Category: Integrating

Nature has an extensive article on the ‘deception detection training’ that’s been widely rolled out for airport security staff and anti-terrorism police despite that fact that is has barely been publicly tested.

As we reported in 2007, a great deal of this training seems to be based on psychologist Paul Ekman’s various methods for focusing on facial expressions as a way of improving the ability to detect lies.

However, there is no convincing evidence that has been published in peer-reviewed journals to suggest it can actually improve the ability to pick up deception.

The actual technique, at least as used by the United States, is called Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques or SPOT, and was apparently created ‘in consultation’ with Ekman.

The Nature piece also discusses another technology Future Attribute Screening Technology or FAST, which essentially just looks to see if someone is stressed, with the idea that it can pick out potential terrorists, again with no public data available on its effectiveness.

Now, it could be that there are a great deal of classified test results that show how accurate these systems are, but if not, I suspect that physiological threat detection has barely moved on for 50 years and entirely relies on whether someone ‘looks shifty’ and is demonstrably stressed, probably back up with a bit of statistical modelling to sort through passenger characteristics.

However, the Nature article does a fantastic job of questioning the basis of the current technologies and asking to what extent they are high-tech snake oil.

Link to Nature ‘Airport security: Intent to deceive?’.

There’s a common belief that the weather affects our mood, that we tend to become more depressed in the winter and that summer brings an emotional lift. This has been researched before in small studies that have found inconsistent results but a new study published in Psychiatry Research tested the idea on almost 14,500 people and found no link to weather, while the seasonal effects did not follow the common belief: depression was more common in summer and autumn.

The researchers, led by Dutch psychologist Marcus Huibers, tested both the effect of daily changes in weather and the influence of the season. They sent out thousands of invitations to to people in Holland to complete a standard depression diagnosis questionnaire on the internet, in waves of a few thousand every week, over 18 months.

This allowed the researchers to check the exact day’s weather against people’s mood states.

Neither that day’s temperature, the amount of sunshine or rainfall had any immediate effect on mood, and the seasonal changes were not what you’d expect from ‘common knowledge’: men had seasonal peaks of major depression and sad mood in the summer, while women had seasonal peaks in the autumn.

Although there are some people who do seem to have depression triggered when winter arrives (a condition diagnosed as ‘seasonal affective disorder’ or SAD) this link doesn’t seem to exist in the public as a whole.

I currently live in Medell√≠n, a city without seasons, to the point where it is nicknamed as ‘the city of eternal spring’. The locals says it used to be possible to tell the difference between the rainy seasons and dry seasons but over the last few years it’s simply been impossible to make any distinctions.

Interestingly, this has an effect on how we assess people for dementia. One of the ‘orientation’ questions for the widely used ‘Mini-mental state examination’ or MMSE evaluation is ‘what season is it?’.

As no-one knows what season it is, the assessment has to be scored out of 29 rather than 30, or it has to be replaced with something ad-hoc like ‘what part of the day is it?’.

However, it would be also interesting to find out whether depression varies here by time of year to understand whether this effect is really to do with season, or perhaps to do with the significance of the date.

For example, self-harm and suicide has been found to vary more by significant public holidays than by time of year.

Link to PubMed entry for depression, weather and season study.

Koro is the unfounded fear that the genitals are retracting into the body or have disappeared. It is usually classified by Western psychiatry as a ‘culture bound syndrome‘ as it typically appears Asian or African cultures in various forms but an article in the Journal of Sexual Medicine notes that it has shown up in most cultures at one time or another.

Koro–the psychological disappearance of the penis.

Mattelaer JJ, Jilek W.

J Sex Med. 2007 Sep;4(5):1509-15.

The aim of this article is to present a summarizing overview on ethnomedical aspects of koro (in Chinese called suo-yang), the panic anxiety state in which affected males believe that the penis is shrinking and/or retracting, and perhaps disappearing. While reduction of penile volume occurs physiologically due to vasoconstriction in cold temperature and intense anxiety, it is believed in certain cultures that genital shrinking leads to impotence and sterility, and eventually to death. Traditional Chinese medicine treats suo-yang, the reduction of the male principle yang, as a dangerous disturbance of the life-sustaining yin-yang equilibrium of the organism. Koro has therefore been held to be a Chinese “culture-bound” condition. However , the koro phenomenon is also known among diverse ethnic and religious groups in Asia and Africa, typically in cultures in which reproductive ability is a major determinant of a young person’s worth. Koro epidemics of panic anxiety due to widespread fears of losing one’s genitals, procreative ability, and even one’s life, are triggered by rumors of genital disappearance supposedly caused in China by female fox spirits, in Singapore and Thailand by mass poisoning, and in Africa by sorcery, usually in the context of socioeconomic or political tension. Today, in contemporary Western societies, ideas of genital disappearance are not culturally endorsed. But historically, it should be remembered that in the late Middle Ages in Europe, a man could lose his membrum virile through magical attacks by witches. The conclusion is that the psychological disappearance of the penis is a universal syndrome that was described recently in Asia and Africa and already in Medieval Europe.

Link to PubMed entry for article.
Link to Wikipedia page on the ‘koro’ belief.

During REM sleep, where most dreaming takes place, your eyes move around but it’s never been clear exactly why. A new study just published online by neuroscience journal Brain suggests that they are looking at the ever-changing dream world.

The first question you might ask is how the researchers knew what the dreamers were looking at. To study this, the project recruited people with a condition called REM sleep behaviour disorder who lack the normal sleep paralysis that keeps us still when we dream.

In other words, people with REM sleep behaviour disorder act out their dreams. We’ve discussed the fascinating condition before as it gives an outside view to the inner dream life of the affected person.

In this case, the researchers, led by neuroscientist Laurène Leclair-Visonneau, used electrodes to monitor the eye-muscle movements of 56 patients with REM sleep behaviour disorder and 17 healthy controls in a sleep lab, while also videoing their night-time movements.

The research team initially looked to see if there was a major difference in rapid eye movements between people with the condition and those without. They found that the groups were statistically indistinguishable – meaning that the sleep disorder wasn’t likely to be affecting the eye-movements themselves.

Knowing that REM eye-movements were not abnormal in people who acted out their dreams, the team then looked at the video and picked out where patients completed a ‘goal directed action’ while dreaming – such as picking up a dream object or reaching out to touch something.

By synchronising the videoed actions with the eye muscle recordings during REM sleep the researchers found that the eyes were fixed on the dream target 90% of the time.

In other words, when the eyes move during REM sleep they are looking at something in the dream world.

The eyes seem genuinely to be a bridge between the land of dream consciousness and waking life.

Link to PubMed entry for REM and dreaming study.

Nature Neuroscience has an intriguing fMRI brain scanning study where the researchers could work out what sort of silent video clip the volunteers were watching by observing activity in the part of their brains specialised for perceiving sound.

Although silent, the video clips were all chosen to ‘imply’ sound by depicting things such as a howling dog, a piano key being struck or coins being dropped into a drinking glass. This reliably caused activity in the auditory cortex as the brain ‘simulated’ likely sounds.

The researchers used an analysis technique called ‘multivariate pattern analysis’ that can pick out brain activity patterns associated with different types of experience.

In this study, the analysis was set up to work as a ‘classifier’ where the research team entered both the brain scanning data and what video clips the participants were viewing for part of the experiment, and the ‘classifier’ then tried to guess which types of picture were being viewed for the rest of the experiment just by using the brain scan patterns it had learnt earlier.

After being trained on a sample of the data, the ‘classifier’ could identify which type of silent clip (animal, musical instrument or object) the person was watching by analysing the pattern of activity in the auditory part of the brain.

This is a lovely demonstration of how the brain ‘simulates’ the type of neural activity that would normally be triggered by other senses to help flesh out what it is experiencing.

Perhaps the earliest demonstration of this was from several studies that reported activity in parts of the brain specialised for visual perception that was triggered when you try and picture objects in your imagination.

These visualisation studies are an example of where you are consciously trying to ‘simulate’ another sense through active imagination but, as this new study shows, this sensory ‘filling’ in by the brain also seems to happen automatically.

Studies on ‘implicit motion’ provide another demonstration of this. For example, being shown a still picture that implies movement (such as a ball being dropped) will cause activity in V5, an area specialised for motion perception.

Link to Nature Neuroscience study (seems to be open access).
Link to PubMed entry for same.

A delightful study on the function of sighing has just been published in the journal Physiology and Behavior which suggests that our wistful deep breaths reboot our respiration and work as an unconscious stress management strategy.

Researchers, led by psychologist Elke Vlemincx, asked participants to wear devices that kept track of their breathing and monitored chest muscles while they were asked to complete stressful pressured mental arithmetic tasks or an attention task that required similar bodily movements but without the mental stress.

The participants thought they were completing an experiment on the body’s responses to maths problems but, in reality, the researchers were looking at the effect of sighing. Researchers kept track of spontaneous sighs, but in the second high pressure maths task, the volunteers were asked to deliberately sigh.

In biological systems, adding a little randomness or noise can sometimes make a signal clearer as long as it doesn’t drown everything out – a phenomenon technically known as stochastic resonance.

Imagine you’re in a dark nightclub trying to make out people’s faces. Too little light doesn’t help, completely crazy lighting is just too dazzling to allow you to recognise anyone, but moderate disco lighting, even with the colours and movement, does allow you to identify individual faces among the crowd.

The same principle applies when the body is signalling to itself, of course, and the researchers suspected that sighs might work like a bit of added noise into the breathing system, allowing the internal breathing regulator to get back into its groove.

As it turns out, sighs do seem to work like the brain’s reboot button for regular breathing. During mental stress, the volunteers’ breathing became more and more irregular as participants increasingly relied on deliberate breath control, at which point, a sigh occurred, causing automatic regular respiration to kick in again.

Furthermore, muscle tension steadily built up before a spontaneous sigh and decreased afterwards, supporting the idea that sighing helps release tension.

Interestingly, when the participants were prompted to sigh by the researchers, muscle tension decreased by a much smaller amount and breathing become more irregular. Being instructed to deliberately sigh seemed to actual impair recovery from mental stress.

It’s a wonderfully elegant study because it helps us understand both the mental and physiological function of a behaviour usually associated with wistful distraction.

Link to DOI entry and summary for study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

This is just a quick tip for psychologists who want a silent or beepless stopwatch, as they are very easy to make.

Stopwatches are often used when psychologists do neuropsychological assessments as they involve the timing of participant responses. Beeps can sometimes be distracting, especially to people who may have brain injury or might be emotionally disturbed, so many assessments recommend stop watches that don’t beep every time you press a button.

Surprisingly, few actually have this option and I keep seeing online discussions about where to get a silent stopwatch. It’s no coincidence that one of the few that allows you to switch off the beep is most commonly sold with books about psychological assessment.

However, you can make virtually any stopwatch silent very easily. If you unscrew the back – you may need a smaller ‘watchmakers’ or ‘jeweller’s screwdriver’ like this one – on the back plate you can see the the piezoelectric speaker (the circular metal disc – on the left in the image). Just cover it with tape and voila! you have a silent stopwatch.

Cheaper than commercially available devices with silent options and works with every stopwatch I’ve found so far.

Discover Magazine has an excellent piece by Carl Zimmer on the brains of elite athletes and how they have adapted with practice to process movement and the body differently.

There are lots of fascinating aspects to the article, but this particularly caught my eye:

To understand how athletes arrive at these better solutions, other neuroscientists have run experiments in which athletes and nonathletes perform the same task. This past January Claudio Del Percio of Sapienza University in Rome and his colleagues reported the results of a study in which they measured the brain waves of karate champions and ordinary people, at rest with their eyes closed, and compared them. The athletes, it turned out, emitted stronger alpha waves, which indicate a restful state. This finding suggests that an athlete’s brain is like a race car idling in neutral, ready to spring into action.

Del Percio’s team has also measured brain waves of athletes and nonathletes in action. In one experiment the researchers observed pistol shooters as they fired 120 times. In another experiment Del Percio had fencers balance on one foot. In both cases the scientists arrived at the same surprising results: The athletes’ brains were quieter, which means they devoted less brain activity to these motor tasks than nonathletes did. The reason, Del Percio argues, is that the brains of athletes are more efficient, so they produce the desired result with the help of fewer neurons. Del Percio’s research suggests that the more efficient a brain, the better job it does in sports. The scientists also found that when the pistol shooters hit their target, their brains tended to be quieter than when they missed.

There’s an interesting distinction here between what it means to have a quiet mind and what it means to have a quiet brain.

The EEG studies mentioned above found that during skilled athletic performance there were an increased number of alpha waves – electrical brain activity between 8-12Hz (cycles or waves per second) – usually associated with wakeful relaxation. In other words, mental calm.

However, these waves do not necessarily imply that the brain is similarly relaxed. In fact, a study that directly measured the link between alpha waves and the brain’s use of glucose found that more energy was need as alpha waves increased.

This whole brain energy / activity link is a little crude, however, and a more recent study using fMRI – a technique that measures the difference in oxygenated blood – has found increased alpha waves linked to reduced activity in parts of the occipital, temporal and frontal lobes, but with increased activity in the deeper brain areas the thalamus and insula.

In other words, it’s not that the whole brain just becomes ‘quieter’ (although you could say this about some specific areas) but that it seems to reconfigure the distribution of work.

Rather than becoming ‘relaxed’ the brain seem to become more ‘finely tuned’ with practice.

Link to Discover article on the brains of athletes.

New Scientist has a fantastic article on making sense of cognitive genetics studies, the science that links certain versions of genes to behaviour, by taking the use and abuse of the MAOA gene as an example. If the name doesn’t ring a bell you may remember it being dubbed ‘warrior gene’, which as well as being inaccurate, was one of its least embarrassing moments.

For many decades, genetics and psychology only really interacted with the twin study, which, by comparing the differences between identical and non-identical twins, can indicate how much of the difference in the twins you’ve studied is due to the environment and how much has been inherited.

As it became possible to identify individual genes, and more importantly, as automated ‘gene chip‘ technology made this economical, studies began looking at differences between groups of people distinguished by simply having different versions of the same gene.

The idea is to see how a single gene influences behaviour, but because the gene and the everyday effect are so distant (it’s like trying to detect the effect of a day of farm weather on the flavour of your lunch) the story often gets mangled in the retelling.

The New Scientist article, by Not Exactly Rocket Science’s Ed Yong, tells the story of MAOA and its headline-making link with aggression, but it also serves as an essential hitchhiker’s guide to the science and pitfalls of linking genetics with behaviour.

However, the clearest sign yet that the gene is no ruthless determinant of behaviour came in 2002 when Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, published their findings about a sample of 442 men from New Zealand who they had followed from birth. A third of these men carried the MAOA-L variant. Now, aged 26, this group was indeed more likely than the others to have developed antisocial disorders and violent behaviour – but only if they had been poorly treated or abused as children. Moffitt and Caspi concluded that the so-called “warrior gene” affects a child’s sensitivity to stress and trauma at an early age. Childhood trauma “activates” bad behaviour, but in a caring environment its effect is quashed.

Since then, similar interactions between nature and nurture have become part and parcel of the MAOA story. Carriers of MAOA-L are more likely to show delinquent behaviour if they were physically disciplined as children. They are also more likely to be hyperactive in late childhood if their first three years were stressful, and to develop conduct disorders if their mothers smoked cigarettes while pregnant with them. The list goes on. Likewise, Beaver found that MAOA-H carriers were more likely to commit fraud, but only if they hung around with delinquent peers.

Link to NewSci article on MAOA, genes and behaviour.

The journal Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience has an paper that looks at how rates of yawning change throughout our life.

It has a slightly surreal feel to it, and I can’t help imaging yawn scientists carefully tracking the behaviour across the globe with overly complicated machines, like something out of a Roald Dahl book.

Yawning throughout Life.

Front Neurol Neurosci. 2010;28:26-31.

Giganti F, Salzarulo P.

Yawning is a behavior that begins in the first stages of life. It has not only been observed in infants and in newborns, but also in fetuses of 12-14 weeks’ gestational age. Yawning frequency changes over the life span. In preterm infants, the number of yawns decreases between 31 and 40 weeks’ postconceptional age, mainly during the day. In this period of life, yawning is an isolated behavior rarely occurring in bursts, and its frequency is quite low with respect to adults. The incidence of yawning seems to increase when children attend elementary school, whereas this is reduced in the elderly. Aged people yawn less than younger ones, mainly during morning and mid-afternoon. In adults, the time course of yawning is associated with the time course of sleepiness, except upon awakening when the high frequency of yawns is not associated with high sleepiness. In adults, yawning frequency increases in the early morning and in the late evening, whereas at the earliest stages of development (fetuses and preterm infants) yawning does not show diurnal variations. Yawning seems to be involved in the modulation of arousal process across the whole life span. In preterm infants, yawning is often followed by motor activation and it is more common during waking than sleep; in adults, yawning occurs mainly at sleep onset and upon awakening.

Link to PubMed entry for paper on ‘Yawning throughout Life’.

The FBI has an appointment-only display called the Evil Minds Research Museum that displays the letters, art and artefacts of serial killers in an attempt to understand their psychology. There’s not much about it online but it is discussed in the second part of the two part FBI podcast about their behavioural science programme.

This is the part where head of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, Greg Vecchi, describes the exhibit:

One of the most exciting research projects that we have, is we‚Äôve have started what we have labeled the ‘Evil Minds Research Museum.’ And what this is, this is actually a research museum where we are collecting serial killer and other offender artifacts.

And so these artifacts are like paintings, John Wayne Gacey paintings. Paintings that he was the Killer Clown back in Chicago several decades back, who would kill men and boys, and he would dismember their bodies and put them under his floor board. Well, after he was caught, well, he turned out to be a so-called killer of the community [NB: this is a transcription error, Vecchi actually says ‘pillar of the community’], and he would dress up as a clown and do gigs doing clown stuff for the kids. And so he would draw pictures or paint pictures of clowns, and he had clown paintings in the room where he dismembered the bodies. And he had clown paintings that he did after he got arrested and when he was basically on death row.

And so we got those paintings and we are studying those paintings. We want to look at the brush strokes. We want to look at what drives him, what changes, because the pictures are completely different. Before he was arrested, for instance, the clowns were Flippo the Clown, very happy clowns, very colorful; afterwards his paintings were very dark. It was basically a skeleton or a skull dressed up or painted up to be a clown.

We’ve have got thousands and thousands of pages of correspondence between a number of serial killers. Richard Ramirez, the night stalker. We’ve got Keith Hunter Jesperson, another famous serial killer, his complete manifesto of why he killed, written in his own handwriting. We have greeting cards, we have photos, we have serial killer art. But the museum itself, and here is where the value of it is, for the most part, almost all of the research of law enforcement is usually done interacting with the subject rather through an investigation, or, in what we do, more of a research-type of approach, where we would sit down with protocols and interview them like we do with the serial killers, or like we are doing with the hostage takers now. This is stuff that is taken out of their most personal possessions. Things that were not taken as law enforcement, but were taken on search warrants, or provided, maybe after they were executed, by their family. And so it gives a completely different perspective of their mindset—where they are coming from because this is correspondence to themselves, correspondence between them and their loved ones—their mother, their father—correspondence between them and other serial killers, and even correspondence between them and the many groupies that write to them and develop a relationship as a pen pal. And so this is a very exciting research, this research museum, where we are looking at their motivation and try to understand them from a perspective that, as far as we know, has never been undertaken.”

Although it’s not open to the public, you can apply to visit if you’re a genuine researcher with the visiting scholars programme.

One such visit is described in the latest issue of the Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association. You can download the magazine for free, although only in one 7Mb pdf. The article about the unit starts on page 14 and has pictures of several of the exhibits.

Interestingly, the article is followed by a museum advert which asks for donations of exhibits, although I have to say, it’s not the most tasteful piece of promotion I’ve ever seen as it looks more like a B-movie horror poster. Click here to see it in all its dubious glory.

By the way, did you know that the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit has a student intern programme? If you’re a student and would like to apply the details are online.

Link to part 1 of FBI podcast on behavioural science.
Link to part 2 of FBI podcast on behavioural science.
pdf of latest Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association.
Link to details of FBI behavioural science intern scheme.

Discover magazine has a fantastic Carl Zimmer piece about a man who lost the ability to see things in his mind’s eye after a minor neurological procedure.

Zimmer covers a recently published study on patient MX who lost his conscious visual imagery but could still do tests, like mental rotation, that were assumed to need the ability to mentally picture the procedure to work it out.

All the exams the scientists gave MX confirmed his claim that he was missing his mind’s eye. And yet he could do lots of things that would seem impossible without one. Without any effort he could give the scientists detailed descriptions of landmarks around Edinburgh, for example. He could remember visual details, but he couldn’t “see” them. Della Sala and Zeman asked MX to say whether each letter of the alphabet had a low-hanging tail (like g and j). He got every one right. They asked him about specific details of the faces of famous people (“Does Tony Blair have light-colored eyes?”). He did just as well as the architects.

The key insight came with a test derived from a classic psychological experiment invented in the 1970s by Stanford University psychologist Roger Shepherd. Della Sala and Zeman showed MX pairs of pictures, each one consisting of an object made up of 10 cubes. MX had to say whether the pairs of objects were different things or actually the same thing shown from two different perspectives. Normal people solve this puzzle in a strikingly consistent way, with their response time depending on how much the angle of perspective differs between the two objects: The bigger the difference, the longer it takes people to decide whether the objects are the same…

MX’s results flew in the face of that explanation. When he solved the puzzles, he always took about the same amount of time to answer—and he got every one right.

We still understand relatively little about the role and importance of visual mental imagery or what role it takes in problems or impairments.

A study I was part of found that people with congenital prosopagnosia, a genetic inability to recognise faces, had virtually absent visual imagery despite having no signs of brain damage or neurological abnormalities.

Patients who acquire prosopagnosia after brain damage often report that they can no longer imagine what faces look like, but in MX’s case, he seems to have lost his ability to mentally ‘see’ faces but has no problem recognising people.

The Discover article is a concise yet comprehensive take on this new study that helps us understand the link between how we experience the world and how we construct it inside our heads.

Link to Discover article ‘Look Deep Into the Mind’s Eye’.

Psychologist Jesse Bering has written one of the most remarkable popular science articles I have read in a very long time that discusses, believe it or not, zoophilia or the sexual attraction to animals. The piece for Scientific American is surprising, unnerving, hilarious, frightening and thought-provoking, all in equal measure.

The article considers to what extent sexual attraction to animals is a perversion, opportunistic sex act or a genuine sexual orientation and gives a comprehensive review of the (admittedly few) scientific studies in the area.

But the stereotypical portrait of the zoophile as a woman-deprived, down-on-the-farm, and poorly educated male is presently being challenged by some contemporary findings. The most fascinating of these, in my opinion, is a set of two case studies published by University of Montreal psychologist Christopher Earls and his colleague Martin Lalumière, of the University of Lethbridge. The first case study appeared in 2002 in the journal Sexual Abuse and documented the story of a low-IQ’ed, antisocial, fifty-four-year-old convict who had a strong sexual interest in horses. In fact, this was why he was in prison for the fourth time on related offenses; in the latest incident, he had cruelly killed a mare out of jealousy because he thought she’d been giving eyes to a certain stallion. (You thought you had issues.)

The man’s self-reported sexual interest in mares was actually verified by a controlled, phallometric study. When hooked up to a penile plethysmograph [a hard-on measuring device] and shown nude photos of all varieties and ages of humans, the man was decidedly flaccid. Nothing happening down there either when he looked at slides of cats, dogs, sheep, chickens, or cows. But he certainly wasn’t impotent, as the researchers clearly observed when the subject was shown images of horses.

Blimey.

The documentary Animal Passions is a serious attempt to understand the motivations of people who are sexually attracted to animals. Many of the people claim, apparently sincerely, to want to be in fulfilling romantic relationships with other species. Needless to say, it is similarly eye-opening. Although unnerving at times, it is not gratuitious and, in fact, is available on YouTube.

Bering discusses what science and philosophy makes of these unusual attractions and does a fantastic job of covering a difficult topic.

Link to Bering’s article on zoophilia at Scientific American.

Nature has a freely available feature article that discusses recent debates about how functional brain scans should be used in court cases concerning people charged with murder and classified as psychopaths.

Brain scans that show an estimate of brain activity, such as fMRI, are widely used in forensic and medical research to understand whether offenders and psychopaths differ in how their brain processes information.

These studies usually rely on group differences, showing that, on average, brain activity occurs differently in offenders compared to non-offenders, patients compared to non-patients and so on.

Court cases, of course, attempt to decided whether a single individual is criminally responsible for his or her actions. Inferring individual differences from broad group averages is difficult, some say impossible but despite this, functional neuroimaging is being increasingly used in court.

The Nature article discusses the recent Jeanine Nicarico murder case where Brian Dugan was being charged (and later confessed to) with the young girl’s murder.

Controversially, and for the first time in the US, the court was permitted to see evidence from functional brain scans from neuroscientist Kent Kiehl related to Dugan’s diagnosis of psychopathy.

On 29 October, Kiehl participated in a ‘Frye hearing’ for Dugan’s case. Based on a 1923 ruling, the hearing determines whether scientific evidence is robust enough to be admitted. Joseph Birkett, the lead prosecutor in the Dugan case, argued that allowing the scans ‚Äî the bright colours and statistical parameters of which are chosen by the researchers ‚Äî might bias the jury. Some studies, prosecutors argued, have shown that neuroscientific explanations can be particularly seductive to the layperson.

The judge ultimately “cut the baby in half”, says Birkett. He ruled that the jury would not be allowed to see Dugan’s actual brain scans, but that Kiehl could describe them and how he interpreted them based on his research.

According to the article, the scans had a significant influence on the case and it has raised a heated debated about whether such evidence is possibly interpretable in legal terms.

Neuroscientists are typically harshly critical about lawyers’ enthusiasm for wanting to use less-than-clear cut technologies like ‘brain scan lie detectors’ in court.

However an article recently published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences was very critical of this attitude, noting that the court’s requirements were often different from science’s, and than even suggestive evidence could help fill out the overall picture, and hence it was up to the court to decide whether such evidence should be admissible, not scientists.

Nevertheless, these sorts of arguments raise the hackles of many researchers and neuroscientist Helen Mayberg is quoted in the Nature piece as saying “It is a dangerous distortion of science that sets dangerous precedents for the field”.

The article is great coverage of the particular case and an interesting look into how neuroscience research is being uncomfortably integrated into the legal system.

Link Nature article ‘Science in court: Head case’ (via @mocost).

There are numerous forms of body distortions and out-of-body experiences reported in the neurological literature but this is the first case I’ve found of someone who experienced tics that seemed to occur in external objects.

The report was published in the journal Neurology in 1997 and concerns a man with Tourette’s syndrome, a condition of persistent tics.

These more commonly appear as almost irresistible repetitive movements that the person feels compelled to complete, but occasionally they can appear as what are known as ‘sensory tics’ which are repetitive sensations such as feelings of pressure, tickle, warmth, cold, or other abnormal sensation in skin, bones, muscles, and joints.

In this case, however, the sensations felt as if they were appearing in external objects:

A 34-year-old man dated the onset of his symptoms to age 5 when he developed a compulsion to bite down on cups and glasses. The drive was so irresistible that he once shattered a glass in his mouth. He later began having painful repetitive neck extension and shoulder shrugging. During childhood, he first noticed itchy or pressure sensations, usually deep in a joint, but sometimes on the skin, in his hands, feet, and arms. The sensations eventually spread. For a period of time, the inside of his knees and ankles were particularly affected and the sensation could only be relieved by banging his ankles together. Noises including grunts, sniffs, and loud shouts began during early adolescence. A period of coprolalia was present briefly. The tics came to involve the entire body. He had associated difficulty concentrating, compulsions, and obsessions. He was given a trial of clonidine without relief. He was never tried on other medications.

The patient characterizes his motor tics as voluntary movements performed in response to the “itchy” feeling. Although he can partially suppress tics in any given location, suppression enhances the feeling that he must move another body area. He frequently has the urge to repeat what others say to him but can usually suppress it. Beginning during childhood and persisting through adulthood, the patient noticed that the itchy sensations preceding motor tics could arise in other people or in objects.

The extracorporeal sensations are associated with the need to scratch or touch the itchy item in a particular way. External sensations most frequently arise in angles, corners, and points of objects such as elbows, the edges of tables, or the edge of his computer screen. Out-of-body sensations are more likely if the patient is touching an object but can also arise without direct contact. When younger, the patient would act on the accompanying urge and would scratch his sister’s elbow. He is able to resist touching other people.

Disembodied sensations are not uncommon after neurological difficulties (for example, a recent case study of a person with epilepsy reported a feeling of complete disembodiment) and can even be induced in you and me, as the ‘rubber hand illusion‘ demonstrates.

In this case, however, it isn’t clear exactly how the Tourette’s syndrome is triggering the feeling that the sensations appear in other objects, although it does suggest that our self-other boundary is not as iron-clad as we sometimes like to believe.

Link to PubMed entry for case study.