One of the many witty pieces on McSweeney’s, this one on the legendary American writer, Ernest Hemingway.
Signs of Impending Suicide That Hemingway’s Friends May Have Overlooked.
by Mark Wilcoxson
A Farewell to Arms
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Old Man and the Sea
Link to McSweeney’s post.
The March edition of HR Magazine has an unintentionally hilarious cover article on ‘The Brain at Work’ which informs us that we can ‘squirt’ neurotransmitters into each others’ brains, tell us how we can reboot dendrites and is strangely obsessed with the basal ganglia.
It’s full of fantastic howlers and misplaced metaphors which you’ll have the pleasure of discovering for yourselves, but the stuff about the basal ganglia is just plain odd.
Tired of listening to her employees vent, she told them, “No longer will I listen to a problem unless you submit at least a portion of the solution.”
Weber explains what happened next in neuroscientific terms: “The next day, the basal ganglia were at work continuing to vent about the problems with no solution.” One employee went to the HR professional’s office. He didn’t have a solution, so she sent him away.
“About three days later, workers realized she was serious. So, a different person went into her office with a solution to the problem. The HR professional agreed to and supported the solution put forward with slight revisions to keep it under budget.”
That simple change transformed the employees’ dynamics — and their brains — by turning control over to them. “The conversation in the basal ganglia went from problem-focused to solution-focused,” says Weber. “When people in that department went to sleep at night, they rewired their brains for the new behaviors.”
Let’s just pause there for a moment.
Nope, it doesn’t help.
The curious thing is that the article is generally full of quite sensible advice for managing employees but its just wrapped up in this bizarre alternative universe neurobabble.
Somehow we’ve got to the point where people feel they can’t give good advice without waving poorly-understood neuroscience around like it was a recently enlarged willy.
Link to ‘The Brain at Work’.
The Sunday Express is one of the UK’s biggest selling Sunday papers and today’s front page is spectacularly half-cocked, attempting to link suicides to phone masts based on an unpublished study, by a man who sells cranky radiation protection devices, and who seems to have only the feintest grasp of neurobiology.
Roger Coghill (incorrectly described as Dr Coghill in the article), is an independent researcher who argues that radiation from mobile phone masts and electricity cables causes cancer, kills children and, now, is a suicide risk.
The study isn’t published, is not available on his website, and may still turn out to be an interesting well controlled study of mobile phone mast proximity and suicide risk. I’ve requested a copy of the research report, so hopefully I’ll find out, but from the way it is described, I suspect it won’t be.
According to the article, the people who recently killed themselves in a spate of suicides centred around the South Wales town of Bridgend lived closer to a mobile phone mast than the average for each home across the country.
Now, it strikes me that the average distance from a mobile phone mast in any small town is going to be less than the national average because mobile phone masts tend to be clustered around where people live.
So you’d want to do two things. The first, is control for population density, the second is compare the correlation between suicide rate and mobile phone mast distance with other small towns, because you’d want to be sure that this wasn’t a spurious correlation. Neither are mentioned.
According to Mr Coghill, however:
What seems to be happening is that the electrical energy is having an effect on the chemistry of the brain, depleting serotonin levels. We know that in depression serotonin levels are low and that a standard treatment for depression is to give drugs to boost serotonin levels. As they begin to work, the patient’s depression lifts.
So what evidence is there that mobile phone mast radiation affects serotonin levels in the brain? None that I can find. Really, nothing at all. I’d be interested to hear otherwise.
In fact, the whole idea that serotonin, depression and suicide are linked so simply is highly suspect.
Studies that have looked at this association using measures of serotonin metabolites, transporter proteins, receptor density and binding, depletion studies and genetics show remarkably mixed results.
While, on average, there seems to be something up with serotonin neurotransmission in the brains of people diagnosed with depression, the evidence suggests that the ‘low serotonin = depression’ idea is so over-simplified to be virtually useless.
However, those of you who are keen to take precautions even without a good scientific basis may be interested in purchasing some ‘protective devices’ that also lack a good scientific basis.
Mr Coghill’s company also sells lots of useful devices to ‘shield’ you and your pet, and a number of other devices to harness the ‘healing power’ of magnets.
This includes a ‘small discrete unit that attaches to your underwear’ to boost your flagging libido.
This rather obvious conflict of interest is not mentioned in the article.
Anyway, I will await the mystery research report and see whether I need to be avoiding phone masts or putting magnets down my pants.
Link to shining example of how not to do science journalism.
Miss Conduct, one of the columnists from The Boston Globe, has picked up on our post about the uncanny resemblance between psychologist Joey Tempest and 80s rock legend Steven Pinker, and noted several other surprising likenesses in the world of cognitive science.
Pictured is the probably-separated-at-birth behaviourist B.F. Skinner and popcorn mogul Orville Redenbacher.
There are several others which raise the question whether celebrities have been routinely disguising themselves as psychologists throughout the years.
Or whether psychologists have been disguising themselves as celebrities. Or wombats, in one case.
Link to Miss Conduct on psychology likenesses.
The Guardian profiles the life and work of psychologist Steven Pinker, noting both his controversial views on human nature and his “trademark rock-star chic”.
Here at Mind Hacks, we’re glad someone else has finally picked up on Professor Pinker’s rock n’ roll credentials as we’ve noted for some time that he bears an uncanny resemblance to Joey Tempest, lead singer of 80s rock band Europe.
Has anyone ever seen them in the same place? Is there something missing from Pinker’s official biography? I think we should be told.
Link to profile in The Guardian.
The University of Utah have created a web game where you can train as a mad scientist by demonstrating you can label and construct what looks like an alien from a 60s B-movie but is apparently a giant neuron.
For those wanting their mad neuroscientist stereotypes a little stronger, I suggest that the 1985 zombie movie Day of the Dead, where neuroscientists attempt to tame some captured zombies by meddling with their brains in an attempt to work out how to stop the hordes of the undead that are overrunning the earth.
As if you couldn’t guess, the neuroscientists turn out to be sadly deluded and become victims of both the zombies and their fellow humans.
There’s a moral in there somewhere, but I’m too tired to work it out, so stereotype away.
Link to ‘Make a Mad, Mad, Mad Neuron’ game.
Today’s edition of Bad Science covers a so-called ‘miracle cure’ for dyslexia which has been persistently promoted in the UK media, despite numerous complaints upheld by media regulators, veiled threats of legal action against people who say it doesn’t work and five editors of a scientific journal resigning over the publication of a flawed study on the treatment.
Personally, I would have thought anyone promoting their ‘treatment’ under the name “miracle cure” is asking for trouble but apparently with enough celebrity endorsement you can get away with promoting your product without the need for irony (quite hard work in modern Britain, I can tell you).
The system was developed by paint millionaire Wynford Dore and involves various balancing and co-ordination exercises supposedly to strengthen the cerebellum, which Dore argues is functionally impaired in dyslexia.
There’s actually a fair amount of independent research on the role of the cerebellem in dyslexia but, sadly, the idea that exercises might help treat this has the sole drawback of not being supported by the scientific evidence.
Interestingly, it seems that the company went bankrupt yesterday and have just closed up shop. That might have been a result of charging £2,000 for the course.
Ben Goldacre has more on the whole sordid tale over at Bad Science.
Link to Bad Science on the Dore ‘miracle’ ‘cure’ for dyslexia.
Our post on the 1930’s ‘wife rating scale’ was picked up by Boing Boing and one of their readers realised she had a copy of the full scale – including the rating scale for husbands – and posted the whole questionnaire online.
You may be interested to hear that husbands could earn a demerit for “Smokes in bed”, but 5 merits for “Tries to keep wife equipped with modern labor saving devices”. A whopping 20 merits could be awarded for being an “Ardent lover – sees that wife has an orgasm in marital congress”.
My favourite is getting a demerit for calling “Where is….? without first hunting the object”.
With the full husband and wife scales now online you can rate each other all the way to marital bliss. Or not.
Link to ‘Tests for Husbands and Wives’.
This month’s edition of the psychology magazine Monitor has an amusing article about a psychometric scale designed in the 1930s for rating the quality of your wife.
It was designed by Dr George W. Crane in an attempt to give couples feedback on their marriages. But although husbands or wives could fill in the scale to rate the wife’s ‘quality’, there is no mention of a similar rating scale that rated the husband’s performance.
Apparently, the full scale had 50 merits and 50 demerits of differing value which were subtracted from each other to give the final score.
The Monitor has the first 12 items which are hugely amusing, although I note that an item mentioned in the article – “reacts with pleasure and delight to marital congress” – is not among them, but was apparently worth 10 ‘merits’. This is equal in value to “Religious – sends children to Sunday school and goes herself”.
Personally, I can’t believe that “Puts her cold feet on husband at night to warm them” is worth only one ‘demerit’. Surely this grievous violation of the sacred bond of marriage should have been looked on more strictly.
UPDATE: The full scale is now available online, include one for husbands!
Link to APA article (scroll down for image of rating scale).
Cracked has an amusing article satirising the increasing tendency to portray any repetitive behaviour as an ‘addiction’. It discusses the horrifying reality of six things you didn’t know you could get addicted to and helpfully lists the warning signs.
The first on the list is the scourge of book addiction. We know that reading can affect mood, interfere with sleep, cause arguments, lead to financial difficulties and, in some instances, has caused violence and even revolutions.
Book junkies are thought to be driven by a need to repeatedly experience literary pleasure, a desire to escape from the unpleasant realities of everyday life or a profound insecurity about not fully understanding themselves and the world.
Luckily, Cracked has outlined the warning signs for you to look out for:
Technology has obviously made books unnecessary, so the sight of even one book in a friend’s home should be cause for concern. If the person has gone as far as to purchase an entire special shelf to hold all of his books, it’s probably time for an intervention.
I’m still a bit baffled as to why ‘addiction’ seems to be such a popular explanation for perceived negative behaviour in ourselves or others. It has strayed so far from its original concept of a drug affecting brain function that it can now apply to almost anything.
I suspect it’s because the concept has now been so heavily medicalised that it brings with it a concept of loss of personal control or reduction in responsibility without regard for the context or even the validity of what it applies to.
Of course, as soon as something is medicalised, there’s a big disincentive to question the concept because people assume you’re doubting the problem (i.e. the human suffering the behaviour causes) rather than the explanation.
I was struck by how Josef Fritzl, the man at the centre of the appalling ‘daughter in the dungeon’ case, explained his behaviour as an ‘addiction’. Presumably, that will be the well-known underground cellar, false imprisonment and incest addiction that appears in all the diagnostic manuals.
Returning to a somewhat lighter theme, the Cracked article has a few great lines and attempts to poke fun at the whole idea. Apart from water addiction, of course, which is genuinely serious.
I’ve heard some people hide bottles of water in their desk at work so they can have a drink when they get the ‘urge’. Sad.
Link to Cracked on things you didn’t know you could be addicted to.
A wonderful poem called ‘Survivor’ from the playful English poet, Roger McGough:
Survivor
by Roger McGoughEveryday,
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
violence, terrorism, war,
the end of the world.It helps
keep my mind off things.
McGough has a talent for blending the fanciful with the poignant, as demonstrated in a poem we featured previously.
Purveyors of the delightfully cynical, Despair Inc, have created a wonderful drinking vessel that makes it absolutely clear when your glass is half empty.
If you feel The Pessimist’s Mug doesn’t quite get the message across, you can always try this Threadless t-shirt which illustrates the basic psychology behind the metaphor.
Personally, I’ve always preferred the approach from the anonymous quote “An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be”.
Link to Despair Inc Pessimist’s Mug (via Deric Bownds).
Link to Threadless Pessimist or Optimist t-shirt.
Last week, we featured a sexy serotonin tattoo, and this week, thanks to the work of the same diligent correspondent (thanks Sandra!), we feature a new brain tattoo that has a markedly different effect, despite the fact it resides in the same location.
You really need to click on the image and go to the full size picture to get the maximum effect.
Interestingly, the discussion in the comments note that it might be part of a recent trend for parents to have their children’s pictures as tattoos (although this is a bit too direct if you ask me).
Either way, I’d be sitting the child down and having some serious words about the relative sizes of cortical and subcortical structures in the normal adult brain before letting them them loose on my tattoo design.
Link to arse residing brain tattoo from another dimension.
The Devil’s Dictionary was a famously satirical book by Ambrose Bierce where he lampooned almost everything, in alphabetical order. He famously defined the brain as “an apparatus with which we think we think”, but now, a similarly cutting dictionary has been dedicated to psychology.
Dr Mezmer’s Dictionary of Bad Psychology contains a wealth of useful definitions, covering the everything from the hard edge of cognitive science to the fluffy gloss of pop psychology.
Behaviorism: A psychological movement, now extinct, that is built on the premise that you are what you do, and you do because of what you have done. Replaced by humanistic psychology (you are what you feel), cognitive science (you are what you think), Dr. Atkins (you are what you eat) and modern advertising (you are what we say).
Link to Dr Mezmer’s Dictionary of Bad Psychology.
Carl Zimmer has been collecting science tattoos for a while now, but recently posted this tattoo of Hayley who has the molecular structure of serotonin tattooed elegantly over her body.
I’m sure there’s some relevant chat-up line for exactly such a situation when you meet someone with serotonin tattooed across their butt, but I’m too tired to try and formulate it, so I shall leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Of course, if you’ve been drinking, refrain from trying to incorporate G coupled receptors into your chat-up line, it’s obviously going to end with someone getting a slap.
Link to serotonin tattoo (thanks Sandra!).
In response to my throwaway comment about a finding a suitable chat-up line for someone with the molecular structure of serotonin 
Mind Hacks 
