Category: News

Don’t miss a special edition of the Nature NeuroPod podcast which is dedicated to highlights from the recent Society for Neuroscience annual gathering of the tribes which took place in Chicago in October.

The discussion looks at the big themes in this year’s conference, including optogenetics – the use of light stimulation to alter gene expression neuron activity with millisecond precision, society and neuroethics, and the use of techniques from stage magic to explore attention and consciousness.

A fascinating summary that clearly only scratches the surface of the biggest brain meeting on the planet but it still has plenty of shiny new gems.

Link to NeurPod homepage.
mp3 of NeuroPod Extra podcast of SfN highlights.

The Chicago Tribune has just published two important articles on how untested and potentially dangerous medical treatments are being used on autistic children by US parents desperate for a cure.

Many of these treatments are based on flimsy or non-existent evidence and they are being promoted by a subculture of parents of autistic children, who seem to overlap significantly with the anti-vaccination movement.

Dr. Carlos Pardo was trying to head off trouble.

The Johns Hopkins neurologist and his colleagues had autopsied the brains of people with autism who died in accidents and found evidence of neuroinflammation. This rare look inside the autistic brain had the potential to increase understanding of the mysterious disorder.

It also, he knew, could inspire doctors aiming to help children recover from autism to develop new experimental treatments — even though the research was so preliminary the scientists did not know whether the inflammation was good or bad, or even how it might relate to autism.

So when Pardo and his colleagues published their paper in the Annals of Neurology in 2005, they added an online primer that clearly explained their findings in layman’s terms and sternly warned doctors not to use them to develop treatments…

Citing Pardo’s research, doctors have treated children with a blood product typically reserved for people with severe immune system disorders like the one known as “bubble boy” disease. They have used it to justify sealing children with autism in pressurized bags and submarine-like metal chambers. Other children have been given a drug used to treat extremely rare genetic disorders.

The articles have several more examples of how scientific findings have been distorted or misinterpreted to justify dubious treatments (like chelation therapy, hormone suppressors and hyperbaric chambers) without any clear evidence for their benefit.

They’re both in-depth articles but are well worth your time as, along with Wired’s recent article on autism and antivaxxers, they are some of the best mainstream articles to track the growing trend for pseudo-medical autism treatments in recent times.

Link to ‘Risky alternative therapies have little basis in science’.
Link to ‘Science hijacked to support alternative therapies’ (both via MeFi)

Henry Markram, leader of the Blue Brain neural tissue simulation project, has sent an angry email to IBM following their widely-reported but misleading announcement that they’d created a simulation as complex as a cat brain.

This has come some months after similar headlines declared that an equivalent of a ‘mouse brain’ had been simulated by the IBM-affiliated Blue Brain project.

The initial claims were clearly false, as the project only aims to simulate cortical columns, a type of highly organised brain tissue that is common in the cortex, and the most recent simulation to make the headlines is even more simple.

Even the Blue Brain project, which is attempting realistic biological simulations, is not aiming to simulate the complexity or the function of a whole brain, in the same way that a simulation of muscle tissue, no matter how accurate, is clearly not going to produce an artificial human.

In an email which was copied to several leading science publications, project leader Henry Markram takes IBM’s PR department and one of their cognitive computing researchers to task for ‘stupid statements’ and ‘mass deception of the public’ – and those statements are some of the tamer ones. Here are points 1-3:

1. These are point neurons (missing 99.999% of the brain; no branches; no detailed ion channels; the simplest possible equation you can imagine to simulate a neuron, totally trivial synapses; and using the STDP learning rule I discovered in this way is also is a joke).

2. All these kinds of simulations are trivial and have been around for decades – simply called artificial neural network (ANN) simulations. We even stooped to doing these kinds of simulations as bench mark tests 4 years ago with 10’s of millions of such points before we bought the Blue Gene/L. If we (or anyone else) wanted to we could easily do this for a billion “points”, but we would certainly not call it a cat-scale simulation. It is really no big deal to simulate a billion points interacting if you have a big enough computer. The only step here is that they have at their disposal a big computer. For a grown up “researcher” to get excited because one can simulate billions of points interacting is ludicrous.

3. It is not even an innovation in simulation technology. You don’t need any special “C2 simulator”, this is just a hoax and a PR stunt. Most neural network simulators for parallel machines can can do this today. Nest, pNeuron, SPIKE, CSIM, etc, etc. all of them can do this! We could do the same simulation immediately, this very second by just loading up some network of points on such a machine, but it would just be a complete waste of time – and again, I would consider it shameful and unethical to call it a cat simulation.

It’s a stinging response from someone clearly annoyed at the misrepresentation of this sort of biological simulation work.

If you want to get a good handle on the aims of the Blue Brain project at least, Jonah Lehrer’s piece for Seed is the best you’re likely to read for a while.

Link to Markram’s email in IEEE Spectrum (via @Neurotechnology)

Colombia has an official Day of the Psychologist and you might be forgiven for thinking that it’s a self-declared promotional event by the psychology association here, but it isn’t, the day is established by law. Article 92 of Law 1090 establishes 20th November as the official celebration.

Psychology departments around the country usually celebrate the day with conferences and parties. I was kindly invited to give a talk on the ‘Neuropsicología de Alucinaciones’ at the four day conference (wow) at the University of Antioquia, so many thanks to everyone who attended.

Later on, there is a free concert at the university which will be broadcast live on radio station La Mega, so you can see the celebration is taken quite seriously.

It turns out that Colombia is not the only country with a ‘day of the psychologist’ as they also seem to happen in Argentina (13th October), Guatemala (23rd July), Uruguay (6th December), Mexico (22nd May) and Cuba (13th April).

I’m wondering whether this is purely a Latin American phenomenon, so if you know of any more, anywhere in the world, please let me know.

So, qué tengas un buen Día Nacional del Psicólogo and I’ll see you at the concert.

The Wall Street Journal has a revealing article on why Argentina has the largest concentration of psychologists anywhere in the world and why it has a long-standing cultural fascination with psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis is a set of psychological theories and form of psychotherapy based strongly on the ideas of Freud. Buenos Aires is one of the world centres of psychoanalysis and has been since the earliest days of Freud’s work.

Unlike in many countries, where psychoanalysis was, and remains, a psychology for the rich, the practice took off in Argentina during the 1960s to the point where is is common for everyday folk to see an analyst. The WSJ cites a recent survey suggesting that 32% of Argentinians have seen an analyst at some point in their lives.

Argentina is also known as a centre of Lacanian psychoanalysis, based on the work of French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan. If you can, imagine a French post-modern take on Freud. If you can’t, reading Lacan is unlikely to help because it’s an almost impenetrable reinterpretation of what was already a set of theories that was fairly loopy in places.

But psychoanalysis is more than a psychological practice in Argentina, it is a central part of the culture, and the WSJ article explores some of its social popularity.

Psychoanalysis is embedded in the geography of Buenos Aires, where many analysts are clustered in a neighborhood popularly known as Villa Freud.

Freudian thought colors political reporting. The newsweekly Noticias recently turned to a panel of 10 psychoanalysts to explain the behavior of ex-president Néstor Kirchner, who has been stealing the policymaking spotlight from his wife, Cristina, the current president.

One magazine query: What to make of Mrs. Kirchner’s statement that her husband sleeps in the fetal position?

Meanwhile, on TV, a drama series called “Tratame Bien,” (“Treat Me Well”), focuses on the travails of Jos√© and Sofia, a husband and wife, each of whom has an analyst. Facing midlife crises, the two make a momentous decision: retaining a third analyst they can see together for couples’ therapy.

Interestingly, lots of Latin America is still heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, probably due to the historical influences of the USA to the North and Argentina in the West.

However, since working here, I’ve realised that doing evidence-based empirical psychology and psychiatry is a lot more difficult in countries with limited resources.

Access to the evidence is expensive (thanks to the use of restrictive copyright and excessive pricing by scientific journals) and research is difficult when there is little free time and few funding opportunities.

However, this is much less of an issue with psychoanalysis because the major source of information is your own experience, insights and work with the patient, plus discussions in a limited set of journals.

In other words, it’s much easier to fulfil the requirements of what is expected of a well-informed competent psychoanalytic practitioner than what is expected of a scientifically-oriented evidence-based psychologist.

This, I suspect, is one of the many reasons that psychoanalysis remains popular in Latin America.

Link to WSJ piece on psychoanalysis in Argentina (via PCFTI).
Link to entry for Argentina in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.

Writer Malcolm Gladwell recently published a collection of his essays in his new book What the Dog Saw. It was recently reviewed in The New York Times by cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker who complements Gladwell as “a writer of many gifts” but notes that “he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong”.

Pinker cites several errors (including describing eigenvalues as ‘Igon values’) but cites one claim, over the link between IQ and American football players’ rankings, as “simply not true”.

Gladwell has just written a stinging response where he notes Pinker was using data from blog posts rather than the scientific article Gladwell was basing his claims on.

While the two writers spar over the details, the subtext is that Pinker is a proponent of IQ being a reliable predictor of success with a significant genetic influence (see The Blank Slate) whereas Gladwell has argued that success is largely a combination of practice plus being in the right place at the right time (see Outliers).

However, you may be interested to know that all of the essays collected in Gladwell’s new book are available for free on his website, so you can try before you buy.

Link to Pinker’s review in the NYT
Link to Gladwell’s reply (via @carlzimmer).

The latest issue of Wired UK has a cover feature on breaking ideas for 2010. Mind and brain innovations feature strongly and several are freely available online.

I might immodestly recommend the piece on ‘neurosecurity‘ and how researchers are having harden neural implants against hackers, as it was written by me. Regular readers will know we broke the story back in June, although it was great to have it selected as one of the ‘ideas of the future’ by Wired UK.

There’s also a fascinating piece on ‘hyperopia‘ – a cognitive bias where people falsely assume they’ll be happier in the future by forgoing an indulgent pleasure and doing something ‘sensible’ that will benefit the long-term.

It was described by psychologists Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz and their original paper is available online as a pdf. It’s a lovely flip-side to the self-control research, that has shown the ability to delay gratification predicts success in a number of areas of life. Hyperopia demonstrates that this ability can make people worse off if used in excess.

There’s also a couple of great pieces on the interface between psychology and technology.

The article on ‘bionic noticing‘ discusses how portable networked devices both allow us to be passively alerted to things in our environment through location specific information sources but also how simply having the technology can change of awareness: for example, the ability to instantly post pictures online from mobile devices can change how we look at the environment.

There’s also a piece on ‘digital forgetting‘, arguing that the ability to permanently store photos, conversations and social network interactions is a bug, not a feature, and we need to build in forgetting processes to facilitate to the traditional social practice of ‘putting things behind us’.

The print version has lots of other breaking ideas for 2010 which are not available online, including a piece by me on ‘networked drugs’.

Link to Wired UK neurosecurity article.
Link to Wired UK hyperopia article.
Link to Wired UK bionic noticing article.
Link to Wired UK digital forgetting article.

Full disclosure: I’m contributing editor at Wired UK and my neural implant has no password.

The Philip K. Dick novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch features a portable device which allows patients to consult with the virtual psychiatrist Dr Smile. If I’m not mistaken, the system seems to have re-invented by this research team:

Virtual patient: a photo-real virtual human for VR-based therapy

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2004;98:154-6.

Kiss B, Benedek B, Szijártó G, Csukly G, Simon L, Takács B.

A high fidelity Virtual Human Interface (VHI) system was developed using low-cost and portable computers. The system features real-time photo-realistic digital replicas of multiple individuals capable of talking, acting and showing emotions and over 60 different facial expressions. These virtual patients appear in a high-performance virtual reality environment featuring full panoramic backgrounds, animated 3D objects, behavior and AI models, a complete vision system for supporting interaction and advanced animation interfaces. The VHI takes advantage of the latest advances in computer graphics. As such, it allows medical researchers and practitioners to create real-time responsive virtual humans for their experiments using computer systems priced under $2000.

Link to PubMed entry for Dr Smile re-invention.

As regular readers will know, we often note the passing of the regular British ritual where the UK government asks a group of scientific advisers to give evidence on the harmfulness of drugs and then ignores them.

The unwritten rule is that everyone feigns mild exasperation and then goes about their business as if nothing had happened, but the Home Secretary Alan Johnson has gone and spoiled the party by firing neuroscientist David Nutt, the head of the drugs advisory committee, for, well, waving that damned evidence about.

The home secretary’s officially sacked the chief adviser for breaking what turns out to be a non-existent rule about discussing government policy in a recent lecture – using the carefully mischosen words “I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy”.

Subsequently, two other scientists from the advisory committee have resigned and both the government’s Chief Scientific Advisor and the Science Minister expressed their dismay.

An evidence free drugs policy isn’t a British speciality, unfortunately, as shown by a recent World Health Organisation study that showed that severity of drug laws around the world have virtually no relation to the drug use of the population.

So why did the home secretary break the unwritten rule about quietly ignoring the evidence in the service of some pointless sabre rattling? Surely nothing to do with the fact that a general election is coming up.

The world’s largest scientific conference, the Society for Neuroscience meeting, starts tomorrow in Chicago. Tens of thousands of researchers from all areas of neuroscience will meet to discuss all aspects of the brain. The conference always has a full programme of social events, as well as the usual scientific programme (I am still filled with regret about missing the ‘Hippocampus Poetry Slam’ the last time I went). If you are in Chigaco this year, one particular event you might want to check out is the Neuroethics Social, hosted by Martha Farah from the University of Pennslyvania

Neuroethics Social
Time & Date: Tuesday Oct 20, 6:30-8:00
Location: Room N139, convention center
Guests: J.T. Cacioppo J.D. Haynes J. Illes S. Laureys H.S. Mayberg E.A. Phelps R.A. Poldrack B.J. Sahakian
“Interested in the ethical, legal or policy implications of neuroscience? Come to the neuroethics social hour and meet others with the same interests. And don’t miss the short but spirited debate, between two leading neuroimaging researchers, on the proposition that “brain imaging is already capable of (something worthy of the term) ‘mind reading’.”

Martha is the academic director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society at U. of Pennsylvania and for the last few years has been running a ‘Neuroscience Bootcamp’ for professionals and graduate students in fields such as law, ethics and education who feel they need a crash course in modern neuroscience.

There’s a chance Mind Hacks posts might be a bit sporadic over the next week as I’m returning to beautiful Colombia to work with the fantastic psychologists and psychiatrists in Hospital Universitario San Vicente de Pa√∫l in Medell√≠n.

I’m at the airport in London, but due to my bargain basement plane tickets I won’t arrive in Medell√≠n for another 30 hours and then have to find somewhere to live.

After the jet lag has cleared and I find a reliable internet connection, normal service will be resumed, but in the meantime I’ll post when I can.

By the way, the picture is the entrance to the psychiatric ward in Hospital San Vicente de Pa√∫l, which like the rest of the hospital, is remarkably beautiful.

The latest Nature NeuroPod podcast has just been released and covers the use of the hot new genetics technique genome-wide association studies in neuroscience, sections on colour-blindness and stroke, and a recent study on learning in patients in coma-like states.

The discussion of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) is interesting in light of some headline studies that have come along recently on schizophrenia, autism and Alzheimer’s disease. There’s also a fantastic article in this week’s Nature that discusses the successes and failures of the technique, including in recent studies on the genetics of schizophrenia.

Perhaps the most interesting section is the discussion on how patients in a coma-like ‘persistent vegetative state’ (PVS) can show conditioned learning where they can associate different sensations. Not all unconscious patient could show learning, but the ones that did showed much better recovery from their severe brain damage.

Link to NeuroPod page.
mp3 of this edition.

Prospect magazine has an interesting article covering psychologist Irving Kirsch’s widely publicised meta-analyses that have questioned whether Prozac-style SSRI antidepressants are any better than placebo.

Kirsch has become well known for requesting unpublished trial data via the US Freedom of Information Act and pooling it with the published evidence. The conclusion of his latest re-analysis was that there was little difference between sugar pills and SSRIs in the treatment of depression.

This has kicked up all sorts of merry hell, not least because the media reported (and the Prospect article implies) that ‘antidepressants don’t work’ which is clearly false. They do work, but the debate is over how much of the effect is due to placebo.

It’s not quite as simple as it seems of course, as not everyone agrees with Kirsch’s methods and, as noted in an insightful 2008 paper, his argument is based on the assumption that people who respond to antidepressants also respond to placebo in a similar way, when we know there are individual variations in both.

Kirsch apparently has a book coming out shortly which is likely to restart the debate and it’s likely to be heated.

There are some hints of this in the article where several prominent psychiatric scientists give variations on the “don’t criticise the evidence, you’re harming children!” argument. In fact, head of the NHS trust where my research institution is based apparently blames ‘the media, and psychologists’ “who have a vested interest in constantly attacking antidepressants”. Yes, we’ve reached that level already.

We went through a very similar process when concerns over whether SSRIs increased suicidal thinking in adolescents were raised. Lots of similar mud-flinging ensued.

Interestingly, a meta-analysis of suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts in 372 trials just published in the British Medical Journal found that overall SSRIs had no effect on risk of self-harm, and that when the data was divided by age, there was a slight increase in thoughts and attempt in people younger than 25 and a slight decrease in adults aged over 65 (the comments on the article are also worth reading).

It’s probably worth saying that even in young people self-harm when taking antidepressants is very rare, but the fact that the drugs had no overall protective effect except in older people should give us pause for thought.

But getting people to focus on the evidence when they’re wound up is like getting people to focus on the fire exits during a strip show. We all accept the importance of doing so but few can quite manage it when the time comes.

Link to Prospect article on antidepressants (via @researchdigest)

Time magazine has a remarkably one-sided article on America’s first ‘internet addiction’ clinic. The clinic turns out to be a few rooms in someone’s house, but the article gives away an interesting if not depressing gem about the likely status of the ‘internet addiction’ diagnosis in the DSM-V, the next version of the psychiatrists’ diagnostic manual:

“The central issue is the absence of research literature on this,” says Dr. Charles O’Brien, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Studies in Addiction and the current chair of the DSM-V committee to revise the manual, adding that with the backdrop of the health-care debate, now is a precarious time to introduce new disorders that will require more money to treat.

“At this point I think it’s appropriate that it’s not considered an official disease,” says O’Brien. “We are probably going to mention it in the appendix.”

The appendix refers to Appendix B, which is a list of diagnoses worthy of future study, and yes, that’s the head of the DSM addiction committee saying that an “absence of research literature” makes something worthy of future study.

In which case, I might write to him and ask to have my own diagnosis of “impulsive diagnosis inclusion syndrome” listed on the same basis.

But not only is his reasoning rather odd, he’s also wrong. There’s quite a sizeable literature on the ‘internet addiction’ diagnosis and, as noted by a meta-analysis published last year, it turns out to be rubbish.

If you’re interested in reading something a little more balanced, I get to spar with Kimberley Young, one of the long-standing ‘internet addiction’ promoters, in an article in this month’s Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Link to Time on America’s first ‘internet addiction’ clinic.
Link to ‘internet addiction’ scrap in CMAJ.

Last year I posted about a wonderful film called The English Surgeon, a sublime documentary about the work of neurosurgeons Henry Marsh and Igor Kurilets in the Ukraine. It turns out you can now watch it for free online at the PBS website until 9th October.

As I mentioned last time “to say the film was just about brain surgery would be vastly under value its significance, and to describe it as a meditation on the humanity of medicine would be to confine it to a clich√©.”

As far as I can work out, it should be available wherever you are in the world.

By the way, it turns out that Henry Marsh is the husband of social anthropologist Kate Fox who wrote the book Watching the English that we discussed earlier, so interesting to see that Marsh embodies many typical English traits.

Link to The English Surgeon online (via @mocost @balajajian).