Category: Other People

I’ve just found a very odd news clip about an Australian project to create a disembodied virtual head that reminds people with dementia to take their medication.

The clip is from 2009 and is a little strange not least because the project is actually much more ambitious than described.

‘The Thinking Head Project’ (warning: rubbish website) is run by a heavyweight Australian research team that aims to design an artificially intelligent virtual head that you can communicate with just as you would with another human.

Unexpectedly, the team contains tech-artist Stelarc, known for creating work so astonishing you have to check to see if you haven’t shit yourself with surprise.

Stelarc is interviewed about the project on ABC Radio National’s Future Tense programme where you can hear a bit more about where the project is at the current time.

The disembodied virtual head also turns out to be an image of Stelarc himself, and it looks like they’ve now put it on the end of a fully mobile robot arm.

Philip K Dick didn’t come here to predict the future, he came here to change it.

Link to news clip.
Link to Stelarc interview on the project.

The legendary perception researcher Richard Gregory has passed away and science is certainly the worse off for his departure.

As a student he worked with the great Frederic Bartlett and later became one of the most influential researchers in perception. He was key in demonstrating that expectations and prior experience have a ‘top down’ influence and that perceptions are often just best guesses or hypotheses about the world.

His liberal use of visual illusions demonstrated this in an instantly graspable way, making his explanations clear and immediate, and he was the first to study the perceptual effects of having lifelong cataracts removed.

Previously it was thought that perception was largely ‘all there’ during early childhood, but the fact that people who had the operation as adults couldn’t distinguish objects from each other, for example, suggested that the developing visual system learns many assumptions essential to making sense of the world.

His book Eye and Brain has probably been read by virtually every undergraduate over the last 30 years and he co-founded the Experimental Psychology Society in the UK to promote psychological science at the highest level.

There is a fantastic interview series from The Wellcome Trust where he discusses the history of perception psychology which you can watch in full on YouTube if you want to get a handle on the breadth of his knowledge.

Gregory was also a keen promoter of science education and founded The Exploratory, the first ‘hands on’ science museum in the UK, where children and adults could get their hands dirty and see scientific principles in action.

It’s also worth saying that he was a very approachable and gentlemanly character. A previous Mind Hacks post, on the fact that he was in discussion with film director Roman Polanksi to make a 3D horror movie earlier in his career was prompted by Gregory himself after I had the pleasure of chatting to him at a science event and he mentioned the curious incident.

From what I can make out, his first publication listed on PubMed is from 1957 and his last is from 2010 – appropriately titled ‘Is it more fun to be an artist or a scientist?’.

Link to obituary for Richard Gregory from UCL.
Link to Gregory interview on the history of perception science.

From the track Bonkers by Dizzee Rascal, who turns out to be a remarkably insightful lyricist when he’s not rapping about working it with the ladies:

I wake up, every day is a daydream
Everything in my life isn’t what it seems
I wake up just to go back to sleep
I act real shallow but I’m in too deep
And all I care about is sex and violence
And a heavy bass line is my kind of silence
Everybody says that I got to get a grip
But I let sanity give me the slip

Link to video for Bonkers.

I’ve just re-read an interesting biographical study from last year on the ‘Neurological problems of jazz legends’ and noticed a interesting snippet about Charlie Parker:

As a result of a car accident as a teenager, Parker became addicted to morphine and, in turn, heroin. Contemporary musicians took similar drugs, hoping to emulate his playing. Through the 1940s, Parker’s career flourished. He recorded some of his most famous tunes, including ‘‘Billie’s Bounce’’ and ‘‘Koko.’’ Yet, he also careened erratically between incredible playing and extreme bouts of alcohol and drug abuse. This deteriorated in 1946, when after the recording of the song ‘‘Lover Man,’’ Parker became inebriated in his hotel room, set fire to his mattress, and ran through the hotel lobby wearing only his socks. Parker was arrested and committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where he stayed for 6 months. This stay inspired the song ‘‘Relaxin at Camarillo (1947).’’

The track Relaxin at Camarillo is available on YouTube and it has a wonderfully rambling swing-backed sound. As far as I know, it is the only song about a stay at a mental hospital, but as musicians have had more than their fair share of hospital stays, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were any others, so do let me know if you know of any others.

By the way, the full article on the neurological problems of jazz legends is available online and has six biographies of jazz greats. There’s also a fascinating anecdote related by the author regarding a possible emperor’s new clothes moment during Thelonious Monk’s mental decline:

A personal anecdote: The author’s father, a professional jazz trumpeter, attended an outdoor concert in which Monk simply stared at the keyboard for the 16 bars of his solo but ultimately returned to playing as the next soloist took his course. The audience applauded wildly, assuming that if Monk was thinking through the course but not actually playing, then it must have been astounding, even immanent and transcending a human’s ability to perform much less understand. In retrospect, Monk’s mental status was disordered enough [whether dominated by depressed mood or confusion] that he must have been unable to perform for that verse.

Likely a moment of confusion but I prefer the version where the internal music soars above Monk’s declining skills.

Link to ‘Neurological problems of jazz legends’.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to Relaxin’ at Camarillo.
Link to previous entry on the study’s beat poem abstract.

In 1987, British TV station Channel 4 had a series called Voices that included four programmes on psychoanalysis. One of the guests was psychologist Sherry Turkle, years before she became well-known for her groundbreaking work on the internet and identity, and she makes some strikingly prophetic comments about free will and technology that ring true today but were dismissed at the time.

This is from the book (ISBN 0851244920) of the discussions. In this part, Turkle was talking with presenter Michael Ignatieff and psychoanalysts Philip Rieff and Geoffrey Hartman. Unfortunately, the text is a direct transcript so it retains the awkwardness of the spoken word written down but you can see that she had remarkable foresight.

Turkle: I’m seems to me that the issue of free will is for us today what sex was for the Victorians. The same urgency about sexuality and interdictions about sexuality that so tormented the Victorian spirit, we are now tormented by questions having to do with whether or not we are actors, our own centre, whether, to take computer examples, whether we are programmed from the outside. In what sense are we not like machines? In sociobiology, it raises the question in what sense are we like or not like animals, in a very serious way. It seems to me that fields of study like Artificial Intelligence, like sociobiology, the use of computer metaphors to describe people in everyday parlance, much as psychoanalysis was picked up in everyday parlance – ‘I’m debugging a relationship’ – that kind of talk, raises the issue of free will and to the extent to which we are actors in a very urgent, hot way. And that Freud remains an urgent and a hot thinker, not just for the contribution about sexuality, the family, the question of parents, but by this discovery of the unconscious which makes us take seriously a way of talking about this sense in which we are not our own centre.

Rieff: I don’t think that that is what is happening. I think that the self, the ego, the agent of reality is being fragmented…

I’ve just read a funny and insightful interview with neuroscientist Vincent Walsh from last November’s Current Biology that’s full of over-caffeinated anecdotes and understated wisdom.

It’s really worth reading in full but, unfortunately, the whole thing is locked behind a paywall (a bargain at only $31.50), but I’ve reproduced part of the piece below:

What’s the best advice you have ever given to others? I interviewed a truly exceptional person for a PhD last year. I told her ‚Äúfor God’s sake don’t waste your talent on me as a supervisor‚Äù. I haven’t seen her since. It is rewarding to be listened to.

What has been your biggest mistake in science? Oh, I haven’t even begun to peak on mistakes. I have so many more to give. I make mistakes all the time. In fact, I can’t think of any of my most rewarding papers for which I wouldn’t either interpret the data differently now or start/end with a different theoretical perspective. If you’re still being right about the same shit you were right about 20 years ago, then something tells me you’re either not thinking or you’re just moving papers as product. The whole point of intellectual activity is to come to new conclusions. I don’t see how one can think and keep coming up with the same conclusion, unless it’s really dull stuff. It’s almost our job to be wrong. How can you not make mistakes if you’re reaching for something? I don’t understand people who are proud of never having made one.

One of my scientific heroes is Semir Zeki. I think he’s been substantially wrong on almost everything, but his contribution to science has been far bigger than those who haven’t had the intellectual smarts or courage to put new ideas into the literature. This is no side swipe, I actually think Zeki should have shared the 1982 Nobel prize: he had completely rewritten the architecture of the visual cortex by 1978. The best most of us can hope for is to be fruitfully wrong ‚Äî and you need to be damned clever and courageous to be so. I can only dream of getting things as intelligently wrong, but there’s time.

Do you really mean that? Yes, I mean it with knobs on actually. The view comes from my love of the history of science. I get really angry when people say nonsense like ‚ÄúGall was discredited‚Äù or ‚ÄúLet’s not make the phrenological error‚Äù. I even heard someone say that ‚ÄúNewton has been discredited‚Äù. Such things display a deep ignorance of what Gall contributed and of how history proceeds (the point being that it isn’t a procession of course). Some people think that knowledge of the history of the subject is some kind of optional indulgence but it’s not, it’s essential and it’s also the gateway to humility.

We really haven’t kept up with the general pace as a science. If you reincarnated Gall and explained to him where we are up to, you could bring him up to speed over a pint. If you did the same with a physicist or cell biologist from the same period, the poor buggers’ brains would be throwing sparks by 1905, spewing smoke by 1930 and be in total meltdown by 1953 ‚Äî and that’s when the pace really picked up! Being interestingly wrong is so underrated. Galileo’s ridiculously premature attempt to measure the speed of light is one of my favourite experiments in the whole of science ‚Äî it was based on great thought, not on tweaking a variable.

How do you run your research group? Er ‚Äúrun‚Äù? I think I run after it most of the time…

Link to locked Current Biology interview.

The Boston Globe has an excellent profile of psychologist Ellen Langer, responsible for some of the most influential studies in psychology and a champion of ‘mindfulness’ as an approach to a happier life.

Needless to say, she’s become a doyenne of the positive psychology movement, and, as the article notes, occasionally comes across as slightly guru-like.

Her research remains impressive, however, and when reading through the article I found myself saying “I never knew that was one of Langer’s studies” several times.

These include studies finding that people are much more attached to lottery numbers when they are allowed to choose them – even though this makes no difference to the final outcomes (the ‘illusion of control‘), and one where giving a nonsense excuse to cut in line to use a photocopier was as effective as giving a reasonable excuse.

And of course, she’s well-known for her studies on how giving residents in a nursing home for old people more control over the environment improved their well-being.

For many years she has become interested in mindfulness, although it’s never really been clear to me that she means more than simply ‘think more about what’s going on’ as it seems to be a little different from the concept of mindfulness taken from Buddhism and now an evidence-based component of many psychological treatments.

Apparently, Hollywood studio Universal Pictures are to make a film of Langer’s ageing studies and Jennifer Aniston has been chosen to play the Harvard psychologist. I would have gone for Megan Fox myself but that’s probably why I should stick to the day job.

Link to Boston Globe profile of Ellen Langer.

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind has an engaging interview with psychologist and author Kay Redfield Jamison who discusses her new book which is both a memoir of losing her husband and a consideration of the psychology of grief.

Towards the end of the interview she tackles the distinction between grief and depression, which has recently returned as a contentious topic after lying fallow for many years.

Since Freud’s essay Mourning and Melancholia, the two have been linked in many psychological theories. Freud’s idea was that both were similar types of reaction to loss although in depression it might not be clear to the conscious mind what was lost because the prior attachment might have had unconscious components.

In other words, a small event might trigger a big grief reaction event though it might not be clear why – because some of the psychological value of what you have lost might exist only in the unconscious.

Although the essay is one of the foundational texts of psychoanalysis, nowadays only the most orthodox followers of Freud would agree fully with this theory of depression and the idea that grief and depression are fundamentally the same is no longer widely subscribed to.

Nevertheless, psychiatry is once more approaching grief as a potential form of mental illness, albeit from a different angle.

The concept of complicated grief, where grieving is considered to be more intense, disabling or extended than normal, has been much discussed as an area where psychiatric treatment may be warranted. It’s an interesting concept because it essentially sets limits on what should be considered a normal response to personal loss.

It’s not an official diagnosis as yet, but various proposals set the limits for ‘normal’ grieving at 6 months or one year.

More recently, the draft version of the new American diagnostic bible, the DSM-V, has gone even further and removed bereavement as an exclusion for a diagnosis of major depressive disorder. This means that two weeks of low mood, loss of pleasure and interest in activities, poor sleep, appetite or concentration after a loved one had died could get you a diagnosis of mental illness.

It’s a difficult area, because while it is important not to medicalise normal and healthy reactions to the loss of a significant person in your life, we also wouldn’t want to miss treating mental illness simply because the person has experienced a loss. Clearly there is a balance, although it’s difficult to say where it is.

Jamison has an interesting perspective on the issue, as she’s a clinical psychologist interested in mood disorders, but also has experienced profound depression and loss herself.

Link to AITM interview with Kay Redfield Jamison.
Link to AITM blog on some of the diagnostic issues.

The Guardian books blog has a fantastic short piece on fictional mind-bending drugs from literature, stretching from the nightmare-inducing hallucinogens of William Burroughs to Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster from Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.

The most famous invented drug is probably soma in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It was an integral part of the story because it was an integral part of the authorities’ control mechanism ‚Äì they were literally keeping the people doped up and happy. Sounds alright to me: a permanent state of blissed-out semi-catatonia. In fact, given my choice of fictional narcotics, soma would probably be first.

Nor would I mind sampling some melange/spice from Frank Herbert’s Dune (long life, heightened awareness and possible extrasensory properties, cool blue eyeballs); septus from Iain Banks’s Transition (the ability to flit between parallel worlds and inhabit others’ bodies); Dylar from Don DeLillo’s White Noise (no more fear of death); the various hallucinogens drunk with the old moloko in A Clockwork Orange (a nice quiet horrorshow starring Bog and all his angels); Can-D in Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (allows you to participate in a group hallucination). I also quite like the sound of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, described as “like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick”. Well, it beats aspirin and sniffing exhaust pipes.

However, it misses out one of the most wonderful examples: the feathers from Jeff Noon’s Vurt and Pollen novels that produce shared hallucinations that are a cross between Jung’s collective unconscious and the internet.

Link to ‘Literature’s most mind-blowing drugs’.

ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live has a fascinating discussion with the author of a new book on nine famous hypochondriacs: James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol.

I’m not sure Daniel Paul Schreber is necessarily the best example of someone with hypochondria is he is famous for writing a personal account of being genuinely mentally ill and floridly psychotic. However, I’ve not read the book and the programme focuses on better known figures so I am open to being convinced (certainly his delusions included lots of beliefs about his body changing in curious ways).

Link to Late Night Live on hypochondria.

Bioemphemera has found some wonderfully left-field brain illustrations by Dutch graphic designer Rhonald Blommestijn. The image on the left is a brain made out of clocks.

Blommestijn’s blog is full of strikingly surreal eye-candy that manages both to inspire a feeling of wide-eyed wonder and illustrate scientific themes.

They’re certainly very original takes on the subject and the neuroscience images are particularly vivid.

Link to Bioephemera on Blommestijn’s brain illustrations.
Link to Blommestijn’s blog.

BBC Radio 4 has a fantastic documentary on one of then 20th century’s great poets, Anne Sexton, who struggled with mental illness throughout her adult life and eventually committed suicide at the age of 46.

Uniquely, tapes of Sexton’s psychotherapy sessions with psychiatrist Martin Orne were found after her death giving an alternative insight into her mental life.

The programme dramatises excerpts from the tapes and talks to members of her family about her life, writing and frequent hospitalisations.

Sexton is typically classified as one of the ‘confessional’ poets, although, regardless of the label, her work is certainly very personal and reveals an articulate if not fragile look at many key relationships in her life.

Because of the BBC’s archive of doom, you only have three days to listen to it before it disappears for good into the abyss, although it is well worth catching if you get the chance.

Link to BBC Radio 4 documentary ‘Consorting with Angels’.

I’ve just discovered that the excellent PBS documentary A Brilliant Madness that looks at the life of Nobel-prize winning mathematician, John Nash, is available online either as streamed video or as a torrent.

Nash was famously the subject of the Oscar-winning film, A Beautiful Mind, although the while the main plot elements are true – he both won the Nobel prize and experienced decades of psychosis – his life was heavily fictionalised to the point of being schmaltzy.

The PBS documentary is a more honest, but no less inspirational, look at Nash, and is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning biography by Silvia Nasar.

Nash himself gives an articulate account of his own illness and how society deals with those who experience other realities, while the documentary traces Nash’s sometimes less-than-flattering earlier life story to his later years where he is widely considered to be an altogether more gentle and humane individual.

If you want to know the real story behind A Beautiful Mind or more about Nash it is essential viewing.

Link to information on the documentary from PBS.
Link to flash streamed version.
Link to torrent.

I’m re-reading the excellent book Into the Silent Land by neuropsychologist Paul Broks and was reminded of a part where he recounts an eerie poem about a 1938 operation to remove a brain tumour.

The poem is by Welsh poet and doctor Dannie Abse and, looking it up on the internet, I discovered that the poetry archive has a wonderful entry for the piece online that not only includes the text but also a recording of Abse introducing and reading the poem.

The uncanny incident, probably caused by stimulation of the cortical surface, was witnessed by Abse’s brother, also a doctor, when observing an operation by the famous neurosurgeon Lambert Rogers.

In the Theatre
by Dannie Abse

(A true incident)

Sister saying—‘Soon you’ll be back in the ward,’
sister thinking—‘Only two more on the list,’
the patient saying—‘Thank you, I feel fine’;
small voices, small lies, nothing untoward,
though, soon, he would blink again and again
because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers,
rash as a blind man’s, inside his soft brain.

If items of horror can make a man laugh
then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth
still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time;
more brain mashed because of the probe’s braille path;
Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still;
his dresser thinking, ‘Christ! Two more on the list,
a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.’

Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain,
a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod,
leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’—
the patient’s dummy lips moving to that refrain,
the patient’s eyes too wide. And, shocked,
Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe
with nurses, students, sister, petrified.

‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’
that voice so arctic and that cry so odd
had nowhere else to go—till the antique
gramophone wound down and the words began
to blur and slow, ‘ … leave … my … soul … alone … ’
to cease at last when something other died.
And silence matched the silence under snow.

Link to poetry archive entry for ‘In the Theatre’.

Clinical psychologist and US Congressman Tim Murphy has volunteered to treat soldiers traumatised by the war he voted for.

From January’s APA Monitor magazine:

Clinical child psychologist Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) has consistently voted to continue America’s military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan while appreciating the deepening psychological toll the repeated deployments and combat experiences are taking on service members. That’s why Murphy, 57 and now in his forth congressional term, secured a commission as a military psychologist in the Naval Reserve.

‚ÄúIt’d be difficult for me to continue to vote to send soldiers there and not provide for them what they needed when they got back,‚Äù he says.

Freudians would have a field day with you my lad.

Link to ‘U.S. Congressman will provide psychological services to military’.

A thoughtful reflection on the psychology of the New Year, published in 1895 by the acclaimed essayist Charles Lamb in his collection The Essays of Elia.

Every man has two birth-days: two days at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this custom of solemnising our proper birth-day hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand anything in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

Charles Lamb was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation although struggled with mental illness for much of his life and directed a great deal of his energies to caring for his sister, Mary, who was similarly affected by mental disorder and an exceptional talent for literature.

Link to Wikipedia page on Charles Lamb.