Category: News

Press Release Spam (an interlude)

Sorry to interrupt your normal psych/neuro programming, but this is just a short note to say that I have retired the tom@mindhacks.com email address. If you wish to contact me or Vaughan, please tweet us (details in rightbar).

I’ve retired the email address because of the amount of PR spam I’ve been getting, which has lowered the signal to noise ratio of this account so much it isn’t worth checking anymore. One of the reasons I get so much PR spam is because people like Vocus PR are selling my email address, to publishers and University Press offices, who then send me email about things I’m not interested in. For a while I was collecting the email addresses of these people so I could block them in gmail. My list is here. I invite you to do a search for these addresses and label them spam (warning: this list contains real people from respectable organisations, but since they work in PR I am happy never to hear from them again).

If anyone can think of a good crowdsourced way of breaking the business model of people like Vocus, I’d love to hear from you.

Human error in psychology research: a rough guide

Science writer Ed Yong has just posted the audio of a fantastic talk on problems in psychology research and how to fix them.

The talk was delivered at Bristol University but is remarkably direct and he pulls no punches in pointing out psychology’s scientific flaws.

Interestingly, Yong makes the point that this is not a problem of psychology specifically, because many of the problems – like publication bias and selective reporting – appear across the scientific board, but that psychology is a hot topic because the field is trying to do something about it.

Yong has been doing some fantastic work not only highlighting these difficulties but getting a public debate going about solutions to these problems of research culture.

His talk is an excellent round-up of his own work and the state of play in the fight to change science culture.
 

Link to post with audio of Ed Yong’s talk.

The great rock n’ roll brain scramble

It’s not often you see someone licking a brain in a rock n’ roll video and get to think to yourself “well, there’s a funny story behind that”, but this is one of those occasions.

The video for singer Candice Gordon’s new single Cannibal Love starts out as a TV cooking programme and ends in a cannibal cook-out with the brain as the pièce de résistance.

Oddly, I met Candice when I was living in Dublin when she came to a neuroscience talk I did in a pub. She was both interested in neuroscience and just starting out on her music career.

All these years later, she’s still interested in neuroscience but is now touring the world with her startling blend of big band voodoo blues.

In contrast, I’m still doing talks in pubs.

So kids, er… stay in school.
 

Link to Candice Gordon’s Cannibal Love video.

No, internet addiction is not an ‘official mental illness’

The media has been buzzing with the supposed news that ‘internet addiction’ has been added to the list of ‘official mental disorders’. This is nonsense, but it tells us something oddly disappointing about how the media handles tech scare scores.

This recent wave of ‘the internet is making us crazy’ drivel stemmed from an article published in The Sydney Morning Herald and the story soon went global – being picked up by everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Russia Today.

Firstly, for those of you who are not aware why the concept of internet addiction is so untrue it’s a logical impossibility, I’ll direct you to an earlier post.

But talking specifically about the article which sparked the media panic attack, it’s odd in that it quotes two psychologists – one who has never published anything on internet addiction and the other who is a Reiki therapist. This doesn’t make it wrong but it does strike me as slightly strange for a news piece.

The article is trying to talk about the listing of ‘internet use disorder‘ in a non-diagnosable section of the DSM-5 for conditions “recommended for further study”.

This section has speculative and non-official disorders in it. You can find caffeine use disorder there if you’re feeling a bit jittery.

It also has the diagnosis of attenuated psychosis syndrome in it. Here’s how science journal Nature reacted when this diagnosis was listed in the same section: “Psychosis risk syndrome excluded from DSM-5″

In other words, if something appears in the DSM-5 section “recommended for further study” it is excluded from the list of ‘official mental illnesses’ because the diagnosis has been evaluated but found to be unsupported by research evidence.

It’s a mystery why this has suddenly become ‘news’ now because this decision has been discussed for years and it finally happened last May.

But it’s also worth noting that even the proposed definition of internet use disorder isn’t actually about using the internet, it’s about online gaming. This doesn’t make it any less nonsense, however. If someone who is addicted to gambling starts playing online do they suddenly have ‘another mental illness’? Clearly not.

Similarly, the idea that someone can be ‘addicted to gaming’ is just daft as the concept of ‘gaming’ is so wide as to not describe any single behaviour or experience – something quite important if you’re going to say that there is a mental illness based on it.

More interestingly, the The Sydney Morning Herald article has a curious quirk that allows us to see how lazily these stories get picked up and flung around.

The piece says will be included in the ‘revised edition of the DSM-IV’ – which is presumably a very awkward way of saying DSM-5.

Suddenly though, the world’s media is saying that ‘internet addiction’ will be included in the ‘DSM-IV’ which would be quite a feat considering it was published in 1994.

Here’s the clanger presented as original journalism from Forbes, the Daily Mail, the HuffPo, Mashable, the New York Post, Times of India and Russia Today. The Guardian even asked readers to vote on whether it was true!

Essentially, you can currently get anything into the media just by suggesting that technology is ‘bad for our minds’, because we love stories that justify our worries – no matter how untrue.

We used to think schools were ‘bad for the mind’ but try getting ‘education causes mental illness’ into the newspapers.

Fake pot industry generating novel, untested drugs

There’s an excellent article on the highs and increasing lows of the synthetic marijuana ‘legal high’ industry in the Broward Palm Beach New Times.

The piece is an in-depth account of how a legal high company called Mr. Nice Guy became the biggest fake pot manufacturer in the US.

It describes in detail how the business created and sold the product – only to fall foul of the rush ban on the first wave of synthetic cannabinoids.

The company was eventually raided by the Drugs Enforcement Agency and is waiting for the case to be tried in court. However, it’s still not clear whether they actually broke the law.

They changed their formula a few months before the raid to use two cannabinoids, called UR-144 and 5-fluoro-ur-144, which are not specifically covered by the current ban, so the prosecutors have to argue that they are close enough to the prohibited molecules to be illegal.

A curious point not mentioned in the article is that cannabinoid 5-fluoro-ur-144, also known as XLR-11, had never previously been described in the scientific literature and was first detected in synthetic marijuana.

It is listed by companies that sell research chemicals (for example, here) so you can buy it straight from the commercials labs.

But the data sheet makes it clear that structurally it is “expected to be a cannabinoid” but actually, it has never been tested – nothing is known about its effects or toxicity.

Previously, grey-market labs were picking out legal chemicals confirmed to be cannabinoids from the scientific literature and synthesizing them to sell to legal high manufacturers.

But now, they are pioneering their own molecules, based on nothing but an educated guess on how they might affect the brain, for the next wave of legislation-dodging drugs.

Fake pot smokers are now first-line drug testers for these completely new compounds.
 

Link to ‘The Fake-Pot Industry Is Coming Down From a Three-Year High’.

A dark and complex past

In a story that could be the plot for a film, one of the world’s pioneering anthropologists has been found to have been a member of both the Nazi SS and the French resistance during the Second World War.

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff retains legendary status in anthropology and particularly in Colombia, where he first lived with many of the country’s remote indigenous people during the 1950s and 60s and founded the first department of anthropology. He died in 1994 but his legend has only grown since his passing.

In many ways, the classic image of the anthropologist was shaped by Reichel-Dolmatoff. He lived with remote communities to learn the language and worldviews of previously unknown societies. He trekked through jungles and participated in the hallucinatory ceremonies of local religions. He pioneered the archaeology not of the giant civilization, but of the lost peoples of specific valleys and mountain ridges.

He was actually born in Austria but talked little about his past. This is not surprising in the light of new revelations.

Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo, an anthropologist at the University of Florida, has been researching the background of this legendary figure but found far more than the echo of myth.

If you speak Spanish you can watch his recent conference presentation. But even if you don’t, you can see it has a power absent from most academic talks.

Oyuela-Caycedo began his investigation as a tribute to his friend and mentor only to discover a grim past well documented in the Nazi archives. At one point in the presentation, he is brought to tears as he reads a description of how the yet-to-be Austrian anthropologist murders an old man with a pistol.

It turns out that Reichel-Dolmatoff was a member of both the Nazi Party and the SS, in the personal guard of Hitler himself and a participant in Gestapo death squads. He later trained guards in the Dachau Concentration Camp.

In light of his subsequent life in Colombia, it would be easy to chalk this up as another bitter tale of a Nazi who escaped justice to the anonymity of Latin America, but Reichel-Dolmatoff did not seem to make the typical Nazi exit from Europe. He had what is vaguely described as a ‘mental crisis’ in 1936 and was declared unfit for the SS and publicly expelled from the Nazi party.

Curiously, he turned up immediately afterwards working for the anti-Hitler resistance in France and continued to support the French resistance after he arrived in Colombia in 1939, to the point where he was eventually awarded the National Order of Merit by the French president.

Reichel-Dolmatof’s subsequent anthropological work is completely devoid of Nazi overtones – no hints of eugenics or ‘racial hygiene’ – and throughout his life he attempted to demonstrate the amazing diversity of the native peoples of Colombia, the Amazon and the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The case raises a number of difficult questions. The nature of Reichel-Dolmatof’s ‘mental crisis’ remains completely obscure. As the Spanish-language magazine Arcadia asks – how did a young Nazi end up working in Colombia for a Hitler resistance movement? Was it a crisis of conscious or something more opportunistic?

But perhaps more important is the question of whether Reichel-Dolmatof can ever redeem himself. Is his life and his work now forever tainted? Does his good work drown under the tide of his dark and vicious past?

It may have been a question he asked himself many times.
 

Link to English-language coverage of discovery.
Link to Oyuela-Caycedo’s Spanish-language presentation.
Link to Spanish-language coverage from Arcadia magazine.

Communicating at the speed of thought

Your humble hosts, Tom and Vaughan, have written an article for Trends in Cognitive Sciences about how social media is changing mind and brain research.

The piece is both a brief introduction to blogs and Twitter, as well as an overview of how scientific debate happens online and how it is affecting the traditional approach to cognitive science.

Although we focus on cognitive science, it actually applies to science and science communication in general:

Fundamentally, there are important similarities between principles of traditional scientific culture and on-line culture: both prioritise access to information, citation (whether to journals or via links to other online sources), and kudos for whoever does good work. Academia aspires to openness, engagement, and respect for the principles of rational discussion. Social media facilitate these. The online community is free-flowing, somewhat chaotic, and information-rich – much the same as science has ever been.

In the same spirit, Trends in Cognitive Sciences have made the article freely available online, so you can read it at the link below.
 

Link to ‘Brain network: social media and the cognitive scientist’.

How the FBI sees the psychopath

The latest FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin is a special issue on the criminal psychopath.

Apart from the use of eye-scorching clip-art, it’s notable more what it tells us about how the FBI approaches the concept of psychopathy than necessarily being a great introduction to the topic.

Some of the most revealing articles are written by agents and give advice on how to interrogate the ‘psychopath’ as if it was a single type of person and not a relatively consistent pattern of characteristics found within unique individuals.

“…small talk, fidgeting with cell phones or notepads, or showing uncertainty regarding seating arrangements can communicate to psychopaths that interrogators are nervous or unsure of themselves,” says one article, “psychopathic individuals view this as a weakness”.

Well, that’s that then.

Despite some overconfident conclusions, several of the articles do give some good accounts of actual cases and the issue remains an interesting peek into how the FBI sees the psychopath.
 

Link to latest FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin (via @crimepsychblog)

No, the web is not driving us mad

Oh Newsweek, what have you done. The cover story in the latest edition is an embarrasing look at non-research that certainly doesn’t suggest that the internet is causing “extreme forms of mental illness”.

The article is a litany of scientific stereotypes and exaggeration:

The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic.

This is an amazing list of mental illnesses supposedly caused by the internet but really Newsweek? Psychosis? A condition ranked by the World Health Organisation as the third most disabling health condition there is and one that is only beaten in its ability to disable by total limb paralysis and dementia and that comes ahead of leg paralysis and blindness.

We’re talking schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder here. The mention of psychosis even makes the front page, of one of the most respected news magazines in the world, so this must be pretty striking evidence.

So striking, in fact, that it would probably turn psychiatric research on its head. We have studied the environmental risk factors for psychosis for decades and nothing has suggested that the internet or anything like it would raise the risk of psychosis. This must be amazing new scientific evidence.

So what is the evidence to back up Newsweek’s front page splash: a blog post, a quote and a single case study.

The rest of the article is full of similar howlers.

But the research is now making it clear that the Internet is not “just” another delivery system. It is creating a whole new mental environment, a digital state of nature where the human mind becomes a spinning instrument panel, and few people will survive unscathed.

“This is an issue as important and unprecedented as climate change,” says Susan Greenfield, a pharmacology professor at Oxford Univer…

Oh Christ.

A 1998 Carnegie Mellon study found that Web use over a two-year period was linked to blue moods, loneliness, and the loss of real-world friends. But the subjects all lived in Pittsburgh, critics sneered.

They didn’t sneer. They looked at the follow-up study, done on the same people, by the same research team, that found that “A 3-year follow-up of 208 of these respondents found that negative effects dissipated”.

As I’ve mentioned before, it is only possible to report on the first of these findings without the second if you’ve not read the research or are aiming for a particular angle. Why? Because if you type ‘internet paradox’, the name of the original study, into Google, the name of the follow-up study – The Internet Paradox Revisited – comes up as the second link.

If you’d read any of the actual literature on the topic, you’d know about the follow-up study because they are two of the most important and some of the few longitudinal studies in the field.

The article also manages the usual neuroscience misunderstandings. The internet ‘rewires the brain’ – which I should hope it does, as every experience ‘rewires the brain’ and if your brain ever stops re-wiring you’ll be dead. Dopamine is described as a reward, which is like mistaking your bank statement for the money.

There are some scattered studies mentioned here and there but without any sort of critical appraisal. Methodological problems with internet addiction studies? No mention. The fact that the whole concept of internet addiction is a category error? Not a whisper. The fact that prevalence has been estimated to vary between 1% and 66% of internet users. Nada

Sadly, these sorts of distorted media portrayals have a genuine impact on the public’s attitudes and beliefs about mental illness.

But perhaps the biggest problem with the article is that it doesn’t include any critical voices. It’s mainly people who have a book to sell or an axe to grind.

The internet will apparently make you psychotic if you only listen to the three people who think so. Or Newsweek, that is.
 

Link to ‘Is the Web Driving Us Mad?’

Feed your head

LiveScience has a spectacularly bad article that covers the toxicology results of Rudy Eugene, the ‘Miami cannibal’ who was immediately labelled as being high on ‘bath salts‘ and was predictably, not high on bath salts.

But don’t let the Parp! Parp! Clown Taxi notion of drugs causing cannibalism put you off from suggesting that drugs cause cannibalism because the article makes a point of carefully considering which substances were responsible for the face eating.

Eugene tested positive for marijuana. Could that have been the cause? Definitely not says the article.

“Some people have said, ‘Well, it must have been the marijuana that triggered Eugene’s behavior.’ That, in my opinion, is outrageous, and out of the question. Marijuana will not cause this type of behavior,” said Dr. Bruce Goldberger, professor and director of toxicology at the University of Florida.

Goldberger said that although a significant amount of research has found a link between marijuana use and the onset of schizophrenia or psychosis in at-risk individuals, this isn’t what happened to Eugene. “This behavior exhibited by Eugene is well beyond the scope of someone suffering from acute psychosis,” he told Life’s Little Mysteries. [Could Cannibalism Solve a Future Food Shortage?]

The ‘Could Cannibalism Solve a Future Food Shortage?’ link is genuinely in the original article by the way, presumably inserted by an automatic algorithm with an unintentional genius for badly timed inappropriate humour.

But one of the major points of the article is to report the toxicology results which found no evidence for ‘bath salts’ drugs in Eugene’s body.

Conclusion: the cannibalism was caused by bath salts. Secret bath salts. That no-one can detect yet.

There’s probably a cognitive bias that leads people to believe in impossible causal mechanisms in the face of evidence that all but rules out the presence of the supposed trigger – but I’m damned if I can find it.

Hang on. I think it’s called the Living Elvis Makes Me Girlfriends Out of Gatorade bias.
 

Link to article (via @stevesilberman)

Berlin plan #3: Instant social knowledge through unconscious perception

So I think I’ve figured out the third and final intervention I want to run for the cognitive science safari I’ll be leading in Berlin on the 11th of July. Regular readers will recall that I first wanted to try a field test of the change blindness phenomenon, and to follow that up with an exercise in contaigous attention. For my final trick, I’m going to try something which demonstrates how rapidly, and successfully, we can make unconscious judgements about people.

There’s a powerful demonstration of this that I experienced thanks to Professor Jon May during my undergraduate degree. Jon showed the class black and white photos of middle aged men and women and asked us to judge if they were American or British. There were no obviously clues, no cowboy hats, no uniforms or flags. Just boring pictures. If you had of asked any of us in the class we would all have said that we had no idea who was American and who was British. It just wasn’t possible to be sure, but we all guessed and – of course – at the end of the demonstration we found out that we’d mostly been right. It’s an important demonstration that we often have access to information that we aren’t fully aware of or certain about. We couldn’t make judgements on explicit criteria, but instead relied on a perceptual intuition. Without realising it, we’d been trained by experience to associate certain things – styles of haircut? certain facial features? clothing? who knows – with the different nationalities.

So it seems that throughout our lives we’re building up tacit knowledge of how we expect different kinds of people to look. This effect isn’t just for nationalities. Famously, it also seems to work for things like sexual orientation. This is a remarkable paper :Brief exposures: Male sexual orientation is accurately perceived at 50 ms. As the title suggests, it shows that people were able to judge at above chance rates if someone was straight or gay merely from a photo of their face shown for a twentieth of a second. It’s not quite instant, but it shows that even the briefest of flashes can contain a surprising amount of information. You can try a version of this experiment yourself, thanks to the wonders of the internet, with the “Gay? or Eurotrash?” game (via this neurocritic post).

What I’d like to try in Berlin is a demonstration of this phenomenon, but for geography. Using the group of people on the tour, I will find willing volunteers from around Berlin and ask them where they come from. Then we’ll ask the tour to try and guess, through a series of Yes/No answers like “Is this person a European?”, “From Germany?”, “From Berlin?” and so on. Through what has been called the wisdom of crowds we should be able to take the average guess of those on the tour to come up with a more accurate judgement than any one of us will individually produce. The fun will be in seeing how often we are able to judge someone’s hometown from no more than how they look.

Berlin plan #2: Contagious attention

As I’ve mentioned, I’ll be leading a ‘cognitive science safari’ in Berlin on 11th of July. We’ll be generating some experiences based on classic psychology experiments, experiments which tell us important things about how cities organise our perceptions.

Previously I described how I’ll be trying to revive a classic change blindness experiment. For my next trick, I plan to re-mix another classic experiment. This is one by famed social psychologist Stanley Milgram on the drawing power of crowds (Milgram et al, 1969).

We’ve all hear that nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd, but Milgram set out to systematically test this idea. Filming from a sixth floor window, Milgram arranged for collaborators to stop on a busy street and stare up at him. With the video evidence he could then record data on what proportion of passers-by would stop and join the crowd. In agreement with his classic work on obedience to authority, he found that the drawing power of crowds increased rapidly as the first few members joined.

Recently, research led by Princton’s Iain Couzin has provided an improved analysis on how this kind of shared attention spreads through a crowd (Gallup et al, 2012). Using automated tracking tools, the new research showed that people only follow the gaze of people near them, and – like traffic jams – attention tends to spread backwards in the crowd, rather than between people next to each other, or facing each other. There’s a great write-up of this research over at Ed Yong’s Discover blog: What are you looking at? People follow each other’s gazes, but without a tipping point.

One of the conclusion of Couzin’s recent study was that there wasn’t a tipping point for crowd gathering – no magic threshold where a crowd would just get bigger and bigger under its own `attentional gravity’.

Well, this sounds like a challenge to me, and I think I’ve thought of a way we can try and hack these experiments for added interest. Milgram and Couzin’s experiments both had a single crowd looking at a relatively uninteresting phenenon (Milgram filming from his window, a pair of experimenters filming surreptitiously). In Berlin, I’d like to try to plug two crowds into each other, so to speak. We’ll start off as in Milgram’s experiment, with one person looking up at the experimenter (Perhaps on the bridge overlooking Alexanderplatz – although suggestions welcome). The rest of us can watch the behaviour of passers-by: will they join the person staring up at the bridge? What kind of person will stop to have a look? How long will they stay? We’ll add more people to this crowd and should be able to see the patterns Milgram and Couzin observed: what is the effect of a bigger crowd? How far does the influence of the crowd extend?

Next, we’ll see if we can generate a self-sustained crowd by having more and more people join the experimenter on the bridge – creating two crowds watching each other, both attracting the attention of their nearby passers-by. If my reading of Iain Couzin’s research is right then there should be a stable equilibrium where the crowds reach a certain size and stop growing. If his theory is wrong, we could generate an endlessly growing crowd, driven by the power of positive feedback until it encompasses the whole population of the world – a Psychology equivalent to grey goo or one of those particle physics experiments which risks creating a black hole in the centre of Planet Earth.

Okay, so that second possibility is unlikely, but we are sure to generate a rich field in which to observe the interply of shared attention among the city-crowd. So please join me in Berlin as we travel the spectrum from science to speculation to experience in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of psychology in the city. As ever, I’m eagar to meet any mindhacks.com readers who live in Berlin and would like to come along (or even help out). Get in touch!

Original announcement: Meet me in Berlin
Plan #1: The Change Blindness Experiment
Make sure you check out the video of the analysis technique on Iain Couzin’s page here (it’s the one where everyone in the crowd looks like they’ve got a yellow arrow protruding from their foreheads).
HT to Vaughan Bell for the phrase ‘cognitive science safari’

References:

Gallup, A.C., Hale, J.J., Garnier, S., Sumpter, D.J.T., Kacelnik, A., Krebs, J. & Couzin, I.D. (2012) Visual attention and the acquisition of information in human crowds. PNAS, published online April 23rd, open access.

Milgram, S., Bickman, L. & Berkowitz, L. (1969) Note on the drawing power of crowds of different size. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 13, 79–82.

Berlin Plan #1: The Change Blindess Experiment

I’m giving a talk and leading an ‘experience treasure hunt’ in Berlin on July 11th (see here). The aim will be to show how our perception works, using examples from city life. Cities, like all environments, channel our attention. One of the things I’m planning on doing is to recreate a classic experiment which shows how much we don’t notice about the city around us.

The experiment is a demonstration of change blindness – a phenomenon where we don’t notice changes in something we’re supposed to be watching. Here’s Richard Wiseman with a short video showing off the effect: The Colour-changing Card Trick. In 1998 Simons & Levin took this research out of the lab, using the general public as their experiment participants. They got a confederate, who we’ll call Person A, to approach people with the pretence of asking directions. When the unwitting participant had got underway giving directions, Simons & Levin had another pair of confederates walk rudely between them and Person A carrying a door. Person A used the shield provided by the door to sneak off, and another experimental confederate, person B, took their place. The research measure is whether the person giving directions noticed that they were now giving them to a totally different person. Amazingly, slightly less than half of the people approached noticed the switch. Here’s a fun recreation of the experiment I found on YouTube.

As well as being a great example of the fun of taking Psychology experiments out of the lab, this research confirms how narrow our perception of the world around us is. As with our visual blindspots, we think we capture a full-spectrum high-resolution image of the world, but actually we only sample a very limited slice, and our perceptual machinery infers across the gaps.

With luck we’ll be recreating this experiment in Berlin on July 11th (if you’d like to help out, get in touch!). Like all good experiments, this one opens up as many questions as it answers. Will different kinds of people be more or less sensitive to the switch? Will people be more likely to notice switches that cross social categories (men switched with women, old with young, etc etc)? Join me in Berlin and we’ll make a start on finding out.

Reference: Simons, Daniel J.; Levin, Daniel T. (1998), “Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction”, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 5 (4): 644–649, DOI:10.3758/BF03208840

Meet me in Berlin

On July 11th I’ll be running a workshop as part of the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin. The lab is a temporary public space, in the neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg, dedicated to encouraging ‘open dialogue about issues related to urban living’. I’ve been invited by Corinne Rose, a psychologist and artist who has an interest in microanalyzing urban environments.

I’ll be giving a talk about the psychology of attention and perception in the city, and the leading a tour out into Berlin on an ‘experience treasure hunt’ where we’ll be trying to collect some interesting experiences of attention in the city. Here’s the blurb for my talk.

Lens and filters: the mind and the city

The city trains you to both see and unsee. There is a riot of experience available in cities, which stimulates our hearts and heads, but for everything you see there are things you have to unsee. We can use illusions, tricks and curiosities to focus back on the psychological processes which generate our experience of the city. In this session I will give an introduction to the study of perception and to some of the fascinating psychology research about living in cities. For the second part we will venture into the city on a “treasure hunt” for experiences which illustrate something important about how our minds respond to the city or how the city affects our minds. The hope is that by putting our own lens and filters to inspection we can gain a deeper understanding of how both cities and ourselves work.

I’ve got a few ideas for the treasure hunt aspect, which I’ll blog about shortly. The session is due to start at 3pm, I think, and it would be great to see any mindhacks.com readers there. In particular, if you are Berlin based psychologist (studying or practicing) and fancy helping out with some of the demonstrations, I’d love to hear from you before the 11th.

Update: The plan is taking shape! See parts #1, #2 and #3