Category: Other People

“…no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.”

From the novel Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad.

Sex and relationship psychologist Petra Boyton has just posted her review of sexual health, science and media trends of 2005 as well as her predictions for 2006.

As the media is increasingly keen on psychological angles to sex stories and pharmaceutical companies are now starting to push the pills and ills of sexual behaviour in earnest, it’s worth being aware of where the evidence could stop and the spin begins:

2006 is going to be the year of the sex addict.
Many new television series in the pipeline that will be outlining this condition ‚Äì either showing it to be an epidemic or offering training for men who are ‘cheaters’ to curb their behaviour. Despite no agreement on sex addiction, or concern from the psychiatric and medical professions of sexual behaviour being pathologised or misdiagnosed, television researchers are ignoring this evidence and making programmes anyway.

Petra also mentions Mind Hacks as ‘not always about sex, but very good nonetheless’, which is probably one of the most unusual complements we’ve had in a while.

Link to ‘Sex Review of 2005’
Link to ‘Sex Predictions and Trends for 2006’

I assumed cognitive science blog Mixing Memory had gone missing in action during October, only to have it burst back into life after a mysterious period of radio silence. It’s one of my favourite reads on the net so it’s great to see it back again.

Link to Mixing Memory.

Borag Thungg Earthlets!

I have just found the webpage of Professor Yasuharu Shirai from Osaka University in Japan.

He is currently involved in researching the “Development of Artificial Skin for Humanoid Robot and Body Image Acquisition Learning” and “Mechanism Behavior Generation by Imitation Learning of Humanoid Robot”.

Prof. Shirai also supervises an investigation into the “Positron Annihilation Study of Defects in Advanced Materials” and belongs to the mysterious “Society for Discrete Variational Xa“.

Is this the most sci-fi sounding scientist on the planet? Answers on a ram card please…

Link to Yasuharu Shirai’s webpage.

The great computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra on artificial intelligence and thinking machines:

“John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.”

Link to ‘The threats to computing science’ by Edsger Dijkstra.

Research published last year showed people are more likely to marry others whose names resemble their own. Now researchers in Paris have shown this egocentric bias extends to shopping – apparently, in certain circumstances, we’re also more likely to buy products with brand names that share letters with our own name.

The researchers said “We found that name letter branding influences choices only under one of two conditions. Either consumers have a need to enhance their self-esteem because of a threatening situation. For instance, a sophisticated restaurant could pose such a threat. Or consumers have to have a product relevant need (for example, being thirsty when choosing a beverage)“.

Link to Journal of Consumer Research (study out in December issue).
Link to abstract of research on picking marriage partners (p. 665).

As the new academic year is in full flow, students might find themselves with a raft of information and little to paddle with.

Mind Hacks has collected a list of favourite internet resources for mind and brain sciences students to help with getting yourselves ashore.

Continue reading “Essential sites for students”

What’s happened to PsyBlog and Mixing Memory? Two of my favourite cognitive science blogs have gone mysteriously quiet.

Answers on a Zener card please…

Where and how is human morality processed and represented by the brain? A freely available review by Jorge Moll and colleagues in the latest issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience proposes a new model based on neuroimaging and clinical data – the event-feature-emotion complex framework (EFEC) – that makes specific predictions about the kinds of moral impairment that will follow from damage to different brain regions.

In contrast with earlier models that have advocated the idea of a rational prefrontal cortex suppressing our amoral emotional drives, the EFEC framework posits a more integrative three-way system, whereby the prefrontal cortex stores information about moral values, social interactions and expected outcomes, the emotional limbic system codes for the reward value of our behavioural choices, and the superior temporal sulcus allows us to extract relevant functional and social features from the environment, like a sad face or aggressive gesture.

The review gives the example of localised cognitive processes that would occur in response to the sight of an orphan girl. The prefrontal cortex will predict the kind of life the girl is likely to have, the superior temporal sulcus will detect the sadness in her face and body language, and recognise her helplessness, and the limbic regions will give rise to feelings of sadness, anxiety and attachment. Taken together, “these component representations give rise to a ‘gestalt’ [unified] experience by way of temporal synchronisation”, the authors say.

Continue reading “The moral brain”

Erving Goffman spent a year working in St Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital in Washington DC, ostensibly as a physical education assistant. In reality, he was a sociologist studying the social situations of patients and staff.

The following is a thought-provoking view on the reasons for hospitalisation from his classic 1961 book Asylums (p126), which he wrote as a result of his undercover study.

Some of these contingencies [that lead to hospitalisation] in the mental patient’s career have been suggested, if not explored, such as socio-economic status, visibility of the offence, proximity to a mental hospital, amount of treatment facilities available, community regard for the type of treatment given in available hospitals and so on.

For information about other contingencies, one must rely on atrocity tales: a psychotic man is tolerated by his wife until she finds herself a boyfriend, or by his adult children until they move from a house to an apartment; an alcoholic is sent to a mental hospital because the jail is full and a drug addict because he declines to avail himself of psychiatric treatment on the outside; a rebellious adolescent daughter can no longer be managed at home because she now threatens to have an open affair with an unsuitable companion; and so on.

Correspondingly there is an equally important set of contingencies causing the person to by-pass this fate. And should the person enter hospital, still another set of contingencies will help determine whether he is to obtain a discharge – such as the desire of his family to return, the availability of a ‘manageable’ job, and so on.

The society’s official view is that inmates of mental hospitals are there primarily because they are suffering from mental illness. However, in the degree that the ‘mentally ill’ outside hospitals numerically approach or surpass those inside hospitals, one could say that mental patients suffer not from mental illness, but from contingencies.

Link to life and work biography of Erving Goffman.
Link to extracts from Goffman’s books (including Asylums).

Cognitive science site Mixing Memory has a tribute to David Marr, a pioneer in understanding visual perception, and in combining neurological and psychological levels of explanation, who died tragically early at the age of 35.

Marr wanted to understand how the brain could start with two-dimensional arrays of light spots on the retina and subsequently produce a rich three-dimensional visual experience.

He argued that the final visual experience is produced by a series of computations that extract important information, such as edges, object groupings and depth information, from basic visual data.

Crucially, he also gave the mathematical procedures, based on an understanding of the biology of the visual system, that might perform these operations.

As well as producing one of the most influential theories of vision, he also influenced how neuroscientists and psychologists think about how the brain works. He proposed that the biology of the brain serves to process information, and that brain cells can be modelled with accurate computational models.

Marr died of leukemia at the age of 35, and produced his most influential work (the book Vision) in the knowledge he had little time left to complete it.

It was published two years after his death in 1982 and is prefaced by the statement “This book is meant to be enjoyed”.

Link to article on Mixing Memory (including link to Marr’s work)
Link to biography of Marr.

An article from art and culture magazine Cabinet discusses the prodigious and tragic life of neural network pioneer Walter Pitts, who was one of the major forces in the early development of computational models of the mind and brain.

Pitts started attending university lectures, uninvited, during his teenage years, and by the age of 17 was working with neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch. As Pitts was homeless and without an income at the time, McCulloch invited Pitts to live in the family home.

Together, they wrote one of the foundational papers in cognitive science, where they demonstrated that individual neurons, mathematically modelled, could be combined in networks to simulate logical computation. This suggested that such neurons could be the basic units of an information processing model of the mind.

This was a big step forward, as it suggested a potential link between the mind and brain to a science that was trying to break free from previous behaviourist ‘stimulus-response’ theories, by adopting a computational framework.

This broad approach is now the dominant theory in modern psychology, although Pitts’ was convinced of a more strictly logical model than is generally accepted today.

Pitts was completely absorbed in his work and often seemed troubled when not focused on it. It was rumoured he may have suffered from schizophrenia on account of his markedly odd behaviour and difficulties with social interaction.

Pitts moved to work with a research group in Boston, but fell out with another group member who had a disagreement with Pitts’ mentor Warren McCulloch. Pitts became a recluse and it has been rumoured he committed suicide.

Many artificial neural networks are based on his work, which are used as theoretical models of the mind, and to solve practical problems in technology and industry.

Link to Cabinet article on Walter Pitts.
Link to Wikipedia article on Walter Pitts.

The Economist, who seem to have a run of psychology article of late, has a brief article discussing theories of why we laugh:

Why do people laugh at all? What is the point of it? Laughter is very contagious and this suggests that it may have become a part of human behaviour because it promotes social bonding. When a group of people laughs, the message seems to be “relax, you are among friends”.

But laughter does not unite us all. There are those who have a pathological fear that others will laugh at them. Sufferers avoid situations where there will be laughter, which means most places where people meet.

Link to article “Poking fun”.

Apple seems to be targeting a new advert at neuroscientists. Dr Nouchine Hadjikhani is featured in the promotion, although at closer inspection, the intended audience are more likely to be people dazzled by the bright lights of brain scanning.

The ad is interesting in that it touts her Apple system as a “vital tool” in her research, although the main selling point seems to be that it runs a free software programme used in brain scan analysis called NeuroLens.

NeuroLens, although respected, is not widely used at present, largely due to the domination of SPM. SPM is also free software, and although it requires a commercial copy of Matlab, it runs on Mac, Windows Linux and other sorts of Unix.

One of the reasons given by Dr Hadjikhani for preferring MacOS is that she is ‘challenged by the command line’, despite the fact that the ad claims she uses NeuroLens before ‘delving into extensive data analysis on her Linux systems’.

“Using UNIX at the command line is time consuming and you have to remember a number of things”, she says, although I suspect her job as a cognitive neuroscientist means she’s quite used to remembering ‘a number of things’ on a daily basis.

They conveniently neglect to say that MacOS is Unix and that Linux isn’t just the command line.

For cognitive neuroscientists, Apple seem to be advertising their systems on the back of (admittedly very attractive) free software, and hoping to use the leverage of Mac only software to get a foot in the door of a largely Apple-free science.

I suspect the ad is more likely to be targeted at executives, however, who want to be seen to be using systems that serious scientists use.

Co-branding with neuroscience, along with other ‘hot topic’ sciences, might be a policy which would go down well with those worried about being seen with an “artist’s” computer on their desk.

Link to Wikipedia page on brain scan analysis and SPM.
Link to NeuroLens software.
Link to Apple ad (via BrainBlog).

In the wake of suspicion that the London bombings were carried out by British nationals, many have asked what motivates acts of terror. Psychologist Andrew Silke studies the psychology of terrorism to try and find out.

Despite the insanity of the acts, one of the most common myths is that terrorists are mentally unbalanced in some way. In an article written shortly after 9/11 (PDF) he noted that even for suicide bombers, evidence for psychopathology or personality disorders is scant.

Work on the impact of terrorist attacks has been most recently focused on the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Silke notes in a more recent article (PDF), that although, in general, being closer to the Twin Towers was related to higher levels of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for other people, stress was related to exposure to television reporting.

The effects on people’s desire for revenge was, perhaps, contrary to expectation:

It was interesting to note, however, that Johll and Brant (2002) also found that New York City residents actually reported a lower need for
vengeance than other Americans. As one firefighter in their study put it: “I wouldn’t wish what happened to us on anyone.”

Suggesting that experience of terrorist attacks, can make people less likely to want more violence to return.

Needless to say, the psychology of terrorism and terrorists is now being heavily researched, as very little was known about it before 2000.

PDF of 2004 article ‘Terrorism, 9/11 and Psychology’ by Andrew Silke
PDF of 2001 article ‘Terrorism’ by Andrew Silke
Link 1 , link 2 and link 3 to coverage from PsyBlog on psychology of terrorism.
Link to summary fof 2004 conference from BBC News.