Author: vaughanbell

ABC Radio’s All in the Mind starts a four part series today on the emotional brain, with the first in the series examining the complexity of sexual desire.

Psychologists Dylan Evans and Doris McIlwain discuss whether we have one sex drive or many, and how it influences and gets tangled up with our other thoughts, desires and behaviour.

Despite the portrayal in some of the media, what emerges is that sexual desire is a rich and complex human motivator.

mp3 or realaudio or programme audio.
Link to transcript.

The New York Times has an article on the increasing interest in hypnosis among cognitive neuroscientists, who are trying to understanding how suggestion and belief can affect basic mental processing.

The article describes some interesting recent work on hypnosis and perception, but omits some of the most fascinating experiments in this area.

A study published in 2003 involved hypnotising participants to simulate experiences of external control, akin to experiences sometimes found in psychosis, to discover whether similar brain areas might be involved in the psychotic and non-psychotic experiences.

Another study, published in the same year, involved hypnotising participants so they thought they were paralysed, in an attempt to better understand ‘hysterical’ paralysis, sometimes known as conversion disorder – a condition where paralysis is thought to occur due to psychological trauma rather than physical damage.

In these cases, hypnotised, non-hypnotised or ‘pretending’ participants were were asked to conduct actions while being brain-scanned, to compare and contrast active brain areas.

Interestingly, these two studies suggested that quite different brain networks were involved in producing the experiences, although both activated the cerebellum, a complex area, known to be involved in movement, but still largely mysterious.

Link to article ‘This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis’.

As a follow up to our previous post on the history of the now discarded practice of lobotomy, there’s been quite a bit of recent interest in the science and ethics of modern-day brain surgery in treating mental illness, a practice often known as ‘psychosurgery’.

BBC Radio 4 aired a one-off documentary called Brain Surgery to Cure the Mind, that discussed its history, practise and effects, including the use of ‘deep brain stimulation or DBS.

DBS involves implanting an electrode to increase or decrease activation in a certain brain area. It was pioneered for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease but early results suggest it may be useful in treating severe clinical depression. One advantage of DBS over other types of neurosurgery is that it is reversible.

An alternative type of brain surgery, used in both severe psychiatric illness and Parkinson’s disease, is to sever or remove a small area of brain thought to be involved in the causing the distress or impairment.

This latter form is particularly controversial, and the British Journal of Psychiatry has published a debate entitled ‘Should neurosurgery for mental disorder be allowed to die out?’.

A recent review of the scientific literature, based on psychiatric neurosurgery in Scotland details the evidence for the effectiveness of such treatments, what the most common forms of brain surgery involve, and the likely physical and cognitive risks.

Link to BBC ‘Brain Surgery to Cure the Mind’ (with audio).
Link to debate ‘Should neurosurgery for mental disorder be allowed to die out?’.
Link to article ‘Status of neurosurgery for mental disorder in Scotland’.

ABC Radio’s All in the Mind has a special on epilepsy, examining the provision for epilepsy care in South Africa, and the link between altered states of consciousness and epileptic seizures.

The programme interviews Professor Bryan Kies from Groote Schuur Hospital in South Africa, and discusses the difficulties with dealing with epilepsy without access to newer, but more expensive medications, and the influence on traditional beliefs and how people with epilepsy are viewed.

Professor Michael Trimble, from the Insititue of Neurology in London discusses unusual experiences and altered states linked to epilepsy. Trimble has written extensively on the neuropsychiatry of epilepsy, particularly psychosis linked to epilepsy.

mp3 of realaudio of programme audio.
Link to transcript.
Learn to deal with an epileptic seizure.

Public radio station NPR has an interview with Howard Dully, who received a lobotomy when he was only 12 years old from controversial psychosurgery champion Walter Freeman.

Dully is shown on the left, holding one of Freeman’s operating tools that was used to punch through the bone just behind the eyes and sever the connections to the frontal lobes.

Freeman (pictured right) was a complex character, as previously reported on Mind Hacks, who performed hundreds of lobotomies during his career.

Although psychosurgery is still performed to treat seemingly untreatable mental disorder, its use is now rare, unlike when it was championed for almost all forms of mental distress. It is still as controversial now as it was when it was in its heyday, however.

The inventor of the procedure, Egas Moniz, won a Nobel Prize for his work, now much to the embarrassment of many in the scientific community. This was only a few years before he was shot and paralysed by one of his ex-patients who resented Moniz’s work.

The website Lobotomy.info has a wealth of information about the procedure and its originators, including an excellent history entitled “Adventures with an Ice Pick“.

Link to webpage on NPR programme “My Lobotomy” (via BoingBoing).
mp3 of programme audio.
Link to lobotomy.info

A recently reported brain-scanning study has found evidence that sustained meditation alters the physical structure of the brain by increasing the thickness of the grey matter.

The researchers, led by neuroscientist Sarah Lazar, scanned the brains of 20 people with long-term experience of meditation, and compared them with 20 other, non-meditating people.

Brain regions associated with attention, sensation, perception and monitoring the body’s internal state were thicker in meditation participants than in the comparison group.

There is now increasing evidence – in line with a 2000 study, that reported that London Taxi drivers may have a larger hippocampus (an area of the brain known to be crucial for navigation), that mental practice may alter the brain’s structure on a relatively large scale.

Update: Grabbed from the comments page… Some cautionary words on interpreting ’cause’ from this sort of study (Thanks ‘Coffee Mug’!):

The only way to say that meditation can alter the structure of the brain would be to do a longitudinal study following people who hadn’t chosen to meditate prior to the study. Otherwise you run into the same problem as you did with the London cabbie study. Correlation is not causation. People born with bigger hippocampi might self-select as cab-drivers. People with bigger ‘attention centers’ might be more predisposed to get into meditation.

Link to write-up from LiveScience.
Link to scientific paper abstract.