Category: News

Scientific American has released another one if its special editions, the most recent is on the science of evolution and the rise of intelligence.

From what I can make out, all the articles have been published before in the regular Scientific American, but are collected together in place to make a special theme issue.

The ‘Becoming Human’ issue looks at the cognitive and social skills of apes, the migration patterns of early humans, the curious case of the homo floresiensis (‘hobbit’) fossils and the current theories and controversites over the evolution of mind and intelligence.

I picked up a copy in the newsagent but it looks like you can also download a version from their website for $5.

Link to SciAm special edition ‘Becoming Human’.

American medical journal JAMA has just published two fascinating articles on the impact of war: one on the neuropsychological effects of combat duty on US soldiers, and the other on the impact of chemical weapons on the mental health of Iranian chemical warfare survivors.

The study on US soldiers has been covered by the New York Times and the original research paper is freely available online.

It found that compared to non-deployed soldiers, previously deployed soldiers in Iraq scored worse on measures of sustained attention, verbal learning, and visual-spatial memory and had higher scores on measures of tension and confusion. In contrast, their general reaction time had improved.

The authors of the study suggest that these differences may result from the effects of persistent arousal on the brain which heighten the ability to react quickly at the expense of dampening attention, learning, and memory for things that are not threat-relevant.

The research on the impact of chemical weapons focused on three towns in northern Iran (Oshnaviyeh, Rabat and Sardasht) that had suffered either ‘low-intensity’ conventional warfare, ‘high-intensity’ conventional warfare or a mixture of conventional and chemical warfare in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

Researchers interviewed civilian residents of the towns and found frightening levels of lasting PTSD, anxiety symptoms and severe depressive symptoms, particularly in those who had experienced the additional horror of chemical weapon attack.

The chances of mental disorder were 7.2 to 14.6 times higher for chemical weapons survivors than for individuals who had experienced ‘low-intensity’ warfare.

Link to New York Times article (via Frontal Cortex).
Link to full-text JAMA paper on US soldiers.
Link to abstract of paper on chemical warfare.

The UK goverment commissioned psychopharmacologist Professor David Nutt and neuroscientist Professor Colin Blakemore to rank recreational drugs by their dangerousness.

The list has just been published in today’s The Independent and gives some surprising results. Unusually, the list contains both legal and illegal drugs.

The drugs were ranked by ratings which took into account a combination of their physical damage, social harm and addictive properties.

In rank order of harmfulness:

1. Heroin
2. Cocaine
3. Barbituates
4. Street methadone
5. Alcohol
6. Ketamine
7. Benzodiazepines (e.g. Vallium)
8. Amphetamines
9. Tobacco
10. Buprenorphine
11. Cannabis
12. Solvents
13. 4-MTA
14. LSD
15. Methylphenidate (Ritalin)
16. Anabolic steroids
17. GHB
18. Ecstasy
19. Alkyl Nitrites (poppers)
20. Khat

I would like to point out to my ex-girlfriend that Red Bull is not listed among them.

There’s more information on each drug here and an article about the consultation here.

Apparently, the government were a little reticient to publish the report, considering the legal clasification is completely out of whack with this analysis.

Don’t worry, this isn’t about telepathy and doesn’t involve Uri Gellar.

No, it’s about a team of three Italian researchers who won $10000 in a brain-activity interpretation competition organised by the University of Pittsburgh earlier this year.

Entrants were provided with the fMRI data and behavioural reports recorded when four people watched two movies. The competitors’ task was to create an algorithm that could use the viewers ongoing brain activity to predict what they were thinking and feeling as the film unfolded. The crunch test came from a third film. This time the competing researchers were shown the viewers’ brain activity only, and they had to predict the behavioural data – what the viewers had reported seeing and feeling during the film on a moment-by-moment basis. The full rules are here.

The Italians – Emanuele Olivetti, Diego Sona, and Sriharsha Veeramachaneni were the most accurate, achieving a correlation of .86 for basic features, such as whether an instant of the film contained music. The full results are here.

I heard about this from the latest Nature Neuroscience editorial. They discuss the competition in the context of the increasing trend for researchers to see if they can predict what people are thinking based on their overall brain activity (this often gets discussed in relation to lie detection), rather than the more traditional correlational/localisation approach of seeing what brain activity occurs where, when people are thinking certain things.

The Nature Neurosci. editors welcome the shift:

Neuroimaging’s obsession with localization has often led to accusations that it is little more than phrenology. By using population responses across the whole brain to ask how rather than where information is processed, neuroimaging may be starting to come of age.

Link to the competition website.

World of Psychology has a short but interesting article on the increasing trend for people to order unprescribed psychiatric medication as a form of self-treatment or simply to get their kicks.

The trend is being fuelled by ‘no prescription’ web sites that will deliver drugs to anywhere in the world and online instructions of dubious origin.

Link to article ‘Self-medicating Online’.

The latest issue of Prospect magazine features a fresh in-depth analysis of whether there is such a thing as a criminal personality. The author David Rose of the Observer notes that contemporary politicans have tended to focus on the social causes of criminality – think of Blair’s ‘tough on the causes of crime’ speech. But he points to new research showing that genetic factors are also key, in particular he highlights research by Terrie Moffitt and colleagues at the Institute of Psychiatry, including a study showing that whether childhood maltreatment leads to later increased risk of criminality depends in part on the variant of the MAOA gene that a person has. The gene codes for the enzyme monoamine oxidase A, and is involved in the regulation of neurotransmitter levels. A person with a low activity variant of this gene who is maltreated is far more likely to develop antisocial behaviour.

Link to Prospect article (open access).
Link to the Dunedin Study.

PsyWar is a website dedicated to the dark arts of psychological warfare and propoganda.

It has a huge archive of propoganda and psychological warfare material from wars past, including copies of leaflets dropped into enemy territory to persuade soldiers and civilians that they were fighting for a lost cause.

The website also has articles and analyses of the techniques used in times past (including a fasinating article on the use of rumour campaigns) with commentary on their effectiveness and cultural impact.

It is interesting to compare these historical materials, largely created by government departments, with the increasing trend for corporations to provide ‘psyops’ services on a consultancy basis (as previously reported on Mind Hacks).

More recently, PsyWar reports on how psychological warfare is being used in the current campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Link to PsyWar website.

In a somewhat bizarre turn of events, Kellogg’s Rice Krispies have agreed to print ‘autism awareness’ messages on the side of their US breakfast cereal packets in partnership with American lobbying group Autism Speaks.

Autism Speaks is a controversial group in some areas, as they claim to speak for people with autism and tend to use emotional messages (compare with the UK’s National Autistic Society) to promote the idea that autism is a “neurological disorder” and “the nation’s fastest-growing serious developmental disorder”.

Although autism is associated with serious learning disabilities in some, many with autism are quite functional and happy to be autistic, and resent the idea that everyone with autism has a ‘neurological disorder’.

Along these lines, a recent edition of NPR radio show All Things Considered looked at the views of people with autism who argue that we should be aiming to accept people with autism, rather than ‘cure’ them.

Furthermore, the idea that cases of autism are on the increase is controversial, largely owing to the fact that the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders has significantly widened in the last 30 years (as discussed recently on Mind Hacks) and the knowledge of autistic-like traits has become more common.

The cereal packets contain a list of “a few of the possible early signs” of autism and then encourages people to consult their doctor if they have concerns about their child.

Link to info on campaign from Autism Speaks.
Link to critical view from Autism Diva blog.

Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Lab at Osaka University in Japan, has created an android double of himself and intends to use it to give lectures to test how well his creation recreates the ‘presence’ of genuine human interaction.

Ishiguro was recently in the news when he demonstrated a female android he had created which was a copy of a popular Japanese news reader.

One of his main aims is to understand the subtleties of face-to-face human interaction so he can reproduce this artificially and overcome the so-called ‘uncanny valley‘ that makes close-to-human robots seem synthetic and unnatural.

Link to Wired article on Ishiguro’s android double.

The 4th International Conference on Memory is currently in full swing in the beautiful Australian city of Sydney, and there’s been a couple of interesting news reports from presentations on deja vu and jamais vu research.

I’m sure d√©j√† vu is familiar to you, but you may never have encountered jamais vu before. [Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I shall be here all evening].

Although details are a bit sketchy, a report from AFP News gives the outline of an experiment on déjà vu by Chris Moulin and colleagues who used hypnosis to experimentally induce familiarity in participants for information they had not recently encountered.

The 18 [participants] were told that when they were next presented with a word in a red frame, they would feel that the word was familiar, although they would not know when they last saw it. But if they saw a word in a green frame, they would think that the word belonged to the original list of 24.

The volunteers were then taken out of hypnosis and presented with a series of words in frames of various colours. Some of the words were not in the original list of 24 and were framed in red or green. Ten of the volunteers said they felt an odd sensation when they saw new words in red, and five others said this sensation definitely felt like deja vu.

ABC News reports on an experiment on jamais vu (a feeling of unfamiliarity when encountering something familiar) by Akira O’Connor and colleagues that involved asking participants by write down the same word over and over until it started feeling ‘peculiar’.

These experiences were described as being similar to classic jamais vu, as described in the literature on people who have permanent or intense jamais vu as part of a neurological or psychiatric condition.

The abstracts of all the talks are available as one large pdf file, but for convenience, I’ve included the abstracts of the d√©ja vu and jamais vu presentations below the fold.

By the way, if anyone attending ICOM-4 has any photos or reports online, let us know, as it would be great to link to them.

Continue reading “It’s like jamais vu never again”

The ever excellent ABC Radio All in the Mind has a special edition on the psychology of stalking, investigating the drives and motivations of persistent stalkers as well as the impact on their victims.

In order to better understand stalking, Paul Mullen’s group have categorised people who stalk according to what motivates them. There’s the rejected stalker, usually ex-partners trying to reinstate a relationship. The intimacy seeker, who professes love but is oblivious to their victim’s feelings – people who stalk celebrities usually fall into this category and are the most persistent. There’s the incompetent suitor, who lacks the social skills necessary to establish an intimate relationship; the resentful stalker, who’s motivated by anger and a desire for revenge – they can be very frightening but rarely physically violent. And lastly, and thankfully the most rare, is the predatory stalker – they are driven by sadistic pleasure, their stalking is sexual in nature and often leads to attack.

The British Psychological Society magazine The Psychologist published an article on stalking a few years ago (pdf) also examining this intriguing yet disturbing phenomenon.

Link to audio and transcript of AITM on stalking.
pdf of article on stalking from The Psychologist.

After attending April’s “Who’s the greatest? Minds that changed our minds” debate, and last night’s “From bad to worse: the worst ideas on the mind” debate – both hosted by the Royal Institution, I thought I’d give a quick summary of the results.

In winning order:

Who’s the greatest
1) Aaron T. Beck inventor of CBT
2) Freud
3) Hans Eysenck
4) Karl Jaspers

Worst ideas on the mind
1) Lobotomy
2) Drug company advertising
3) Post-trauma counselling
4) Freudian theory of hysteria

The BBC kicks off a season on memory in a few days that aims to explore the impact of memory on our everyday lives as well as encouraging people to improve their memory to keep it sharp.

The Memory Experience includes a series of TV programmes, radio programmes and web resources that will also attempt to explain the psychology and neuroscience of memory to viewers and listeners.

You can even test your memory online and take part in a national survey of autobiographical memories of people in the UK.

Link to ‘Memory Experience’ TV website.
Link to ‘Memory Experience’ website with links to radio programmes.

I’m a bit skeptical about this story, but I’m not sure whether it’s just because it’s on AOL’s news service (not known for their cutting edge journalism) or whether it’s because it has a cutesy video of the boy ‘connecting’ with dolphins. If accurate though, it’s quite an amazing talent.

Completely blind since the age of 3, after retinal cancer claimed both his eyes (he now wears two prostheses), Ben has learned to perceive and locate objects by making a steady stream of sounds with his tongue, then listening for the echoes as they bounce off the surfaces around him. About as loud as the snapping of fingers, Ben’s clicks tell him what’s ahead: the echoes they produce can be soft (indicating metals), dense (wood) or sharp (glass). Judging by how loud or faint they are, Ben has learned to gauge distances.

Link to article ‘The Boy Who Sees with Sound’.

Research has been published in today’s Lancet on the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) in the population of UK children, suggesting that these disorders are more common than previously thought.

The paper reported that the prevalence of ASDs in the population is 116·1 per 10,000 of the population Рmeaning just over 1% of the population are likely to qualify for one of these diagnoses.

“One of these diagnoses” is the crucial phrase here, as Baird and colleagues were not looking just for ‘classic’ or ‘narrowly defined’ autism (diagnosed as childhood autism in the ICD-10), but at the whole of the autism spectrum disorders – also known as pervasive developmental disorders.

BBC News has a good write-up on the study including a crucial quote from the Lancet article’s main author Professor Gillian Baird:

Whether the increase is due to better ascertainment, broadening diagnostic criteria, or increased incidence is unclear.

In fact, the reported prevalence of the narrow form of autism was only 38.9 in 10,000 of the population, less than 0.4%.

In contrast, autism spectrum or pervasive developmental disorders have a much broader scope, and can include both a 10 year-old child with no language, severe learning disabilities, lack of social interest and restricted interests (‘narrow’ autism) to a bright articulate 10 year-old child who is socially awkward and bit inflexible in his thinking.

This is largely because of fairly recently included diagnoses such as ‘Asperger syndrome’, ‘Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Not Otherwise Specificed’ (PDD-NOS) and ‘Atypical Autism’ which, particularly for the latter two, have much wider criteria.

Although Baird and colleagues used systematic methods for making their diagnoses, it’s interesting that there’s quite a pressure on everyday clinicians to make these sort of diagnoses for children who are having emotional or behavioural problems.

Having one of these diagnoses entitles children to special educational support or even a place in an expensive yet well-supported special school in many areas of the UK.

Who wouldn’t want special support for their child who is doing badly in education and is constantly distressed by school life? This in turn puts pressure on local clinicians, and on the medical establishment, to recognise these difficulties by widening the diagnostic criteria.

I sometimes smile to myself when I see news stories about science and medicine being out of touch with society, since the history of medicine suggests that there is an intimate connection between medical decisions and social needs.

Link to abstract of Lancet study on ASD prevalence.
Link to BBC News story on research.

Matt and I researched and co-wrote Mind Hacks using a wiki (MoinMoin). The wiki was just right for what we were doing – a brief, intense project with lots of information which needed efficient sharing and storing. Our use of the wiki was as part of the process, rather than aiming to produce a public, finished project (like say Wikipedia). We loved using the wiki as a provisional, shared, short-term memory – an ideal note taking device which allowed us to explore the ideas and information in Mind Hacks without getting bogged down by it all. We loved it so much that we’ve written an article about what wikis are and our view of how they are best used for the O’Reilly Network, What Is a Wiki (and How to Use One for Your Projects) – let us know what you think!