Category: News

The latest Nature Neuroscience podcast has just appeared online. The latest edition is a particularly good one and tackles the 100th anniversary of William James’ death, a barely known gene that has been linked to severe brain malformations, monkey anxiety and psychedelic psychiatry.

The author of William James‘ biography, Linda Simon, is interviewed about the life of the great man and founder of modern psychology. The interview makes for a brilliant potted biography of James and is a particular highlight of the show.

I also enjoyed the interview with Franz Vollenwider, co-author of the recent article on the use of psychedelic drugs in psychiatry who gives a classic scientists’ answer to the question “Have you ever taken these drugs yourself?” He replies “When we did the very first psilocybin study, we had no idea about the dose…”

You’ll have to listen to the show to hear how it went.
 

Link to NeuroPod homepage.
mp3 of this episode.

We’ve refreshed the engine of mindhacks.com. moving it to WordPress. This should only improve your viewing pleasure, giving us less server downtime and easier commenting. It also means that we can easily see the viewer stats for the site – around 5,000 a day, which is great. It also lets me see that there have been 3,930 posts on mindhacks.com, nearly all of which have been Vaughan’s. So, it’s a good time to say “Great work Vaughan!”, as well as many thanks to Matt for hosting up the site up to now. Matt, myself and Vaughan were managed through the move by J.D. Hollis who provided his expertise with good humour and dazzling efficiency – thanks JD!

Our new RSS feed is : https://mindhacks.com/feed and you can follow the blog on Twitter @mindhacksblog. Vaughan is @vaughanbell and I’m @tomstafford.

Thank for everyone who joins us here, and stay tuned for more on mind and brain.

I’ve just listened to NPR’s series reporting on the drug war in Mexico and I was left completely stunned by the final part which explains how the current upsurge in violence was triggered.

It turns out that it stems from a change in government, when the Institutional Revolutionary Party or the PRI were voted out after 71 years in power.

This was significant because, according to NPR, the previous government had set up a system where the cartels paid to smuggle drugs through the country but were bound to keep violence to a minimum.

When the elections changed the government, the agreements no longer held, and the cartels were essentially ‘unregulated’.

George Grayson, a professor at the College of William and Mary, says the PRI covertly cut deals with the criminals to allow a particular trafficker to operate in a particular part of Mexico.

“The capos would pay bribes to local, state and federal officials; in return, the government would turn a blind eye to their activities,” he says.

But Mexican drug gangs under the PRI had to follow strict rules. They were supposed to act discreetly, spurn kidnapping, avoid killing civilians and not encroach on another cartel’s turf.

“If in fact the cartels broke the rules of the game, the PRI had the capacity to come down on them like a ton of bricks,” Grayson says…

With so many people in government getting bribes, there was little incentive to crack down on the narcotics trade. The PRI’s kickback system even encouraged the cartels to expand, Poppa says.

The cartels ramped up their arms smuggling networks. They diversified into legitimate businesses to launder their profits. They recruited special forces soldiers to be their muscle.

Then the PRI lost the presidency in 2000 to Vicente Fox and his National Action Party, or PAN, and Mexico was left with a monster it couldn’t control.

The word ‘narcostate‘ tends to be thrown around rather too liberally, but assuming NPR have their story straight, the fact that the collapse of a government protection racquet can destabilise a country really speaks to the huge power of the cocaine industry.
 

Link to final part of NPR series (see left hand box for other parts).
Link to Wikipedia page on the Mexican Drug War.

There will be a brief pause in postings while The Mind Hacks Blog moves to a new home. I’ve disabled comments while this is happening. Full details after we’ve successfully completed moving the furniture behind the scenes (clue: not too much will change).

‘Legal highs’ may actually contain illegal drugs, according to a study just published in the medical journal QJM.

This new research provides a further insight into the foggy world of the ‘legal high’ industry, with particular reference to recent UK legislation which banned several previously ‘legal highs’ including a drug called mephedrone which was bizarrely dubbed ‘miaow miaow’ by the media.

The authors of the study bought several substances before and after the ban and sent them for lab testing to see whether the listed ingredients matched the advertised ingredients.

Surprisingly, they found on both occasions that the advertised ingredients of the ‘legal highs’ didn’t meet the active ingredients they discovered through chemical tests.

For example, before the ban, a legal pill sold as ‘Doves Original’ was advertised as containing a blend of amino acids and ketones but actually contained the psychedelic drugs mephedrone and butylone. Both were completely legal but were simply not mentioned by the manufacturers.

Interestingly, after the ban, it seems that several companies just changed their packaging without changing their ingredients.

Out of the six products tested, all advertised as being legal, five included recently banned substances – including mephedrone, 4-fluoromethcathinone and methylone – and the other contained dimethocaine, a legal but unmentioned local anaesthetic (presumably to emulate the nose-numbing effect of cocaine).

This makes an interesting contrast to a recent study on ‘legal high’ synthetic cannabinoids that we covered previously, where new unregulated substances appeared on the market before the ban came into place.

In the case of the UK legal stimulant market, however, it seems rather than innovating new substances to avoid the ban, the industry has simply resorted to mislabelling and deceptive advertising.

What this may suggest is that the synthetic cannabinoid industry is more scientifically savvy than the legal stimulant industry, not least because synthesising cannabinoids can’t be done as easily. But despite this, they seem to be more ‘agile’ when it comes to reacting to legal clamp downs.

Link to PubMed entry for study.
Link to previous Mind Hacks on synthetic cannabinoids.

This week’s Science has a thought-provoking article charting how several of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies have canned their development of psychiatric drugs, citing the medications as unlikely to be profitable given the difficulties in understanding the neurobiology of mental illness.

On 4 February, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced that it planned to pull the plug on drug discovery in some areas of neuroscience, including pain and depression. A few weeks later, news came that AstraZeneca was closing research facilities in the United States and Europe and ceasing drug-discovery work in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety.

These cutbacks by two of the top players in drug development for disorders of the central nervous system have raised concerns that the pharmaceutical industry is pulling out, or at least pulling back, in this area. In direct response to the cuts at GSK and AstraZeneca, the Institute of Medicine Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders organized a meeting in late June that brought together leaders from government, academia, and private foundations to take stock.

But the biggest problem, researchers say, is that there is almost nothing in the pipeline that gives any hope for a transformation in the treatment of mental illness. That’s worrying, they say, because the need for better treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders is vast. Hundreds of millions of people are afflicted worldwide. Yet for some common disorders, like Alzheimer’s disease, no truly effective treatments exist; for others, like depression, the existing drugs have limited efficacy and substantial side effects.

Sadly, the full article is locked behind a paywall (news kills people) but the author, science journalist Greg Miller, discusses the topic in the freely available Science podcast which covers the same ground.

One theme to consistently emerge is how, for years, Big Pharma has been chasing easy profits by making slightly tweaked versions of existing drugs rather than investing in research aimed at developing genuinely new treatments. It seems this short-term-ism is starting to run out of steam.

By the way, the Science podcast piece on Big Pharma is followed by coverage of an innovative new study on dopamine and impulsivity so well worth a listen.

Link to ‘Is Pharma Running Out of Brainy Ideas?’
Link to Science podcast.

Mind Hacks updates may be a little hit and miss over the next week as I’m off to San Francisco for SciFoo – the Nature / Google / O’Reilly science anti-conference.

Apart from conferencing I’ll be sleeping on floors and wandering the streets but normal service should be resumed in a week.

Wired Danger Room reports that the US Military are thinking of changing the name of their Psychological Operations or PSYOPS units to ‘Military Information Support and/to Operations’ that has the forgettable acronym MISO.

Apparently the suggestion has not gone down well with the (dare we say) image conscious PSYOPS troops. Perhaps rather worryingly, one self-identified member is reported as saying “Some of us joined Psychological Operations because it sounded awesome for it‚Äôs name alone.‚Äù

Interestingly, the UK military’s PSYOPS service, 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group, seems to have pulled a lot of its material from the web. Despite the fact it used to have its own webpage (copy from archive.org) it now seems only to be mentioned on a page on the Royal Navy website.

However, the Wired piece links to the ‘PSYOP Regimental Blog’ which has news about PSYOPS around the world and shop talk from US soldiers in the service.

Link to Wired on possible PSYOPs rebranding.
Link to the PSYOP Regimental Blog.

I’ve just noticed that the complete transcript of my House of Lords committee debate with Susan Greenfield on ‘What is the potential impact of technology, such as computer gaming, on the brain?’ is now online as a pdf file.

The debate was for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Scientific Research in Learning and Education and, handily, the transcript has all the slides included next to the relevant text.

As with all direct transcripts it has the fluency of frozen mud: “And we saw a thing from the newspaper there and this was based on a report by Childwise” (clearly hitting one of my rhetorical highs at this point).

You can draw your own conclusions from the debate, however, what stands out for me, and what struck me at the time, is Greenfield’s completely unwillingness to engage with any of the scientific studies on the topic.

There’s also an interesting typo in the transcript. When talking about the research on video game violence during the questions I’m quoted as saying “There is a very good discussion about this in the Binary report”.

What I actually mentioned was the Byron report – a wide-ranging review commissioned by the UK government entitled ‘Safer Children in a Digital World’.

It is probably one of the best scientific reviews on the impact of computers on the well-being and behaviour of children. Interestingly, I met no-one in parliament who had read it and drew blanks whenever I mentioned it. Joined up government in action, I presume.

pdf of ‘impact of technology on the brain’ debate transcript.

The building for Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas is just beautiful.

The centre is a neuroscience research institute that was designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry.

It particularly focuses on Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative brain diseases.

The ‘Lou Ruvo’ in the name is a tribute to the father of the centre’s founder who died from dementia.

Link to image from BoingBoing
Link to the centre’s website.

Wired’s Danger Room blog has a short news item reporting that the co-founder and leader of the Human Terrain System, the US Army’s teams of battlefield social scientists, is no longer in post and has presumably been fired.

The HTS has been a controversial innovation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and aims to understand the culture in which the conflict takes place to give the military a strategic advantage. Civilian social scientists have criticised the project as violating the ‘do no harm’ principal and branding the members ‘weaponised anthropologists’.

Colonel Steve Fondacaro co-created the military project and pushed it to prominence in the military who are increasingly relying on human intelligence to fight an insurgent-led conflict.

No specific details have been given for why Fondacaro is no longer leading the project but the article does provide a potted history of the Human Terrain System’s colourful history to the present time.

At last count, there were 21 Human Terrain Teams operating in Iraq and six more in Afghanistan, offering advice to commanders on the local cultural landscape.

There was a sense of perpetual chaos swirling around HTS, however. The program came under assault from nearly every angle: the quality of the Human Terrain “experts,” the depth of its training, the utility to infantry leaders, the competency of its managers, the exposure of civilian researchers to hostile environments, the ethics of turning social science into military intelligence.

Dozens left the program, disgruntled. Three social scientists were killed in action. One Human Terrain employee pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Another was charged with spying. A third was taken hostage in Iraq.

Link to Danger Room piece ‘Human Terrain Chief Ousted’

We recently reported on an academic article that criticised one of the most popular methods for diagnosing psychopaths and which had remained unpublished for four years due to legal threats by the designers of the interview.

The article was by researchers Jennifer Skeem and David Cooke who had criticised the PCL-R, a diagnostic scale by renowned forensic psychologist Robert Hare, for its supposed over-focus on criminality.

Their piece was peer reviewed and accepted for publication in 2006 by the journal Psychological Assessment but Hare got wind of the piece which he felt unjustly criticised him and his work and threatened both the journal and the authors with a law suit for defamation.

The article remained unpublished for four years, so it was rather surprising when the journal published the article with subsequent responses from both parties this morning.

I’m wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that the case is being covered in tomorrow’s edition of Science, although the pay-walled article is already available online. The journalist who covered the story has also covered the case in a blog post.

Interestingly, those reports note that the issue was apparently resolved in 2008 but the journal has sat on the articles ever since and the spat only came to public attention a few weeks ago due to it featuring in a journal article about academic freedom.

Seemingly the first to pick up on this was the excellent forensic psychology blog In the News which has also just posted coverage of the days happenings as well as discussing the original article and its responses.

Link to coverage from In The News.
Link to pay-walled Science coverage.
Link to blog coverage by same journalist.

Robert Hare is a psychologist who studies psychopaths and is best known for developing the ‘Hare Psychopathy Checklist’ or PCL-R, a standard diagnostic tool for assessing offenders. He is currently threatening to sue two psychologists who wrote an article critical of the theory underlying the checklist, as well as the academic journal, Psychologist Assessment, that accepted the piece for publication after it was peer-reviewed.

There’s an account of the affair over at the excellent forensic psychology blog, In the News, who note that the article was authored by respected researchers Jennifer Skeem and David Cooke and was titled “Is Criminal Behavior a Central Component of Psychopathy? Conceptual Directions for Resolving the Debate”. As a result of the legal threat the article has never come to light.

The letter from Hare’s lawyers apparently claimed that the he would:

“have no choice but to seek financial damages from your publication and from the authors of the article, as well as a public retraction of the article” if it was published. The letter claimed that Skeem and Cooke’s paper was “fraught with misrepresentations and other problems and a completely inaccurate summary of what amounts to [Hare’s] life’s work” and “deliberately fabricated or altered quotes of Dr. Hare, and substantially altered the sense of what Dr. Hare said in his previous publications.”

It’s probably worth noting that the PCL-R is big business. At current prices, each assessor who uses the checklist needs their own copy of the manual ($123) and the rating booklet ($68.50) and each individual assessment requires an interview guide at $5 each and a scoring form at about $3 each.

However, to use the assessment, each person needs to attend a training workshop at about $350 per person and workshops can easily involve 100 people at a time. Additionally, there is a follow-up correspondence course, price unspecified.

Because the assessments are used in the legal system, it is important that no-one (like an opposing lawyer in court) can find fault in the process and attending the ‘official’ training from the PCL-R company is considered the gold standard.

Recently, the affair has caught the attention of two lawyers and legal scholars who have just published their own analysis of the situation in the International Journal of Forensic Mental Health.

They express regret that Hare has chosen to use legal threats to counter his critics rather than to refute any points he felt were unfair in print himself, but also note that his strategy may actually undermine the usefulness of the PCL-R in court as opposing lawyers “may attempt to discredit that testimony by arguing that the literature relevant to evaluating the PCL-R has been tainted”.

Link to In the News on the case.

ABC Radio National’s Life Matters covers the surprising news that France has created a brain and behavioural research unit specifically to form public policy.

The public policy in question is not just to do with the mind and brain and the director of the unit describes a ‘neuromarketing’ approach where the programme seems set to advise on how, for example, anti-smoking messages can be formulated.

As we’ve discussed several times, the ‘neuro’ of ‘neuromarketing’ is an interesting research focus but as an applied science it is completely premature and can currently tell us nothing about how best to appeal to the public that standard psychology can’t do already.

Rather worringly, unit director Olivier Oullier seems to think that ‘neuroscience’ and ‘neuroimaging’ allows access to unconscious and emotional responses that aren’t available to established behavioural research.

This is clearly crap and anyone who is aware of how neuroimaging studies are created knows that they rest on the quality of the psychological science.

It is also the case that not a single ‘neuromarketing’ study has shown a way to predict consumer responses, attitudes or preferences that improves on previously established cognitive science.

Psychology can be, and is, used to inform and evaluate public information campaigns and the effectiveness of public policy but at the current time brain scans are nothing but fairly lights.

UPDATE: Olivier Oullier got in touch to note that his interview was sparked by the release of a (very good) report [pdf] on ‘Improving public health prevention with behavioural, cognitive and neuroscience’. We’ve agreed to disagree on the value of neuroimaging in public policy right now, but he notes he’s actually a lot more measured in his analysis than you might of thought from my comments above.

Link to Life Matters on ‘Neuroscience and public policy’.