Category: Nonsense

There is simply not enough conspiracy theory-driven paranoid funk rock in the world.

By the looks of his YouTube video Ralph Buckley is hoping to redress the balance with a song that rages against psychiatry, the media, George Bush, Prozac, corporations, socialised health care, mind control, the police state, and the government. Phew!

Not one to let his shaky grasp of neurobiology temper his attack on the New World Order, he notes that antidepressants are hallucinogenic like LSD and both were created to keep down the masses. Fact.

Prozac, zoloft, wellbutrin, paxil etc…are psychoactive drugs (in the hallucinogen family) not unlike LSD which is also another drug developed by the government for purposes of mind control. Curious coincidence? How many ‘coincidences’ does it take before a conspiracy stops becoming a conspiracy?

How many conspiracy theorists does it take to change a light bulb? The light bulb didn’t change man, that’s WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK!

Despite the pharmacological mix-up, Buckley definitely has the funk and cuts some mean blues into the deal. The track is from an album called ‘9/11 Conspiracy Blues’ and he’s a big Ron Paul supporter if you want to get a feel for his suspicious outlook on life.

Best of all though, he rhymes ‘schizophrenia’ with ‘fuck the media’ and you gotta respect that.

Link to Buckley’s paranoid blues track ‘schizophrenia’.

The following passage is from p107 of the excellent but sadly out-of-print history book Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain (ISBN 0708305628) that explores mental and neurological illness in times past.

As well as discussing the theories of the times, it also charts many of the treatments used to try and cure disturbances of the mind and brain.

This is a particularly terrifying example of a (probably 16-17th century) folk treatment for depression that involved the local blacksmith pretending he was going to flatten your head on an anvil:

A highly specific treatment for ‘faintness of the spirits’ was attributed in a well-known passage by Martin Martin to a blacksmith in the Skye parish of Kilmartin. Like other shock treatments which have tried to elicit a ‘natural’ total reaction by creating a physical or physiological emergency, it had its risks.

“The patient laid on the anvil with his face uppermost, the smith takes a big hammer in both his hands, and making his face all grimace, he approaches his patient; and then drawing his hammer from the ground as if to hit him with full strength on his forehead, he ends in a feint, else he would be sure to cure the patient of all diseases; but the smith being accustomed to the performance, has a dexterity of managing his hammer with discretion; though at the same time he must do it so as to strike terror in the patient; and this they say, has always the desired effect.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s a little vague on what the ‘desired effect’ was supposed to be.

It wasn’t all hammer wielding blacksmiths though, some gentler treatments are noted. Apparently, dried cuckoo was used to treat epilepsy.

I’ve just discovered we’ve had our 2000th user bookmark us on del.icio.us. Users can also add notes to their bookmarks, so I thought I’d share some of the comments with you.

Neuroscience weblog. Often exciting, sometimes unsettling.

Or your money back.

Good sight.

..excellent hearing, and all our own marbles (so far).

like the design, esp. the underlines for links.

Thanks to Matt’s excellent design skills.

Weblog oficial del libro Mind Hacks.

¬°Bienvenidos a nuestros queridos lectores hispanohablantes!

Entertaining blog about mind/brain things.

I like the precision. If we had a design brief, I think that would be it.

I still have to read the book. I gave it as a birthday present to Rudin and I should borrow it in the near future. I’ll check out the blog regularly till then.

And they say the internet is killing literature.

science of biomental creature

Next week, return of the biomental creature (this time it’s personal).

Crazy/beautiful

Aren’t we all?

and my favourite…

One of the biggest Cogsci blogs… sometimes they post a big bunch of crap (luckily its different most of time)

Enough said.

“I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

Who else, but the the inimitable Hunter S. Thompson.

Laptop Punk has created a mashup of two curiously complementary music videos: Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy and The Avalanches’ Frontier Psychiatrist.

The original version of Frontier Psychiatrist is a turntable satire on clich√©s about psychiatry and mental illness taken from films of the 1950s, that include mental illness being dangerous, psychiatrists having couches and patients being ‘crazy as a coconut’.

In contrast, Crazy gives us the modern voice of someone who’s lost their mind, but suggests that being betrayed in love is the greater madness.

When combined, they make an unlikely couple, but the musical mix works well and the contrast is wryly appropriate.

Link to Gnarls Barkley / Avalanches mashup.

A lyrical tribute to the pain killer ibuprofen, written by poet Matt Harvey.

The poem was written for BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live, as they had Dr Stewart Adams on the programme discussing his discovery of the drug.

The Telegraph has a great article on its discovery, which includes the fact that he tested the drug on himself to try and shift a troublesome hangover.

I Prefer Ibuprofen

Life is so much easier with effective analgesia

The purpose of pain is to say to the brain:
Ow! Houston we’ve got a problem…
But once we’ve got the message we don’t need it again and again…

What do we want? Symptom Relief!
When do we want it? Now!

When you’ve had enough of it there’s just no need to suffer it
Just pop a little caplet and Ibuprofen will buffer it

I’ve had a go with Aspirin, Codeine and Paracetamol
With Solpadeine, Co-codamol, with Anadin and Ultramol
I love them all, I really do, but I prefer Ibuprofen

There are other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs around
Your NSAID’s these days are quite thick on the ground
There‚Äôs Naproxen, there’s Nabumetone
and, of course, there’s Indomethacin
Each with much to offer us. But I prefer Ibuprofen

I love the way the compound sticks its cheeky little hand in
The way it blocks the enzyme that creates the prostaglandin

Reducing fever, inflammation, and mild to moderate pain

Yes I know it isn’t curative, in anyway preventative
But to dwell on what it doesn’t do is anally retentative
I know it doesn’t treat the cause, the cause will still be there
But it lends a hand, it puts the ‘pal’ back into palliative care.

It does exactly what you’d expect it to say it would do if it came in a tin

Link to more poems by Harvey.
Link to Telegraph article on the story of ibuprofen.

The Utne Reader has a shocking article on a near medical tragedy – a misdiagnosis of depression that led to inappropriate medication and the patient almost being given electroshock treatment.

Luckily, one of the more cultural sensitive of the medical staff noticed the patient’s normal behaviour was being inappropriately pathologised as mental illness.

George Farthing, an expatriate British man living in America, was diagnosed as clinically depressed, tanked up on antidepressants, and scheduled for a controversial shock therapy when doctors realized he wasn’t depressed at all, he was just British!

Farthing, a man whose characteristic pessimism and gloomy perspective were interpreted as serious clinical depression, was led on a nightmare journey through the American psychiatric system. Doctors described Farthing as suffering from pervasive negative anticipation: a belief that everything will turn out for the worst, whether it’s trains arriving late, England’s chances of winning any national sports events, or his own prospects of getting ahead in life. The doctors reported that the satisfaction he seemed to get from his pessimism was particularly pathological.

You can read the full story at the link below for all the shocking details.

Of course, it would be churlish not to mention Whybrow and Gartner’s theory that the personality of the American people reflects the fact that they have a greater genetic propensity for mania.

Yes, they are being serious. You may wish to insert your own comment about the genetic propensity for irony at this point.

Link to article ‘Not Depressed, Just British!’ (via TWS).

T-shirt fashionistas Alphanumeric have created an anatomically labelled brain t-shirt, so you never have to decide between wearing a t-shirt or taking your neuroanatomy textbook with you.

Of course, if ever you were in a situation where you needed to choose between clothes or a neuroanatomy book, you might have more to worry about than the accurate labelling of brain parts.

Needless to say, while naked neuroanatomy might be the way forward, this t-shirt might suffice in the mean time.

Link to Alphanumeric brain t-shirt (via HYA).

Rebel online clothing shop Ban T-Shirts have a t-shirt extolling the virtues of thinking green, nicely illustrated with a brain-tree hybrid.

Whether a brain-tree hybrid would itself be considered environmentally friendly is anyone’s guess, but it makes for a good visual statement nonetheless.

But if paranoid resistance is more your thing, their ‘thought criminal’ shirt should serve to promote your illicit cognitions.

Of course, you might think you’ve got nothing to hide, but we know that’s exactly what they want you to think. I think.

Link to Think Green t-shirt.
Link to Thought Criminal t-shirt.

Two views on wine appreciation. The first from the introduction of an academic book edited by Prof Barry Smith called Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, a volume that collects perspectives from philosophy and cognitive science on how we understand the qualities of wine:

Do we directly perceive the quality of a wine, or do we assess its quality on the basis of what we first perceive? Tasting seems to involve both perception and judgement. But does the perceptual experience of tasting – which relies on the sensations of touch, taste and smell – already involve a judgement of quality? Is such judgement a matter of understanding and assessment, and does require wine knowledge to arrive at a correct verdict?

Some philosophers would claim that one cannot assess a wine’s quality on the basis of perceptual experience alone and evaluation goes beyond what one finds in a description of its objective characteristics. According to these thinkers something else is required to arrive at an assessment of a wine’s merits. This may be the pleasure the taster derives from the wine, the valuing of certain characteristics, or the individual preferences of the taster. Is there room among such views for non-subjective judgements of wine quality?

And the alternative view, from The New York Times review of the same book:

The rhetoric and rituals of wine appreciation are sometimes said to be the alimentary equivalent of lipstick on a pig: they are meant to give an attractive sheen to the ugly business of getting drunk.

Link to book details (thanks Kat!).
Link to NYT review.

Fortune has just published it’s list of the year’s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, and at number two comes drug company Eli Lilly, with dog Prozac.

Seemingly, dog depression is an unrecognised epidemic / untapped market that is just crying out for some pharmacological intervention.

Thank God. We’ve been so worried since Lucky dyed his hair jet black and started listening to the Smiths.

Eli Lilly wins FDA approval to put Prozac into chewable, beef-flavored pills to treat separation anxiety in dogs.

Link to Fortune second dumbest business moment of the year.

We’ve learned to tie into every organ in the human body but one. The brain! The brain is what life is all about.

Star Trek doctor Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy from the episode entitled The Menagerie.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal has just published its traditional Christmas article which covers the lesser known diseases of popular culture. This year, the article tackles the scourge of cacophonopathology, a dreadful affliction caused by a disturbing reaction to music.

It notes that a particular form of the disorder affects fans of heavy metal:

A severe form of cacophonopathology, metallicus gravis, has also been identified among many of the misguided souls who followed the siren of cultura popularis. Victims of metallicus gravis attend mass gatherings to participate in this form of auditory abuse, which employs sound to numb rather than to enhance awareness. In its later stages, patients demonstrate involuntary movement disorders, such as caput metallicus (headbanging), florid hemiballismus (air guitar syndrome) and precipitous projectile collapse (crowd surfing).

Post-mortem findings include scarred cerebral gyri, which assume the texture of hard pebbles or rocks, diagnostic of dementia zeppelophilia plumbea. A related condition is black s*bbath excephalobaty (BSE), which features Ozzyform band degeneration and afflicts those who dismember flying rodents with their teeth.

The author suggests that a possible treatment might involve a slow immersion in classical music.

I, along with many others, have yet to be convinced by the evidence for this treatment, and tend to be guided by the trusted clinical maxim “a day without AC/DC is like a day without sunshine”.

I was reminded of the Journal’s fantastic Christmas tradition by Tom mailing me a wonderful article from 2004 about the neurology of Tintin’s possible hormonal problems.

The footnotes to the article are priceless, so have a look when you read the article.

Another past article took a neurodevelopmental approach to the pathologies of Winnie-the-Pooh and friends.

One of the best bits about these articles is the correspondence they generate. Letters are linked from the bottom of each article and as you can see, they can be a wonderful parody of medical argument and high-brow posturing.

Link to article on cacophonopathology.
Link to article on the neurology of Tintin.
Link to article on neurodevelopmental disorders in Winnie the Pooh.

One of the best brain t-shirts to come along in a very long time has just arrived, and, unfortunately, it sold out within days.

At least, if you’re after a male sizes that is. Luckily, there are still plenty in female sizes left.

It’s a beautiful multi-coloured brain where the brain stem changes in a series of USB plugs so you can connect your cortex to the nearest computer.

It’s a Threadless t-shirt, so despite the fact they’re out of stock, you can click to register your interest in getting them to print some more, and they’ll let you know when they’re ready.

In the mean time, you may have to find your nearest female neuroscience enthusiast to admire the t-shirt in all its glory.

Link to Threadless ‘Connect It’ t-shirt.

Think Gum is a chewing gum that apparently contains a number of ‘brain boosting’ ingredients, although is mainly notable for its high caffeine content.

As well as caffeine, it contains ginkgo biloba and bacopa monnieri, two herbal supplements which some preliminary studies have found increase memory and concentration.

It’s hard to say whether these have any effect in this particular product but the 20mg of caffeine per piece of gum should keep you alert, even if the caffeine come-down will take away as much as the lift will give you in the first place.

I once had a pharmacist explain the lift and come-down of stimulant drugs to me as “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”, which I thought was a little ironic considering how many catered advertising pitches they get taken to by drug companies while under the impression they’re getting a free lunch.

Link to Think Gum.

Ivan Pavlov and Brian Wilson – together at last! This rather unlikely combination seemed to spark a bit of interest, so here is a brief collection of your contributions.

Thanks to Lloyd for sending in one of Mark Stivers’ hilarious cartoons that gives an interesting twist on Pavlov’s experiments. Click for the larger version.

Jesse mentioned a clip from The Office that depicts a wonderful demonstration of classical conditioning, as used when trying to annoy your coworkers.

On a Brian Wilson tip, Simon notes that “While insane, Brian Wilson recorded an album called “Sweet Insanity” with [psychologist] Eugene Landy as co-producer, but his label rejected it. WFMU’s blog has a most delightfully terrifying track from said album.”

Brian Wilson rapping. Indeed truly terrifying.

Distinctly less terrifying is Aimee Mann’s recent track, ‘Pavlov’s Bell’, which also references the work of the bearded Russian dog harasser.