Category: News

I’ve spent most of the last caffeine-fuelled 24 hours re-writing the Wikipedia page on anorexia nervosa which now seems to be in better shape than it was. It needs some well qualified stewards to keep an eye on it though, could this be you?

If you are a clinician, researcher or enthusiastic student with an interest in anorexia, this page could do with your input.

Otherwise, the bulimia nervosa article is in urgent need of attention, which is in a similarly poor state as the anorexia article was.

Wikipedia is currently one of the most visited sites on the internet, meaning millions of people get their information from it. The need for free, high-quality, accurate information is essential.

You could contribute your expertise to the world. Eating disorders have the highest mortality of any psychiatric disorder, so your time could literally save lives.

Unlike other forms of scientific writing, Wikipedia articles are a process rather than a product. The best pages have well-informed, open-minded and diplomatic ‘regulars’ who maintain the article in good shape, steer other contributors into best practice, and back up the information with references to academic studies.

Often this means challenging your own pre-conceptions and point-of-view (no matter how much you know) and getting a broad understanding of the subject, so the article can reflect this rounded approach.

It is an incredible learning experience, but can also be a little frustrating at times, as you meet people with a wide variety of agendas.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the anorexia article, but it also needs adopting by some specialists in the field, as I’m not an eating disorders specialist by any means.

If you’re intending to ‘adopt’ an article, it’s good practice to say hello on the discussion page and discuss your intentions as you go, and if you’ve never edited a Wikipedia page before, now’s your chance to learn.

Link to Wikipedia page on anorexia nervosa.
Link to Wikipedia page on bulimia nervosa.

Nobel prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel is featured on Scientific American’s weekly podcast where he discusses his past and current work and his speculations for the future of brain research.

Kandel has just published his autobiography In Search of Memory (ISBN 0393058638) which has got positive reviews in both the mainstream press and scientific journals.

He was also recently interviewed for Science and the City, where you can also get audio and video and a Q&A session with Kandel, and read Chapter 4 of his book.

Link to Scientific American podcast page.
mp3 of Scientific American interview.

After a short and rather unspectacular life, I take it Action Potential is dead then…

The comments page of the earlier article on the psychology of Morgellons mention that there are rumours that the whole thing is a viral marketing campaign for the upcoming Philip K. Dick movie A Scanner Darkly – it’s a theory that PKD would have been pround of, but almost certainly untrue.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the idea of a new form of parasite has been used for a marketing campaign, though.

The computer game Cold Fear was marketed by a seemingly genuine website that claimed that a new form of brain parasite had been discovered (with a cleverly doctored brain scan, reproduced on the right). The real purpose of the information was only revealed some weeks later.

If the same is true of Morgellons, however, the marketeers have managed to smuggle an article into a scientific journal and persuade at least one academic scientist to throw away his career for the sake of a quick buck.

Randy Wymore, a genuine professor of Pharmacology and Physiology at Oklahoma State University, has made several public statements about his ongoing research into the condition. If it were found that he was fuelling interest into a fake disease purely for marketing purposes, he would be booted out of his profession faster than you could say ‘free popcorn’.

Secondly, if it is a viral marketing campaign, it’s not a very good one. The claimed symptoms of Morgellons are quite different from the Scanner Darkly scene where where Charles Freck and Jerry Fabin believe themselves to be infested with ‘aphids’ and are attempting to capture them in glass jars.

Nevertheless, delusional parasitosis is a link. Morgellons is claimed to be a manifestation of this psychotic syndrome, and the fictional scene is a fine description of how the clinical condition can present.

If you were going to create a covert marketing campaign though, you’d probably want a closer match, unless you only wanted to advertise to those with an interest in obscure psychopathology.

One of the best suggestions is that the rumours themselves are a marketing campaign, capitalising on the recent media interest.

Truly, this is a rumour worthy of PKD himself, a true connoisseur of conspiracy theories and mass media scepticism. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether we are living in Philip K. Dick’s reality, or if he is living in ours.

Just a quick note to say that BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week this week is Brain Matters by Katrina Firlik (mentioned previously here and here on Mind Hacks).

The book tackles Firlik’s work as a neurosurgeon and will be broadcast in five parts. Each will be available online for a week after broadcast.

This week’s BBC Radio 4 world radio roundup show A World in Your Ear featured highlights from recent broadcasts on mental health from around the globe.

In an excerpt from Sudan Radio counsellor Moses Mayuen Akuein discusses his work with trauma victims caught up in Darfur conflict, while Real Jamaican Radio discusses maintaining good mental health on a phone-in programme.

The show features numerous other highlights, including the incredibly moving story of Howard Dully (featured previously on Mind Hacks), who was lobotomised at the age of 12 and attempts to make sense of his experiences as an adult.

Link to A World in Your Ear webpage.
realaudio of programme.

Innovative autism community software project Reactive Colours had its official launch the other day, and is now sporting a new website and numerous ‘reactivities’ to download and play online.

The project is designed to encourage individuals with autistic spectrum differences and learning disabilities to use computers, through which they can develop mouse, keyboard, programming and screen skills and deliberately emphasise the characteristics of computing that are of potential significance to people on the autism spectrum.

The project is based on open-source principles and intended to be more than just a free download. Interested people are encouraged to contribute their own programming skills to the project.

The input of people with autism and Asperger syndrome is particularly encouraged, as they are likely to have the best insight into what sort of activities will engage those on the autism spectrum.

Mind Hacks covered Reactive Colours last year where we interviewed project leader Wendy Keay-Bright about the development of the idea.

Link to Reactive Colours website and community.
Link to Reactive Colours project description.

Disclaimer: I am an open licensing advisor to the project.

A couple of encouraging pieces of news for those following the progress of open-access science journals: The open access medical journal PLoS Clinical Trials has just launched, and recent research shows that science published in open journals is more widely cited and distributed.

PLoS Clinical Trials aims to publish studies into the effectiveness of treatments, regardless of whether they show an effect or not (to avoid the publication bias whereby trials showing ‘no effect’ are dismissed as uninteresting).

The journal also demands that trials are registered before they are submitted for publication, to avoid organisations hiding the results of trials which don’t support the effectiveness of their treatment.

Furthermore, PLoS Clinical Trials does not rely on advertising from drug companies or other vested interests, meaning they are less likely to be influenced by any outside commercial pressure.

In particular, these biases have been seen as a major problem for the effective evaluation of psychiatric drugs in particular, leading to the reform of procedures for publishing and registering drug company funded studies by some journals.

The article on the advantage of publishing on open-access journals is appropriately published in PLoS Biology, and shows that the advantage even holds over journals that make their articles freely available after a delay of 6 months.

Link to PLoS Clinical Trials.
Link to editorial ‘Open Access Increases Citation Rate’ from PLoS Biology
Link to research article from PLoS Biology.

More neurologisms abound, as Zack Lynch posts about a recent conference on ‘neuroweapons’.

In a previous post, he mentioned concerns about neurowarfare – the use of weapons that target the human central nervous system.

Presumably this means nerve agents, neurotoxins and the like, rather than simply being bashed on the head with a rock (perhaps, the earliest example of a neuroweapon?).

However, the more recent discussions seem to focus on the use of technology and drugs to enhance the cognitive function of soldiers and other military personnel.

Link to Brain Waves post on neuroweapons.

London’s swanky Institute of Contemporary Arts has an ongoing series of “psychoanalytic exploration of films representing various forms of psychopathology and other emotional conditions”.

It’s been happening for a while and seems to be an ongoing project, but had totally passed me by.

Films are shown, and then discussed by members of the Institute of Psychoanalysis to try and better understand the social meaning of the movie and motivations of the characters.

The next film is Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, to be shown Sunday 14th May.

Liverpool University’s new Child Language Study Centre hopes to become the first UK-based lab to replicate and expand upon American findings published in the 90’s that led to the ‘syntactic bootstrapping’ hypothesis – the idea that children as young as two use their innate understanding of syntax to help them learn new words.

With a team of six researchers led by Professor Julian Pine, the Centre is one of the largest of its kind in the UK. And after launching last Summer, the centre is now ready to start experimenting.

“In essence the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis assumes the child has an innate predisposition to understand the syntactic properties of language. We want to know if this is true or not”, Dr. Javier Aguado-Orea, a researcher in the lab, told Mind Hacks.

In one study, the researchers will present young children with sentences containing an unfamiliar verb (e.g. ‘the boy strokes the girl’). Either side of the speaker playing the pre-recorded sentences will be two video screens showing a boy and girl, with one of them matching the action described in the spoken sentence. In this example, the structure of the sentence reveals the boy as the active player and the researchers want to know if the children can use that information to guide them to look at the correct video screen, thus facilitating their learning of the meaning of the verb ‘to stroke’.

“It can be tricky, for six months we’ve been piloting our stimuli – for example, you have to make sure that the child is looking at the correct screen based on the structure of the sentence, not because one of the characters or objects is more attractive to them”, Aguado-Orea explained.

“But if we are able to replicate this finding it would be quite powerful because it would be an indication of a very early stage in the development of language, and it would illustrate learning mechanisms that there is no other way, in our knowledge, to detect” he said.

The Centre have tested 11 children on this particular experiment so far, but they need at least 12 more. Parents willing to volunteer their child should email childlanguage[@]liv.ac.uk for further information.

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Link to lab.

Kamran Nazeer, author of a new book on being a child in a school for kids with autism, called Send in the Idiots, is interviewed on NPR radio.

Nazeer was mentioned earlier this week on Mind Hacks, and there’s some commentary and ongoing discussion about the interview on a post over at Autism Diva’s blog.

Link to NPR interview with Kamran Nazeer.

New Scientist has had a run of neuroscience-related articles recently, and this week’s cover story is no exception as it looks at developments in the science of human enhancement.

For those seeking that advantage, more opportunities are just around the corner – a lot more. Around 40 cognition-enhancing drugs are in development right now, designed to improve wakefulness, attention, memory, decision making and planning (see “Smarter minds”). Gerontologists are starting to believe we could directly intervene in the process of senescence to significantly increase the average human lifespan.

There have also been rapid advances in brain-machine interfaces, such as retinal implants, communication devices for paralysed and locked-in patients, and even memory prostheses, hinting at the possibility of neural implants that enhance normal functioning. Progress in genetic engineering and gene therapy suggests that we will soon be able to rewrite our own genetic code, and that of future generations, removing broken genes, correcting errors and even inserting new ones…

Unfortunately, not available online unless you’re a subscribed, unfortunately, but your library shop or library should have a copy kicking around.

Link to table of contents.

The Soho Theatre in London’s West End hosts an event on Monday 15 May where a production will be staged after several days of intense collaboration between scientists and writers, exploring the theme that both science and theatre are essentially driven by experiment.

The event is being run by Tassos Stevens, who did his PhD in developmental psychology before moving on to theatre production.

He’s since been keen to integrate the two fields, and hopes to illustrate and explore a scientific experiement as part of the production.

There’s also a blog with an ongoing discussion about the project for those not able to see the production in person.

Link to details of event at London’s Soho Theatre.
Link to blog with ongoing discussion.

This friday the Royal Insitution is asking Are you comfortably numb?, with an event about what we can learn about consciousness from unconsciousness:

Until very recently it was thought that consciousness couldn’t be studied scientifically, but now the drive to find out how your brain can make you self-aware is one of the most significant areas of new research. What’s more, scientists are now making headway with some of the big questions. What is consciousness? How can we hope to study it empirically when it’s all about each person’s subjective experience?

Some clues to these answers may come from studying anaesthesia. When you go under anaesthesia you’re in a strange position with regard to consciousness. It’s a much deeper oblivion than sleep, but we all know stories of people becoming aware during surgery. It even appears that patients under perfectly adequate anaesthesia can still hear, and in one experiment, patients were able to learn while under!

The event features Prof Mike Alkire & Prof Peter Sebel and is Chaired by Baroness Susan Greenfield. Date & Time: Friday 12 May 2006, 7.00pm–8.30pm, and tickets are £8/£5 for members and concessions.

If you’d like an even more in-depth look at the topic, you can join the preceding day-long Consciousness and Anaesthesia meeting at the Royal Society of Medicine.

We seem to be on a run of autism news lately, and here’s one more to add to the list. I’ve just discovered AutismPodcast.org that has regular podcasts about autism science, parenting and people.

The most recent programme has an interview with Autism Diva who has been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome herself, has both a child with autism and a neurotypical child to keep her busy. She talks about her own experience of Asperger’s and her view on the current state of understanding the condition.

Autism Diva also runs a popular autism blog which we featured previously on Mind Hacks, that keeps tabs on the science and politics of the autism world.

The host of Autism Podcast is a father of a boy with autism, and obviously has a wide interest, as the archive of past programmes demonstrates.

Link to Autism Podcast.