Category: News

Nigel Smith is a respected British comedy writer whose new show Vent has just hit BBC Radio 4. It is based around his experiences of suffering a demyelinating brain stem lesion and falling into a serious coma.

Luckily, Smith has recovered, although still has difficulties with many everyday activities, but has managed to write a dryly comic show about the darkest of times with some wit and panache.

The show is full of reverie and comic fantasy, contrasted with incisive commentary on the banality of everyday family life when a member is less than willing to engage in conversation.

“Some rules about comas: 1) Mothers never switch off the life support. They can’t do it. Maybe it’s love? Maybe it’s for the first time since you were on the tit, they’ve got you where they want you. They finally know where you are, they know you’re warm, you’re eating regularly and you’re having those quiet nights in they always dreamed of.”

The show is archived online, so you can listen to past episodes if you’re not in the UK.

Link to audio archive of Vent.
Link to Times article on Smith’s experiences.

BBC News are reporting that Syd Barrett, the troubled genius and founding member of Pink Floyd, has passed away.

Barrett was rumoured to have had mental health difficulties, and his later solo albums are repleat with commentaries on the experience of mental turmoil.

He is commonly cited as one of the most influential musicians of his generation.

Shine on you crazy diamond.

Neurons in a Dish: Scientists at the Potter Lab have found that blobs of neurons cultured in a dish spontaneously generate hierarchical structures of periodic activity with population-wide spatiotemporal structure demonstrating oscillations. Certain patterns persist for hours, implying that perhaps that such in vitro neural preparations could be used to store memories.

Nerve Stump Interface: Horch and Dhillon have found that stimulation by electrodes implanted into the peripheral nerve stumps of amputees allow amputees to feel graded, discrete touch sensations in the phantom hand, and recorded motor neurons in the nerve stump can be used to set grip force and position in an artificial arm.

Re-assigning a Nerve: Kuiken has pioneered a technique in which remaining peripheral nerves that would have sent fibers to stimulate muscles in and transmit sensory information from an amputated limb, can be surgically moved within the body to an intact muscle, such as the pectoralis major. A small patch of this muscle ends up serving as a biopotential amplifier for the nerve stump, such that gross EMG signals from the newly reinnervated muscle patch can be used as myoelectric signals. Furthermore, when the skin overlying the patch is touched, the amputee experiences it as if the absent limb were being touched,

The most recent Synapse has just been published on A Blog Around the Clock with a collection of new psychology and neuroscience writing for your reading pleasure…

In addition, there’s also a neuroscience competition embedded in this edition:

This time, you have a puzzle to solve. Next to each entry, there is an image depicting the structural formula of a neurotransmitter, neurohormone or neuromodulator. Your job is to figure out what they are and leave the answers in the comments (or in your own posts that link to this edition)…

The winner – whoever is the first to correctly identify all ten compounds – will be highlighted first and with an extra post, when I host Encephalon, the other neurocarnival, later this Fall on November 6th.

There’s a few of the ‘classic nine’ in there, and the molecule accompanying the Mind Hacks post looks to be related to glycine, but I haven’t got any further than that.

Best of luck!

Link to latest Synapse neuroscience writing carnival.

The Guardian has the obituary of Dr John Beloff, the British researcher who was one of the pioneers of academic parapsychology.

Beloff had already been conducting research in parapsychology. In 1961, he and a physics student, Leonard Evans, carried out an innovative experiment in psychokinesis (PK) – that is, roughly, mind over matter. In this experiment, radioactive decay served as a source of randomness, and the objective was to influence the radioactive source so that its particle emissions were non-random. This was the first instance of what later became a standard approach to PK research, and it marked an important advance over using more mathematically and physically complex objects (for example, falling dice or coins) as PK targets. Although the Beloff and Evans experiment yielded null results, their report has been cited more often than any other of his experimental papers.

Link to obituary of Dr John Beloff.
Link to John Beloff’s website.

As a follow on to their previous ‘greatest minds on the minds’ event, the Royal Institution will be hosting a lively event in London to find out what is the worst idea ever to grace the worlds of psychology and psychiatry.

The debate will happen on Tuesday 18 July and will feature lobotomy, post-trauma counselling, drug company advertising and Freudian psychotherapy.

Interestingly, Freud also featured as one of the ‘great minds’ featured in the last debate. The fact he turns up in both is a lovely illustration of his still controversial legacy.

Lobotomy is notorious for its over-zealous application and long-term damaging effects, post-trauma counselling – otherwise known as ‘debriefing’ – has been shown to make trauma worse in some people, and drug company advertising is widely cited for its insidious effects on both doctors and patients.

As with the previous event, the debate will finish with an audience vote to settle the matter. Let the battle begin!

Link to details of event from the Royal Institution.

Brain Ethics has picked up on the launch of the Neuroethics Society – a professional organisation for those interested in the ethics of neuroscience and neurological enhancement.

It is being kicked off by neuropsychologist Professor Martha Farah who is one of the pioneers in the field and wrote an influential article on neuroethics [pdf] that introduced the field to many in the mainstream of cognitive science.

The society is hoping to organise some upcoming conferences and focus some much needed attention in the increasingly pervasive influence of neurotechnology on society.

Link to Brain Ethics on launch of the Neuroethics Society.
Link to Neuroethics Society webpage.
pdf of Martha Farah’s article ‘Neuroethics: the practical and the philosophical’.

The first edition of the online neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon has just been published and contains a wealth of new stories and articles.

The articles cover everything from the cognitive neuroscience of the executive system to the workings of hair cells in the inner ear.

Enjoy!

Psychiatric Times has a fascinating article on people who hoard animals – a type of compulsive hoarding.

The report is from the The Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium – an professional association of researchers and clinicians who aim to better understand the condition.

A recent news report describes the sort of behaviour the association is aiming to explain:

A few years back the focus was on Marilyn Barletta, Petaluma’s so-called ‘cat woman’ who was found to have been keeping 196 cats in her home. In the past week, also in Petaluma, nearly 1,000 rats were discovered in filthy conditions in the home of Roger Dier.

And Friday, in South San Francisco, a man with a soft spot for bunnies was reported to the local humane society. When animal welfare workers arrived at his home, they discovered 80 rabbits chewing on day-old bagels and cauliflower.

The Psychiatric Times article discusses the current explanations for animal hoarding, which are a wide and varied list.

They include the idea that animal hoarders have delusional beliefs about special abilities to communicate with animals, that hoarding is an early sign of dementia, that animals may be collected for sexual gratification, that the condition may be a form of addiction and that hoarding is a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Needless to say, the actual behaviour may be motivated by a wide range of factors, and one theory is not meant to explain everyone who hoards animals.

Link to article ‘People Who Hoard Animals’ (via World of Psychology).
Link to The Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium webpage.

Encephalon is neuroscience carnival to which anyone can submit their online writing to be featured in the forthcoming edition.

It will run on alternate weeks to Synapse, so there should be two fascinating digests of mind and brain writing for your viewing pleasure.

The first edition of Encepahlon is due to appear on the Neurophilosopher’s Blog on Monday.

Check out the Encephalon webpage for details of how to submit your writing.

Neuroscience writer Sandra Kiume has started Channel N – a blog that will point avid readers towards neuroscience and related video on the internet.

Sandra already writes for Neurofuture, Omni Brain and World of Psychology and this is a welcome addition to her prolific output.

There’s an intriguing letter in today’s Nature by Oliver Sacks and Ralph Siegel who report on a patient who has developed stereopsis (3D binocular vision) after 50 years of stereoblindness.

It is generally thought that most visual abilities develop in the first years of life, and if they do not get a chance to develop (usually through eye problems), they cannot be gained later.

For example, people who have had severe congenital cateracts from birth that prevent light from entering the eye, often have trouble making sense of objects if this condition is cured later in life, because the brain has not developed the necessary functions to make sense of objects.

Sacks and Siegel’s letter follows a previous report in Nature that reported on the development of useful vision after 30 years of blindness.

Both of these reports suggest that the brain is more ‘plastic’ (able to reorganise) than was previously thought. This is contrast to ten years ago, when it was largely accepted that the brain developed few new functions after early adulthood.

Link to letter ‘Seeing is believing as brain reveals its adaptability’.

New presenter Claudia Hammond kicks off a new series of BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind with a programme that includes features on decision making, synaesthesia and psychiatric patients writing their own medical notes.

The section on decision making particularly focuses on decisions that involve predicting how the future will turn out and how prior knowledge can both help and hinder our choices.

Neuroscientist Catherine Mulvenna discusses her work on synaesthesia, the condition where the senses are often connected, so, for example, words can be experienced as colours. Mulvenna is using fMRI to look at brain activation in synaesthetes to understand how this happens in the brain.

Finally, clinical psychologist Dr Susan Grey discusses a project where psychiatric patients are asked to contribute to their own medical notes when they are admitted to hospital.

I had the pleasure of working with Dr Grey on the ward she works on, and it’s great to see some of her innovations are becoming recognised. Patients often appreciate the chance to make their own contributions to the medical record, as hospitalisation can sometimes seem disempowering and coercive to many.

Link to All in the Mind webpage with audio.

ABC Radio National’s In Conversation has an interview with psychologist Susan Gilchrist who has been studying the psychology of dreams and emotion.

As part of her research, she’s been asking people to record and rate and emotional content of their dreams, as well as the emotional impact of the events during the week.

One interesting finding is that the emotional theme of a dream may be more influenced by the average emotional experience during the past week, rather than just the day before.

Gilchrist seems to be taking an empirical approach to an area that was traditionally tackled by Freudian analysis, and was subsequently
ignored as unresearchable.

Link to transcript and audio of Susan Gilchrist interview.

Petra Boyton has an article on yet another piece of useless pop psychology from Cliff Arnall – the guy who specialises in making up ‘formulas’ about the happiest day of the year and other such banalities.

These press releases are usually on behalf of a PR company and usually make the headlines, despite being complete nonsense.

Cliff, stop it.