Category: Other People

Wired magazine has an interview with Oliver Sacks where he talks about cases from his forthcoming book on the neurology of music, and his own drug-induced experiences of seeing non-existent colours while listening to Monteverdi.

Hume wondered whether one can imagine a color that one has never encountered. One day in 1964, I constructed a sort of pharmacological mountain, and at its peak, I said, “I want to see indigo, now!” As if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling drop of purest indigo appeared on the wall ‚Äî the color of heaven. For months after that, I kept looking for that color. It was like the lost chord.

Then I went to a concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, they played the Monteverdi Vespers, and I was transported. I felt a river of music 400 years long running from Monteverdi’s mind into mine. Wandering around during the interval, I saw some lapis lazuli snuffboxes that were that same wonderful indigo, and I thought, “Good, the color exists in the external world.” But in the second half I got restless, and when I saw the snuffboxes again, they were no longer indigo ‚Äî they were blue, mauve, pink. I’ve never seen that color since.

The interview is a glimpse of what his next book will contain, and also relates a case of a man with Alzheimer’s and severe memory impairment who can nonetheless take part in an acapella singing group. Seemingly his musical abilities survived his amnesia, not unlike Clive Wearing, who we discussed recently on Mind Hacks.

Link to Wired interview with Oliver Sacks.

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery ‚Äî always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?”

English novelist Virginia Woolf, writing in a December 28, 1932, letter.

Woolf was one of the most brilliant writers of her generation and a significant influence on the modernist movement of the time.

She also suffered from profound depressions and eventually committed suicide at the age of 59 rather than suffer another mental breakdown.

A recent article in the journal PsyArt examined the work of Woolf and the American poet Sylvia Plath in light of what we now know about the factors that influence the likelihood of suicide.

Link to Wikipedia page on Virginia Woolf.
Link to ‘Suicidal Risk Factors in Lives of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath’.

I’ve just discovered the remarkable life of Princess Alice of Battenberg, who was Prince Philip’s mother, the current Queen’s mother-in-law.

She was deaf from birth, dedicated her life to charity work and nursing, became psychotic, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent two years in a psychiatric hospital, founded an order of nuns, and was declared one of the ‘Righteous among the Nations‘ for risking her life by hiding a Jewish family from the Gestapo when Greece was occupied.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography she was treated by the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, one of the founders of existential psychology.

Apparently, she was a patient in the same hospital as Vaslav Nijinsky, the legendary ballet dancer and choreographer who succumbed to schizophrenia in his 20s.

Ludwig’s uncle, Otto Binswanger was also a psychiatrist of some note, after whom Binswangers disease, a type of subcortical dementia, is named.

Link to Wikipedia biography of Princess Alice.

Neural network and ‘fuzzy thinking’ researcher Bart Kosko is briefly interviewed in this month’s Wired where he argues that adding noise to a system, including the human one, may improve performance.

It reminded me of part of a colourful interview he did for the 1998 book Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks – a wonderful collection of personal memories from key scientists in artificial intelligence.

I like to ask researchers where they get their ideas. The only answer I’ve heard that makes sense is, “You vary your input if you want to vary your output.” Do lots of things. If you’ve gotta take drugs, take drugs. Take long walks, meditate, watch a lot of movies, learn a new language, read different books, argue the other side of the debate – anything you can to vary your stimuli.

And then you have to, as they say, “keep the ass in the seat.” You actually have to sit down and write. Do it in a disciplined way. I think if people have a certain minimal training in mathematics, the problem will take care of itself because neural networks are inherently interesting, and I believe they will stay interesting well into the next century.

The rest of Kosko’s Talking Nets interview covers topics as diverse as libertarian politics, cognitive maps, God, the mathematics of fuzzy systems, the economics of marijuana, organising neural network conferences and cryogenic nanobots.

Link to brief Kosko interview in Wired.
Link to Talking Nets book details.

UPDATE: Thanks to Daniel for finding the full Talking Nets interview on Google Books. You can read it here.

To know the brain…is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

A quote from pioneering Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal. From his autobiography Recollections of My Life.

John Hughlings Jackson was one of ‘fathers’ of modern neurology and the picture on the right is of his bust, which resides in the Institute of Neurology library in London. However, it’s actually a copy as the original went missing and its location is still something of a mystery.

The original was carved in marble in 1907 and graced the entrance to the Institute before being stolen by unknown thieves.

It was thought it was destroyed during the theft because broken marble was found in its place, but it was later spotted in the window of a North London home.

The home was owned by a neurologist who apparently bought the bust in a local antique shop for next to nothing, but when the Institute attempted to negotiate its return, the person refused all contact and its location is now a mystery.

Later, the legendary Canadian neurologist Wilder Penfield, a huge admirer of Jackson, had a bronze bust of Jackson created for the Montreal Neurological Institute which was installed in 1934.

This bust was gifted to London’s Institute of Neurology in 1996 and is the one that now resides in their library.

However, an article commemorating the presentation, made a request that if anyone knows the location of the marble bust to get in touch with the Institute to solve the mystery.

The much loved original is presumably still out there somewhere, so keep a look out for a marble version of the current bronze.

As an aside, while searching the archives for material on John Hughlings Jackson, I found this snippet from a personal tribute printed in a Oct 27, 1934 article for The Lancet:

He had no particular taste for music and art in any form, he often admitted he could not distinguish the National Anthem from ‘Rule Brittania’…

The fact he couldn’t distinguish two common tunes suggests he had amusia, the inability to recognise and understand music.

The condition can be caused by brain damage but it is also known to be inherited, which is the more likely source of Jackson’s misperception of music.

Link to article on Jackon’s bust mystery.

Elyn Saks is a law professor at the University of Southern California and adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego. She’s also been diagnosed with schizophrenia and has experienced some intense psychotic episodes.

She’s just published a book about her experiences called ‘The Center Cannot Hold’ (ISBN 140130138X) and was the subject of a recent Newsweek article.

Saks also gave an interview to mental health blog Treatment Online where she recounts some of the insights she has gained through her experiences about herself, the mental health system, and the possibilities of living with a mental disorder.

How do you feel that we as a larger society can mitigate the belief – and we feel a lot of people believe this even though they claim not to or can rationally move beyond it – that mentally ill individuals are somehow broken or incomplete?

I guess one way would be having examples of people who have mental illnesses who are doing well. People hear of schizophrenia and they think someone is never going to be able to live independently and work, and then you have people like me who stand up and say, “No, it doesn’t have to be that way.” Some people say well aren’t you unique, and I’m actually doing a study with folks at USC and UCLA on high-functioning individuals with schizophrenia. We’ve got an MD, we’ve got a Ph.D. psychologist, we’ve got some high-level consumer advocates, full-time students and stay at home parents. Just in LA in the past couple of months we’ve already recruited ten people, and we’re going to try to hear their stories and find out if there are things they do to master their illness that we might teach to other people so other people could become higher functioning.

Link to Newsweek article.
Link to Treatment Online interview.
Link to excerpt from book ‘The Center Cannot Hold’.

I’ve just found a concise piece from NPR radio on Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who used his uncle’s ideas on the unconscious to transform advertising into its current form.

Bernays pretty much invented the idea that you can sell products, not by making their practical advantages known, but by associating them with the satisfaction of desires – to be sexy, successful, a good husband or wife, the need to feel safe, well-regarded and so on.

Every time you see razors sold as babe magnets, or perfume sold as booty dust, that’s Bernays’ ideas at work.

He also invented the idea that marketing was more than just adverts. It could also be presented as ‘education’ that had no direct connection with a product but made people more receptive to other marketing.

Almost any sponsored survey or research you see in press, especially if masquerading as science, is based on this idea.

For example, Pfizer fund a survey that says people over 40 are having the best sex. People over 40 not having great sex wonder what they could do about it.

Hey, that’s my favourite B-list celebrity! And he’s telling me that Pfizer sell a pill aimed at the over-40s that claims to improve my sex life. My problem solved, through the power of science!

Of course, it’s not just hard-on pills [note to self: that’s not a phrase I get to use often enough]. It’s now a tried and tested technique that has been used for selling everything from igloos to ideologies.

Indeed, Bernays was personally involved in selling political ideas as well as commercial products. Notably, in his book Propoganda, he argues that this form of manipulation is essential for managing the inherent chaos and destructive forces of society.

Film-maker Adam Curtis cited Bernays as one of the most influential people of the 20th century in his persuasive, if not slightly polemic, four-part series Century of the Self (available online: 1, 2, 3, 4). It contains many more examples of Bernays’ often ingenious PR campaigns.

The NPR piece is a short 10 minute introduction to Bernays’ life and work, and the site has a some additional audio clips of Bernays himself discussing his ideas.

Link to ‘Freud’s Nephew and the Origins of Public Relations’.
Parts one, two, three, four of Century of the Self.
Link to online Bernays exhibit from the Museum of Public Relations.

A completely charming excerpt from the ‘People’ section of UK news magazine The Week, discussing Ben Pridmore, current British and past world memory champion:

Ben Pridomore can be surprisingly absent-minded says Adam Lusher in The Sunday Telegraph. The bespectacled accountant from Derby is Britain’s “memory champion” and a world-class mental athlete. He set a new record when he remembered 17 shuffled packs of cards in an hour.

“It was last year at the World Championships”, he recalls. “In London, somewhere in London. Erm, where was it? No it’s gone completely.”

Pridmore does remember that: “I hold all four card-remembering world records, and both binary number records. I think they are the only world records I hold at the moment, although I have quite possibly forgotten a few.

Brazilian TV gave me this wonderful cloak. They flew me to Rio just to memorise a pack of cards. Now, where did I put it…?”

His memory is, he admits, highly selective. “Yes, I have a toned hippocampus, for anything pointless like cards or long numbers. But with useful things, like names, I forget everything. Go into a room and wonder why I’m there? Happens to me all the time.”

Link to Pridmore supporting Alzheimer’s Society’s Million Memories campaign.

Philip Zimbardo, known for the Stanford prison experiment and recent book on the situational causes of ‘evil’, gives a revealing interview to ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind.

Zimbardo’s work has been getting a lot of exposure recently, largely because of the Abu Ghraib scandal and its seeming similarities to the prison experiment.

However, this interview is interesting because Zimbardo discusses his motivations for designing one of the most infamous studies in the history of psychology and reflects upon our understanding of institutionalised abuse and complicity, as well as his own role in creating a ‘petri dish prison camp’.

Stanford University is one of the most beautiful universities in the world and in that basement in the psychology department I created a mini-hell for all those students. This young woman, Christina Maslach, had just gotten a job as a psychology professor at Berkeley and we had just started dating. I looked up and in front of my door was the usual 10 o’clock toilet run, prisoners with paper bags over their heads, legs chained together and one arm on each other’s shoulder, marching blindly down the hall with guards yelling at them obscenely…and I looked up from whatever I was doing and said hey Chris, look at that. I said something like, ‘the crucible of human behaviour’. And she said, ‘I don’t want to see any more of this!’ And she ran out, and I ran after her and we had a big argument: what’s wrong with you, what sort of psychologist are you?

And she says to me, ‘I don’t want to hear about simulation, I don’t want to hear about the power of the situation. ‘It’s terrible what you are doing to those boys, they are not students, they are not prisoners, they are not guards, they are young men, what’s happening to them is terrible and you are responsible for it.’ That was the left hook, the right hook was, ‘You know, I’m not sure I want to continue dating you if this is the real you, this person is like a monster.’ There was like a cataract over my eyes, I was not seeing this most obvious thing that she coming down fresh in ten minutes looks at this and says it’s terrible.

Link to Zimbardo interview on All in the Mind.

Albert Ellis, one of the co-founders of cognitive therapy, died yesterday at his home in New York. The Boston Herald has an obituary that captures some of his work and eccentric spirit.

Ellis created ‘rational emotive behavior therapy’ (REBT) that stressed a rational approach to dealing with distressing cognitive distortions – a significant break from the largely Freudian therapy he was trained in.

It was an early version of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), now one of the most extensively tested, empirically validated and widely used psychological treatments for mental disorder.

Ellis was a prolific writer, producing a small library of books, papers and articles, did weekly seminars for most of his life and founded the Albert Ellis Institute.

Apart from his extensive writing he was known for his boundless energy and his approach to therapy and teaching which was variously described as no nonsense / assertive / confrontational (take your pick).

He was voted sixth in Psychotherapy Networker’s list of ‘top ten’ influential therapists of all time earlier this year.

Link to Boston Herald obituary for Albert Ellis.
Link to Psychotherapy Networker on Ellis.

A couple of quotes from the 16th and 17th centuries that still hold true today. The first from Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, dated 1508:

Irons rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

Which reminded me of Robert Burton’s advice for combating depression, given in his landmark 17th century book, The Anatomy of Melancholy:

Observe this short precept — Be not solitary; be not idle.

Both sets of advice hold true today. Modern studies have shown that exercise boosts mood and prevents cognitive decline.

I’m currently reading Irvin Yalom’s novel about psychoanalysts, Lying on the Couch (ISBN 0060928514), and have noticed that a key character bears a striking resemblance to one of the most controversial people in the history of psychoanalysis, Masud Khan.

Psychoanalysis is both the talking therapy and the set of theories about the human mind that were originally created by Freud. Both have a colourful history owing to the controversial ideas and the eccentric people involved.

In Yalom’s book, Seth Pande is introduced as a senior Indian psychoanalyst who is dying of lung cancer and is being censured by the psychoanalytic society for bringing the profession into disrepute, owing to unethical conduct such as sleeping with patients, financial irregularities and, worst of all, writing about what he does!

Perhaps the real-life inspiration for Pande, Masud Khan, is discussed in an eye-opening article from the Boston Review that looks at his life and also gives an insight into the turbulent world of 20th century psychoanalysis.

Initially a student when he came to the UK, he ended up training with some of the leading psychoanalysts of the time, notably being analysed by Donald Winnicott.

Khan was known for his brilliant writing, but also slept with his patients, insulted them and largely lacked ‘therapeutic boundaries’ (i.e. a responsible doctor-patient relationship) even with those patients whom he didn’t so obviously abuse.

Later in his life, Khan wrote a book called The Long Wait which detailed his anti-Semitic views and outrageous behaviour with a number of patients.

Although it has been suggested that the case studies in his book are fake, it is now well established that Khan was regularly drunk and abusive with his patients, and was kicked out of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. He later died of lung cancer.

A famous 2001 article and subsequent letters published in the London Review of Books ‘outed’ Khan to the general public, who were mostly unaware of his previous misdeeds.

Interestingly, both the fictional Pande and the real-life Khan inspired considerable devotion in some of their patients and trainees. It’s been noted in recent biographies that Khan seemed to behave more responsibly with some people, whom he reportedly genuinely helped.

One of the most interesting things about both Yalom’s enormously fun novel and the Boston Review article is that they give a fascinating insight into the world of psychoanalysis past and present.

One of the great ironies is that for a profession that prides itself in resolving conflicts, psychoanalysts have a long history of stabbing each other in the back.

Link to great Boston Review article on Masud Khan.
Link to (closed access) LRB article on Khan by former patient.
Link to LRB post-article letters page.

From the ‘images in psychiatry’ column from July’s American Journal of Psychiatry, written by Dr Paolo Fusar-Poli:

Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett was both the founding member of one of the most legendary rock bands and probably the most famous rock star to develop psychosis. He formed the band that would become Pink Floyd in 1965, amalgamating the first names of two American bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

Recorded at Abbey Road Studios, inspired by LSD, and driven by Barrett’s songwriting, singing, and otherworldly guitar solos, the first album, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” (1967), alchemized the whimsical bohemian spirit of the “summer of love” and influenced generations of musicians with its sonic inventions and surreal lyrics.

Music journalists have called him “the golden boy of the mind-melting late-60s psychedelic era, its brightest star and ultimately its most tragic victim”. In fact after two haunting solo albums, “The Madcap Laughs” and “Barrett,” which showed the last flickering lights of his genius, his eccentric and creative personality drifted into a psychotic reclusive state, forcing him to withdraw from public view in 1974.

However, Pink Floyd would pay tribute to Barrett and would include madness as an ongoing theme on their best and most successful albums, “Dark Side of the Moon” (1973) and “The Wall” (1979), speaking to Syd directly in the songs “Wish You Were Here” and “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” Barrett spent the rest of his life in his mother‚Äôs house in Cambridge, painting and gardening.

Link to AJP images in psychiatry column on Syd Barrett.
Link to Wikipedia page on Syd Barrett.

“The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.”

A quote from the French writer and philosopher Paul Valéry.

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on neurotech industry consultant Zack Lynch, who you might know from the blog Brain Waves.

Lynch is executive director of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization, an umbrella organisation for the commercial neuroscience sector, and managing director of NeuroInsights, a business intelligence service.

The San Francisco Chronicle article looks at Lynch’s aims and work, in partnership with his wife, neurobiologist Casey Lynch, as well as giving an insight into how the neurotech industry is becoming an increasingly important force in the marketplace and in policy making.

Lynch is an interesting guy to watch. He’ll always pitch for industry, but his job relies on him having a balanced view of what’s likely to work out in the marketplace.

Interestingly, the article also notes he’s written a book on the neurotech industry that’s recently found a publisher:

The first neurotechnology project Lynch took on in 2001, a book titled “Brain Waves,” just landed a publisher. The book allows Lynch to take his favored “200-year view,” speculating on how business, politics and culture will evolve in a future era of neurotech inventions that might change the way people think and communicate. Lynch is fascinated by the ethical and social dilemmas that might emerge. If drugs can enhance memory, for example, would college entrance exams still be fair? “Who’s going to be able to afford this?” Lynch asks.

Link to article ‘Brainstorming about the brain’.