Category: Integrating

New Scientist has an excellent article looking at current attempts to develop a pill that will treat alcoholism or help people reduce their cravings for booze.

It’s a really well-rounded piece that captures the problems with the ‘cure in a pill’ method as well as the neuroscience behind attempts to alter the chemistry of craving and addiction.

Apart from drugs to treat associated mental illnesses, one of the few widely used treatments at the moment, naltrexone, is designed to make booze less pleasurable by blocking opioid receptors, but it is far from effective for everyone:

Naltrexone’s biggest stumbling block, however, is that it fails to treat some of the more painful aspects of abstinence. Drinking dampens the brain’s response to stress – indeed, many heavy drinkers become hooked on alcohol for this reason alone. The result is that going cold turkey without also calming the brain’s stress pathways can be a distressing experience. “People feel just terrible,” says George Koob, a specialist in the neurobiology of addiction at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. “These individuals are miserable. They have panic attacks.”

Targeting these drink-hijacked stress pathways – often without even touching the brain’s pleasure circuits – is now the hottest area in alcoholism research.

And several of the new drugs outlined in the article are designed to do exactly this.

It’s probably worth mentioning that, apart from naltrexone, probably the only other widely used medication is disulfiram, which, rather than change the cravings, just makes the patient unpleasantly ill if they do drink alcohol as a form of chemical dissuasion.

Of course, if the patient is determined to continue drinking, they’ll just stop taking the drug, a problem with all chemical treatments, and so comprehensive addiction treatment needs to be more than just medication.

Link to NewSci on ‘Could popping a pill stop you hitting the bottle?’

MIT’s online magazine Technology Review has a good short article reviewing the year in robotics, giving the highlights of the latest developments from 2009.

The piece has loads of links so you can read up, and sometimes see, the robots in action and it looks like giving robots ‘social skills’ to interact with humans has been a big area of progress:

The socialization of robots was an important area of research this year. Many researchers believe that giving robots social skills will make them better at assisting people in homes, schools, offices, and hospitals. Andrea Thomaz, a TR35 innovator for 2009, created robots that can learn simple grasping tasks from human instructors who use social cues, such as verbal instructions, gestures, and expressions.

Another robot, made by a group at Carnegie Mellon University, guides conversations by making “eye contact” to suggest that it’s time to speak (“Making Robots Give the Right Glances”). Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, created a machine-learning program that lets a robotic head develop better facial expressions. By looking in a mirror, the robot can analyze the way its motors move different parts of the face, and create new expressions (“A Robot that’s Learning to Smile”). And a virtual robot mimicked sneakiness, hiding in virtual shadows and darting between obstacles to remain undetected (“Modeling Sneaky Robots”).

Link to Tech Review Year in Robotics.

American Scientist has a fascinating podcast on the evolution of the human capacity for killing at a distance – in other words, the cultural evolution of projectile weapons.

The talk is by anthropologist Steven Churchill who looks at what motivated the development of projectile weapons – initially rocks, slings and spears and – and what effect these developments had on the culture of ancient peoples.

He starts as far back as the time when neanderthals and modern humans were both in existence and discusses how the development of these weapons may have influence the competition between the two species.

He also discusses how these weapons may have affected human evolution and notes that these weapons make group attacks easier, meaning that it was probably easier for societies to police themselves and so leading to selection against aggressive individuals.

A thoroughly fascinating discussion, where Churchill talks about historical evidence as well as his own studies where he’s asked people to test the limits of using ancient weapons.

Link to ‘The Evolution of the Human Capacity for Killing at a Distance’.

A study just released in the Archives of General Psychiatry has found that the prescription of multiple psychiatric drugs to individual patients has increased greatly in recent years despite their being little hard evidence about the benefits and risks of combining medication.

The practice of prescribing multiple drugs is called ‘polypharmacy‘ and usually occurs because a single medication doesn’t treat the symptoms adequately or quickly enough.

This situation is common in psychiatry partly due to what is euphemistically known as ‘treatment resistance’. This phrase is often used as if the patient has an especially tough case of the disorder (e.g. they have ‘treatment resistant schizophrenia’) or if it is a biological trait of the person (the patient is ‘treatment resistant’) but it could equally well describe the fact that the drugs don’t work very well – or rather, they don’t work very well for everyone.

This is common enough that in schizophrenia, about a third of patients show little or no response to common antipsychotic drugs and many of the rest don’t have their symptoms completely controlled. There are similar numbers in people with depression.

It may also be the case that a patient has other symptoms, severe anxiety for example, and in any of these cases the psychiatrist will often add medications on top of each other, attempting to improve the outcome.

However, there is very little research on medication combinations. We have some studies that show that adding one drug to another (‘augmenting’ in the jargon) can improve outcome with some drugs and in some conditions, but these are few and far between.

There is virtually no good quality evidence on the effects of three or more drugs, but this is exactly where the rates of prescribing have risen, as shown by the most recent study which looked at how common this was in US office-based (rather than on hospital ward) consultations with a psychiatrist:

Between 1996 and 2006, there was a substantial increase in the proportion of patient visits in which 2 or more psychotropic medications were prescribed. During this period, the proportion of visits in which 3 or more psychotropic medications were prescribed increased from fewer than 1 in 5 to nearly 1 in 3.

One of the reasons there are so few trials of medication combinations is that drug companies are reluctant to fund them, given that they would rarely include two in-patent medications from the same company, meaning they could use the results to promote their products.

This has meant that we have had to wait until quite recently for, for example, the results of the US government funded STAR*D study on depression treatment to find out whether some combinations actually help.

Link to study on increase in polypharmacy in psychiatry.

Dr Petra has an excellent write-up of the new study which has been widely reported as showing there is ‘no genetic evidence for the g spot’, but in fact indicates that there is ‘no genetic evidence for thinking you have a g spot’, which is quite a different thing and doesn’t bear particularly well on whether this famed point of sexual ecstasy really exists.

The research is a twin study, which looks at the differences in how human traits vary between identical twins, who are genetically identical, and regular twins who share, on average, only 50% of their genetic information. The differences between how the trait varies between the two types of twins indicates how closely controlled the trait is by genetics in that sample.

The rationale behind the research is that if the g spot is a genuine fixed anatomical feature, then it should be more likely to be influenced by genetics, as other such features are.

However, this study didn’t measure anything anatomical, it just asked the women whether they thought they had a g spot or not with a single question: ‚ÄúDo you believe you have a so called G spot, a small areas the size of a 20p coin on the front wall of your vagina that is sensitive to deep pressure?‚Äù.

This is a bit of an odd strategy because we’re not necessarily the best guides to our own internal anatomy.

This was demonstrated in 1998 when a study by surgeon Helen O’Connell and colleagues dissected several dead bodies and found that the clitoris was much larger than had been thought for thousands of years and in fact had nerves and blood vessels that extend deep within the body.

Crucially, the sexual experiences of women throughout history had not provided a reliable guide to the anatomy of the clitoris and it took a detailed look at the body’s structures to work this out. This suggests that asking people whether they think they have a particular feature may not be a reliable guide to whether they do.

Dr Petra’s write-up gives an excellent account of the history of ‘g spot’ concept and discusses how this study fits into the bigger picture.

Link to ‘Where have all the g spots gone?’

A summary of an eye-opening 2002 article on the psychological characteristics of prisoners on ‘death row‘ in the United States, published in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law.

Death row inmate characteristics, adjustment, and confinement: a critical review of the literature

Behav Sci Law. 2002;20(1-2):191-210.

Cunningham MD, Vigen MP.

This article reviews and summarizes research on death row inmates. The contributions and weaknesses of death row demographic data, clinical studies, and research based on institutional records are critiqued. Our analysis shows that death row inmates are overwhelmingly male and disproportionately Southern. Racial representation remains controversial.

Frequently death row inmates are intellectually limited and academically deficient. Histories of significant neurological insult are common, as are developmental histories of trauma, family disruption, and substance abuse. Rates of psychological disorder among death row inmates are high, with conditions of confinement appearing to precipitate or aggravate these disorders. Contrary to expectation, the extant research indicates that the majority of death row inmates do not exhibit violence in prison even in more open institutional settings.

These findings have implications for forensic mental health sentencing evaluations, competent attorney representation, provision of mental health services, racial disparity in death sentences, death row security and confinement policies, and moral culpability considerations. Future research directions on death row populations are suggested.

It’s a fascinating, if not slightly morbid article, and the full text is available online as a pdf if you want a full breakdown of the research.

Link to PubMed entry for study.
pdf of full text of the article.

Scientific American has an interesting short piece on whether people can really demonstrate super-human strength in emergency situations. The typical story is where someone is trapped under a car after an accident and a friend or relative manages to lift a seemingly impossible weight to free them.

This common tale has all the hallmarks of an urban myth, but it turns out to be partially plausible. Fear seems to increase our available muscle strength – but not by super-human amounts – only by a fraction of our normal lifting power.

Vladimir Zatsiorsky, a professor of kinesiology at Penn State who has extensively studied the biomechanics of weightlifting, draws the distinction between the force that our muscles are able to theoretically apply, which he calls “absolute strength,” and the maximum force that they can generate through the conscious exertion of will, which he calls “maximal strength.” An ordinary person, he has found, can only summon about 65 percent of their absolute power in a training session, while a trained weightlifter can exceed 80 percent…

But there’s a limit to how fast and how strong fear can make us. We’ve all heard stories about panicked mothers lifting cars off their trapped babies. They’ve been circulating for so long that many of us assume that they must be true. Zatsiorsky’s work, however, suggests that while fear can indeed motivate us to approach more closely to our absolute power level than even the fiercest competition, there’s no way to exceed it. A woman who can lift 100 pounds at the gym might, according to Zatsiorsky, be able to lift 135 pounds in a frenzy of maternal fear. But she’s not going to suddenly be able to lift a 3,000-pound car.

The SciAm article is apparently an excerpt from a new book entitled Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger.

Link to SciAm excerpt on ‘super-human strength’
Link to book website.

The New York Times has a fascinating article revisiting a classic problem in psychology of whether our accounts of our individual ‘streams of consciousness’ have any useful role in the scientific understanding the mind.

Many of the early studies in psychology relied on people simply reporting ‘what they thought’ and got a bad reputation due to the rather haphazard ways in which studies were conducted.

In part, this led to a swing in the other direction, where the extremes of behaviourism suggested that not only were these methods useless but that the ‘stream of consciousness’ played no causal role in our behaviour – in effect, it was seen as uninteresting mental fluff.

Thankfully, mainstream psychology has moved on and now often tries to integrate conscious experience with objective observational data, but this isn’t always the easiest of tasks either practically or theoretically (indeed, the difficulty is the basis of the ‘hard problem‘ of consciousness).

Recently, psychologists have developed the experience sampling method to try and make sample the stream of consciousness a little more systematic. It involves giving someone a device that beeps randomly and when it sounds, they have to record exactly what they were thinking about or have to rate a certain aspect of the current psychological state.

The resulting mental freeze-frames are remarkably diverse.

On the third day of Melanie’s experiment, as her boyfriend was asking her a question about insurance, she was trying to remember the word “periodontist.” On the fourth day, she was having a strong urge to go scuba diving. On the sixth day, she was picking flower petals from the sink while hearing echoes of the phrase “nice long time” in her head.

These dispatches from the front lines of consciousness might be useful to a novelist seeking authentic material. But can they contribute to a scientific understanding of the mind?

…Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher at the University of California, Riverside, says after-the-fact interviews should be treated with caution: one cannot assume the subjects will be honest, or that they are not twisting their answers to conform with their own biases, or telling the experimenter what they think he wants to hear, or simply filling in details they forgot.

The article is riffing on the recent book by Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel called Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic and a recent article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies where the debate was opened out to a range of cognitive scientists for their views.

Link to NYT piece ‘Taking Mental Snapshots to Plumb Our Inner Selves’.

If you’re wondering how effective your average clown is, wonder no more. I’ve found a randomised controlled trial that tested the effectiveness of clowns in treating children’s anxiety before an operation, in comparison to midazolam, an anti-anxiety drug.

It turned out, clowns worked the best, but wow, doesn’t the study summary read weirdly.

Clowns for the prevention of preoperative anxiety in children: a randomized controlled trial.

Paediatr Anaesth. 2009 Mar;19(3):262-6.

Golan G, Tighe P, Dobija N, Perel A, Keidan I.

OBJECTIVE: To determine if specially trained professional clowns allayed preoperative anxiety and resulted in a smooth anesthetic induction compared to the use of midazolam or no intervention.

METHODS: This was a randomized, controlled, and blinded study conducted with children 3-8 years of age undergoing general anesthesia and elective outpatient surgery. Patients were assigned to one of three groups: Group 1 did not receive midazolam or clown presence; group 2 received 0.5 mg x kg(-1) oral midazolam 30 min before surgery up to a maximum of 15 mg; and group 3 had two specially trained clowns present upon arrival to the preoperative holding area and throughout operating room (OR) entrance and mask application for inhalation induction of anesthesia. The children were videotaped for later grading.

RESULTS: The clown group had a statistically significant lower modified-Yale Preoperative Anxiety Scale score in the preoperative holding area compared to the control and midazolam group. The clowns’ effect on anxiety reduction continued when the children entered the OR but was equal at this point to the midazolam group. Upon application of the anesthesia mask no significant differences were detected between the groups.

CONCLUSIONS: This study found that the use of preoperative medically trained clowns for children undergoing surgery can significantly alleviate preoperative anxiety. However, clowns do not have any effect once the anesthesia mask is introduced.

The use of ‘clown doctors’ is actually pretty common in Children’s hospitals and, as far as I know, the practice was invented by the American physician Patch Adams.

As for adverse reactions, despite the popular belief in ‘clown phobia’, variously called ballatrophobia, coulrophobia or my favourite – bozophobia, I could only find one case report of this particular anxiety disorder. Interestingly, it was discovered by a clown doctor who got a powerful negative reaction from an adult patient.

However, there is a video of a woman undergoing psychological treatment for clown phobia on that font of medical knowledge, YouTube.

Link to PubMed entry for clown trial.

Neurophilosophy has an excellent piece on ‘time-space’ synaesthesia where affected individuals experience units of time – such as hours, days, or months – as occupying specific locations in space relative to their own body.

The image on the right is taken from a BBC News article on time-space synaesthesia and was drawn by one lady to illustrate how days of the week appear to her.

However, Neurophilosophy piece covers two new studies, one on a person with synaesthesia who experiences months in the space around her body in the form of a ‘7’ shape:

Michelle Jarick of the Synaesthesia Research Group at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and her colleagues describe the case of an individual whose time-space synaesthesia has a previously undescribed feature. Like other time-space synaesthetes, the 21-year-old individual, known as L, experiences the time of day and the months of the year as being represented in the space around her body. She experiences the hours of the day in the form of a large “clock face”, and her mental calender consists of a giant number “7”, which extends for approximately 1 meter around her waist, and on which the months of the year are arranged.

Both of the studies covered in the article demonstrate a crucial technique in synaesthesia research – in part, a demonstration that the effect is a genuine cross-over of the senses.

The general technique is the same no matter what form of synaesthesia you’re testing. It involves finding a task which will be changed by the triggered sense but not (or not so much) by the original perception.

For example, with the lady who drew the layout of her months in the image above, October appears on her right and July appears on her left.

So if you did a reaction task that involved indicating what side a word appeared on, you’d expect someone with this form of synaesthesia to do worse when October appeared on the left and July appeared on the right, owing to the confusion caused by the unfamiliar associations, or better when they appeared on the expected sides.

This form of study, where synaesthesia can be shown to improve or worsen performance on other tasks related mostly to the triggered perception is the basis of much research in this area, and the Neurophilosophy piece outlines how these two new studies have shown how time-space fusion is associated with better abilities in understanding time and space.

Link to Neurophilosophy on ‘The cognitive benefits of time-space synaesthesia’.
Link to BBC News on time-space synaesthesia.

Seed Magazine has an interesting piece on the ‘uncanny valley‘ effect, where humanoid figures become increasingly more attractive until they’re ‘a bit too lifelike’ and start seeming uncomfortably eerie.

It’s a fantastic piece because it discusses the development of the concept of ‘uncanniness’ – from the initial explanations by Freud to some tentative experimental studies that attempts to explain why some androids feel a bit creepy.

Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the particular occurrences of the uncanny, in which humans are bothered by interaction with human-like models, began as a psychological curiosity. But as our ability to design artificial life has increased—along with our dependence on it—getting to the heart of why people respond negatively to realistic models of themselves has taken on a new importance. Attempts to understand the origins of this reaction, known since the 1970s as the “uncanny valley response,” have drawn on everything from repressed fears of castration to an evolutionary mechanism for mate selection, but there has been little empirical evidence to assess the validity of these ideas.

I’ve always wondered whether people with robot fetishes, who get sexually aroused by android-like sex partners, are less susceptible to the uncanny valley effect.

Best of luck getting funding for that research project, I think to myself.

Link to Seed article ‘Into the Uncanny Valley’.

Havelock Ellis is better known as a pioneering sexologist but I’ve just found this account of a young man with striking synaesthesia from a 1904 edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry

Ellis is apparently recounting a case from a Dr. Ulrich of the ‘Asylum for Epileptics at Zurich’, which I suspect is because he is summarising the original French report for the readers of the BJP.

The patient is described as acquiring epilepsy after catching measles at the age of three and having experiencing ongoing neurological impairment as a result, particularly with memory problems.

However, he does have a striking form of synaesthesia, where the senses become crossed, and the description is appropriately vivid:

From his earliest years voices have had colours to him, and he can hear nothing without a definite colour impression. The colours are very delicate, and transparent, like the colours of the prism; he does not actually see them before his eyes, but seems to hear them at the same time as he sees them. The vowel sounds have the most intense colours, which are here fully described, as well as the colours of musical instruments, cries of animals, etc. Colour hearing is, however, by no means the only form of synaesthesia presented by this subject. All the senses are affected. There is optical synaesthesia, whereby geometrical forms, etc., are coloured, and whereby also colours have faintly marked tastes.

There is, again, olfactory synaesthesia, by which odours produce colours; gustatory synaesthesia, by which tastes produce colours; and similarly tactile synaesthesia, and synaesthesia produced by painful impressions. There is finally a reciprocity of synaesthesia, by which colours recall the sensations with which they are associated. Among the points to be noted are that pains produce sensations of taste and also of temperature, while heat sensations produce sensations of vision and also of taste, and olfactory stimuli produce both visual and taste sensations…

The phenomena are most vivid after a quick succession of fits, and at such times it occasionally happens that there is some slight mental disturbance, and the patient fancies he is bewitched by the colours. Ulrich believes that all the synaesthesias so far known are combined in the person of his subject.

Although Ellis is one of the founders of sexology, he admitted in his autiobiography that he was impotent until the age of 60.

Link to entry in the British Journal of Psychiatry archive.

I’ve just found a curious study on whether opera fans are more accepting of suicide in the case of dishonor to one’s family in real life, in light of the fact that this is a common theme in several well known stage masterpieces.

It turns out that they are, and the researchers label the phenomenon the ‘Madame Butterfly effect’ after the famous opera of the same name where one of the lead characters kills themselves to avoid dishonour.

Opera subculture and suicide for honor.

Death Studies. 2002 Jun;26(5):431-7.

Stack S.

The influence of music-based subcultures on suicidality has been the subject of much debate but little scholarly research. While previous work has documented that suicide is a remarkably frequent cause of death in opera, it has not explored the related consequences on opera’s audience. In particular, the possible influence of the opera subculture on suicide acceptability has been largely unexplored. Suicide in the case of life without honor, the “Madame Butterfly Effect,” is a theme in opera. Persons who are drawn into and/or influenced by the opera subculture of honor are hypothesized to be more accepting of suicide in the case of dishonor to one’s family. Data are from the national general social surveys (N = 845). A multivariate logistic regression analysis finds that opera fans are 2.37 times more accepting of suicide because of dishonor than nonfans. Only two variables, religiosity and education, are more closely related to suicide acceptability than opera fanship. These are the first empirical results on the subject of opera and suicide acceptability.

Link to PubMed entry for opera and attitudes to suicide study.

The latest edition of Monitor on Psychology has an excellent article on the psychology of terrorism, looking at both what motivates people to join terrorist organisations and what influences attitudes to terrorist groups.

Being an article in the publication of the American Psychological Association, it’s a round-up of American research on terrorism, however, there are two findings on terrorism which perhaps suggest one of the political challenges in dealing with the problem.

One of those is from terror management theory, in which making people temporarily conscious of a risk to their life or their impending mortality affects how people think about a range of issues, including response to terrorism:

To test whether the theory applies to the conflict between the Middle East and the West, Pyszczynski’s team conducted a set of studies in the United States, Iran and Israel. In all three countries, people who were subtly reminded of their mortality‚Äîand thus primed to cling more strongly to their group identities‚Äîwere more likely to support violence against the out group. Iranians were more likely to support suicide bombing against Westerners. Americans were more likely to advocate military force to battle Islamic extremists, even if it meant killing thousands of civilians. Israelis were more likely to condone violence against Palestinians.

So discussing mortal threat increases people’s desire for violent responses to perceived terrorism.

However, the article makes clear that radicalisation is potentially increased by violent responses and that successful deredicalisation programmes take a supportive rather than a punitive approach:

In preliminary research, Kruglanski and colleagues note that many of these programs share:

‚Ä¢ An intellectual component, often involving moderate Muslim clerics who hold dialogues with imprisoned detainees about the Qu’ran’s true teachings on violence and jihad.

‚Ä¢ An emotional component that defuses detainees’ anger and frustration by showing authentic concern for their families, through means such as funding their children’s education or offering professional training for their wives. This aspect also capitalizes on the fact that detainees are weary from their lifestyles and imprisonment.

• A social component that addresses the reality that detainees often re-enter societies that may rekindle their radical beliefs. A program in Indonesia, for instance, uses former militants who are now law-abiding citizens to convince former terrorists that violence against civilians compromises the image of Islam.

So the political dilemma seems to be that simply discussing the threat of terrorism makes people less likely to support the most effective counter-terrorist programmes, owing to the effect of mortality awareness increasing the desire for violent responses, which, if carried out, could increase support for terrorism in the target population.

Answers on a postcard please…

Link to article ‘Understanding terrorism’.

The Atlantic has an excellent article on how our assumptions about genetic vulnerability to mental illness may be misplaced, as many studies have missed out how the same genetic factors may cause people to thrive but only in quite specific circumstances.

One of the difficulties with psychiatry research is that it often has a sample bias, a blind spot if you will, as it typically studies people who turn up in front of mental health professionals because they’re a problem to themselves or others.

It finds social, psychological or biological factors associated with the problem and then speculates that these might be involved in causing the problem.

Many times throughout history, however, it has later been discovered that perfectly functional people have the same traits but they weren’t specifically looked for and so weren’t included when the theories were devised.

In this case, the article tackles how genes originally identified as ‘risk factors’ for mental illness, could, in fact, be equally well conceived of as ‘sensitivity factors’ that heighten response to all situations.

When these situations include tragedy, abuse, or what in the medical literature are euphemistically called ‘life events’ (essentially, the shit in ‘shit happens’) the result may be an increased chance of mental illness, but when the situations are positive, life-enhancing opportunities, this extra sensitivity may lead to better outcomes.

Though this hypothesis is new to modern biological psychiatry, it can be found in folk wisdom, as the University of Arizona developmental psychologist Bruce Ellis and the University of British Columbia developmental pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce pointed out last year in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The Swedes, Ellis and Boyce noted in an essay titled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.

At first glance, this idea, which I’ll call the orchid hypothesis, may seem a simple amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis. It merely adds that environment and experience can steer a person up instead of down. Yet it’s actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness.

Link to Atlantic article ‘The Science of Success’.

Alien or anarchic hand syndrome is where you lose conscious control of one of your hands after brain damage, to the point where it seems to have a ‘will of its own’. There’s a great short article in this month’s Cortex examining how this curious phenomenon has appeared in fiction.

Famously, something similar appears in the film Dr Strangelove to the point where the disorder is sometimes called the ‘Dr Strangelove syndrome’.

But it turns out that self-directed hands have also appeared in numerous other works of fiction. I was particularly taken by this plot device:

The phenomenon is usually accounted for as resulting from lesions to the contralateral Supplementary Motor Area (SMA). However, it has also been associated to the severance of the Corpus Callosum and William Boyd, in his short story, ‘‘Bizarre Situations’’, from the collection ‘‘On the Yankee Station’’, embraced this anatomical interpretation of the syndrome. The main character of this novel, who underwent a callosotomy, does not know whether or not his left hand shot his best friend’s wife dead.

The Cortex article is by neuropsychologist Sergio Della Salla who has done a great deal of the research on this condition himself and who also wrote a great article on the condition for The Psychologist back in 2005.

However, it misses out one of the most famous depictions of a hand with a ‘mind of its own’ – from the film The Evil Dead II – where Ash’s hand becomes possessed and he ends up having to chainsaw it off. There’s a clip of the scene here, which is a bit icky if you’re not into that sort of thing.

Link to ‘Dr Strangelove syndrome’ in literature.