Category: Integrating

I’m just reading a thought-provoking book called Hallucinations and Their Impact on Art. Unfortunately, it’s a little dry so isn’t the most gripping of reads but it has this fascinating bit about how hallucinations weren’t considered to be part of madness in the middle ages.

While it is widely accepted in modern times that you can ‘hear voices’ without being mentally ill, the experience of hallucinations is thought to be part and parcel of most forms of madness, whereas this was apparently not the case in medieval times:

From p7:

What is more curious to the contemporary man is that the medieval description of insanity does not include hallucinations; and the experience of possession (passivity phenomena) is not described as occurring concurrently with or as part of a visionary state.

In Western Europe from AD 500-1500, people who heard voices or saw visions considered themselves, and were considered buy their contemporaries, to have had an actual perceptual experience of either divine or satanic inspiration. They were not considered mad and were not treated as such. Hallucinations (fantasmata) were only considered mad when combined with trickery (prestigiae).

Unfortunately, the book is out of print but it contains many such gems among the rather dull academic prose.

A newly published study has demonstrated the remarkable influence of beliefs on our experience of illness by showing that patients undergoing surgery to correct painful spinal tears report greater improvement if they’ve been shown the fragments of the removed disc.

The researchers, a surgical team from St George’s Hospital in London, were aware that anxiety and depression had a major influence on recovery after surgery for a type of spinal disc tear, commonly but inaccurately known as a ‘slipped disc’.

They decided to try a simple measure to help patients feel less anxious and bolster their belief that a good job had been done: the surgeons presented randomly selected patients with the removed fragments from their back.

This simple technique had a remarkable effect. Patients given a ‘souvenir’ of their operation reported greater improvement in sciatic nerve pain, lower back pain, less pins and needles sensations, less leg weakness and a reduced use of pain killers.

This study adds to the increasing evidence that beliefs have a marked impact on how the symptoms of an illness manifest themselves.

We know this is particularly the case for pain, and different beliefs about what is causing the pain and the effect it has, regardless of what the reality might be, can have a significant impact on the duration and the intensity of the pain itself.

Link to PubMed entry for surgery study (via @bengoldacre).

The New York Times covers an interesting study finding that if you smell different odours in each nostril the brain doesn’t blend the scents, instead, your experience of smell alternates between the two.

This nostril rivalry, as the researchers describe it in a paper in Current Biology, is similar to what happens when the eyes are presented with different images, or the ears with different tones.

The researchers experimented with 12 people using two chemicals, one that has an odor like a marker pen, the other that smells like a rose. All 12 experienced switching between the two odors, with no pattern as to when and how often they switched.

And as with hearing and vision, smell sensitivity is related to the general tendency for left or right hemisphere activation in the brain.

Because this general tendency is also related to a bias for magical thinking and unusual perceptual experiences, we know that differences in nostril sensitivity can be found between people who have high numbers of paranormal-like experiences and those who don’t.

Link to NYT piece ‘How the Nose Copes With Nostril Rivalry’.
Link to PubMed entry for study.

People who spend lots of time monitoring multiple sources of information are worse at switching between tasks and are less able to focus exclusively on single sources according to a new study published in the Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences.

It’s a well designed, rigorous study of the type that we are sorely missing in the debate over the psychological effects of media which, sadly, often amounts to little more than hot air.

It’s also been picked up by hundreds of news sources, almost all of which miss the subtlety of what it’s actually telling us.

Here are some of the headlines that miss the point: Hi-tech addicts scrambling their brains; Multi-media use muddles the mind; and my favourite Electronic Multitaskers Not Really ‘Information Gods’ (damn you Microsoft, fooled again!)

The experiment compared groups of people who frequently monitor multiple media sources compared to those who do it rarely. Big media has picked up on the ‘multi media’ angle and has focused solely on digital technology but the study was much broader than this.

It divided groups into high and low ‘media multitaskers’ but ‘media’ included a whole bunch of sources, including:

print media, television, computer-based video (such as YouTube or online television episodes), music, nonmusic audio, video or computer games, telephone and mobile phone voice calls, instant messaging, SMS (text messaging), email, web surfing, and other computer-based applications (such as word processing).

In other words, listening to music while reading a book counts as ‘media multitasking’, as does chatting on the telephone while watching television, none of which need digital technology. In fact, you could have multitasked five out of the twelve activities (print, TV, music, nonmusic audio, phone calls) in the 1950s.

This is actually one of the study’s major advantages. It makes sense to look at how people monitor multiple sources in the real world rather restrict ourselves to the computer technology, because there is nothing necessarily distinctive about ‘digital media’. A digital radio is not psychologically different to an analogue one in terms of its output.

So the researchers compared the high and low multitaskers on several tasks looking at whether peripheral information affected performance on visual and memory monitoring tasks, and on a task-switching experiment.

High media multitaskers were generally more affected by peripheral information but this is not a bad thing in itself. You could interpret it as them being more distractable, or simply that they have a wider net of attention and are more able to pick up peripheral information. They might be open to noticing more stuff.

But the task-switching experiment was quite striking. Participants were presented with a letter and number combination, like “a6” or “i7” and were asked to do one of two tasks: one was to hit the left button if they saw an odd number and the right for an even; the other was to press the left for a vowel the right for a consonant.

They were warned before each letter-number combination appeared what the task was to be, but high multi-taskers responded on average half a second more slowly when the task was switched.

In reaction time terms, half a second is a very long time. Bruce Lee could have made mincemeat of you by then.

Of course, what we can’t tell from this study is whether heavy parallel media monitoring causes these effects, or whether people who are less able to exclusively focus and switch prefer more media concurrently. Maybe they’re actually absorbing more of it in total. We don’t know from this study.

Despite big media going off half-cocked, this is a valuable study because we need to start understanding how information technology affects us in our day-to-day life.

We have precious few of these studies and we need more.

Link to paper.
Link to DOI entry for same.
Link to great write-up from Not Exactly Rocket Science who beat me to the punch.

RadioLab has just released an excellent brief podcast on how babies’ experience of the world is quite different during the first months of life due to some startling differences in brain function that they rapidly lose.

It’s a discussion with developmental psychologist Charles Fernyhough who has pieced together the perceptual world of young children from studies on newborns.

It’s full of fascinating insights, like the fact that the lenses in the eyes of newborns have yet to acquired the yellow tint of adults which filters out blue light – so children see a much brighter whiter world.

One of the most surprising bits is about a phenomenon I’d never heard of before – something called sticky fixation – where babies lose control of their vision at about two months old and seem to lose the ability to look away from interesting things.

This seems to be due to the fact that vision is initially controlled by subcortical brain systems but about two months the control shifts to the cortex. During the ‘changeover’ the competition between the two systems seems to lead to the stalemate of sticky fixation.

It’s a really fascinating way to spend 10 minutes and I think virtually everything featured was quite new to me.

And if you’re wanting more about the fascinating science of baby development Edge has an interesting discussion with psychologist Alison Gopnik.

One interesting thing to note here is how Bayesian statistical models are now appearing everywhere in cognitive science as models of thought and behaviour.

Influential neuroscientist Karl Friston has been championing them as a ‘theory of everything’ for the brain for a couple of years now and they’re starting to be more widely accepted as you can see by the way Gopnik riffs about them with regards to infant psychology.

Link to RadioLab short ‘After Birth’.
Link to Edge on ‘Amazing Babies’ with Alison Gopnik.

We often use weight as a metaphor for importance, describing something as a ‘weighty issue’ or dismissing an argument as ‘not holding much weight’ but a new study suggests that this is not just a figure of speech.

A research team found that they could alter people’s judgement of importance just by getting them to answer questions using a heavier clipboard.

In a series of short elegant experiments, a research team led by psychologist Nils Jostmann found that people holding a heavy clipboard would, for example, value foreign currencies more highly than those using a lighter clipboard.

Of course, this might be because of the simple association that larger amounts of money weigh more, so they looked at whether more abstract judgements about value could be affected by weight.

Subsequent studies showed that heavier clipboards led to participants placing more importance on the university listening to student opinions, and that participants were more likely to link their opinion of whether Amsterdam was a great city to the competence of the mayor.

A final study found that visitors who were stopped in the street and asked their opinion on a controversial subway were more confident in their opinion and were more likely to agree with strong arguments for the plan.

The researchers link these findings with the growing field of embodied cognition that suggests that much of our experience of the world is actually mediated through how we interact with it.

Much of this research shows that altering the physical condition of the body affects how we perceive and understand, even for concepts that we think are nothing but metaphors.

Link to summary of ‘Weight as an Embodiment of Importance’.

I’ve just found this wonderful short paper on emotional peaks and ‘chills down the spine’ in response to music. I didn’t realise the area had been investigated and apparently there is a small literature on these most sublime of experiences.

The paper is brief, accessible and is available online as a pdf but the abstract gives a great summary:

Chills as an indicator of individual emotional peaks

Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2009 Jul;1169:351-4.

Grewe O, Kopiez R, Altenmüller E.

Chills (goose bumps) have been repeatedly associated with positive emotional peaks. Chills seem to be related to distinct musical structures and the reward system in the brain. A new approach that uses chills as indicators of individual emotional peaks is discussed. Chill reactions of 95 participants in response to seven music pieces were recorded. Subjective intensity as well as physiological arousal (skin conductance response, heart rate) revealed peaks during chill episodes. This review suggests that chills are a reliable indicator of individual emotional peaks, combining reports of subjective feelings with physiological arousal.

Right, where’s that Miley Cyrus CD.

pdf of scientific paper.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Newsweek has an interesting article about the science behind the infuriating muzak that plays while you’re on hold in a telephone queue.

The article made me realise what probably should have been obvious, that telephone queuing systems are a multi-million dollar industry and psychologists have been employed to research the best way to stop you hanging up.

When of the most interesting bit is where the article touches on the use of music to alter customers’ perception of passing time.

Kellaris says that while musical distraction often causes time to feel like it’s passing more quickly, particularly dull, or overly familiar, music can actually make the wait feel longer. Familiar music may act as a sort of “Zip file,” says Kellaris, referring to the common format computers use to compress large volumes of data into a smaller package.

“If you hear an excerpt of a familiar piece of music, it might cue recall of the entire piece.” Kellaris also cautions that numerous factors, including mindset and setting‚Äîand in one of his studies, even gender‚Äîdetermine the effect that background music has on us. “Time on hold seemed shortest for women exposed to alternative rock and for men exposed to classical music,” he says.

And there are apparently a number of studies which have tested exactly this, including two intriguing ones I found after my interest was sparked.

The article also notes that a major factor in keeping people in a queue is the perception that they are progressing by giving customers’ feedback on their position on time to destination.

Link to Newsweek article ‘On Hold And In Hell’.

The New York Times Well blog covers the growing amount of research on how the same genes that give rise to red hair also make red heads more sensitive to pain.

This has knock-on effects for doctors and dentists in that greater levels of pain killers are needed for red haired patients:

Researchers believe redheads are more sensitive to pain because of a mutation in a gene that affects hair color. In people with brown, black and blond hair, the gene, for the melanocortin-1 receptor, produces melanin. But a mutation in the MC1R gene results in the production of a substance called pheomelanin that results in red hair and fair skin.

The MC1R gene belongs to a family of receptors that include pain receptors in the brain, and as a result, a mutation in the gene appears to influence the body’s sensitivity to pain. A 2004 study showed that redheads require, on average, about 20 percent more general anesthesia than people with dark hair or blond coloring. And in 2005, researchers found that redheads are more resistant to the effects of local anesthesia, such as the numbing drugs used by dentists.

Link to NYT Well Blog on ‘The Pain of Being a Redhead’.

There are two intriguing cases studies in the latest edition of the journal Sleep and Breathing of people with persistent yawning.

Normally, recurrent yawning might be put down to tiredness, but in these cases, both women slept well. They could, however, reduce their yawning by cooling themselves – suggesting that yawning and heat regulation may be linked.

Both of their symptoms are very similar. Each complains of unpredictable and uncontrolled yawning attacks lasting from 5 to 45 min. During these excessive yawning episodes, they experience deep, recurrent, overwhelming yawns that cause their eyes to water and nose to run. Occurring one to 15 times a day, these attacks are very aversive and debilitating, and both patients report feeling ill and exhausted following an attack. The most common diagnosis is a sleep disorder, although neither patient reports sleep problems.

These cases include features consistent with a diagnosis of thermoregulatory dysfunction. Both patients report that nasal breathing and/or applying cool cloths to the forehead can provide temporary relief and/or postpone the onset of an attack…

Taking a cold shower or swimming in cold water after the onset of an attack produces complete remission of symptoms for the South African woman. Both patients report feeling cold during or after an attack and experience goose bumps and shivering which may be a consequence of overcompensation by cooling mechanisms activated during thermoregulatory dysfunction.

Although it is still not well understood why we yawn, this gels with some growing evidence that heat regulation may be at least part of the story.

In one intriguing study [pdf], nasal breathing and forehead cooling reduced ‘contagious yawning’ where yawns are more likely to be triggered when we see other people doing the same.

Link to PubMed entry for yawning case studies.

In 1905 a French doctor wanted to see how long consciousness remained in a severed head and so did a rather morbid experiment at the execution of a beheaded prisoner. The remarkable report is linked from the Wikipedia page on the guillotine.

The observations were apparently made by a Dr Beaurieux who watched the execution of a prisoner named Henri Languille and immediately tried to get the attention of the severed head to see how it would react.

Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. This phenomenon has been remarked by all those finding themselves in the same conditions as myself for observing what happens after the severing of the neck…

I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased. […] It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions – I insist advisedly on this peculiarity – but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts.

Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. After several seconds, the eyelids closed again[…].

It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement – and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.

Apparently, this was also discussed in a brief article in a 1939 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association but I can’t read it because my institution’s subscription seems to be broken (off with their heads!).

The famous French chemist Antoine Lavoisier is often said to have arranged an experiment before his execution where he would try and blink as many times as possible before his head finally died, but the story is apparently a myth.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mind Hacks reader jata for a link to the complete 1939 JAMA piece on decaptitation and consciousness which is available here.

Link to full copy of the report.
Link to Wikipedia page on the guillotine.

The August edition of The Psychologist has a fascinating article on the awareness during sleep paralysis, a state where we wake but can’t move and sometimes experience intense hallucinations.

This form of awake sleep paralysis is remarkably common and has been explained throughout the world with a diverse and colourful range of cultural explanations.

In Newfoundland it’s called the ‘old hag’, in Hong Kong ‘ghost oppression’, in Japan ‘kanashibari’ – the result of magic from a Buddhist spirit and famously, in Europe of the middle ages, the effect of the succubus demon. A recent study looked at the phenomenon among Mexican teens and found it was explained as ‘a dead body climbed on top of me’.

The article also tackles science of this curious state and one of the most interesting bits is where it discusses the evidence for sleep paralysis being the intrusion of the rapid eye-movement (REM) stage of sleep into wakefulness.

It turns out that there are some people who experience REM almost immediately after falling asleep and they are much more likely to experience awareness during sleep paralysis:

This research strongly suggests that sleep paralysis is related to REM sleep, and in particular REM sleep that occurs at sleep onset. Shiftwork, jetlag, irregular sleep habits, overtiredness and sleep deprivation are all considered to be predisposing factors to sleep paralysis (American Sleep Disorders Association, 1997); this may be because such events disrupt the sleep–wake cycle, which can then cause SOREMPs [sleep-onset REM periods].

Of course, episodes of sleep paralysis occurring as people emerge from sleep cannot be explained in terms of SOREMPs, but it seems reasonable to argue that such episodes may well involve a similar state of consciousness, mixing aspects of both normal wakeful consciousness and REM consciousness. Needless to say, for practical reasons such episodes are inherently more difficult to study in psychophysiological terms as there is currently no known way to induce their occurrence.

Link to The Psychologist article ‘Terror in the night’.

Full disclosure: I’m an occasional columnist and unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist. I have experienced sleep paralysis once and interpreted it as sleep paralysis.

I’ve just found an intriguing article on how LSD was used as an experimental treatment for children with autism during the 1960s. When I first heard about these studies I did a double take, but there were a surprising number conducted at the time.

Flashback to the 1960s: LSD in the treatment of autism.

Dev Neurorehabil. 2007 Jan-Mar;10(1):75-81.

Between 1959 and 1974, several groups of researchers issued reports on the use of d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) in the treatment of children with autism. This paper reviews that literature to consider how the authors justified these studies, as well as their methods, results, and conclusions. The justification for using LSD was often based on the default logic that other treatment efforts had failed. Several positive outcomes were reported with the use of LSD, but most of these studies lacked proper experimental controls and presented largely narrative/descriptive data. Today there is renewed interest in the use of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic purposes. While this resurgence of research has not yet included children with autism, this review of the LSD studies from the 1960s and 1970s offers important lessons for future efforts to evaluate new or controversial treatments for children with autism.

Sadly I don’t have access to the full text of the paper, but I’ve discovered that the Neurodiversity website has created a list of many of the original studies and has archived the full text of most of them online.

The studies are a morbidly fascinating read and it’s interesting how some studies seem to exclusively report beneficial effects with remarkably flowery language (“They seek positive contacts with adults, approaching them with face uplifted and bright eyes…”) while others report mixed or quite unpleasant reactions (“mood swings which were sharp and rapid from extreme elation to extreme depression or anxiety”).

Link to PubMed abstract of LSD and autism paper.
Link to Neurodiversity paper archive.

The New York Times has an interesting article on the role of ‘hunches’ in how soldiers detect roadside bombs.

The article is a little bit cobbled together, alternating anecdote with some indirectly related studies that seem to be included on the basis of speculation, but it does mention one ‘in progress’ study which seems particularly interesting.

In the past two years, an Army researcher, Steven Burnett, has overseen a study into human perception and bomb detection involving about 800 military men and women. Researchers have conducted exhaustive interviews with experienced fighters. They have administered personality tests and measured depth perception, vigilance and related abilities. The troops have competed to find bombs in photographs, videos, virtual reality simulations and on the ground in mock exercises…

The men and women who performed best in the Army’s I.E.D. detection study had the sort of knowledge gained through experience, according to a preliminary analysis of the results; but many also had superb depth perception and a keen ability to sustain intense focus for long periods. The ability to pick odd shapes masked in complex backgrounds — a “Where’s Waldo” type of skill that some call anomaly detection — also predicted performance on some of the roadside bomb simulations.

If you want more details about the study there are good descriptions here and here seemingly taken from military news coverage of the research.

Link to NYT piece on bombs and hunches.

Music video director duo Terri Timely have created a beautifully shot and kaleidoscopic short film about synaesthesia.

It’s a visually striking piece that attempts to represent the effect of crossed senses conceptually, rather the the common approach of interpreting sounds as abstract visual impressions (probably best done in the video for Coldcut’s Music 4 No Musicians).

I also just like the idea. Music video directors are professional synaesthetes in many ways, so it’s interesting getting their take on the experience.

To see it in its full glory, I recommend the hi-definition QuickTime version.

Link to embedded YouTube version (via @willyumlu)
Link to hi-def QuickTime version.

Psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum has written an excellent short article about a remarkable group of blind mountain bikers who apparently use echolocation to avoid obstacles by making loud click sounds as they ride.

Rosenblum has studied human echolocation in the lab and has shown that we all have some ability to get an idea of the spatial layout of our environment from sound reflection.

But one of the most interesting bits is where he discusses the fact that while echolocation uses sound, we don’t always process it as a conscious hearing experience. It can seem to just be a ‘sense’ of where objects are.

To get a sense of how echolocation works, try this. Hold your hand up about one foot in front of your face with your palm facing your mouth. Put your front teeth together, open your lips, and make a continuous shhhhhh sound. As you make this sound, slowly bring your hand toward your mouth. You will hear the shhhh sound change. What you’re hearing is the sound reflecting from your hand colliding with the sound leaving your mouth. This interference turns out to be one of the most important types of sound dimensions we use to echolocate objects at close distances.

But this demonstration is exaggerated. The interference patterns used for echolocation are usually too subtle to be consciously heard. This highlights one of the most amazing aspects of echolocation: It’s rarely experienced as sound. Try using your shhhh sounds to walk slowly toward a wall with your eyes closed. As you come close to the wall, you’ll experience its presence as more of a feeling than a change in sound. It may feel as if there are air pressure changes on your face, an experience also reported by the blind (echolocation was once called “facial vision”). Echolocation is truly one of your implicit perceptual skills: It allows you to detect aspects of your environment without even knowing which sensory system you’re using.

Link to post of echolocation and blind mountain bikers.
pdf of Rosenblum study on human echolocation.
Link to DOI entry for same.