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Legal highs found to contain illegal drugs

‘Legal highs’ may actually contain illegal drugs, according to a study just published in the medical journal QJM.

This new research provides a further insight into the foggy world of the ‘legal high’ industry, with particular reference to recent UK legislation which banned several previously ‘legal highs’ including a drug called mephedrone which was bizarrely dubbed ‘miaow miaow’ by the media.

The authors of the study bought several substances before and after the ban and sent them for lab testing to see whether the listed ingredients matched the advertised ingredients.

Surprisingly, they found on both occasions that the advertised ingredients of the ‘legal highs’ didn’t meet the active ingredients they discovered through chemical tests.

For example, before the ban, a legal pill sold as ‘Doves Original’ was advertised as containing a blend of amino acids and ketones but actually contained the psychedelic drugs mephedrone and butylone. Both were completely legal but were simply not mentioned by the manufacturers.

Interestingly, after the ban, it seems that several companies just changed their packaging without changing their ingredients.

Out of the six products tested, all advertised as being legal, five included recently banned substances – including mephedrone, 4-fluoromethcathinone and methylone – and the other contained dimethocaine, a legal but unmentioned local anaesthetic (presumably to emulate the nose-numbing effect of cocaine).

This makes an interesting contrast to a recent study on ‘legal high’ synthetic cannabinoids that we covered previously, where new unregulated substances appeared on the market before the ban came into place.

In the case of the UK legal stimulant market, however, it seems rather than innovating new substances to avoid the ban, the industry has simply resorted to mislabelling and deceptive advertising.

What this may suggest is that the synthetic cannabinoid industry is more scientifically savvy than the legal stimulant industry, not least because synthesising cannabinoids can’t be done as easily. But despite this, they seem to be more ‘agile’ when it comes to reacting to legal clamp downs.

Link to PubMed entry for study.
Link to previous Mind Hacks on synthetic cannabinoids.

Is Big Pharma abandoning psychiatry?

This week’s Science has a thought-provoking article charting how several of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies have canned their development of psychiatric drugs, citing the medications as unlikely to be profitable given the difficulties in understanding the neurobiology of mental illness.

On 4 February, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced that it planned to pull the plug on drug discovery in some areas of neuroscience, including pain and depression. A few weeks later, news came that AstraZeneca was closing research facilities in the United States and Europe and ceasing drug-discovery work in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety.

These cutbacks by two of the top players in drug development for disorders of the central nervous system have raised concerns that the pharmaceutical industry is pulling out, or at least pulling back, in this area. In direct response to the cuts at GSK and AstraZeneca, the Institute of Medicine Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders organized a meeting in late June that brought together leaders from government, academia, and private foundations to take stock.

But the biggest problem, researchers say, is that there is almost nothing in the pipeline that gives any hope for a transformation in the treatment of mental illness. That’s worrying, they say, because the need for better treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders is vast. Hundreds of millions of people are afflicted worldwide. Yet for some common disorders, like Alzheimer’s disease, no truly effective treatments exist; for others, like depression, the existing drugs have limited efficacy and substantial side effects.

Sadly, the full article is locked behind a paywall (news kills people) but the author, science journalist Greg Miller, discusses the topic in the freely available Science podcast which covers the same ground.

One theme to consistently emerge is how, for years, Big Pharma has been chasing easy profits by making slightly tweaked versions of existing drugs rather than investing in research aimed at developing genuinely new treatments. It seems this short-term-ism is starting to run out of steam.

By the way, the Science podcast piece on Big Pharma is followed by coverage of an innovative new study on dopamine and impulsivity so well worth a listen.

Link to ‘Is Pharma Running Out of Brainy Ideas?’
Link to Science podcast.

Down and dirty

Baba Brinkman is a beat dealer and science rhyming pioneer who has just recorded an awesome hip-hop album on evolutionary psychology.

Most importantly, it’s actually a great album. It’s not an attempt at parody or a tribute, it’s an inspired, groove heavy, high production values record with a wonderful lyrical touch.

It’s not for kids, you simply won’t be able to play half the tracks to your high school science class without risking your job, as in classic hip-hop tradition, it’s down and dirty from beginning to end.

But it’s also a brilliant guide to the theories and controversies of evolutionary psychology and covers everything from game theory to twin studies.

You can listen to it online and can download it to your computer and mp3 player, choosing whatever price you want to pay for it.

Link to Baba Brinkman’s The Rap Guide to Human Nature (thanks Mark!)

The psychic origins of EEG

Oscillatory Thoughts has an excellent post on Hans Berger, the inventor of EEG, who created the technology not solely to investigate the electrical signals of the brain, but to try and uncover the neural basis of ‘telepathy’.

It turns out, Berger was a big believer in psychic phenomena: namely telepathy. He believed that there was an underlying physical basis for mental phenomena, and that these mental processes‚Äîbeing physical in nature‚Äîcould be transmitted between people. Thus, in order to show that psychic phenomena exist, Berger sought to show the nature of the underlying physical processes of thoughts and emotions.

The piece goes on the explain the details of Berger’s early experiments and how the link between electrical activity and brain function has expanded since his revolutionary invention.

Berger is one of the most fascinating characters in the history of neuroscience, but is badly under-researched.

Sadly, he ended his own life in his later years as he struggled to come to terms with the rise of the Nazis, but he has left a weighty legacy which has become a central pillar of neuroscience, despite its somewhat idiosyncratic origins.

Link to Oscillatory Thoughts on Hans Berger and EEG.

Chasing the mechanical dragon

A coin operated ‘opium den‘, found in the Musée Mécanique antique mechanical arcade on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.

For only 25 cents you can see some rather glassy-eyed Chinese gentlemen, a door which reveals a skeleton, and a dragon that appears through the window.

It’s no coincidence that this somewhat eccentric piece of carnivalia originates in San Francisco, as it was the first place in America to ban smoking opium.

The city passed the ‘Opium Den Ordinance’ in 1875, timed to take advantage of the growing anti-Asian sentiment that had grown during the gold rush in which many immigrants from China had settled in the area.

The episode was perhaps the first modern drug scare, with moral panic making the papers and opium being blamed for a whole range of social ills, well beyond its actual impact.

These days, the last echoes of the turn of the century scare can be mechanically animated for anyone with a quarter and a curious mind.

Link to the Musée Mécanique website (thanks @aleksk!)

2010-07-30 Spike activity

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

Popular Science reports on proposals to study the obscure hallucinogen ibogain as a treatment for opiate addiction.

A study on how money restricts life’s pleasures is covered by PsyBlog.

Yale Alumni Magazine looks at research “which seeks to use robots not to perform tasks for humans but as a means of investigating the inner workings of human behavior and psychology”.

The chance of getting executed for killing a white person is about three times higher than for killing an African American, regardless of the offender’s race, according to research covered by In the News.

The New York Times piece on free will by philosopher Galen Strawson has some insightful commentaries here at The Frontal Cortex and here at Oscillatory Thoughts.

Stereotypes of mental illness in cinema – a brief diagnostic guide – over at Frontier Psychiatrist.

Wired Science reports on a study finding synchronised brain activity between people in a conversation.

The first and preliminary controlled trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD is covered by Drug Monkey.

New Scientist analyse the shaky idea that bigger brains means more intelligence.

A video introduces IBM cognitive computing’s SyNAPSE project – which stands for ‘Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics’ since you asked – is over at Developing Intelligence.

The Today Programme from BBC Radio 4 interviews psychologist Til Wykes on changes to psychiatric diagnosis and the shrinking definition of normality.

What proportion of chemical leaks provoke mass hysteria? asks the BPS Research Digest.

Seed Magazine has an interesting review of ‘Sex at Dawn’ – a new book looking at the history of sexuality in pre-history.

Brain scan based career advice? The Neurocritic covers a curious study on using brain structure and cognitive performance for ‘vocational guidance’.

Life Matters from ABC Radio National discusses whether ‘bad kids’ become more popular as rule-breaking becomes attractive as kids age.

There’s a great piece on how a study of heroin addiction in ex-Vietnam soldiers gave birth to the ‘disease model’ of addiction over at Addiction Inbox.

The New York Times has an in-depth article discussing whether the seemingly permanent record of the internet means an ‘end to forgetting’.

The Research Blogging editor’s selections of psychology and neuroscience articles posted regularly at The Thoughtful Animal are excellent.

Wired has an in-depth article on the possibilities of a ‘stress vaccine‘ that protects against the damage associated with chronic stress.

Can music negatively affect your memory? asks Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

New Scientist reports on how a doctor has been reprimanded apparently for asking valid questions about the validity of ‘shaken baby syndrome’.

There is some intelligent commentary concerning the recent Edge online seminar on the psychology of morality over at Neuroanthropology.

Scientific American Mind has excellent coverage of the recent ‘self-fulfilling feigning of mental illness’ study.

BBC Radio 4’s Inside the Ethics Committee programme had an interesting discussion on when it is ethical to accept a mentally ill patient’s decision to refuse a life-saving operation if their objections are based on delusional ideas.

Not Exactly Rocket Science discusses an awesome ‘sniff-detector‘ that allows paralysed people to write messages, surf the net and drive a wheelchair.

What if there had never been a Cognitive Revolution? asks Cognition and Culture.

Booty calling

Someone, somewhere, can look you straight in the eye and say “I’ve got a PhD in booty call research”.

A new study just published online in the Journal of Sex Research investigates where the booty call falls on the spectrum of relationships.

Positioning the Booty-Call Relationship on the Spectrum of Relationships: Sexual but More Emotional Than One-Night Stands

Peter K. Jonason; Norman P. Li; Jessica Richardson

Journal of Sex Research

Most research on human sexuality has focused on long-term pairbonds and one-night stands. However, growing evidence suggests there are relationships that do not fit cleanly into either of those categories. One of these relationships is a ‚Äúbooty-call relationship.‚Äù

The purpose of this study was to describe the sexual and emotional nature of booty-call relationships by (a) examining the types of emotional and sexual acts involved in booty-call relationships and (b) comparing the frequency of those acts in booty-call relationships to one-night stands and serious long-term relationships.

In addition, the manner in which sociosexuality is associated with the commission of these acts was also examined. Demonstrative of booty-call relationships’ sexual nature was individuals’ tendency to leave after sex and infrequent handholding.

In contrast, the romantic nature of booty-call relationships was demonstrated through the frequency of acts like kissing. The results suggest the booty-call relationship is a distinct type of relationship situated between one-night stands and serious romantic relationships.

Guys, if you need a post-doc… just call.

Link to booty call study in the Journal of Sex Research (via @NoahWG).

The experiment requires that you continue

Spanish daily El Pa√≠s recently published an article on psychologist Stanley Milgram which had this amazing photo of the young conformity researcher where he looks surprisingly beatnick.

Sadly the photo isn’t dated but it makes quite a contrast to the better known photos where he looks much more like the typical professor of the age.

He looks both wonderfully creative and slightly haunted, which seems to capture his contribution to psychology perfectly.

The article is also worth checking out but is only available in Spanish, so you may have to deploy a utilisation of the page of Google’s Translate which can make a translate of the text if you desire to read it in the English.

Link to El Pa√≠s article ‘El psic√≥logo’.
Link to big version of photo.

Poker face science

The best ‘poker face’ is probably not a neutral expression, but a happy one, as it led to a greater number of opponent mistakes in a study just published in PLoS One.

The research looked at how poker playing was influenced by the emotional expression of opponents and discovered that blank and threatening expressions had little effect, but a positive expression tends to lull people into a false sense of trust and puts them off their game.

Taken from the study abstract:

This study investigates whether an opponent’s face influences players’ wagering decisions in a zero-sum game with hidden information. Participants made risky choices in a simplified poker task while being presented opponents whose faces differentially correlated with subjective impressions of trust. Surprisingly, we find that threatening face information has little influence on wagering behavior, but faces relaying positive emotional characteristics impact peoples’ decisions.

Thus, people took significantly longer and made more mistakes against emotionally positive opponents. Differences in reaction times and percent correct were greatest around the optimal decision boundary, indicating that face information is predominantly used when making decisions during medium-value gambles. Mistakes against emotionally positive opponents resulted from increased folding rates, suggesting that participants may have believed that these opponents were betting with hands of greater value than other opponents.

According to these results, the best “poker face” for bluffing may not be a neutral face, but rather a face that contains emotional correlates of trustworthiness. Moreover, it suggests that rapid impressions of an opponent play an important role in competitive games, especially when people have little or no experience with an opponent.

Link to Pubmed entry for study.
Link to full-text of study at PLoS One.

Plastic punk

Some awesome geek moves from the science of phonetics, as applied to the new wave punk classic ‘√áa Plane Pour Moi’ previously and falsely believed to have been sung by Plastic Bertrand.

From the AV Club report:

A staple of any new-wave dance night (ask a white person), ‚ÄúCa Plane Pour Moi‚Äù made a chart-stopping star out of Belgian singer Plastic Bertrand (n√© Roger Jouret) and provided him with his most lasting legacy‚Äîexcept an expert linguist has just proved that Bertrand didn‚Äôt actually sing on his most famous record. The battle over ‚ÄúCa Plane Pour Moi‚Äù has been brewing for four years now, stemming from a 2006 lawsuit involving original producer Lou Deprijck, who released his own version of the single under the marketing claim that he was the ‚Äúoriginal voice.‚Äù At the time, Deprijck found himself sued by record label AMC.

As a result, a panel of experts was appointed to study the track, and today a linguist announced that, after three months of study, during which he compared the original to Deprijck’s 2006 version, he had determined that ‚Äúthe way the phrases end on each record show that the song could only have been sung by a Ch’ti‚Äîotherwise known as someone from the Picard region of France. It could therefore not have been Plastic Bertrand‚Äîwho was born in Brussels‚Äîand was surely Monsieur Deprijck.‚Äù So it’s been settled: Plastic Bertrand was the Milli Vanilli of the punk era.

Link to AV Club on the fake Plastic Bertrand (via @sophiescott).

From on hayo

An amazing passage about the use of coca among of the indigenous Kogi and Ika people of Colombia, taken from p24 of anthropologist Wade Davis’ magical book on the ethnobotany of ceremonial chemicals, One River.

In a sacred landscape in which every plant is a manifestation of the divine, the chewing of hayo, a variety of coca only found in the mountains of Colombia, represents the most profound expression of culture. Distance in the mountains is not measured in miles but coca chews. When two men meet, they do not shake hands, they exchange leaves. Their societal ideal is to abstain from sex, eating and sleeping while staying up all night, chewing hayo and chanting the names of ancestors. Each week the men chew about a pound of dry leaves, thus absorbing as much as a third of a gram of cocaine each day of their adults lives.

The book traces Davis’ own travels, and those of his mentor Richard Evans Schultes, to understand the culture and chemistry of psychoactive plants among the native peoples of America, both North and South.

It’s an amazingly evocative book and is full of engrossing cultural insights into how plants like coca, the peyote cactus and psilocybin mushrooms have been used traditionally and how they were discovered by Western science.

As we’ve mentioned before, Davis has also given a couple of amazing TED talks that focus on traditional uses of mind altering plants.

Link to more info on One River (Thanks @David_Dobbs!)
Link to previous discussion and links to TED talks.

SciFoo bound

Mind Hacks updates may be a little hit and miss over the next week as I’m off to San Francisco for SciFoo – the Nature / Google / O’Reilly science anti-conference.

Apart from conferencing I’ll be sleeping on floors and wandering the streets but normal service should be resumed in a week.

Rebranding Freud

McSweeney’s has a funny piece where Freud visits the ad agency Sterling Cooper from the Mad Men television series:

FREUD: Well, as you know, we’ve dominated psychology for decades. But lately we’ve begun losing our share of the market to Behaviorism. People want a more comforting interpretation of their lives. They don’t want to be told that they’re suppressing base urges, or that their problems can be traced back to how they learned to use the toilet.

DRAPER: But that’s always been your identity. People think of Freudian insights as rising above the crowd. It’s an attitude that says, “I’m educated. I’m not a mechanic.” I don’t think you toy with that.

FREUD: Society is changing. At our last board meeting, we decided we have to reposition ourselves. We want to promote our expertise in dreams. We want people to see them as the means to discover themselves, and that Freud will show them how.

PEGGY OLSON: When I was a girl, I always lay in bed in the morning thinking over the dream I just had. It was the happiest part of my day.

FREUD: (Brightening) That’s the feel that we’re looking for. People want a lift, and we give it to them.

OLSON: You could have a slogan like, “Dare to Dream.” Or “Full Dream Ahead.”

Although intended to be satirical, Freud’s family has a long association with advertising. His nephew, Edward Bernays, essentially invented the field of PR, and his great grandson, Matthew Freud, is the founder of Freud Communications, one of the biggest PR companies in the UK.

Link to ‘Freud: The Rebranding’ (via @mrianleslie).

Through a monitor darkly

An online meth house, created in virtual world Second Life, has been created, tested and found to reliably induce drug cravings in methamphetamine users – in an experimental study just published in the journal Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior.

A ‘meth house’ is where methamphetamine users go to buy, take or make speed and regular users may spend long periods of time there. Being able to reliably induce drug cravings in the research lab is useful as it allows controlled studies to be more easily conducted.

The researchers in this study, led by psychiatrist Christopher Culbertson, compared the reactions of 17 speed users to four situations: a video of a meth house, a neutral video, a Second Life simulation of a meth house and an average looking flat recreated in the online world.

Below are some of the images of the meth house used in the study and you can see more in a description on the project’s web pages.

It turns out that the interactive Second Life meth house reliably induced the strongest cravings.

The study bears a sideways resemblance to Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly which plays with themes of shifting realities and surveillance in a community of stimulant drug users.

Link to PubMed entry for study.
Link to research team’s web page on the project.

The case of the unknown father

Arthur Conan Doyle is famous for the creation of Sherlock Holmes but a lot less is known about his father. Practical Neurology has an interesting article about art and epilepsy which discusses Doyle senior’s artistic talents and how he was eventually committed to an asylum.

Probably more famous as the father of Arthur Conan, Charles Altamont Doyle (1832‚Äì1893) was said to have epilepsy for the last 10‚Äì15 years of his life. The cause on his death certificate was epilepsy of ‚Äòmany years‚Äô standing. He was not a particularly successful artist and perhaps is best remembered for his illustrations that accompanied the Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet 1888. Charles was another depressive, but he chose to self-medicate heavily with alcohol. It is possible that his seizures, occurring late in life, were related to his consumption of alcohol and rapid withdrawal.

He was committed to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum in 1881, where finding peace at last, he created some of his best work. It is said that he persevered with his art in an attempt to show that he had been wrongfully imprisoned in the institution; ironically, the recurring themes that he used to plead for his sanity were elves, fairies and other fantastical characters. It is said that he died during a prolonged seizure.

Link to PubMed entry for article.

How murder fell out of fashion with the rich

Murder has become largely confined to the poor and disadvantaged whereas historical records show that in times gone past it was used equally by all levels of society.

This is taken from a 1997 study called ‘The Decline of Elite Homocide’, published in the journal Criminology, which attempts to explain how homicide has become less democratic over time.

The criminological literature consistently reports a negative relationship between social status and interpersonal homicide. Regardless of the setting studied, homicide tends, with just a few exceptions, to be concentrated among low-status groups, such as the poor, the unemployed, the young, and cultural minorities. Yet robust as it is, this relationship is confined to modern societies. In the premodern era, homicide was found at all levels of the social hierarchy, including its higher echelons.

What explains these facts? Why is homicide largely confined to low status people today but was not in the societies studied by anthropologists and historians? Why has elite homicide declined? The answer developed here builds on a theory advanced by Donald Black (1983), which argues that violent conflict is a function of the unavailability of law. In modern societies, low social status and law are antagonistic, and the result is that legal means of resolving conflict are effectively unavailable to those at the bottom of the social pyramid. In earlier societies, law tended to be unavailable to everybody, irrespective of their social standing.

Link to DOI entry and summary for study.