Category: News

The UK Government have announced they want to change the drugs law and ban “[any] substance which is capable of producing a psychoactive effect”. It’s a fairly clumsy attempt to tackle the wave of ‘legal highs’ but there’s a little psychopharmacological gem, hidden away, in the Home Secretary’s letter that accompanies the proposed changes.

There’s been plenty of news coverage of the proposed blanket ban, both for and against, and you can read the official documents on the Home Office Psychoactive Substances Bill webpage.

From the government’s point of view, it’s pretty much all they can do. The list of banned drugs has got so large that they’ve decided it is easier to say what isn’t prohibited. So apart from the specifically mentioned exceptions (the respectable dangerous drugs: booze, nicotine, meds) they’ve decided to ban

“[any] substance [that] produces a psychoactive effect in a person if, by stimulating or depressing the person’s central nervous system, it affects the person’s mental functioning or emotional state”

It’s a vague and unhelpful definition that could include half the products in your cleaning cupboard. But it leaves a more interesting question which the Home Secretary is clearly aware of. That is – how do you know a substance is psychoactive at all?

In other words, imagine the police find a suspicious looking white powder but the drug isn’t in their database. New drugs are appearing at about one a week, so it’s a very likely scenario. Working out whether it is psychoactive or not is key for legal purposes.

This issue has clearly already troubled the Home Secretary. In her letter to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, the Home Secretary says “I would welcome the Council’s views on how best we can establish a comprehensive scientific approach for determining psychoactivity for evidential purposes.”

But what science tells us is that the only way of confidently working out whether something is psychoactive or not, is to take it.

This is because you can’t confidently predict what a drug will do to the mind from its chemical structure.

We can say some general structures are more likely to be psychoactive than others, but it’s never guaranteed. For example lots of tryptamines are psychoactive but even here structurally very similar drugs may have very different effects.

Some tryptamines – like DMT and psilocybin are powerfully hallucinogenic – other very similar tryptamines – like the drugs used to treat migraines, are not.

As drugs are essentially keys to the ‘locks’ of the brain’s synaptic receptors – even a tiny change might suddenly mean it won’t fit in the keyhole and has no psychoactive effect.

Interestingly, this means both the manufacturers of new psychoactive compounds and the UK government will have the same problem. Because you can’t do a chemical test on a new drug and say for sure it’s psychoactive, and animal tests won’t give you a definite answer, someone has to take it to find out.

Grey market labs in China and Eastern Europe solve this problem by, well, getting someone to take the drugs. Christ knows what the Government are going to do.

Cheeky line of as-yet-untested phenethylamine derivative Home Secretary?

The latest edition of intriguing podcast Love and Radio is on a lesbian who passed as a man to report on masculinity, writing a amphetamine-fuelled stream-of-consciousness biography of Virginia Woolf, and finding hope in suicide.

It’s an interview with writer Norah Vincent and it makes for compelling listening.

Love and Radio is an interesting project that attempts to capture diverse people’s take on relationships. It veers between the rambling and the sublime, but this is definitely towards the sublime end of the spectrum.
 

Link to episode ‘Eternity Through Skirts and Waistcoats’.

The New York Times recently covered a report by long-term critics of psychologists’ involvement in the CIA torture programme.

It includes a series of leaked emails which suggests something beyond what is widely noted – that the US security agencies have been handing out key contracts to high profile psychologists on the basis of shared political sympathies rather than sound scientific evidence. The result has been a series of largely ineffective white elephant security projects that have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

To back up a bit, this new report claims, on the basis of the leaked emails, that there was collusion between the American Psychological Association and the CIA to make psychologists’ participation in brutal interrogations possible through engineering the written code of ethics.

The allegations are not new but as part of the coverage The New York Times includes the full text of the report which includes the full text of key emails.

The APA have commissioned an independent investigation and have released a statement, quite reasonably actually, saying they’re not going to comment until it’s concluded.

But looking at the emails, you can see that the CIA was buddies with a select group of high profile psychologists who later get big money contracts from the US Government. You may recognise the names.

One email from Kirk Hubbard, Senior Behavioral Scientist for the CIA, notes that “I have been in contact with Ekman and he is eager to do work for us”, seemingly with regard to a forum on the science of deception. This is Paul Ekman famous for his work on facial emotions and micro-expression.

Hubbard notes that Martin Seligman, famous for his work on learned helplessness and later positive psychology, “helped out alot over the past four years”. Seligman hosted a now well-documented meeting in December 2001 for “a small group of professors and law enforcement and intelligence officers” who “gathered outside Philadelphia at the home of a prominent psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, to brainstorm about Muslim extremism”.

This meeting included James Mitchell, of the now notorious Mitchell Jessen and Associates, who developed the CIA’s brutal interrogation / torture programme.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Ekman and Seligman were directly involved in CIA interrogations or torture. Seligman has gone as far as directly denying it on record.

But there is something else interesting which links Ekman, Seligman and Mitchell: lucrative multi-million dollar US Government contracts for security programmes based on little evidence that turned out to be next to useless.

Ekman was awarded a contract to train ‘behavior detection officers’ at US airports using a technique called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques) based on detecting facial expressions – part of a $900 million programme. It was widely criticised as lacking a scientific foundation, there has been not one verified case of a successful terrorist detection, and evaluations by the Department of Homeland Security, the Government Accountability Office and the Rand Corporation were scathing.

Seligman was reportedly awarded a $31 million US Army no-bid contract to develop ‘resilience training’ for soldiers to prevent mental health problems. This was surprising to many as he had no particular experience in developing clinical interventions. It was deployed as the $237 million Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme, the results of which have only been reported in some oddly incompetent technical reports and are markedly under-whelming. Nicholas Brown’s analysis of the first three evaluative technical reports is particularly good where he notes the tiny effects sizes and shoddy design. A fourth report has since been published (pdf) which also notes “small effect sizes” and doesn’t control for things like combat exposure.

And famously, Mitchell and Jessen won an $81 million contract to develop the interrogation programme, now officially labelled as torture, and which the Senate Intelligence Committee suggested was actually counter-productive in gathering intelligence.

Applying psychology to improve airport security screening, soldiers’ well-being and interrogation are all reasonable aims. But rather than reviewing the evidence to see what’s possible and contracting relevant specialists to develop and evaluate programmes where possible, they seem to have contracted supporters of the ‘war on terror’ for work that lacked an applied evidence base.

The outcome has been expensive and ineffectual.
 

Link to full text of critical report, full text of emails in Appendix.

The New York Review of Books has an excellent new piece by Oliver Sacks where he describes the psychological effects of cancer treatment in terms of its effects on the ‘homeostasis of well being’.

The article weaves together the role of the autonomic nervous system, the progression of migraine and the repressions and releases of cancer treatment.

Indeed, everything comes and goes, and if one could take a scan or inner photograph of the body at such times, one would see vascular beds opening and closing, peristalsis accelerating or stopping, viscera squirming or tightening in spasms, secretions suddenly increasing or decreasing—as if the nervous system itself were in a state of indecision. Instability, fluctuation, and oscillation are of the essence in the unsettled state, this general feeling of disorder. We lose the normal feeling of “wellness,” which all of us, and perhaps all animals, have in health.

As you might expect it’s intricate, poetic and profound.
 

Link to ‘A General Feeling of Disorder’.

The U-T San Diego, which I originally thought was a university but turns out it’s a newspaper, has an excellent online multimedia project called ‘The Wonders of Your Brain’ which is an extensive and excellent look at some of the key issues in modern neuroscience.

It tackles everything from the development of the brain from embryo to old age, how the brain processes senses, the challenges of neurosurgery, mental health and brain disorders, and the future of brain science – to name just a little of the content.

It has some great articles, fantastic video, and includes a range of neuroscientists discussing their work.

Specialist science magazines would be proud to have this as a neuroscience piece so good work U-T San Diego. I may never have heard of you but apparently your a proper newspaper and you do great online neuroscience specials.

Recommended.
 

Link to ‘The Wonders of Your Brain’.

In a moving and defiant article for the The New York Times, neurologist Oliver Sacks has announced he has terminal cancer.

Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).

The whole piece is a reflection on life, death and living and, fittingly, is a joy to read.

Keep on keepin’ on Dr Sacks.

We look forward to hearing about your final adventures.
 

Link to ‘My Own Life: Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer’.

The British media has been covering the creation of 77th Brigade, or ‘Chindits’ in the UK Army which they’ve wrongly described as PsyOps ‘Twitter troops’. The renaming is new but the plan for a significant restructuring and expansion of the UK military’s influence operations is not.

The change in focus has been prompted by a growing realisation that the success of security strategy depends as much on influencing populations at home and abroad as it does through military force.

The creation of a new military structure, designed to tackle exactly this problem, was actually reported last year in British Army 2014 – a glossy annual policy publication. The latest announcement of the 77th Brigade is really just a media-friendly re-branding of the existing plan.

You can read the document online (warning it’s a 50Mb plus pdf) but here’s a crucial section from page 121 onwards:

Our potential adversaries and partners are increasingly blurring the lines between regular and irregular and between military, political, economic and information activities. At least three nations who operate large conventional ‘traditional’ armies have now also adopted the Chinese concept of Unrestricted Warfare.

Author Steve Metz describes this as involving “diverse, simultaneous attacks on an adversary’s social, economic and political systems. It ignores and transcends the ‘boundaries the boundaries between what is a weapon and what is not, between soldier and non-combatant, between state and non-state or suprastate.” If we wish to succeed in such as environment we need to compete on an equal footing.

To do this, we must change not only our physical capabilities but our conceptual approach, our planning and our execution. This is not to say that the virtual and cognitive domains now produce a ‘silver bullet’ that will mean the end of combat, but that “superiority in the physical environment was of little value unless it could be translated into an advantage in the information environment”…

In order to shift the Army’s thinking in the approach to this new manoeuvre, the Security Assistance Group (SAG) will form in September 2014. It will form through the amalgamation of the current 15 Psychological Operations Group, the Military Stabilisation Support Group, the Media Operations Group and the Security Capacity Team.

However, these structures are merely the start point for a fully integrated capability that will harness a wide range of powers to achieve the desired effects – from cyber through to engagement, commercial, financial, stabilisation and deception. At the heart of the new structure must be a culture and attitude that is both Defence and civilian orientated.

And that is really what the ‘newly announced’ 77th Brigade is all about.

To see how seriously the British Army are taking this, the 77th is reportedly going to be made up of up to 2,000 full-time and reserve troops. Think Defence report that the combined strength of all the existing relevant groups that will be incorporated is just 300 people.

The idea is to make Information Operations a much more central part of military doctrine. This includes electronic warfare and computer hacking, physical force targeted on information resources (like taking out infrastructure), psychological operations – traditionally focused on changing belief and behaviour in the theatre of war, media operations – essentially corporate PR, and a wider use of media to influence external populations and potential adversaries.

The Daily Express reports that “the brigade will bring together specialists in media, signalling and psychological operations, with some Special Forces soldiers and possibly computer hackers” which seems likely to reflect exactly what the Army are aiming for in their new plan.

From this point of view, you can see why governments are so keen to hold on to their Snowden-era digital monitoring and intervention capabilities.

They typically justify their existence in terms of ‘breaking terrorist networks’ but they are equally as useful for their role in wider information operations – targeting groups rather than individuals – now considered key to national security.

The formation of the 77th Brigade is a mostly reflection of a wider refiguring of global conflict that puts cognition and behaviour at the centre of political objectives.

It is simultaneously more and less democratic that ‘hard power’. It makes the battle of ideas, rather than the use of force, central to determining political outcome but attempts to shape the information environment so some ideas become more equal than others.

I’ve written a review of legendary playwright Tom Stoppard’s new play The Hard Problem at the National Theatre, where he tackles neuroscience and consciousness – or at least thinks he does.

The review is in The Psychologist and covers the themes running through Stoppard’s new work and how they combine with the subtly misfiring conceptualisation of cognitive science:

This is a typical and often pedantic criticism of plays about technical subjects but in Stoppard’s case, the work is primarily about what defines us as human, in light of the science of human nature, and because of this, the material often comes off as clunky. It’s not that the descriptions are inaccurate – allusions to optogenetics, Gödel and the computability of consciousness, game theory, and cortisol studies of risk in poker players, are all in context – but Stoppard doesn’t really understand what implications these concept have for either each other or for his main contention. Questions about mind and body, consciousness and morality, are confused at times, and it’s not clear that Stoppard really understands the true implications of the Hard Problem of consciousness.

It’s worth saying, I actually enjoyed the play, but it was Stoppard’s philosophy and unwieldy use of neuroscience that didn’t quite hang together for me.

The full piece is the link below.
 

Link to review of The Hard Problem in The Psychologist

A new film, Ex Machina, is released in the UK tomorrow and it is quite possibly one of the best sci-fi films of recent times and probably the best film about consciousness and artificial intelligence ever made.

The movie revolves around startup geek turned tech corp billionaire Nathan who has created the artificially conscious android Ava. Nathan invites one of his corporate coders, Caleb, to help test whether Ava feels conscious.

The film is near-future but in the tradition of sci-fi as a theatre in which to test ideas, it focuses on the stark and unexpected issues raised by self-conscious robots designed for the human market.

Writer and debut director Alex Garland clearly put a lot of effort into getting the scientific concepts right, enlisting biologist Adam Rutherford and cognitive roboticist Murray Shanahan to finesse the philosophy of mind.

In addition, it’s brilliantly acted, paranoid, subtly disturbing and thought-provoking – long after the credits roll.

It’s also sparked some great reviews of the movie and the cognitive science behind it. The Independent has an excellent piece on the science behind the plot and there’s a great interview with the scientific advisors in Dazed.

But probably the best so far is consciousness researcher Anil Seth’s extended review in New Scientist which tackles the core of the film’s philosophical kick:

While the Turing test has provided a trope for many AI-inspired movies… Ex Machina takes things much further. In a sparkling exchange between Caleb and Nathan, Garland nails the weakness of Turing’s version of the test, a focus on the disembodied exchange of messages, and proposes something far more interesting. “The challenge is to show you that she’s a robot. And see if you still feel she has consciousness,” Nathan says to Caleb.

This shifts the goalposts in a vital way. What matters is not whether Ava is a machine. It is not even whether Ava, even though a machine, can be conscious. What matters is whether Ava makes a conscious person feel that Ava is conscious. The brilliance of Ex Machina is that it reveals the Turing test for what it really is: a test of the human, not of the machine. And Garland is not necessarily on our side.

In fact, the film constantly flips viewers between thinking of Ava as a machine, and as a conscious being, and forces us to continually check the shifting plot reality to see if it still holds together.

At the end of the film you come to realise that it’s not Ava who’s being tested, it’s you.
 

Link to Ex Machina page on Wikipedia.
Link to UK trailer on YouTube.
Link to international trailer on YouTube.

Backchannel has a fascinating profile of DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis which although an interesting read in itself, has a link to a brief, barely mentioned study which may herald a quiet revolution in artificial intelligence.

The paper (available online as a pdf) is entitled “Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning” and describes an AI system which, without any prior training, learned to play a series of Atari 2600 games to the point of out-performing humans.

The key here is ‘without any prior training’ as the system was not ‘told’ anything about the games. It worked out how to play them, and how to win them, entirely on its own.

The system was created with a combination of a reinforcement learning system and a deep learning network.

Reinforcement learning is based on the psychological theory of operant conditioning where we learning through reward and punishment what behaviours help us achieve certain goals.

One difficulty is that in video games, the reward (points) may only be distantly related to individual actions because strategy is not something that can be boiled down to ‘do this action again to win’. Mathematically there is lots of noise in the link between an action and eventual outcome.

Traditionally this has been solved by programming the structure of the game into the AI agent. Non-player characters in video games act as effective opponents because they include lots of hard-coded rules about what different aspects of the game symbolise, and what good strategy involves.

But this is a hack that doesn’t generalise. Genuine AI would work out what to do, in any given environment, by itself.

To help achieve this, the DeepMind Atari AI uses deep learning, a hierarchical neural network that is good at generating its own structure from unstructured data. In this case, the data was just what was on the screen.

To combine ‘learning effective action’ and ‘understanding the environment’ the research team plumbed together deep learning and reinforcement learning with an algorithm called Q-learning that is specialised for ‘model-free’ or unstructured learning.

So far, we have performed experiments on seven popular ATARI games – Beam Rider, Breakout, Enduro, Pong, Q*bert, Seaquest, Space Invaders. We use the same network architecture, learning algorithm and hyperparameters settings across all seven games, showing that our approach is robust enough to work on a variety of games without incorporating game-specific information…

Finally, we show that our method achieves better performance than an expert human player on Breakout, Enduro and Pong and it achieves close to human performance on Beam Rider.

The team note that the system wasn’t so good at Q*bert, Seaquest and Space Invaders, and it wasn’t asked to battle the real Ko-Dan Empire after playing Starfighter, but it’s still incredibly impressive.

It’s an AI that worked out its environment, its actions, and what it needs to do to ‘survive’, without any prior information.

Given, the environment is an Atari 2600, but the AI is a surprisingly simple system that ends up, in some instances, outperforming humans from a standing start.

Essentially, the future of humanity now rests on whether the next system is given a gun or a dildo to play with.
 

Link to Backchannel profile of Demis Hassabis.
pdf of paper “Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning”

A sublime new radio show on mind, brain and behaviour has launched today. It’s called Invisibilia and is both profound and brilliant.

It’s produced by ex-Radiolab alumni Lulu Miller and radio journalist Alix Spiegel – responsible for some of the best mind and brain material on the radio in the last decade.

The first episode is excellent and I’ve had a sneak preview of some other material for future broadcast which is equally as good.

It’s on weekly, and you can download or stream from the link below, and you can follow the show on the Twitter @nprinvisibilia.

Recommended.
 
Link to NPR Invisibilia.

The US Government has just released its report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, aptly branded the “torture report”, which is available online as a pdf.

It makes for appalling reading but sheds light on the role of two psychologists in the creation and running of what turned out to be genuinely counter-productive ‘enhanced interrogations’ that were used in preference to already productive non-abusive interrogations.

In the report the psychologists are given the codenames Grayson SWIGERT and Hammond DUNBAR but these refer to James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen who have been widely identified by other sources in the preceding years.

Mitchell and Jessen were both contractors, who, according to the new report, arrived at detention centres to direct CIA interrogations, despite having no interrogation experience, and in face of sometimes severe reservations of regular CIA staff.

Later, Mitchell and Jessen formed a company, Mitchell Jessen and Associates – given the codename ‘Company Y’ in the report – which was contracted to the tune of $81 million to perform the interrogations. By interrogations here, of course, we mean torture that include waterboarding, unnecessary feeding through the anus, sleep deprivation, violence, threats, confinement to coffin shaped boxes for days on end, and painful stress positions.

Mitchell and Jessen’s approach was flawed from the start because it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory they based their approach on.

They are frequently described in the report as saying that their interrogation method aimed to induce a state of ‘learned helplessness’.

This was a concept first developed by the psychologist Martin Seligman who noted that if you prevented animals from escaping when they were given electric shocks some eventually stopped trying and just fell into a state of passivity as they were repeatedly shocked.

Seligman argued that this might explain depression: people who experience multiple uncontrollable tragedies simply lose motivation and give up trying to make things better.

It’s not a great theory of depression but it does describe the loss of coherent self-helping behaviour that appears in some people who have no control over their abusive situations.

Mitchell and Jessen wanted to induce this state in detainees, thinking that it would make them more likely to co-operate.

This, to be frank, is just bizarre. The theory predicts the opposite would happen and this is, rather grimly, exactly what occurred.

Detainee Abu Zubaydah, the report notes, became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth” after repeated waterboarding. Ramzi bin al-Shibh started to exhibit “visions, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm.”

One CIA staff member understood exactly the counter-productive psychology of these techniques when he noted that “we believe employing enhanced measures will accomplish nothing except show [al-Nashiri] that he will be punished whether he cooperates or not, thus eroding any remaining desire to continue cooperating”. This is learned helplessness in action.

It’s not as if the entirely nonsensical basis of Mitchell and Jessen’s ‘learned helplessness’ approach was a complex or subtle theoretical distinction – it’s undergraduate level psychology. Even for the uninitiated, the clue is in the name.

Perhaps one of the biggest questions is why Mitchell and Jessen were given such a central and powerful role to carry out these useless torture sessions in light of their lack of experience, the incoherent basis of their ideas, lack of results, abusive methods and and massive conflict of interest.

On this last point, the report notes that CIA staff members on the ground expressed concerns that Mitchell and Jessen were responsible for assessing detainees’ suitability for ‘enhanced interrogation’, directing the sessions, evaluating their own performance, and profiting from participation.

If it couldn’t get any worse, the report mentions in several places that established CIA psychologists repeatedly expressed concerns about what was happening but were overruled.

The episode is both a monumental fuck-up on the level of the organisation’s ability to detect psychological snake oil and a vast human tragedy.
 

pdf of full report from Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Mind Hacks is exactly 10 years old today. Here’s the first post where Matt announced that the book had started shipping.

This is the 4950th post and Mind Hacks has been going for 3652 days which means we’ve published an average of 1.4 posts a day, every day, for the last 10 years.

Apart from the blog posts there were two memorable occasions when we were featured in the mainstream press. Both were fittingly, slightly unusual.

Tom was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for leading a cognitive science safari through the streets of Berlin. A reporter accompanied him through the urban jungle and reported back from the pioneering trip through unexplored cognitive territory.

On a slightly different tack, an article in The New York Times featured my psychosis research. Curiously, it was put in the Fashion and Style section, which was most likely a mistake, although sometimes I catch a look at my well cut corduroy slacks and think maybe it was really due to my daring autumn look and stylistic joie de vivre.

Apart from those moments, we’ve mainly spent the rest of the decade at our laptops alternately flicking between PubMed and Google News, grumbling about people not linking to the original study and tapping out diatribes when people make unjustified inferences from neuroanatomical findings or limited behavioural data.

I suspect the next ten years might be somewhat similar.