeps tabs on the ongoing court case concerning the antipsychotic drug olanzapine.
What’s going on in George Bush’s mind? The New York Magazine speculates.
Developing Intelligence examines research on change blindness and attention.
Explaining piano skills: Deric Bownds discusses a study that suggests that the brain makes specific connections between action and sound areas.
Andrew Tyler describes the attraction of heroin, from p275 of Street Drugs (ISBN 0340609753).
The book is considered one of the best guides to the culture, markets and effects of society’s common illicit drugs and is widely read by professionals who deal with drug users.
So what is this strange romance with heroin? Why, when people discuss it, do they leave their shoes and talk in symbols and metaphor? The heroin experience, for those who don’t let the drug run away with them, is warm, woozy, and carefree. Nothing matters any more in their beautiful bubble. For everyday users who have lost control, the experience is ultimately a mediocre one. The drug does not open doors to other worlds (like LSD) but closes them. It stupefies and kills feeling.
Perhaps the key to understanding heroin is to recognise that, for most of these compulsive users, it serves as an antidote to a wretched existence – lives that might be full of pain, might be too complicated to manage, or – conversely – empty of any meaning whatsoever. Heroin promises neutrality. It promises nothing.
If you’re not familiar with the pharmacology of heroin, you may be interested to know that heroin itself is largely inactive as a drug.
Heroin is a type of prodrug – meaning that it only becomes active after it is absorbed and metabolised.
The heroin molecule gets converted into morphine, which binds to the opioid receptors in the brain to have the desired effect.
Ironically, in it’s early days, heroin was marketed as a non-addictive treatment for morphine addiction.
Link to Wikipedia page on heroin.
The cover story of today’s New Scientist discusses the work of Dr Kwabena Boahen who is creating microchips with neural networks designed into the hardware.
Building functions into microchips mean they run fast and efficiently, despite the fact it reduces the flexibility of what the hardware can do.
Artificial neural networks can require a lot of computer processing power because every simulated neuron in the network is essentially a mathematical procedure that needs running every time the network is updated.
With a frequently updated network of thousands and thousands of simulated neurons, the required computing power quickly adds up.
What Boahen and others are doing is building microchips that have functions to simulate neurons built into the hardware to make this possible on only a few chips.
Crucially, some of the simulation is done by analogue, rather than digital, computation.
Digital processors use transistors in their on/off switching phase. Mead realised that by using transistors in their analogue amplifier phase instead, he could build circuits that accurately mimicked the electrical behaviour of real neurons. Using transistors in this way also meant Mead could dispense with the central clock altogether, dramatically cutting the power demand. As long as the input signals arrived within a few milliseconds of each other, the circuit of transistors imitating a given neuron would sum the input values, and if that tipped over a certain threshold, would produce an output spike. “It’s totally foreign to the way we’ve built computers for the last 40 years,” says Boahen.
Neural networks can try and simulate real neurons as closely as possible, or be quite abstract or general impressions of them.
The New Scientist article notes that these hardware-based systems are also intended to mirror the brain’s biology quite closely.
Closely enough, that the systems are being used for designing replacement retinas to augment parts of the damaged visual system in humans.
Unfortunately, the article isn’t freely available online, but you should be able to pick up a copy in your local library or newsagent.
However, the Brains in Silicon lab at Stanford University has a comprehensive website with a host of information if you want to find out more.
If you’ve always harboured secret Dr Frankenstein fantasies (and let’s face it, who hasn’t?) what better way to unleash your inner re-animator than by having a glowing brain lamp?
Yes, it’s a plasma lamp in the shape of a brain, so you can dance lightening across your glass cortex with the touch of your finger.
Just don’t cackle loudly enough to frighten the locals, whatever you do.
Sound Medicine has a fascinating podcast interview with Dr Jill Bolte Taylor a neuroanatomist who experienced a stroke that damaged her brain and fundamentally changed her perception of the world.
A stroke is when the blood supply to the brain get interrupted, often because an artery gets blocked, it swells, or bursts.
Taylor notes that she didn’t ‘suffer’ a stroke, but ‘experienced’ one, as despite the significant impairment, she found the whole experience an amazing insight into how her brain degraded and repaired after damage.
In the interview, her sense of wonder at the effect of this sudden change in brain function is quite infectious.
Taylor has written a book about her experiences called My Stroke of Insight (ISBN 1430300612) which recounts how the stroke affected her life and mind.
If you’re interested in how mind and brain scientists make sense of their own personal experiences of neurological disorder, there’s a wonderful book called Injured Brains of Medical Minds which is a collection of writing on the topic.
If you want to know how to detect the signs of a stroke and want to know what life-saving action you could take, there’s a fantastic information page here.
Link to podcast webpage.
mp3 of podcast interview.
Link to ‘What You Need to Know About Stroke’ infomation.
Wired has a report and video on a research project by Spanish researchers to develop a wheelchair which can be controlled by a brain-computer interface.
Brain-computer interfaces are big news at the moment, although most of the excitement is focused on the sci-fi-like interfaces that implant directly into the brain.
These systems are all lab-based prototypes at the moment so it’s interesting to see the Spanish team, led by Dr Javier Minguez, use off the shelf parts to attempt to make something that could be widely available.
The system will read and process from brain signals via EEG to determine the intended direction, but also use an electronic collision avoidance system to help the wheelchair make fine-grained adjustments.
While most the media attention focuses on direct brain implants, it is this sort of remarkably practical approach that will most quickly produce a potentially life-enhancing and relatively low-cost solution for severely paralysed people.
Link to Wired article ‘A Wheelchair That Reads Your Mind’ (with video).
Link to Javier Minguez’s webpage with more info.
There’s a fascinating case report in the medical journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica about a man who became psychotic and developed the delusional belief that his mother had transformed into a wolf.
Lycanthropy is the name given to the mythical condition that causes someone to turn into a werewolf.
However, it’s also the name given to the psychiatric syndrome where someone becomes psychotic and believes they have tranformed or are transforming into another animal. It’s a fascinating condition as I discussed in a past article.
This case report is the first to describe a case where the person believed someone else was transforming into an animal, in this case a wolf:
He stated that he was captured by devil and sometimes his thoughts or
body were controlled by its power. Sometimes he had auditory hallucinations and heard the sound of drumming.He said that he had drooling from his mouth for no apparent reason. He also claimed that this feeling caused some other changes in him, for example, he had previously had doubts about his ability to command animals and had now seen cats obey his commands.
He was from a low socioeconomic family and lived with all of his family members in a single room. His parents lay him down between themselves. One night sleeping beside her mother he had a dream. He saw a few undistinguishable creatures which reminded him of animals. He awoke and felt air flow coming out of his nostrils which changed his mother into a wolf. After this event his restlessness and agitation had become worse and finally he was admitted into the psychiatric ward.
Interestingly, the author, Dr Alireza Nejad, is a psychiatrist in Iran, and has written a number of fascinating papers on rare delusional syndromes.
Link to PubMed entry for case report.
BBC News has a report on a recent conference presentation by Prof Vivette Glover suggesting that mother’s stress can affect the brain development of an unborn child.
If you are pregnant, don’t panic, the effect has only been found for quite intense stresses, but these do seem to increase the chances of the child developing behavioural problems later in life.
Actually, the idea that motherly stress could affect the unborn child’s chance of developing mental illness is not new.
One of the earliest reports on this was a paper from 1978 who looked at mothers affected by the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939, later to become known as the Winter War.
Researchers tracked down mothers who were pregnant when their partners were killed in the conflict, and compared them to mothers who were also pregnant at the time of the war, but whose partners were not killed in the fighting.
They found that children born to mothers whose partners were killed were more likely to develop schizophrenia later in life than the children born to mothers with partners who survived, suggesting that the stress of grief affected the child’s neurodevelopment.
This is thought to be due, at least in part, to the effect of stress-related hormone cortisol from the mother affecting the development of the foetus’ nervous system.
Interestingly, a similar increase in cases has also been found for children born to women who lived through physically and psychologically stressful famines – one in China and one in Holland.
It is well known that birth complications can lead to a slight increase risk for schizophrenia later in life, probably because of the effect on the brain.
It is fascinating to think that the mother’s experiences can influence the development of the unborn child’s brain, however indirectly it might occur.
Link to BBC News story on conference presentation.
The 15th edition of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon has just arrived online, this time ably hosted by brain fitness blog SharpBrains.
A couple of my favourites include a wonderfully informative post from Blog Around the Clock on the biological clock and a video of Jonah Lehrer’s talk on Walt Whitman’s connection to modern neuroscience.
There are many more fascinating pieces, so wander over and have a browse.
The next edition of Encephalon will be hosted here, so if you have any writing you wish to submit, send it in.
Link to 15th edition of Encephalon.
Today’s Guardian has a fascinating first person account by someone with ‘body identity integrity disorder’ or BIID. The condition is where people are uncomfortable with their bodies, usually a particular healthy limb, and want to have it amputated.
Importantly, people who have this desire are not psychotic, and it’s not a sexual fetish, they just have this intense desire that they should be an amputee.
Individuals will often go to extreme lengths to have a limb amputated. A recent case in the medical literature described how a man used bandages and pipe clamps to try and cut the blood off to his legs so they would require amputation.
His legs were finally amputated after suffering irreversible frostbite after applying dry ice to them for 7 hours. Interestingly, a similar technique was used by the woman in The Guardian article.
A 2005 article in The New York Times also discussed this fascinating condition, and it was the subject of a 2003 documentary by film maker Melody Gilbert.
How we represent the body and our body image in the brain is still quite mysterious.
For example, after amputation about 90% of people will experience a phantom limb – sensations of touch and movement seeming to arise from the previous location of the amputated limb.
However, people who have a limb missing at birth (who never had one to start with) can also experience phantom limbs, suggesting that we can develop with curiously distorted body representations from the very beginning.
Link to article ‘I won’t be happy until I lose my legs’ (thanks Tom!).
Link to NYT article on BIID.
Link to info on BIID documentary Whole.
Link to full text paper on phantom limbs from birth.
Luminous Lint has published a collection of evocative images by photographer Jean-Philippe Charbonnier who documented French psychiatric hospitals and psychiatric patients in the 1950s.
Some of the most important developments in psychiatry have happened in France.
Physician Phillipe Pinel was one of the first people to advocate humane treatment for patients with mental illness and epilepsy.
A famous painting shows him overseeing the removal of chains from patients at the Salpêtrière Hospital in 1795 Paris.
The photo collection shows French psychiatry in the 1950s and contain both hopeful and desperate scenes.
This sort of historical record is important both to realise how far psychiatry has developed since these bygone days, and to pick up where change still needs to occur.
Link to Jean-Philippe Charbonnier photo collection (via BB).
The aesthetically and intellectually compelling PsyBlog has a great article arguing that long-term career planning is often a waste of time as research has shown that we are unlikely to be able to predict what will make us happy in the future.
The research was a paper from Daniel Gilbert’s lab, that specifically studies happiness, how we understand it, and how it is affected by life events and our choices.
Gilbert has written a book about his research called Stumbling on Happiness that discusses the fact that although we think we know what will make us happy, it rarely does.
PsyBlog notes one particular experiment that highlights this effect:
My favourite is a simple experiment in which two groups of participants get free sandwiches if they participate in the experiment – a doozie for any undergraduate.
One group has to choose which sandwiches they want for an entire week in advance. The other group gets to choose which they want each day. A fascinating thing happens. People who choose their favourite sandwich each day at lunchtime also often choose the same sandwich. This group turns out to be reasonably happy with its choice.
Amazingly, though, people choosing in advance assume that what they’ll want for lunch next week is a variety. And so they choose a turkey sandwich Monday, tuna on Tuesday, egg on Wednesday and so on. It turn out that when next week rolls around they generally don’t like the variety they thought they would. In fact they are significantly less happy with their choices than the group who chose their sandwiches on the day.
The PsyBlog post draws these findings out and applies them to making career choices.
How will we know what make us happy in even 5 years away if we can’t even predict what sandwiches we’d be most happy with during the following week?
Link to PsyBlog post ‘Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted’.
Amanda Baggs is a young woman with autism and she’s created a powerful and articulate video that ‘translates’ from her world of environmental interaction to the neurotypical form of speech and perception.
As well as a stunning view into how she experiences and makes sense of the world, it’s also a forceful philosophical argument concerning how the mainstream understands people who don’t think or communicate in a conventional way.
Presumably speech-less (either through choice or development), Baggs communicates to the viewer using a voice synthesiser and on-screen text.
She has also put many of her medical notes online, sharpening the contrast between our assumptions about autism, and the message she deftly communicates.
Well worth watching to the end. A profound and exciting insight into an alternative humanity.
Link to YouTube video ‘In My Language’ (via Joy of Autism).
The February edition of Wired magazine has a special feature on 42 of the biggest unanswered questions in science. Several of them concern the mind, brain and behaviour.
How the brain creates consciousness is, perhaps, one of the most obvious ones.
If you’re not familiar with sleep research, you might find the question about why we sleep a surprising inclusion. However, the difficulty with conducting neuropsychology experiments on sleeping people makes this a very difficult question to answer, despite some fascinating ongoing research.
The evolution of language is, perhaps, an example of the problem in reverse. Doing experiments on language is much easier, because we understand the system so we can manipulate meaning and syntax independently. However, the sheer complexity of language makes it a mammoth task.
Placebos are also a curious and mysterious phenomenon, and inspire wider questions about how expectation and suggestion affects the function of the body.
The final question concerns how the brain calculates movement. There are an infinite number of possible muscle movements that allow you to perform the same action – for example, picking up a cup.
Think about it for a second. You could just grab the cup, or walk to India first. Even if you chose the near option, each tiny adjustment to the muscles can be modified ad infinitum.
To pick up the cup, the brain has to choose the most efficient action out of an infinite number of possibilities. Working through an infinite number of possibilities should take infinite time, yet we move fluidly and often without conscious thought.
Interestingly, you can help clarify the issues and answer the question to the best of current knowledge, as each entry has a link to a wiki where you can make your suggestions for each mini-article.
Link to Wired on “What We Don’t Know”.
Mind Hacks 
