Category: Integrating

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind just had a programme looking at both the neuroscience of meditation and its increasing use in evidence-based mental health treatments.

Key aspects of meditation are increasingly become adopted into well-researched mainstream cognitive therapies.

Essentially, it’s Buddhist mindfulness meditation, repackaged to make it sound more palatable to a wider audience, and often included alongside more traditional approaches.

The two big players in the psychological treatment field at the moment are Mindfulness-based CBT and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Mindfulness approaches seem particularly useful for people with chronic or relapsing symptoms, such as severe relapsing depression, rather than for first-episode or acute conditions.

For example, a key study published in 2000 found that mindfulness-based CBT had a beneficial effect on people who had three or more relapse of depression, but not people who had experienced two relapses or less.

The idea is quite different from cognitive approaches, where clients are encouraged to identify, evaluate and retrain their problematic thoughts and behaviours.

Mindfulness instead encourages people to be fully aware of these troublesome thoughts or sensations, but not to engage with them.

In other words, clients are encouraged to develop a degree of separation from their thoughts and emotions, so they can experience them, but not feel that they are fully controlled by them.

Some research has suggested that this is because mindfulness (and indeed other approaches) improve our ability to monitor, evaluate and engage with our own thoughts – so-called metacognitive ability.

Link to AITM on ‘Dr Mindfulness: science and the meditation boom’.

Malcolm Gladwell has written an excellent article for The New Yorker on the problems with the FBI’s methods of profiling serial killers and other serious offenders.

The Behavioral Analysis Unit (formerly the Behavioural Science Unit) is the FBI’s psychology unit that aims to research and develop methods of understanding criminal behaviour, police tactics, negotiation, and crime scene analysis.

It is a huge enterprise that exports its expertise around the world. Foreign police forces can often call on their expertise, for free, to help solve domestic cases.

However, in many ways the BAU is a world onto itself. It develops its own techniques that can often be quite distinct from those of non-FBI forensic psychologists. For example, many of its criminal and crime science analysis methods rely heavily on Freudian-style symbolic interpretations.

For example, the FBI classifies serial killers into ‘organized’ and ‘disorganized’ types.

Organized serial killers supposedly use logic and planning to commit crimes that fulfil their fantasies. The victim carefully selected, efforts are made to maintain control throughout the crime and the scene is cleaned up afterwards.

In contrast, disorganized serial killers supposedly choose their victims almost randomly and attack in a haphazard way, taking opportunity as it occurs. The crime scene is apparently chaotic and because the ‘disorganized killer’ has no interest in the person themselves, they may, as Gladwell recounts, “takes steps to obliterate their personalities by quickly knocking them unconscious or covering their faces or otherwise disfiguring them.”

Perhaps the thing that raises the most eyebrows is that it publishes and reviews many of its theories in its own in-house journals, meaning they get little outside academic scrutiny.

Gladwell takes a look at some of these ideas in more detail and notes that they haven’t faired well to some of the independent academic assessments they’ve been tested with:

Not long ago, a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool decided to test the F.B.I.’s assumptions [pdf]. First, they made a list of crime-scene characteristics generally considered to show organization: perhaps the victim was alive during the sex acts, or the body was posed in a certain way, or the murder weapon was missing, or the body was concealed, or torture and restraints were involved. Then they made a list of characteristics showing disorganization: perhaps the victim was beaten, the body was left in an isolated spot, the victim’s belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised.

If the F.B.I. was right, they reasoned, the crime-scene details on each of those two lists should “co-occur” ‚Äî that is, if you see one or more organized traits in a crime, there should be a reasonably high probability of seeing other organized traits. When they looked at a sample of a hundred serial crimes, however, they couldn‚Äôt find any support for the F.B.I.’s distinction. Crimes don’t fall into one camp or the other. It turns out that they’re almost always a mixture of a few key organized traits and a random array of disorganized traits. Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of “The Forensic Psychologist‚Äôs Casebook,” told me, “The whole business is a lot more complicated than the F.B.I. imagines.”

The whole article is a fascinating insight into the world of FBI profiling and notes that the methods may rely as much on cognitive distortions for their impact, as on hard evidence.

UPDATE: The forensic psychologists over at the excellent CrimePsychBlog have some commentary on the Gladwell piece, noting, among other things that Gladwell bases his criticisms on methods of profiling pioneers whose time has long since passed. A scientific approach is apparently now the mainstay of profiling practice and (they hope) that also includes the FBI.

Link to New Yorker article ‘Dangerous Minds’ (via 3Q).

I just found this abstract of a 1987 article from the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism that reviewed attitudes to alcohol in the Bible, and found that boozing was looked on considerably more favourably in the Old Testament than the New.

Alcohol abuse in the New Testament.

Seller SC.

Alcohol and Alcoholism. 1987;22(1):83-90.

The New Testament is similar to the Old Testament in terms of some fundamental attitudes towards alcohol. St Paul, for example, in the spirit of the Old Testament, unequivocally condemns drunkenness but recommends the consumption of wine in moderate amounts. Nevertheless, there are significant differences in emphasis between the two documents. Wine is referred to as God’s gift in six of the books from the Old Testament, and no such description is offered in the New Testament. Total abstention seems acceptable only under exceptional circumstances in the Old Testament, while it is implicitly extolled through the exemplary role of John the Baptist in the New Testament. Finally, penalties for drunkards, including loss of salvation, are proportionally more frequent and comprehensive in the New Testament.

Link to PubMed entry for article.

The Psychologist has just made an article available that looks at the parallels between the most recent David Lynch film, Inland Empire, and what we know of the psychology of psychosis.

The article looks at some of the proposed pathologies of psychosis, drawn from cognitive science, and suggests how these are represented in Lynch’s latest movie.

Paranoia comes with an inherent sense of personal threat and concomitant fear. Inland Empire’s dark and chilling world is produced in part by David Lynch’s use of story. While fear is generated with genuinely unsettling imagery and dark shadowy lighting, it also comes from the carefully managed attrition of any recognisable storyline. The audience, who have been led through the early stages of the plot with some of the conventional devices of storytelling (coherent dialogue, linear chronology) are suddenly thrown into a world of unfamiliar film cuts, unexplained locations and wordless acting. We are forced to jump to our own conclusions and build what narrative we will from scant concrete evidence as to events. Our sense of sense itself forces us to put something together and, given the presence of ominous emotions and apparent malice, what we put together is a paranoid and terrifying vision of the intentions of the characters in the film and even the world we inhabit.

Lynch’s hallucinatory style certainly suggests altered realities and this is not the first time that it has been linked with mind-being reality distortion, as countless interpretations of Mulholland Drive testify.

Link to article ‘David Lynch and psychosis’.

I’ve just found a fantastic article on the history of curare, the powerful Amazonian arrow poison that causes paralysis and death. It’s from a 2005 edition of the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh and is available online as a pdf.

The article tells the story of how the New World poison came to be known to the West, and how explorers, researchers and ‘gentleman scientists’ attempted to work out how it had its deadly effect.

Curare can be extracted from several plants but the active ingredient is d-tubocurarine.

It has its effect by blocking the effect of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junction. In other words, it blocks the chemical signals that allow nerve signals to activate the muscle.

You may be interested to know that Botox works in an almost identical fashion. It is used in in very small doses in plastic surgery to supposedly ‘smooth’ wrinkles.

Actually, the main ‘smoothing’ effect is due to the fact that the underlying muscles are paralysed and so cannot move to cause creases in the skin.

In larger doses it is also very dangerous. The name is a clue – Botox is short for ‘botulinum toxin’.

The article on curare also has some fascinating asides about the myths associated with the compound, and some curious historical incidents associated with it – such as its role in a plot to assassinate the British Prime Minister during World War One.

pdf of article ‘Curare: the South American arrow poison’.

BBC Radio 4’s science programme Material World just had an interesting edition on the links between face structure, psychological attributes and genetics, as well as a discussion on the science of addiction.

It is well known that certain genetic disorders that affect brain development can also lead to differences in facial structure (the most well-known example being Down Syndrome) owing to the fact that the brain and face develop from closely related groups of cells during embryogenesis.

One interesting example mentioned by medical geneticist Dian Donnai is the link between having a single incisor (‘front tooth) and possible problems with brain development.

It’s now being found that differences in the face, even in people without genetic disorders, reflect aspects of growth and development that can be linked to psychological attributes (or just as interestingly, are reliably linked to perceived psychological traits).

Psychologist Anthony Little is one of the guests on the programme and, with a number of colleagues, has done some fascinating work in this area (often using morphed or averaged faces like the one on the left) with many of the research articles available online.

The second part of the programme discusses the science of addiction in terms of both its psychology and neurobiology, but also in terms of its place in our culture as a concept that is applied to patterns of excessive behaviour.

Both are engaging discussions and are well-worth a listen.

Link to Material World with permanent audio archive.
realaudio of programme.

Gerontologist and all-round skeptic Raymond Tallis has written an article for The Times where he laments the rise of ‘neurolaw’ where brain scan evidence is used in court in an attempt to show that the accused was not responsible for their actions.

Tallis cites the example of the trial of Bobby Joe Long where his lawyers tried to argue (unsuccessfully as it turned out) that he wasn’t responsible for his crimes because brain scan evidence showed that he had an overactive amygdala (supposedly suggesting increased aggression) and underactive frontal lobes (supposedly suggesting reduced ability to inhibit aggression).

This, Tallis argues, is hardly evidence for diminished responsibility because it assumes that our brain is some sort of separate ‘alien force’ that is somehow not ‘us’, when we generally think of the brain as being synonymous with the self.

However, he goes on to cite the example of an epileptic seizure and argues that this is an example where we definitely can’t say the person is responsible for twitching or losing consciousness.

Tallis aims to make a clear cut distinction between these different sorts of action and how we attribute responsibility for them, but he is perhaps relying on the extremes when reality can be full of grey areas.

Each of us has a propensity or threshold for violence, so some people will have aggressive urges more easily than others.

One way of looking at the question is ‘how responsible is the person for their actions’, but another is ‘what strength of urge do we think it is reasonable for a person to inhibit’.

Life experience, genetic factors, brain injury or any forms of neurological disturbance may make urges stronger or reduce our ability to inhibit them.

Some epileptic seizures may be ‘irresistible’ in this way of thinking (although interestingly, some seizures may cause thoughts or urges that are resistible to varying degrees), whereas other patterns of brain activity will produce desires or intentions that can be more easily suppressed.

A serial killer may genuinely have reduced ability to inhibit violence urges, but at what point do we say that the effort they would have to make to stop them reacting violently is beyond what is considered reasonable or possible.

Link to Times article ‘Why blame me? It was all my brain’s fault’.

In another sign the robot revolution is coming, a robot cannon used by the South African military malfunctioned and tragically killed nine and wounded fourteen after firing uncontrollably.

Mechanised self-targeting machine guns with artificial intelligence systems to distinguish between targets (e.g. humans) and non-targets (e.g. trees) are becomingly increasingly common.

Last year Samsung announced that it had developed a machine gun toting robot sentry that can identify and shoot a target up to two miles away.

The system uses twin optical and infrared sensors to identify targets from 2.5 miles in daylight and around half that distance at night. It has a microphone and speakers so that passwords can be exchanged with human troops.

If the password is not accepted the robot can either sound an alarm or fire at the target using rubber bullets or a swivel-mounted K-3 machine gun.

South Korea’s northern border is the most heavily militarised zone in the world, and the southern government has poured millions of dollars into automated military technology.

…

The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot was jointly developed with a South Korean university, and is designed to replace some of the troops guarding the border with North Korea.

North Korea?!? When World War Three is over, someone is going to get a Darwin Award for that decision.

Where’s Asimov when you need him?

Link to ‘Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14’ from Wired (via BB).
Link to new story on Samsung robot sentry.
Link to Samsung page with specs of their robot sentry.

The New York Times has a short article on the recent upsurge of interest in both the arts and sciences on lucid dreaming – a form of reflective self-awareness in which you realise you’re dreaming when it occurs.

You can apparently train yourself to increase your chances of having a lucid dream, and proponents say that the self-awareness allows you to change your ‘dream reality’ at will.

Unfortunately, it’s jolly hard to study scientifically, because its rare, unpredictable and you can’t signal when it occurs.

This means its hard even to make simple correlations between lucid dreaming and measures of brain activity.

Although occasional studies have attempted to study it in ‘proficient’ lucid dreamers, it’s also been used as the basis for a philosophical analysis of what it tells us about different types of consciousness.

We normally assume we’re unconscious during sleep, yet lucid dreaming suggests that while we have reflective self-consciousness (usually considered the ‘highest form’ of consciousness), we don’t experience the ‘lower’ form of perceptual conscious awareness to the same degree.

Apparently, The Good Night, a film shortly to appear in cinemas, has lucid dreaming as its central theme. The trailer for the movie is available here as an embedded video.

Link to NYT article ‘Living Your Dreams, in a Manner of Speaking’.

Computer games may contribute to mental illness in children, but for adults they protect against cognitive decline, at least according to neuroscientist Susan Greenfield. However, the evidence for these claims is non-existent for the former, and only preliminary for the latter.

Baroness Greenfield has lent her name, and investment cash, to the ‘brain training’ game MindFit which was launched today in the UK.

It has apparently been shown in an as-yet-unpublished randomized controlled trial to boost cognitive function in senior citizens.

Interestingly, this time last year, Greenfield was a signatory to an open letter suggesting that “sedentary, screen based entertainment” was damaging to children’s brain’s because they “they cannot adjust ‚Äì as full-grown adults can ‚Äì to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change”.

So what evidence is there that computer games are detrimental to children’s minds, but beneficial to adults?

There is some evidence that violent media, including computer games, is associated with aggression in children, but none that computer games in general affect mental health or that children cannot adjust to rapid technological and cultural change.

Limited evidence suggests that cognitive training can help healthy older adults stay sharp, but there is no evidence on how it can effect mood or mental health.

So, on the basis of current evidence, or at least the lack of it, we could just as easily warn against the possible mental health implications of “sedentary, screen based entertainment” for seniors as for children.

In lieu of further evidence, I suspect the message that computer games are ‘good for adults but bad for children’ is based largely on common, but unsupported, social concerns about how technology is used: too much by children, not enough by seniors.

Link to BBC News story ‘Mind games’.

New Scientist has just made a popular article freely available online that focuses on how shops use scent to alter our buying behaviour.

The article looks at ‘scent marketing‘ – the practice of selecting an in-shop scent to encourage spending on a particular product line.

In one recent study, accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Research, Eric Spangenberg, a consumer psychologist and dean of the College of Business and Economics at Washington State University in Pullman, and his colleagues carried out an experiment in a local clothing store. They discovered that when “feminine scents”, like vanilla, were used, sales of women’s clothes doubled; as did men’s clothes when scents like rose maroc were diffused.

“Men don’t like to stick around when it smells feminine, and women don’t linger in a store if it smells masculine,” says Spangenberg, who led the research and has been studying the impact of ambient scents on consumers for more than a decade. Spangenberg says this most recent study underscores the importance of matching gender-preferred scents to the product. Both men and women browsed for longer and spent more money when a fragrance specific to their gender was used to scent the store atmosphere. “Scent marketing is a viable strategy that retailers should consider,” says Spangenberg. “But they really need to tailor the scent to the consumer.”

It’s not clear exactly how this works, but we know that smell has a particularly strong effect on emotional memory.

In fact, the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain’s olfactory system that takes information directly from the nose, is linked directly to the amygdala, a key emotion processing area.

Link to New Sci article ‘Recruiting smell for the hard sell’.

Science has just published two short papers where researchers induced a touch sensation that that seemed to be felt in a ‘fake’ body that appeared to be several metres in front – similar to an ‘out-of-body-experience’.

The two studies were developed independently but both involved the same idea. In one study, the person was filmed from behind while they had their back stroked. They also wore a special head-mounted display that showed them what the video camera saw.

In other words, they saw their back being stroked as if they were sitting behind themselves and their body was in front of them. After a while, the sensation seemed to be move from their own back to be located in the projected body in front.

Neurophilosopher has found a fantastic video of Prof Olaf Blanke explaining the experiment, which is a wonderful introduction.

The other study did something very similar but used touches to the chest.

While these two studies have demonstrated the effect in a most striking way, the effect isn’t new, as it’s often been demonstrated with the ‘rubber hand illusion‘.

In fact, you can do something similar at home, and make touch sensations seem as if they are located in inanimate objects:

This is taken from Hack #64 (‘Mold your Body Schema’ [pdf]) from the Mind Hacks book, but was originally inspired by a similar exercise in Ramanchandran and Blakesee’s book Phantoms in the Brain:

Sit at a table with a friend at your side. Put one hand on your knee, out of sight under the table. Your friend‚Äôs job is to tap, touch, and stoke your hidden hand and‚Äîwith identical movements using her other hand‚Äîto tap the top of the table directly above. Do this for a couple of minutes. It helps if you concentrate on the table where your friend is touching, and it’s important you don’t get hints of how your friend is touching your hidden hand. The more irregular the pattern and the better synchronized the movements on your hand and on the table, the greater the chance this will work for you. About 50% of people begin to feel as if the tapping sensation is arising from the table, where they can see the tapping happening before their very eyes. If you’re lucky, the simultaneous touching and visual input have led the table to be incorporated into your body image.

All of these experiments synchronise the touch with visual movement, but put these perceptions in conflict with visual information about where the synchronisation is happening.

The brain attempts to resolve this conflict by prioritising the visual system, which is relatively information rich in comparison to our other senses.

Notably, these new studies are the first to demonstrate something akin to an ‘out-of-body-experience’.

It’s not really the same as the classic experience where you see your body in front of you, perhaps as you float above it, something known as autoscopy or heautoscopy in the medical literature.

However, as we reported last year, Prof Olaf Blanke’s team have studied various types of ‘out-of-body’ and ‘projected self’ experiences, either caused by direct brain stimulation, or after neurological disorder.

The lab’s publications page has many of their papers available as full-text articles if you want more detail.

Link to video interview and explanation of experiment.
Link to New Scientist write-up.
Link to previous Mind Hacks article on Blanke’s and colleagues studies.
pdf to Hack #64 ‘Mold your Body Schema’.

The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness invited some of the world’s best stage magicians along to their June conference to demonstrate how the conscious mind can be manipulated. The New York Times has just published a fantastic article on the conference and the cognitive science of magic.

The symposium was entitled ‘The Magic of Consciousness’ and was deliberately more than just light entertainment. The magicians were specifically chosen for the interest in the cognitive aspects on illusion and talked on how they take advantage our of brain’s quirks.

“This wasn’t just a group of world-class performers,” said Susana Martinez-Conde, a scientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix who studies optical illusions and what they say about the brain. “They were hand-picked because of their specific interest in the cognitive principles underlying the magic.”

She and Stephen Macknik, another Barrow researcher, organized the symposium, appropriately called the Magic of Consciousness.

Apollo, with the pull of his eyes and the arc of his hand, swung around my attention like a gooseneck lamp, so that it always pointed in the wrong direction. When he appeared to be reaching for my left pocket he was swiping something from the right. At the end of the act the audience applauded as he handed me my pen, some crumpled receipts and dollar bills, and my digital audio recorder, which had been running all the while. I hadn’t noticed that my watch was gone until he unstrapped it from his own wrist.

Link to NYT article ‘Sleights of Mind’.
Link to list of symposium speakers and talks.

An ingenious experiment using an adapted treadmill has shown that our brain seems to store patterns for the smooth movement of our legs independently for each leg, and for each direction of walking.

The study, devised by neuroscientists Julia Choi and Dr Amy Bastian, used a split-belt treadmill – a normal treadmill for walking but where each side can be programmed with its own speed and direction.

They asked 40 volunteers to walk on the treadmill while they varied the speed and direction of each belt. They then recorded the limb movements with sensors attached to key body positions.

They found that even for unnatural walking patterns, where the two belts were going in different directions at different speeds, participants quickly adapted so that they maintained smooth graceful walking patterns.

The researchers varied these patterns so that they could separate out the adaptation needed for each limb in different directions.

After the person had adapted to the new pattern, the researchers then asked participants to walk normally.

The participants walked with a limp, showing that the brain had adjusted existing walking patterns within a matter of minutes to allow for the new style of walking, and that this new pattern was stored and still in place, even to the point of slightly disrupting normal walking.

The best demonstration of this is a short video of the results produced by the research team.

Because this could be shown to occur separately for each leg and direction, it suggests that we don’t have a single ‘rhythm generator’ (known as a central pattern generator or CPG) for walking.

This could have important implications for treating people who have walking problems caused by brain damage that affects movement in one particular limb.

Link to study abstract.
Link to video of results.
Link to write-up from Wired.

Below is an early report of a phantom limb – the perception of feeling from a limb which has since been removed – from the partly-autobiographical fiction of American Civil War physician and writer Silas Weir Mitchell.

It recounts the effect in a Civil War soldier who had both legs amputated after suffering battlefield injuries.

It was published in Section III of Mitchell’s sarcastically titled partly autobiographical book The Autobiography of a Quack, available in full on the web.

I got hold of my own identity in a moment or two, and was suddenly aware of a sharp cramp in my left leg. I tried to get at it to rub it with my single arm, but, finding myself too weak, hailed an attendant. “Just rub my left calf,” said I, “if you please.”

“Calf?” said he. “You ain’t none. It’s took off.”

“I know better,” said I. “I have pain in both legs.”

“Wall, I never!” said he. “You ain’t got nary leg.”

As I did not believe him, he threw off the covers, and, to my horror, showed me that I had suffered amputation of both thighs, very high up.

“That will do,” said I, faintly.

Although earlier accounts of phantom limbs have been found in retrospect, Mitchell was the first clinician to seriously consider this phenomenon and he included it, and other neurological conditions, in his fiction.

A recent paper [pdf] in the journal Neurology examined how his writing used these syndromes and what his fiction tells us about the disorders that affect the brain.

pdf of paper ‘The neurologic content of S. Weir Mitchell‚Äôs fiction’.
Link to page with excerpt, with links to full text.

A recently published study on brand influence has reported that preschool children perceive carrots to taste better when they come out of a McDonald’s bag, even though the company doesn’t sell carrots.

The study shows that even very young children have internalised advertising and that it significantly affects their perception of the outside world.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the strength of the effect was found to correlate with the number of TVs present in the child’s house.

The research team was led by Prof Thomas Robinson and was published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

The team tested 63 three to five year-olds and asked them to taste a number of foods. One sample of the food was presented in McDonald’s packaging, another sample was presented in a similar plain paper bag.

These included foods genuinely from McDonald’s and others that the company don’t sell (milk, apple juice and carrots).

Children consistently said the food from the McDonald’s packaging actually tasted better, regardless of whether it was actually from the company, or whether the company even had it on their menus.

The researchers then looked at what might be linked to the strength of this effect, and found that how often the child eats at the fast food chain was a significant factor.

However, another significant predictor was how many televisions the family had in their home, suggesting that exposure to advertising itself might play a part.

Link to full-text of scientific paper.
Link to write-up and ’60 sec podcast’ from SciAm.