Category: Other People

If you’ve got half an hour, you could do a lot worse than spending it listening to ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind interview with neuropsychologist Dr Paul Broks, author of Into the Silent Land (ISBN 1843540347).

Broks writes in a part philosophical, part hallucinatory style, focusing on patients whose understanding and experience of the self has been disturbed by brain injury.

It’s one of my favourite books on neuropsychology, and Broks touches on many of its themes in the interview.

Broks has also written the play On Ego (ISBN 184002609X), which was based on part of the book, but which I found a little luke warm when I saw it and seemed to lack the originality of his writing.

However, he notes in the interview that he’s currently writing another play with the Royal Shakespeare Company about a woman who has intense religious experiences and temporal lobe epilepsy (the two often co-occur), which sounds immensely promising.

Broks will also be appearing at three events at the Sydney Writer’s Festival (two of which are free) so wander along if you happen to be in Sydney on May 31st or June 2nd.

Link to AITM interview with Paul Broks.

Tony Wright is aiming to beat the world record for staying awake, and you can watch him on a webcam. The record is currently held by Randy Gardner who managed 11 days without sleep.

A previous record was famously claimed by Radio DJ Peter Tripp who stayed awake for 8 days, but used methylphenidate (Ritalin) to help him fight off sleep.

Methylphenidate is a form of amphetamine and it’s known to increase the risk of psychosis in some people. Sleep deprivation is also linked to psychosis.

Needless to say, Tripp was quite psychotic by the end of his ‘wakeathon’ with hallucinations and paranoid delusions.

As it wasn’t widely known that Tripp had taken stimulants, it was assumed that sleep deprivation led to madness.

This is why Gardner suggested at the final press conference that he was perfectly fine, announcing that “I wanted to prove that bad things didn’t happen if you went without sleep”.

Contrary to Gardner’s claims, it was obvious that the lack of sleep was causing cognitive difficulties, as well as temporary delusions and hallucinations, although not to the same extent as Tripp suffered.

We know now that sleep deprivation causes significant mood problems, reality distortion and profound cognitive difficulties.

So, if you’re watching the webcam you might see some rather unusual behaviour, as Tony Wright is likely to be experiencing some very odd things as time goes on.

Link to Tony Wright’s record attempt webpage (via MeFi).
Link to live webcam.

Bookslut has an in-depth interview with neuropsychologist Dr Mark Solms, one of the pioneers of neuropsychoanalysis, the field that attempts to test, extend and integrate Freudian ideas with modern neuroscience.

Twenty years ago, Freud’s ideas were considered virtually obsolete by mainstream cognitive scientists, but some recent findings have suggested a neurocognitive basis for some key Freudian ideas.

For example, a 2001 paper by Anderson and Green suggested that people can effectively suppress unwanted memories from consciousness and that the executive system (considered a key control function of the frontal lobes) may be responsible.

More recently, a study of brain injured patients who confabulate (produce false or unlikely memories without intending to deceive) have reported that the false memories are more likely to be positive and emotionally uplifting, suggesting a level of wish fulfilment.

In the interview, Solms discusses the future of neuropsychoanalysis, addresses some of the criticisms, and talks about his new translation of Freud’s complete works.

Link to Mark Solms interview.
Link to Wikipedia page on neuropsychoanalysis.

Dr Petra Boynton is a social psychologist, researcher, author, broadcaster, blogger, and award winning sex educator.

She’s an advocate for evidence-based sex education, amid the largely sensationalist media coverage of the subject, and a tireless campaigner for sexual equality, having worked to improve media sex coverage both in the UK and internationally.

As well as conducting extensive research into sexual attitudes and behaviours, she also promotes the public understanding of social and health science research through her teaching, writing and broadcasting.

Petra has kindly agreed to talk to Mind Hacks about her work, motivations and current interests in the world of sex research.

Continue reading “Five minutes with Petra Boynton”

Nobel prize-winning psychologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) gives a description of brain activity that eerily echoes the results of modern brain scanning studies.

The quote is from a lecture given in 1913 and published on p222 of the book Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes: Twenty-Five Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity Behavior of Animals.

“If we could look through the skull into the brain of a consciously thinking person, and if the place of optimal excitability were luminous, then we should see playing over the cerebral surface, a bright spot with fantastic, waving borders constantly fluctuating in size and form, surrounded by a darkness more or less deep, covering the rest of the hemisphere.”

The picture is of one of the lock gates on Grand Canal Way in South Dublin. The bench is a memorial to Irish artist, songwriter and civil engineer Percy French and is inscribed with the following ode to memory:

Remember me is all I ask,
And yet
If the remembrance prove a task
Forget

“But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? ‚Äî the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world ‚Äî a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.”

A quote from Virginia Woolf’s short story An Unwritten Novel.

Woolf suffered from debilitating depression throughout her life and eventually committed suicide at the age of 58, but not before revolutionising modernist literature and leaving a huge legacy of both fiction and non-fiction works.

This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.

A quote from Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel by American writer Kurt Vonnegut, who died yesterday.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel about World War II, the bombing of Dresden, alien abduction, youthful foolishness, time travel, brain injury and forgiveness.

It is a truly remarkable book that gives a profound and sensitive portrait of a person with brain injury, and the chaotic, hallucinatory, terrifying and sometimes wonderful experiences that can come with it.

“We are accustomed to think of any particular response as either learned or innate, which is apt to be a source of confusion in thinking about things… Is the response inherited or acquired? The answer is, Neither: either Yes or No would be very misleading.”

Pioneering neuropsychologist Donald Hebb highlights that fact that all human responses are a result of both inherited attributes and learnt experience.

Hebb is best known for his theory of how learning can be supported by networks of single neurons.

The theory, now called Hebbian learning, is a key aspect of artificial intelligence and neuroscience.

I got this quote from Oliver Sacks’ book Migraine but the source isn’t listed. If anyone knows exactly which of Hebb’s writings this comes from, do let me know.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments: It is from “The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory” – it’s on Google Books. Thanks John!

Psychotherapy Networker magazine is celebrating its 25th anniversary and has conducted a survey to find out the 10 most influential psychotherapists.

Over two and a half thousand (presumably) American psychotherapists responded to the question “Over the last 25 years, which figures have most influenced your practice?” from which the top ten were compiled.

This list is as follows:

1. Carl Rogers
2. Aaron Beck
3. Salvador Minuchin
4. Irvin Yalom
5. Virginia Satir
6. Albert Ellis
7. Murray Bowen
8. Carl Jung
9. Milton Erickson
10. John Gottman

The article discusses each of these key figures and their contribution to psychotherapy, as well as placing them in the wider context of psychological treatments for mental distress.

As well as outlining the most influential psychotherapists, another article looks at the 10 most influential research findings from the last 25 years that have influenced the development of modern psychotherapy.

Finally, an article on ‘Defining Psychotherapy’ cuts to the core of the debate over what psychotherapy is and what is should be in terms of both theory and everyday practice.

The articles are a fantastic introduction to both the theory behind psychological therapies and to what you might expect if you were to undertake therapy yourself, either as a client or a therapist.

Link to ‘The Top 10 Most Influential Therapists…’
Link to ‘Top 10 Research Findings…’
Link to article ‘Defining Psychotherapy’.

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n

A quote from John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Interestingly, the idea that it’s not solely events themselves that determine our emotional reaction but also how the mind makes sense of them, is a core principal of CBT or cognitive behaviour therapy.

“We are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever.”

A quote from the late American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan.

BBC News has a brief news story on its front page that relates the experiences of Dr Haidr al-Maliki, a child psychiatrist in Iraq.

From what Dr al-Maliki says, it seems most psychiatrists have left the country and he himself is having to work with severely traumatised children despite not having the proper training.

He has also been shot and threatened, and lives in fear of his life.

About a year ago, during Ramadan, four boys aged about 15 to 20 came into my private clinic, in front of my patient.

They asked “Are you Dr Haidr?” I said yes. And they shot me several times.

One bullet went into my right shoulder, another into my right arm. I am left with nerve injury and muscle atrophy.

Afterwards they told me I couldn’t go to my clinic and that I had to leave the country. They didn’t say why.

Link to BBC News article ‘My Iraq: Child psychiatrist’.

“The brain is a world consisting of a number of unexplored continents and great stretches of unknown territory.”

A quote from the pioneering Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Gretchen Rubin is a lawyer-turned-author who’s now pursuing happiness, by test-driving every principle, tip, theory, and scientific study she can find on the subject, and writing a book about her experiences as she goes.

Sources of inspiration stretch from Aristotle to Oprah Winfrey, and her quest is being charted on her blog, the Happiness Project.

Her online journal has recently explored how happiness relates to physical attractiveness, whether children makes us content, and what Voltaire has to say about living a good life – among a bewildering array of other investigations.

As well as experimenting with her life and recording the results, Gretchen has also been kind enough to talk to Mind Hacks about her motivations and discoveries.

Continue reading “Five minutes with Gretchen Rubin”

Below is an excerpt from the novel Bedlam by Jennifer Higgie which gives a fictional account of the travels and madness of Victorian artist Richard Dadd.

Dadd was eventually confined to Bethlem Hospital and subsequently to the then ‘Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane’ (now Broadmoor Hospital) for the murder of his father and attempted murder of a tourist while being tormented by paranoid delusions.

Dadd was allowed to keep painting in hospital and produced some of the most important artwork of the era.

From p144 of the novel:

I find myself gazing at sand and seeing green hills.
I notice hideous faces glaring at me from the faces of sweet young girls.
I the silhouette of a pig in the mild eyes of a camel.
I lie stuck to my bed, covered in sweat as the mattress breathes and groans beneath me.
I have forgotten the names of my own sisters and brothers.
I speak happily, for hours, with my dead mother, whose hand I feel stroke mine, and curse the breath of my father, who is revealed to me as an impostor of the highest order.
I walk in sunlight and feel the hot glare of the moon burn my skin.
I see scorpions the size of men haunting ruins.
I crash into walls I do not see.
I pluck poisonous flowers and dream I boil them for tea.
I spend hours polishing teaspoons I do not need.
I long to dilute my colours with mirages, to make them hot and trembling.

Link to details of Higgie’s Bedlam.
Link to Wikipedia page on Dadd.