Category: News

I just read a news item in Psychiatric News on the first John E. Fryer M.D. Award, named after the man who appeared in disguise as Dr H. Anonymous at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association conference to declare he was a gay psychiatrist at a time when homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness.

This has been cited as a key factor in getting homosexuality de-listed from the diagnostic manual the following year, and was a landmark event both in the history of psychiatry and gay rights.

Consequently, I was surprised to find that there was nothing about John Fryer on Wikipedia, despite having been honoured by having an award named after him and obituaries in the leading medical journals when he passed away in 2003.

So, I’ve put together a Wikipedia page for John E. Fryer with some of the fascinating story and details, but this is where I need your help.

Although I know a little about the history of psychiatry, I’m afraid I don’t know a great deal about gay culture or history, so if you do, please expand the article and mesh it in with the other relevant articles on Wikipedia.

Also, if anyone knows of any open-licensed pictures of Dr Fryer or Dr Anonymous to include in the article, or can get permission to use any pictures, please do so.

Finally, there are more details in the information in the ‘external links’ section, so if you have a few minutes to rewrite it in your own words to add to the article, this would also be very useful (and any factual corrections or fixes to my dodgy prose are also welcome!).

Link to Wikipedia page for Dr John E. Fryer.
Link to text of Dr H. Anonymous’ 1972 speech.

This month’s Scientific American has a cover story on why differences in the ‘mirror neuron‘ system may explain the social difficulties in autism – and an extended preview is available online.

Mirror neurons are cells in the brain that are active both when a person is performing an action, or when they see someone else perform an action, and have been hypothesised to be involved in perceiving and comprehending others’ actions.

The preview is written by neuroscientists V.S. Ramachandran and Lindsay Oberman and introduces an extended article (not freely available online) that argues that people with autism may develop with a dysfunctional mirror neuron system, making them less able to make sense of social interactions.

This basic difficulty could then lead to the common autistic features such as abnormalities of language development, non-verbal communication, emotion recognition and understanding others’ intentions, which all rely on social interaction to develop fully.

‘Mirror neurons’ were first discovered in monkeys by Giacomo Rizzolatti, author of the extended article. However, the mirror neuron system is poorly understood in humans, despite some interesting findings in the research literature.

Ramachandran is currently one of the most enthusiastic ‘mirror neuron’ evangelists, going as far as saying “I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology”.

One of the difficulties with this research, is that when compared on a task that involves understanding others’ actions in some way, people with autism tend to perform worse than a non-autistic comparison group.

This makes it difficult to say whether differences in performing the task are really due to differences in the mirror system, or whether it’s a more general problem, such as learning or perception difficulties.

Nevertheless, one recent study has provided some of the best evidence that mirror system differences may genuinely be present.

A team led by neuroscientist Dr Mirella Dapretto asked children with autism who had normal IQ scores to observe and imitate emotional expressions while in an fMRI brain-scanner.

They were compared to non-autistic children and the researchers found that both groups of children performed the task equally well.

Crucially, the children with autism did not show brain activity in an area of the frontal lobe called the pars opercularis – part of the ‘mirror neuron’ system.

This provides strong evidence of differences in the mirror neuron system in autism, although why this difference occurs is still a matter of debate.

For those wanting a good scientific review of the research in this area, a pdf of a recent paper by Vittorio Gallese, one of the co-authors of the extended Scientific American article, is available online.

Link to SciAm preview article ‘Broken Mirrors: A Theory of Autism’.
Link to abstract of Dapretto study.
Link to coverage of Dapretto study from BBC News.
pdf of Vittorio Gallese’s review on mirror neurons and autism.

Seed Magazine has a fantastic article written by Ogi Ogas, a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience who applied techniques from cognitive psychology to win a cool half-million on the show ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?’

Taking advantage of psychological processes such as priming and the structure of associations in memory, Ogas devised strategies to optimise his chances of winning.

The first technique I drew upon was priming. The priming of a memory occurs because of the peculiar “connectionist” neural dynamics of our cortex, where memories are distributed across many regions and neurons. If we can recall any fragment of a pattern, our brains tend to automatically fill in the rest….

I used priming on my $16,000 question: “This past spring, which country first published inflammatory cartoons of the prophet Mohammed?” I did not know the answer. But I did know I had a long conversation with my friend Gena about the cartoons. So I chatted with Meredith about Gena. I tried to remember where we discussed the cartoons and the way Gena flutters his hands. As I pictured how he rolls his eyes to express disdain, Gena’s remark popped into my mind: “What else would you expect from Denmark?”

The article is a fascinating insight into both the psychology of quiz shows, and how lab-based cognitive science relates to more pragmatic real-life situations.

Link to Seed Magazine article (thanks Paul and Candace!).

A new edition of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon has just arrived online, as has the latest instalment of British Psychological Society fortnightly psychology update, The Research Digest.

A couple of my favourites include a discussion of the possible conscious influences on the Implicit Association Test or IAT, a psychological test that supposedly tests subconscious associations, and an analysis of a study that suggests that our motivations can influence what we see.

There’s plenty more articles at the two summaries of psychology’s latest, so have a look if you’re eager for more information.

Link to Encephalon issue 10.
Link to lastest BPS Research Digest.

Neurosurgeon and author Katrina Firlik is interviewed in the latest edition of ABC Radio’s All in the Mind about her work and motivations.

Firlik wrote Brain Matters, an engaging book about the difficulties of working knuckle-deep in the brain.

The book spilt the beans on the curiosities of the neurosurgery operating theatre and the preoccupations of people who have dedicated their lives to making running repairs to the nervous system.

Katrina Firlik’s business is brains. Carving into the ‘flesh of the soul’ is her day job. The first woman admitted into one of the most prestigious neurosurgery programs, she’s just penned an insiders account of her world. Part mechanic – part scientist, her intimate encounters of diseased and damaged brains offer a unique, and grisly, lens onto our most mysterious and wondrous organ.

Link to audio and transcript of ‘The Private Life of a Brain Surgeon’.

The Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum in London has a fascinating exhibition on at the moment entitled How do you look? that investigates the role of visual cognition in painting and surgery.

The exhibition has been conceived and led by Dr John Tchalenko from Camberwell College of Arts, who has a long-standing interest in the cognitive neuroscience of painting-relevant skills.

Also involved is artist Humphrey Ocean, who has previously been brain-scanned by Tchalenko as part of a study into novice vs expert artistic skills.

How Do You Look? examines how a painter and a surgeon use their eyes in their work, how they coordinate their eye and hand movements and how these translate into actions and creative processes. The exhibition explores the similarities and differences in their work and makes comparisons with how we all use our eyes in everyday tasks and when viewing the world around us.

Dr John Tchalenko elaborates, ‘The eye captures and the brain processes the information needed at a particular instant to fulfil the task in hand. It is how the visual system works. In the scientific jargon it’s known as “eye ‚Äì hand coordination”‘. ‘The brain does not know whether it is dealing with art, surgery or everyday life. How you look depends on what the action is, not who you are.’

There’s more at the dedicated website including dates for when the exhibition is touring the UK.

It remains at the Hunterian Museum until 22nd December 2006.

Link to info from Royal College of Surgeons.
Link to ‘How do you look?’ website.

Scholarships-ar-us.org are offering $5000 in fee-money as part of their ‘Student Blogging Scholarship’. You can vote for your favourite student blogger from among the top ten finalists here.

There is only one neuroscientist in the final 10: Shelley Batts, a 3rd-year Neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, who blogs at Retrospectacle. Shelley would love to have your vote, and the money would help put her through school, promote blogging and promote neuroscience – all good things in my book!

Vote for Shelley here. Voting ends midnight Nov 5th.

An article in October’s Biological Psychiatry reports that immediate sleep maintains emotional memories and suggests an intriguing hypothesis – that post-traumatic stress disorder could be prevented by stopping people from sleeping immediately after a traumatic event.

A research team, led by psychologist Ullrich Wagner, asked tired participants to learn neutral texts (such as a piece about dressmaking) or emotional texts (such as a piece about child murder).

Some of the participants slept immediately, others were kept awake for three hours after learning.

Four years later, the participants were tested for how well they had remembered the texts.

Those who had slept immediately after learning had better memory than those who hadn’t, but only for the emotional topics.

This suggests that sleep helps consolidate memory most effectively for emotional material.

The researchers argue that these results suggest a simple way of dampening the impact of intense memories that form one of the main features of post-traumatic distress disorder: intrusive vivid memories of the event.

“From a clinical perspective, our results suggest the use of sleep deprivation in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events as a possible therapeutic measure to prevent a long-term engravement of these events in memory, thereby at least partly counteracting the development of PTSD as a disease thought to reflect overconsolidated emotional memories.”

Although not widely known, sleep deprivation is not a new treatment for psychiatric disorders.

It is known that missing a night’s sleep can significantly improve mood, even in people with severe depression.

Unfortunately, the improvement is often lost when people catch up on their sleep and it is still not clear why these effects occur.

Link to abstract of ‘Brief sleep after learning keeps emotional memories alive for years’.
Link to abstract of ‘Therapeutic use of sleep deprivation in depression’.

Two studies published this year have highlighted a stark difference in the level of psychiatric casualties between British and American troops involved in the Iraq war.

A study in the Lancet reported that only four percent of British troops in Iraq reach criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – a trauma related mental illness.

In contrast, approximately ten to twenty percent of US troops are diagnosable with the condition, according to studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In an editorial for JAMA, psychiatrists Matthew Hotopf and Simon Wessely suggest a number of reasons for why this might be the case.

The first is that US troops may be involved in more dangerous combat duty and are therefore more likely to be traumatised.

However, they suggest other factors are also likely to be important.

US tours of duty are typically for 1 year, whereas UK tours are for 6 months. This means any combat-duty-related psychological stresses are likely to be extended in US personnel.

Further factors relate to the differences in the populations of the US and UK forces:

…the groups described in the US studies were demographically different from those described here. The US forces deployed to Iraq in both studies were younger, of lower rank, and contained more reservists than our UK sample. While less than 10% of the US sample had previous experience of deployment, more than two-thirds of the UK service personnel from both cohorts had been on previous deployments in a range of settings, including both war-fighting and peacekeeping duties. They therefore had much more experience of the stresses of military deployments, and might have been more resilient to these stresses.

In other words, US forces in Iraq are more likely to be made up of younger, non-professional soldiers, on longer tours of duty, with less combat experience, in more dangerous areas, when compared to their their UK counterparts – potentially making them more vulnerable to mental illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Link to abstract of Lancet study on mental health of UK troops in Iraq.
Link to JAMA study on mental health of US troops in Iraq.
Link to NEJM study on mental health of US troops in Iraq.
Link to US National Center for PTSD Iraq War information page.

The cover story on yesterday’s The Independent on Sunday had a special report on eating disorders. The report is in several sections and covers the rising prevalence of eating disorders and the experience of people who have anorexia or bulimia.

Two main reports describe the characteristics of common eating disorders and discuss the possible contributory factors, including the growing concern over online ‘pro-ana‘ or pro-anorexia communities.

It also includes two articles on ‘Living with Anorexia‘ and ‘Living with Bulimia‘ where people who have experienced eating disorders for themselves recount the effect on their lives.

This issue has been in the media recently after Madrid fashion week banned unhealthily thin models from their catwalks and Prof Janet Treasure, head of the eating disorders service at the Institute of Psychiatry, and 40 health professional colleagues, wrote to the British Fashion Council asking them to do the same.

Link to ‘Dying to be thin: a special IoS investigation’.
Link to ‘Why one in 100 young women suffer from eating disorders’.
Link to ‘Living with Anorexia’.
Link to ‘Living with Bulimia’.

Are we paralysed by risk aversion? Is TV good for children? What do we want from science? These questions and many others will be debated at the second day of the Battle of Ideas Festival tomorrow (Sunday, 29th Oct) at the Royal College of Art, London, held in association with the Institute of Ideas. A limited number of tickets will be available on the door.

Link to the Battle of Ideas.

This week’s Nature has a fascinating and freely-accessible review (pdf) of Jonathan Moreno’s new book Mind Wars (ISBN 1932594167) that tackles both the deployment of military neuroscience research on the battlefield and the ethical issues raised by these new technologies.

Welcome to the world of Mind Wars and the military application of neuroscience, which is the subject of this fascinating and sometimes unsettling book. As the author Jonathan Moreno reveals, the US military has a longstanding interest in brain research and, as scientific understanding continues to advance, so does its appeal to the national security establishment.

The Department of Defense conducts much of its research in secret, and some of it would probably fare poorly in open peer review – for example, the military continued to fund psychic research until 1995 – but with an annual research and development budget of at least $68 billion, it can presumably afford to leave no stone unturned.

Partly because its activities are more visible, Moreno focuses especially on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which supports unclassified academic research with potential military applications. DARPA has a distinguished record of supporting innovation, including the Internet, so its involvement in brain research must be taken seriously.

Nature has put some relevant links online from the review, so you can follow up the topic if you’re interested.

There’s also more about the book, including some (very) brief excerpts and a Q&A with the author on the Dana website.

It’s also worth noting that Moreno will be discussing the topic and his new book on November 28th in New York, at an event hosted by The New York Academy of Sciences.

pdf of review of Mind Wars (thanks Tom!).
Link to info on book from Dana Press.
Link to details of Moreno ‘Mind Wars’ talk in New York.

I just discovered from The Neurophilosopher’s blog that Nature Neuroscience have launched a (presumably monthly) podcast where the latest in neuroscience research is discussed.

It seems that it will only discuss research published in Nature journals, however.

This may seem surprising to those unaware how science and scientific publishing works, but it makes good business sense for Nature.

Scientific journals make money on the basis of advertising (a large part) and readership (through charging for subscriptions, online access and single article reprints).

They vie to be the most prestigious journals by having the widest readership and attracting the best research for publication.

In turn, scientists’ careers are often based on getting their research published in the most prestigious journals because this should guaruntee it is widely read and has the greatest impact.

Having a journal-sponsored podcast that might discuss and, therefore, promote, any of the articles in the publication gives scientists an extra reason to submit their work to the journal.

Whereas discussing research from competitors’ journals would just be giving free advertising to commercial rivals.

That said, the Nature journals are among the most prestigious science publications, and a monthly discussion even of their articles alone is likely to keep you informed of some of the most important developments in neuroscience.

Link to Nature Neuroscience podcast.

Surely this isn’t news? BBC News is reporting that ‘stay-up-forever’ drug modafinil has been tested on UK troops.

The drug, which prevents sleep and increases cognitive performance but does not cause the same ‘wired’ effect as amphetamines, has been used by the US military for several years.

One of the problems with amphetamines, the previous military drug of choice, is that over time it vastly increases the risk of paranoia and psychosis (obviously not good for heavily armed soldiers), whereas the risk with modafinil seems, at least at this stage, to be minimal in comparison.

It has been previously reported that the UK Ministry of Defence bought thousands of doses of modafinil prior to 2004.

It’s hardly a shock that they’ve been given to troops in an attempt to give them a cognitive edge over the opposition.

Did anyone really think that they were bought in case there was a massive influx of soldiers with narcolepsy?

One bizarre aspect, however, is the BBC News story reports that modafinil pills are called ‘zombies’ on the “drug scene”.

Modafinil is noted as having virtually no pleasurable effects, making it a poor candidate for a recreational drug. Furthermore, there seems to be few references to the nickname on the net.

The UK government have launched a campaign to warn 11-15 year-olds about the dangers of cannabis, using an ironic and lighthearted website and advert.

They’re both based around the concept of a high-street retailer for new brains. Teenagers who have trouble with their brains due to cannabis use can trade theirs in for new models.

These include the ‘Freakout-Free X50’ (Free yourself from paranoid freakouts once and for all with this little beauty!) and the ‘Spewstopper’ (Whether smoking a spliff or a bong, say no to embarrassing puking sessions!).

The comical tone is obviously meant to connect with teenagers who are immune, on principal, to dire warnings about partaking in illegal drugs.

Two UK mental health charities have criticised the adverts for not warning about the more extreme and unlikely outcomes of cannabis use (such as schizophrenia) and even for potentially increasing the popularity of cannabis.

Actually, it seems that the adverts are focusing much more on the short-term unpleasant effects, perhaps, as these are the least socially acceptable among teenagers.

Maybe this is in the hope that this will reduce consumption and have a knock-on benefit for mental health.

Like many drug campaigns I remember from teenage years, my concern is that this campaign is still a little unbalanced.

I suspect not describing the positive as well as the negative aspects of drugs leads people to disbelieve most things they’ve heard from a particular source if they subsequently take something and thoroughly enjoy themselves, contrary to the ‘received wisdom’.

This is purely speculation on my part, however, as I’ve had little luck tracking down relevant research, so the results of any studies on the effectiveness of different types of drug education would be particularly interesting and gratefully received.

Link to Brain Warehouse website.

The latest edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just arrived on the net with plenty of musings on the mind and brain to keep you occupied.

Favourites include an article on the balance of activation in the cortical hemispheres and the link to paranormal experiences, and a discussion of a recent critical article on the cognitive neuroscience of education.