Category: Remembering

Oscillatory Thoughts has an excellent post on Hans Berger, the inventor of EEG, who created the technology not solely to investigate the electrical signals of the brain, but to try and uncover the neural basis of ‘telepathy’.

It turns out, Berger was a big believer in psychic phenomena: namely telepathy. He believed that there was an underlying physical basis for mental phenomena, and that these mental processes—being physical in nature—could be transmitted between people. Thus, in order to show that psychic phenomena exist, Berger sought to show the nature of the underlying physical processes of thoughts and emotions.

The piece goes on the explain the details of Berger’s early experiments and how the link between electrical activity and brain function has expanded since his revolutionary invention.

Berger is one of the most fascinating characters in the history of neuroscience, but is badly under-researched.

Sadly, he ended his own life in his later years as he struggled to come to terms with the rise of the Nazis, but he has left a weighty legacy which has become a central pillar of neuroscience, despite its somewhat idiosyncratic origins.

Link to Oscillatory Thoughts on Hans Berger and EEG.

A coin operated ‘opium den‘, found in the Musée Mécanique antique mechanical arcade on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.

For only 25 cents you can see some rather glassy-eyed Chinese gentlemen, a door which reveals a skeleton, and a dragon that appears through the window.

It’s no coincidence that this somewhat eccentric piece of carnivalia originates in San Francisco, as it was the first place in America to ban smoking opium.

The city passed the ‘Opium Den Ordinance’ in 1875, timed to take advantage of the growing anti-Asian sentiment that had grown during the gold rush in which many immigrants from China had settled in the area.

The episode was perhaps the first modern drug scare, with moral panic making the papers and opium being blamed for a whole range of social ills, well beyond its actual impact.

These days, the last echoes of the turn of the century scare can be mechanically animated for anyone with a quarter and a curious mind.

Link to the Musée Mécanique website (thanks @aleksk!)

Arthur Conan Doyle is famous for the creation of Sherlock Holmes but a lot less is known about his father. Practical Neurology has an interesting article about art and epilepsy which discusses Doyle senior’s artistic talents and how he was eventually committed to an asylum.

Probably more famous as the father of Arthur Conan, Charles Altamont Doyle (1832–1893) was said to have epilepsy for the last 10–15 years of his life. The cause on his death certificate was epilepsy of ‘many years’ standing. He was not a particularly successful artist and perhaps is best remembered for his illustrations that accompanied the Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet 1888. Charles was another depressive, but he chose to self-medicate heavily with alcohol. It is possible that his seizures, occurring late in life, were related to his consumption of alcohol and rapid withdrawal.

He was committed to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum in 1881, where finding peace at last, he created some of his best work. It is said that he persevered with his art in an attempt to show that he had been wrongfully imprisoned in the institution; ironically, the recurring themes that he used to plead for his sanity were elves, fairies and other fantastical characters. It is said that he died during a prolonged seizure.

Link to PubMed entry for article.

The website for ‘The Man Who Shocked the World’, a biography of Stanley Milgram, is a goldmine of information about the psychologist who became famous for his obedience experiments. The little known facts section has an interesting snippet about a 70s TV drama based on the experiments which starred William Shatner as the Milgram character.

In August, 1976, CBS presented a prime-time dramatization of the obedience experiments and the events surrounding them, titled “The Tenth Level.” William Shatner had the starring role as Stephen Hunter, the Milgram-like scientist. Milgram served as a consultant for the film. While it contains a lot of fictional elements, it powerfully conveyed enough of the essence of the true story for its writer, George Bellak, to receive Honorable Mention in the American Psychological Association’s media awards for 1977.

It turns out that The Tenth Level is available in full on YouTube. The first part is here and you can click through to the other parts.

The combination of some of the most notorious experiments in the history of psychology, Big Bill Shatner, cheap production and hammy acting make for a heady mix, although it doesn’t particularly overdo the psychology.

I’ve not read ‘The Man Who Shocked the World’ although it is, by all accounts, excellent. The website, at least, is a fantastic resource in itself and well worth a visit.

Link to ‘The Man Who Shocked the World’ website.
Link to first part of ‘The Tenth Level’.

Neuroscience journal Brain has an amazing article on the history of non-drug treatments for headaches. What sounds like a dry article on the history of neurology is actually a remarkable romp through many of the most eccentric treatments in medicine.

The piece has just been published online and sadly is locked behind a paywall (keeps the riff-raff out) but here are a couple of interesting excerpts. The first, completely terrifying, the second, somewhat more calming.

To start, a scorching treatment for headache from Ancient Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia:

‘Consequently, you have to shave off the hair (which yet on its own is good for the head) and cauterize [burn] superficially down to the muscles. If you wish to cauterize down to the bone, carry it out at a site where there are no muscles. For if you burn muscles, you will provoke cramps. Some physicians incise down to the bone on the forehead along the border of the hair. They abrade or chisel the bone down to the diploe and let flesh grow over the place. Others perforate the bone down to the meninges. These are hazardous treatments. You have to apply them when the headache persists after all that has been done; the patient keeps courage and the body is vigorous’

…and relax. Needless to say, there were also some slightly more gentle treatments from times gone past (assuming you’re not a mole).

Oribasius, mentioned above, advised the injection of soft oil into the ear. An interesting treatment for headache was that recommended by the 10th century astronomer and physician Ali ibn Isa (ca. 940–1010 CE), who recommended binding a dead mole to the head. If diseases of the head occur because of a faulty warm constitution, Maimonides advised bathing in comfortable warm sweet water, because it dissolved the sharp vapours that rose to the head and improved the body disposition. If headache was localized, it was most appropriate to apply massage with oil of roses

By the way, the image at the top of the post is an ‘nerve vibrator’ taken from Mortimer Granville’s 1883 book Nerve-Vibration and Excitation as Agents in the Treatment of Functional Disorder and Organic Disease.

The article is packed full of such snippets and is worth checking out if you can get hold of a copy through a library or by emailing the authors.

Link to DOI entry and summary.

An intriguing study just published in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology has found that we can be convinced we reported symptoms of mental illness that we never mentioned and, as a result, we can actually start believing we have the symptom itself.

The faking and exaggerating of psychiatric and neurological symptoms is a big problem in the medical world, not because it is difficult to see when symptoms are inconsistent with the person’s medical history, but because they can also be arise unconsciously without any intent to deceive.

For example, imagine someone experiences a minor car crash but afterwards reports that their legs are paralysed. Of course, they could be outright faking, but they could also be experiencing what is now diagnosed as conversion disorder, where they have no neurological damage that would prevent them moving their legs but where they also have no conscious control over their movements.

It is probably true to say that the condition is not well understood, but it seems that the paralysis occurs through problems in the organisation of activity patterns in the brain, rather than through ‘damaged wiring’.

In terms of the medical diagnosis, however, the distinction can often rely on making a difficult judgement about the person’s intentions and motivations – whether they are deliberately faking, have no control or are somewhere in between.

These issues become even more tricky when the reported symptoms are psychological in nature – e.g. memory loss, emotional disturbance, difficulty concentrating – because it can be even harder to make the distinction between genuine, exaggerated or outright faked symptoms.

This is also a legal problem, because patients making insurance or compensation claims have a financial incentive to report more symptoms.

Psychologists have developed numerous tests and evaluations to assess the genuineness of symptoms and whether someone is putting their full effort into ability tests, but this new study shows that the line between conscious and unconscious exaggeration can be quite blurry.

The research team, led by psychologist Harald Merckelbach, asked two groups of student participants to read a description of a legal case where the defendant had illegally entered a medieval building and accidentally dislodged some stones which had fatally wounded a young girl.

They were then told to imagine they were the defendant and to fill in a medical assessment questionnaire. One group was told to fill it in honestly, and other was told to fake a serious psychological condition in a credible way to minimise their criminal responsibility.

The twist came when, after an hour of doing unrelated puzzles and quizzes, the participants in the dishonest group were told they had been detected as fakers, and were asked to fill in the medical questionnaire again – but this time honestly. Those in the honest group were simply told that sometimes people can change their mind and were asked to complete the assessment again.

The group asked to ‘fake’ the first time around showed much higher levels of symptom exaggeration and faking on the second assessment – even though they were told to complete the questionnaire honestly.

In an interesting parallel to a recent study showing that just wearing counterfeit designer clothes led by higher levels of deception, just having experience of earlier deliberate faking led to unconscious exaggeration later on.

But perhaps the most interesting part came in their second experiment. Participants were asked to complete a checklist of symptoms, to report, honestly, on their mental health.

After handing in the questionnaires, the researchers secretly altered a couple of the participants responses – for example, when the participant answered a question about concentration difficulties with 0 (“not at all”), this score was surreptitiously changed to a 2 (“occasionally”).

One of the research team then went through the questionnaire and asked each participant to explain why they answered the way they did.

During the interview, more than two-thirds of the participants gave justification for why a faked item was true, without realising it had been manipulated, and over half were completely blind to the fact that both items had been changed.

The researchers described how “participants would say that they occasionally or rather often experienced concentration difficulties because they had been drinking a lot of coffee lately or because they were going through a difficult time in life with a lot of exams”.

Afterwards, the participants were given the same questions again and those who had justified the faked responses tended to change their answers – having seemingly come to believe more strongly that they really did experience the symptoms ‘given’ to them by the researchers. The effect was not dramatic, but still a significant shift.

In some ways, the study is an extension of the many studies that have found how easy it is to implant fictitious experiences into the memories of everyday folk. But it also shows that there is no cut and dry line between deliberate faking and unconscious motivation and that we can give exaggerated answers even when we’re trying to be brutally honest.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

A gripping edition of This American Life explores the ‘recovered memory movement’ of the 1990s where patients became convinced that they had experienced horrific, sometimes supernatural, abuse as children, led on by credulous therapists who used techniques now know to cause false memories.

The programme is a 2002 exploration of when experts give bad advice. Skip the first 8 minutes – it’s some irrelevant chattering about car mechanics – as it’s the next 35 minutes that matter.

The piece explores the now infamous recovered memory movement which led to therapists convincing patients that they had suffered dreadful, sometimes theatrically ‘satanic’ abuse, at the hand of their families, which they had supposedly ‘repressed’ into their unconscious mind.

Therapists believed they were detecting the unconscious traces of these ‘experiences’ in the dreams and emotional upset of genuine patients and encouraged their clients to elaborate on what was usually nothing but prejudice.

We now know, largely from research sparked from the work of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, that we can easily form false memories with this sort of elaboration, leading patients to believe that these experiences genuinely happened, despite having no memories of it prior to therapy.

Of course, we forget things and remember them again later, but we know now that traumatic experiences are the least likely to be forgotten. In fact, there is still no convincing evidence, or indeed, a single well-verified example, of a ‘repressed’ traumatic experience that was later ‘recovered’.

It’s probably worth noting, as the programme does, that the ‘recovered memory movement’ arrived when the full extent of child sexual abuse was just becoming known and when people were realising that victims of sexual abuse where often dismissed or not believed.

Without the evidence we have today on the remarkable malleability of memory, many therapists began to see what they thought were signs of repressed sexual abuse in their patients, even when this was denied, and began to encourage their clients ‘recover’ their memories.

The programme talks to both people who were falsely led to believe they were abused, and therapists who were caught up in the movement and helped patients ‘recover’ their baseless memories.

The piece is neither voyeuristic nor sensational and carefully weaves together the history of the social phenomenon and the personal stories of those affected.

As an aside, the reporter is Alix Spiegel who makes consistently brilliant mind, brain and mental health radio almost all of which is available online on the NPR archives and This American Life the archives.

Link to ‘An Epidemic Created By Doctors’.

The Journal of Cranio-Maxillofacial Surgery has an intriguing article on head injuries from Ancient Greece which has a section on ‘Unusual cranial injuries in prominent men’.

There is something cosmically poetic in the fact that the ‘father of tragedy’ Aeschylos died from being hit on the head by a turtle.

The death of the father of tragedy, Aeschylos (524–455 B.C.) is a very unusual case of accidental head trauma. At the age of seventy Aeschylos was mortally injured by a turtle thrown by an eagle on his head (Aelian, 1971). “Aeschylos was seated upon a rock, meditating, … He had no hair on his head and was bald. Now an Eagle supposing his head to be a rock, let the Tortoise which it was holding fall upon it. And the missile struck the aforesaid poet and killed him”. This fulfilled a prophecy, the oracle predicting that Aeschylos would die by an arrow dropped from high in the sky.

An interesting case of concussion that caused a change of personality is described by Plutarch. Aridaios, an unscrupulous and hard man, fell from a height, struck his head and neck and became comatose without any obvious wounds. On the third day he regained consciousness, recovered his strength and senses and he instituted a change in his way of life that could hardly be believed (Plutarch, 1959). According to Plato “the neck is the “isthmus and boundary” between the head, the abode of the divine part of the soul, and the body, the abode of its mortal part” (Plato, 1925). This statement illustrates the belief that traumatic injuries above the neck can be associated with a change of personality.

Xenocrates (400–314 B.C.) a philosopher, mathematician and scholar of the Platonic Academy, is most likely to have died from a head injury “in consequence of stumbling by night against a dish, being more than 82 years of age” (Diogenes Laertius, 1972).

Link to PubMed entry for article.

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind has a fantastic programme that looks back on how amnesic Patient HM was central to our understanding of human memory and how the study his post-mortem brain will continue to illuminate the neuroscience of remembering.

HM became densely amnesic after experimental neurosurgery was performed to treat his otherwise untreatable epilepsy.

His case has been very well covered over the years, especially since he died in 2008, but this edition of All in the Mind talks to some of the world’s leading memory researchers to discuss his scientific legacy.

Also, don’t miss the audio extras on the AITM blog which probably add up to another programme’s worth of material and goes into more depth on the implications for cognitive science.

Link to All in the Mind on HM.
Link to extras on the All in the Mind blog.

The fascinating story of the Collyer Brothers, the ‘Hermits of Harlem, is recounted in an article the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.

The two brothers became famous owing to them living in a chaotic home in New York City, although both met a tragic end as a result of their accumulation of junk:

Most famously, over decades they had filled the huge brownstone with possessions, newspapers, and just plain junk. After their deaths in 1947, over 130 tons of material was removed. There was so little of value that the few auctioned items fetched only $1,800.

So packed was the home of Homer (aged 64 years at death) and Langley (aged 61) Collyer that the interior was a maze of tunnels, many booby trapped to satisfy Langley’s fear of intrusion. Langley, a failed concert pianist and Columbia engineering graduate, would go out at night dragging a carton by a rope, collecting things. Homer, a lawyer, blind and crippled by arthritis, was entirely dependent on his brother. In the end, Langley was crushed to death by debris triggered by one of his booby traps, leaving Homer to starve to death. Running the story as page-one news for weeks, the media fueled a frenzy of interest after Homer’s body was found and a search for Langley revealed that he was buried [under junk] 10 feet from where Homer had died.

At the time the brothers were considered eccentric but not unusual enough to warrant the attention of a psychiatrist.

The article goes on to discuss who their behaviour might be understood by modern psychiatry, which would likely diagnose it as ‘compulsive hoarding‘, usually thought to be a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD.

However, it the piece also a wide-ranging discussion on what different forms hoarding can take and how it is portrayed by the media.

Don’t forget to check out the Wikipedia entry on the brothers that has many more details and also a list of other famous hoarders at the bottom of page.

Link to article on psychiatry and the Collyer brothers.
Link to Wikipedia page on the pair.

Slate has just finished an awesome eight-part special on how memory can be manipulated, shaped and reshaped even when we’re completely unaware of it.

The series is really a retrospective on the life and work of Elizabeth Loftus, one of the most important and influential researchers in the area of false and flexible memories.

The first part is description of an online memory experiment completed by the website. If you’re new to the area it’s worth checking out, but if you’re aware of how easy it is for people to say they’ve genuinely remembered false events, it may be worth skipping to part two where the series really kicks off.

The articles weave together Loftus’ life and scientific work, describing how her own experiences have shaped her interest in false memory and how she has applied her interest in the flexibility of memory to a remarkably wide range of fields.

She is probably best known for her research which countered much of the ‘recovered memories of abuse’ hysteria which arose in the 90s. Loftus demonstrated it was very easy for therapists to encourage false memories in their clients.

This is a wonderfully vivid passage that describes how she developed her early experiments that ‘implanted’ nondescript false memories (such as the experience of being lost in the mall) to more unusual scenarios:

So Loftus ran bolder experiments with more subjects, more trauma, and greater implausibility. She convinced people that they had nearly choked, had caught their parents having sex, or had seen a wounded animal after a bombing. Other researchers planted memories of nearly drowning, being hospitalized overnight, and being attacked by an animal. In one study, Loftus and her collaborators persuaded 18 percent of people that they had probably witnessed demonic possession.

Critics protested that Loftus still hadn’t proved the memories were fake. So she raised the ante. She persuaded 16 percent of a study population that they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. In a follow-up experiment, researchers sold the same memory to 36 percent of subjects. This was impossible, since Bugs belonged to Warner Bros., not Disney. When critics complained that the Bugs memory wasn’t abusive, Loftus obliged them again. Her team convinced 30 percent of another group of subjects that on a visit to Disneyland, a drug-addled Pluto character had licked their ears.

The ‘recovered memories of abuse’ hysteria reached its peak with recovered memories of ‘satanic ritual abuse’ or SRA in which both the law and professionals got caught up in despite the fact that no reliable evidence was ever found for its existence.

It is now a matter of embarrassment not least due to several high profile cases, such as the Orkney scandal, where children were removed from their families owing to leading interviews and over-zealous social workers.

However, the ‘ritual abuse’ movement is not completely dead. In fact, only last year London’s John Bowlby Centre ran a conference on ‘Ritual Abuse and Mind Control’ (programme: pdf) which featured Valerie Sinason, author of the book ‘Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse’, which was partly responsible for fuelling the panic.

The Slate series covers some of the most important research to show how people could come to believe they were involved in such incidents and has many extras and links to other resources and the original research.

Link to Slate’s false memory series.

Full disclosure: I’m an occasional writer for Slate

The New York Times has an excellent article on the history of the ‘nervous breakdown’ – an inexact term that has never been officially recognised but which has been popular for over a century.

The article suggests that the phrase is common precisely because it sounds medical and, hence, significant, but remains vague enough to be used flexibly and by everybody without seeming pretentious.

The vagueness of the phrase made it impossible to survey the prevalence of any specific mental problem: It could mean anything from depression to mania or drunkenness; it might be the cause of a bitter divorce or the result of a split. And glossing over those details left people who suffered from what are now well-known afflictions, like postpartum depression, entirely in the dark, wondering if they were alone in their misery.

But that same imprecision allowed the speaker, not medical professionals, to control its meaning. People might be on the verge of, or close to, a nervous breakdown; and it was common enough to have had “something like” a nervous breakdown, or a mild one. The phrase allowed a person to disclose as much, or as little, detail about a “crackup” as he or she saw fit. Vagueness preserves privacy.

As the article notes, we have a long history of vague ’emotional exhaustion’ coveralls stretching from neurasthenia to burnout syndrome that come in and out of fashion.

Link to NYT On the Verge of ‘Vital Exhaustion’?

I’ve written an article for the magazine fotografya about how photography was initially used by doctors to document ‘hysteria’ in the 19th century but quickly became a vector through which the condition was spread.

The most influential photos came from the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, where, under the direction of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, hysteria was redefined to mean the appearance of apparently neurological symptoms, like paralysis or epileptic-like movements, without any clear damage to the nervous system.

Harnessed due to its presumed ability to objectively record the symptoms of patients, the camera became a vector for the condition, causing doctors to diagnose it in far greater numbers and for patients to express their distress through ‘hysterical’ symptoms in increasing numbers. We tend to think of media fashions as transient and frivolous but we forget that popular culture is as much an influence on illness and its treatment as science itself. For many, Charcot’s iconic pictures became the public expression of their private anguish and their documentary potential extended beyond the hospital walls to capture the broken spirit of the times.

These conditions are now known diagnosed as ‘conversion disorder‘ or considered to be ‘psychogenic’ in nature because psychological factors are thought to be behind the symptoms rather than what they appear to be – namely brain damage.

This means that the conditions are more likely to appear in people who already have experience of them, so early depictions of them were part of the process that led to an explosion in their appearance and diagnosis.

fotografya is a Turkish magazine and it has my original in English but I recommend checking out the Turkish translation as it is wonderfully illustrated by some of the striking photos of the time.

The article traces the history of ‘photographing madness’ from its clinical origins to its place in 19th century pop culture.

Link to article ‘Studio Charcot’ in English.
Link to Turkish translation with awesome illustrations.