Category: Integrating

The May issue of The Psychologist has a freely available cover article on wine which takes a suitably meandering route through the history and psychology of the fermented grape.

It’s full of fascinating facts from times past mixed in with recent findings from research studies.

I particularly liked this section, which starts with an ancient Persian decision-making technique (still widely used during weekends in London) and goes on to look at the influence of music on wine purchasing:

Many psychoactive substances have been associated with creativity, and ancient Persians are reported to have used wine to facilitate decision making. An issue would be explored whilst intoxicated and, the next day, the conclusions that stood up to sober scrutiny were adopted.

Some psychologists have demonstrated associations between music played in retail outlets and subsequent wine purchases. Playing classical or pop music does not influence the amount of wine purchased but appears to influence the average price of bottles selected, with classical music leading to sales of more expensive wines (Areni & Kim, 1993). It also appears that playing French or German music influences selections, with more purchases of wines from the same origin as the music (North et al., 1999).

There’s also plenty more ammunition in the article for anyone wanting to convince themselves that wine snobbery is bunk. For example, adding red food colouring to white wine is enough to convince wine masters that they can ‘nose’ red wine scents.

Unfortunately, the article on the webpage is almost impossible to read because of the broken formatting, so I suggest just reading it straight from the pdf.

Link to article ‘On vines and minds’.
pdf of same.

Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist but am ignorant about wine!

Nerve has a brief but interesting interview with psychologist Rachel Herz who talks about her research on the sense of smell and how it can influence our mind and behaviour.

I’ve not encountered Herz’s work before but it turns out she’s done a great deal of scientific research on the psychology and neuroscience of smell and has just written a book, The Scent of Desire, which seems to present the science of smell in an accessible format.

The interview contains a number of gems, but this particularly caught my eye:

Why do we grow accustomed to odors, but not to something like sound? In other words, why is the stench of garbage outside my apartment nowhere near as distracting as the drilling?

When we experience olfactory adaptation, the receptor literally stops responding to a chemical in the air after about twenty minutes. We adapt to all the sensations that are out there, but when the drilling starts and stops, your attention focuses on it and you’re irritated.

Smell is a fascinating area, perhaps because it is relatively unstudied (especially compared to vision).

We previously covered an interesting review article that talked about the fact that the brain has two smell networks – something that came us a complete surprise to me.

Link to Nerve interview with Rachel Herz.
Link to more info on The Scent of Desire book.

An upcoming article in the medical journal Clinical Toxicology reports on a man who suffered lead poisoning owing to his habit of eating roofing plates.

The tendency to eat the inedible is known as ‘pica‘. It is an established psychiatric diagnosis, is well-reported in the medical literature and has given us some of the more unusual case reports of recent years.

Although there is a specific diagnosis, the term is also used more widely as a general label for any eating behaviour that focuses on inedible objects.

Two of the most striking cases have involved coins. The x-ray on the right is from a case report from the New England Journal of Medicine where doctors discovered five and a half kilograms of coins, necklaces, and needles in a patient’s stomach.

In another case report from 1998, a British patient had swallowed £175.32 pounds worth of loose change and had a history of eating a wide range of curious objects:

At different times she has eaten tablets, coins, nuts, wire, plastic, ‘purple hearts’, Bob Martin’s dog conditioning powder and dried flowers. There is much comment made throughout her medical notes detailing vigorous negotiations about the colour, size, number, timing and supply of medication, including a large batch of hand-written letters to her doctor.

The behaviour in the more extreme cases in adults is usually associated with psychosis, as was the case with these two individuals.

It was also the case with one other gentleman, who had suffered lead poisoning after swallowing over 200 live bullets. The case report was rather wittily titled ‘Bite the Bullet’.

Normally, however, pica is most commonly seen in children with learning difficulties or autism spectrum diagnoses.

Perhaps giving partial support for the stereotype that pregnancy leads to unusual food cravings, it is known to occur more commonly in pregnant women, particularly from lower income families.

It’s not clear why it occurs, but interestingly, it has been linked to iron and zinc deficiencies.

Link to NEJM case report with x-ray.

Time magazine has an article on the counter-intuitive psychology of expertise and experience. It turns out simple experience might not add anything to our competency, it’s how we use our time in attempting to master a skill that counts.

The article notes that research has typically failed to show that experience, on its own, predicts task performance. In other words, old hands often do no better than novices.

Unfortunately for us, it seems the secret to expertise lies within the well-known saying that ‘genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration’.

Research suggests that it is experience of practising the most difficult and laborious aspects of a skill that are key.

Ericsson’s primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion – repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician – that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion “deliberate practice,” by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair-pulling and fist-pounding. You like the Tuesday New York Times crossword? You have to tackle the Saturday one to be really good.

Take figure-skating. For the 2003 book Expert Performance in Sports, researchers Janice Deakin and Stephen Cobley observed 24 figure skaters as they practiced. Deakin and Cobley asked the skaters to complete diaries about their practice habits. The researchers found that Elite skaters spent 68% of their sessions practicing jumps – one of the riskiest and most demanding parts of figure-skating routines. Skaters in a second tier, who were just as experienced in terms of years, spent only 48% of their time on jumps, and they rested more often. As Deakin and her colleagues write in the Cambridge Handbook, “All skaters spent considerably more time practicing jumps that already existed in their repertoire and less time on jumps they were attempting to learn.” In other words, we like to practice what we know, stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity rather than stretching our skills. Those who overcome that tendency are the real high performers.

Link to Time article ‘The Science of Experience’.

Dana’s online neuroscience magazine Cerebrum has a fantastic article on trauma and dissociation – the splitting of consciousness that apparently makes some aspects of the mind inaccessible to others.

Dissociation is a term that’s used rather loosely in modern psychology and psychiatry. It is sometimes used to be synonymous with derealisation or depersonalisation, describing a feeling of being detached from reality or not being ‘grounded’ in your usual sense of self.

However, in its original and most interesting formulation by the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, it describes the splitting of consciousness so one part of conscious experience is compartmentalised, becomes inaccessible, is literally ‘dis-associated’ from the rest.

Its not clear why it occurs, but Janet’s theory (often erroneously ascribed to Freud) suggests its a defence against psychological distress. Like the mental equivalent of brushing something under the carpet until you’re unaware it existed or you even did the brushing.

Regardless of whether it is genuinely a ‘defence’ in this sense, it is thought to be at play in conversion disorder, where a person might experience paralysis despite having no damage to the muscles or nervous system (so called ‘hysterical paralysis’).

There is now growing evidence that the high level control systems in the brain deliberately inhibit the movement in the immobile limb, outside the conscious control of the patient.

It is also thought to be the mechanism by which hypnosis has its effect on those susceptible to it. In this case, however, it is a form voluntary dissociation guided by suggestion – meaning someone can have the experience of, for example, limb movement without the associated sense of having willed the action.

One of the most striking demonstrations of this form of dissociation is where some people can be hypnotised not to be bothered by pain, despite the fact they can report on its intensity – even to the point of surgical operations being possible without anaesthetic in some rare cases.

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that dissociative disorders, where patients are seemingly permanently dissociated from their memory (dissociative amnesia) or dissociated from their senses or actions (conversion disorder) are particularly linked to trauma.

The most controversial of these syndromes is what used to be called ‘multiple personality disorder’, but is now called ‘dissociative identity disorder’ to suggest that the patient’s very personality structure has become dissociated from itself, seemingly leading to several identities or ‘alters’.

It’s partly controversial because it was so obviously over-diagnosed in a period of 1950s and 60s American psychiatry that was seemingly drunk on Freudian theory without recourse to the strong coffee of scientific testing.

But its also controversial because its so rare despite still being in the diagnostic manuals. For example, I’ve never met a patient with the condition, and I’ve never met anyone who’s met a patient with the condition, whereas I’ve seen many patients with dissociative amnesias and conversion disorders.

The Cerebrum opens as if it’s about ‘multiple personality disorder’ but don’t be fooled – it’s actually a really good review of what cognitive science has told us about how trauma might cause dissociation (almost all the research mentioned is on memory rather than ‘multiple personalities’).

This is still a controversial area but the article gives the case for the link. The article presents evidence that experience of childhood abuse, both physical and sexual, may be particularly linked to dissociation, perhaps suggesting that it arises from an attempt at a ‘defence’ in some cases.

Cognitive scientists are now increasingly interested in dissociation and hopefully this new level of interest should unlock some of the its mysterious secrets.

Link to article ‘Coming Apart: Trauma and the Fragmentation of the Self’.

Can you die from a voodoo curse? Physiologist Walter Cannon was better known for his work on emotion but was fascinated by the idea that someone could die from fright – something he nicknamed ‘voodoo death’.

He collected anecdotes from around the world of people who had died after being cursed in a now classic 1942 article.

But rather than simply recount the tales as curiosities, he speculated on the medical basis of how someone might die of fright – triggering a whole line of research into neurocardiology, the study of how the brain and heart work together.

Cannon’s ideas were recently revisited by physician Esther Sternberg who looked at whether scientific developments since 1942 have made us any the wiser to this intriguing phenomenon.

While there is no clear idea on whether the belief in a curse directly kills many people, it seems Connon’s ideas on fear’s effect on the body had remarkable foresight and preceded many later discoveries about body-brain connections.

If you’re interested in hearing more, psychiatrist Stuart Brown gave one of the prestigious 2006 ‘TED’ talks on play, which is available to view on the National Institute of Play’s website.

Link to Cannon’s 1942 “Voodoo” Death article.
Link to Sternberg’s 2002 update.

The Guardian has a insightful piece by journalist Rik Hemsley describing his personal experiences with Alice in Wonderland syndrome, where the ‘body image’ or ‘body map’ becomes distorted, leading the affected person to feel like particular parts of the body, or the whole of it, have changed size or shape.

It doesn’t usually involve direct visual hallucinations, but can lead to the sensation that the world around you has grown to an enormous size, or that you have shrunk.

It was first described by psychiatrist John Todd in a 1955 article that you can read freely online, which I discovered when writing an previous post on the neurology of Alice in Wonderland.

It’s usually associated with epilepsy or migraine although is actually quite common, although not always in such an intense form as The Guardian article describes.

Children often experience it but grow out of it as they reach adulthood (both of which happened to me).

Link to Guardian article ‘I have Alice In Wonderland syndrome’ (via BB).
Link to full-text of Todd’s original article.

The changing fortunes of psychoanalysis have been reflected in some of the greatest novels of the last hundred years, a literary history recounted in an article for The Guardian.

The piece is by historian Lisa Appignanesi, author of the highly regarded new book Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800.

The article notes that two recent novels (Kureishi’s Something to Tell You and Vickers’ The Other Side of You) have reversed the recent tradition of portraying psychoanalysts as somehow deviant, unethical or intellectually bankrupt.

The low-point for the creative depiction of Freudian mind doctors was probably Nabakov’s novel Lolita, which is presented as a faux psychiatric case study of a paedophile.

You might think that someone who wrote a widely-read novel about a middle-aged man who desired under-aged girls had good reasons to dislike any theory which attempted to uncover unconscious motivations, but Nabakov was famously and venomously anti-Freudian even before he began writing his masterpiece.

He first started knocking psychoanalysis in his second novel, The Defense, and he often referred to Freud as the ‘Viennese Quack’ and his theories as ‘voodooism’ for the rest of life his.

This negative portrayal is not universal though, and many novels contain sympathetic and even highly complementary depictions. For example, Appignanesi notes that in Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, Dr Nolan is “something of a guardian angel amid the horror of asylum life”.

Interestingly, the more recent positive portrayals of psychoanalysts mirror some positive results in the scientific literature.

Two recent randomised controlled trials have found that psychoanalytically-inspired treatments can be effective.

A recent trial on treatments for ‘personality disorder’ found it effective, as did a recent trial on using it as a treatment for panic disorder.

Unfortunately, these are still a drop in the ocean compared to the evidence for some other psychological treatments, but hopefully this is a sign that psychoanalysis is beginning to adopt a more scientific approach to its theories and practice and we’ll be better able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Link to Guardian article on psychoanalysis and literature (thanks Kat!).

You might have prejudices you won’t admit to, or, don’t even know about. The Implicit Attribution Test claims to measure these hidden associations and it’s been one of the most important psychological developments during the last decade.

Edge has a video interview with two of its creators, psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, and an online version of the IAT which allows you to test your unconscious associations in relation to the US presidential candidates.

The IAT is a computer task that measures the strength of automatic, implicit or unconscious associations between concepts.

Let’s say we’re interested in whether black or white faces are more linked to positive or negative associations.

Faces of black or white people, and either pleasant or unpleasant words are flashed up on screen, one at a time. Participants are asked to press one key if the face is black or the word is pleasant, and other if the face is white or the word is unpleasant.

In other words, you’re asked to classify both black faces and pleasant words using the same response, and white faces and unpleasant words using the same response.

Next, you’re asked to do the same thing, but with the reverse associations: so you’re asked to classify black faces and unpleasant words together, and white faces and pleasant words together.

The idea is that you’re going to be quicker doing whichever classification best matches associations you already have.

So, if you already have unconscious associations between white and pleasant, and black and unpleasant, you’re going to be quicker when these two responses are grouped.

Importantly, the idea is that these associations are different from our conscious attitudes. Someone who is definitely not racist might still have negative associations with black people, perhaps because of exposure to social stereotypes.

Most studies have more than just the two conditions, to control for order, practice and other effects and if you’re interested, you can take part in this exact experiment online.

It was originally thought that the test could uncover people’s implicit or hidden attitudes (indeed, it was originally called the Implicit Attitude Test) but it’s now generally thought of just in terms of associations, because, in effect, it measures how closely two things are linked, and implicit attitude sounds more like a sort of evaluation or stance on something.

The value in this sort of test is not only in that it can pick out associations we might have but don’t admit to or aren’t aware of, but it can also map out how various things influence the unconscious structure of meanings in the mind and brain.

Needless to say, it’s been researched intensively since it was first uncovered, with research suggesting it can even pick up on hidden violent associations in psychopathic murderers.

Link to video interview and presidential IAT at Edge.
Link to previous WashPost article on the IAT.

In 1997, BBC science programme Horizon broadcast a legendary edition on the use of psychedelic drugs in medicine. Luckily, it’s been uploaded to Google Video and you can now watch the whole thing online.

It came at an interesting time in psychedelic drug research – when the authorities were still touchy (they’d only raided Shulgin’s licensed lab three years earlier) but were just starting to allow some stirrings of research since they’d shut it down almost completely in the 1960s.

The programme looks at the history of psychedelic drug research when it was still easily possible, focusing on Osmond and Hoffer’s early work on using LSD in treating addiction and facilitating psychotherapy.

It’s also got loads of great historical footage from the early research but also talks to the new generation of researchers looking at compounds such as ayahuasca and ibogaine, who are now the senior figures in this growing area.

Unfortunately, the video is a bit grainy in places but it’s quite watchable and it’s got a great soundtrack. The producers used Future Sound of London, Massive Attack and a number of tracks from the Ninja Tune label to give the programme a trippy feel.

Link to ‘Psychedelic Science’ edition of Horizon.

The Economist covers an intriguing study that found the financial success of a company can be largely guessed by making a judgement based on photographs of the chief executives.

Most interestingly, the people doing the guessing weren’t particularly skilled in business or finance, they were undergraduate student volunteers.

And Dr Ambady and Mr Rule were surprised by just how accurate the students’ observations were. The results of their study, which are about to be published in Psychological Science, show that both the students’ assessments of the leadership potential of the bosses and their ratings for the traits of competence, dominance and facial maturity were significantly related to a company’s profits. Moreover, the researchers discovered that these two connections were independent of each other. When they controlled for the ‚Äúpower‚Äù traits, they still found the link between perceived leadership and profit, and when they controlled for leadership they still found the link between profit and power.

These findings suggest that instant judgments by the ignorant (nobody even recognised Warren Buffett) are more accurate than assessments made by well-informed professionals. It looks as if knowing a chief executive disrupts the ability to judge his performance.

Other studies have looked at whether it is possible to judge the success of politicians from their photographs.

Perhaps sadly, it seems it is possible. A study [pdf] published in Evolution and Human Behavior found that face shape could reliably predict voter preference in nine leadership elections from four countries – Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA.

A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that photograph-only judgements of competence could also predict the winners in election for US state governor, even when they were flashed on-screen for less than a quarter of a second.

Interestingly, showing people the faces for longer actually changed people’s competency ratings and reduced how well these judgements predicted the election winners.

Link to Economist article ‘Face value’.

ABC Radio National’s opinion programme Ockham’s Razor has an engrossing edition on how our perception and ownership of our body can break down after brain injury – leading to disorders where we think our limbs are someone else’s, where we feel there’s a phantom body behind us, or where we think we’ve been cloned.

The talk is by neuropsychologist John Bradshaw who specialises in understanding how the body is represented by the brain, including the experience of having feelings from an amputated phantom limb.

The talk is a little dense in places but more than worth the attention it needs, as the somewhat wordy sentences unpack into an evocative tour through the far reaches of some strikingly neurological syndromes.

One of the most unusual of these disorders is somatoparaphrenia.

While limb paralysis is not unusual after brain injury, in somatoparaphrenia the patient denies the limb is their own and often suggests that it is someone else’s, such as their husband’s, their doctor’s, or even a ‘dead’ limb that has been attached by people trying to trick them.

One of the earliest discussions of these phenomenon is in a 1955 paper on the personification of paralysed limbs. Rather wonderfully, the full text of the paper is available online.

Link to Ockham’s Razor on bodily integration, identity and brain injury.
Link to paper ‘Personification of Paralysed Limbs in Hemiplegics’.

While we’re on the subject of art and neuroscience I recently discovered a couple of pieces that caught my interest.

The picture is a piece by Sandra Dawson called ‘Sensory Processing’ which has combined a cap used for EEG recordings of the brain with comforting objects and materials.

I recycled two EEG caps, cut up pyjama bottoms which were freeform crocheted with the leads and black yarn, with iPod headphones
symbolizing synaesthesia with output from the eye going to the ear.

It’s called “Sensory Processing” and is meant to evoke sensual comforts (music, flannel) that are perceived and processed by the brain; only with my hat, it’s abstracted and externalized into fashionable form so that viewers ponder connections.

It’s part of a show currently on at the Femina Potens gallery in San Francisco until January 28.

The other piece is one I saw at the weekend called Neurotopographics and is a collaboration between artist Antoni Malinowski, architect Bettina Vismann and neuroscientist Hugo Spiers.

It takes inspiration from the recent discovery of three types of neurons that seem specialised for spatial awareness and navigation.

Place cells provide a ‘you are here’ signal; grid cells signal information about distances travelled and head direction cells provide a sort of internal compass.

So far, these have only been discovered in rats, but Spiers and his collaborators have created a film of how they might operate in humans.

In fact, they’ve created three films which run simultaneously:

The resulting artwork – which will be on show at the Gimpel Fils Gallery from 18–21 January – follows the journey of a person through space, in this case the gallery itself. The actor is filmed from two camera viewpoints: a static wide angle position, which records movement and spatial position, similar to a surveillance camera; and from a dynamic point of view, filmed out of the perspective of the actor’s eyes, recording the subjective impressions of the space and his journey through it. The films will be simultaneously projected onto the gallery walls and combined with a two-dimensional animation displayed on the floor representing assumed brain cell activity patterns.

Rather annoying, the website only works properly in Explorer, but the film from the observational point of view and the firing of the cells can be experienced online.

Link to Femina Potens gallery.
Link to Neurotopographics website.

NPR’s radio show Talk of the Nation has a discussion with Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee, authors of a new book on the neuroscience of the body and movement.

If you’re interested in the ideas of embodied cognition that we covered the other day, the discussion touches on many of the major findings in cognitive science that are feeding into this important area.

The book, called The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, has a website which is somewhat sparse on readable excerpts but does have links to some more interviews about the topic.

The host of the NPR programme is a bit taken by the idea of ‘body maps’ (called sensory or somatotopic maps in the scientific literature), where areas of the body are literally mapped by the brain to represent sensation and movement, and the Blakeslees get asked lots of variations on the question ‘how do body maps explain x, y and z’.

Of course, somatotopic maps are only one part of a complex brain system that perceives the outside world and allows us to act within it, but I wonder whether this is a sign that ‘body maps’ might be the new ‘mirror neurons’ and become a popular explanation for everything from winning the World Cup to finding a partner.

Either way, Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee do a great job of explaining the science and trying to draw out some of the complexities.

Link to NPR discussion.
Link to The Body Has a Mind of Its Own website.

Inkling has an interesting article on the effect of stress on the menstrual cycle that investigates the received wisdom that stress can prevent periods.

It turns out the scientific studies have found no conclusive answer as they’ve returned mixed results, but this may be because they don’t adequately distinguish between physical stress and psychological stress.

A range of physical health problems are known to halt menstruation. Malnutrition is a common example and this is why women with anorexia often don’t have periods.

Of course, physical and psychological stress go hand in hand, but one study that looked at healthy young women under a great deal of psychological stress, but no major physical health problems, found no alteration in the menstrual cycle.

So Ellison examined female juniors at Harvard who were preparing for the MCAT [Medical College Admission Test] and compared their anxiety levels (and ovulation schedules) to women who were not preparing for the MCAT. In order to make sure there were no other factors at play, all the women were otherwise physically healthy, were not using any oral contraceptive pill that would change hormone levels, and all reported normal ovulation…

But despite the significant increase in stress, there was no change in ovulation or periods in either group. No matter how stressed these students were about the upcoming exam, they continued to have a visit from Aunt Flow right on schedule. This was even the case during the final days and weeks leading up to the MCAT exam, when the subjects described intense stress levels that only Harvard pre-meds can sustain. The study was published in the December 2007 issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

There’s more on the effects of stress on menstruation in the article.

Link to Inkling article ‘Of Stress and Periods’.

The Boston Globe just published an excellent article on ‘embodied cognition‘, an area that’s recently been getting a lot of attention in cognitive science and which argues that we can’t understand psychology without understanding the body and our actions.

The reason it’s so potentially revolutionary is that it challenges the idea that psychology can be understood as a purely abstract mental process and suggests that our mind is shaped as much by our body and how we physically interact with the environment as by ‘passive’ sensory experience.

In other words, the reason we’ve developed thinking brains is to allow us to act, and so the possibilities, limitations and feedback from actions must shape our psychology – both in the long term as a species (via evolution) and in the short term as individuals (via learning and plasticity).

The body, it appears, can subtly shape people’s preferences. A study led by John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, found that subjects (all non-Chinese speakers) shown a series of Chinese ideographs while either pushing down or pulling up on a table in front of them will say they prefer the ideographs they saw when pulling upward over the ones they saw while pushing downward. Work by Beilock and Holt found that expert typists, when shown pairs of two-letter combinations and told to pick their favorite, tend to pick the pairs that are easier to type – without being able to explain why they did so.

Some of my favourite research in this area is by psychologist Dennis Proffitt who has found a range of bodily effects on perception.

In one particularly striking study, Proffitt and his colleagues found that we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand, but only when we intend to use it.

They suggest that we perceive the environment in terms of our intentions and abilities to act within it.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘Don’t just stand there, think’.
Link to great introduction to embodied cognition.