Author: vaughanbell

Eric Kandel profiled

There’s a great introductory profile of psychiatrist and neurobiologist Eric Kandel in Columbia Magazine that outlines his life and Nobel-prize winning work.

Kandel is best known for his work on how memory operates at the cellular and molecular level.

For example, his research has investigated long-term potentiation, the process by which the synaptic connection between neurons is temporarily strengthened.

This has been cited as the basis of neural plasticity – the process by which the brain can re-organise itself at the cellular level to make new connections and pathways.

This is thought to be essential for learning, as well as recovery after damage.

Kandel’s “new science of mind” is an integration of neuroscience, biology, and the study of behavior that will connect the workings of individual neurons in the brain with philosophy, sociology, economics, art, war, and manifestations of human culture. “Neuroscience is the Esperanto,” Kandel says, “the humanistic language that binds it all together.” His research into the molecular and cellular basis of short- and long-term memory forms the foundation for the understanding of this language. His work illuminating how signals move through neurons earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000, alongside Arvid Carlsson from the University of G√∂teborg in Sweden and Paul Greengard of Rockefeller University. Kandel is, as Grundfest suggested 50 years ago, taking the next step in the study of the mind. “I think it’s likely that a variety of social phenomena are going to be explored at the biological level,” he says.

Kandel is also well-known for being the first author of the weighty neuroscience ‘bible’ Principles of Neural Science (ISBN 0838577016).

UPDATE: A video and transcript of Kandel’s Nobel lecture is available here. Thanks Mxr!

Link to article ‘Minding the Brain’.

The Mystery of Consciousness

This week’s Time Magazine has a wonderfully in-depth article on the science and implications of consciousness by cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker.

It shouldn’t be surprising that research on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. No other topic is like it. As Ren√© Descartes noted, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. The major religions locate it in a soul that survives the body’s death to receive its just deserts or to meld into a global mind. For each of us, consciousness is life itself, the reason Woody Allen said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.” And the conviction that other people can suffer and flourish as each of us does is the essence of empathy and the foundation of morality.

As well as the article itself, there’s some great links on the left hand side of the page to video, graphics and related articles.

Link to Time article ‘The Mystery of Consciousness’.

Psychologists and the pursuit of happiness

The New York Times has a remarkably comprehensive article on ‘positive psychology’ – the research and applied field that aims to understand happiness and human growth.

The article takes a critical look at the field, what the research is showing and how it’s being applied and taught.

Traditionally, psychology has been more focused on mental illness and pathology, with the implicit assumption that freedom from distress is akin to happiness.

Psychologists have begun to challenge this idea and look specifically at human virtues which have been sorely neglected throughout psychology’s history.

For example, despite the fact that we use a concept of wisdom in everyday life and value people considered wise, barely any work has been done to develop a psychological theory of wisdom.

The NYT article is remarkably well researched and discusses the roots of the movement and it current critics.

Link to NYT article ‘Happiness 101’.

Web guide for psychology students

The BPS Research Digest commissioned PsychSplash founder Dr. Gareth Furber to produce a list of links to psychology resources on the internet. He oblidged in the form of a poem.

This is one of the verses:

I must admit, I have a thing for librarians
Mostly the younger ones, not the octogenarians
My fascination however I assure you is pure
It’s their mental health resources that are the lure.

And who can disagree with that?

Link to BPSRD ‘Web guide for psychology students’.

2007-01-19 Spike activity

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

The New York Times reports on effective non-drug treatments and behavioural techniques for children with mental disorder.

BBC News reports that mental health drugs are over-prescribed (is this news?). BBC graphics watchers may note that the standard mental health graphic has changed from a man looking out the window to an attractive girl in white trousers.

PsyBlog’s wonderful series on the psychology of emotions continues. Check it out for the latest installments.

The Neurocritic has a fantastic post on a Suzanne Vega song about phantoms limbs (really) and the latest treatments for the post-amputation experience.

See what’s hot in consciousness research: Deric Bownds has a list of the most frequently download academic articles on consciousness.

News on an upcoming conference on fMRI lie detection.

A video of psychedelic and imperceptibly shifting artwork generated by neural networks has been tracked down by Neurofuture.

ShrinkRap considers research on treatments for injecting speed users: Abilify (an antipsychotic) or Ritalin (another form of speed).

Is this a sentient machine? Neurophilosopher publishes a follow-up to an earlier post on whether machines can be sentient.

More on childhood amnesia from Developing Intelligence – what is the role of the important memory skill source monitoring?

SciAm reports on research that suggests that daydreaming is a necessary function of the brain.

Fearing the unfamiliar

American Scientist reviews a new book that suggests an intriguing hypothesis – that the reason that the distrust of people with a different skin color, different values or a different ideology is so prevalent is because the early development of crucial brain pathways makes it hard for people to accept new and unfamiliar experiences.

Wexler argues that when people are faced with information that does not agree with their internal structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret or forget that information. When changes in the environment are great, corresponding internal changes are accompanied by distress and dysfunction. The inability to reconcile differences between strange others and ingrained notions of “humanness” can culminate in violence. The neurobiological imperative to maintain a balance between internal structures and external reality fuels this struggle for control, which contributes to making the contact zone a place of intractable conflict.

The book is Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change (ISBN 0262232480) by psychiatrist Bruce Wexler.

Link to review from American Scientist.

Extra ordinary valour

Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely give one of several examples of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorder giving exemplary service during the Second World War.

From p108 of their book Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War (ISBN 1841695807):

“As regards to the related question of how those diagnosed with psychiatric disorder actually performed in [World War II] combat, Plesset (1946) followed up 138 soldiers who in training had shown ‘sufficient adjustment difficulty to necessitate psychiatric attention’. After 30 days of combat, 137 remained on active duty, and one had received a gallantary medal. By the end of the war, 120 remained on active duty and eight had been awarded Bronze stars.”

Screening for those likely to suffer combat-related psychiatric disorder is one of the ‘holy grails’ of military psychiatry.

So far, this has proved impossible, as the single most important factor in predicting whether a soldier is likely to suffer combat stress reaction is the intensity of the fighting, rather than whether they have a history of mental illness.

Link to review of Jones and Wessely’s Shell Shock to PTSD.

Cognitive robotics

Memoirs of a Postgrad has an eye-opening analysis of the world of cognitive robotics – the science of developing ‘cognitive agents’.

When we think of ‘intelligent robots’ we tend to think of the human-think-alike androids from science-fiction, but the article argues that we should think about it more in terms of intelligence that would manifest itself it whatever way the robot interacts with the world.

Bats undoubtedly have a special sort of ‘bat intelligence’ because they interact with the world in unique ways and need to perform tasks only relevant to bats.

Similarly, a robot might be small, have wheels and only have limited sensors, and so its intelligence should be ’embodied’ within its own ways of experiencing and interacting with the world.

However, the article argues there’s more to it than just simple interaction.

…cognition requires not only real-time interaction with the real world (thus incorporating the concept of embodiment), it also requires the ability to internally improve ones interaction with the environment without it actually being present. So, the cognitive agent must be able internally simulate in some way its interactions with the world, and be able to learn from this process…

Link to ‘What does Cognitive Robotics mean?’

Is infantile amnesia a myth?

There’s a great post from Developing Intelligence looking at research on ‘infantile amnesia’ – the ‘amnesia’ we have for events that happened before about 3 years of age.

It turns out that studies done on young babies, even babies in the womb, have shown that infants have got surprisingly good memory.

As reviewed by Hayne, 3-day-old infants were capable of distinguishing a particular passage (from Dr. Seuss’s “Cat in the Hat”) that had been read to them twice daily for the last 6 weeks of gestation from similar passages (matched for word count, length, and prosody). What’s more, these infants preferred the familiar passage even if spoken by someone other than their mother, strongly suggesting that they had encoded (and retained) a relatively high-level representation of the passage’s auditory content.

The post looks at the mystery of how we have such trouble remembering this period, when psychology studies show that infants’ memory is actually quite good.

Link to ‘The Myth of Infantile Amnesia’.

Mind control and the modern citizen

The Washington Post has an intriguing article on people who believe they are subject to secret government ‘mind control’ technology.

People who experience voices being ‘beamed’ into their heads or forces acting on their bodies, have formed communities on the internet to support each other and to lobby the government to stop what they claim are illegal tests of this ‘invasive technology’.

Critics argue that they are simply mentally ill, and indeed some probably are. In a paper published last year myself and some colleagues reported that some people show obvious signs of psychosis. Despite this, however, they have formed complex and innovative online communities.

Many members of this community are obviously not mentally ill though, and have concerns that might seem a little unusual but are no different from the types of concerns that drive JFK, 9/11 and Princess Diana enthusiasts.

One of the most interesting aspects of this community, in all its diversity, is that it challenges the psychiatric notion of what is considered a delusion.

In one of the more curious episodes during the last consultation for the UK Government’s Draft Mental Health Bill, an organisation called Christians Against Mental Slavery made a surprising submission to the parliamentary committee.

Even if you don’t buy their premise that the government is testing ‘Mind Invasive Technology’ on people, they make some pertinent points.

For example, they suggest that if a psychiatrist is presented with someone who complains of being affected by microwave mind control technology (not uncommon in psychosis), they should put them in Faraday cage to see if their experiences stop, so the psychiatrist can try and test whether they are genuinely delusional.

The fact that delusions are diagnostically ‘false beliefs’ but clinicians largely rely on assumptions (rather than tests) about the truth of a belief, is a point that has also been made in the medical literature.

Indeed, some authors have argued as a result, that the falsity condition should be rejected as one of the criteria in diagnosis.

One interesting point, rarely considered by the mind control community or its critics, is that it is possible, indeed common, to have isolated or restricted psychosis-like experiences that are relatively benign.

For example, someone might hear voices, have unusual beliefs, or experience their thoughts being broadcast or altered from outside, while not being significantly disabled by their experiences.

The fact that someone could have reasonable concerns about ‘mind control’ technology, which governments have certainly tried to develop, while also hearing voices or having other similarly unusual experiences, is often overlooked.

Link to Washington Post ‘Mind Games’.

Amnesia affects ability to imagine the future

There’s an interesting New Scientist news report on recent research suggesting that people with amnesia have difficulty imagining the future, suggesting this ability relies on our capacity to remember past experience.

The study was led by Dr Eleanor Maguire and involved five participants with dense amnesia caused by damage to the hippocampus on both sides of the brain.

Researchers asked the participants ‚Äì and a control group without amnesia ‚Äì to imagine several future scenarios, such as visiting a beach, museum and castle, and to describe what the experience would be like. They then analysed the subjects’ narrations sentence by sentence, scoring each statement based on whether it involved references to spatial relationships, emotions or specific objects.

All but one of the amnesiacs were worse at imagining future events than the participants in the trial who did not suffer from amnesia. Their visualisations of future events were more likely to be disorganised and emotionless. “It’s not very real. It’s just not happening. My imagination isn’t‚Ķwell, I’m not imagining it, let’s put it that way,” one patient told researchers during a trial.

Apparently, the research will be published in the science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences but I’m damned if I can find it at their website or on PubMed, but presumably it will appear shortly.

Link to NewSci story ‘Amnesiacs struggle to imagine future events’.
Link to write-up from Nature News.

Archive footage of shell shock patients

I’ve just uploaded some archive film footage to YouTube of shell shock patients from World War One, taken from a recent Channel 4 documentary on soldiers executed for cowardice.

I was surprised to find that there is almost no video of this historically and clinically important condition on the internet.

The clip has footage of patients who displayed some extreme ‘shell shock’ reactions, including paralysis, shaking and convulsions.

These physical reactions are now considered a form of conversion disorder, where extreme emotional stress or turmoil is expressed as physical symptoms.

The clip also discusses the case of Private Harry Farr (covered previously on Mind Hacks) who was executed for cowardice, despite having been affected by the condition.

If you didn’t catch it the first we mentioned it, the recent article about his case that was recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine [pdf] is a gripping and thought-inspiring read.

Link to YouTube video of shell shock patients.
pdf of article ‘The life and death of Private Harry Farr’.

Ninety minutes blindfolded enhances your hearing

The BPS Research Digest reports on a new study that shows that 90 minutes of being blindfolded significantly improves our ability to locate sounds.

Next the participants spent 90 minutes sitting quietly with the blindfold on. Crucially, when they repeated the [sound location] task after this, their accuracy was improved as they no longer underestimated the location of the sounds as much… In fact their performance had become more typical of a blind person performing this kind of task.

There’s more on the study over at the BPSRD including a link to the original paper.

Link to BPSRD article.