Category: Other People

Scientic American has an interview online with philosopher David J. Buller who attacks current research in evolutionary psychology.

Buller has recently written a critical book on the subject, Adapting Minds, that analyses much of the evidence on which evolutionary theories of the mind are based, and finds many of them lacking.

His interview tackles many of his concerns in this area, and outlines his main objections to the core theories in evolutionary psychology.

There are three foundational claims that it makes. One is that the nature of [evolutionary] adaptation is going to create massive modularity in the mind–separate mental organs functionally specialized for separate tasks. Second, that those modules continue to be adapted to a hunter-gatherer way of life. And third, that these modules are universal and define a universal human nature. I think that all three of those claims are deeply problematic.

If anything the evidence indicates that the great cognitive achievement in human evolution was cortical plasticity, which allows for rapidly adaptive changes to the environment, both across evolutionary time and [across] individual lifetimes. Because of that, we’re not quite the Pleistocene relics that Evolutionary Psychology claims.

Link to David J. Buller interview in Scientific American.
Link to information and reviews of the book Adapting Minds.

Reactive Colours is an innovative project that is developing software to promote enjoyment and social interaction in severely autistic children.

In contrast to existing packages, it is using a non-commercial open source development model, and is aiming to include the autistic and Asperger’s community as developers and contributors to the project.

I caught up with project leader Wendy Keay-Bright at London’s Autistic Pride Day to ask her about the project.

Continue reading “Reactive Colours and the autistic community”

This month’s BBC Radio discussion programme Book Club is on The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sacks‘ popular and influential book of unusual cases.

The Man Who Mistook… describes a number of patients Sacks has worked with, and describes the strange experiences that can sometimes arise from injury to the brain.

The title refers to a man with visual agnosia, a condition where the ability to perceive or understand objects is lost, despite otherwise normal vision.

Sacks’ writes in the style of influential neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who described his writing as ‘romantic science’ – aiming to capture both the scientific importance and the human impact of the disorders he studied.

Sacks himself is a guest on the programme, and members of the audience include doctors, neuroscientists, students and people who have experienced brain injury.

Link to Book Club webpage.
Realaudio of Book Club on The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

Researchers claim to have identified nine different types of love. In reality, it is more likely that they have simply classified love in nine different ways.

For the curious however, the types include:

The “Cupid’s dart” variety, in which couples – think Antony and Cleopatra or even Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity – are swept away by blind passion.

Hedonistic love, concerned with personal and perhaps fleeting pleasure, the theme of much Hollywood film noir.

Love as the ultimate connection: an essentially romantic view.

I’m not sure whether it is the reporter or the researchers who are getting carried away there.

Call me a cynic, but I think that maybe they’ve just watched too many movies. Be thankful it wasn’t Dawson’s Creek.

Link to article ‘How do I love thee? Which of the nine ways?’

Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of artificial intelligence research, has slammed modern AI as “brain dead”.

Quoted in Wired magazine, he lambasted the last 30 years of work in the area, particularly the focus on creating AI driven autonomous robots.

However, the article finishes on a throwaway comment about the ‘moving goal posts’ problem in the perception of artificial intelligence, that belies much of the problem with how AI is perceived.

It is illustrated by the success of chess computers. In the 60s, it was said that computers will never beat people at chess, because that requires intelligence and computers aren’t capable of intelligent thought.

When computers regularly started winning matches in the 80s, it was claimed that playing chess wasn’t a test of real intelligence because computers could do it.

As there is no widely accepted definition for intelligence, this is often an example of the No true Scotsman fallacy.

Link to Wired article.
Link to Minsky on ‘Smart Machines’ from edge.org
Link to Wikipedia page on Minsky.

A story from NY Newsday queries professional psychologists about the mental health of Batman and the likely causes of his mental instability.

Batman is a fascinating character, not least because his mind and motivations have become an integral plot device in many films and graphic novels.

In fact, the portrayal of madness in the Batman universe is a topic I have tackled myself, in a past article for kuro5hin.org

Almost uniquely for such a popular genre, the plots of Batman revolve around mental illness, because, in addition to Batman’s own troubled thoughts, almost all the criminals are depicted as insane.

It is likely that Batman is both a mirror for our own stereotypes of madness, as well as a medium through which children get some of their first impressions of mental illness.

Link to ‘Is he really batty?’ from NY Newsday
Link to ‘Madness in Gotham’ from kuro5hin.org

A review of tobacco industry documents show research on psychological and behavioural needs in women was used to target cigarette advertising and ingredients, to increase smoking and reduce quitting rates.

The recently released review (PDF), published in the journal Addiction notes that:

A 1976 British-American Tobacco Company (BAT) review of gender differences (drawing on both internal and published studies) concluded that women were more motivated to smoke, smoked more for insecurity reasons and exhibited more neurotic traits.

The author further observed that higher neuroticism among women may intensify responses to smoking-related health pressures, and that female smokers found quitting more difficult and reported fewer successful cessation attempts.

In response, cigarette advertising and ingredients were altered to make them even more difficult to give up, and more attractive for new smokers.

Link to summary from Science Blog
PDF of full-text paper Designing cigarettes for women.
PDF of Addiction editorial Exploitation by design

Continuing the recent evolutionary psychology theme (here,here), I’d like to recommend a piece posted by the ever excellent Carl Zimmer. Recent brain scanning evidence shows, possibly, that problems involving social exchange activate additional specific brain regions compared to problems of the same logical form which don’t involve social exchange. What’s this got to do with Evolutionary Psychology? Well the particular tasks involved are something called the Wason Selection Task, and a variant on it developed by the Evolutionary Psychologists Tooby and Cosmides, and subsequently used as a foundational piece of research for the Evolutionary Psychology movement (note the capital E and the capital P). Swing over to Carl’s place and take a look.

An online article from Scientific American discusses the work of criminologist Russel Ogden, who has been researching the social organisation of the euthanasia underground.

The practice of assisted suicide is illegal in most countries and Ogden has been pressured academically and legally to give up his research or reveal the identities of anonymous interviewees in his study.

He has successfully continued his research while navigating the novel ethical issues his works brings-up, and has discovered some surprising facts about the existence of the often unacknowledged ‘euthanasia networks’.

[Euthanasia organisation] NuTech is at the forefront of what Ogden calls the “deathing counterculture,” in which nonmedical death practitioners offer referrals, consultations and house calls. “They are taking the place of physicians to deliver virtually undetectable death assistance,” says Ogden

Link to article A Culture of Death.
Link to abstract of paper Non-physician assisted suicide: the technological imperative of the deathing counterculture.

I thought I’d post a short essay, originally written for another destination, that touches on issues discussed below in a previous post. It’s also cross-posted at my own blog. Hope y’all enjoy, and I welcome any feedback or crit of my somewhat contentious take on the issue.

Violence is common to our present, history and prehistory. Is there reason to hope that our future will be different? Doubtless we’ll know in the long run, thanks to the grand uncontrolled experiment of life. Meanwhile some argue we can get an early forecast by using the behavioural sciences – investigate our nature to divine our future. But just what do we mean by a violent nature, and would such a nature necessarily force us to be so pessimistic? Such a wide issue needs to be viewed through a narrow prism, so here we shall focus on the neuroscience of violence. Are we wired for violence Рis it brain-based, an original sin never to be expelled? Or could it be less indelible than we fear?

Continue reading “Are we designed for violence?”

Psychologist Susan Blackmore has written an article for the Daily Telegraph, arguing that taking drugs has provided inspiration for her work.

So can drugs be creative? I would say so, although the dangers are great – not just the dangers inherent in any drug use, but the danger of coming to rely on them too much and of neglecting the hard work that both art and science demand. There are plenty of good reasons to shun drug-induced creativity.

Yet, in my own case, drugs have an interesting role: in trying to understand consciousness, I am taking substances that affect the brain that I’m trying to understand. In other words, they alter the mind that is both the investigator and the investigated.

She discusses her experience with a range of drugs, including cannabis, LSD, ketamine and MDMA and examines the influence on her own career choices and insights.

Interestingly, she’s taking part in a debate at the Cheltenham Science Festival on whether using drugs can tell us anything about ourselves, with neuroscientist Colin Blakemore and author Mike Jay.

Lets hope the irony of Cheltenham Science Festival being sponsored by a major pharmaceutical company won’t be lost on the panel.

Link to article I take illegal drugs for inspiration.

The notable evolutionary psychologist David Buss thinks that Murder is in our blood. Specifically that homicide isn’t a rare pathology, or the product of social forces, of culture, poverty or poor parenting – but is an evolutionary adaptation that we all share. He’s saying that in the right circumstances we will all kill, because ancestors of ours who killed had greater reproductive success.

Emotive stuff. I’d be interested to hear what readers of mindhacks.com have to say on it. Here are a few of my first thoughts:

As an observation, this is as old fashioned as original sin. What would make this interesting to me, is detailed, rigourous, demonstration of the psychological mechanisms behind murderous behaviour. Self-styled ‘Evolutionary psychology’ tells a plausible story about the context of murder, but I don’t think there’s much content to disagree or agree with until the experimental work has been done.

Related to this, Buss maligns theories that social forces/parenting/culture/poverty are behind killing while at the same time (in the penultimate paragraph) using them to explain why the rate of murder is so much lower in modern society compared to stone-age civilisations (“Among the Yanomamo of Venezuela and the Gebusi of Africa, for example, more than 30% of men die by being murdered” remember that next time someone trys to force a declension narrative about the collapse of society upon you). The thing about, say, the theory that parenting style produces murder is that at least it is a specific theory – both with regard to the factor and the mechanism. You may not agree, but at least you have something to disagree with (maybe it isn’t that particular style of parenting? maybe it isn’t parenting at all but peer group involvement? etc).

Evolution is an essential theoretical background to psychology, but it only provides hints and allegations – the real work still has to be done. Alas, you can’t derive your answers from the calculus of reproductive success, but need to go collect data to test your each hypotheses against.

Dr. Victoria Zdrok is an ex-lawyer, international model, author, webmistress and clinical psychologist, and she has agreed to share her insights into the sexual psyche with Mind Hacks.

 
Providing a unique perspective on the amorous mind, Dr. Zdrok talks about her influences as a psychologist, her views on the current state of sex research and her own studies into the psychology of sexual fantasy.
 

Continue reading “Dr. Victoria Zdrok on the psychology of sex”

Prosopagnosia is an inability to recognise faces. It most commonly occurs after brain injury, although this week’s New Scientist reports on a recently completed study on a type of inherited prosopagnosia, suggesting a genetic basis for face recognition.

The research was an international effort, led by husband and wife team, geneticists Thomas and Martina Grüter. Notably, Thomas has a particular interest in this area, as he has prosopagnosia himself.

Unfortunately, the New Scientist article is only available to subscribers The full article is now available online, and Mind Hacks has spoken to two members of the research team about this intriguing study: Thomas on his own experience of prosopagnosia and the genetics of face recognition, and neuropsychologist Hadyn Ellis on the implications for the developing field of ‘cognitive genetics’.

Continue reading “When faces fade”

A new three-part series called Two’s a Crowd has started on BBC Radio 4, tackling the the biology of personal identity.

It got a few trailers on air, but has otherwise slipped surruptitiously onto the schedule with not so much as a supporting web page. Luckily, the programme is available as a realaudio archive for a week after each show has been aired (Tuesdays, 11am GMT).

A particular focus is the possible biological bases of personality, particularly with reference to the so-called ‘big five‘ personality traits, that have come to dominate personality research.

BBC, if you’re listening, any chance of some supporting information on the web ? It seems too good a series to be lost among the schedule.

Link to realaudio archive of latest edition of Two’s a Crowd.

A recent article from ‘Inside Bay Area’ discusses the work of psychiatrist Nick Kanas and his team, who study the minds of astronauts.

Kanas heads up the Human Interactions in Space project, that studies the psychology of space travel, both to improve mission efficiency and maintain mental health during its completion.

The research team uses a number of techniques. One method is to use simulated missions, where participants are required to live in confined spaces or conduct procedures while being observed. Another is research on astronauts during ‘live’ missions.

Link to article from Inside Bay Area.
Link to brief summary of book ‘Space Psychology and Psychiatry’.