Category: News

Sex and relationship psychologist Petra Boyton has published her annual predictions for the year ahead in sex and sexuality and revisits last year’s predictions to see how they turned out.

Unfortunately, the majority of ‘sex research’ stories that appear in the media are usually poorly conducted PR exercises with the barely disclosed aim of promoting, well, almost anything really.

It seems 2006 was a particularly bad year for this and it seems this trend is set to continue into 2007. After all, sex sells, and bad sex, it seems, sells just as well.

Link to Petra Boyton’s 2007 predictions.
Link to 2006 review.

The brain fitness freaks at cognitive enhancement blog Sharp Brains have launched a Brain Fitness carnival so they can create a regular digest of self-submitted online articles.

The first edition is due out on Friday January 17th so get your submissions sent in if you want to be included.

Sharp Brains is also a company that wants to develop commercial mental exercise programmes based on sound science to help improve and maintain cognitive function.

They even envisage ‘Brain Gyms’ so you could drop in after work and pump some mental iron:

We at SharpBrains believe that Brain Fitness will grow one day to become as widespread as physical fitness, and that Brain Fitness Centers or “brain gyms” will complement today’s gyms.

Ha! Make a (NSFW) sexy pop video out of that one Eric Prydz!

Link to details of the upcoming Brain Fitness carnival.
Link to carnival homepage.

A new season of the BBC radio programme All in the Mind (not to be confused with the Australian ABC Radio programme of the same name) has just started and you can listen to the archives online.

The BBC version, to be fair, is a little more starched than the Aussie version, but covers a wider range of topics each week.

The first edition, broadcast just before Christmas, looked at the impact of reality TV on children who have been the subject of such TV programmes, and visits a unique suicide prevention drop-in centre.

The second in the series, broadcast tonight and available online from tomorrow evening, looks at false confessions and whether we all have think of the same colour when we think of a colour word.

It will also discuss the technology behind neurofeedback – a technique for ‘training the brain’ by turning EEG signals into something you can monitor and, therefore, learn to change.

As the technology has become cheaper, neurofeedback is becoming big business, with some dubious claims being made on its behalf (as a web search demonstrates).

However, despite the wild promises of some unscrupulous clinics, there is some sound science behind it and some early evidence it might help to improve certain mental abilities.

There’s even a game – Mindball – that you can play purely with the power of thought. All in the Mind tries it out!

Link to BBC All in the Mind website with audio.

The winners for the 2006 National Brain-Science Writing Prize have been announced with the full text of all the winning entries available online.

The first prize for a newspaper article written about the brain was awarded to Rebecca Poole for her article on false memories.

The first prize for an article written by a researcher was awarded to Dr Angelica Ronald for an article looking at the links between ADHD and autism.

The runners-up articles are on the website too, so wander over if you want some more quality neuroscience writing.

Link to 2006 National Brain-Science Writing Prize winners.

The excellent ABC Radio All in the Mind has just had an edition on delusions and insight – examining why people not only have wildly unusual psychotic experiences, but also why they don’t realise these experiences are in any way strange or unusual.

Several people are interviewed who have experienced delusions and psychosis, as well as psychologist Dr Xavier Amador who has extensively written and researched on the topic of insight.

He is co-editor of one of the key books in the field, Insight and Psychosis, and also runs workshops for friends and relatives of people with psychosis.

Insight is a tricky concept, because it is not clear exactly what the person is supposed to have insight into.

It is usually broken down into three factors:

* Does the person believe they have a mental illness?
* Does the person believe the symptoms they are experiencing are due to the mental illness?
* Does the person accept treatment?

Although someone who believes they are dead must be lacking insight into something, the last factor is particularly contentious and there is a degree to which ‘having insight’ is a measure of how much you agree with your psychiatrist.

For example, one measure of insight into the negative symptoms of schizophrenia is to ask the person to fill out a subjective rating of their symptoms, and compared it to the same rating completed by the psychiatrist.

The difference in score is supposed to represent the extent of the patients lack of insight, but it could just as easily represent the psychiatrist’s lack of insight into the patient’s condition.

It is also not clear how the lack of insight in psychotic mental illness links to lack of insight after brain injury – known as anosognosia.

This can be so striking that a person with paralysis or even blindness after brain injury may be completely unaware that they can no longer move or see.

All in the Mind discusses how it’s possible to help someone who believes there is nothing wrong with them, even when there’s a clear difference in the perception of reality.

Link to All in the Mind on insight and psychosis.

The Christmas holidays are approaching and I suspect updates to Mind Hacks will be a little sporadic over the next week or two.

Hopefully we’ll manage some posts but I’m not sure how internet access will work out as we travel about spreading good cheer (or, alternatively, we might just be travelling about).

Enjoy yourself, wherever and whoever you are!

The New York Times have published a second article based on internal documents from drug company Eli Lilly over the promotion of an antipsychotic medication known as Zyprexa or olanzapine – this time claiming that Eli Lilly have been deliberately promoting the drug for unlicensed conditions.

When a drug is ‘licensed’, this is not a license to prescribe the drug, but a license for the drug company to advertise it for a specific condition.

For example, olanzapine is licensed for schizophrenia, meaning it can be advertised as treatment for this condition.

However, doctors have the freedom to prescribe the drug for anything they want to if they think it will help. This is known as ‘off-label’ prescribing.

Promoting ‘off-label’ prescribing is illegal, however, and the article in the New York Times suggests Eli Lilly has been doing exactly this by marketing the use of olanzapine for dementia and undiagnosed psychotic symptoms.

This campaign was allegedly targeted at ‘primary care physicians’ (i.e. GPs or non-specialist doctors) rather than specialists.

In terms of marketing, pharmaceutical companies often consider GPs to be soft targets as they have to know ‘a little about a lot’, and so are more likely to be persuaded by selective data on a particular topic.

From the article:

The documents also show that Lilly encouraged primary care doctors to treat the symptoms and behaviors of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder even if the doctors had not actually diagnosed those diseases in their patients. Lilly’s market research had found that many primary care doctors did not consider themselves qualified to treat people with schizophrenia or severe bipolar disorder.

In response to these and previous allegation made by the New York Times, Eli Lilly have issued a statement denying any wrongdoing and have suggested that the allegations are based on an unrepresentative selection of company documents:

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. As part of Lilly’s commitment to patients and healthcare professionals, many high-level Lilly physicians and researchers — along with researchers from outside Lilly — were engaged for a number of years to study the issue of Zyprexa and diabetes. Leaked documents involving these discussions do not represent an accurate view of company strategy or conduct.

Link to NYT article ‘Drug Files Show Maker Promoted Unapproved Use’.
Link to response from Eli Lilly.

A new edition of hardcore consciousness research journal Psyche has just been released online with a special issue focusing on consciousness, causation and the links to the physical structure of the brain.

All the papers are freely available online, and address the arguments put forward in philosopher Gregg Rosenberg’s influential book A Place for Consciousness (ISBN 0195168143).

Rosenberg has a page about the book, with several of the key chapters available online.

In fact, for those wanting a quick overview of his theory, he’s put together some PowerPoint slides which explain the key points in nine easy steps.

The new edition of Psyche examines Rosenberg’s arguments in some detail, as the link between consciousness and brain function, and the causal role of mental phenomena are two of the most important and difficult parts of modern consciousness research.

Link to Psyche.
Link to page on Rosenberg’s book with chapters and summary.

So what happened to the Nature Neuroscience podcast? The first one was really good but no more have appeared. I don’t think these new fangled internet things are their strong point somehow.

OpenStim is a community that aims to develop a magnetic brain stimulator which you can build and use in your own home.

The technique is known as ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation’ or TMS. In essence, TMS is a powerful computer controlled electromagnet that sends focused magnetic pulses into the brain.

The magnetic field induces a current in the neurons, which then become stimulated as a result.

This can be used to alter the brain in specific ways, either activating or deactivating certain areas of the cortex.

This is often used for neuroscience research. For example, if you suspect that a certain brain area is involved during a certain task, you can alter the function of the brain area and see if participants perform the task any differently.

Existing research has used this technique and has shown that stimulating certain areas improves mood or, in some instances, cognitive performance.

The OpenStim project states their aims as:

1. Create a community that designs the core technology for a safe, highly functional, inexpensive, efficacious noninvasive transcranial magnetic stimulator (TMS) device for stimulating the central nervous system.

2. Facilitate experimentation and exchange of ideas, on the topic of modulation of brain function in a variety of people and contexts, so that we can learn more about the neural circuits mediating our subjective experiences, and improve mental functions (aka hacking your brain).

Although they aim to build a “safe” device, I can’t actually see anything on their site which specifies exactly what they define as safe.

In the research, TMS most commonly refers to specifically designed high powered electromagnets that pump out about 1-1.5 Tesla of field strength in millisecond bursts.

This is very powerful, although because of the thickness of the skull and the need to use only the most focused part of the magnetic field, it is only enough to reliably discharge a few centimetres square of neurons just below the skull.

However, a significant danger is that with enough pulses, a seizure is triggered.

Most of the protocols in the TMS literature and research centres are designed to avoid this. When these limits are adhered to, TMS is very safe and no long-lasting effects have been found.

However, even if you make sure you keep within the accepted ‘safe limits’ for TMS stimulation, with home-built kit you are less likely to be sure that your equipment is genuinely doing what it is supposed to.

In other words, builder beware! Your brain is fragile, so make sure you know the risks before altering it in anyway.

Link to OpenStim project.

The New York Times has obtained documents suggesting that drug company Eli Lilly deliberately tried to cover up life-threatening side-effects of one of its most widely used antipsychotic drugs – known as Zyprexa or olanzapine.

Antipsychotic drugs are largely used to treat hallucinations and delusions and seem to have their main effect by blocking ‘D₂‘ dopamine receptors in the mesolimbic pathway of the brain.

Antipsychotics are far from perfect. They all have serious side-effects and don’t seem to help about 25% of psychotic patients.

Nevertheless, as the first effective treatment for psychosis they are one of the most significant advances in the history of psychiatry.

The newer generation of antipsychotic drugs, called ‘atypical antipsychotics’, of which olanzapine is one, were originally marketed as having fewer side effects than the first generation ‘typical antipsychotics’.

However, it is now clear that the newer drugs don’t seem to have less side-effects, just different ones.

Instead of producing a Parkinson’s disease-like movement disorder (a big problem with the older antipsychotics), the newer medications are more likely to increase the risk of diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

In short, atypical antipsychotics make you fat, often dangerously so, and olanzapine is thought to have one of the strongest weight-gain effects.

So the fact that olanzapine has side-effects is not breaking news.

What is new, however, is that Eli Lilly seem to have known about these side-effects before they were common knowledge while simultaneously attempting to play-down and obscure them through marketing.

In 2002, for example, Lilly rejected plans to give psychiatrists guidance about how to treat diabetes, worrying that doing so would tarnish Zyprexa’s reputation. “Although M.D.’s like objective, educational materials, having our reps provide some with diabetes would further build its association to Zyprexa,” a Lilly manager wrote in a March 2002 e-mail message.

But Lilly did expand its marketing to primary care physicians, who its internal studies showed were less aware of Zyprexa’s side effects. Lilly sales material encouraged representatives to promote Zyprexa as a “safe, gentle psychotropic” suitable for people with mild mental illness.

This has only come to light because lawyer James B. Gottstein gave The New York Times internal documents that Eli Lilly originally released to someone else on the condition they wouldn’t be made public.

Despite their problems, psychiatric drugs are a valuable treatment for mental illness.

Unfortunately, as a number of recent exposés have highlighted, the drug industry is rife with spin, cover-ups, dodgy data and questionable marketing strategies.

This makes it difficult to make a reasonable assessment of the costs and benefits of these drugs for both working psychiatrists and the general public.

We can only hope that in the future pharmaceutical companies will be more honest about the negative effects of their drugs as well as the positive, meaning better treatment for all.

In the mean time, No Free Lunch is a campaign group asking doctors not to take drug company gifts and to take a critical look at corporate promotion.

Whether you’re a clinician or consumer, their web site has plenty of research and material which is an effective antidote to healthcare hype.

Link to NYT article ‘Eli Lilly Said to Play Down Risk of Top Pill’ (via TWS).
Link to No Free Lunch.

With the tragic and chilling news that the bodies of five women have been found in woodland near Ipswich in the UK, forensic psychology has featured heavily in the news as the police hunt to catch the killer intensifies.

Forensic psychology is psychology applied to the law or legal system. For example, it can involve treating mentally ill prisoners, assessing people for court evidence, working with legal staff, or, in this case, analysing crime patterns to build up a profile of the likely offender.

In the current cases, the forensic psychologists are likely to be looking carefully at the evidence and seeing how well it matches known psychological characteristics of similar cases in the past.

While TV usually portrays this as giving a ‘personality profile’ of possible suspect or suspects, it could also suggest lifestyle, occupation or motivations.

This might not be enough to describe a single person, but might significantly reduce the field or allow the police to eliminate a number of suspects.

The Times had a short article yesterday, which includes audio (mp3) of forensic psychologist Dr David Nias discussing possible motivations of the killer.

However, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this and many of the other press stories are based on interviews with individual forensic psychologists who probably only have access to information from the media, and so are best considered as professional speculation.

New Scientist seems to have the best coverage and discusses the limitations and difficulties of offender profiling as well as its potential contributions to the ongoing investigation.

In light of the tragic circumstances, we can only wish the best for the investigation and the victims’ friends and families.

Link to NewSci article ‘Forensic psychologists tackle UK serial killer’.

The Echo Maker (ISBN 0374146357) is the latest novel by American writer Richard Powers that centres around someone who develops Capgras delusion after suffering brain injury during a car crash.

Capgras delusion is the belief that someone, usually a spouse or close relative, has been replaced by an identical (or near-identical) looking impostor.

It most commonly occurs in the context of schizophrenia, but most of the research on the condition has been done on people who have developed it after brain injury.

It seems to be particularly associated with damage to the right-hemisphere of the brain (as most brain injury-related delusions are), but research suggests it might be particularly linked to the loss of the automatic emotional response to familiar faces.

Current theories suggest that this damage could lead to someone being able to recognise and identify a familiar face, while also having the feeling that something doesn’t feel ‘quite right’, potentially causing a delusional belief that the person is an impostor if there are also impairments with reasoning.

The Echo Maker won the National Book Award in the USA and has made several ‘best of 2006’ lists, but hasn’t been released in the UK yet, so, annoyingly, I’ve not been able to get hold of a copy.

Philip K. Dick’s short story Impostor is widely cited as another fictional example of Capgras delusion (most probably because it got made into a film), although another one of his short stories, The Father Thing, is a much better match.

Link to Wikipedia page on ‘The Echo Maker’.
Link to page with reviews of the book (thanks Paddy!).

Propaganda news site PsyWar have just published an article on the ‘psychological warfare’ tactics used in the Israel-Lebanon war earlier this year.

PsyWar keeps meticulous archives of propaganda leaflets from wars past and present, as well as charting the increasingly sophisticated psychological techniques from both sides of contemporary conflicts.

The article notes that information warfare was used extensively in both sides of the Israel-Lebanon conflict, and has English translations of much of the propaganda.

There’s good evidence that leaflets were delivered by artillery units with ‘leaflet shells’ and electronic messages figured heavily in the campaign.

Interestingly, the end of the article has what are claimed to be the principles used by an advertising agency hired to promote a post-war message of victory.

Link to PsyWar article ‘Psychological Operations during the Israel-Lebanon War 2006’.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on PsyWar.

British philosophy magazine Philosophy Now has a special edition on that most psychological of philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, with several of the feature articles freely available online.

Wittgenstein is known as much for his character as his philosophy, and for those not familiar with his life Tim Madigan’s short introduction is a good place to start.

If you want to get your teeth into some of the philosophical ideas, Mark Jago has written a remarkably clear guide to Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language.

There’s more articles available if you pick up a copy of the magazine or have online access.

If you get a chance to see the magazine itself (a bit difficult to get hold of as many shops don’t carry it) you’ll notice that Philosophy Now is exactly what you’d expect from a philosophy magazine: a bit chaotic, endearingly eccentric and wonderfully intellectual.

Otherwise, you could do much worse than listening to a fantastic edition of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time that tackled the life and philosophy of Wittgenstein, archived online.

Link to Philosophy Now.
Link to Wikipedia page on Wittgenstein.
Link to In Our Time on Wittgenstein (with realaudio link).

If you were wondering where it had got to, it looks like the annual ‘brain scan predicts schizophrenia’ story has arrived. If you’re feeling a bit nostalgic, have a look back at some past classics.

It’s not that these studies don’t show any predictive value of brain scans, but so far, none have proved reliable enough to be even slightly useful in clinical practice.

It’s also likely that brain scans will never predict schizophrenia 100%, because the evidence suggests that schizophrenia isn’t a single cut-and-dry condition, like the flu or arthritis – it’s just a vaguely described set of experiences that tend to occur together and often cause the person distress or impairment.

In fact, two people could have schizophrenia and not share any symptoms. In other words, there’s little that’s definitive and definite to predict.

Now, if only brain scans could predict when journalists will write a ‘brain scans predict’ article, then we might be able to intervene with the appropriate help.

UPDATE: There’s some good comments on this post, and CopperKettle has provided a link to the full paper.

Link to BBC News story “Scans ‘can predict schizophrenia'”.