Flickr user Isaac E has posted a stunning photo collection of images taken inside the now abandoned Bradgate Park Nursing Home and Beacon Lodge psychiatric unit.
The photos have been fantastically composed and are processed with high dynamic ranging imaging meaning they are incredibly striking.
Link to photo collection.
This is both odd and slightly disturbing. The Wall Street Journal reports that a medical researcher has been publicly insulted and allegedly threatened by the editors of the medical heavyweight Journal of the American Medical Association for calling out an antidepressant study for undisclosed conflicts of interest.
Jonathan Leo, a professor of neuroanatomy at Lincoln Memorial University, wrote a succinct and reasonably worded letter to the British Medical Journal noting that a study on the use of the antidepressant escitalopram (Lexapro) in stroke had concluded that the drug was better than other treatments, when in fact the data supported no such claims.
He also noted that the authors had failed to disclose their ties to the drug makers Forest Laboratories.
For his trouble he was phoned by the JAMA editors who allegedly made some academic threats to him, his students, and his superiors.
The story was followed-up by the Wall Street Journal who contacted the editor-in-chief Catherine DeAngelis. Surprisingly, DeAngelis publicly insulted Leo and is quoted by the WSJ saying:
“This guy is a nobody and a nothing” she said of Leo. “He is trying to make a name for himself. Please call me about something important.” She added that Leo “should be spending time with his students instead of doing this.”
When asked if she called his superiors and what she said to them, DeAngelis said “it is none of your business.” She added that she did not threaten Leo or anyone at the school.
This would perhaps be less shocking had the authors of the study in question not publicly apologised for omitting conflicts of interest and confirmed that the drug was not a superior treatment in subsequent letters to JAMA.
Ironically, DeAngelis has a reputation for closely monitoring conflicts of interest and has made JAMA a leader in requiring such admissions from authors.
Furious Seasons has been keeping tabs on the situation and as usual had the scoop before the WSJ got involved.
Link to WSJ piece “JAMA Editor Calls Critic a ‚ÄòNobody and a Nothing‚Äô”.
Philosopher A.C. Grayling has a just-released opinion piece on the New Scientist site arguing that we should regulate armed military robots before they are responsible for, presumably, what would otherwise be classified as war crimes.
As we reported in 2007, a military robot has already malfunctioned and ended up killing nine people with gunfire.
Grayling notes that military robots are already deployed on ‘active duty’ and that we need to regulate the consequences of an increasingly mechanised military that relies on artificial intelligence technology to engage its firepower.
Robot sentries patrol the borders of South Korea and Israel. Remote-controlled aircraft mount missile attacks on enemy positions. Other military robots are already in service, and not just for defusing bombs or detecting landmines: a coming generation of autonomous combat robots capable of deep penetration into enemy territory raises questions about whether they will be able to discriminate between soldiers and innocent civilians…
In the next decades, completely autonomous robots might be involved in many military, policing, transport and even caring roles. What if they malfunction? What if a programming glitch makes them kill, electrocute, demolish, drown and explode, or fail at the crucial moment? Whose insurance will pay for damage to furniture, other traffic or the baby, when things go wrong? The software company, the manufacturer, the owner?
Most thinking about the implications of robotics tends to take sci-fi forms: robots enslave humankind, or beautifully sculpted humanoid machines have sex with their owners and then post-coitally tidy the room and make coffee. But the real concern lies in the areas to which the money already flows: the military and the police.
Link to NewSci piece by A.C. Grayling (via David Dobbs).
Many thanks for sending or posting all your suggestions for psychology and neuroscience Twitter feeds to follow. After watching the streams for a few days, here are my suggestions for some of the best:
@mocost
Probably the single best mind and brain Twitter feed I’ve yet found. By the author of the excellent Neurophilosophy blog. Diverse, regularly updated, fascinating.@noahwilliamgray
One of the neuroscience editors for Nature, who used to write for the underperforming ‘Action Potential’ blog. However, he’s really hit his stride since moving on to better things and he posts a load of interesting material to his feed, including live updates from a recent conference. Has a slight neurobiological tendency.@PsychScience
The Association for Psychological Science’s Twitter feed focuses on new discoveries and association members in the news. The ‘members in the news’ posts usually lead to good articles but you’ll need to follow the link to find out what they’re about as it often doesn’t say.@allinthemind
Wonderful radio show that keeps going from strength to strength and now posts to Twitter. Previews of upcoming programmes and commentary from the programme’s switched on host Natasha Mitchell.@anibalmastobiza
A Spanish cognitive scientist who blogs in Spanish but Tweets in English. A high signal to noise ratio and with only 15 followers at the moment, one of Twitter’s best kept secrets.@DrShock
A Dutch psychiatrist who you may know from the blog of the same name. Links to interesting mind, brain and mental health snippets with the occasional bonus tweet in Dutch about, well… I’ve no idea.@RightThought
A psychotherapist who often posts useful and interesting links to mind and brain news, as well as the occasional productivity and successful living tip.@sandygautam
Like being rained on with psychology and neuroscience content. A high volume, stream of consciousness feed, but luckily a stream with plenty of gold nuggets in it.@mentalhealthuk
I have no idea who or what mentalhealthuk are, but they refeed pretty much every mention of mental health in the media to their Twitter account. High volume, but very complete.
I’m sure there are others that I’ve not discovered or who have been quiet since I’ve been watching, so I’ll post here when I find further gems.
Please note that the Mind Hacks feed @mindhacksblog just alerts you to new blog posts, but, after some weeks of trying to work out what the hell I’d do with it, I have started posting to Twitter myself.
You can find me at @vaughanbell, where I’ve essentially been posting mind and brain stuff I find interesting or curious. Not a great surprise I know, but hopefully it’ll be of interest.
I’m interesting in creating a list of people on Twitter that Mind Hacks readers might be interested in: psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, AI hackers, anthropologists, sociologists, science writers, philosophers – you know the sort.
However, it seems quite hard to track down people by their interests.
So if you follow, or are, someone who posts lots of interesting mind and brain stuff on Twitter, leave a comment on this post, or email me using this web form with Twitter in the title.
My only caveat is I’m not particularly interested in, for example, a psychologist who mostly twitters about their cat, the news, sport or whatever. They need to be a good source of mind and brain insights.
I’ll filter the list and post it up here.
mindhacks.com is now on twitter. You can find us at /mindhacksblog.
Our rss is piped to twitter via the magic of twitterfeed. Thanks to Brent for the suggestion.
Today’s issue of Science has a letter from neuroscientist Martha Farah and theologian Nancey Murphy warning against ‘non-materialist neuroscience’ becoming the new front-line in the religion wars.
Most religions endorse the idea of a soul (or spirit) that is distinct from the physical body. Yet as neuroscience advances, it increasingly seems that all aspects of a person can be explained by the functioning of a material system. This first became clear in the realms of motor control and perception. Yet, models of perceptual and motor capacities such as color vision and gait do not directly threaten the idea of the soul. You can still believe in what Gilbert Ryle called “the ghost in the machine” and simply conclude that color vision and gait are features of the machine rather than the ghost.
However, as neuroscience begins to reveal the mechanisms underlying personality, love, morality, and spirituality, the idea of a ghost in the machine becomes strained. Brain imaging indicates that all of these traits have physical correlates in brain function. Furthermore, pharmacologic influences on these traits, as well as the effects of localized stimulation or damage, demonstrate that the brain processes in question are not mere correlates but are the physical bases of these central aspects of our personhood. If these aspects of the person are all features of the machine, why have a ghost at all?
By raising questions like this, it seems likely that neuroscience will pose a far more fundamental challenge than evolutionary biology to many religions. Predictably, then, some theologians and even neuroscientists are resisting the implications of modern cognitive and affective neuroscience. “Nonmaterialist neuroscience” has joined “intelligent design” as an alternative interpretation of scientific data. This work is counterproductive, however, in that it ignores what most scholars of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures now understand about biblical views of human nature. These views were physicalist, and body-soul dualism entered Christian thought around a century after Jesus’ day.
As I’ve noted before, I remain sceptical that this will pose much of a threat, largely due to the fact that non-materialist neuroscience is not particularly new – many famous neuroscientists (including the Nobel prize-winning John Eccles) have been explicitly non-materialist with few contemporary ripples.
Unlike evolution, which bluntly contradicts what many religious texts claim, very few holy books describe any concepts of the soul that can be directly contradicted by neuroscience.
However, there is certainly some interest in the neuroscience bashing among Christian fundamentalists, who recently held their first conference on the issue. We shall have to see how successfully they manage to enthuse their flock.
Link to letter ‘Neuroscience and the Soul’.
Link to DOI entry for same.
The BBC’s flagship news analysis programme Newsnight featured a hefty segment on the ‘Facebook causes cancer / the end of the world as we know it’ nonsense that recently hit the headlines. The Beeb invited alarmist psychologist Aric Sigman on the show but, God bless ’em, they also invited Bad Science author Ben Goldacre who did a great job of countering the drivel. And due to wonders of the internet you can see the whole interview on YouTube.
The segment also features neuroscientist Susan Greenfield who has recently taken to warning everybody (including in the House of Lords believe it or not) about the ‘neurological dangers’ of children using the internet – based entirely on her own prejudices and in the absence of any good evidence.
She is featured in the TV report where, rather bizarrely, she admits there is no evidence but then goes on to warn of the dangers.
The debate between Goldacre and Sigman is pure TV gold, not least for watching Goldacre’s facial expressions.
Ben has also written-up the episode and put load of links and background material on Bad Science.
Link to Newsnight interview and debate.
Link to Bad Science with more on the debate.
The British Psychological Society’s monthly magazine The Psychologist is continuing to dip its toes into the world of open-access and has made the entire March edition freely available online.
A couple of articles stand out. The first is on stigma that discusses studies on how we internally structure information and notes that even here, the golden ratio may play a role, with a crucial 68% / 32% split on negative and positive information being linked to stigmatised people.
The other is a surprising article on an interpretation of the sexually explicit sado-masochist novel The Story of O in light of Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance.
More tea vicar?
In comparison, my page 9 column on language-dependent psychosis rather pales in comparison.
The magazine is available as an embedded document, so you get to see the whole magazine as it appears in print, although I’m not sure you can link to individual papers so you’ll have to explore!
Link to March edition of The Psychologist.
Full disclosure: I’m an occasional columnist and unpaid member of the editoral board for The Psychologist.
You know that awkward feeling you get when you stop laughing because you realise the person you’re talking to isn’t actually joking? I’ve just had it after reading the news reports that tell us ‘Facebook raises cancer risk’, ruining what I thought was a very funny parody.
They’re based on an appalling article by psychologist Aric Sigman which was published in the magazine Biologist. You can read it online as a pdf and it is a wonderful example of cherry-picking evidence and citing correlations as causes.
His claim is that electronic media, and particularly the use of social networking sites, are leading us to interact face-to-face less and that this has health risks.
So what evidence does Sigman cite to support his claim that social networking sites and face-to-face interaction are linked – a correlation showing that as social media use has increased, face-to-face interaction has decreased. Really, that’s it, and as we shall see it’s largely nonsense.
He then goes on to cite evidence that subjective loneliness is associated with various biological effects and health risks.
The last bit is well supported, loneliness is associated with negative health risks, but Sigman neglects to cite any studies that test the link between face-to-face interaction and the use of services such as Facebook.
This is not surprising, because so far, they’ve typically found that people who who these sites actually feel more socially connected and have better social ties.
Like this study that found that students use Facebook to enhance relationships they already formed in real life, or this study that found that Facebook use was associated with greater levels of social capital and psychological well-being.
In contrast, the link between loneliness and internet communication has not been reliably established and it is notable to we have almost nothing but correlational studies. So we don’t know whether internet communication increases loneliness in some people, or whether lonely people just use the internet to try and make themselves less lonely.
In fact, studies have reported correlations in both directions. Interestingly, while the early studies tended to find a link, later studies have been much less likely to do so, and in fact, many find exactly the opposite to what Sigman claims, but these are not mentioned.
For example, like one study that found that older adults who use the internet more report lower levels of loneliness, or this study in children that found internet use was associated with less loneliness, or this study that found no link in adolescents.
I’d like to be charitable and assume that this one-sidedness was down to ignorance, but the conclusion of the article makes me think it was deliberate cherry-picking. He writes:
A decade ago, a detailed classic study of 73 families who used the internet for communication, The Internet Paradox, concluded that greater use of the internet was associated with declines in communication between family members in the house, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their levels of depression and loneliness. They went on to report ‚Äúboth social disengagement and worsening of mood… and limited face-to-face social interaction… poor quality of life and diminished physical and psychological health‚Äù (Kraut et al, 1998).
This study was indeed a classic. It was so important that the same research team followed up the same participants several years later and published their results in a study called Internet Paradox Revisted that you can read online as a pdf file.
What they found was that the negative effects reported in the first study, except for a measure of daily hassles, had disappeared, and that the internet use was associated with better a social life:
Internet was associated with mainly positive outcomes over a range of dependent variables measuring social involvement and psychological well-being, local and distant social circle, face-to-face communication, community involvement, trust in people, positive affect, and unsurprisingly, computer skill.
Just typing ‘internet paradox’ into Google brings up both studies, but the second seems to be missing.
The article is quite clearly drivel if you spend more than 20 seconds on Google, but it seems to have been swallowed by most mainstream press outlets without question.
What is it about mentioning the internet that makes the press lose their marbles? I blame it on not using the internet.
A few days ago I wrote a piece criticising the arguments of author Maggie Jackson on the effects of digital technology and concentration. The piece garnered some fantastic reader comments, including a thoughtful response from Jackson herself, which I’ve reproduced below:
In my interview with Wired and my book Distracted, I don’t argue that we need to venerate unbending concentration and single-tasking. In fact, that’s a monochromatic Industrial Age vision of attention that I reject! In cultures where work and productivity are now information-based, we do need to hone skills related to multitasking and split-focus, skimming and non-linear reasoning.
But in the US and other tech-centric societies today, we’ve become so reliant on this narrow band of skills that we’ve begun to undermine our ability to go deeply in thought and relations. We’re fragmenting and diffusing our multifaceted attentional abilities – and this is not by any means “progress.”
As for cooking and babies, I’d agree that at any time in history, the environment makes demands on our attention. Attention is in essence how we interact with our environment! But attention is also central to the pursuit of goals, to planning, judgment, vision. The point is, are we using our powers of attention well by cultivating environments of interruption, fragmentation,and skimming, and by losing time/space for reflection, disciplined problem-solving, deep reading?
In short, the “concentration oasis” is a myth I don’t subscribe to. And yet it’s truly short-sighted to fail to consider the costs of cultivating a culture of distraction and inattention.
Link to the original post and comments.
An interesting if dubious Twitter phenomenon: a $200 an hour online therapist website is spamming people who express distress in their twitter bulletins with a reply advertising their service.
The service is called AskAnAlly and the Twitter spam has really pissed a number people off.
Like many of the other people, I can’t help reading the name as AskAnally, which I shall be charitable and assume is a reference to Freudian psychotherapy.
It seems life imitates Web Therapy.
Thanks for Mind Hacks reader Rachel for letting me know.
Wired has an interview with author Maggie Jackson who’s recently written a book called ‘Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age’ in which she argues modern life and digital technology constantly demand our attention and are consequently damaging our ability to concentrate and be creative. The trouble is, I just don’t buy it and it’s easy to see why.
The ‘modern technology is hurting our brain’ argument is widespread but it seems so short-sighted. It’s based on the idea that before digital communication technology came along, people spent their time focusing on single tasks for hours on end and were rarely distracted.
The trouble is, it’s plainly rubbish, and you just have to spend time with some low tech communities to see this is the case.
In some of the poorer neighbourhoods Medell√≠n, my current city of residence, there is no electricity. In these barrios, computers, the internet, and even washing machines and telephones don’t exist in the average home.
Pretty much everything is done manually. By the lights of the ‘driven to digital distraction’ argument, the residents should be able to live blissfully focused distraction-free lives, but they don’t.
If you think twitter is an attention magnet, try living with an infant. Kids are the most distracting thing there is and when you have three of even four in the house it is both impossible to focus on one thing, and stressful, because the consequences of not keeping an eye on your kids can be frightening even to think about.
The manual nature of all the tasks means you have to watch everything. There is no timer on the cooker, so you need to watch the food. The washing has to be done, by hand, while keeping an eye on everything else.
People call all the time, because, well, there is no other way of communication. Street vendors pass by the house and shout what they’re selling. If you miss out on something, it might mean your days food planning has gone down the drain.
On top of this, people may be working to make a living in the same building. Running a shop, mending stuff, selling food, or whatever their business might be.
The difference between this, and the “oh isn’t email stressful” situation, is that you can take a break from email and phone calls. You can switch everything off for an hour so you can concentrate. You can tell people you won’t be available.
For people trying to work and run a family at the same time, not only are the consequences of missing something more important and potentially more dangerous, but it’s impossible to take a break. A break means your kids are in danger, your family doesn’t get fed and you’re losing money that buys the food.
Now, think about the fact that the majority of the world live just like this, and not in not in the world of email, tweets and instant messaging. Until about 100 years ago everyone lived like this.
In other words, the ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted, is the strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development.
New technology has not created some sort of unnatural cyber-world, but is just moving us away from a relatively short blip of focus that pervaded parts of the Western world for probably about 50 years at most.
And when we compare the level of stress and distraction it causes in comparison to the life of the average low-tech family, it’s nothing. It actually allows us to focus, because it makes things less urgent, it controls the consequences and allows us to suffer no more than social indignation if we don’t respond immediately.
The past, and for most people on the planet, the present, have never been an oasis of mental calm and creativity. And anyone who thinks they have it hard because people keep emailing them should trying bringing up a room of kids with nothing but two pairs of hands and a cooking pot.
Link to Wired interview with short-sighted digital doomsayer.
I’ve just realised that a new series of ABC Radio National’s excellent All in the Mind just kicked off the other week with a fantastic programme on the therapeutic potential of music.
The programme is both wonderful to listen to because music is threaded woven throughout the interviews, but it’s also a critical and well-balanced look at music therapy.
It immediately tackles the fallacy of ‘Mozart makes you smarter’ but then goes on to discuss the evidence behind music therapy itself.
This form of treatment is usually regarded with a great deal of enthusiasm by staff and patients but doesn’t have a huge research base to back it up in comparison to other forms of psychological treatment, largely, it has to be said, because music therapists get very little in the way of research training.
However, the studies that have been done (for example, see this Cochrane review on its effect in schizophrenia) suggest it can be quite effective.
The programme is a really great introduction to the topic and great to see AITM back with a new series.
Link to AITM on ‘Music: Is it really therapeutic?’.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Furious Seasons has the curious news that FDA has linked anti-depressants to the development of neuroleptic malignant syndrome. Curious as NMS is traditionally linked to dopamine inhibitors, and serotonin syndrome has several similar symptoms but is already known.
Readers build vivid mental simulations of literary narratives, suggests brain scanning study.
Brain has a interesting commentary on the vascular theory of migraine – ‘a great story wrecked by the facts’.
The wonderful RadioLab has a brief post-season follow-up programme with an excellent section on ‘stereotype threat‘.
USA Today covers an fMRI study on a women with hypermnesia or ‘super memory’ as the paper calls it.
Speed dating as a method for studying the psychology of attraction is discussed by Science News.
Not Exactly Rocket Science covers research suggesting colours affect the mind – red improves attention to detail, blue boosts creativity.
Hypothesis / conclusion confusion hits BBC News, again, as it says Alzheimer’s ‘is brain diabetes’.
Neurophilosophy has a typically excellent article on a study looking at how the age of a memory being recalled is linked to which brain areas are active during remembering.
A study on the epidemiology and prognosis of coma in soap operas is covered by Neurotopia.
Time magazine asks will plastic surgery make you happier? Unlikely, is the answer.
Financial bubbles, economic crashes and cognitive biases are discussed by The Atlantic.
Nth Position reviews an interesting looking new book on the ‘globalisation of addiction‘.
A study on the negative effects of violent video games on social helping is discussed by New Scientist.
BoingBoing notes news that a Hollywood film about amnesic patient H.M. could be in the pipeline.
Activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group, according to a new study covered by New Scientist.
BPS Research Digest asks how much thought do we put into our moral judgements?
There’s only so much science can tell us about human morality, argues Howard Gardner in an article for Slate.
Cognitive Daily has a great piece on how the Kanizsa illusion is being used to study how we recognise shapes.
The latest Nature Neuropod neuroscience podcast has just hit the net, with a great selection of discussions and interviews covering everything from pheromones and sexual attraction to the impact of poor quality sleep on memory.
This final section on an intriguing and recently published study found that even mild disturbance that didn’t wake the sleeper but knocked them out of deeper sleeper into the shallower sleep stages could still disrupt the retention of material learned the previous day.
However, as I am remarkably tired myself I need as much deep sleep as I can get, so I shall leave the rest of the podcast as a voyage of discovery. Enjoy!
Link to Neuropod home page with audio.
mp3 of latest podcast.
Mind Hacks 