Category: Nonsense

In a wonderfully twisted solution to poor mental health care, prison officers in UK’s Winchester Prison are being issued knives in an attempt to reduce suicide rates by allowing them to cut down prisoners they find hanging in their cells.

Mental health care in prison is notoriously bad (a recent reported noted one third of UK young offenders are mentally ill), and many operate as little more than surrogate psychiatric facilities – without the psychiatry or the facilities. There is a similar situation in the USA.

I’ve spent some time trying to track down the latest reports on HMP Winchester but with very little success, although from what I can find Winchester seems to be a particularly bad example.

This news story incidentally mentions that a recent report “attacks the policy of keeping people with mental health problems locked up in prison healthcare wings when they should be receiving treatment from trained staff.”

This written response to a 2001 parliamentary request for a information on suicide rates in the prison shows them spiralling out of control to almost eight times the national average. More recent figures show it to have one of the highest number of prison suicides in the country.

The spectacularly broken website of the Independent Monitoring Board, the body that reports on prison conditions, lists the last published annual report as 2004.

This report notes that “The problem of prisoners with severe mental disabilities is raised time and time again” and also notes the lack of mental health care facilities “leaves Prison Officers no choice but to deal with these prisoners even though they are not medically trained so to do”.

It seems prison suicides have been a more recent matter of parliamentary concern and the actual prevention guidelines (which seem remarkably sensible) are available online as a Word doc.

Link to article ‘Prison issue knives to officers to cut suicide rate’ from Hampshire News (via TWS).

Online t-shirt retailer and design free-for-all Threadless have just released a t-shirt based on the theme of ‘confabulated memory’.

In neuropsychology, ‘confabulation’ usually refers to a condition where people produce streams of false memories.

It is distinguished from lying in that affected people do not seem to be intentionally trying to deceive. In fact, they seem to have little control over their recall.

Although we all confabulate without realising it to some degree, the clinical condition is most striking after brain injury.

The following example is from a study on a 56 year-old man who developed the condition after brain surgery to remove a tumour.

You were at school together?
We still are.

You and Val? Really? I didn’t know that. When you say you still are, do you mean you are still at school now?
Well not at school, at university.

Oh. So the two of you are at university together?
Yes. She is doing third year and I am doing computers.

The t-shirt is a wonderful graphic portrayal of this free-wheeling fountain of memories with themes mingling and overlapping in a confused and chaotic state.

Link to Threadless t-shirt ‘Confabulated Memory’.

The most important application of brain-machine interfaces is to allow paralysed people the ability to control their environment.

The second most important application, is, of course, to create psychedelic rave visuals to accompany pumping acid techno.

Mind VJ is a project by Lenara Verle and Marlon Barrios-Solano that has filled this neglected area of research by designing an EEG-based system that creates intense visuals in response to electrical brain changes.

In MIND VJ, the idea is to use the rhythm of our own brain waves as the conducting element for the performance. In this manner, we can tap into a normally “hidden” area of our body (brain function and its electrical activity) and make it “visible” in the form of projected images. In this case, the images projected won’t be wave graphs, like the ones usually plotted by medical EEG machines, but artistic images, undergoing real-time changes and manipulations controlled by the current brain wave output of the subject (the MIND VJ)

Provocatively, The MIND VJ project references thoughts of utopian cyber dreams about the ultimate direct brain to computer interface, and on the other side brings paranoid ideas of “mind reading” and “mind control”.

I think we can guess where the drugs kicked in when they were writing that bit of text.

There’s more about the project on their website and a video of Mind VJ in action.

Apparently the project is still in progress and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

Link to Mind VJ.

Tom alerted me to a largely neglected psychometric measure of happiness designed by Michael Leunig that was sadly absent from the article discussed in an earlier post.

It is a truly objective measure, but one I suspect that will not be readily adopted by politicians.

The medical literature is a source of endless fascination. As well as charting the sure-but-steady progress of medical science, it also keeps tabs on the more unusual aspects of human behaviour.

PubMed is the world’s medical research database, and I’ve found endless ways of entertaining myself with this seemingly starched and functional research tool.

One of those ways is to search using the keyword ‘autoerotic‘.

The diversity of human sexuality is awe-inspiring, and this simple search will bring some of the most unusual aspects of the sexual rainbow into stark relief.

Where else could you read about ‘Aqua-eroticum: an unusual autoerotic fatality in a lake involving a home-made diving apparatus’?

That last one is from the Journal of Forensic Sciences, which, if ever you get a chance to read it, is a bi-monthly litany of the most obscure, surprising and compelling aspects of the human character – delivered in a completely deadpan style.

To quote Groucho Marx “Yesterday I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don’t know”.

Link to search of PubMed using the keyword ‘autoerotic’.

New York-based designer AbracaDebra has created baby clothing with brain prints emblazoned across the front.

Pictured on the left is her all-in-one baby onesie for the neuroscience obsessed young scientist in your life.

She also makes a brain print bib just waiting to be dribbled on, probably at the sight of a tasty unconditioned stimulus.

Due to the public’s confusion over the difference between psychiatry and psychology, I have developed a minor hobby out of spotting the word ‘psychiatry’ in places it shouldn’t be.

This was inspired by hearing someone on the bus accuse her friend of using ‘reverse psychiatry’ on her.

Another one that seems to pop up is ‘abnormal psychiatry‘, which is presumably where doctors treat mental illness while acting a bit oddly.

One of my favourites though, is on a drinks can sold by sandwich shop Pret. The ‘Yoga Bunny Detox’ drink is advertised as being ‘liquid psychiatry’.

I’ve checked the ingredients, and there seems to be no trace of psychotropic drugs, so I presume it just takes my blood and interviews me for signs of psychopathology.

Any other sightings of out-of-place psychiatry would be gratefully received.

Purveyor of molecular gifts and jewellery Made With Molecules has just launched a new line for Christmas: serotonin Christmas decorations for your tree.

They’ve also added to their existing range with jewellery made from the caffeine molecule, and the theobromine molecule – one of the psychoactive ingredients in chocolate.

So if you want to decorate either yourself or your house with drugs and neurotransmitters, you know where to go.

Link to Made With Molecules

According to the Spiritual Science Research Foundation, 96% of addictions are “primarily caused due to possession by either ghosts or our departed ancestors” with only 4% being due to physical and psychological factors. Well, that’s that sorted then.

The full ‘research’ report is available online, and I have to say, the diagrams alone are worth the effort.

The Statz Rappers “What would you say if I told you my Cohen d was .30?”:

These guys are so sig…

Alright, hold tight
I want to ball tonight
On my fender, no space defender
I enjoy it on the floor, I get it tight
Toe to toe with a black widow
Fee Fia Foo smell the blood of rock ‘n’ roll
All night drive on the rockin’ suicide
My feet are jumping, she’s a joy to ride
Joy to ride, a joy to ride
She’s an all night drive on the rockin’ suicide

And it’s a brain shake, brain shake, brain shake
All I can take
Brain shake, brain shake, brain shake

Rock group AC/DC give a timely warning about the dangers of diffuse axonal injury when going “toe to toe with a black widow” in their 1983 song Brain Shake.

As the song is presumably a reference to having sex, you’d be having to be doing something really quite frightening to risk diffuse axonal injury, which is a tear in the brain’s white matter that usually occurs after the brain is shaken by a serious fall or car crash.

Perhaps Brian Johnson and his bandmates might consider using a future song to warn about the more realistic dangers of stroke during sex in those with patent foramen ovale, a congenital heart defect?

What’s the difference between a psychologist and a magician?
A psychologist pulls habits out of rats

Just found this funny misprint in an article from the American Psychological Association’s magazine Monitor on Psychology while looking for articles on sleep psychology:

Sleep psychologist Paul Saskin helps Las Vegans sleep more soundly, day and night.

…perfectly timed for World Vegan Day.

UPDATE: I’ve been told people from Las Vegas are really called Las Vegans. Every day is a school day isn’t it?

Is it me, or are these Chinese acrobats attempting to form dopamine molecules?

Don’t get me wrong, I think the circus is woefully lacking in neurobiology-based entertainment, but I think they might have a little more trouble getting into the anandamide formation…

…and I dread to think what might happen if they attempted oxytocin.

Depending on what you believe, Mind Hacks is either a top 10 or top 20 UK blog. I suspect this fact would probably kill as many conversations as telling people that you’re ranked 4th in the Scandinavian hula dancing stakes.

When the law and the mind come together…

The former Tory leader Iain Duncan-Smith appeared on the Today programme this morning, promoting his call for a new law to be introduced to punish people who drive their partners to suicide. He says the current 1861 Offence Against the Person Act is inadequate because it requires a retrospective diagnosis of psychiatric illness in the person who killed themselves.

Enter criminal barrister John Cooper who believes the current Act works perfectly well. He says the law already states that psychiatric harm is assault. He explains:

“It’s very difficult to prove psychological harm. Psychological harm is not a disease of the mind. A psychiatric condition is a disease of the mind. But the law has to have clarity in this respect. We can section people under a mental health order. We can say a person is unfit to plead if they are psychiatrically troubled. That’s because we can prove it by a disease of the mind. It all gets very woolly when we bring in psychology”.

Well that’s cleared that up then.

Link to audio file of the discussion.