Category: News

Following advice from the Committee on Safety of Medicines, the only SSRI-type anti-depressant that UK clinicians can prescribe to children and teenagers is fluoxetine. The risk of suicide and self-harm associated with the use of the other drugs in the SSRI family has been judged to outweigh their benefit.

But speaking at a conference at the Institute of Psychiatry recently, Dr. Paramala Santosh, Consultant in Developmental Neuropsychiatry and Neuropharmacology at Great Ormond Street Hospital, said that the absolute size of the benefit of the banned drugs was often no less, and sometimes more than the effect size found for fluoxetine – it’s just that in the trials for the banned drugs, the size of the placebo effect had been so much larger.

Could this be a fundamental flaw in placebo-controlled trials? The effectiveness of drugs is measured against a placebo effect, but the size of that placebo effect isn’t constant and varies from one trial to another. So potentially, an inferior drug could be deemed effective in a trial where the placebo effect was weak.

Of course NICE guidelines state psychotherapy should be the first line treatment for depressed children, but with too few therapists available, it’s vital that effective drugs aren’t banned unnecessarily.

Continue reading “A problem with placebo-controlled trials?”

Research on smell – what scientists call olfaction – is discussed in the December issue of the Reader’s Digest magazine in an article by Paula Dranov. She explains how smells are composed of molecules that bind to our smell receptors located at the top of the nasal cavity. According to Nobel Prize-winner Linda Buck “A slight change in the chemistry of an orange scent and you get something that smells like sweaty socks”.

Linda Buck and Richard Axel won the 2004 Nobel Prize for medicine for identifying the approximately 1000 genes (3 per cent of the human genome) that code for the hundreds of smell receptors.

The article also mentions research looking at how smells could be used to help obese people eat less, based on the idea that satiety has less to do with feeling full and more to do with our senses of smell and taste feeling satisfied.

Brain damage can affect our sense of smell with unwelcome consequences. Dranov describes the case of Melissa Wittenborn who lost her sense of smell after an ice skating accident. A hit on her head caused her brain to shudder inside the skull, severing a nerve in the olfactory area. Wittenborn said “I’m missing out on so much, such as smelling my kids and husband when they get out of the shower”.

Losing one’s sense of smell can also be a sign of neurological illnesses like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or Multiple Sclerosis.

Of course, smell is intimately related to memory. There’s a wealth of research showing that smell can aid recall, but there’s also more recent research showing that irrelevant smells can hinder memory.

Link to research on smell and dieting (and lots of other smell research)
Link to research on human pheromones
Link to research on irrelevant smells
Link to research suggesting smelling nice could help in interviews
Link to research on whether humans can sense the direction of smell
Link (item 2) to the vibration theory of smell

The International Robot Exhibition concluded recently in Japan, where the world’s robot manufacturers displayed their most advanced and, in some cases, human-like creations.

The emotional response to robots was discussed by roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, who created the theory of the Uncanny Valley.

He argued that that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response of humans will become increasingly positive and empathic.

This is until a point at which the response suddenly becomes strongly repulsive, owing to the uncanny ‘not quite human’ aspect of the robot’s behaviour. This is the point known as the Uncanny Valley (see graph as pop-up).

However, as the appearance and motion are made to be indistinguishable to that of human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

Mori’s theory is controversial, with some researchers rejecting it out of hand. Nevertheless, it seems intuitively plausible, and still influences robot design and engineering.

Link to excellent Wikipedia article on the ‘Uncanny Valley’.
Link to 2005 International Robot Exhibition.
Link to Coriolinus’ photos of the exhibition (via BoingBoing).

A long running web journal, the Science and Consciousness Review, has relaunched with a new look and growing content.

The journal is run by three academic scientists who want to open up consciousness research and discussion to the internet. The journal contains book reviews, summaries of new papers and internet resources.

One of the most interesting recent posts is about the increasingly comprehensive Consciousness Studies Wikibook, which is a becoming a dynamic textbook on consciousness science.

Link to Science and Consciousness Review.
Link to Consciousness Studies Wikibook.

Christian Antonioli and Michael Reveley at the University of Leicester recruited 30 mildly or moderately depressed people via adverts in America and Honduras. They allocated half of them to a two week course of swimming with dolphins in Honduras and the other half to two weeks of snorkelling and having fun in the sea without dolphins. Afterwards they found the participants who swam with dolphins had recovered from their depression significantly more than the control group. Seventy-seven percent of the dolphin group no longer met the threshold for depression on the Hamilton scale compared with 25 per cent in the control group.

The researchers said “The echolocation system, the aesthetic value, and the emotions raised by the interaction with dolphins may explain the mammals‚Äô healing properties”.

The findings support the concept of biophilia – the idea that “human health and wellbeing are strictly dependent on our relationships with the natural environment”. The term was first coined by Erich Fromm but has since been championed by and become associated with E.O. Wilson.

The dolphins weren’t available to comment.

Link to the study published in BMJ

Link to dolphin swimming holidays

The Croatian translation of Mind Hacks has just been published. The full title is “Tajne uma. 100 hakerskih trikova na≈°eg mozga” and you can see it / buy it here. Kudos to the translator, Ognjen Strpic, who i discovered is not only fluent in English and Croatian, but also in Neuroscience too (Ognjen picked up on a small error I’d made in the text on the physical colour of part of the visual cortex).

A new issue of Scientific American Mind has hit the shelves, and with it comes two freely available articles on their website. One asking “Can We Cure Fear?” and the other on The Promise of eTherapy.

Other articles, only available in the print edition to non-subscribers, include one on the use of drugs to prevent long-term memories from forming, and another on regulating anger.

One other print-only article that particualarly caught my eye is supposedly on Brian Wilson, musical genius behind the Beach Boys.

I’ve only read the intro on the website so far, which states “Perhaps no story better exemplifies how mental illness can free up creativity, then crush it, than that of Brian Wilson”.

I’m hoping the article gets better than that, as Brian Wilson is perhaps one of the best examples of how someone can maintain their creative genius after severe mental illness, as the recent critically acclaimed ‘Smile‘ album and tour have proved.

Link to SciAmMind website.
Link to article ‘Can we cure fear?’.
Link to article ‘The promise of eTherapy’.

Mind Hacks already told you about Jabberwacky, the winner of this year’s Loebner prize for the chatbot that comes closest to passing the Turing Test (to pass, a judge must be unable to tell whether she’s talking to the chatbot or another human).

Now you can meet the chatbots and their creators at an informal one-day meeting at Surrey University’s Digital World Research Centre on November 25.

Dr. Richard Wallace, creator of three-times Loebner prize-winning chatbot ALICE, will be there. So too will Rollo Carpenter, creator of Jabberwacky, and Dr. Hugh Loebner himself, sponsor of the annual Loebner prize.

Nancy Andreasen, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, says her profession have become overly dependent on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the industry’s diagnostic bible that’s now in its fourth edition, and which Andreasen helped write an earlier version of.

Speaking to New Scientist magazine, Andreasen says the book was never meant to be “the absolute truth” and that there’s a tendency in psychiatry today to “make diagnosis through checklists, with less emphasis on the interesting uniqueness of each individual patient and on the humanism that lay at the heart of early psychiatry”.

Citing the example of schizophrenia, Andreasen says that following the recommendations of a working party she chaired, DSM IV keeps things simple and lists 8 general symptoms for the illness. But she says “This is not a complete description. You have to know much more than just those DSM criteria before a patient can be reliably diagnosed”.

Link to New Sci interview (requires subscription).
Link to Critical Psychiatry Network

They say mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery, now the Editors at New York based review journal Nature Neuroscience have launched a blog called ‘Action Potential‘.

In their words:

Action Potential is a blog by the editors of Nature Neuroscience – and a forum for our readers, authors and the entire neuroscience community. We’ll discuss what’s new and exciting in neuroscience, be it in our journal or elsewhere. We hope for spirited conversation! To contact the editors directly with confidential questions or feedback, please e-mail actionpotential@natureny.com

It’s early days but hopefully the blog could offer readers a fascinating insight into the minds of the people steering one of the most influential journals in neuroscience.

Link to Action Potential blog

The world’s biggest scientific meeting, the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, happens next week in Washington DC. They’ll be over 30,000 researchers and clinicians there, as well as the Dalai Lama talking about neuroscience and meditation, 17,000 presentations and a variety of side scientific meetings and social events (i’m intrigued by the Hippocampus open mike event, an evening for researchers interested in the hippocampus organised around the format of a poetry slam).

Anyway, from tomorrow I’ll be in Washington – I’m going early for the computational cognitive neuroscience conference. I’ll be there until the 16th, so if anyone has any recommendations for things to do, or if any readers fancy meeting up (maybe we could go to the hippocampus social?), let me know. tom [at] mindhacks [dot] com

Theodore Millon, one of the grandees of modern psychology (so old-school he’s smoking a pipe on his homepage) is interviewed on ABC Radio’s All in the Mind.

Misleadingly, the show is pitched as “Theodore Millon ‚Äì Grandfather of Personality Theory”, where in actuality he talks very little about personality research.

He mainly focuses on the wider topic of theories of mental illness, although this is not alien territory to Millon, as he has maintained a clinical focus throughout much of his long and distinguished career.

As well as discussing some of the developments since he started practising over half a century ago, he also talks about his own personal experiences.

I was particularly struck by one, in which he recounts how he spent several days living in a psychiatric hospital he was working at, to better understand the experience of the patients.

He soon became disoriented and started to doubt whether he was a doctor or patient, and had to phone a colleague to test reality.

I like to think the tale caused Erving Goffman a wry smile.

mp3 or realaudio of programme audio.
Link to transcript.

Does an alcoholic have a disordered brain or a flawed character? The latest issue of Nature Neuroscience contains a special focus supplement on addiction that is freely available online for the next three months.

The Focus contains the latest reviews and commentaries on the neuroscience of addiction, including discussion of the changes caused by drugs to brain circuits and synapses; the cortical and sub-cortical brain areas that mediate the reinforcing effect of drugs; how drugs affect people’s decision making, tipping the balance in their consideration of immediate rewards weighed against future costs; the genetic influences on personality traits that predispose people to addiction; as well as consideration of the social stigma of addiction and the difficulties of developing effective treatments.

Link to Focus table of contents (all free until Jan’ 06)

Today’s New Scientist is a special edition on creativity, tackling the subject from a number of angles.

Unfortunately, very little of it seems to be available online, so it might require a trip to the library or newsagents.

If you do get hold of a copy, however, you’ll find articles on the psychology and neuroscience of creativity, as well as tips from artists, scientists and researchers to increase your own creative output.

If you’re not able to get a copy, you may want to look at a couple of articles online from past issues of The Psychologist that discuss ‘Computer models of creativity’ (PDF) and ‘Creativity and innovation at work’ (PDF).

Link to New Scientist.
PDF of article ‘Computer models of creativity’.
PDF of article ‘Creativity and innovation at work’.

BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed seems to have changed its focus and now concentrates on sociology.

Previously, it billed itself as “weekly discussion on topical issues of academic concern” but now seems to be advertised as discussing the “latest social science research”.

In this series it has covered topics ranging from the social influence of the pharmaceutical industry to the role of sociology in public life.

The BBC’s biography for the presenter, Laurie Taylor, also makes interesting reading. As well as being a Professor of Sociology, Taylor has previously been a teacher, actor and librarian.

Link to Thinking Allowed website and realaudio archives.

Is yours a box or a Swiss army knife? Last Saturday’s Guardian carried an essay by Charles Fernyhough comparing the use of mind metaphors by psychologists and novelists.

In fiction, the mind is often conceived as a container, be it an aviary confining the wildlife of human cognition, as in Plato’s Theaetetus, or the ante-rooms and winding passages of a character’s mind in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But, Fernyhough writes, the mind as container metaphor fails to account for the idea of inaccessible procedural knowledge, such as the ability to ride a bike, or to capture the dynamic, flowing nature of thought. By implying a fixed boundary between what is in mind and what is not, the container metaphor also fails to encapsulate the idea of embodied cognition “which sees mental processes as shaped by the mutual interactions of mind, body and world” Fernyhough says.

Fernyhough suggests the mind as container metaphor continues to appeal despite its failings because “it fits with our cherished beliefs about the primacy of the unitary, indivisible self”, in contrast with cognitive psychology’s conception of the mind as a “Swiss army knife bristling with separate information-processing modules”.

Novelists have, however, adopted cognitive psychology’s metaphor of the mind as a machine. Fernyhough gives the example of a passage from Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore: “I crunch along the gravel, the mercury light beating down on me, and try to get my brain in gear. Throw the switch, turn the handle, get the old thought processes up and running. But it doesn’t work – not enough juice in the battery to get the engine to turn over”.

Fernyhough ends by suggesting that imperfect metaphors are better than none. The tendency for contemporary novelists to write in the first-person allows them to convey thoughts as they would speech “rather than getting to grips with its dynamics and complex simultaneities” he says, before concluding: “When thought becomes no more than unspoken speech, fiction’s gleaming reputation as a mirror of human consciousness will inevitably begin to tarnish”.

Link to full Guardian essay
Link to online databank of mind metaphors