vaughanbell

Fodor vs Pinker scrap continues

Philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker are continuing their tussle over the structure of the mind in a recently published exchange.

Pinker wrote a book in 1999 entitled ‘How the Mind Works‘ which argues that the mind can be understood as a computational or information processing device. This, he says, consists mostly of independent but co-operating mental modules that can be inherited and selected for by evolution. An approach strongly linked to the new discipline of evolutionary psychology.

Fodor dismissed most of these ideas in 2000 with a book entitled ‘The Mind Doesn’t Work that Way‘ and the two have carried on their dispute in a recent edition of the journal Mind and Language.

Pinker argues his latest case in an article entitled ‘So How Does the Mind Work?’.

The subsequent commentaries get quite lively with Fodor starting with “If you really must have a defense mechanism, I recommend denial. It’s special charm is that it applies to itself, so if it doesn‚Äôt work, you can deny that too.”

Earning the comeback from Pinker “This kind of language can be paraphrased as, ‘I really don’t have an argument here, but if I dismiss the opposition with enough confidence, perhaps readers will assume that I’m right'”.

Meow!

Link to PDF of Pinker’s article ‘So How Does the Mind Work?’.
Wikipedia entries for Jerry Fodor and Stephen Pinker.

An unusual case of a shrinking brain

A gentleman from Utah has a condition which is baffling brain scientists. The left side of his brain is shrinking, although the right-hand side seems fine.

He is currently being investigated by neurologists at the University of Utah, Brain Institute.

His brain scan is shown in the picture on the left.

NB: brain scans done by radiologists have left and right reversed, as they label their scans as if they were looking at the patient as they lie on their backs in the scanner, so the patient’s left is on the viewer’s right.

Link to news story from ksl.com
Link to coverage from Daily Times.

Love looks not with the eyes…

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind” says Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, perhaps explaining the strange behaviour of those in love.

Love has long been linked to madness, and it’s easy to see why. People in love tend to hold unlikely and overly positive beliefs about their lovers, show signs of mania, obsessional thinking and experience catastrophic lows when things go wrong.

In a new book, psychologist Frank Tallis argues that love and lovesickness should be considered more seriously by psychologists and neuroscientists, and that lovesickness can trigger identifiable symptoms of mental illness in some people.

In fact, Dr Tallis is continuing a long tradition of medical enquiry into lovesickness which has been around since the Ancient Greeks (as the history of erotomania shows) although Jacques Ferrand’s 1623 A Treatise on Lovesickness probably stands as one of the greatest works in this area (summary, amazon entry with excerpts).

To say that “The course of true love never did run smooth” would be an understatement though, especially if you’re investigating love and attraction.

Research has shown that, for some, making love causes amnesia. Luckily though, people are disproportionately more likely to marry others whose names resemble their own, perhaps making the post-coital name guessing a little easier. It seems Cupid has a sense of humour if nothing else.

Link to BBC site on the science of love.
Link to Frank Tallis’ site with a sample chapter of his book.

Male faces with feminine features more attractive

Recently released results from Dr Tony Little and his team, suggest that males with more feminine features are more widely attractive to women. Women who consider themselves highly attractive however, are more likely to go for classically masculine faces.

Dr Little is interested in identifying the features of attractiveness and explaining why we might have evolved to recognise and seek-out beauty.

The link might be explained by the fact that some physically attractive features are linked to levels of hormones (such as testosterone) that are present during development. These are also known to have an influence on fertility and coupling behaviour.

The researchers based their findings on data gathered from staff and students at the University of Liverpool, but have an online lab where you can take part in similar experiments.

Link to the research team’s online lab.
Link to BBC News story on the research findings.

Fortean Times article on Outsider Art

The Fortean Times have just put a fantastic article online about Outsider Art.

Although the term ‘Outsider Art’ is used to describe artists from a number of different backgrounds, the art of people who have been declared insane or mentally ill is especially prominent.

The work can often be intricate, intense, disturbing and delightful, sometimes all at the same time, and is largely produced by people with no formal training or contact with the mainstream art world.

The above image is part of Adolf W√∂lfli’s picture ‘Irren-Anstalt Band-Hain’.

Link to Fortean Times article on Outsider Art.
Link to some Outsider artists on wikipedia.org

2005-02-11 Spike activity

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

Previously it was known that higher IQ predicts longer life, but it was not known exactly why. A recent study suggests that faster reaction times, which are known to be linked to higher IQ, may be one of the key factors.

Recent research suggests that some aspects of visual function actually improve with age, particularly some motion perception skills (story 1, story 2).

The ability to make sense of ‘wholes’ rather than ‘parts’ (and vice versa) seems to rely on areas on the opposite sides of the brain in right and left handers.

An in-depth article from this month’s Scientific American on the neuroscience of memory is available online.

Bad news for smokers: Tobacco smoking can cause memory and cognitive impairment in adolescents, and smoking marijuana can have long-term effects on the brain’s blood flow.

A brain scanning study finds that when information is stored, activity in parts of the brain can predict whether it will be recalled accurately or form a false memory.

Coma and the tyranny of mental life

A research team led by neurologist Nicholas Schiff has recently published a brain scanning study on two patients who may show evidence of an internal mental life, despite being in a coma-like “minimally conscious state”.

MCS usually occurs after severe brain damage and is a condition where patients seem to be unconscious, but show intermittent awareness of the self or the environment, although they are not able to communicate or maintain this awareness for pronlonged periods of time.

It is thought to be ‘less severe’ than coma, where patients are entirely unresposive, or persistent vegetative state, where patients are unconscious but may show simple automatic functions such as the sleep-wake cycle or eye-tracking.

Schiff’s study found that an area of the temporal lobe, known to be involved in language comprehension, was activated when the two unconscious patients were played recordings of a friend or relative recounting a familiar event.

These responses were remarkably similar to the responses recorded from healthy participants used as controls. This surprised the researchers, who expected far less brain activity in the MCS patients.

One further result they describe as “haunting” was finding activity in the patients’ occipital lobe. The researchers speculate that activity in these areas may reflect memories and mental images triggered by the recordings and the sound of their family member’s voice.

Little is known about the functioning of the brain during these coma-like or miminally conscious states, and medical science is often surprised by the recovery of function even after prolonged periods of unconsciousness.

Terry Wallis, the subject of a recent Channel 4 documentary, regained consciousness after a record 19 years in a coma.

Link to abstract of Schiff study.
Link to news story about the study from Yahoo News.
Link to information on Terry Wallis, his recovery and the documentary about him (“The Man Who Slept for 19 Years”).

2005-02-04 Spike activity

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

An article on Alexander Shulgin chemist and author of PiHKAL, a book about the chemistry, pharmacology and experience of psychedelic drugs.

Scientists unlock the secrets of sleep and elsewhere report that listening to relaxing music before going to bed can help with sleep problems.

When we make slips of the tongue it may be our language skills which are at fault rather than our intentions, suggests recent research which showed that people often correctly look at an object they incorrectly name.

The large number of young people involved in car crashes may be partly explained by the frontal cortex not being fully mature until the mid twenties. This area of the brain is involved in a number of driving-relevant skills, such as attention, multi-tasking and decision making.

Alan Turing and the lusty robots

A news story in the online edition of the Guardian is reporting that a Korean professor has developed ‘artificial chromosomes’ that will allow robots to fell ‘lusty’ and have their own emotions and personality.

It sounds like some good PR for what seems to be nothing more than a genetic algorithm approach to artificial intelligence. Certainly interesting, but not new and hardly likely to lead to machine lust or emotion.

Nevertheless, Professor Kim Jong-Hwan would not be the first computer scientist to get a little overexecited about the possibilities of AI.

A certain Alan Turing suggested his ‘mechanical brain’ might eventually produce some fairly unusual things way back in 1949…

Continue reading “Alan Turing and the lusty robots”

Vive la difference

A news story about a recent meeting on bioethics in neuroscience reports that brain abnormalities are, well, not that abnormal:

Judy Illes, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, said that she and others have found that 18 percent of healthy volunteers had some kind of brain anamoly. While only 2 percent to 8 percent have required clinical follow-up, these incidental findings have raised concerns among scientists who are using the newest technology to unravel the mysteries of the brain.

Ethical issues in neuroscience and neuroimaging research (often called ‘neuroethics’) are becoming increasingly important as previously expensive and exclusive scientific tools (such as fMRI) are becoming widely used.

One important issue of debate is the ethics of informing someone if a brain abnormality is detected, when they have volunteered to take part in a research study as a healthy participant.

Link to story from newsday.com
Link to recent article on neuroethics from Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Ivan Noble, dies at 37

BBC science writer Ivan Noble, who has been charting his battle with neurological illness since being diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour in 2002, died yesterday.

His online diary gathered thousands of readers as he recorded an ongoing and moving account of the personal, medical and emotional aspects of living with brain cancer.

The diary documented a personal journey not often reflected in the scientific and medical literature.

Thanks Ivan.

Link to announcement on BBC News.
Link to tribute and interview from BBC News.

People hacking for women

A research team led by Simon Chu from the University of Central Lancashire have found that a woman’s height can significantly effect how they are perceived by others.

The researchers found that taller women are perceived by both men and women as more intelligent, assertive, independent, ambitious, richer and more successful, regardless of how the person really is.

In contrast, shorter women are perceived as more considerate and nurturing, but only by men.

Unfortunately, the scientific paper isn’t out yet, as it would be interesting to calculate the strength of the effect per inch or centimetre lost or gained.

However, women should be able to encourage people to form particular first impressions by influencing the height they are perceived to be, either by the use of heels, meeting on uneven surfaces, or even carefully selecting the surrounding environment to fool our brain’s size-estimation process.

This process is known as size constancy and allows us to understand that objects tend not to expand when they come towards us, even though they take up more room on our retina.

Size constancy can be easily fooled though, as the Ames room demonstrates, although standing next to shorter people (to seem taller) or taller people (to seem shorter) is likely to have some effect, as the system partly works by relative comparisons.

Link to summary of research via independent.co.uk

The Noonday Demon

Andrew Solomon, author of the award winning book on depression, ‘The Noonday Demon‘, is interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Taking A Stand‘.

Solomon wrote the book after suffering from an intense clinical depression and managed to convey not only his own personal experiences, but much of the science and history of the disorder as well.

Approaches to depression vary, but Solomon believes that both medication and psychotherapy are worthwhile approaches.

He occupies the middle ground between Lewis Wolpert, the Nobel Prize winning biologist who wrote of his own depression in the book Malignant Sadness, and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist William Styron who recounted his experiences in Darkness Visible.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wolpert tends towards an almost exclusively biological view of depression and treatment with anti-depressants, whereas Styron is less convinced by the physical explanations and medical treatments. Solomon however, maintains a strong belief in the biological reality of depression, but does not suggest that life events and emotional turmoil are unimportant either as a cause or a focus for treatment.

Either way, it’s an important debate which is shaping both how society understands depression and the most appropriate forms of care for people with mental illness.

All three books come highly recommended and Solomon is always worth listening to, as he is an articulate and knowledgable part of an ongoing discussion.

Link to ‘Taking a Stand’ webpage and audio archive (looks like the audio will be available until Tue 1st Feb)

2005-01-28 Spike activity

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

A study finds significant differences in the structure of male and female brains related to IQ. However, an insightful article from the NYT seems to cut through a lot of the crap and looks at the implications and (mis)interpretation of such findings in the age old debate about male-female psychological differences.

‘Bad driving’ may be related to hormones. Best read with the previous link in mind.

Developments in ‘gene chip‘ technology look likely to push forward the understanding of genetic influences on brain development.

Recent brain scanning work has examined the brain functions responsible for looking someone in the eye. Studying this simple action may result in a better understanding of how volutary actions are controlled by the brain.

More research on the contentious area of the genetic contribution to homosexuality has just been published. Don’t be fooled by the title of the article though. Anything which claims that the “gene(s) for x have been identified”, where x is a complex behaviour, is almost certainly marketing or bad journalism rather than informed scientific conclusion.

New Scientist on sensation

The 29th September issue of New Scientist is a particularly good one if you’re interested in the mind and brain.

It has a number of articles on sensation and the senses, and particularly challenges the idea that there are five ‘classical’ senses. Recent research suggests this may be a fairly artificial division, and more subtle distinctions, as well as cross-overs are common.

Unfortunately, New Scientist have been steadily making less and less of their content freely accessible, but there is an outline of the issue at the link below.

Nevertheless, it’s well worth a read, either if you grab a copy at the newsagents or pop into your local library for a browse.

Link to contents for 29th September issue of New Scientist.

UPDATE: One of the articles from the current edition (“The art of seeing without sight”) has appeared online.

Blind people can use the visual cortex to locate sounds

A study just published in the open access journal PLoS Biology has reported that blind people might be able to use parts of the brain for locating sounds that sighted people normally use for vision.

Fr√©d√©ric Gougoux and colleagues asked participants who had been blind from early life and who had previously demonstrated superior listening skills to try and judge the source of certain sounds while they were being brain scanned.

Unlike the normally-sighted participants, they showed activity in the occipital lobe, an area of the brain usually dedicated to processing visual information.

This suggests the brain of the blind participants had reorganised, or had organised differently, demonstrating how the brain can alter its structure depending on the demands placed on it.

This is a process known as neural plasticity and is known to be important in both early brain development and ongoing adult learning.

In fact, this isn’t the first study to show that the brain of blind people might be organised differently. Research published in 1993 showed that braile reading abilities can be impaired by using magnetic stimulation to disrupt the activity of the occipital lobe.

The researchers suggested that this area had been recruited for touch and language skills, rather than vision.

Synopsis or full text from PLoS Biology.
Link to story on nature.com.