Category: Integrating

Newsweek has an eye-opening article on creativity which doesn’t really discuss why creativity is supposedly ‘declining’, as it claims, but is still full of fascinating and counter-intuitive snapshots of creativity research.

I have to say, I’m not very familiar with the scientific research on creativity, so I can’t say how well the article represents it as a whole, however, it does capture lots of interesting angles on creativity I’d not encountered before.

Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

There’s a few throwaway lines that bugged me (“Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli” – not without the rest of the brain it doesn’t; “One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames” – evidence? none) but its generally a well written piece that integrates both neuroscience and psychology studies into a compelling exploration of what it means to think creatively.

UPDATE: Ashley Merryman, one of the authors of the Newsweek piece got in touch to say that there is some evidence on children’s TV viewing and creativity – finding that more time spent spent watching TV correlates with less creativity, although we still don’t have the evidence to say whether this is cause or effect.

Link to Newsweek article ‘The Creativity Crisis’.

Vanity Fair has a great article that charts the very early days of LSD. Before the drug became a symbol of hippy psychedelia, it was used by a select group of psychiatrists to facilitate ‘LSD psychotherapy’ and became popular among the Hollywood set of the 1950s.

To understand why LSD had such a grip on the American psychiatrists who had access to it, it’s useful to know some background about how psychiatry pictured the human mind in the mid-20th century.

Most importantly, it was the height of Freud’s influence when virtually all training was heavily influenced by psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis has a certain view of the unconscious that chimes very well with the effects of LSD. According to the Freudian model, the unconscious mind exists below the level of our awareness but still operates in terms of personal meaning.

Contrast this with the cognitive model of the mind in which the conscious mind is interpretable in terms of personal meaning but the unconscious mind is ‘subpersonal’ or only interpretable in terms of computation or neurobiology.

In other words, the conscious and the unconscious are connected but we can’t use the same concepts to understand the two.

In the Freudian model, the unconscious remains personally significant to the point where the mind may have to shroud this meaning in elaborate symbols to shield us from its unpleasant impact when any of it is revealed through thought or action.

To get to the true significance, psychoanalysis seeks to decode the protected symbols that have been put in place by our defence mechanisms.

Psychoanalysis says our thoughts, dreams, actions and perceptions are rich with hidden personal meaning. LSD reveals a world which seems rich with hidden personal meaning.

Therefore, it is not surprising that many of the psychoanalysts of the time thought the drug was a fast track to the unconscious where the normal route was years of painstaking therapy.

The Vanity Fair article traces the early years when it was used in therapy – a time just after LSD was invented and originally used by psychiatrists to see what madness might be like, and before it was taken up by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and 60s counter-culture.

Nevertheless, the influence of Freudian thought can be clearly seen in the psychedelic movement. The idea that you can ‘free your mind’ from ‘hang ups’ is almost a direct translation of the psychoanalysts creed that you need to ‘resolve’ your ‘neuroses’ in which society and the super ego play a similar role.

In fact, Leary, a psychologist himself, had extensive knowledge of psychoanalysis and, interestingly, couched the effects of psychedelic drugs in terms of Freud, neuroscience and computation.

This is from a lecture delivered to the 1961 International Congress of Applied Psychology, published as ‘How to Change Behaviour’.

Let’s assume that the cortex, the seat of consciousness is a millionfold network of neurons. A fantastic computing machine. Cultural learning has imposed a few pitifully small programs on the cortex. These programs may activate perhaps one-hundredth of the potential neural connections. All the learned games of life can be seen as programs which select, censor, alert and thus drastically limit the available cortical response. The consciousness expanding drugs unplug these narrow programs. They unplug the ego, the game machinery, and the mind (that cluster of game concepts). And with the ego and mind unplugged, what is left? ‚Ķ What is left is something Western culture knows little about. The Open brain. The uncensored cortex, alert and open to a broad sweep of internal and external stimuli hitherto screened out.

Link to Vanity Fair article (via The Frontal Cortex).

Neuroscientists sometimes forget just how different the experience of an MRI scan is from everyday life. I’ve just found this intriguing study that asked patients who had scans for the first time how they felt about the experience – the most common theme was the ‘sense of being in another world’.

There is a delightful bit in the study where one man compares it to being in a space capsule.

The participants’ overall experience of going through the MRI scan was a sense of being in another world. The environment, the enclosed space, the hammering metallic noise and sometimes the discomfort of lying on a hard bed, made the experience special and something out of their normal frame of reference. The experience of being in ‘another world’ was derived from the participants’ feelings of being isolated, far away, confined, lonely and dependent on others. ‘You feel confined, there is no door you yourself can open if you want to go out of there’ (P11). Being in the scanner was often associated with other enclosed spaces like coffins, a wooden sofa with a lid, a space capsule or ‘like lying almost as for cremation’ (P16).

All associations with other enclosed spaces were of a negative kind except for one man who had previously been inside a space capsule. He experienced that ‘I got a feeling, which is quite natural, that I entered a space capsule in NASA, Houston‚Ķ I was lucky I have been there’ (P17). The fact that the MRI department was situated in the basement contributed to the feeling that it was a different and scary place. Walking down the culvert made some participants imagine that this must be special as the MRI scanners had to be down here. A participant experienced a feeling of going to his own execution (P8).

The hammering noise added to the feeling of unreality and was associated with other sounds familiar to the participants. ‘When you have this sound in your ears it’s like listening to those who chop asphalt or concrete’ (P12). The unusual situation with the enclosed space and the sound at irregular intervals made the participants experience difficulties keeping track of time.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mind Hacks reader Brenner who posted a link to this article where a journalist describes their own experience of being MRI scanned:

“It was like being inserted headfirst into a giant, white cigar tube and having minimalist techno music hammered over my entire body. If robots were born and not made, it would be what a robot fetus experienced in the womb — if the robot’s mother was a bipolar drum machine stuck in manic phase”…

Link to PubMed entry for study.

The NeuroKüz blog covers a new study in which research participants were asked to take the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin before being asked to take part in a pretend brain scan in a fake fMRI machine.

If the situation seems a little odd, a bit trippy even, it’s actually more common than you think as almost all functioning brain scanning centres now have fake brain scanners that are used to test out experiments before running them ‘live’.

Brain scanning is a very expensive business and an hour of scanning time can easily cost ¬£500, so it wasn’t long before someone worked out that building a fake ‘dry run’ scanner was actually very economical.

Some of the time, experiments need to be tested out to see if they’re practically possible in the cramped space of the scanner and with the restrictions on equipment that are necessitated by having to avoid material that would be affected by the powerful MRI magnet.

Other times, its more a concern about the psychological well-being of the participants and how well they’d tolerate the conditions.

In this case, no-one had ever tried giving participants psilocybin and then asking them to do experiments while lying down in the restricted ‘tube’ of an fMRI machine, particularly as they hear the loud metallic scanning noises.

It could be a recipe for an unpleasant experience, so the researchers, who plan to do future fMRI research with the drug, tested nine people who stayed inside the mock scanner for 25 minutes after being injected with the substance.

As it turned out, no-one had a bad trip:

During the initial onset, some subjects described ‘quite strong’ drug effects. Synaesthesia was described by one subject (sounds influencing visual percepts) and this was also evident in other subjects’ 5-D ASC [5-Dimensions of Altered States of Consciousness questionnaire] ratings. Several subjects reported an altered sense of time (also seen in 5-D ASC ratings). There were no indications of distress during the acute experience and all subjects reported having found it interesting and insightful.

This doesn’t mean that the researchers will not need to worry about people feeling uncomfortable in future studies, although it does show that fMRI research on psilocybin can be done while participants remain relaxed and able to take part in the research.

Link to NeuroKüz on psilocybin and fake fMRI (via Thoughtful Animal).
Link to PubMed entry for study.

The successes of the South American teams in the World Cup have led to some speculation that years of street football may be responsible for the fast paced dexterity that powers the Latino players.

The photo is of some lads playing street football in the Manrique barrio of Medellín, Colombia. I took the photo a couple of days ago and it depicts the typical type of informal football that happens in residential streets across the continent.

The game is a great way of developing ball skills as the play is fast paced, the space limited, and the ‘field’ often interrupted by a passing motorbike or pedestrian which the players are just expected to work around. It’s clearly a game which demands quick thinking and improvisation.

But I want you to focus on the left hand side, where you can see the goal. It’s tiny. It’s about a metre wide, about the same high, and the goalie can virtually fill it if he crouches. This is the standard street football setup here.

In these games, much of the skill in scoring goals relies on a combination of fooling the keeper, by tempting him out, followed up with pinpoint accuracy in targeting any small angle which subsequently appears.

However, there’s some evidence from sports psychology which may give us another clue as to why this is useful preparation for more formal football matches: experiments have shown that if you’re playing badly the goal is perceived to be smaller than it actually is.

It’s probably worth pointing out that, as far as I know, this has never been tested specifically in football, but it has been shown in various other sports.

There’s a fantastic discussion of these studies over at Neurophilosophy which I highly recommend if you’re interested in the science behind perceptual changes during sport. This is an excerpt which discusses the effect in American ‘foot’ ‘ball’:

It was found that participants who made 3 or more successful kicks perceived the goal to be bigger than it actually was, whereas those who scored 2 or less goals perceived it to be smaller. There was also a relationship between the subsequent perception of the goal posts and how the kicks were missed: participants who more frequently kicked the ball to the left or right of the target perceived the upright posts to be narrower, whereas those whose kicks tended to fall short of the goal, or to be too low, perceived the crossbar to be higher.

So, if you’ll excuse the punditry for a moment, I wonder whether one of the benefits of street football is that players have informal training of dealing with small goal sizes. In other words, as well being useful training for ball skills, it also helps adapt to any perceptual changes that occur during the match.

Link to Neurophilosophy on performance and goal size.

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers a fascinating study on how touching different objects influences how we perceive the world – based on abstract associations between things like weight and seriousness.

Weight is linked to importance, so that people carrying heavy objects deem interview candidates as more serious and social problems as more pressing. Texture is linked to difficulty and harshness. Touching rough sandpaper makes social interactions seem more adversarial, while smooth wood makes them seem friendlier. Finally, hardness is associated with rigidity and stability. When sitting on a hard chair, negotiators take tougher stances but if they sit on a soft one instead, they become more flexible.

The study, led by psychologist Joshua Ackerman, involved a series of innovative experiments that asked people to complete tasks and looked at the effect of simply changing texture or sensation on how the participants’ behaved or perceived the situation. For example:

Ackerman also looked at the influence of an object’s hardness. He asked 49 volunteers to touch either a hard block of word or a soft blanket, under the pretence of examining objects to be used in a magic act. Afterwards, when they read an interaction between a boss and an employee, those who felt the wood thought the employee was stricter and more rigid than those who touched the blanket (but no less positive)

This has obvious practical implications and I suspect attractive shop assistants will find themselves puzzled by sudden influx of the oddly alluring strangers who keep asking for a couple of peaches before asking them out.

Link to write-up from Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Psychologist Jesse Bering has written an absolutely remarkable article about the psychology of masturbation for his latest Scientific American ‘Bering in Mind’ column.

I realise it’s now impossible to write anything about the piece without dropping innuendos like a nurse in a Carry On film but it’s worth checking out for the fact it’s both full of surprising findings and is very funny.

The article covers everything from monkey sex to wet dreams (it has ick and wow in equal measure) but this section on the psychology of sexual fantasy particularly caught my eye:

In their excellent 1995 Psychological Bulletin article [pdf] on sexual fantasy, University of Vermont psychologists Harold Leitenberg and Kris Henning summarize a number of interesting differences between the sexes in this area…

One of the more intriguing things that Leitenberg and Henning conclude is that, contrary to common (and Freudian) belief, sexual fantasies are not simply the result of unsatisfied wishes or erotic deprivation:

“Because people who are deprived of food tend to have more frequent daydreams about food, it might be expected that sexual deprivation would have the same effect on sexual thoughts. The little evidence that exists, however, suggests otherwise. Those with the most active sex lives seem to have the most sexual fantasies, and not vice versa. Several studies have shown that frequency of fantasy is positively correlated with masturbation frequency, intercourse frequency, number of lifetime sexual partners, and self-rated sex drive.”

Link to Bering in Mind psychology of masturbation article.
pdf of full text of Leitenberg and Henning sexual fantasy study.

Earlier this week we discussed how 1800s neurologist Duchenne studied the components of facial expressions by electrocuting individual face muscles.

It turns out someone has done a modern day version, but automated the process and set the dancing faces of four participants to the rhythm of abstract techno. The video to be seen to be believed.

The compelling clip was actually from posted in the comments of another recent Mind Hacks entry on whether we can fake the supposedly unfakeable ‘Duchenne smile’ and was kindly highlighted by reader ‘Thomas Exciting’, who gets top marks for both his YouTube-fu and his nickname.

The facial expression ballet is by Japanese artist Daito Manabe and you can see more of his work on his website.

Link to facial expression techno ballet by Daito Manabe

A recent study in the Journal of Substance Use and Misuse reported on ‘near death experiences’ by users of the anaesthetic drug ketamine which is also widely used illicitly for its hallucinogenic effects.

‘Near death experiences’ are most commonly associated with being seriously ill or injured, although one of my favourite studies found that about half of people who reported the events were never actually in danger of dying.

NDEs typically involve a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ experience, having life flash before your eyes, feeling detached from the body, the experience of making a decision to ‘return to life’, a sense of profound peace and a feeling of communicating with non-physical beings.

There were anecdotal reports that ketamine can produce similar effects with ‘out of body experiences’ being common at high doses. Additionally, the drug targets the glutamate system in the brain which has also been implicated in NDEs that don’t involved the drug.

To understand how closely the drug produces the classic NDE experiences, researchers Ornella Corazza‚Äå and Fabrizio Schifano‚Äå asked ketamine users to anonymously complete a questionnaire on the internet and then invited those who reported an NDE on a validated assessment for an interview.

The results are fascinating:

Interestingly, in 45 (90%) cases, the NDE state occurred either during the first five occasions of intake or during the first few experiences after long spells of ketamine-free periods. On further occasions of intake, ketamine was typically perceived as a stimulant. In terms of the Greyson NDE Scale (see Table 2), the subjects’ perception of time seemed to be altered as typically described during an NDE: 45 (90%) participants reported that everything seemed to be happening at once, or that time lost all its meaning, while 5 (10%) perceived a complete “absence of time” during the experience.

The sense of dissociation from the physical body was experienced by 44 subjects (88%), who claimed that they left their bodies and existed outside it or that they lost awareness of their bodies. Thirteen subjects (26%) clearly described a travel along a tunnel, or through a spiral, with a brilliant light at the end or experienced a more general sense of light, or of flashing lights. Fifteen (30%) participants somewhat met with a “being,” or heard a definite voice of mystical or unearthly nature. An infrequently described feature was the so-called “life review.” Twelve (24%) subjects reported that they were able to either vividly “review” past events, or felt that their past “flashed before them, out of control.”

Furthermore, 10 (20%) subjects reported that during their experience they were “aware of things going on elsewhere,” as if by extrasensory perceptions. At the question “Did you suddenly seem to understand everything?” most interviewees (26, 52%), answered that they achieved “a total understanding of the universe.” Only 4 (8%) participants approached a sort of “barrier” or “a point of no return,” which was described as “the limit between earthly life and the next life.” This could have been an edge, a wall, or a river, among other patterns. Thirty-six (72%) respondents experienced an ineffable sense of peace and pleasantness, and 38 (76%) subjects described an “incredible joy.”

Link to PubMed entry for study.

The New York Times has an important article about how animal cruelty is being increasingly recognised as part of a wider pattern of behaviour including anti-social violence and criminality.

Cruelty to animals has been implicitly recognised as being a sign of behavioural problems in children for some time as it forms part of the diagnosis of conduct disorder, characterised somewhat glibly as ‘kiddie psychopathy’.

However, research has been slowly accumulating over the last few years that animal cruelty is related to lower levels of general empathy and is a signal that the person concerned may have abusive tendencies that extend towards other people.

The link between animal abuse and interpersonal violence is becoming so well established that many U.S. communities now cross-train social-service and animal-control agencies in how to recognize signs of animal abuse as possible indicators of other abusive behaviors. In Illinois and several other states, new laws mandate that veterinarians notify the police if their suspicions are aroused by the condition of the animals they treat. The state of California recently added Humane Society and animal-control officers to the list of professionals bound by law to report suspected child abuse and is now considering a bill in the State Legislature that would list animal abusers on the same type of online registry as sex offenders and arsonists.

The article is an extensive investigation into the cross-over between criminal psychology and forensic veterinary science and, although disturbing in places, is an important and in-depth look at how the two types of abusive behaviour share common roots.

Link to NYT on ‘The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome’.

Neurology journal Brain had a wide-ranging review of the book ‘Insomnia: A Cultural History’ last year which has this wonderful part about Darwin, Duchenne and how he electrocuted the face to study emotional expression.

In the same era and acting on the same beliefs, many experiments were done to study the effect of electricity on sleep and on the nervous system. Beard and Rockwell (1871) claimed that the tendency to insomnia could be removed by electricity, thus galvanizing and causing contraction of the cerebral circulation, and Charles Darwin illustrated his book on the expression of the emotions with many illustrations taken from Duchenne’s work (Darwin, 1904) [see image]. However, some of Darwin’s conclusions, such as that terror and grief were accompanied by automatic contraction of the forehead muscles, may not have been entirely justified by the apparent results since Duchenne’s subjects were admitted to be actors (Duchenne, 1871).

Duchenne was a doctor who studied the link between nerves, electrical activity and muscles. He’s probably best known in medicine for his work on what is now called ‘Duchenne muscular dystrophy‘, a muscle wasting disease caused by inherited problems with muscle protein.

However, his work on the link between facial muscles and emotions, partly researched by electrically stimulating muscles to see what expressions could be created, was groundbreaking and Darwin included Duchenne’s pictures in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Even now, psychologists talk of the ‘Duchenne smile‘ which involves raising the corners of the mouth and, crucially, raising the cheeks and wrinkling the eyes through the use of the orbicularis oculi muscle.

A ‘Duchenne smile’ is often regarded as the most genuine display of spontaneous joy or happiness, due to the fact that parts of the orbicularis oculi muscle cannot be controlled voluntarily and so this specific type of smile can’t be easily faked.

Sadly the whole review of the book ‘Insomnia: A Cultural History’ is locked, which is a pity as it works equally well as an article on its own and covers some fantastic ground.

The book itself look fascinating, and I note that the Wall Street Journal made the whole of Chapter 6 available online which is well worth a read in itself.

Link to locked review for ‘Insomnia: A Cultural History’.
Link to more info about the book.
Link to Chapter 6 at the WSJ.

New Scientist has an intriguing article on how the study of people who have been trained to have lucid dreams may help us understand the neuroscience of consciousness.

Lucid dreams are where the sleeper becomes aware that they are dreaming inside the dream. My first thought was that the combination of these and consciousness sounded a bit gimmicky but the justification seem like an interesting bit of lateral thinking with potentially valuable results:

Surprisingly, given the irrationality of the dream experience, many of the frontal areas of the brain involved in advanced cognition such as reasoning and forward planning were also active in the dreamers. But there was one notable exception: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was remarkably subdued in REM sleep, compared with during wakefulness. To Hobson, that strongly suggests that this particular area, above other frontal regions, is crucial for the critical reflective awareness present in waking, and therefore secondary, consciousness (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 6, p 475).

Could this one brain region alone explain our secondary consciousness? It’s here that lucid dreams enter the picture. With their increased self-awareness, lucid dreams share certain aspects of secondary consciousness, so researchers are now vying to observe what happens in the brain when someone “wakes up” within their dream, and whether they exhibit any further signatures of consciousness. “It’s a very interesting leap because it can show you exactly what occurs if you jump from limited consciousness to very high consciousness,” says Victor Spoormaker of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, Germany. “This should be one of the main themes of lucid dream research.”

The article also has some tips on making lucid dreams more likely while you sleep.

Almost every guide to lucid dreaming has the core advice that you need to get into the habit of constantly checking and asking yourself while awake ‘am I dreaming?’ presumably based on the principle that dreams often contain things we’ve experienced during the day.

One of my favourite ‘reality checks’ comes from the FAQ of the Lucidity Institute, a commercial training course set up by neuroscientist Stephen LaBerge.

It says to wear a digital watch and get used to checking it regularly at two close intervals to see if the numbers have changed as expected. If they haven’t or the numbers don’t make sense, you’re probably dreaming. Apparently checking light switches work is another technique.

No idea how rigorously these specific ideas have been tested but there is good evidence that lucid dreaming can be successfully practised and the typical lab technique to confirm it is happening is to ask participants to make specific horizontal eye movements when they become lucid.

As your eye muscles aren’t paralysed during sleep, it allows the dreamer one of the few ways they can signal to the researchers.

Link to NewSci on dreaming and consciousness (via @researchdigest).

Sleeping people are difficult to engage but easy to monitor, meaning that we know a great deal about what happens in the body and brain during our restful hours but little about the actual psychology of slumber.

One of the most interesting stages is the transition into sleep, where we can sometimes detect that our mind is changing as we slip into unconsciousness. These changes are known as the hypnagogic state and are when hallucinations are particularly common because the mind starts to ‘free up’ in poorly understood ways.

A new study has taken an interesting approach to try and understand the nature of this twilight period by using the biological measures to monitor how ‘far gone’ people are as they drift off, and then gently waking them to ask how their mind has changed.

The research team, led by Chien-Ming Yang from the National Chengchi University in Taipei, asked 20 participants to have an afternoon nap in the sleep lab while they were wired up to an EEG machine to measure electrical activity in the brain, with additional electrodes to measure eye movements, heart rate and muscle jerks.

As the participants drifted off they were awakened at different times: either just after eye-closing, the onset of ‘stage 1’ sleep where you’re still aware of the external world, the onset of ‘stage 2’ sleep where awareness starts to diminish, and after five minutes at ‘stage 2’ where awareness should have largely disappeared.

After wakening, participants were asked questions about their perception of being asleep and the experience of their own minds: “Did you fall asleep?”, “Did you see any visual images?”, “Were you able to control your perceptual experiences?”, “How real did any of the experiences seem to you?”, “How well were you able to control your thoughts?”, “Were your thoughts logical?” and several questions to try and capture the conscious experience of sleep onset.

The experience of having control over your own thoughts and how coherent and logical they seemed to begin to change almost as soon as the participants closed their eyes and they continued to seem slightly more unusual and autonomous as time went on.

However, as soon as ‘stage 2’ sleep began there was a step change into a state of mind where thoughts became markedly freewheeling, illogical and seemed to have a life of their own.

In contrast, awareness of the outside world remained largely present until ‘stage 2’ kicked in, at which point it quickly dropped off.

Most interestingly, the perception that ‘I was asleep’ when woken was most associated not with a reduced awareness of the surrounds, but instead largely relied on the experience that the sleeper no longer had control over their increasingly illogical thoughts.

In other words, we seem to know when we’ve been sleeping because we’re quickly drawn back into the world of controlled, logical thought after gently drifting in fantasy.

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

Psychologist Paul Bloom considers why imaginary characters and fictional plots can have such a powerful emotional effect in a fantastic article for the The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Bloom argues that we have a form of ‘dual representation’ for fictional reveries where we engage our emotions with the characters, plot or situation as if they were real while knowing that they are not.

Does this suggest that people believe, at some level, that the events are real? Do we sometimes think that fictional characters actually exist and fictional events actually occur? Of course, people get fooled, as when parents tell their children about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, or when an adult mistakes a story for a documentary, or vice versa. But the idea here is more interesting than that‚Äîit is that even once we consciously know something is fictional, there is a part of us that believes it’s real…

In an important pair of papers, Gendler introduces a novel term to describe the mental state that underlies these reactions: She calls it “alief.” Beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are. Aliefs are more primitive. They are responses to how things seem. In the above example, people have beliefs that tell them they are safe, but they have aliefs that tell them they are in danger. Or consider the findings of Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. Gendler notes that the belief here is: The bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty. But the alief is stupid, screaming, “Filthy object! Dangerous object! Stay away!”

The point of alief is to capture the fact that our minds are partially indifferent to the contrast between events that we believe to be real versus those that seem to be real, or that are imagined to be real. This extends naturally to the pleasures of the imagination.

It’s a wonderfully wide-ranging article that explores imagination from all angles and poses some genuinely challenging ideas about how we keep one foot either side of the fantasy divide.

Link to article ‘The Pleasures of Imagination’.

The flowers in the picture are from one of the most notorious plants in South America. Brugmansia is widespread across the continent and is strongly psychoactive causing disorientation, hallucinations and memory loss.

This is due to the fact that it contains high levels of the drug scopolamine and, as a result, it has been used for generations by many native peoples for shamanic rituals.

It is perhaps more commonly known for its criminal uses, however, particularly as a dried, powdered form, known as ‘burundanga’ where it is slipped into someone’s drink making them liable to assault, theft or worse.

There is an interesting popular belief about the drug, namely that it removes free will. The idea being that you have all your mental faculties but will do whatever is suggested to you without resistance, so criminals can get you to take out money from the cash machine or hand them the keys to your house.

This has never been tested though, so we simply don’t know, although one study indicates that scopolamine reduces our ability to keep information in mind but leaves the processes that manipulate it unaffected, perhaps suggesting that victims remain cognitively sharp, but mentally empty.

The plants are remarkably common (I took the photo above at the side of the road in the Risaralda department of Colombia) which probably accounts for their common use although they are not well known outside of Latin America. In fact, the only scientific review article on the psychology and neuroscience of ‘burundanga’ intoxication is in Spanish.

Work in published in English tends to focus on lab-based experiments using scopoloamine as a model of amnesia, plus the occasional sensationalist story in the press about ‘zombie drugs’.

However, the local name for the plant is ‘el borrachero’ – literally, the drunkeness.

Link to Wikipedia page on brugmansia.

The History of the Human Sciences journal covers the problem of psychedelic drug research and subjective experience. The article argues that the mind-bending nature of the drugs demand that scientists deal with the clash between the objective world view of science and the subjective experience of the participant that is often swept under the carpet in other areas of substance research.

One particular gem is where it has a report from a participant who describes his or her experience being PET brain scanned while tripping on psilocybin:

At the beginning of the trip I suddenly felt an urge to lie down in the lab. At that point, the optical ‘distortion’ began. First, I saw that some structures were moving and took up different colors and forms. From the gurney, I looked at the sink and the soap dispenser on the wall. All of a sudden, they looked as if they had been painted – as if you apply a filter to an image, which makes it look like an oil painting.

Before the scan, I went to the toilet, but I didn’t find my bearings there. All proportions were wrong: the toilet seemed to be huge, my hands were too big, the arms too long. The first minutes of the scan were also strange. When I realized the scientist in the corner of my eye, he looked like a rat, and the assistant’s face was a zombie-like grimace. As soon as I closed my eyes, my perception changed abruptly and totally.

I was gliding through bizarre geometric spaces, mostly cubic and intensively red. My field of vision was enormously wide, up to 270º, at the corners of which I perceived whispering human figures. Only with great effort, could I afterwards fill in the questionnaires. The answers did not seem suitable or too undifferentiated. Sometimes I did not understand the questions. But it was fascinating that I could read at least half of the questions on a page at the same time.

It’s a fascinating paper as it is based on fieldwork by medical anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz in a laboratory where neuroscientists are studying the effects of psychedelic substances.

It explores how the researchers’ personal experience of the drugs informs their experimental designs and hence requires them to deal with the link between subjective experience and empirical science.

For example, in one part, while piloting EEG research, a researcher has a ‘bad trip’ and the team realise they need to make the lab look more friendly and display warmer and more relaxing pictures to reduce the chances of negative reactions.

This is clearly equivalent to the well-known context effects of set and setting developed by 60s acid-heads, but obviously has a feed-back effect on the empirical science.

As there is no ‘correct’ set-up for the look of the lab but it will clearly affect the objectively recorded results, there is an interesting interplay between objectivity and personal experience.

Obviously, this happens in other settings but is typically ignored, owing to the fact that the outcomes are perhaps less dramatic, but the amplifying nature of psychedelics demands a response from the researchers.

Sadly, the article is locked behind a $25 dollar paywall so if you want to read the full text be prepared to give up the best part of a year’s subscription to Playboy. Bargain.

Link to DOI and summary of academic article.