Category: News

The bi-monthly Scientific American Mind seem to be making more of their feature articles freely available online after the first month has gone (and bravo to that!), and they’ve just opened-up two new articles: one on the psychology of boredom and the other on the use of psychedelic drugs to treat mental illness.

But before we start on the articles, have a look at the beautiful image on the right. Click for a larger version because the small size doesn’t do it justice.

It’s the image that accompanies the psychedelics article and it’s by Phil Wheeler, who, as it turns out, seems to specialise in wonderful psychological illustrations.

They’re psychological in both senses of the word, as some contain images associated with psychology, but also often contain hidden images, visual illusions and distortions.

His online gallery of images is really quite striking, and many of them meander between a sort of organic cyberpunk and a visual stream of consciousness.

The psychedelics article discusses the neuroscience and current research trials and looks at some of the main research compounds: LSD, ketamine, MDMA, and ibogaine, and, although it barely touches on psilocybin, is remarkably comprehensive for a feature article of its size.

The article on boredom does a really good job of investigating this under-appreciated mental state, and looks at research showing that having nothing to do is only part of being bored – personality factors, emotions and current interpretations all play a part.

It also makes a distinction between transient, situational boredom, and a more profound existential boredom stemming from a dissatisfaction with life.

A little ironically, it turns out there’s a surprising amount of fascinating research on boredom.

Link to Phil Wheeler’s beautiful illustrations.
Link to Phil Wheeler website with more images.
Link to SciAmMind article ‘Bored?’.
Link to SciAmMind article ‘Psychedelic Healing?’.

Online chin-scratching club Edge have asked their annual question. This year’s it’s “What have you changed your mind about?” and the respondents include a number of cognitive scientists or people thinking about mind and brain issues.

Actually, all of them are a good read (although spot the few who don’t seem to have changed their mind very much!).

We’ve listed the psychology and neuroscience-related answers below if you want to cut to the chase (and fixed a few broken links from the original website along the way).

Enjoy!

Continue reading “Changing minds”

The British Psychological Society’s magazine The Psychologist has just been redesigned and relaunched and its cover article on the psychology of evil has been made freely available online.

The phrase the ‘banality of evil’ was coined by philosopher Hannah Arendt after witnessing the trial of high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann who seemed, at least to Arendt, to be the most mundane of individuals whose evil acts were driven by the requirements of the state and orders from above.

A number of social psychologists, most notably Philip Zimbardo – famous for his prison experiment, have argued for a similar view of evil, suggesting that evil occurs when ordinary individuals are put into corrupt situations that encourage their conformity.

The cover article in The Psychologist re-examines key historical studies and new experimental evidence to challenge the “clear consensus amongst social psychologists, historians and philosophers that everyone succumbs to the power of the group and hence no one can resist evil once in its midst”.

For example, some Nazis who later claimed to be ‘just following orders’ often exceeded their orders in their brutality, while others deliberately avoided capricious violence, suggesting a significant amount of personal choice was involved.

Interestingly, this seems to apply equally to Eichmann and Arendt’s famous phrase may have been a result of her leaving the trial at a crucial point:

On the historical side, a number of new studies ‚Äì notably David Cesarani’s (2004) meticulous examination of Eichmann‚Äôs life and crimes ‚Äì have suggested that Arendt‚Äôs analysis was, at best, naive. Not least, this was because she only attended the start of his trial. In this, Eichmann worked hard to undermine the charge that he was a dangerous fanatic by presenting himself as an inoffensive pen-pusher. Arendt then left.

Had she stayed, though, she (and we) would have discovered a very different Eichmann: a man who identified strongly with anti-semitism and Nazi ideology; a man who did not simply follow orders but who pioneered creative new policies; a man who was well aware of what he was doing and was proud of his murderous ‘achievements’.

The article also looks at famous psychology studies, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s conformity studies, and argues that the people who were supposedly most likely to be led into brutality were actually psychologically quite different from the others, suggesting that they were not just ‘average people’.

It’s a refreshingly provocative look at the widely accepted idea that group pressure is the key driving force in the birth of ‘evil’.

Link to article ‘Questioning the banality of evil’ (with link to PDF version).

Full Disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist.

It seems it’s still handbags at 40 paces as the full text of Colin McGinn’s increasingly infamous review of Honderich’s book On Conciousness has been posted to the web, so you can enjoy the academic mudslinging in all its glory.

If you’re not clear on the background to this spectacular resurgence of the long-running feud, have a look at our post from a few days back.

To continue the saga, Honderich has also posted his own reply , followed by McGinn’s subsequent response with his own (one sentence!) reply to that.

Of course, there’s some good conceptual points being made about the nature of consciousness, but let’s be honest, that’s not why we’re reading it.

Link to McGinn’s review of On Consciousness with links to replies (via MeFi).

The Guardian has an article on a feud between philosophers Colin McGinn and Ted Honderich which has recently been reignited after McGinn wrote a review of Honderich’s new book on consciousness which the newspaper describes as “probably the most negative book review ever written”.

The review was published in the July edition of academic journal Philosophical Review, and the article has some of the highlights:

“This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad,” begins Colin McGinn’s review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. “It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.”

The ending isn’t much better: “Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness? Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark. His instincts, at least, are not always wrong. It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others).”

And in the middle, there is nothing to cheer the book’s author. Honderich’s book is, according to McGinn, sly, woefully uninformed, preposterous, easily refuted, unsophisticated, uncomprehending, banal, pointless, excruciating.

What does the man on the receiving end think of this review? “It is a cold, calculated attempt to murder a philosopher’s reputation,” says Honderich.

Both philosophers can be adequately described as larger than life and both hold positions on consciousness that can be thought of as fairly radical when compared to the mainstream of philosophical thought.

Apparently, the feud goes back many years and includes everything from philosophical mudslinging to backhanded remarks about girlfriends.

Connoisseurs of academic mudslinging may wish to revisit a couple of classics to accompany this recent fine display.

Link to Guardian article ‘Enemies of thought’ (via 3Q).

This is just a brief note to wish all our readers a very happy Christmas, Solstice, Diwali, Hanukkah, Eid ul-Adha, Yalda or non-theist winter holiday, and to say that updates might be a bit irregular over the next week as we take time off to travel and spread good cheer.

Many thanks for your all your comments, contributions and, most of all, continued interest in Mind Hacks. We enjoy writing it and it’s always great to hear that other people enjoy reading it.

Wishing you all life, love and mental health!

It’s a big glossy website with lots of smiling people promoting an intervention for mental illness. Surely, drug company marketing you think? Actually, it turns out to be a US Government initiative promoting the importance of friendship in mental health and recovery from mental illness.

In the medical literature, friends and family are described as ‘social support’ and we know that social support is one of the biggest protectors against mental illness and one of the best predictors of recovery.

It’s probably one of the best studied aspects of mental health, and we know it has a significant impact on physical health as well. For example, it’s clear from the depression research that social support has a positive effect in a wide range of people and situations.

The website has resources on different types of mental illness, tips for helping people you know and information on getting further advice and support, all very well presented with video and audio as well.

Largely because you can’t make a profit from love and friendship, you don’t see it promoted much, despite it being one of the most effective ways of combating psychiatric disorder.

Hopefully, this website is part of a larger campaign to get the word out. Bravo!

Link to What a Difference a Friend Makes.

This week’s Nature has an article about the illicit use of cognitive enhancing drugs by healthy people just wanting to push their limits, including working scientists.

These are the same drugs that have caused concern about their level of use among students, chiefly modafinil (Provigil) and methylphenidate (Ritalin), although other drugs such as Alzheimer’s medication donepezil (Aricept), non-amphetamine ADHD drug atomoxetine (Strattera) are also candidates.

The article argues that the use of these drugs by healthy people raises some new ethical questions that need to be addressed and particularly discusses their use by scientists.

The issue is hardly new, however, as scientists have been using chemical pick-me-ups as long as science has existed.

Mathematicians have been noted for their use of amphetamines (Paul Erdős being a famous example) and there are plenty of famous figures from other fields who have made use of drugs for tweaking their mood or mind.

William Stewart Halsted, the “father of American surgery” and founder of the surgery department at John Hopkins Medical School, was a long-term cocaine and morphine addict.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have had a long history of trying out drugs on themselves and expanding their consciousness with hallucinogens in attempts to understand how the mind and reality can become distorted.

As we’ve noted previously, many of the so-called ‘new’ ethical issues, apply equally well to past drugs and past situations.

Probably the only genuinely new aspect, is that there are virtually no long-term studies on these newer drugs, so it’s still not clear on what the long-term effects might be. Perhaps more scary than their use by consenting adults therefore, is their use on children.

Nevertheless, on this occasion Nature have set up an online forum to discuss the use of drugs by scientists, so you can join the debate yourself.

Link to Nature article ‘Professor’s little helper’.
Link to Nature forum ‘Would you boost your brain power?’.

ABC Radio National’s All the the Mind has just concluded a two part series on human rights and psychiatry that looks at the role of mental health professionals in military interrogations, and the rights of psychiatric detainees.

The first part is based at the World Psychiatric Association conference in Australia and interviews several psychiatrists about their views on whether mental health professionals should be involved in, most relevantly, ‘war on terror’ interrogations that some argue are tantamount to torture.

The response is a bit predictable as psychiatrists have already firmly decided to have no part in these interrogations which they see as incompatible with their oath to ‘do no harm’, unlike the American Psychological Association which has decided to endorse participation within some rather vague limits.

There’s a particularly interesting contribution from psychiatrist Prof Steven Sharfstein, who as president of the American Psychiatric Association was taken to Guantanamo Bay by the US Government, presumably to reassure him and other clinical leaders that the horror stories about the place were unjustified.

Instead, he came away convinced that Guantanamo should be closed for good.

In contrast, the American Psychological Association president, Prof Ronald Levant, who attended the same visit, came away with no strong convictions that any unethical practices were taking place.

The second part of the All in the Mind special investigation looks at the treatment of psychiatric patients across the world, particularly focusing on parts of the developing world where asylums can sometimes be little more than prisons.

The programme mentions a 2003 edition of Time Asia which had a photo essay on some of the shocking conditions in some Asian institutions.

It also discuss the newly agreed UN Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which is likely to have a significant impact on the rights of people with mental difficulties.

One of the most interesting contributions is from psychiatrist Prof Vikram Patel who headed up the excellent Lancet series on Global Mental Health.

It was a fantastic series of articles, including a paper entitled ‘Barriers to improvement of mental health services in low income and middle income countries’ which identifies education and funding as two key factors, and another called ‘Resources for mental health: scarcity, inequity, and inefficiency’.

Without a hint of irony, the series is closed-access and individual articles are charged at $30 each.

The last in the series of article urges the global mental health community to “scale up the coverage of services for mental disorders in all countries, but especially in low-income and middle-income countries”.

So I’ve uploaded all the articles to the web. Enjoy.

No health without mental health [pdf]

Resources for mental health: scarcity, inequity and inefficiency [pdf]

Treatment and prevention of mental disorders in low-income and middle-income countries [pdf]

Mental health systems in countries: where are we now? [pdf]

Barriers to improvement of mental health services in low income and middle income countries [pdf]

Scale up services for mental disorders: a call for action [pdf]

Link to AITM on participation in interrogation or torture.
Link to AITM on ‘Who speaks for the chained and incarcerated?’.
Link to 2003 Time Asia article and photo essay on Asia’s mental health centres.

Inkling Magazine has discovered a curious episode in the history of music and neuroscience where The Beatles helped to fund the development of the CT scanner.

If you ever suffer a head injury, you’re likely to given a CT head scan as its a quick, convenient way of look for damage to brain tissue.

In a recent talk, consultant radiologist Dr Ben Timmins claimed that the sales of Beatles records allowed EMI to fund Sir Godfrey Hounsfield to develop the first scanner.

As a direct result of The Beatles’ success, Dr Timmis claimed, the scanner’s inventor, Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, was able to devote about four years developing the scanner from its 1968 prototype, to something that could be used in a clinical setting. His work was done in the Central Research Laboratory, a facility near Heathrow airport that was part of the EMI Group. Having sold 200 million of the Fab Four’s singles, (at seven inches, almost enough vinyl to stretch the length of the equator) the Beatles’ record company, EMI, was able to fund Hounsfield to do his research and the scanner was ready be used in hospitals in the 1970’s.

Link to Inkling Magazine on The Fab Four and CT scanners.
Link to The Independent with a short article on new CT scan and its history.

The front page of the today’s Daily Express, a UK national newspaper, has one of the worst neuroscience stories I have a read in a very long time.

It’s actually on a valuable research project being run by an established team of researchers and involves giving people with Alzheimer’s disease a small digital camera to wear around their neck which takes pictures every 30 seconds.

The person then views the pictures at a later date. There is a rapid presentation mode (10 pictures per second) but the person has the option to view images individually at will.

It isn’t a cure, it’s just a useful way of reviewing events and ‘refreshing’ the memory. This is likely to prevent people with Alzheimer’s forgetting events so quickly if they’re captured on camera.

I say likely, because the research that the Daily Express story talks about hasn’t been published yet, but a single case study on a woman with limbic encephalitis did show it made a considerable difference to her recall of past events when compared to a diary.

Now let’s just pause for a minute and think what sort of headline you’d write if you were going to publish a story on this line of early research.

Obviously someone had the same decision to make at the Daily Express, and came up with:

BREAKTHROUGH ON ALZHEIMER’S
British scientists bring real hope of a cure

The paper describes the system as involving “a small camera taking photographs every 30 seconds which are then artificially ‘forced’ on to the brain” and says that “In some cases, patients have experienced up to 90 per cent of their memory being restored after just two weeks”.

How they got from ‘viewing pictures on a computer’ to ‘forcing images on the brain’ is anyone’s guess, and presumably the 90% figure is the score on a memory test rather than amount of memory loss restored, although without any published data its hard to say.

So how did this preliminary research make the front page of a UK daily as a “real hope of a cure”?

Microsoft have developed the camera and are funding this project (along with several other similar studies), and I can’t help but wonder whether their PR people have been at work behind the scenes.

Actually, there are other systems that have been around a while now which are equally as interesting. The NeuroPage system is another simple idea.

It’s a pager for people with memory problems and people can program the system to send reminders. So far, early research has found it to be quite effective in helping people with memory impairments.

Despite the hype, the SenseCam project is a great idea and could lead to a genuine benefit to people with memory problems, but it won’t cure Alzheimer’s.

Link to abstract of case study on person with limbic encephalitis.
Link to Microsoft SenseCam and memory loss page.

The New York Times seems to have been publishing loads of mind and brain articles recently and their end of 2007 round-up of ‘hot ideas’ contains no less than 11 articles on developments in psychology and neuroscience – including everything from Alzheimer’s to Zygotes (via Lap Dancing).

I was alerted to the series by Matthew Hutson, who emailed to say he’d written the article on ‘neurorealism‘ – the tendency for people to believe even quite outlandish claims if they think they’re backed up by neuroscience.

In a blog post about his piece, he notes some of the sources and origins of his article, including some peer reviewed research and our own Tom Stafford, who coined the term ‘neuroessentialism’ (independently, as did two others!) to describe the same phenomenon.

The other psychology and neuroscience articles cover a whole range of topics, and are all two-minute write-ups of ingenious studies or theories (sort of like a behavioural science tapas selection):

* Alzheimer’s Telephone Screening
* Faces Decide Elections
* Lap-Dance Science
* The God Effect
* Hope Can Be Worse Than Hopelessness
* Mindful Exercise
* Quitting Can Be Good for You
* Starch Made Us Human
* Zygotic Social Networking

UPDATE: Two more with mind and brain themes!

* The ‘Cat Lady’ Conundrum
* Ambiguity Promotes Liking

Finally, one of the best TV series on the psychology, biology and neuroscience of female sexuality is available online as a torrent.

The Truth About Female Desire was a four part UK television series broadcast in 2005 which was a collaboration between the respected sex research centre The Kinsey Institute, London’s Brunel University and Channel 4.

Eight women volunteered to undergo a number of experiments on sex and sexuality largely taken from the scientific literature, ranging from how suggestion affects attraction, to the physiology of female sexual arousal, to the neuroscience of orgasm, to name just a few.

Researchers are on hand to discuss the results with the women who seem genuinely fascinated about how these results might reflect their own varied experiences of sex, whether straight, gay, stable or single.

While the discussion is frank, if you’re just looking for porn with a bit of science thrown in, you’ll need to go elsewhere.

There’s very little naked flesh on display, and despite this (magazine editors take note!) it’s enormously good fun, quite sexy in places, and utterly fascinating.

There are two torrents available online each of which contains all four 50 minute episodes as one 1.7Gb file.

There is one good torrent available online which contains all four 50 minute episodes as one 1.7Gb download.

At the moment, both have a only a few other people currently downloading, so it may be a little slow to start with, but the more people downloading, the quicker it gets.

It’s rare that proper scientific sex research makes the media and even rarer that it is made into compelling TV, so it’s a few hours well-spent if you’re interested in female sexuality, or sex research in general.

If you’re not sure what a torrent is or how to download one there’s a guide here and if you’re having trouble playing the files the free VLC media player should do the trick.

Finally, thanks to zoidberg for letting me know about the series arriving online.

Link to mininova page with torrent of series.
Link to mininova page with alternative torrent for series.

Philosopher Patricia Churchland wrote a damning review of Steven Pinker’s new book, ‘The Stuff of Thought’, for Nature and it’s caused a bit of a rumble.

One particular highlight was that she described a theory from Pinker’s book, that suggests that language and thought can refer to meaning in a similar way, as:

…about as applicable to real meaning as ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ is to real life. Aptly ridiculed by critics as ‘font-change semantics’, the theory still has its disciples. Including Steven Pinker.

Apart from showing a woeful misunderstanding of Dungeons and Dragons, Churchland also failed to notice that Pinker had never proposed this theory in his book. In fact, his book argues against it.

In this week’s Nature, psychologist Marc Hauser writes in to say Churchland doesn’t seem to have read the book, and Pinker comes back with his own rebuke:

The book apparently stimulated the reviewer to free-associate to her own beliefs that psychological phenomena can be explained at the level of neurons and that human thinking is in the service of motor control. The fact that I (like most cognitive psychologists) have not signed up to these views is the only point of contact between my book and her review.

While definitely being more entertaining than your average book review , it doesn’t even come close to matching the slanging match between Hans Eyesenck and Stephen Jay Gould, where they ending up arguing over the ‘relative exposure of our respective arses’ in The New York Review of Books.

London’s newest science museum, the Wellcome Collection, has just kicked off what looks to be a fantastic exhibition on the art and science of sleeping and dreaming.

It runs until March 2008 and aims to illustrate how we’ve understood sleep through the ages, as well as the contemporary science of this still mysterious state.

If you can’t make it in person, there’s an online taster that contains a collection of striking images from the exhibition with some brief commentary.

The exhibition also has free guided expert-led tours, including ones by sleep researcher Dr Mary Morrell on December 19th, and one by sleep doctor Dr Neil Stanley on January 17th.

Other tours are guided by science journalists and some of the exhibited artists.

Link to exhibition details.
Link to online ‘taster’ exhibition.

Full disclosure: I’ve received grant funding from the Wellcome Trust for a science art collaboration and I am an occasional paid reviewer for their Arts Awards. As far as I know though, neither are connected with this exhibition.

Wired has an article in its latest edition that discusses why understanding human networks are becoming key to the US Military’s mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the article seems to do little more than uncritically echo military enthusiasm for this new approach while telling us little about the actual science behind the techniques.

But the most interesting story is not the strategy itself, which is hardly new, but how it is causing a rift among anthropologists to the point where conference speakers have been heckled and left in tears for their participation.

The debate centres on the US Military’s Human Terrain System, a project that aims to understand the culture, society and social networks in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a view to using this information to further military objectives.

In contrast, the NYT managed to do a brief but considerably more balanced article and video segment on the project last May, noting that the crux of the matter is that the project has employed numerous anthropologists, as anthropology now plays a key role in US military strategy.

Concerns centre over whether co-operating with the military violates the strict codes of ethics that compels anthropologists to ‘do no harm’ to the cultures they are studying, and to ask for informed consent from the people that are observing to make them fully aware of the purpose of the research.

Critics believe that aiding a military occupation is unethical, as it will inevitably lead to deaths prompted by the intelligence they provide, and requires a level of secrecy – violating both of the ‘do no harm’ and ‘informed consent’ principles.

This has caused an angry rift with accusations of ‘mercenary anthropology’ and, in an interesting parallel to the ethical dilemmas faced by the American Psychological Association, the American Anthropological Association has been forced to issue a report and statement on the issue; disapproving of the project while refusing to ban its members from participating.

Last Thursday, at a panel session on the issue at the American Anthropological Association conference, Zenia Helbig, an ex-Human Terrain System researcher, cried when she was heckled by the audience.

Wired describes the scene as ‘ugly’ and quotes Helbig as implying the hecklers were being driven by conspiracy theories, while Inside Higher Education gives a more nuanced account, suggesting audience reactions were mixed.

The overarching issue is that the military has cottoned-on to the fact that its in-house ‘psyops’ services are inadequate for the complexity of new forms of warfare, and are seeking the collaboration of academic disciplines which have been founded on principles of non-coercion.

The debate essentially centres around whether these principles should be universally applied to all people, or whether they are trumped by loyalty to the national interests of a researcher’s country.

Link to NYT article ‘Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones’.
Link to abstract of Human Terrain System paper.
Link to Inside Higher Ed article on panel discussion.