Category: News

Congratulations to Jon C, the winner of the tickets to see Reminiscence, which closes at the end of this week on Saturday September 20th.

Just a last word on the play to say many thanks to everyone who came along to the post-show science forum last Sunday, it was a pleasure debating with you, and just a reminder that there’s another one after the matinee performance this Wednesday as well.

Christian has posted a brief write-up of the show where he discusses some of the ideas behind it and also describes me as “mesmerisingly encyclopedic”, which I’m guessing is a journalistic euphemism for “a bit geeky”.

Link to BPSRD write-up of Reminiscence.
Link to play website.

An interesting abstract from the latest Nordic Journal of Psychiatry: when given otherwise identical case reports of murderers marked either male or female, psychiatrists and psychology students were more likely to declare women ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’. In contrast, judges showed an interesting same sex bias, in that they were more likely to declare a person of the same sex ‘legally insane’ than a perpetrator of the opposite sex.

Evidence of gender bias in legal insanity evaluations: a case vignette study of clinicians, judges and students.

Nord J Psychiatry. 2008;62(4):273-8.

Yourstone J, Lindholm T, Grann M, Svenson O.

Forensic psychiatric decision-making plays a key role in the legal process of homicide cases. Research show that women defendants have a higher likelihood of being declared legally insane and being diverted to hospital. This study attempted to explore if this gender difference is explained by biases in the forensic psychiatric assessments. Participants were 45 practicing forensic psychiatric clinicians, 46 chief judges and 80 psychology students. Participants received a written vignette describing a homicide case, with either a female or a male perpetrator. The results suggested strong gender effects on legal insanity judgements. Forensic psychiatric clinicians and psychology students assessed the case information as more indicative of legal insanity if the perpetrator was a woman than a man. Judges assessed offenders of their own gender, as they were more likely to be declared legally insane than a perpetrator of the opposite gender. Implications of and possible ways to minimize such gender biases in forensic psychiatric evaluations need to be thoroughly considered by the legal system.

Is it me, or does the first author already look like she’s just stepped out of some CSI spin-off?

Link to PubMed entry for study.

The lovely production team behind the London neurology and reality play Reminiscence have been kind enough to offer Mind Hacks readers the chance to win two tickets to see the piece on the date of your choice.

It runs until the 20th September in Jackson’s Lane Theatre in Highgate and all you have to do to enter is just email before about 9am Friday Morning (Queen’s Standard Time) when I shall stick all the email addresses into a spreadsheet, sort by a randomly generated number, and pick out the one on top.

If you want enter, just send an email to:

reminiscencetickets@googlemail.com

I’ve caught it in rehearsal and shall be seeing it ‘live’ for the first time tonight, and I can’t wait!

Just to reiterate, I’m not financially connected to the play in anyway but have had the pleasure of working with the team to discuss the mind, brain and disturbances of reality and I hope as many people get to see it as possible.

Link to more information in earlier post.

Neuroscience and fabric of reality play Reminiscence opens tonight in London. For those not able to make it, the company have put images from the production online, which are quite beautiful in themselves.

Mrs O’Connor is a woman who develops a temporal lobe epilepsy that triggers hallucinated music and memories that seem to help her come to terms with a lost youth.

You’ll notice the set is actually a huge backdrop and one of the amazing things about the play is that it literally uses this fabric to model the mindscape of the main character.

It is not only the surface for some stunning visual projections, but is dynamically reshaped as Mrs O’Connor moves through the story and shifts from reality, to memory, to hallucination.

As science has told as that much of our remembering is reconstruction, the play centres around whether her seizure-sparked memories are real, or just fragments woven together to best fit what she hopes is true.

While Mrs O’Connor is tempted to succumb to her recollections, her neurologist is worried about the consequences of unchecked epilepsy, and both have to weigh neuroscience against the meaning of her memories.

All this is woven together with some stunning original music, played by the cast, who are also professional musicians and singers as well as actors.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend many happy hours discussing neuroscience with the cast and writers, and if you’re keen to come and join the discussion, I’ll be part of the free science forums that happen after the matinee performances on Sunday September 14th and Wednesday September 17th.

You can come along to these even if you saw the play on another day.

The play runs from 9 ‚Äì 20 September at the Jackson’s Lane Theatre in Highgate.

Hopefully, I should have some more exciting news shortly!

Link to Reminiscence information.
Link to online ticket sales.
Link to photos of the production.

The August edition of the Nature Neuroscience podcast, NeuroPod, arrived online after a summer break with some fascinating discussions on everything from altruism to magic.

Perhaps the most interesting bit is on genomic imprinting – a curious effect where the same gene may be expressed differently depending on whether you inherited it from your mother or your father.

The most widely known 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.

A recent opinion piece published in Nature, written by sociologist Christopher Badcock and biologist Bernard Crespi, argued that genetic imprinting may be key to a much wider range of conditions – including many of the more common psychiatric disorders such as depression or schizophrenia.

We believe that psychiatric illness may be less to do with the genes a mother and father pass down, and more to do with which genes they program for expression. By our hypothesis, a hidden battle of the sexes — where a mother’s egg and a father’s sperm engage in an evolutionary struggle to turn gene expression up or down — could play a crucial part in determining the balance or imbalance of an offspring’s brain. If this proves true, it would greatly clarify the diagnosis of mental disorders. It might even make it possible to reset the mind’s balance with targeted drugs.

The article then goes on to propose the idea (presumably related to a similar Chris Frith theory) that autism and psychosis might be ‘diametric opposites’, echoing an argument they expanded on more fully in a larger article earlier this year.

I’ve not read the bigger piece, but my first thought is how they manage to account for the fact that people with Asperger’s or autism can become psychotic. I shall look forward to seeing what they have to say in more detail.

Anyway, the podcast discusses the main points, as well as getting some comments from some more sceptical scientists.

Link to NeuroPod homepage (now with flash streaming).
mp3 of August Neuropod.
Link to piece on genetic imprinting and psychiatric disorder.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

The September issue of The Psychologist has two excellent and freely available articles that smash the popular myths of scientific psychology.

The first examines the widely mythologised story of hole-in-the head celebrity Phineas Gage, and the other tackles commonly repeated stories of famous studies that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Gage, whose skull is pictured on the front cover, is legendary, but, as the article makes clear, there’s actually a great deal we don’t know about his life and the information that typically accompanies his story is based on only a very few sources.

The article on other myths in psychology focuses on some of the most widely incidents and studies in the field: the murder of Kitty Genovese, Asch’s conformity experiments, Little Albert and the Hawthorne Effect.

Particularly interesting is a discussion of the role of myths in science and what benefit they bring to the study of the human mind:

Other sciences certainly do have their own myths – just think of the story of Newton and the falling apple or Archimedes leaping out of the bath following his Eureka insight. Perhaps myths just seem more prominent in psychology because we tend to talk and write about our science in terms of studies rather than facts. Certainly the work of Mary Smyth at Lancaster University would appear to be consistent with this view – she has compared psychology and biology textbooks and found that psychology appears to have comparatively few taken-for-granted facts. Instead, numerous experiments are described in detail, lending scientific credence to any factual claims being made.

Related to this, there’s no doubt that the actual subject matter of psychology plays a part too – there’s that ever-present pressure to demonstrate that psychological findings are more than mere common sense. Benjamin Harris says that historians have described psychology as putting a scientific gloss on the accepted social wisdom of the day. ‘Psychology is always going to have a strong social component,’ he explains. ‘With psychological theories speaking to the human condition, there’s always going to be an appeal to myths that resonate more with experience than something coming out of the lab that’s sterile and ultra scientific.’

Another role that myths play is to reinforce the empirical legitimacy of psychology and to create a sense of a shared knowledge base. ‘In this way, tales such as of Kitty Genovese or Little Albert are rather like origin myths, pushing the creation of psychology, or a particular approach within psychology back in time, thus giving an air of greater authority,’ says Harris. Hobbs agrees: ‘It’s nice to have something that you can take for granted,’ he says. ‘In the case of the Hawthorne effect and other myths, you shouldn’t take it for granted, but it’s comforting to be able to say “Oh, this could be the Hawthorne effect” and for others to nod and say “Ah yes, that’s right”.’

Link to article ‘Phineas Gage ‚Äì Unravelling the myth’.
Link to article ‘Foundations of sand?’.

Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor for The Psychologist.

Today’s Nature has a teeth-grittingly bitchy review of psychologist Daniel Levitin’s new music and psychology book The World In Six Songs that would be entertaining were it not so surprisingly vitriolic.

I’ve not read the book, but when someone is criticising the author’s musical taste as immature, not once, but twice, in the world’s leading science publication, you know the review has gone beyond the point of healthy knock-about into the zone of below-the-belt punches.

What is it about Nature book reviews? We covered one in 2007 where the reviewer got stuck in despite not seeming to have read the book.

Actually, no one does a good book barney like the philosophers, who at least have the good grace to wrap their barbs in dry wit and satire rather than just spitting venom at each other (although they do that too).

If you want to get an idea of Levitin’s basic premise, New Scientist has an online article on the book. It seems to be applying the ‘basic plots’ idea to music.

This is widely discussed in literature where many people have claimed to have identified the seven, eight, twenty, thirty six (you get the idea) basic plots in stories, literature and plays throughout history.

Link to hatchet job in Nature.
Link to NewSci on The World In Six Songs.

I had the pleasure of seeing the initial run-through of the upcoming London play Reminiscence on Friday and was completely blown away.

Inspired by a case study by world-renowned neurologist, Oliver Sacks (from his book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat), Reminiscence is the story of Mrs O’Connor who, in a bizarre neurological twist is transported, via evocative music, to the surreal world of her memories.

As her condition becomes increasingly difficult to fathom, Mrs O’Connor and her doctor go on a journey of discovery to the limits of science’s ability to fully account for what happens in our minds, and to the limits of our mind’s ability to fully recapture the past.

Reminiscence is a stunning piece of total theatre using live music (originally composed and inspired by the folk melodies of Eastern Europe) and spectacular visuals to take the audience on a fantastical, poignant and ultimately moving journey through the mind.

It’s going to be running from 9 ‚Äì 20th September in Jackson’s Lane Theatre in Highgate, and from what I’ve seen, it should be fantastic.

Effy, one of the composers, has managed to sort out some ‘2 for 1’ ticket offers, and says “you can contact the theatre and request two tickets for the price of one on 9 and 10th September (evening performances) and 17th September (matinee performance) but you must quote ‘epilepsy action’ when calling at the box office (020 8341 4421) to obtain this offer.”

I’ve been involved with the play for the last year or so, discussing the dilemmas of neuropsychology with the director, actors and composers.

After meeting the team I knew it was going to be good, but I was quite unprepared for how incredibly inventive and touching it is.

The piece literally plays with the fabric of reality and the original music is woven wonderfully throughout the piece.

By the way, I’m not financially involved in the play in any way, but can’t wait to see the final version as it should be emotionally, visually and musically stunning.

They’ll also be a free panel discussion after the show on the 14th and matinee on the 17th with some of the creative team, myself, and professionals from Headway and Epilepsy Action, all discussing the issues raised by the play – personal, ethical and scientific.

Link to Reminiscence website and details.

BBC Radio 4 has just broadcast the first part of a fantastic two part series on placebo, the most effective evidence-based treatment known to science.

It’s written and presented by Bad Science’s Ben Goldacre and is a wonderful trip through the history and science of what we know about this most psychological of treatments.

One of the most interesting recent placebo findings has been that children show a greater placebo response than adults as demonstrated in a systematic analysis of epilepsy treatment trials.

This matches up with the fact that children and generally more hypnotically suggestible than adults.

Various studies in the 1960s and 70s tracked hypnotisability through childhood and found that susceptibility to suggestion varies as a function of age. This summary is from p120 of the excellent academic book The Highly Hypnotizable Person:

Around the age of 7 children show measurable hypnotic ability, which appear to increase until around the age of 12, where it seems to peak. If then appears to plateau for about two years, decreases moderately during adolescence, and then remains stable during early and middle adulthood.

While both placebo and hypnotisability involve the general concept of ‘suggestion’ it’s not been clear whether they reflect the same things at work.

However, recent work by psychologist Amir Raz has suggesting that both hypnosis and placebo may both work through the manipulation of attention, essentially influencing the focus of processing within the brain to alter how it regulates the body and mind.

Link to Placebo programme webpage and audio archive.
Link to full text of placebo in children paper.
Link to Amir Raz paper on placebo, hypnotizability and attention.

After some exploring of links, the ‘neurowar’ report we mentioned the other day is freely available online, albeit in a non-portable format that doesn’t seem to be displayed very reliably.

Some pages don’t seem to load and I assumed this was to restrict the online version but it turns out it’s just a bit badly set up. However, with a bit of patience and a few page reloads it’s quite readable.

The report makes links between emerging areas of cognitive science and the ‘Potential Intelligence and Military Applications of Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies’.

If you want a slightly briefer summary, a pdf of the executive summary is also available online.

Why they just can’t release the whole thing as a PDF is still, however, a mystery.

Or just in pill form. They can do that, can’t they?

Link to online report.
pdf of executive summary.

Despite the American Psychological Association revising their ethics policy twice in the debate over American psychologists’ participation in war-on-terror interrogations, significant unrest still remains over the fact the APA has yet to actually enforce its reluctantly implemented ban.

The Boston Globe has an op-ed article by psychologist and APA critic Stephen Soldz who notes that an anti-torture candidate has been put forward for the APA presidency in an attempt to force the Association’s hand.

The new candidate is psychologist Steven Reisner who even has a campaign website – an innovation for presidential elections which are usually wildly underwhelming.

According to the Globe piece, Reisner received the most votes of the five candidates in the nomination phase. If the momentum carries forward, APA’s careful tiptoeing to avoid offending the US military may backfire if the most political president for years takes the helm.

Interestingly, both Soldz and Reisner are psychoanalysts, a group who have been leading the campaign against psychologists’ role in US military interrogations and who have consistently opposed the ‘war-on-terror’ since it began.

Freud himself was particularly interested in the tension between individual drives and governmental control. In Civilization and its Discontents he suggested government was an inevitable result of the need to control the unacceptable desires we all have.

He was particularly interested in how common individual neuroses get expressed socially as we project our own fears onto specific groups deemed to be ‘outsiders’, often with barbarous and disastrous consequences.

Link to Boston Globe op-ed.

Today’s Nature has got an interesting letter on psychiatric genetics suggesting an interesting approach to studying the genetics of mental illness.

It’s from neuroscientists John McGrath and Jean-Paul Selten and comments on an earlier Nature article which we discussed previously.

Napoleon Bonaparte advised: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Those of us who assess the contribution of non-heritable risk factors to neuropsychiatric illness would like to politely interrupt this battle to remind opponents that environmental risk factors have now overtaken genetic factors with respect to both effect size and the proportion of the population that is affected.

For schizophrenia, for example, factors relating to urban birth, cannabis use and migrant status are well replicated and have relatively large effects ‚Äî in contrast to the scant evidence that remains after decades of genetics research. Although the ‘heritability index’ for schizophrenia is large (about 85%), this metric encompasses the neglected contribution of gene‚Äìenvironment interactions, as well as the high-profile genetic component. This key point is largely forgotten in the heat of the battle.

It has been convincingly argued (A. Caspi and T. E. Moffitt Nature Rev. Neurosci. 7, 583‚Äì590; 2006) that the power to detect genuine genetic-susceptibility loci would be substantially increased if we could stratify samples according to environmental risk factors. Let’s have more funding to help fine-map the wide range of non-heritable risk factors associated with disabling disorders such as schizophrenia and depression, and discover how they act. These clues are too valuable to overlook.

It’s an interesting point and is relevant to the fact that heritability must be one of the most misinterpreted statistics in genetics.

If a study reports that schizophrenia has a heritability of 85%, many people interpret it to mean that 85% of the risk of developing schizophrenia comes from genetics and this is something to do with the condition itself.

In fact, what it shows is that 85% of the risk of schizophrenia in the samples taken so far is estimated to come from genetics, but crucially this estimate is dependent on the environment in quite subtle ways.

The letter above mentions gene-environment interactions: where exactly the same genes can produce different heritability depending on the environment.

Imagine that everyone lived in a virtually identical environment and we all had almost exactly the same life experiences. The only possible difference in the prevalence of mental disorder would have to come from genetics, because the environment is virtually the same for everyone. In this case, heritability would be close to 100%.

Alternatively, if the environment was widely different for everyone, much more of the difference would come from experience and so the heritability estimate would be less.

In other words, the estimate of heritability depends partly on the variability in the environment experienced by the people being studied.

I was told by a genetics researcher that studies on the genetics of intelligence in school children tend to show that IQ is more heritable in the UK than the US, because in the UK we have a National Curriculum – a specified education programme that every child follows.

This means that UK children have a more similar learning environment, whereas in the US the curriculum is decided state-by-state meaning there’s much more variability in experience. Hence, IQ is less heritable in US school children.

I’ve not found the the studies on IQ in school children, so I’m not sure how it stands at the moment, but it serves as a good illustration of how heritability estimates can be environment dependent.

Actually, this week’s Nature has two other letters on the same topic, and additional feature articles on autism and neural synchrony, as well as a couple brain-relevant book reviews.

Link to contents of this week’s Nature.
pdf of Nature Reviews Genetics paper on twin studies and heritability.

Over the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a fantastic theatre company and some amazingly talented composers to help develop a play called Reminiscence about a woman who hallucinates music after developing temporal lobe epilepsy.

The play premiers in London on September 9th and will be accompanied by talks discussing the neuroscience of hallucinations, music and the ethics of treating personally meaningful neurological symptoms.

 

It’s based on one of Oliver Sacks’ case studies (Mrs O’C) that he featured in both The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia but has been updated and expanded to explore how neuropsychology and medicine deal with the situation when pathology and personal meaning collide. The piece is wonderfully engaging and combines music, visual and theatre to powerful effect.

The idea originated from composers Effy and Litha Efthymiou who were inspired by the musical aspect of Sacks’ case and who began working with the theatre daCapo company to develop a production.

I was honoured to be asked to advise on the neuroscience, and have spent an immensely enjoyable year working with the company. Needless to say, I’m incredibly excited to see it in its final stages and can’t wait until in premiers in the Jacksons Lane theatre in Highgate.

I’ll be posting more on the production nearer the time, but all the when, where and hows are currently on the Theatre DaCapo website.

Link to details of Reminiscence play.

The new edition of Scientific American Mind has just appeared with a whole host of new freely-available articles available online covering the psychology of storytelling, gifted children, genius, animal intelligence, scent, smell and learning through error.

My favourite is the article on the psychology of storytelling and narrative, and why it could intricately bound up in the cognitive abilities we’ve developed to navigate the social world.

The article is quite wide ranging, dipping into anthropology, cognitive and evolutionary psychology to explore why stories are so central to cultures across the world.

Perhaps because theory of mind is so vital to social living, once we possess it we tend to imagine minds everywhere, making stories out of everything. A classic 1944 study by Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel, then at Smith College, elegantly demonstrated this tendency. The psychologists showed people an animation of a pair of triangles and a circle moving around a square and asked the participants what was happening. The subjects described the scene as if the shapes had intentions and motivations—for example, “The circle is chasing the triangles.” Many studies since then have confirmed the human predilection to make characters and narratives out of whatever we see in the world around us.

But what could be the evolutionary advantage of being so prone to fantasy? “One might have expected natural selection to have weeded out any inclination to engage in imaginary worlds rather than the real one,” writes Steven Pinker, a Harvard University evolutionary psychologist, in the April 2007 issue of Philosophy and Literature. Pinker goes on to argue against this claim, positing that stories are an important tool for learning and for developing relationships with others in one’s social group. And most scientists are starting to agree: stories have such a powerful and universal appeal that the neurological roots of both telling tales and enjoying them are probably tied to crucial parts of our social cognition.

Link to August 2008 SciAmMind.

The results of a moderate sized trial on a new Alzheimer’s drug have just been announced and the results, if reliable, may suggest that the treatment is one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the century.

Alzheimer’s disease is a type of dementia, a degenerative disorder of where the brain starts to degrade more quickly than would be expected through normal ageing.

One of the common features of Alzheimer’s disease is the accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles in the brain. These are clumps of tau protein that accumulate inside dying neurons. There have been debates about whether these cause the problems or are just the result, but most researchers are now coming round to the idea that tau protein tangles are the main problem.

The drug has been given the tradename ‘remben’ and was initially thought to be useful as it dissolved tangles in the test tube. It has just been tested in a Phase II trial which have been announced at an Alzheimer’s research conference.

The results of the first announced trial has not been published but there are details on the conference press release which I’ve included below the fold.

What’s most impressive from the preliminary details, is that the drug seemed to both slow or even stop cognitive decline in some cases, as well as eliminating the decline in blood flow in the areas usually most affected by the disease suggesting that it is halting the spread of tangles.

Interestingly, the company behind the drug, TauRx, have just launched their website today to catch the wave of publicity.

However, I’m wondering whether there’s more to it than meets the eye because, if I’ve got it right, the drug isn’t actually new.

Its chemical name is methylthioninium chloride but it’s also known as methylene blue and was synthesised way back in 1876. It was shown to be active against malaria by Paul Ehrlich in 1891 and later as a useful antibacterial drug (have a look at this fascinating NYT article from 1910).

In the late 1980s it was tried as a treatment for manic-depressive disorder and found to be useful.

Is this seems surprising, you may be interested to know that methylene blue was the basic compound from which the first antipsychotic drug chlorpromazine or Thorazine was made (in case you’re wondering, this family of antipsychotics can also work as anti-bacterial drugs, but have not been used due to other drugs having less side-effects).

If this is really just methylene blue, what this means in financial terms is that the drug can’t be patented.

In other words, anyone can make the drug which means its much harder to make money on it as pricing becomes competitive. In contrast, a patent gives you a time-limited monopoly – albeit one that can earn billions.

A widely available cheap generic drug that treats a major disease is actually a fantastic thing for society, but developing them is not typical behaviour for pharmaceutical companies who tend to shun unpatentable drugs.

Also, it’s probably true to say that the history of drug development shows a typical three stage process:

1. We’ve found a miracle cure!
2. We’ve found a miracle cure, but it can kill people.
3. It’s not a miracle cure, it can kill people, but it’s worth the risk in many cases.

So, time will tell how useful it is in the real world, but pretty much everyone has their fingers crossed that it will work out as a useful treatment.

Link to write-up from The Telegraph.

Continue reading “Promising Alzheimer’s drug announced”

The Times has a brief article noting the growing influence of social psychology in government thinking and economic policy, mirroring the popular interest in a slew of new books on behavioural economics.

It’s interesting that the article lists various ways in those close to the British political establishment are increasingly bringing ideas drawn from empirical social sciences in their thinking, mirroring the murmurings about the Obama team’s interest in behavioural economics.

And, as we’ve noted here, there’s now an increasing interest, causing an ongoing controversy, about the use of social scientists in the occupying military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We hear a great deal about interest and initiatives in these areas, but very little about outcome studies (although its possible that the military keep theirs secret) so I wonder whether the success of these approaches will depend on the maturity of the science in terms of how well it actually predicts changes in the real world.

Link to Times article on the ‘social psychology revolution’.