Author: vaughanbell

The Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum in London has a fascinating exhibition on at the moment entitled How do you look? that investigates the role of visual cognition in painting and surgery.

The exhibition has been conceived and led by Dr John Tchalenko from Camberwell College of Arts, who has a long-standing interest in the cognitive neuroscience of painting-relevant skills.

Also involved is artist Humphrey Ocean, who has previously been brain-scanned by Tchalenko as part of a study into novice vs expert artistic skills.

How Do You Look? examines how a painter and a surgeon use their eyes in their work, how they coordinate their eye and hand movements and how these translate into actions and creative processes. The exhibition explores the similarities and differences in their work and makes comparisons with how we all use our eyes in everyday tasks and when viewing the world around us.

Dr John Tchalenko elaborates, ‘The eye captures and the brain processes the information needed at a particular instant to fulfil the task in hand. It is how the visual system works. In the scientific jargon it’s known as “eye ‚Äì hand coordination”‘. ‘The brain does not know whether it is dealing with art, surgery or everyday life. How you look depends on what the action is, not who you are.’

There’s more at the dedicated website including dates for when the exhibition is touring the UK.

It remains at the Hunterian Museum until 22nd December 2006.

Link to info from Royal College of Surgeons.
Link to ‘How do you look?’ website.

An article in October’s Biological Psychiatry reports that immediate sleep maintains emotional memories and suggests an intriguing hypothesis – that post-traumatic stress disorder could be prevented by stopping people from sleeping immediately after a traumatic event.

A research team, led by psychologist Ullrich Wagner, asked tired participants to learn neutral texts (such as a piece about dressmaking) or emotional texts (such as a piece about child murder).

Some of the participants slept immediately, others were kept awake for three hours after learning.

Four years later, the participants were tested for how well they had remembered the texts.

Those who had slept immediately after learning had better memory than those who hadn’t, but only for the emotional topics.

This suggests that sleep helps consolidate memory most effectively for emotional material.

The researchers argue that these results suggest a simple way of dampening the impact of intense memories that form one of the main features of post-traumatic distress disorder: intrusive vivid memories of the event.

“From a clinical perspective, our results suggest the use of sleep deprivation in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events as a possible therapeutic measure to prevent a long-term engravement of these events in memory, thereby at least partly counteracting the development of PTSD as a disease thought to reflect overconsolidated emotional memories.”

Although not widely known, sleep deprivation is not a new treatment for psychiatric disorders.

It is known that missing a night’s sleep can significantly improve mood, even in people with severe depression.

Unfortunately, the improvement is often lost when people catch up on their sleep and it is still not clear why these effects occur.

Link to abstract of ‘Brief sleep after learning keeps emotional memories alive for years’.
Link to abstract of ‘Therapeutic use of sleep deprivation in depression’.

Two studies published this year have highlighted a stark difference in the level of psychiatric casualties between British and American troops involved in the Iraq war.

A study in the Lancet reported that only four percent of British troops in Iraq reach criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – a trauma related mental illness.

In contrast, approximately ten to twenty percent of US troops are diagnosable with the condition, according to studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In an editorial for JAMA, psychiatrists Matthew Hotopf and Simon Wessely suggest a number of reasons for why this might be the case.

The first is that US troops may be involved in more dangerous combat duty and are therefore more likely to be traumatised.

However, they suggest other factors are also likely to be important.

US tours of duty are typically for 1 year, whereas UK tours are for 6 months. This means any combat-duty-related psychological stresses are likely to be extended in US personnel.

Further factors relate to the differences in the populations of the US and UK forces:

…the groups described in the US studies were demographically different from those described here. The US forces deployed to Iraq in both studies were younger, of lower rank, and contained more reservists than our UK sample. While less than 10% of the US sample had previous experience of deployment, more than two-thirds of the UK service personnel from both cohorts had been on previous deployments in a range of settings, including both war-fighting and peacekeeping duties. They therefore had much more experience of the stresses of military deployments, and might have been more resilient to these stresses.

In other words, US forces in Iraq are more likely to be made up of younger, non-professional soldiers, on longer tours of duty, with less combat experience, in more dangerous areas, when compared to their their UK counterparts – potentially making them more vulnerable to mental illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Link to abstract of Lancet study on mental health of UK troops in Iraq.
Link to JAMA study on mental health of US troops in Iraq.
Link to NEJM study on mental health of US troops in Iraq.
Link to US National Center for PTSD Iraq War information page.

The cover story on yesterday’s The Independent on Sunday had a special report on eating disorders. The report is in several sections and covers the rising prevalence of eating disorders and the experience of people who have anorexia or bulimia.

Two main reports describe the characteristics of common eating disorders and discuss the possible contributory factors, including the growing concern over online ‘pro-ana‘ or pro-anorexia communities.

It also includes two articles on ‘Living with Anorexia‘ and ‘Living with Bulimia‘ where people who have experienced eating disorders for themselves recount the effect on their lives.

This issue has been in the media recently after Madrid fashion week banned unhealthily thin models from their catwalks and Prof Janet Treasure, head of the eating disorders service at the Institute of Psychiatry, and 40 health professional colleagues, wrote to the British Fashion Council asking them to do the same.

Link to ‘Dying to be thin: a special IoS investigation’.
Link to ‘Why one in 100 young women suffer from eating disorders’.
Link to ‘Living with Anorexia’.
Link to ‘Living with Bulimia’.