Category: News

Apologies if updates are a little sporadic over the next couple of days as I’ve been kindly invited to speak at KVIT 2009 in Sweden, which is the only cognitive science conference I know of that has an accompanying music video.

It looks like it should be a fantastic few days and it’s my first time in Scandinavia, let alone Sweden, so I look forward to meeting some of their many talented mind and brain scientists.

If I manage to get some internet access, I’ll try and get some updates online.

Link to KVIT 2009.

Cognitive Daily has an excellent article on the fascinating SNARC effect, where we react quicker to numbers with the hand that most approximates their position in space as if they were written out in front of us.

In other words, people react faster with their left hand for small numbers, and faster with their right hand for big numbers. This suggest that our number concepts are mapped partly mapped out in space.

Of course, this has largely been tested on English readers, who all read left to right, but Cognitive Daily reports on some new research that tested Arabic readers, for whom larger numbers would be on the left, and found that they show show the same effect, but in reverse.

Finally, the study investigated the effect on Israeli students, who know both left-right and right-left texts, as they learn both English and Arabic, and found that the effect didn’t appear.

In case you’re wondering, SNARC stands for the rather unwieldy phrase ‘spatial numerical association of response codes’.

While we’re on the subject of the excellent Cognitive Daily blog, you may be interested to know that they’ve started a new in-depth feature called ‘Cognitive Monthly‘ which you can download to your computer, iPhone or Kindle reader for $2.

They kindly sent me a free copy of the first edition, on the psychology of film and theatre, and I can heartily recommend it as excellent.

Link to post on culture and the SNARC effect.
Link to Cognitive Monthly details.

If you’re in London before the end of June, make sure you drop into the Wellcome Collection museum which has two fantastic free exhibitions on the art and history of mental illness. If you can’t make it, the exhibition website is excellent and has video and images from the shows.

The first exhibition, Madness and Modernity, explores mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna in 1900, then the epicentre of the medical world.

Modern psychiatry was beginning to emerge and the ‘mad doctors’ employed some of Europe’s most pioneering architects to create asylums that were intended to be therapeutic by their very design.

For example, this poster is for one of the newly developed asylums of the time, as well as being beautiful in itself. The image to the right is the somewhat more intimidating ‘Tower of Fools’.

Also the use of art as a tool to document and disseminate ideas about mental illness became popular, as did an interest in the ‘art of the insane’.

There’s a video on the site which is a wonderful summary of the exhibition as well as being a great standalone discussion of how art and psychiatry influenced each other in the heady culture of 1900s Vienna.

The other exhibition is a series of diary paintings made by artist Bobby Baker from 1997-2008, as she charted her experience of mental illness and treatment. They’re only really done justice when seen as larger pictures, and the online gallery will give you a feel for their impact and humour.

A couple of things you can’t get online are the free events that accompany the exhibitions, which sadly seem all booked up, and the bookshop, which has a special section where they’ve collected (curated?) a great collection of books on almost everything to do with madness, the mind, art and history.

If you’re just visiting the website, you may need to do a bit of clicking around to see the best of the online material, but it’s well worth the visit. Watch the video if nothing else.

Link to Wellcome Collection Art and Mental Illness website.

Full Disclosure: I’m an occasional grant reviewer for the Wellcome Arts scheme, but I’m not associated with this exhibition in any way.

The latest edition of Nature’s excellent neuroscience podcast NeuroPod has just the wires and discusses using light to control the brain, a quite remarkable breakthrough in the genetics of autism, emotional robots and neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, the first Nobel prizewinner to turn 100.

The highlight is probably the section about Rita Levi-Montalcini who jointly won the Nobel prize for her discovery of nerve growth factor, a protein that is known to be key in neuroplasticity.

Although actually, it’s one of the most interesting and varied NeuroPod’s I’ve heard in a while, which is saying something for a programme which is usually on top form. Enjoy.

Link to NeuroPod page with streaming and download.
mp3 of April edition.

More analysis problems with brain scanning research have come to light in a new study just released in Nature Neuroscience and expertly covered by the BPS Research Digest. It demonstrates that the common practice of using the same data set to identify an area of interest and then home in on this area to test further ideas can lead to misleading results.

This usually occurs when brain activation is compared between two conditions where participants are doing different tasks. A whole brain analysis looks for statistically significant differences at every point in the brain.

It’s very complete, but because of the large amount of data, but the data also contains a large amount of noise, so it’s hard to find areas which you can confidently say are more active in one condition than the other.

An alternative approach is to only look at activation in one area of the brain, perhaps an area where it is most likely to occur based on what we already know about how the brain works. This is called region of interest analysis (often done with the wonderfully named ‘MarsBaR‘ tool) and because the data set is much smaller, it is more likely to find a reliable difference.

However, some studies do a whole brain analysis to find likely areas, and then home in using region of analysis tools to examine them ‘more closely’. This ‘magnifying glass’ metaphor seems intuitive, but because your using the same data set to create and test hypothesis, it can be problematic.

It’s like shooting arrows randomly into a wall and then drawing a target around ones which landed together. Someone looking at wall afterwards might think the archer was a good shot, but this impression is caused by the after-the-event painting of the target, and the same problem could affect these brain imaging studies.

After the recent furore over the ‘voodoo correlations’ study, this new study is markedly more measured in its language and doesn’t list individual offenders.

Indeed, the ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’ paper was actually retitled on publication to ‘Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition’, presumably to avoid stirring the pot any further.

However, this new study takes a similar tack, demonstrating through several careful simulations that ‘double dipping’ a data set is likely to distort the results just due to statistical problems.

From the BPS Research Digest:

Nikolaus Kriegeskorte and colleagues analysed all the fMRI studies published in Nature, Science, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron and Journal of Neuroscience, in 2008, and found that 42 per cent of these 134 papers were guilty of performing at least one non-independent selective analysis – what Kriegeskorte’s team dub “double dipping”.

This is the procedure, also condemned by the Voodoo paper, in which researchers first perform an all-over analysis to find a brain region(s) that responds to the condition of interest, before going on to test their hypothesis on data collected in just that brain region. The cardinal sin is that the same data are used in both stages.

A similarly flawed approach can be seen in brain imaging studies that claim to be able to discern a presented stimulus from patterns of activity recorded in a given brain area. These are the kind of studies that lead to “mind reading” headlines in the popular press. In this case, the alleged statistical crime is to use the same data for the training phase of pattern extraction and the subsequent hypothesis testing phase.

Link to BPS Research Digest on the fMRI analysis problems.
Link to PubMed entry for study.

Contemporary Psychotherapy is a new magazine dedicated to the practice of psychological treatment of all types and the current debates in this sometimes hotly contested field.

The first issue contains articles on the future of psychotherapy, CBT in North America, how psychiatrists deal with somatic or psychogenic symptoms and the challenges in conducting psychotherapy with asylum seekers, to name but a few.

It makes a good complement to the US-based Psychotherapy Networker magazine, it’s stylishly put together, you can download it for free as a PDF file, and long may it continue as it’s off to a brilliant start.

Link to Contemporary Psychotherapy with PDF download.

I’ve been reading the recently released CIA memos on the interrogation of ‘war on terror’ detainees. The memos make clear that the psychological impact of the process is the most important aim of interrogation, from the moment the detainee is captured through the various phases of interrogation.

Although disturbing, they’re interesting for what they reveal about the CIA’s psychologists and their approach to interrogation.

General framework
It is clear that empirical psychological science is core to interrogation-based intelligence gathering on both the individual and general approach levels. In clinical psychology, this is known as the scientist-practitioner model, where scientific research is used to understand types of problems and design interventions, but also where an iterative hypothesis-testing information-gathering process is applied to each individual.

The memos state that psychologists are involved in both directing interrogations and mental health assessments, making it likely that the majority of military psychologists are originally trained as clinical psychologists.

Indeed, after a visit to Guantanamo Bay, American Psychological Association president Ronald Levant wrote about his trip in an article for Military Psychology noting “I turned to see a former doctoral student in clinical psychology from Nova Southeastern University (NSU), who is now a military psychologist”. NSU strongly emphasises the scientist-practitioner model and it this style of clinical psychologist which probably makes up the bulk of the CIA’s ‘Behavioral Science Consultation Teams’ (BSCTs).

It is also clear that the CIA are interested in finding out two types of information: one, intelligence from the detainees, and two, which methods are most effective in doing so. It is interesting that all references to the impact and effectiveness of the interrogation methods are based on single cases (x has started giving intelligence after the use of y) or data from the US Military’s own SERE interrogation resistance programme, run on its own personnel.

There is no significant blacked out text in these sections, indicating that there are unlikely to be other key sources of evidence (such as secret research on the effectiveness of torture). In other words, Guantanamo and other interrogation facilities are as much interrogation labs as they are interrogation centres.

Integrated physiological monitoring
The memo [pdf] that discusses the interrogation of ‘al-Quaeda operative’ Abu Zubaydah has an interesting part where it states that “in an initial confrontational incident, Zubaydah showed signs of sympathetic nervous system arousal”. This would suggest that the detainees are wired-up to a system that detects physiological arousal – probably GSR, blood pressure, heart rate or a similar combination.

This would allow the interrogators to look for patterns in stress responses and focus on areas where stress was present despite an outward appearance of calm. The memo also notes that Zubaydah “appears to have a fear of insects”. Assuming that detainees would not voluntarily disclose their phobias, we can assume that likely phobias are detected by exposing the detainee to photos or situations related to common fears and then monitoring the detainee for abnormal stress responses.

Profiling
The summary of the psychological profile of Zubaydah is notable for the fact it doesn’t use the psychoanalytic or psychodynamic language more favoured by FBI profilers, instead using the relatively plain language of cognitive and psychometric approaches. For example, it describes his “coping resources”, rather than his ‘defences’, “problems” rather than ‘conflicts’ and makes no reference to any unconscious desires or motivations.

The profile is apparently “based on interviews with Zubaydah, observations of him, and information collected from other sources such as intelligence and press reports”. As with the FBI, there is likely to be formal psychometric methods for analysing self-written text to help inform the personality profile, although the complete profile is probably put together by a psychologist who integrates the various sources of information with only a conservative level of interpretation.

Confused understanding of ‘learned helplessness’
A couple of the memos note that the whole interrogation procedure and environment is designed “to create a state of learned helplessness“. This is a concept originally developed by psychologist Martin Seligman who found that dogs given inescapable electric shocks would eventually just give up trying to avoid them and remain passive while electrocuted. The theory was related to depression where people with no control over their unpleasant lives supposedly just learnt to be withdrawn and passive.

The concept is not particularly well validated, but even if it was and you were an interrogator, you’d want to avoid learned helplessness at all costs, because the detainee would see no point in co-operating. Furthermore, the acceptance of the theory is in direct contrast to the claims that the interrogations should not cause “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” Learned helplessness is, by definition, the effect of chronic uncontrollable suffering.

What the interrogators want, and indeed, what the memos describe, is not learned helplessness, but where the detainees know and can demonstrate that co-operation is the only method that allows them control over their environment. This is more akin to sociologist Ervin Goffman’s concept of a total institution.

Clues and curiosities
One memo [pdf] mentions the concept of ‘resistance posture’, meaning the act of resisting the interrogators demands. The fact that this a specific term is used, and that it is additionally referred to as something that could be measured (‘This sequence “may continue for several more iterations as the interrogators continue to measure the [detainee’s] resistance posture”‘) suggests that this might be a specific psychological concept that is being empirically measured, perhaps through a combination of behavioural and physiological responses, presumably to help distinguish between resistance and genuinely not knowing the answer to a question.

It’s interesting that there is no reference to any neuroscience-based research or monitoring to justify conclusions, despite the widespread reports of the US secret services funding billions of pounds of research in this area. This may be because it’s too secret to release to the public, but it is just as likely that, as with other brain-based ‘prediction’ methods (neuromarketing, brain-scan ‘lie detection’) the data is less useful than more straightforward and better validated psychological and physiological methods.

As has been picked up by Wired the claims that 180 hours of sleep deprivation is not harmful in the long-term is based on a selective and limited reading of the scientific literature and is disputed by the people who carried out the research.

Link to PDFs of released memos.

The Independent has an article giving a rare look inside Broadmoor Hospital, one of only four high security psychiatric hospital in the UK, which houses some of the most severely dangerous offenders with mental illness.

Broadmoor is the oldest and most well-known high secure hospital in Britain, having housed a string of high profile murders and other violent offenders since Victorian times to the present day.

The article focuses on the Paddock Centre, a new section to treat people with a dangerous and severe personality disorder (DSPD).

DSPD is not a medical diagnosis, it is a category created by the UK government to classify a group of offenders with a diagnosable personality disorder who are thought to be at risk of violent offending in the future.

The category was devised because the government wanted to find a way in which psychiatrists could treat persistently violent offenders with an antisocial personality disorder diagnosis, because the mental health act only allowed people to be detained if their condition was treatable.

Since there was no treatment, psychiatrists couldn’t detain such people and refused to do so, so the government created the category and changed the law so they could.

Hence we now have the rapidly expanding DSPD Programme and Broadmoor houses the Paddock Centre, the biggest DSPD centre in the country.

The category has caused a great deal of ethical debate and even heated argument, as it allows currently untreatable people to be detained on the basis of risk, rather than for committing a specific crime.

However, the Independent article is more focused on the day-to-day running of the unit, talking to its lead psychiatrists and giving a picture of how it functions.

Journalistic insights into Broadmoor are incredibly infrequent, so this is a rare opportunity to get a glimpse of what goes on. The only other recent example I can think of was a 2004 edition of BBC All in the Mind that you can still listen to online.

Link to Independent ‘Exclusive: Inside Broadmoor’.

The Washington Post has an article exploring recently released ‘war on terror’ interrogation memos, showing that “psychologists, physicians and other health officials” played a key part in interrogations widely condemned as torture.

It’s an interesting revelation because during the long debates, and some say heal-dragging, over whether the American Psychological Association should ban its members from participation, one of their main arguments was that psychologists should participate to prevent any unethical behaviour.

Instead, it looks like the presence of psychologists and other health officials was used to justify the interrogations as reasonable, despite the fact that the Red Cross’s condemnation of techniques as “tantamount to torture” has now been justified by the release of official documents.

Their names are among the few details censored in the long-concealed Bush administration memos released Thursday, but the documents show a steady stream of psychologists, physicians and other health officials who both kept detainees alive and actively participated in designing the interrogation program and monitoring its implementation. Their presence also enabled the government to argue that the interrogations did not include torture.

Most of the psychologists were contract employees of the CIA, according to intelligence officials familiar with the program….

The CIA dispatched personnel from its office of medical services to each secret prison and evaluated medical professionals involved in interrogations “to make sure they could stand up, psychologically handle it,” according to a former CIA official.

The alleged actions of medical professionals in the secret prisons are viewed as particularly troubling by an array of groups, including the American Medical Association and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The documents apparently describe instances where psychologists guided interrogations and provided information about mental weakness of detainees so they could be specifically exploited by interrogators.

Link to WashPost on ‘Psychologists Helped Guide Interrogations’.

Finally, a sceptical take on sex addiction. The Times just published an excellent article examining the problem with the concept of being ‘addicted to sex’, something that has almost entirely been an invention of private treatment clinics and the media.

There is virtually no published research on ‘sex addiction’ and it isn’t an officially recognised diagnosis, but it has become fashionable to describe compulsive or non-mainstream sexual tendencies in these terms.

Partly, as the article notes, because addiction has become the 21st century’s label of choice for people who want to medicalise less acceptable sexual behaviours, especially when someone gets ‘caught in the act’.

Dr Philip Hopley, an addiction specialist at the Priory Hospital at Roehampton, southwest London, and a consultant psychiatrist for LPP Consulting, says that public scepticism is ‚Äúunderstandable‚Äù. He says: ‚ÄúThe major concern is where sex-related problem behaviour is labelled an ‚Äòaddiction’ when in fact poor decision-making and/or impulse control lie at the root of the problem. What constitutes normal, average or healthy sex? There is no recommended limit for adults as there is for, say, alcohol – and if there was, would it be different for males and females?‚Äù

Phillip Hodson, a Fellow of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, points out that the whole idea of having an addiction to a natural drive is problematic. ‚ÄúThe excuse, of course, is that nature wants us to have sex to make babies and isn’t bothered about rationing the drive. It’s the same with eating. You cannot really be ‚Äòaddicted’ to normal drives. What’s the cure – to stop procreating or eating?‚Äù Yet perhaps one can’t really blame people for using the term ‚Äúaddiction‚Äù, because compulsivity or mania don’t have quite the same ring. ‚ÄúSex maniac‚Äù sounds like something out of a Carry On film.

The media love sex addiction and go to great lengths to quote media-hungry rent-a-quotes who can make it sound valid.

Unfortunately, the media tends to like people who have already media connections, and so the dissenting voices barely get a byline.

This article is interesting because it is written by Jed Mercurio, a TV drama writer currently researching a book on JFK, so he’s prime ‘get in the papers’ material.

Interestingly though, he used to be a doctor, and knows a fadish medical concept when he sees one. Hence we get a rare sceptical look at a current media obsession.

Link to ‘JFK, Russell Brand and the myth of sex addiction’.

The Wall Street Journal’s health blog reports that drug company Cephalon are trying to get jet lag recognised as a ‘circadian rhythm sleep disorder’ in an attempt to promote their stay-up-forever drugs modafinil and armodafinil.

Modafinil, under the trade name Provigil, is currently a big seller for the company owing to the fact that it deletes the need for sleep and improves concentration typically without making the person feel particularly ‘wired’.

It’s licensed for the treatment of narcolepsy but is widely used by people without a prescription to stay awake and fend off mental tiredness.

Unfortunately, for Cephalon, modafinil will go out of patent in 2012, meaning its profit making capabilities virtually disappear as competitors will be able to produce the compound at a markedly reduced price.

In the mean time, the company has been developing a very similar but newly patentable drug named armodafinil. In fact, armodafinil has been created by a common ploy used by drug companies when they need to renew a patent on a drug.

Many drug molecules have two versions – both identical but mirror images of each other. Drugs work when the drug molecule ‘hand’ inserts itself into the appropriately matching neuroreceptor ‘glove’.

In the same way that you can’t put your left hand into a right glove, mirror image drug molecules need their matching receptor and each might have a different effect.

Many drugs, like modafinil, are mixture of both left and right-handed enantiomers, even though only one of the mirror images has the desired effect. In the case of modafinil, it’s the right-handed mirror image that seems the most potent.

So a common drug company ploy is to released a new drug which has been synthesised to remove the inactive or less active molecule.

Armodafinil, their new drug, is just this. It’s just the right-handed modafinil molecules.

So essentially it’s the same drug but without the action of the other ‘half’. This can sometimes reduce side effects, or improve the action of the drug, but in general the difference is relatively minor.

Importantly though, you can get a new patent on this synthesized version, meaning profit is guaranteed as long as you can convince people that your new drug is worth switching too. And this is where the spin comes in.

Because in many countries drug must be approved for a medical problem, Cephalon are trying to get jet lag classified as a disorder so they have a whole new market for their compound.

It also turns out that they’re sharply hiking the price on modafinil, so when the new, initially lower-priced armodafinil appears, people will switch.

They’ll then get used to using armodafinil and when modafinil becomes super-cheap and generic sometime later they’ve already established their market on their ‘premium branded’ new compound. Normally, the price begins to rise afterwards.

Isn’t progress great?

Link to WSJ on Cephalon and jet lag as a ‘disorder’.
Link to WSJ on modafinil price hike strategy.

There’s a brief but powerful piece in today’s New York Times on inheritance, environment and suicide by the daughter of poet Anne Sexton, who ended her own life in 1974 while in her mid-forties.

The article reflects on the recent suicide of Nicholas Hughes, the son of poet Sylvia Plath who also die in the same way.

It’s a striking piece because Sexton’s daughter has made her own suicide attempts and tries to untangle what contributes to a risk for self-harm which can run through families.

If you’ve not read it, Edge, Plath’s last poem, written only days before she died is a remarkable thing, dark yet calm and at once fluent and disjointed.

Link to NYT piece ‘A Tortured Inheritance’ (via Trouble with Spikol)

Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe is a comedy news analysis programme that often has a serious point. A recent episode had a section examining TV coverage of the tragic school shooting that recently occurred in Germany and its relation to the motivations of potential copycat killers.

The video clip contrasts the advice of a forensic psychiatrist on how to cover the story in the media to prevent further tragedies and the actual coverage the incident received. I’m sure you can guess the rest.

The forensic psychiatrist being interviewed is Park Dietz, who frequently appears in the media but who has also done a great deal of research in the area, including the classic article ‘Mass, serial and sensational homicides’ where he noted that publicity was a major factor in driving these sorts of public killing sprees.

This was published in 1986 and more than 20 years later satirists are being fed material by TV stations who can’t resist sensationalist coverage.

Both funny and uncomfortably chilling.

Link to Newswipe on media coverage of school shooting.
Link to full text of ‘Mass, serial and sensational homicides’.

BBC News is reporting that neurosurgeon Claudio Vitale had a heart-attack during an operation to remove a brain tumour, but continued with the surgery as he knew the patient wouldn’t recover if he left the theatre.

According to reports, Mr Vitale started to feel chest pains part way through the operation at Naples’ Cardarelli Hospital.

When the pains worsened, Mr Vitale’s team urged him to stop the procedure and get treatment, but he refused.

He agreed to undergo a blood test, which confirmed a heart problem, but the neurosurgeon insisted on completing the operation before getting medical help, reports say.

ABC News also has a good write-up.

Link to BBC News article ‘Doctor in mid-surgery heart scare’ (via MeFi).

I leave Medellín and the beautiful country of Colombia today after six fantastic months working at the Universidad de Antioquia and the Hospital Universitario San Vicente de Paúl.

My thanks to the everyone I worked with here for the fantastically warm welcome, the careful tuition in scientific Spanish and the fascinating conversations.

Colombia is a wonderfully friendly and stunningly beautiful country that I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone, visitor or worker alike.

The picture is of one of the many beautiful mountains of Antioquia, in the ‘Paisa’ region.

Apologies for the likely sporadic updates over the next couple of days as I fly back to the UK and fight the jet lag.

Hasta pronto Colombia.

The New Statesman has an interesting article by a press officer from one of the UK’s biggest mental health charities describing how press stories are put together and why it’s almost impossible to get any media interest without a ‘mentally ill celebrity’.

But there’s the rub. Shouldn’t we want to hear about these issues anyway? Do we really need to look to the stars? I started “selling” this campaign to journalists armed with a raft of compelling stories of real-life discrimination – the experienced business analyst who, after six months off with depression, made 150 job applications before an employer would give him a chance; the singer barred from joining a choir because she had had schizophrenia; the Cambridge graduate refused a chance to train as a teacher because of a history of mental health problems.

They’re interesting stories, emblematic of a stigma that still surrounds mental illness, and they matter to a great many people: one in four of us will have a mental health problem at some stage. And journalists know it. “Wow, yes, that is very interesting,” they say. “It’s dreadful, isn’t it? I know someone that happened to, actually, but . . . I was wondering if you could get me Mel C, y’know, Sporty Spice? Or Ruby Wax? Or, even better, do you have any new celebs who’ve had problems in the past?”

Link to New Statesman piece ‘Get me Sporty Spice’.