Author: vaughanbell

And I’m telling you you’re dead

Two delusional patients who believed that friends and relatives had died, despite them being around to prove otherwise, are described in an amazing 2005 journal article from the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

Although the Cotard delusion is well studied in psychiatry, where patients believe themselves to be dead, the report names the novel belief that another living person has died ‘Odysseus Syndrome’ – after the Greek legend where Penelope continued to believe that Odysseus had died, even after returning home from battle.

Both case studies are quite spectacular:

An 81-year-old lady presented to psychiatric services for the first time with sudden onset of ideas that her grandson had developed grossly swollen legs, inflammation of the brain, lethargy and extreme tiredness after infection by a fly which had picked up radioactive waste in the English Channel. Despite speaking to him over the telephone, she believed that he had died.

She believed that he had no stomach or internal organs, that his eyes had been removed and replaced with glass eyes, that his brain had died and been replaced by a clock and that he had expanded to become grossly obese. She described hallucinations of police providing commentary on his actions, but no other first rank symptoms of schizophrenia. Her mood was subjectively depressed but this clearly post-dated the onset of her delusions.

The lady in question had the beliefs for five years by the time of the report, although seemed to be getting on with life despite her mortality-related convictions.

The second case describes a lady with delusions that are reported as being similarly unshakeable.

A 73-year-old lady with a 40 year history of paranoid schizophrenia presented with grossly elated mood, over-activity, over-talkativeness, distractibility and grandiose beliefs. She sought help to prevent ‘experimentation’ on her lover’s health in the flat next door. She maintained he had developed ‘The Pox’ leading to his limbs rotting away, his heart being replaced by a machine and his brain requiring removal.

She believed nonetheless that he could send messages to her via television to which she could respond by arranging candles in a certain fashion. She was observed to be hallucinating to his voice. She maintained that he had died but come back to live in her mattress in a grossly distorted form, being very much larger than he had been in real life.

 

Link to DOI entry for journal article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

2011-01-14 Spike activity

A somewhat belated collection of quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

All in the Mind host Natasha Mitchell has an insightful article on the perils of treating psychological distress after disasters in light of the devastation from the Australian floods.

Bullshit Blue Monday came and went – and this year was being used to promote a £40-60 an hour internet counselling service. Ironically, it has become one of my worst days of the year.

The New York Times covers an interesting project on the obsession with ‘stuff‘ and the homes and possessions of people with agoraphobia.

What if the very irrationality of psychoanalysis is its strength? One of many ace posts on Neuroskeptic this week.

Edge asks it’s annual question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? 163 of the great and good give their answers.

Scientific American asks whether makeup is a hack for our evolved perception of skin colour and blushing. Baby, that red lipstick is really altering my perceptual heuristics.

There’s a stiff defence of evolutionary psychology over at The EP Blog sparked by bad tempered criticism of a recent Slate article on rape and evolution.

Newsweek has a piece on hacking intelligence, optimising the brain and boosting smarts. Can you build a better brain?

Our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. In The News finds an inspiring speech from Martin Luther King to psychologists.

Read Write Web covers a new Pew study finding that the web is destroying social life as we kn… no wait, sorry, that web users are more socially involved that non-users.

How often are doctors tempted to prescribe what patients want, rather than what’s in the medical guidelines? Dan Ariely’s Irrationally Yours blog considers the psychology of patient power.

Science has a brief study on how writing about testing worries boosts exam performance in the classroom. ‘I must not wet myself during the test, I must not wet myself during…’

What makes revenge sweet? asks the BPS Research Digest.

Seed Magazine has a powerful piece arguing that for social science to deal with humanity’s most pressing problems, it must be restructured from the ground up.

Teaching style is key to promoting discovery in children finds an eye-opening study covered by the mighty Not Exactly Rocket Science

The Huffington Post has video of a 50s housewife tripping on LSD during an early research project.

Vintage Schneider Brain Wave Synchronizer Model MD-5. For Sale – on EBay. An awesome find from The Neurocritic.

The real real thing

The can on the left is an energy drink that gets its kick from real coca leaves.

It’s called Coca Sek and was created by the indigenous Páez people of Colombia, partly in protest at the association between their traditional plant and the cocaine trade, which makes the illicit drug by processing the leaves.

The indigenous people of South American have used coca for thousands of years for its mild stimulant effects. Coca Cola originally used coca leaf extract for its kick, hence the name, but now apparently only uses ‘denatured’ leaves for flavouring.

It has only been relatively recently that the plant has been of interest to narcotraffickers, leading to the stigmatisation of the plant and its use to fund violence.

In 2005, the Páez people decided they would make a series line of home products based on coca, partly as a form of income and partly as a way of rehabilitating the image of their sacred plant.

They launched the drink to much fanfare, including coverage by the LA Times, only for the Colombian government to pressure the major supermarkets to take it off their shelves in 2007 because of its association with drugs.

However, the product lines, including energy drinks and tea bags, are still available in market stalls and health food shops around the capital.
 

Link to somewhat sparse Wikipedia page on the drink.

A violent reaction to sad news

I’ve written article for Slate about the Arizona shooting and why many are too quick to use “mental illness” as a catch-all explanation for violence.

I suspect we’re going to hear a great deal more about the issue in the coming weeks, and not all of it positive or well-informed.

This article looks at some of the relevant scientific evidence and some of the misconceptions that invariably arise when such tragic circumstances make headlines.

Shortly after Jared Lee Loughner had been identified as the alleged shooter of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, online sleuths turned up pages of rambling text and videos he had created. A wave of amateur diagnoses soon followed, most of which concluded that Loughner was not so much a political extremist as a man suffering from “paranoid schizophrenia.”

For many, the investigation will stop there. No need to explore personal motives, out-of-control grievances or distorted political anger. The mere mention of mental illness is explanation enough. This presumed link between psychiatric disorders and violence has become so entrenched in the public consciousness that the entire weight of the medical evidence is unable to shift it. Severe mental illness, on its own, is not an explanation for violence, but don’t expect to hear that from the media in the coming weeks.

 

Link to Slate article ‘Crazy Talk’.

2011-01-07 Spike activity

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

Seed Magazine has a fascinating article on whether fonts affect learning that also tackles the psychology of comic sans.

Antidepressants still don’t work in mild depression. The mighty Neuroskeptic covers a study confirming what the makers of Prozac forgot to remember.

Slate has a fantastic piece on how ranking grad school is like validating mental illness: the mathematics of narcissism.

What causes us to ‘forget’ the first few years of life? The Child in Time blog has a fascinating counter-intuitive piece on brain development and ‘childhood amnesia‘.

The Independent has the most extensive article to date on the UK Government’s behavioural economics-inspired ‘Nudge‘ unit.

Why are the letters “z” and “x” so popular in drug names? The Neurocritic tackles the curious branding decision.

The New York Times has a piece on the quest for the brain’s ‘connectome‘ and the science behind the massive project.

The smell of female tears affects male sexual behaviour. Many mainstream outlets were clearly tripping when they covered this study with all sorts of odd results. In contrast, Not Exactly Rocket causes no weeping with its great coverage.

Some excellent discussion of a brilliant but sadly locked article on slipping into psychosis from Neuroanthropology.

CNN covers the “elaborate fraud” of Wakefield’s original vaccine and autism case series. Also see the key article in this week’s BMJ.

More Friends on Facebook Does NOT Equal a Larger Amygdala. Thank you Neurocritic for some good sense following some more seasonal pop media craziness.

Time covers the latest development in the on-again off-again ‘serotonin transporter gene and risk for depression‘ saga. Science, you fickle mistress.

Does solitary confinement in prison damage mental health? In the News looks at the latest evidence in an ongoing debate.

Scientific American has an excellent piece on slipping the ‘cognitive straitjacket’ of psychiatric diagnosis and the awkward facts of genetics.

The transformational impact of children. Evidence Based Mummy covers the science of how children change our lives.

Time on the science of the awkward           silence.

Young women, hire a practice baby. Wonderland has an amazing article on how prospective mothers were lent real live babies for practice.

A timeline of psychoanalysis. Advances in the History of Psychology discusses a new 7-foot long book and has a video by the authors.

The Philosopher’s Magazine series on the ‘best ideas of the century’ has a justifiably snarky article on taking out the neurotrash.

Why are we less willing to help the victims of man-made disaster? The BPS Research Digest.

The New York Times covers shit hitting the scientific fan in light of the recent positive parapsychology study.

The myth of the tongue map

I have just discovered Wikipedia’s page on a ‘List of common misconceptions’ that includes, among many other wonders, a great piece about the myth of the tongue taste map.

Different tastes can be detected on all parts of the tongue by taste buds, with slightly increased sensitivities in different locations depending on the person, contrary to the popular belief that specific tastes only correspond to specific mapped sites on the tongue.

The original tongue map was based on a mistranslation of a 1901 German thesis by Boring (an eminent psychologist at Harvard). In addition, there are not 4 but 5 primary tastes. In addition to bitter, sour, salty, and sweet, humans have taste receptors for umami, which is a savory or meaty taste.

You can see the referenced entry here and there’s much more joy on the complete page of misconceptions.
 

UPDATE: Thanks to commentors Steve and Vinnie for pointing me in the direction of the latest XKCD comic that mentions the ‘common misconceptions’ page. Not my source but a wonderful reference point!

 

Link to Wikipedia ‘List of common misconceptions’.

Science and the legal high

Nature News has an article by a psychopharmacologist whose experimental drugs appeared on the street – with fatal consequences in some cases – even though he’d only mentioned them in initial scientific studies.

The scientist is David Nichols who was working on drugs chemically related to MDMA or ‘Ecstasy’. However, the compounds he created were being reported for the first time and had never been tested in humans.

A few weeks ago, a colleague sent me a link to an article in the Wall Street Journal. It described a “laboratory-adept European entrepreneur” and his chief chemist, who were mining the scientific literature to find ideas for new designer drugs — dubbed legal highs. I was particularly disturbed to see my name in the article, and that I had “been especially valuable” to their cause. I subsequently received e-mails saying I should stop my research, and that I was an embarrassment to my university.

I have never considered my research to be dangerous, and in fact hoped one day to develop medicines to help people. I have worked for nearly four decades synthesizing and studying drugs that might improve the human condition. One type is designed to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and it works superbly in monkey models of the disease. That same research seeks drugs to improve memory and cognition in patients who have schizophrenia, one of the most devastating human conditions. The other substances I work on are psychedelic agents such as LSD and mescaline. It’s in that latter area of research that I have published papers about numerous molecules that probably have psychoactive properties in humans. It seems that many of these are now being manufactured and sold as ‘legal highs’.

The article that Nichols refers to is itself both worrying and fascinating as it charts how an out-of-work businessman decided to go into the legal high business and now scours the scientific literature for new compounds to try.

They end up as legal highs, presumably with the minimum of safety testing, and Nichols notes that some deaths have occurred as a result of people taking compounds he never intended to be given to humans.

I recommend both articles as they give an insight into the legal high business from two very different perspectives.
 

Link to NN ‘Legal highs: dark side of medicinal chemistry’ (via @mocost)
Link to WSJ In Quest for ‘Legal High,’ Chemists Outfox Law.

The new year in sex and science

Dr Petra has her traditional review of the year in sex and sex reporting and makes her predictions for the coming year.

You probably won’t find a better summary of the sex and psychology highlights from 2010, with both the highs and lows of how the media managed their restless desires.

If you read nothing else, don’t miss this paragraph, because it’s not often that sex shops, the African country of Burkina Faso, a dodgy clitoris adoption project and a flying saucer cult get mentioned in the same breath:

April also saw the bizarre case of Clitoraid unfold. What began as a request via twitter and facebook to ‘adopt a clitoris’ soon was a more complex case involving a cult, unclear activities in Burkina Faso, and the support of sex educators and a sex store. A summary of the story can be found here, here and here. Many questions about Clitoraid still remain unanswered, and have caused rifts between sex educators, activists and health/development practitioners. This bad feeling was distressing, particularly since many involved were highly respected within the field of sex education and activism – and because basic respectful approaches to international practice were ignored.

Also don’t miss Dr Petra’s look back at 2010’s predictions and her look forward to what 2011 might hold for the world of sex and science.

And if you’re made of stronger stuff than me, you might even be able to recommend the article without making the obvious ‘crystal balls’ joke.
 

Link to ‘best and worse science and sex stories 2010’
Link to ‘sex and relationship predictions for 2011’

Words about The Scream

January’s British Journal of Psychiatry has another short article in its fantastic ‘100 words’ series, this time on Edvard Munch’s classic painting ‘The Scream‘.

The image is perhaps one of the most iconic artworks of the 20th century and has spurned as many parodies and light-hearted take offs as straight-up tributes.

However, the BJP piece manages to capture the emotional essence of the original:

Edvard Munch is best known for The Scream, 1893, an image endlessly reproduced in the media to depict mental anguish. Explanations of the meaning behind the image abound, mainly focusing on an outpouring of emotion in response to suffering. Munch’s own explanation is revealed in his diaries, which recall the melancholy of a walk along a bridge with friends. Trembling in fear at the fiery sunset, he sensed ‘how an infinite scream was going through the whole of nature’. This dehumanised figure, into which viewers project their own neuroses, is not screaming but blocking out the scream of its existence.

 

Link to BJP on ‘The Scream – 100 words’.

The war of the manual of mental illness

Wired covers the battle raging over the next version of the ‘manual of mental illness’ – the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5.

The piece discusses how the chief editors of two previous version of the manual, Robert Spitzer and Allen Frances – who edited the DSM-III and DSM-IV, have heavily criticised the proposed new manual for lack of transparency in development (non-disclosure agreements are required) and for ever-widening categories.

We’ve covered the (surprisingly personal ) battle on a couple of occasions but the Wired piece does a great job of getting into the nitty gritty of the arguments.

What the battle over DSM-5 should make clear to all of us—professional and layman alike—is that psychiatric diagnosis will probably always be laden with uncertainty, that the labels doctors give us for our suffering will forever be at least as much the product of negotiations around a conference table as investigations at a lab bench. Regier and Scully are more than willing to acknowledge this.

As Scully puts it, “The DSM will always be provisional; that’s the best we can do.” Regier, for his part, says, “The DSM is not biblical. It’s not on stone tablets.” The real problem is that insurers, juries, and (yes) patients aren’t ready to accept this fact. Nor are psychiatrists ready to lose the authority they derive from seeming to possess scientific certainty about the diseases they treat. After all, the DSM didn’t save the profession, and become a best seller in the bargain, by claiming to be only provisional.

My only gripe with the article is it seems a little star-struck by the idea that mental illness could be validated or even wholly defined by reference to neuroscience, which is a huge category error.

How would we know which aspects of neuroscience to investigate? Clearly, the ones associated with distress and impairment – mental and behavioural concepts that can’t be completely substituted by facts about the function of neurons and neurotransmitters.

That’s not to say that neuroscience isn’t important, essential even, but we can’t define disability purely on a biological basis.

It would be like trying to define poverty purely on how much money you had, without reference to quality of life. We need to know what different amounts of money can do for the people in their real-life situations. Earning $5 a day is not the same in New York and Papua New Guinea.

Not even physical medicine pretends to have completely objective diagnoses, as, by definition, a disorder is defined by the impact it has.

An infectious disease is not solely defined by whether we have certain bacteria or not. First, it must be established that those bacteria cause us problems.

The urge to try and define all mental illnesses in terms of neuroscience is, ironically, more an emotional reaction to criticisms about psychiatry’s vagueness than an achievable scientific aim.
 

Link to article ‘Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness’.

Change of pace

Mind Hacks posts may be a little irregular in the future as I’ve just moved location and job. I’ve left the wonderful city of Medellín and am now living in Colombia’s impressive capital, Bogotá.

I’ve also started working as a psychologist for Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders if you’re American) and, as you might expect, the pace of work is a little more intense and unpredictable than usual – not least because I will be spending quite a bit of time ‘on the road’ to work with some of the many MSF projects in the rather more troubled areas of the country.

In fact, I hear that some of areas we work in are so badly affected that they don’t even have Twitter, so blogging is likely to be a bit restricted at times.

However, Tom and I are mulling over some interesting new plans and we’ll still both be posting when in internet enabled zones, but you might see a change of pace.

This also seems a great opportunity to thank the psychologists and psychiatrists I had the pleasure of working with in Medellín, especially from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Antioquia, from whom I learnt a great deal and with whom I had some incredibly enjoyable times.

Muchas gracias a todos!

Road kill for hot lady drivers

In 1960, the American Journal of Psychiatry reported on “an unusual perversion”, in a case of a man with “the desire to be injured by an automobile operated by a woman.”

The patient, a man in his late twenties, reported a periodic desire to be injured by a woman operating an automobile. This wish, present since adolescence, he had by dint of great ingenuity and effort, gratified hundreds of times without serious injury or detection. Satisfaction could be obtained by inhaling exhaust fumes, having a limb run over on a yielding surface to avoid appreciable damage or by being pressed against a wall by the vehicle.

Gratification was enhanced if the woman were attractive by conventional standards. Injuries inflicted by men operating automobiles or other types of injury inflicted by women had no meaning. He experienced pleasure from the experience, thus establishing the symptom as a perversion rather than a compulsion.

Although psychiatry no longer uses the word perversion (problematic sexual compulsions are now called ‘paraphilias‘) the introduction to the case study says, in a rather understated way, that “some perversions, while representing formidable psychopathology, are also tributes to the complexity of the human mind.”

The article additionally notes that the patient “was ashamed of his symptom but somewhat proud of its unusual nature.”
 

Link to PubMed entry for case study.

The dynamic embrace

I’ve just found an enjoyable BBC World Service radio documentary on the relationship between tango and psychoanalysis in the Argentinian city of Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires is the birthplace of tango and, as we’ve discussed before, has the highest ratio of psychologists to population of any place on earth.

The city has traditionally been one of the world centres for psychoanalysis and it remains a hub for theory and treatment drawn from the work of Sigmund Freud.

The BBC documentary looks at the relationship between the city’s love of therapy and one of the most psychological of dances, talking to both enthusiasts and conscientious objectors.
 

Link to documentary with mp3 and streaming.

The psychology of shoulder-to-shoulder

The consistently sublime RadioLab has a wonderful programme on the psychology of altruism which manages to capture the psychology of supporting others in gripping stories of human interaction.

The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today’s plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness … or even, self-sacrifice.

Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?

The programme touches on everything from the mathematics of nuclear war to the motivation for heroism and, as always, is really better experienced than described.

But even given the usual exceptional quality of RadioLab, this episode is definitely not one to miss. Fantastic stuff.
 

Link to RadioLab on altruism.

2010-12-24 Spike activity

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

Brain scans as art. The Neurocritic covers a charming paper where a bunch of Serbian radiologists review the history of neuroradiology in famous artworks and then contribute some of their own creative efforts!

Scientific American looks at the evolutionary pressures on religious belief in light of the fact that religious people vastly out-reproduce secular folks.

The first recorded human snog is uncovered by The Intersection. No mention of ancient bike sheds being involved.

The RSA Journal has a thoroughly fascinating interview with behavioural economist Dan Ariely on many curious biases in how we reason about money and finances.

Don’t miss Neuroskeptic on the subtleties of the new studies that seemed to have all but dismissed the link between the XMRV virus and chronic fatigue syndrome. The devil being in the detail.

New Scientist has a positive review of Oliver Sacks’ new book ‘The Mind’s Eye’.

Meet the Denisovans, a potentially new branch on the human tree of life, over at The Loom.

The British Medical Journal has a seasonal paper on phantom vibration syndrome – on the hallucination of an incoming call.

Brain-damaged patients who are paralysed but are unaware of it show unconscious recognition of their difficulties, according to a fascinating new study covered by the BPS Research Digest.

Cerebrum from the Dana Brain Alliance has an excellent piece on ‘the promise and the reality of stem-cell therapies for neurodegenerative diseases.’

20 simple steps to the perfect persuasive message. PsyBlog rounds up its recent series on persuasion and influence.

Discover Magazine asks whether music is for wooing, mothering, bonding, or is it just “auditory cheesecake”? Mmmmm…. cheesecake.

The Man with the Electronic Brain. Great comics find from Boing Boing.

Scientific American has put the stand-out chapter from Carl Zimmer’s Brain Cuttings book online – taking a critical look at the ‘singularity’ and the neuro-immortalists.

Some great coverage of the new study finding that placebos seems to work even when we know they’re placebos from Neurotribes and Not Exactly Rocket Science. Also a more critical take from Respectful Insolence.

Time Magazine asks what methamphetamine has to do with addiction and autism treatments? Turns out, they’re all interesting new findings on the hormone oxytocin.

There’s a lovely look at self-organising principles in the nervous system over at Wiring the Brain.

The Washington Post has a case of very applied ethics. A philosopher calls a vote on whether he should donate a kidney.

Great coverage of a study that used brain activation to try and predict the improvement of teenagers with dyslexia over at BishopBlog.

The Wellcome Collection has the audio of its ‘Describing the Drug Experience’ event online.