Biologist and reproductive scientist Prof David Clapham is interviewed in the New York Times, leading to a sublime moment halfway through the exchange:
Q. Among biologists, is sperm research very respected?
A. Well, in biology, all the glamour is in neuroscience.
Link to NYT interview with David Clapham (via Frontal Cortex).
Film-maker Louis Theroux has written an insightful article for the BBC website about society’s view of weirdness and his experience of meeting out-of-the-ordinary people.
He suggests that ‘weirdness’ is in the eye of the beholder as the idea of what makes someone ‘weird’ is just the result of our transient views of what is considered normal, regardless of how common the actual opinion or behaviour is.
Furthermore, he notes that ‘weird’ behaviour is often understandable if you put yourself in the person’s shoes.
Though it’s been helpful as a kind of short-hand for the sort of stories I do, the term “weirdness” actually does a disservice to the people I cover. Looking closer at what seemed – at first hand – the oddest of behaviour and I’ve always found a kind of logic.
I was recently reading a book of neurological essays called Phantoms in the Brain, which had an introduction by neurologist Oliver Sacks. He discussed brain disorders with symptoms that to me seemed very weird indeed – patients who don’t recognise their own limbs as belonging to them, for example, or who sometimes think one side of their body belongs to someone else.
But these are, he says, “quite normal defence mechanisms” which the unconscious uses to make sense of the world. “Such an understanding removes such patients from the realm of the mad or the freakish,” he continues, “and restores them to the realm of discourse and reason – albeit the discourse and reason of the unconscious.”
It’s interesting that Theroux makes a connection between people considered ‘socially weird’ and those considered ‘clinically disordered’.
There’s a been an ongoing debate in psychiatry about the extent to which particular psychiatric diagnoses are influenced by social perceptions of certain behaviour and the wish to classify them as different.
For example, people will regularly talk about “the mentally ill” as if they were a coherent group (e.g ‘these health reforms will affect the mentally ill’) but almost never talk about “the physically ill” in the same way.
We know that mental illness is not a cut-and-dry affair. Psychosis, for example, is found on a continuum with everybody having psychosis-like experiences to some degree.
People diagnosed with psychotic disorders just have very frequent or intense experiences that cause them distress or impairment. The rest of us hardly notice them or aren’t bothered by them if they do occur.
In other words, the odd beliefs and behaviours of the ‘weird’ are just part of life’s rich tapestry.
Theroux ends by saying that “weird beliefs” never stood in the way of him making a human connection, which is another way of saying that we classify people are weird to put unnecessary distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’, when in reality, there is only us.
Link to article ‘Weird, or just in search of meaning?’.
A study published in today’s edition of Science reports that nicotine addicted patients who acquired damage to the insula – an area just behind the temporal lobes – reported that the urge to smoke reduced after their brain damage occurred.
The insula is coloured red in the diagram on the right and has been heavily linked to emotional responses, particularly the perception and experience of disgust.
However, this new study, led by Nasir Naqvi, suggests that the insula is also heavily involved in addiction-related cravings.
Studying patients with brain damage is one of the most powerful methods in cognitive neuroscience.
While brain scans can tell you which areas of the brain might be associated with a particular experience or behaviour, they can’t tell you whether that area is necessary or not.
If you think a brain area might be crucial for a certain process, finding someone who has damage to that area should confirm whether your idea is correct or not by seeing whether they still have the ability or experience you think is linked to the area.
In Bechara and colleagues’ study, they included a series of patients who had insula damage, either after suffering a stroke, or after having it deliberately removed as part of brain surgery to treat epilepsy or brain cancer.
Because this sort of damage is rarely precise and causes damage to a number of areas in addition to the insula, a series of patients was studied.
While other damage was present, the patients only had insula damage in common.
This means when group results are analysed, the strongest overall effect should be related to insula damage, whereas effects from damage to other areas wouldn’t be as apparent, because it’s not common to all patients.
The researchers compared the group with insula damage to other smokers who had suffered non-insula brain damage by measuring who quit smoking, how strong the cravings were and how easy it was to give up.
Insula-damaged patients were much more likely to have quit smoking than the other patients, to experience less cravings, and to have found it easier to give up.
The researchers start their paper by noting that “cigarette smoking [is] the most common preventable cause of morbidity and mortality in the developed world”.
You can bet this study will cause massive interest in the pharmaceutical industry who will be attempting to work out the neurochemistry of the insula to try and create drugs which will make treating addiction easier.
Undoubtedly, education and prevention will be much cheaper, but it’s hard to make money out of people who don’t become addicted.
That’s progress for you.
Link to ScienceNow write-up of study.
Link to study abstract.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
NPR radio has a special on teenage sleep: how it works and sleeping better.
There’s a careful analysis of differences in the structure of the left and right hemispheres of the brain over at Developing Intelligence.
American Scientist has an interview with ergonomist and author Steven Casey.
A new drug seems to show early positive results in treating glioblastomas – one of the most difficult and dangerous forms of brain cancer.
‘You are what you expect’ according to The New York Times.
Folic acid supplements may help maintain mental abilities in older adults, reports New Scientist.
Activation in an area of the right temporal lobe when viewing others’ actions is associated with self-reported altruism – a story that got so muddled in the press it’s best just reading the study abstract.
Cognitive Daily examines research that suggests that the brain responds differently to metaphor and irony.
What is it like to be a manbat? (Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has a blog – cool!).
Pure Pedantry has a wonderful post on perceptual binding and the binding problem.
The January edition of the Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast has an interview with Prof John Gunn about his life working in forensic psychiatry.
Forensic psychiatry, the branch of medicine that deals with mentally ill offenders, is something that you rarely hear about unless there’s a (usually sensationalised) story in the newspapers about a crime having being committed by someone with a psychiatric disorder.
It is a fascinating area, and the people who work in forensic psychiatry are often completely absorbing to talk to. If you ever get the chance, ask a forensic psychiatrist about their work.
Psychiatry, in general, is not considered glamorous. When was the last time you saw a politician having a photo call with a group of psychiatric patients?
Can you even imagine a politician having their photo taken with a man who killed his mother when psychotic, because he believed she was trying to poison him?
This is what makes forensic psychiatry so interesting. It attempts to help some of the most stigmatised and shamed people in society.
It also tries to balance this with managing risk from the small minority of people who offend when mentally ill.
And it’s not just risk to others. For example, people with schizophrenia are 14 times more likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators, and so forensic psychiatry also tries to reduce the risk of harm to the patient.
In the podcast interview, Prof Gunn talks about the profession, how he became interested in working in the area, and you hear a lot about what forensic psychiatrists do.
Well worth a listen if you’ve ever been curious about the speciality.
The interview starts 17 minutes into the podcast.
Link to January Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast page.
I found this on the wall of a Rehab Unit in a London hospital this morning.
Dancing in the Waiting Room
by Angus MacmillanAll our living
is in waiting.
In these moments
we find our myriad selves
anxious, hopeful, trembling,
wishful, fearful, impatient.
All our dancing shadows
are there
flitting in the half light
of unreason
crowding together
in fevers of movement
never still, never one.Then a voice says ‘Next’
and a new dance
begins.
I looked up the author on the net, and it turns out he’s a Scottish poet who writes in English and Gaelic, and is also a psychologist!
And luckily, there’s some audio of him reading his poems in both English and Gaelic available online.
Link to info and audio from Angus Macmillan.
Cognitive scientist Sacha Barber has created a three-part guide to the mechanics and mathematics of neural networks.
If you’re interested in how many artificial intelligence systems work, the guide takes you through the mathematics of neural networks, to the basic of creating your own network in the C programming language.
Even if you’re not a mathematician or programmer, the article is worth a scan so you can get an idea of the level of complexity that is needed for a group of mathematical functions to start displaying ‘cognitive’ properties.
The first thing you’ll notice is how simple the functions are.
With many sorts of neural networks, the difficulty is not in creating the ‘building blocks’ – i.e. the simulated neurons, but in creating a network structure that is useful for solving problems.
While engineers might be interested in creating networks to solve practical problems, neuropsychologists often create networks to simulate encapsulated mental processes, and then damage the networks to simulate brain damage.
This allows the researchers to test out ideas about how cognitive processes might be organised in the brain.
Link to ‘AI : Neural Network for beginners’.
Brain Ethics has a fantastic post by neuroscientist Thomas Rams√∏y who describes the discovery of a worrying brain pathology in a volunteer who took part in one of his brain imaging studies.
A 1999 study found that 18% of healthy participants have brain scans that might suggest some form of abnormality, although only a minority of these abnormalities were considered serious enough to require a referral for further medical assessment.
As more and more healthy people are being scanned for neuroscience studies, researchers are now starting to develop protocols and procedures for dealing with situations where previously undiscovered medical problems are discovered, as described by a 2006 Science article.
In his own work, Rams√∏y notes a useful technique he’s picked up for detecting brain abnormalities and what he discovered in one of his participants.
One of our radiologists told me to “scroll through the brain quickly and look for flashes”, just as a first approximation to detecting brain pathology. So I’ve done that ever since. Just that simple trick has actually been helpful, this case being the prime example. Above, you can see how the lesions pop out as white sparks in the brain.
For my subject, it means that we have detected a stenosis in both arteries supporting the brain. If untreated, they would eventually have blocked the bloodstream to the brain and caused widespread neuronal damage, maybe even be life threatening.
It’s rare researchers talk about instances when this happens, so Rams√∏y’s post is an enlightening look into a worrying situation that thankfully turned out well in the end.
Link to Brain Ethics article ‘Scroll through and look for fireworks’.
Link to Science article ‘Incidental Findings in Brain Imaging Research’.
…when you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you sometimes find that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
Winnie the Pooh struggles with the problem of communicating qualia to external observers in A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner.
The Toronto Star has a preview of Steven Pinker’s forthcoming book ‘The Stuff of Thought’ which apparently tackles language (no surprise there) but this time examines the multiple meanings in language and how and why we use metaphor.
The book isn’t slated to appear until late 2007, although it seems he’ll be doing some lectures based on the book throughout the coming year.
The article outlines some of the themes in his forthcoming work:
“The Harvard psychologist classes [his example of] the salt request as an example of indirect speech, a category that also includes euphemisms and innuendo. Two other key themes for Wednesday’s talk are the ubiquity of metaphor in everyday language and swearing and what it says about human emotion.
For Pinker all three categories of language provide windows on human nature, and analyzing them can reveal what people are thinking and feeling. The approach builds upon his earlier thesis that human nature has distinct and universal properties, some of which are innate ‚Äì determined at birth by genes rather than shaped primarily by environment.”
I had the pleasure of seeing of seeing one of Steven Pinker’s talks once, and even if you don’t buy his hard-nosed nativist view of cognition (that suggests that the fundamentals of our mental processes are inherited and selected for by evolution), he’s still greatly entertaining and thought-provoking.
Link to article ‘Of thought and metaphor’.
The Economist has a short article on two recent studies which have examined the theory that our ability to perceive colours is influenced by the way a language labels different hues.
The general idea that language shapes our thoughts and experience is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
For example, some languages don’t have separate names for green and blue, and so this theory might predict that speakers of these languages would be less able to distinguish between the colours.
A less strong prediction might be that speakers of these languages might be able to distinguish between what we label as green and blue, but wouldn’t necessarily make the division at the same point in the colour spectrum as English speakers typically do.
The Economist article discusses two recent experiments which have tested this idea, both in quite ingenious ways – suggesting that colour perception may indeed be influenced by colour naming.
Link to Economist article ‘How grue is your valley?’.
The New York Times has an article on magical thinking – the mental process of making connections between unrelated or loosely-related things.
Magical thinking is thought to exist on a spectrum, from hunches, creative leaps and superstitions at one end, to frank psychosis at the other – where the connections become so odd as to lead to delusions.
As children we, perhaps, experience magical thinking at its strongest. Children live in magical worlds where moving trees cause the wind to blow and toys come to life after dark.
The link between magical thinking in children in adults is rarely discussed, but it was the subject of an 2004 article published in The Psychologist.
The NYT article looks at magical thinking in all its guises, and discusses its possible roles in religion and spirituality, and how it is affected by stress and coincidence.
Link to NYT article ‘Do You Believe in Magic?’.
Link to ‘Magical thinking – Reality or illusion?’ from The Psychologist.
I’ve been notified of a rare case of focal retrograde amnesia that doesn’t seem to have been reported in the medical literature.
Focal retrograde amnesia is where memory for past events and personal information is lost, while the ability to remember new events is spared.
The case is described in Mr Bump Loses His Memory by Roger Hargreaves (ISBN 1844229866).
In this instance, amnesia seems to have been induced by falling out of the window while attempting to smell flowers in a window box.
BUMP!
Mr Bump sat up and rubbed his head. And as he rubbed, it dawned on him that he had no idea where he was.
He had no idea whose garden he was sitting in.
He had no idea whose house he was sitting in front of.
And he had no idea who he was.
Mr Bump had lost his memory.
Focal retrograde amnesia has been reported both after clear brain injury (particularly to temporal lobes) and when there is an absence of detectable brain damage.
The latter condition is sometimes called ‘functional’ or ‘psychogenic’ amnesia, and it might result from emotional disturbance rather than permanent impairment to memory structures in the brain.
As no neurological investigations were conducted after Mr Bump’s concussive head injury (despite clear indications of past traumatic injury), it is not possible to determine whether his amnesia was the result of organic damage or distress-related psychogenic factors.
As Mr Bump’s memory difficulties resolve after another minor blow to his head it is unlikely that the return of his memory can be explained by the spontaneous recovery of brain function, as this might only be exacerbated by further damage.
This might suggest that the original amnesia was psychogenic in nature. This make the case a particularly interesting example of this rare phenomena and additionally suggests a good prognosis for Mr Bump’s recovery of memory function.
However, in light of obvious past injuries, Mr Bump should be offered a full neurological and psychological assessment so any undetected neuropathology or psychiatric disorder or can be treated at the earliest opportunity.
Link to more on Mr Bump (thanks Tenyen!).
It’s January 22nd, it must be time for another Cliff Arnall bollocks-fest. According to Arnall, his ‘formula’ predicts that today is officially the most depressing of the year.
Yes, Cliff, it is, but only because we have to put up with more utter nonsense from you.
Exactly the same story appeared in 2005 and 2006, and what a coincidence that all of these ‘most depressing days of the year’ have happened on a Monday.
As is traditional, it’s a commercial tie in, this time with a management consultancy and a PR firm.
What is genuinely depressing, is that mental health charity The Samaritans (who should really know better) have now been roped into the sorry affair.
Cliff Arnall specialises in creating nonsense formulas predicting almost anything that helps promote something or other, and gets credibility by being described as a psychologist.
Link to a suitable Arnall antidote from Ben Goldacre.
Online t-shirt retailers No Demographic have created a t-shirt with EEG (‘brainwave’) traces from each stage of sleep.
Sleep is divided into two main types: ‘rapid eye movement‘ or REM sleep, and non-REM sleep. The majority (but not all) dreaming happens in REM sleep.
REM sleep is sometimes called ‘paradoxical sleep’ in the research literature, because the brain is extremely active and far from relaxed.
However, because the brain interrupts the connection between the brain and the spinal cord (probably by inhibiting motor neurons in the pons), we don’t tend to move while all this activity is happening, even if we think we’re moving in our dreams.
Non-REM sleep is divided into stages 1-4. During a night’s sleep, we will go through several cycles of descending through sleep stages 1-4 and experiencing REM sleep.
Each of these stages has a distinctive profile which can be identified by EEG.
The No Demographic t-shirt has one trace from each of these cycles, so you can advertise your unconscious brain function to the world.
The t-shirt reminds me of one of my favourite works of art – a piece called Slumber by Janine Antoni.
Antoni records her own EEG signals while sleeping, weaves them into a blanket, and then sleeps in the blanket, reflecting the wonderful recursive world of sleep and dreams while contrasting modern neuroscience with the ancient art of weaving.
It seems the latest edition of Time Magazine is a special on the brain, and there’s another full-length neuroscience feature article available online that discusses how the brain reorganises and ‘rewires’ itself.
This is known as ‘plasticity’ and neuroscientists often talk about the brain being ‘plastic’.
This doesn’t refer to the material, although does refer to the fact that the structure of the brain isn’t fixed and can change in response to learning or physical stresses.
For decades, the prevailing dogma in neuroscience was that the adult human brain is essentially immutable, hardwired, fixed in form and function, so that by the time we reach adulthood we are pretty much stuck with what we have….
But research in the past few years has overthrown the dogma. In its place has come the realization that the adult brain retains impressive powers of “neuroplasticity” – the ability to change its structure and function in response to experience. These aren’t minor tweaks either. Something as basic as the function of the visual or auditory cortex can change as a result of a person’s experience of becoming deaf or blind at a young age. Even when the brain suffers a trauma late in life, it can rezone itself like a city in a frenzy of urban renewal. If a stroke knocks out, say, the neighborhood of motor cortex that moves the right arm, a new technique called constraint-induced movement therapy can coax next-door regions to take over the function of the damaged area. The brain can be rewired.
The special edition of Time also has shorter article on the new map of the brain, how the brain deals with time, and an article on six lessons for handling stress.
There’s also an interactive timeline of discoveries in psychology and neuroscience.
Link to Time article ‘How The Brain Rewires Itself’.
Mind Hacks 