The BBC News website has a brief section on medical specialties as part of its health coverage. Each article is a brief interview with a doctor about their work in a certain area.
Two of interest to readers here might be the interviews with the psychiatrist and anaesthetist.
No neurologist or neurosurgeon, but I suspect the list may grow, as there’s plenty more schools of medicine not represented.
A Slice of Life is a company that makes scarves and ties with bioscience prints on them, and two are likely to be particularly attractive to neuroscientists.
Pictured on the left is a satin scarf (named ‘Contacts‘) that is decorated with neuron endings especially rich in synaptic vesicles.
Also available is a bow tie that depicts synaptic vesicles massing on the edges of the synaptic gap.
While neuroscientists might immediately pick up on the significance, your non-neuroscience friends will probably think they’re just stylish additions to your wardrobe.
Link to A Slice of Life.
PsyBlog has just started a series looking at whether the different findings, concepts and predictions of the various schools of psychology could ever be explained by one ‘grand theory’.
By drawing on excerpts from the existing literature, the series gives us a tour through a radical rethinking of how we explain the action of the mind.
Alternatively, perhaps a search for a ‘grand unifying theory’ is just physics envy at its most ridiculous, where psychology is just trying to ape the most absurd aspects of modern theoretical physics.
Whether it sounds like a grand vision or navel gazing to you, the series covers all angles, and there is more to come in the series.
Link to ‘Unity in Psychology: The Search Starts Here’ from PsyBlog.
As an update to a previous Mind Hacks story, the American Psychological Association has released a statement after considering the backlash against their guidelines that permit psychologists to participate in military interrogations.
The statement seems to reaffirm the previous position that permits participation in interrogations but additionally requires that psychologists intervene in abusive situations and report the incidents to the relevant authorities.
However, the statement still falls short of the policy adopted by American doctors’ and psychiatrists’ organisations that specifically warns against any participation in interrogations.
This has spurred pressure group Psychologists for Social Responsibility to urge the APA to adopt a similar policy.
The subtext of much of this debate is about ‘war on terror’ interrogations, and more specifically, whether psychologists should participate in the controversial interrogations of inmates in Guantanamo Bay and other secret facilities.
Link to APA statement on military interrogations.
Link to response of Psychologists for Social Responsibility.
Epileptic is a comic book by David B that charts the impact of his brother’s epilepsy on the author’s life and family.
Originally written in French, when first published in English, Time Magazine described it as “a great work of art” and nominated it as the best graphic novel of the year.
It has subsequently won a number of prizes and is often mentioned alongside Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus for its narrative and insight.
I’ve only just begun reading it myself but it is immediately striking both for its honesty and its dream-like (post seizure-like?) approach, where ideas and experiences fill the panels as real as if they were concrete characters of the plot.
The portrayal of epilepsy is accurate and sensitive, and rivals Ray Robinson’s novel Electricity for its impact.
Epileptic was released in paperback earlier this year (ISBN 0224079204).
Link to information about Epileptic graphic novel.
Link to Time review.
Link to Time interview with author.
The media has just been full of reports about research that suggests that while male sex drive stays constant, female sex drive reduces significantly after several years in a long-term relationship.
Sex and relationship psychologist Dr Petra Boyton has an excellent analysis of the study, its conclusions and the media reports.
Particularly, she notes that the researchers have opted for an evolutionary explanation for why this might occur.
Evolutionary explanations are sometimes uncritically applied to sex research (after all, sex is about mating right?) when other, more straightforward explanations will probably be more useful.
Rather than explaining these outcomes as related to changing lifestyle factors or practical alterations in women’s lives that may lead to them reporting less desire for sex, the researchers compare the outcomes to the behaviour of female prairie voles and argue the results are due to women keeping her ‘resources’ scarce to keep a male partner interested in her. Males keep a higher sex drive to keep their mate faithful and other males away.
The study will of course get lots of coverage since it has a media-friendly mix of hormones, evolution and comparisons with small mammals which journalists always love.
Link to BBC News article ‘Security ‘bad news for sex drive’.
Link to commentary from Petra Boyton.
Commentary Magazine has an articulate article arguing in support of large drug companies and the necessity of current drug developing and marketing practices.
Most of the articles you see these days are quite critical of ‘Big Pharma’ so it’s refreshing to see a spirited defense.
Over the last decade, extraordinary advances in bioengineering have transformed pharmacology. Sooner or later, the industry and its pilot fish will surely find drugs that can halt colon, breast, and lung cancers, that can curb obesity and thus heart disease, and that will not merely suppress the HIV virus but purge it from the body completely. A new pharmacology of the brain may cure depression and stop the onset of Alzheimer’s. These and other once inscrutable scourges are now—essentially—becoming problems in diligent engineering.
The article tackles the economics, politics and medicine of producing potentially useful drugs on an international scale and argues that only large corporate entities have the resources and the motivation to do so.
Link to article ‘In Defense of Big Pharma’.
The 4th Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival is now online! The host for this edition is the excellent Neurocritic.
If you want to hear Philip K. Dick himself discuss the writing of A Scanner Darkly and describe some of the borderline-paranoid ideas that drove the plot, there’s a three minute video clip on YouTube.
There’s evidence that Dick had reason to be paranoid. It is likely that he was investigated by the authorities during the period of anti-communist McCarthyism because of his anti-government views.
The burglarly he talks about is mystery, and it is not clear whether he was burgled by secret services, drug-using associates or whether he did it himself during a period of psychosis.
The fact that all three are possible candidates says much about Dick’s life.
Link to Philip K. Dick interview clip (via PKD Fans).
UPDATE: NPR Radio’s Talk of the Nation has a fantastic discussion on PKD’s life, work and influences.
Partly motivated by his increasing brushes with psychosis, by the early 1970s, Philip K. Dick was struggling with increasing doubts over the nature of reality and personal identity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, characters with unstable worlds and existential doubts are a familiar focus of his work. Dick was interested in more than just description however, and often used his novels to explore personal theories of existence.
During his research, he discovered the work of Roger Sperry, who had rocked the foundations of neuroscience by discovering that when separated, the hemispheres of the brain seemed, at least to some degree, independently conscious. Worried about his own perception of reality, Dick considered that this could explain his increasing feelings of alienation and self-detachment. These reflections resulted in A Scanner Darkly, a partly autobiographical near-future novel that remains an incisive commentary on society, psychosis and the brain.
Continue reading “Neuropsychology and Psychosis in ‘A Scanner Darkly’”
“You can tell a lot about a person by the way they are.”
I’ve heard this attributed to British comedian Harry Hill, but if anyone can verify exactly where it came from, please let me know!
London’s Hammersmith Hospital want to borrow your brain – for about an hour and a half. They are building a medical database of healthy MRI brain scans to allow more accurate comparisons when assessing people with psychiatric or neurological problems.
They have a had a number of volunteers already, but are still looking for volunteers in all age ranges except females under 30.
So if you’ve never experienced mental or neurological illness, and you’re a male aged between 18 and 90, or a female aged 30 to 90 and want to see what it’s like to get your brain scanned, now’s your chance.
According to the researchers, the MRI scan itself takes about 45 minutes to an hour, and involves no radiation, no injections and doesn’t require you to do any preparation before the scan. You’ll be asked to fill out brief medical and safety questionnaires, so the total visit usually takes about 90 minutes.
If you’re interested, contact the project co-ordinator Dulcie Rodrigues at The Robert Steiner MRI Unit at Hammersmith Hospital. Tel: 020 8383 3298, or email her on dulcie.rodrigues [at] csc.mrc.ac.uk
I watched prime time BBC show How to Improve Your Memory last night and was very impressed.
Some of the Beeb’s past efforts to do popular psychology programmes have been a bit dodgy to say the least. I am still haunted by the concept of ‘brain sex’ invented by the producers of Secrets of the Sexes to describe how ‘male or female’ your brain was. You had to be there.
In contrast, How to Improve Your Memory was a comprehensive journey through memory science and also gave plenty of effective techniques to improve attention and memory.
It also included try-it-yourself exercises and experiments, and almost all were taken from the scientific literature.
Probably because of this, it was a bit dry in places, but this would easily be fixed if you were in front of the TV with the family playing along.
The show also tried to get viewers to reconsider their negative beliefs about their memory. In particular, it tried to normalise forgetting rather than portraying it as the early signs of decline, and demonstrated how memory could be improved even during later-life.
The combination of teaching new mental skills while getting people to modify their self-defeating beliefs is a common technique used in cognitive behaviour therapy to improve performance, and if it works, can also reduce how often people consult doctors for noticeable but normal cognitive changes.
I suspect this may be the BBC doing their bit for the UK government’s appallingly branded but potentially promising ‘happiness campaign‘ (really an employment campaign).
Also doing their bit were the presenters, real-life clinical psychologist Tanya Byron and real-life er, embryologist, Robert Winston.
There are plenty of activities to check out and try on the website if you missed the programme.
Link to How to Improve Your Memory webpage.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Psychiatrist Peter Kramer reviews ‘Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror’ in the Washington Post.
Cognitive Daily on psychedelic sunglasses.
Could ‘ketamine therapy‘ treat depression? asks the Washington Post.
The New York Times reports on the use of the medical lunch as a drug-company marketing tool.
Seed Magazine reports on an experiment using drug induced amnesia to examine the structure of memory.
Can differences in national levels of trust be partly explained by nutrition? Zack Lynch picks up on an interesting research paper that suggests it can.
The Telegraph has a short piece on the nature of consciousness.
Does the amount of email in your inbox say anything about your personality? Let me think…
Maori people may have a higher prevalence of a gene which has been linked to aggression. Restrospectacle analyses the controversy.
Jake Young has more careful analysis on mind and brain gender differences.
PsyBlog springs back into life!
Human the barricades! OpenCyc are unleashing self-aware software onto the internet.
Just found this interesting New York Times article from 2004 about the introduction of the concept of depression in Japan since 1999, a country that had no such concept outside of professional psychiatry and medicine.
In the late 1980’s, Eli Lilly decided against selling Prozac in Japan after market research there revealed virtually no demand for antidepressants. Throughout the 90’s, when Prozac and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.’s, were traveling the strange road from chemical compound to cultural phenomenon in the West, the drugs and the disease alike remained virtually unknown in Japan.
Then, in 1999, a Japanese company, Meiji Seika Kaisha, began selling the S.S.R.I. Depromel. Meiji was among the first users of the phrase kokoro no kaze [common cold of the soul]. The next year, GlaxoSmithKline — maker of the antidepressant Paxil — followed Meiji into the market. Koji Nakagawa, GlaxoSmithKline’s product manager for Paxil, explained: ”When other pharmaceutical companies were giving up on developing antidepressants in Japan, we went ahead for a very simple reason: the successful marketing in the United States and Europe.”
Direct-to-consumer drug advertising is illegal in Japan, so the company relied on educational campaigns targeting mild depression. As Nakagawa put it: ”People didn’t know they were suffering from a disease. We felt it was important to reach out to them.” So the company formulated a tripartite message: ”Depression is a disease that anyone can get. It can be cured by medicine. Early detection is important.”
Link to article ‘Did Antidepressants Depress Japan?’.
Mind Hacks 