Category: News

A new edition of Scientific American Mind has been published and, as is customary, two of their feature articles are online, each on a different end of the human attraction spectrum.

The first looks at online dating and how the psychology of relationships is altered by perusing your potential partners on a website.

One of the most significant differences stems from how the internet allows people to have quite a fine-grained control over how they present themselves online – even to the point where being ‘economical with the truth’ is a fairly standard tactic.

For men, the major areas of deception are educational level, income, height, age and marital status; at least 13 percent of online male suitors are thought to be married. For women, the major areas of deception are weight, physical appearance and age. All of the relevant research shows the importance of physical appearance for both sexes, and online daters interpret the absence of photos negatively. According to one recent survey, men’s profiles without photos draw one fourth the response of those with photos, and women’s profiles without photos draw only one sixth the response of those with photos.

The second article examines the psychology and treatment of paedophilia – sexual attraction to children.

Often paedophiles are described as ‘evil’ by the media, as if this was an explanation rather than a label that describes the gravity of their acts.

Knowing how best to protect children, through both the legal and medical system, need a deeper understanding. The SciAmMind article looks both at current theories and how they’re applied in practice.

Link to article on online dating.
Link to article on paedophilia.

A new psychiatric journal called Clinical Schizophrenia is launching in April that will have a novel distribution policy.

If you’re in the top 70% of antipsychotic drug prescribers in America, you’ll get your copy free.

The journal is intending to publish prestigious studies on the treatment of schizophrenia.

So it not only acts as an incentive to prescribe drugs to patients, it also guarantees that the advertisers (i.e. drug companies) will reach the doctors spending the most money on medication.

Someone got a promotion for that idea I’m sure.

The Feb 12th edition of The New Yorker has an extensive article on neurophilosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the article is available online, even to subscribers, but is worth checking out if you catch a copy in the library or on news stands as it’s an in-depth look into their work and theories.

The Churchlands are known for a radical approach to philosophy of mind called eliminative materialism that argues that we should reject the majority of psychological concepts we talk about in everyday language.

Everyday theories of the mind are known as folk psychology and includes concepts such as belief and intention.

They argue that neuroscience will not eventually produce better specified theories of (for example) belief, but that like the four humours theory of medicine, the concept of belief will eventually be rejected wholesale as science advances and that the concept as it currently stands is little more than a linguistic fiction.

Link to excellent Wikipedia article on eliminative materialism.

Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly has been in the news recently over sealed documents leaked to the New York Times which suggest that they covered-up the dangers of their popular antipsychotic drug olanzapine.

In particular, it has been alleged that Eli Lilly knew about the drug’s side-effects before they were widely known but deliberately tried to obscure this information and market to non-specialist doctors who would be less aware of the problems.

Mental health blog Furious Seasons has obtained the documents and today, made them available online so you can read them for yourself.

How the documents got leaked in the first place is still a mystery, and the US federal judge involved in related court cases has asked the New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who broke the story, to explain himself in court. Currently, the paper is refusing to co-operate.

In reply to the allegations made in the newspaper reports, Eli Lilly have said that “The Times failed to mention that these leaked documents are a tiny fraction of the more than 11 million pages of documents provided by Lilly as part of the litigation process. They do not accurately portray Lilly’s conduct”.

Link to copies of Eli Lilly documents.
Link 1 and Link 2 of previous Mind Hacks coverage on the story.
Link to Eli Lilly response to allegations.

We will be hosting the 16th edition of the psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon, next Monday (12th), here on Mind Hacks.

If you have written a post or article about the mind, brain or behaviour for the web and want to share your hard work, you can submit a link here to have it featured.

Get your submissions in by Sunday to guarantee they’ll be included. Thanks!

The cover story of today’s New Scientist discusses the work of Dr Kwabena Boahen who is creating microchips with neural networks designed into the hardware.

Building functions into microchips mean they run fast and efficiently, despite the fact it reduces the flexibility of what the hardware can do.

Artificial neural networks can require a lot of computer processing power because every simulated neuron in the network is essentially a mathematical procedure that needs running every time the network is updated.

With a frequently updated network of thousands and thousands of simulated neurons, the required computing power quickly adds up.

What Boahen and others are doing is building microchips that have functions to simulate neurons built into the hardware to make this possible on only a few chips.

Crucially, some of the simulation is done by analogue, rather than digital, computation.

Digital processors use transistors in their on/off switching phase. Mead realised that by using transistors in their analogue amplifier phase instead, he could build circuits that accurately mimicked the electrical behaviour of real neurons. Using transistors in this way also meant Mead could dispense with the central clock altogether, dramatically cutting the power demand. As long as the input signals arrived within a few milliseconds of each other, the circuit of transistors imitating a given neuron would sum the input values, and if that tipped over a certain threshold, would produce an output spike. “It’s totally foreign to the way we’ve built computers for the last 40 years,” says Boahen.

Neural networks can try and simulate real neurons as closely as possible, or be quite abstract or general impressions of them.

The New Scientist article notes that these hardware-based systems are also intended to mirror the brain’s biology quite closely.

Closely enough, that the systems are being used for designing replacement retinas to augment parts of the damaged visual system in humans.

Unfortunately, the article isn’t freely available online, but you should be able to pick up a copy in your local library or newsagent.

However, the Brains in Silicon lab at Stanford University has a comprehensive website with a host of information if you want to find out more.

Link to article preview.
Link to Brains in Silicon lab.

The February edition of Wired magazine has a special feature on 42 of the biggest unanswered questions in science. Several of them concern the mind, brain and behaviour.

How the brain creates consciousness is, perhaps, one of the most obvious ones.

If you’re not familiar with sleep research, you might find the question about why we sleep a surprising inclusion. However, the difficulty with conducting neuropsychology experiments on sleeping people makes this a very difficult question to answer, despite some fascinating ongoing research.

The evolution of language is, perhaps, an example of the problem in reverse. Doing experiments on language is much easier, because we understand the system so we can manipulate meaning and syntax independently. However, the sheer complexity of language makes it a mammoth task.

Placebos are also a curious and mysterious phenomenon, and inspire wider questions about how expectation and suggestion affects the function of the body.

The final question concerns how the brain calculates movement. There are an infinite number of possible muscle movements that allow you to perform the same action – for example, picking up a cup.

Think about it for a second. You could just grab the cup, or walk to India first. Even if you chose the near option, each tiny adjustment to the muscles can be modified ad infinitum.

To pick up the cup, the brain has to choose the most efficient action out of an infinite number of possibilities. Working through an infinite number of possibilities should take infinite time, yet we move fluidly and often without conscious thought.

Interestingly, you can help clarify the issues and answer the question to the best of current knowledge, as each entry has a link to a wiki where you can make your suggestions for each mini-article.

Link to Wired on “What We Don’t Know”.

The January edition of the Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast has an interview with Prof John Gunn about his life working in forensic psychiatry.

Forensic psychiatry, the branch of medicine that deals with mentally ill offenders, is something that you rarely hear about unless there’s a (usually sensationalised) story in the newspapers about a crime having being committed by someone with a psychiatric disorder.

It is a fascinating area, and the people who work in forensic psychiatry are often completely absorbing to talk to. If you ever get the chance, ask a forensic psychiatrist about their work.

Psychiatry, in general, is not considered glamorous. When was the last time you saw a politician having a photo call with a group of psychiatric patients?

Can you even imagine a politician having their photo taken with a man who killed his mother when psychotic, because he believed she was trying to poison him?

This is what makes forensic psychiatry so interesting. It attempts to help some of the most stigmatised and shamed people in society.

It also tries to balance this with managing risk from the small minority of people who offend when mentally ill.

And it’s not just risk to others. For example, people with schizophrenia are 14 times more likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators, and so forensic psychiatry also tries to reduce the risk of harm to the patient.

In the podcast interview, Prof Gunn talks about the profession, how he became interested in working in the area, and you hear a lot about what forensic psychiatrists do.

Well worth a listen if you’ve ever been curious about the speciality.

The interview starts 17 minutes into the podcast.

Link to January Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast page.

The Toronto Star has a preview of Steven Pinker’s forthcoming book ‘The Stuff of Thought’ which apparently tackles language (no surprise there) but this time examines the multiple meanings in language and how and why we use metaphor.

The book isn’t slated to appear until late 2007, although it seems he’ll be doing some lectures based on the book throughout the coming year.

The article outlines some of the themes in his forthcoming work:

“The Harvard psychologist classes [his example of] the salt request as an example of indirect speech, a category that also includes euphemisms and innuendo. Two other key themes for Wednesday’s talk are the ubiquity of metaphor in everyday language and swearing and what it says about human emotion.

For Pinker all three categories of language provide windows on human nature, and analyzing them can reveal what people are thinking and feeling. The approach builds upon his earlier thesis that human nature has distinct and universal properties, some of which are innate ‚Äì determined at birth by genes rather than shaped primarily by environment.”

I had the pleasure of seeing of seeing one of Steven Pinker’s talks once, and even if you don’t buy his hard-nosed nativist view of cognition (that suggests that the fundamentals of our mental processes are inherited and selected for by evolution), he’s still greatly entertaining and thought-provoking.

Link to article ‘Of thought and metaphor’.

It’s January 22nd, it must be time for another Cliff Arnall bollocks-fest. According to Arnall, his ‘formula’ predicts that today is officially the most depressing of the year.

Yes, Cliff, it is, but only because we have to put up with more utter nonsense from you.

Exactly the same story appeared in 2005 and 2006, and what a coincidence that all of these ‘most depressing days of the year’ have happened on a Monday.

As is traditional, it’s a commercial tie in, this time with a management consultancy and a PR firm.

What is genuinely depressing, is that mental health charity The Samaritans (who should really know better) have now been roped into the sorry affair.

Cliff Arnall specialises in creating nonsense formulas predicting almost anything that helps promote something or other, and gets credibility by being described as a psychologist.

Link to a suitable Arnall antidote from Ben Goldacre.

The Washington Post has an intriguing article on people who believe they are subject to secret government ‘mind control’ technology.

People who experience voices being ‘beamed’ into their heads or forces acting on their bodies, have formed communities on the internet to support each other and to lobby the government to stop what they claim are illegal tests of this ‘invasive technology’.

Critics argue that they are simply mentally ill, and indeed some probably are. In a paper published last year myself and some colleagues reported that some people show obvious signs of psychosis. Despite this, however, they have formed complex and innovative online communities.

Many members of this community are obviously not mentally ill though, and have concerns that might seem a little unusual but are no different from the types of concerns that drive JFK, 9/11 and Princess Diana enthusiasts.

One of the most interesting aspects of this community, in all its diversity, is that it challenges the psychiatric notion of what is considered a delusion.

In one of the more curious episodes during the last consultation for the UK Government’s Draft Mental Health Bill, an organisation called Christians Against Mental Slavery made a surprising submission to the parliamentary committee.

Even if you don’t buy their premise that the government is testing ‘Mind Invasive Technology’ on people, they make some pertinent points.

For example, they suggest that if a psychiatrist is presented with someone who complains of being affected by microwave mind control technology (not uncommon in psychosis), they should put them in Faraday cage to see if their experiences stop, so the psychiatrist can try and test whether they are genuinely delusional.

The fact that delusions are diagnostically ‘false beliefs’ but clinicians largely rely on assumptions (rather than tests) about the truth of a belief, is a point that has also been made in the medical literature.

Indeed, some authors have argued as a result, that the falsity condition should be rejected as one of the criteria in diagnosis.

One interesting point, rarely considered by the mind control community or its critics, is that it is possible, indeed common, to have isolated or restricted psychosis-like experiences that are relatively benign.

For example, someone might hear voices, have unusual beliefs, or experience their thoughts being broadcast or altered from outside, while not being significantly disabled by their experiences.

The fact that someone could have reasonable concerns about ‘mind control’ technology, which governments have certainly tried to develop, while also hearing voices or having other similarly unusual experiences, is often overlooked.

Link to Washington Post ‘Mind Games’.

The University of Washington Neural Systems Lab have created a humanoid robot you can control with your thoughts.

I’ll say that again – a humanoid robot you can control with your thoughts

The future is here. Thank you and goodnight.

The control system is a type of EEG-based non-invasive brain-computer interface and the page has video of the robot in action, as well as a video that describes the neuroscience of how the interface works.

Link to Neural Systems Lab robot info page (via MakeZine Blog).

Sometimes I think there’s some sort of secret competition going on with American mental health professionals to see who can diagnose mental illness in the youngest child.

The BPS Research Digest reports on a recently published case study of ‘traumatic stress disorder’ (supposedly an infant equivalent to PTSD) in a 5-month-old child.

There’s no doubt that young children can become disturbed, but many clinicians doubt that mental disorder manifests itself in the same way in children.

In some cases it hardly seems to manifest at all. For example, psychosis very rarely occurs in children from 10-16 years, and is almost unknown at younger ages.

Although no-one is quite sure why, the typical age of onset for psychosis is about 18-30 years.

Almost all psychiatric diagnosis is made on the basis of a detailed interview in which the patient describes their mental state, guided by careful questioning from the clinician.

Like other diagnoses, the diagnostic criteria for adult PTSD has many points which could only be discovered through interview.

Therefore, the diagnosis of any psychiatric disorder in a pre-verbal child or child with developing language skills would have to be made on very broad criteria.

So broad, some would say, to be highly unreliable or of doubtful validity.

The author of the case study, psychologist Aletha Solter, admits that the adult criteria would be inapplicable, and instead applies diagnostic criteria for pre-verbal children developed by charity Zero to Three (intro online as pdf).

However, despite the fact that these diagnostic criteria do not rely on verbal report, it’s still not clear whether they represent a reliable and valid way of diagnosing problems in very young children.

Link to BPSRD on ‘post-traumatic stress in a five-month-old baby’.
Link to abstract of case report.

A surprising study published last year in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs reported that hypnotism could be used to induce a realistic experience of being high on MDMA (aka ‘ecstasy’) in people who had taken the drug before.

An extended nondrug MDMA-like experience evoked through posthypnotic suggestion

J Psychoactive Drugs. 2006 Sep;38(3):273-83.

Hastings A

This research explored whether hypnotic suggestion could produce a subjective mindbody condition similar to that produced by the psychoactive drug methylenedioxy methamphetamine (MDMA, Ecstasy). Twelve participants received posthypnotic instructions to re-experience an MDMA-like state posthypnotically, similar to one in their prior experience, for one hour. Three separate self report measures and qualitative self reports showed that the posthypnotic condition effectively mimicked an MDMA-like experience, lasting an hour at a stable level. Participant ratings in real time and in retrospect ranged from 36% to 100% similarity to a drug-induced experience. The qualitative reports and rating scales enabled a phenomenological description of the subjective experience. Scores on the Tellegen Absorption Scale correlated significantly with the strength of the posthypnotic condition (Spearman rho .87, p = .0003). The participants successfully carried out various intentional activities during this time (e.g., self reflection, talking with partners about relationships, artwork, walking in nature). Applications for this technique as an adjunct to therapy and health treatments are discussed.

It’s interesting to speculate how this effect occurs. A brain imaging study has shown that in patients with Parkinson’s disease who take regular medication for the condition, a placebo actually causes the brain the mimic the effects of the medication.

Perhaps the participants hypnotised to believe they are re-experiencing the effects of MDMA genuinely re-experience the neurochemical effects of the drug to some degree.

Link to PubMed entry.

There’s an interesting interview over at 10 Zen Monkeys with psychiatrist James S. Ketchum who claims to have been director of psychopharmacology research for the US military when they were testing the potential of mind-altering drugs such as LSD and BZ.

Ketchum has just released a book entitled Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten where he recounts his time working in the labs and the research that was carried out there.

Notably, Ketchum makes a distinction between the research programme he was involved with, and the CIA’s now famous Project MKULTRA, which also looked at ways of influencing the mind and involved a significant amount of LSD research.

The book has been independently published, so make of that what you will (conspiracy theorists, start your engines), but there’s some excerpts online if you want to judge for yourself.

Link to interview with Dr James Ketchum (via BoingBoing).
Link to Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten website.
Link to excerpts.

BoingBoing links to an image of a London Underground crime prevention poster with a picture of disembodied eyes and the slogan ‘Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes’.

It could be a rather ill advised advert, unwittingly reminding London’s citizens of 1984-style totalitarian policing, or it could be a rare flash of post-9/11 irony in a public service announcement.

I suspect, however, that the poster is inspired by West Midlands Police’s Operation Momentum, which uses posters with images of eyes in an attempt to cut crime.

This was based on a study (pdf) by psychologist Dr Melissa Bateson who found that a picture of a pair of eyes near a coffee machine honesty box tripled the amount of money collected.

Bateson suggests that eyes remind us that we could be being watched, and, either consciously or unconsciously, we feel to the need to be more honest as a result.

Whether disembodied eyes with London Underground signs as pupils have the same effect remains to be seen.

jpg of ‘Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes’ poster.
Link to Newcastle Uni press release on Operation Momentum.
pdf of paper ‘Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting’.