Category: News

This Saturday, I’m going to walk between the two poles of London’s psyche, the Maudsley Hospital and the Tavistock Clinic, whose rivalries have shaped our understanding of the mind in both the UK and around the world. If you’d like to join me, you’d be more than welcome.

Both were galvanised by the experience of the First World War where ‘war neuroses’ became a major source of casualties as the mechanised slaughter took a massive toll even on the survivors.

The South London Maudsley pioneered the scientific approach to psychiatry focusing on statistical empiricism and neuroscience while the North London Tavistock pioneered the clinical use of psychotherapy developing group treatments and youth work.

The competition between the two institutions swayed between healthy rivarly to outright distrust and as a result both have developed as contrasting sides to the city’s psyche each conveniently separated by the Thames.

The dark clouds of the Second World War brought an influx of European Jewish émigrés into London, including Sigmund and Anna Freud into the psychoanalytic community orbiting around the Tavistock; while the Maudsley benefited from the arrival of psychopathologists such as Alfred Meyer and William Mayer-Gross.

This cemented their reputation and their outlook and both remain centres of excellence nationally and internationally.

The walk is about 8 miles but I’m planning for a few minor detours for interesting sites (grounds of the old Bedlam Hospital, now the Imperial War Museum, St Thomas’ Hospital and the like) and with stops for lunch and maybe the occasional pint, I reckon leaving the Maudsley at 11am, arriving at the Tavistock will be between about 4-5pm.

I’ve no idea if anyone else wants to walk across London, guided by psychiatric hospitals, but if you do drop me a line, and I’ll email you the exact details nearer the time. I shall be going rain or shine so no need to commit. It’s just so I don’t have to think so bloody far ahead.

I’ll post some details on the day via the Twitter (@vaughanbell) so you can always catch up at any point.

In summary, 11am, near the Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill, Saturday 19th September, to walk to the Tavistock Clinic in the leafy suburb of Belsize Park for about 4-5ish.

A TV watchdog has ticked off Australian company Channel Nine for breaching the broadcasters code of conduct and showing a hypnosis session.

You may not be aware, but in many countries any broadcast of a hypnosis session is banned. Here is the relevant rule from the regulations [pdf] from the British TV watchdog Ofcom:

Rule 2.9 Hypnosis

Elements of the hypnotist’s routine may be broadcast to set the scene. However, it is important not to broadcast the routine in its entirety, nor to broadcast elements that may cause a member of the audience to believe they are being influenced in some way.

This is because it is perfectly possible to be hypnotised through the TV, or indeed through the radio.

There is no ‘magic’ to hypnosis, it just requires that someone relax, focus, listen to suggestions and engage with the process, and some research suggests that even the relaxing and focusing is optional.

The most important thing to know about hypnosis is that people vary in their hypnotisability and this is the single most important thing that determines whether suggestions will have an effect.

As long as they are spoken clearly, it doesn’t seem to matter how they’re presented.

In fact, one of the most widely used measures of hypnotisability in the scientific literature takes participants through a number of hypnotic suggestions to see which they can experience and is usually just run from a pre-recorded tape.

Link to ABC news ‘Nine attempted to ‘hypnotise viewers’ (thanks David!).

The latest edition of Nature’s NeuroPod podcast has just hit the wires and has some great items on updating the Brodmann brain map, a challenge to the ‘use it or lose it’ theory of synapse formation, genetic copy and pasting in neurons and face perception in the monkey.

The first part is about a project to update the Brodmann areas, a map of the brain by different neuron structures that forms the basis of much modern neuroscience but is now 100 years old.

German neurologist Korbinian Brodmann started mapping the brain with his microscope and charting the different ways brain cells were organised and still today, if you read scientific papers on the brain, they often refer to places like Brodmann area 10 as a way of locating specific parts.

So you can see why the 100 year-old map needs an update.

Link to NeuroPod webpage.
mp3 of latest edition.

I’ve just discovered the joys of the Microgram Bulletin, the newsletter of the US Drug Enforcement Administration that explains interesting new drug finds and novel methods for smuggling illicit substances.

It’s a curious mirror of the illicit drug trade and contains numerous mysterious finds, such as playground marbles systematically placed in cocaine bricks for an unknown purpose, or a find of cocaine smuggled as clear plastic-like coating for calendars, photos or magazines.

The bulletin also reports ‘mimic’ drugs, where manufacturers are passing off cheaper (and often nastier) substances as pill-based drugs such as ecstasy or amphetamine.

The publication has been going mostly monthly since 2003, and I recommend checking out some of the earlier editions as they contain some great essays and technical reports on the drug trade.

For example, there’s one edition with an analysis of cocaine trafficking derived from chemical analysis of seized drugs, and another on chemical dumps from illegal drug labs.

The picture on the left is from a report entitled “Cocaine concealed in religious plaques in Miami, Florida” from a report from May this year.

Link to DEA Microgram Bulletin online.

For several years ‘internet addiction’ has been promoted by the Chinese government as a serious mental illness affecting large numbers of young people, but in recent months it has started to pull back, seemingly due to the growth of a widespread, poorly regulated and abusive system of internet addiction ‘treatment’ centres.

Firstly, let me say that most of my sources on this issue are from China Daily, a state-run news service, but whether this reflects the reality or not, it is clear that the Chinese authorities are becoming worried about how the problem is being dealt with.

For example, the Chinese authorities recently shut down an unlicensed internet ‘boot camp’ style clinic and arrested 13 employees after a 15-year-old boy was beaten to death by camp counsellors for apparently running too slowly.

This follows news that the Chinese Ministry of Health has recently banned electroshock therapy for ‘internet addiction’. The same state media source reported that in Linyi Psychiatric Hospital alone, 3,000 young people had been ‘treated’ in this way. Both Chinese and Western media report that electroshock was also used as a punishment (note that some reports portray it as mild electrical current while others specifically describe it as electroconvulsive therapy).

The clinics seems to be a mixture of private clinics, of which 400 or so are estimated to exist, and government run clinics of an indeterminate number.

The approach of one of the most prestigious state-run clinics is described in this article:

Co-founded by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China and Beijing Military Region General Hospital in 2004, Tao’s clinic in the suburbs of Beijing has treated nearly 5,000 Internet-addicted youths and says 75 percent have been cured.

At the clinic, young addicts receive “comprehensive therapy” including medication, psychological counseling and low-intensity military training. They also take interactive courses with their parents to learn communication skills.

Tao also uses psychotropic drugs to treat patients suffering from mental illnesses such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression.

This clinic seems to be the only one to have admitted Western journalists and it has been featured in TV and radio news reports, which, at times, make for quite disturbing viewing.

The recent admission of abuses in ‘internet addiction’ treatment centres is a significant change in tack as previous reports have typically discussed the internet in rather alarming terms, variously claiming that it has caused schizophrenia, led to drug addiction, resulted in job loss and the like. State media claims that about 10% of young net users are addicts.

Reading all the stories on ‘internet addiction’ in China, both from Chinese and Western media, I was struck by how it consistently reflected the idea that the popularity of the ‘treatment’ is being driven by parents’ anxieties about their children not conforming to the social pressures of family and academic achievement.

This is remarkably similar to what seems to drive the concept in the Western world and while our stereotype can often be that ‘internet addiction’ is simply a tool of Chinese state repression of free speech, it is worth bearing in mind that it may be closer to home than we like to believe.

Link to TV news report on ‘internet addiction’ in China.
Link to China Daily on shut down of illegal clinics.

The New York Times has a profile of the two psychologists who developed the US ‘war on terror’ interrogations that were widely condemned as torture.

The piece makes an interesting update to the 2007 Vanity Fair article that first fingered Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, and has compiled additional information about the pair from interviews with ex-colleagues.

For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency’s “mistakes.”

The psychologists’ subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring.

The piece notes that a decision in imminent on whether a criminal enquiry will be launched into the use of harsh interrogation techniques. If so, all psychologists involved in the programme, not just Jessen and Mitchell, are likely to be the focus of some uncomfortable scrutiny.

Given the somewhat odd behaviour and heal dragging by the American Psychological Association during the saga that eventually led them to an outright ban on participation, one wonders whether any high level contact between the US military and the APA will come to light.

Link to NYT piece ‘Interrogation Inc.’ (via BoingBoing).
Link to Vanity Fair piece on psychologists and interrogation.

The New England Journal of Medicine has a brilliant research paper describing the first MRI scan capable of imaging the whole nervous system, plus a little something extra.

The technology is based on diffusion MRI, a technique which takes advantage of how water molecules move to separate out nerves from the rest of the body.

Water molecules bounce around inside all of the body tissues. Nerve fibres are long and thin, and so water molecules trapped inside are restricted in their movement – like jumping beans in a pipe.

Diffusion MRI works out which water molecules diffuse only along a fixed route (the nerves) and which are moving more freely (the rest of the body).

Of course, there could be some false positives in there, so the scan looks specifically for this diffusion effect only in tissue of the right density for nerve fibres.

Normal MRI scans are essentially density maps and to do this the scanner aligns the proton spins of the body’s hydrogen atoms using huge magnets. It then fires off a electromagnetic pulse which knocks the spins out of alignment. As the spins return to alignment (called the ‘relaxation time’) a radio signal is given off which differs depending on the type of tissue. This can be read, mapped and turned into a scan.

As an analogy, imagine if you had compasses with lots of different liquids inside. They’d all point north, but you could knock them out of alignment by giving them a shake. Slowly the needles would return to north, but the liquid inside would affect how quickly they moved. Just by measuring the speed of return you could work out the density of the liquid. Treacle would take longer than oil, oil longer than water.

So if you restrict the scan only to pick out tissue with the same density as nerve fibres, that also only has water molecules moving along a single route, you’ve got a very high-tech nerve mapper.

The researchers tweaked this process for the whole body and produced the first scan of the entire nervous system which they called ‘Whole-Body Magnetic Resonance Neurography’.

You may notice from the scans that as well as imaging the young man’s nervous system, it also gives a remarkably good likeness of his cock.

As it turns out, the prostate, testes, and penis also hit the sweet spot of restricting water molecule diffusion while giving off a similar radio signal to nerves.

Action potential? Oh give over.

Link to ‘Whole-Body Magnetic Resonance Neurography’ (via @PsychTimes)

Anyone who thinks science can’t be beautiful or profound should spend an hour in the audio headspace of the latest RadioLab as it tackles life, death and mortality.

It contemplates how death has moved from the heart to the brain, the attempt to weigh souls, delusions of non-existence, digital immortality, neuroimaging for flickers of life, and a man who survived a suicide plunge that has killed almost everyone else who made the leap.

One highlight is a reading of an amazing short story from a book by neuroscientist David Eagleman in which he imagines 40 versions of the afterlife.

In this particular story, people live in a limbo after death where they exist while their names are still remembered by the living. While some leave this realm when they fade the collective consciousness, others become famous and are trapped, slave to their recollected selves that warp slowly over time as the living distort their memories.

Eagleman notes that it was inspired by the neuroscience of memory, which information is kept alive by being constantly re-represented in the brain.

As always, it’s beautifully produced and hits. just. the. right. notes. for such a powerful subject.

There is probably no better way to spend an hour in the underworld.

Link to RadioLab edition ‘After Life’.

The New York Times covers the recent flap over the internet publication of the ink blots used in the Rorschach test. While the images are out of copyright and can be legally uploaded, some American psychologists are furious that the validity of the test may be compromised.

The test has been controversial since it was created and partly because of what it symbolises. It is one of the few remaining tests that are drawn from the psychoanalytic tradition and so battles over the Rorschach are always partly battles over the validity of Freudian-ideas.

You can see the influence of these ideas in how it is used. It is a type of ‘projective’ test, where participants are shown the images and then asked to give their impressions. The psychologist writes down what they make of each image and then interprets what they say and do.

These interpretations supposedly give an insight into the person’s personality, loosely framed in Freudian concepts.

The original version of the Rorschach was quite clearly hokum, but over the years the ‘comprehensive system’ was developed by psychologist John Exner which allowed independent clinicians to come to similar conclusions when assessing the same responses.

Not everyone agrees on this and, on the basis of evidence reviews, some argue that the test’s reliability has been exaggerated. But the trouble is, even if it is reliable, it’s still a bit rubbish. It doesn’t seem to correlate well with other mental health measures and has a particular tendency to ‘diagnose’ schizophrenic tendencies in perfectly healthy people.

While the release of the ink blots onto the internet seems to have caused controversy among US psychologists, most European psychologists are likely to be rolling their eyes, as the test never caught on and is largely extinct.

However, the wider issue of test material being released online is of significant concern.

Almost every psychological test relies on the fact that the person being assessed has no foreknowledge of the material. In technology terms, they rely on security through obscurity for their validity.

Currently, this is enforced by the test companies only supplying tests to qualified professionals, charging excessively high prices for each one and enforcing copyright. This is backed up by professional organisations who come down like a ton of bricks on anyone seen to be promoting wider availability.

As anyone involved in security will tell you, this model is doomed to failure in the age of the internet as it only takes one significant breach for the test to be publicly available.

Psychologists need to start designing tests where knowledge of the test material does not have such a profound influence on performance, but unfortunately, this requires a significant shift in current thinking and a huge research effort to validate the tests. Hence inertia weds us to our current doomed methods.

Link to NYT ‘A Rorschach Cheat Sheet on Wikipedia?’

The New Atlantis magazine has a fantastic article on the increasing use of robots and artificial intelligence systems in warfare and how they bring the fog of war to the murky area of military ethics and international law.

This comes as the The New York Times has just run a report on a recent closed meeting where some of the world’s top artificial intelligence researchers gathered to discuss what limits should be placed on the development of autonomous AI systems.

The NYT article frames the issue as a worry over whether machines will ‘outsmart’ humans, but the issue is really whether machines will outdumb us, as it is a combination of the responsibilities assigned to them and their limitations which pose the greatest threat.

One particularly difficulty is the unpredictability of AI systems. For example, you may be interested to know that while we can define the mathematical algorithms for simple artificial neural networks, exactly how the network is representing the knowledge it has learnt through training can be a mystery.

If you examine the ‘weights’ of connections across different instances of the same network after being trained, you can find differences in how they’re distributed even though they seem to be completing the task in the same way.

In other words, simply because we have built and trained something, it does not follow that we can fully control its actions or understand its responses in all situations.

In light of this, it is now worryingly common for militaries to publicly deploy or request armed autonomous weapons systems based, at least partly, on similar technologies.

Only recently this has included Israel, South Korea, the US, Australia and South Africa – the latter of which suffered the deaths of nine soldiers when a robot cannon was affected by a software error.

Of course, the use of technology of assist medical decision-making and safety control is also a key issue, but it is the military use of robots which is currently causing the most concern.

And it is exactly this topic that military researcher Peter W. Singer tackles in his engaging article for The New Atlantis magazine.

He traces the history of robot weapons systems, including the little known deployment of unmanned weapons systems in World War Two and Vietnam, and gives some excellent coverage of the latest in war zone robots and how they are being deployed in current conflicts.

Interestingly, the article claims that remotely-controlled drone missions now outnumber manned aircraft missions in the US military, with battles increasingly being fought through pixelated screens and image processing algorithms.

Singer makes the point that the rules of war become murky when the fighting is carried out by software. Copyright lawyer Lawrence Lessig has highlighted how social and legal rules are becoming effectively implemented as software (‘Code is Law‘) but the same point can be extended to armed conflict if the Geneva convention is being entrusted to algorithms.

The New Atlantis article is taken from a new book by Singer called Wired for War and if you’d like more on the ethics of AI systems the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has a fantastic and very complete reading list covering all the major issues.

Correction: I originally thought the author was the philosopher Peter Singer and linked to his Wikipedia entry. It turns out it is Peter W. Singer the defence and foreign policy expert. The link has now been fixed!

Link to excellent Peter Singer article in The New Atlantis.
Link to NYT piece on AI limits conference.
Link to AAAI reading list on ethics and AI.

ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing has a good programme on the issues and debates about the new version of the DSM that is currently being prepared and causing much flailing of handbags in the process.

The radio show is not particularly focused but touches on some contentious diagnoses and the problems with defining mental illness.

But there is one surprising part where they ask Australian psychiatrist and DSM-V committee member Gavin Andrews to respond to criticisms by ex-committee chief Robert Spitzer over the lack of openness in the process.

His answer, like an earlier response from American Psychiatric Association to their critics, is remarkable for the fact it contains a personal attack:

Well, he was the guy that wrote DSM-III, and we all owe him a considerable debt because someone had to be strong-willed and very strongly opinionated to pull that off. He’s saying, something’s going on and no-one’s telling me everything. Well, there’s no need for him to be told everything day by day. I’m sure he probably hasn’t read all those books that we’ve already published, and he certainly hasn’t written to me about the research planning conference that I ran. So I presume it’s a sense of not being on the centre of the stage, as he once sensibly and gloriously was.

Believe it or not, it actually sounds more patronising when you hear the original audio. Either these ad hominem attacks are a sign of the committee being rattled or they are evidence for exactly what the critics accuse them of, and neither is particular promising.

And if anyone thinks that the squabbling was just a bit of internal politicking, you might be interested to know that it’s featured as one of the major news stories in this week’s Nature.

However, while the DSM is often described as the psychiatric ‘bible’, it’s probably more accurate to call it the American psychiatrists’ ‘bible’.

While it’s widely used in the US and Latin America, much of the rest of the world uses the slightly less barmy (pun intended) International Classification of Diseases (ICD) from the World Health Organisation.

The danger is not so much that the DSM will become ridiculous, but that it will become irrelevant.

Link to Background Briefing on ‘Expanding mental illness’.

Furious Seasons has alerted me to an interesting article in the Boston Globe about street dealing of the antipsychotic drug quetiapine – interesting because it reveals some of our prejudices about the neuroscience of recreational drug use.

One of the mantras of neuroscience is that drugs of abuse boost the dopamine system. This led to the somewhat bizarre headlines earlier this year that modafinil may be ‘addictive’ because it was found to increase dopamine function in the nucleus accumbens, a key part of the reward system.

The reason this was bizarre is because while there are many reports of people illicitly using the drug to avoid sleep and maintain focus, there are none about ‘modafinil addicts’. In fact, I couldn’t find a single case in the literature.

However, the ‘all drugs of abuse boost dopamine’ mantra trumped the fact that there aren’t any actual addicts to make people warn about its potential for addiction. And by people I don’t just mean the press, I mean the neuroscientists who carried out the research, including Nora Volkow, head of the US’s National Institute on Drug Abuse.

And this is why the reports of the abuse of quetiapine (trade name Seroquel), both in the popular press and in the medical literature, are so interesting, because quetiapine is a dopamine blocker.

In fact, it reduces function at the same D₂ dopamine receptors in exactly the same ‘reward circuits’ that are supposedly always stimulated by drugs of abuse.

In other words, it does exactly the opposite of what the received wisdom tell us, and yet, it is being widely abused to the point where people are getting gunned down over shady quetiapine deals.

As scientists one of our greatest vices is fitting the world into our theories, rather than fitting our theories to the world. For neuroscientists, this is especially tempting because society has come to the popular but false conclusion that brain-based explanations trump behavioural or psychological observations.

There is more to drug abuse and addiction than dopamine and our clich√©s about the ‘reward system’ are hampering our efforts to make sense of it all.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘Psychiatric drug sought on streets’.
Link to Furious Seasons who have been on the case for ages.

neuro culture is a beautiful and interesting website that tracks the interaction between neuroscience and visual art as it develops across the world.

It works as a cross between an online gallery and an art studies venture, looking at how artists are making sense of the increasing awareness and interest in the brain through all levels of society.

Visual and digital technologies of the brain, the widespread dissemination of psychotropic drugs, expanding programs in consciousness studies and other neurotechnologies are having a significant impact on individuals and society.

These ongoing transformations in science and society are deeply pervading popular culture and are appearing in a profusion of media and artistic expanse- from the visual arts to film, theatre, novels and advertisements.

With this website, we explore and document past and current manifestations of this phenomenon and introduce an online platform for the analysis and exchange of cultural projects intersecting neuroscience, the arts and the humanities.

There’s some truly beautiful artwork on the site which is worth a visit purely for the rich visual spectacle.

Link to neuro culture.

The latest edition of the Nature NeuroPod podcast is now available. It has the usual collection of cutting edge brain stories but is particularly good for an introduction to transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS, a technique that allows researchers to temporarily ‘switch off’ bits of the human brain during experiments.

TMS is really just a large electromagnetic coil that can switched on and off very quickly, allowing a focused high intensity magnetic field to be directed into the brain from a few centimetres outside the skull.

As you may remember from high school physics, when a magnetic field passes over a conductor it causes an electrical current. In this case, the conductor is the area of your brain just at the focus of the magnetic field and the current is enough to trigger all the neurons in that small area.

Because neurons are all busy doing their thing, suddenly electrifying them all at once effectively ‘resets’ them, and so switches them off for a brief moment before they resume.

If you suspect that a particular brain area is involved in a task, you can get someone to do the task and switch the brain area off for a few hundred milliseconds with TMS. If the area is genuinely involved, the person should do it slightly worse or slightly slower, whereas, if it isn’t, there should be no difference.

TMS can also be used before someone is doing a task to make the area more or less excitable in general terms, by applying repetitive pulses to the area a few minutes before. Think of it like changing the mood of a crowd before the main event. It’ll affect how they react later on.

It’s a versatile and interesting technique for exploring brain function, but the exact detail of how it affected the electrical circuitry of the brain has been a mystery.

NeuroPod interviews neuroscientist Sven Bestmann, who recently published a paper on what we know about TMS and the brain, where he discusses the latest discoveries and explains the technique in more detail.

Link to NeuroPod webpage.
mp3 of latest podcast.

The storm over the new version of the diagnostic manual for psychiatrists shows no signs of dying down as a committee member has publicly resigned over concerns that new diagnoses are being created without proper regard to the scientific evidence.

The 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental disorders, known as the DSM-V, is due out in 2012. It is hotly anticipated because it defines mental illness for the USA and much of the world.

The Carlat Psychiatry Blog reports that Dr. Jane Costello, a member of the Work Group on Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence, recently resigned in protest at what she suggests are unrealistic aims and a disregard of the research evidence. A copy of her resignation letter has already found its way online.

Carlat also reports that Allen Frances and Robert Spitzer, both chiefs of the committee for past versions of the manual, have amplified their recent criticisms in a leaked letter by writing to the American Psychiatric Association Board of Trustee to denounce the DSM-V leadership as having “lost contact with the field” and urging that “It is your responsibility to save DSM-V from itself before it is too late”.

As Frances’ last public criticism was greeted by a strongly worded and surprisingly personal response, this may be the beginning of a drawn out public battle.

Link to Carlat Psychiatry Blog on latest DSM feuding.

The latest edition of Scientific American Mind has just hit the shelves with a number of freely available online articles covering music and its emotional kick, the tyranny of perfectionism, the drama of developing child and the neural benefits of exercise.

One of the most interesting articles tackles a fascinating genetic effect called genomic imprinting where certain genes have different effects, depending on whether you inherited them from your mother or your father.

The classic examples are the Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes, both of which are genetic disorders linked to learning disabilities and neurological problems.

Both are caused by a partial deletion of genes from chromosome 15. When this is inherited from the mother, it causes Angelman syndrome, when inherited from the father, it causes Prader-Willi syndrome.

Recently, two Canadian researchers suggested that this process could also contribute to a whole range of mental difficulties and disorders, including relatively common ones like autism and psychosis which they cite as being differently affected by opposite and competing genetic influences from each parent.

The theory is perhaps a little fanciful, in that it seems to ignore cases of people with both conditions and doesn’t account for more recent evidence finding that forms of a genetic mutation known as a ‘copy number variation’ seems to increase the risk of both.

However, there is good evidence for the more general effect, where some genes can have a different psychological effect depending on where they originate, and the article discusses what we know about the science of this quirk of inheritance.

Link to July’s Scientific American Mind.