Category: Integrating

I’ve written a piece for the BPS Research Digest about a fascinating study that caused people to feel their thoughts were being controlled by outside forces.

It’s a psychologically intriguing study because it used the psychology lab to conduct the study but it also used the psychology lab as a form of misdirection, so participants wouldn’t realise that the effect of having their ‘thoughts read’ and ‘thoughts inserted into their mind’ was in fact a common trick used in stage mentalism.

The interesting bit came where the researchers recorded whether participants reacted differently when they thought their thoughts were being read (they did) and asked about their experience of it happening (when it never actually did).

They reported a range of anomalous effects when they thought numbers were being “inserted” into their minds: A number “popped in” my head, reported one participant. Others described “a voice … dragging me from the number that already exists in my mind”, feeling “some kind of force”, feeling “drawn” to a number, or the sensation of their brain getting “stuck” on one number. All a striking testament to the power of suggestion.

A really wonderfully conceived study that may provide a useful tool for temporarily inducing the feeling of not controlling your own thoughts – something that occurs in a range of psychological difficulties and disorders.
 

Link to piece on BPS Research Digest.

I’m just reading Clinical Psychology in Britain: Historical Perspectives which is a wonderful book if you are a clinical psychologist but probably about as exciting to non-clinical psychologists as you might expect. However, it does contain a few gems of wider interest.

This is a remarkable story from the chapter on the history of forensic clinical psychology which concerns the case of Barry George during the original trial that wrongfully convicted him for the murder of television journalist Jill Dando.

On 26 April 1999, Jill Dando, the presenter of BBC programme Crimewatch, was shot dead outside her home in Fulham, London. On 2 July 2001 Barry George, who lived nearby, was convicted of her murder. Prior to the trial, three defence experts, Gisli Gudjonsson, Susan Young and Michael Kopelman, had reported that Mr George’s fitness to stand trial was contingent on his receiving clinical psychological support in court throughout the trial, which lasted from 23 April to 2 July 2001.

Mr George had a complex presentation, including a long history of primary generalised epilepsy (first identified at age two or three), severely abnormal EEG, intellectual deterioration, significant cognitive and executive deficits, rigid and obsessive personality structure, hypochondriacal preoccupations, and an extreme reaction to stress in the form of anxiety and panic attacks, which increased the frequency of absence epileptic seizures. The court appointed Susan Young, a forensic clinical psychologist, who initially sat in the dock with Mr George and provided him with the required assistance. On 26 April 2001, on the fourth day of the legal arguments and prior to swearing in the jury, Mr George turned to Susan Young and declared, ‘I can’t see’. Prior to this Mr George had been observed having difficulties concentrating on the legal arguments and he claimed to be experiencing petit mal epileptic seizures in the dock.

The trial before the jury was due to commence on 2 May, but the court determined that the trial could only proceed if Mr George’s eyesight could be restored. On the morning of 1 May, all three defence experts were asked to meet Mr George and try to restore his eyesight by 2pm (when the court commenced that day). Michael Kopelman conducted a medical examination and informed Mr George that there was no physical explanation for his blindness. All attempts to persuade Mr George that it was in his interest to to regain his eyesight proved fruitless; he simply kept saying ‘I can’t see’.

At 12.30pm Gisli Gudjonnson, who was trained in hypnosis techniques, suggested that hypnosis might prove successful in bringing back his sight. Mr George agreed to this approach. After an initial induction to the process, Mr George was asked to imagine that he was being taken through a tunnel, accompanied by suggestions that his eyesight would gradually return during the journey and improve further during the lunchbreak (i.e. posthypnotic suggestion). After being brought out of the hypnosis, Mr George said he could see but his eyesight was blurred. He was reassured that it would continue to improve and by 2.00pm his eyesight had fully recovered and after the final legal arguments that afternoon, the trial commenced before a jury.

The defence experts construed Mr George’s blindness as being psychogenic in origin caused by the inability to cope with the stress generated by the legal arguments (i.e. putting a physical barrier between himself and the court), which was unlocked by the process of hypnosis. This was not the first time Mr George had presented with psychogenic symptoms as he had presented with a functional aphonia (i.e. nonorganic loss of speech) following a stressful environmental event in 1994. Psychogenic blindness and psychogenic aphonia are both a form of ‘conversion disorder’ and are often caused by stress that manifests itself as physical symptoms.

Gisli Gudjonnson was originally a policeman in his native Iceland but became interested in the psychological aspects of the crimes he was investigating, moved to the UK to study psychology, and has been massively influential in the development of forensic psychology.

He has been involved in some of the most high profile cases in the country and, TV producers, is the likely subject of your next Nordic detective drama.
 

Link to details of Clinical Psychology in Britain: Historical Perspectives.

For those of you who like to get your geek on (and rumour has it, they can be found reading this blog) the Computerphile channel just had a video interview with Steve Furber of the Human Brain Project who talks about the custom hardware that’s going to run their neural net simulations.

Furber is better known as one of the designers of the BBC Micro and the ARM microprocessor but has more recently been involved in the SpiNNaker project which is the basis of the Neuromorphic Computing Platform for the Human Brain Project.

Fascinating interview with a man who clearly likes the word toroid.

Longreads has an excellent article on the psychology of drone warfare that looks at this particularly modern form of air-to-ground combat from many, thought-provoking angles.

These include the effect of humanless warfare, how suicide bombers are being dronified, how reducing the risk to soldiers might make civilians a more inviting target, whether remote-drone-pilot PTSD is convenient myth, and most interesting, the reliance of ‘Pattern-of-Life Analysis’ on which to base strikes.

Apart from these “personal strikes,” there are also “signature strikes,” here meaning strikes authorized on the basis of traces, indications, or defining characteristics. Such strikes target individuals whose identity remains unknown but whose behavior suggests, signals, or signs membership in a “terrorist organization.”

In such cases, the strike is made “without knowing the precise identity of the individuals targeted.” It depends solely on their behavior, which, seen from the sky, appears to “correspond to a ‘signature’ of pre-identified behavior that the United States links to militant activity.” Today, strikes of this type, against unknown suspects, appear to constitute the majority of cases…

An analysis of the pattern of a person’s life may be defined more precisely as “the fusion of link analysis and a geospatial analysis.” For some idea of what is involved here, imagine a superimposition, on a single map, of Facebook, Google Maps, and an Outlook calendar. This would be a fusion of social, spatial, and temporal particulars, a mixed mapping of the socius, locus, and tempus spheres—in other words, a combination of the three dimensions that, not only in their regularities but also in their discordances, constitute a human life.

This anonymous death by heuristics is also the type of problem that yields well to statistical approaches and, with enough data, machine learning algorithms such as deep learning.

It’s the sort of problem that cloud-based on-tap-AI systems like IBM’s Watson are designed to help with and you can bet your bottom dollar that there’s research going on to use machine learning to identify terrorists from their Pattern-of-Life. The Skynet of fiction will probably become the Skyapp of reality.

The article is remarkably wide-ranging and genuinely thought-provoking for a subject where much has already been written. Recommended.
 

Link to ‘Theorizing the Drone’.

I’ve just found a curious scientific paper that looks at whether computational models of neural function are of relevance to clinical psychiatry. Oddly, it is written as a debate between two Charles Dickens characters.

The paper was published in the journal Neural Networks and is entitled “Are computational models of any use to psychiatry?”.

It starts entirely normally and then suddenly introduces two characters from the novel David Copperfield who begin to discuss the cognitive science of computational psychiatry.

Wise old Dr. Strong (Dickens, 1850) will now put the case against CMs [computational models] from the point of view of a psychiatrist. Our optimistic – or maybe unrealistic – friend Mr. Micawber will try to enthuse him about their cause. He is also a fan of reinforcement learning models.

It’s worth noting that in the original version of David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber barely mentions his admiration of computational reinforcement learning models (reading between the lines, he always seemed more of learning mechanism agnostic autoassociative memory man to me – but hey, I’m no English literature scholar).

Dr. Strong: First and foremost, CMs have failed to influence clinical practice.

Mr. Micawber: I would agree, Dr. Strong, that CMs have not influenced clinical practice to date; but neither have most advances in neurosciences. In fact, we believe that CMs will be instrumental in helping to bridge the gap between neurobiology and psychiatry because CMs are able to link levels of descriptions and make well-founded predictions at one level based on information at another level.

Dr. Strong: I disagree. The question is: are they clinically relevant, not will they be at some point in the future. All the models omit the very centre of psychiatry: subjective experiences. No one I have met believes that computers feel duty, personal bonds, or sexual titillation.

Weirdly, this is not the first cognitive science paper to be presented as a debate between two rather unexpected people.

Jerry Fodor’s paper “Fodor’s Guide to Mental Representation: The Intelligent Auntie’s Vade-Mecum” involves a discussion between him and his aunty about the finer points of mental representation.

Sadly, the paper is behind a pay-wall because Elsevier know that the cognitive science / Dickens combination can be deadly in the wrong hands.
 

Link to locked article “Are computational models of any use to psychiatry?”

I’ve just found a 2008 review article on the multisensory perception of flavour that is full of fascinating examples of taste illusions and demonstrates the surprisingly complexity of the gustatory system.

The following is one of my favourites. The article first makes the interesting observation that the majority of odour names refer to objects and most non-object odour names like ‘acrid’ and ‘pungent’ actually refer not to smell but to felt sensation.

Another manifestation of the object-based nature of olfactory perception is the constant error made, when eating, of attributing to taste what really belongs to the sense of smell. The error of localizing the odors coming from food as originating in the mouth has been termed the olfactory illusion. It has been compared to the ventriloquism effect, that is, the influence of visual cues on the identification of the location of a sound source. Green (2001) has provided a similar explanation for the fact that although flavor is perceived by receptors on the tongue, in the nose, and even in the eyes, the brain interprets the overall sensation as originating from within the mouth. According to Green, all of the sensory information is localized in the mouth in order that we associate this information with the food being consumed, in the same way that we typically use both touch and vision to localize a point on our bodies.

The paper is by psychologists by Malika Auvray and Charles Spence and it’s sadly locked – but someone has handily a put a pdf online.
 

Link to journal hosted locked article (via @velascop)
pdf of full text.

A fascinating study published in today’s Lancet Neurology reports on sleep deprivation in astronauts but also describes the drugs shuttle crew members use to keep themselves awake and help them fall asleep.

The study looked at sleep data from 64 astronauts on 80 space shuttle missions along with 21 astronauts on 13 International Space Station missions, and compared it to their sleep on the ground and in the days before space flight.

Essentially, in-flight astronauts don’t get a great deal of shut-eye, but what’s surprising is the range and extent of drugs they use to manipulate sleep.

Mostly these are the z-drug class of sleep medications (of which the best known is zolpidem, branded name Ambien) but also include benzos, melatonin and an antipsychotic called quetiapine.

Here are the sleep-inducing drugs with my comments in square brackets:

Zolpidem and zolpidem controlled release were the most frequently used drugs on shuttle missions, accounting for 301 (73%) and 49 (12%) of the 413 nights, respectively, when one dose of drug was reported. Zaleplon use was reported on 45 (11%) of 413 nights.

Other sleep-promoting drugs reported by shuttle crew members during the 413 nights included temazepam [sedative anti-anxiety benzodiazepine – similar to Vallium] on 8 (2%) nights, eszopiclone on 2 (<1%) nights, melatonin [hormone that regulates circadian rhythms] on 7 (2%) nights, and quetiapine fumarate [antipsychotic] on 1 (<1%) night.

The paper also notes concerns about the astronauts’ use of zolpidem and similar z-drug medications because they can affect mental sharpness, coordination and can lead to unusual and complex ‘sleep-behaviours’.

Interestingly, it seems astronauts tend to use these drugs in a rather ad-hoc manner and the consequences of this have clearly not been well thought through.

As the Lancet Neurology paper notes:

This consideration is especially important because all crew members on a given mission might be taking a sleep-promoting drug at the same time…. crew members reported taking a second dose of hypnotic drugs—most commonly zolpidem—often only a few hours before awakening. Although crew members are encouraged to try such drugs on the ground at home at least once before their use in flight, such preparations probably do not involve multiple dosing or dosing with two different drugs on the same night.

Furthermore, such tests do not include any measure of objective effectiveness or safety, such as what would happen in the case of abrupt awakening during an in-flight night-time emergency… sleep-related-eating, sleep-walking, and sleep-driving events have been reported with zolpidem use, leading the FDA to require a so-called black-box warning on all hypnotic drugs stating that driving and performance of other tasks might be impaired in the morning after use of such drugs:

“A variety of abnormal thinking and behavior changes have been reported to occur in association with the use of sedative/hypnotics…. Complex behaviors such as ‘sleep-driving’…have been reported. Amnesia, anxiety, and other neuropsychiatric symptoms may occur unpredictably.”

However, use of sleep drugs was reported on more than half the nights before extravehicular activities were undertaken.

Information on stimulant use by astronauts is hidden in the appendix but caffeine was widely used in space, but less than when on the ground – although possibly due to coffee shortages, and modafinil was used occasionally.

Caffeine was widely used throughout all data collection intervals by both shuttle and ISS crewmembers, though supply shortages sometimes led to coffee rationing and reduced consumption aboard ISS. All but eight shuttle mission crewmembers (72/80, 90%) and all but one ISS crewmember (20/21,95%) reported using caffeine at least once during the study…

Given the 3-7 hour half-life of caffeine and the sleep disturbances associated with its use, caffeine may have contributed to or enabled the sleep curtailment observed in this population. However, there is no evidence that caffeine accounts for the reduced sleep duration observed during spaceflight, as caffeine consumption was, if anything, reduced during spaceflight.

The wakefulness-promoting medication, modafinil, was reportedly used on both shuttle (10 reported uses) and ISS missions (2 reported uses). The use of this wakefulness-promoting medication was reported more frequently in post-flight debriefs.

There’s also an interesting snippet that gives the most common reason for sleep disturbance in space:

Nocturnal micturition is common in this age group and was the most reported reason for disruptive sleep both on Earth and inflight

Not stress, not being surrounded by equipment, not a lack of home comforts, but ‘Nocturnal micturition’ or wetting yourself in your sleep.

This is possibly more likely in space due to the fact that bodily cues for a full bladder work less effectively in zero gravity, but one major factor in astronauts wetting themselves was that it a better alternative than waking sleeping colleagues by going to the toilet.

The paper notes that this is why many astronauts wear ‘maximum absorbency garments’ – essentially giant nappies – while they sleep.
 

Link to locked Lancet study on sleep in astronauts.

A fascinating section of the book How Forests Think by anthropologist Eduardo Kohn where he describes how dreaming is much more porous among the Runa people of Ecuador.

This is both because of how they understand dreams, but also because of the way sleep happens in their culture – it being a more social and frequently interrupted activity, meaning that dreams and the outside world interact much more intensely.

From page 13:

Sleeping in Ávila is not the consolidated, solitary, sensorially deprived endeavour it has often become for us. Sleep – surrounded by lots of people in open thatch houses with no electricity and largely exposed to the outdoors – is continuously interspersed with wakefulness. One awakens in the middle of the night to sit by the fire and ward off the chill, or to receive a gourd full of steaming huayusa tea, or on hearing the common potoo call during a full moon, or sometimes the distant hum of a jaguar. And one awakens also to the extemporaneous comments people make throughout the night about those voices they hear.

Thanks to these continuous disruptions, dreams spill into wakefulness and wakefulness into dreams in a way that entangles both. Dreams – my own and those of my housemates, the strange ones we shared, and even those of their dogs – came to occupy a great deal of my ethnographic attention, especially because they so often involved the creatures and spirits that people the forest. Dreams too are part of the empirical, and they are kind of real. They grow out of and work on the world, and learning to be attuned to their special logics and their fragile forms of efficacy helps reveal something about the world beyond the human.

Interestingly, if your sleep is interrupted by people giving you huayasa tea you are also likely to sleep rather differently as it contains caffeine, meaning you may sleep more lightly and be more sensitive to your environment as a result.

I’m still getting to grips with the book which sounds lovely but is actually about how the theory of anthropology as a study of humans is challenged by societies where whole ecosystems form part of cognitive systems.

As with any book about deep theory, it is both difficult and intriguing, and sometimes I feel like I am lost in a forest myself.
 

Link to more details of How Forests Think.

The media love ‘your genes are to blame’ stories despite the fact that genetics is, in most cases, just one, often small, influence on a behaviour or trait.

Here’s a few lowlights:

Glass always half-empty? Your genes may be to blame
Lazy? Your Genes May Be to Blame
Have math anxiety? Your genes may be to blame
Couch potato? Your GENES could be to blame
Are You Forgetful? Your Genes Might Be To Blame
Are your genes to blame for not being rich?
Can’t do well in exams? Your genes are mostly to blame
Are Genetics to Blame for Poor Driving?
Genes to blame for boozy night

Spoiler: your genes are not to blame.

Firstly, it’s interesting that these stories are almost always framed around difficulties or negative characteristics. Rarely do you read stories along the lines of ‘Good looking? Compassionate? Healthy? Your genes may be to blame’.

In other words, they rely on people’s interest in discounting negative characteristics about themselves to attract readers / advertising targets at the expense of biasing the sorts of scientific results that get media attention.

So here would be a a more accurate if not slightly less catchy version of all these headlines: ‘Have this specific trait or behaviour? Your genes may typically contribute a small to moderate amount to the difference between people if you are similar to the population used in the study to estimate this effect – bearing in mind the caveats about the need to independently replicate the results to be confident in the reliability of the conclusions’

Yes, it doesn’t have quite the same impact as the ‘blame your genes’ headlines but you can still illustrate it with a stock photo of a blonde girl with an exaggerated expression of frustration on her face. Not all bad news, is it editors?

It’s worth saying that these sorts of stories are almost always about traits or behaviours where genetics contributes only a partial amount to the overall outcome but this is not a feature of genetics per se, it depends on what you’re looking at.

On one end of the spectrum are highly penetrant single gene disorders like Huntingdon’s disease where if you have the gene you’ll get the disorder. On the other end are much of human behaviours and traits where there are likely many genes that contribute a varying amount indirectly to the overall difference depending on the population being studied.

No-one has yet done a study on genetic contributions to differences in the likelihood of writing ‘your genes are to blame’ stories – probably due to a fear of opening a recursive media loop from which we may never emerge.

It’s a tried and tested technique used by writers and poets, but can psychology explain why first moments after waking can be among our most imaginative?