Mind Hacks has reached the 1000 link mark on social bookmarking site del.icio.us.
Some of the comments are priceless. A few of my favourites…
“Crazy/beautiful”
“Curiosidades sobre la mente” [¬°Gracias!]
“Mind Hacks is a collection of probes into the moment-by-moment workings of our brain with a view to understanding ourselves a little better and learning a little more, in a very real sense, about what makes us tick.”
“url links (yellow)” [huh?]
“this looks like it might be interesting”
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Tom Lunt asks web visitors to name my brain tumour.
A series of fits, terrors and crying spells hit children in Chechnya and is blamed on mass hysteria.
Psychologist Lauren Slater discusses the common ‘wonder-drug to toxic tablet’ story of new psychotropic medicines in the New York Times.
Woman with a ‘perfect memory’ is investigated by neuroscientists to try and understand her remarkable talents, reports ABC News (abstract of scientific paper here).
Daniel Dennett on taking a scientific approach to understanding religion in a Seed Magazine article, and a piece for American Scientist.
A study finds few consistent tell-tale signs of lying, providing further evidence against this sort of nonsense.
Mixing Memory has a careful analysis of recent claims that people with strong political affilitations show ‘irrationality’ in reacting to opposing pitches.
Impulsive violence linked to gene for monoamine oxidase.
Aliens gave me psychic powers says clinical psychologist.
American Scientist <a href="http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/49580;jsessionid=aaa6J-GFIciRx2Live”>reviews new book “Origins of the Social Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and Child Development” – charting the beginnings of ‘EvoDevo Psych’.
Live Science examines the neuropsychology of numbers, and ‘dyscalculia’ – impairment in the ability to do mathematical operations.
Newsweek has a special edition on the legacy of Sigmund Freud and its relevance for the modern mind and brain sciences.
The issue includes several articles and takes a comprehensive approach, looking at Freud’s early life as a neurologist, and interviews Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel about the influence of Freud on modern psychiatry.
The issue is also accompanied by a podcast interview with Kandel and psychoanalyst Leon Hoffman (section on Freud start’s 18 minutes 40 seconds in).
Research shows dopamine has the same effect on the brain as taking cocaine!
A fantastically backward scientific explanation from the transcript of a TV programme on the neuroscience of love.
If you’re not familiar with why this is so silly, it’s because cocaine has its major effect by altering the dopamine system.
The above explanation is like saying “the economy has the same effect on society as shopping”, rather than “shopping affects society via the economy”.
This page used to hold a picture and glowing recommendation for Off The Mark Cartoons. However, we received a threatening legal notice from them so we’ve withdrawn the picture.
We’ve also withdrawn our recommendation because they seem to think that sending threats for $150,000 dollars, out-of-the-blue, with not so much as an introduction, is an appropriate way to treat their fans.
We think different, so we hope you don’t mind us changing a page in our archives.
For those still desperate for some cartoon action, this XKCD cartoon is wonderful.
Cognitive Daily has just published two fascinating articles on research showing that the angle at which a police interview is filmed can affect how well people judge whether a confession has been forced.
The first article discusses a study which suggests that coerced confessions are much more likely to be picked up by jurors if they are filmed from the side.
The second looks at an extension of the first study, where the experimenters setup and ran a simulated trial (wow!), and found that the camera angle used to film a suspicious confession could influence the jurors’ final verdict.
Interestingly, the researchers used a re-enactment of a real-life interview, from someone who falsely confessed to his girlfriend’s murder under police pressure.
Fascinating work and a great write-up, showing the importance of understanding psychological influences in the process of justice.
Link to ‘Coerced confessions: Is videotaping part of the problem, or part of the solution?’.
Link to ‘Can court procedure mitigate abuse?’.
The winner of the Neurofuture create-a-new-‘neuroword’ contest has been announced as the very worthy…
Neurologism: a word created by prefixing “neuro” to almost any normal word.
…coined by Neil H.
This video is a 1972 documentary about the beginnings of ARPANET, the forerunner to the modern internet, developed by the U.S. Department of Defense
In one scene, a woman is seen typing Chinese symbols into a computer, echoing a beautifully whimsical scene from John Searle‘s famous ‘Chinese room‘ thought experiment.
Searle’s experiment addresses the question of whether information processing would be sufficient to account for consciousness, and includes people in a room, typing Chinese symbols into a computer.
Link to ‘Computer Networks’ video (via BoingBoing).
Sandra Kiume, founder of the Neurofuture blog has kicked off a tongue-in-cheek competition to coin a new ‘neuroword’.
Some of my favourites include the beautifully recursive “neurologism: a word created by prefixing ‘neuro’ to almost any normal word” (by Neil H) and “neuromanticism: the discipline that investigates neural correlates of love” (by Andrea Gaggioli). My own contribution is “neurosceptic: someone who doubts grand media claims made on behalf of neuroscience”.
If you want to enter, you’ll need to be quick. The competition closes shortly.
Link to neurowords competition (via Brain Waves).
The Wikipedia article on eliminative materialism has undergone a radical transformation since the end of January. It is now a clear and comprehensive introduction to one of the most important philosophical approaches to modern cognitive science.
Philosophers, unfortunately, have an image problem. Ask the average person in the street about what philosophers do and you’re likely to be informed that they try and work out whether God, reality or each other exist.
In reality, a significant number are involved in the cognitive sciences and are doing some much needed structural work on the foundations.
Philosophy of mind focuses on understanding and testing the foundations of psychology and cognitive science, and is now an essential partner in the bid to explain human thought.
The majority of theories about the mind make assumptions about the sort of mental states we have. Many of these assumptions are taken from everyday language and culture, and are usually described by ‘common sense’.
For example, the everyday concept of ‘belief’ features regularly in scientific explanations of the mind, despite the fact that this concept is often applied so widely in natural language as to be seemingly contradictory in places.
A school of thought called ‘eliminative materialism’ argues that these ‘common-sense’ concepts are like the ancient four humours theory of medicine – which said that the body and mind are controlled by levels of ‘blood’, ‘black bile’, ‘yellow bile’ and ‘phlegm’.
Although this theory was assumed to be true at the time, modern science hasn’t given us an improved explanation of the ‘four humours’, it has rejected the idea as completely ridiculous.
Eliminative materialism argues that everyday concepts like ‘belief’ and ‘desire’ will suffer the same fate because of their inconsistencies, and that theories that use these concepts are ultimately flawed.
Supporters also point to the lack of clear evidence that these everyday concepts are linked to any consistent pattern of brain activity. This might suggest that these concepts are also not supported by other, similarly intentioned, approaches.
If eliminative materialism is accurate, many past theories will have to be re-thought, and how we test, create and think about the mind and brain will change radically.
It is not clear, however, whether it is accurate, and the recently updated Wikipedia page gives an excellent and evolving account of the arguments.
Link to Wikipedia article on eliminative materialism.
I went to the Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum on Saturday.
They have the left hemisphere of Charles Babbage‘s brain, in a jar, on display.
A online video purports to show two people playing the classic video game Pong using what looks like an an EEG machine to read electrical activity from the brain.
Although I’m no EEG expert, the kit looks authentic and it’s certainly a technically possible feat with the current state of neurofeedback research.
So if anyone can actually verify whether this was genuinely an example of ‘mental pong’, or knows more about the event being filmed, I’d be interested to find out.
Link to video of ‘Berlin Brain Computer Interface’.
Satirical newspaper The Onion hits the mark with an article on PharmAmorin, “a prescription tablet developed by Pfizer to treat chronic distrust of large prescription-drug manufacturers”.
One TV ad, set to debut during next Sunday’s 60 Minutes telecast, shows a woman relaxing in her living room and reading a newspaper headlined “Newest Drug Company Scandal Undermines Public Trust.” The camera zooms into the tangled neural matter of her brain, revealing a sticky black substance and a purplish gas.
The narrator says, “She may show no symptoms, but in her brain, irrational fear and dislike of global pharmaceutical manufacturers is overwhelming her very peace of mind.”
After a brief summary of PharmAmorin’s benefits, the commercial concludes with the woman flying a kite across a sunny green meadow, the Pfizer headquarters gleaming in the background.
Link to article ‘Wonder Drug Inspires Deep, Unwavering Love Of Pharmaceutical Companies’.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Science Central News discusses change blindness (with video demos).
Researchers find that antibiotic D-cycloserine, used to treat tuberculosis, improves recovery rate in psychological treatment for social anxiety.
CBS News has an in-depth article on the science of sexual orientation.
Research suggests that solo exercise may not have the same beneficial effect on the brain as exercising with someone else.
The American Journal of Psychiatry has an article on the potential use of virtual reality to diagnose schizophrenia.
A couple of articles on ADHD:
* The New York Times discusses the potential value of ADHD to ‘knowledge economy’ works.
* USA Today reports on the use of computer games and neurofeedback as a treatment.
Natural sleep is bimodal – two stretches with a brief wakening in the middle – reports Circadiana.
Drugs which lower blood pressure may significantly reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Long term users of marijuana have poorer memory function, finds new study.
Antidepressant drugs may be more effective in treating older people, suggest new research.
I love Cortex. I’m not referring to my brain (although I do think very highly of it – “my second favourite organ” to quote Woody Allen) but to the neuropsychology journal which has been around since 1965.
Although the website doesn’t work properly in Firefox, and all the links seem to open as new windows, these are forgivable foibles (and hopefully fixable ones), as all Cortex papers are published online as open-access articles.
As well as publishing original cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology research, Cortex includes articles on the history and philosophy of mind and brain science.
Like this one on the history of the concept of ‘inner speech’ and its relationship to the early discoveries in aphasia – the dysfunction of language or speech after brain injury.
There’s plenty more gems in the archive.
Link to Cortex Online.
Wired has some brief coverage of the USA Memory Championship, which was won by a journalist who entered as research for a book!
This was Foer’s first time competing, but he’d covered it as a freelance science journalist, he said. This year, he decided to experience things from the inside as research for a book he‚Äôs writing on memory, and was shocked at the results.
“I really did not expect to win,” Foer said. “I thought maybe I‚Äôd crack the top five.”
He practiced for the competition starting in July, and his techniques echoed those used by other contestants. He’d spend five to 10 minutes several times a week trying to memorize the order of playing cards in a deck. He also mentally linked integers from 1 to 100 with images and letters to help in remembering lists of numbers. Thirteen, for example, is his girlfriend, he said.
Link to ‘Flexing Brains: Feats of Memory’.
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