Category: Togetherness

An amazing passage about the use of coca among of the indigenous Kogi and Ika people of Colombia, taken from p24 of anthropologist Wade Davis’ magical book on the ethnobotany of ceremonial chemicals, One River.

In a sacred landscape in which every plant is a manifestation of the divine, the chewing of hayo, a variety of coca only found in the mountains of Colombia, represents the most profound expression of culture. Distance in the mountains is not measured in miles but coca chews. When two men meet, they do not shake hands, they exchange leaves. Their societal ideal is to abstain from sex, eating and sleeping while staying up all night, chewing hayo and chanting the names of ancestors. Each week the men chew about a pound of dry leaves, thus absorbing as much as a third of a gram of cocaine each day of their adults lives.

The book traces Davis’ own travels, and those of his mentor Richard Evans Schultes, to understand the culture and chemistry of psychoactive plants among the native peoples of America, both North and South.

It’s an amazingly evocative book and is full of engrossing cultural insights into how plants like coca, the peyote cactus and psilocybin mushrooms have been used traditionally and how they were discovered by Western science.

As we’ve mentioned before, Davis has also given a couple of amazing TED talks that focus on traditional uses of mind altering plants.

Link to more info on One River (Thanks @David_Dobbs!)
Link to previous discussion and links to TED talks.

Murder has become largely confined to the poor and disadvantaged whereas historical records show that in times gone past it was used equally by all levels of society.

This is taken from a 1997 study called ‘The Decline of Elite Homocide’, published in the journal Criminology, which attempts to explain how homicide has become less democratic over time.

The criminological literature consistently reports a negative relationship between social status and interpersonal homicide. Regardless of the setting studied, homicide tends, with just a few exceptions, to be concentrated among low-status groups, such as the poor, the unemployed, the young, and cultural minorities. Yet robust as it is, this relationship is confined to modern societies. In the premodern era, homicide was found at all levels of the social hierarchy, including its higher echelons.

What explains these facts? Why is homicide largely confined to low status people today but was not in the societies studied by anthropologists and historians? Why has elite homicide declined? The answer developed here builds on a theory advanced by Donald Black (1983), which argues that violent conflict is a function of the unavailability of law. In modern societies, low social status and law are antagonistic, and the result is that legal means of resolving conflict are effectively unavailable to those at the bottom of the social pyramid. In earlier societies, law tended to be unavailable to everybody, irrespective of their social standing.

Link to DOI entry and summary for study.

The ‘incest taboo‘ is the aversion to being sexually attracted to our own family and evolutionary psychology has suggested it is an inherited adaptation to promote genetic diversity. A brilliant study just published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin provides evidence that this is actually a cultural phenomenon, received wisdom if you like, because when awareness of the relationship is hidden, people find individuals who resemble their family more sexually attractive.

The debate about whether the incest taboo is an evolutionary adaptation or a cultural practice has quite a vintage as it became a point of contention between the followers of Edvard Westermarck, the Finnish anthropologist, and Sigmund Freud, the Austrian sex obsessive.

Westermarck believed the practice was an adaptation, based on the fact that it seems to occur universally, whereas Freud believed it was a cultural practice and that, actually, we all have incestuous desires that we typically repress – something now famous as the Oedipus complex.

More modern theories of incest avoidance have suggested that they rely on cognitive processes that judge how related someone might be based on our knowledge and our perception of similarity that may signify a genetic relationship.

However, the picture is a little muddied by the fact that recent psychology studies have shown that we are more likely to be attracted to people we are familiar with and that, to some extent, we are more attracted to people who are physically similar to us.

This new study, by psychologists Chris Fraley and Michael Marks, set out to tackle the issue by seeing how subliminal exposure to closely related people would affect sexual attraction.

In an initial experiment, participants were asked to provide a photo of their parent to the researchers. During the study, they were asked to simply rate the attractiveness of strangers’ faces presented to them on a computer.

What they didn’t know was that just before they saw each face, half of the participants had the photo of their opposite-sex parent quickly flashed up on-screen – so quickly, in fact, that it was too fast to take in consciously. The other half, were given a subliminal image of someone else’s parent.

Those who were subliminally shown their opposite-sex parent rated the subsequent face as significantly more attractive, suggesting that their sexual interest had been slightly raised by subliminal exposure to their mother or father.

The researchers decided to go further by seeing how attraction would be affected if the person was exposed to images of themselves – after all, someone who shares 100% of their genetic material.

For this study this they used a technique called morphing to make images that had been digitally manipulated to be composites of two distinct faces – the person’s own and a stranger’s – to varying amounts. The participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of the faces, each of which ranged from being 0% their own face to a blend of 45% their face and 55% stranger.

The mix was never enough so the participants could tell that the faces were blended with their own, but they consistently rated faces that had more of themselves as more attractive.

A final experiment did exactly the same, but with an additional group who were told their own faces had been blended into the photos and that the study was investigating incest and attraction to faces that are designed to resemble genetic relatives.

The group who were aware what was happening showed exactly the opposite behaviour, they were less sexually attracted to faces that they more closely resembled.

In other words, the aversion to people we have a relation to may be based in conscious awareness, not an unconscious evolutionary adaptation.

This suggests is that Freud may have been right when he suggested that there may be an element of attraction to people in our own family.

The researchers doubt that we need to accept the full ‘Oedipus complex’ theory to make sense of this, but simply that the psychology of familiarity, bonding and attraction begins to develop in the family environment and so we retain an element of attraction to people we learnt about love with.

However, for sensible reasons, as a society we need to make sure we form new romantic relationships with people outside our immediate families, and so have instilled this knowledge in our culture.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

The LA Times has an article and video about a young girl who has one of the very rare cases of childhood schizophrenia. In this instance, it is particularly unusual because the affected child is only six years old.

One of the biggest mysteries in psychiatry is why psychosis, the occurrence of delusions and hallucinations, doesn’t typically first appear until about 17 years of age for males and about 20 for females.

It’s curious because from a psychological perspective, all the things that are supposed to ‘go wrong’ – thinking, belief, perception, motivation, emotion – are already in place many years before.

To give a clumsy example, it would be like finding out that kids never broke their arms until they were teenagers, despite having perfectly functional limbs for years before.

There are some clues from studies of ‘neural migration’ that have shown that people with schizophrenia, on average, don’t show the same patterns of connections between cortical layers in the frontal lobes – which are built during brain development and continue maturing well in the early 20s.

However, these are still no more than clues, as no-one has a well worked-out idea of how this explains the fact that psychosis doesn’t typically appear until early adulthood.

In very rare cases, however, psychosis does seem to appear earlier – like in the early teenage years – and in rarer cases still, it appears in children younger than 12.

Clearly, kids have a rich fantasy life and imaginary friends are normal (and, in case you’re worrying, are usually associated with better adjustment later in life). In addition, some kids are just a bit eccentric. This can make it difficult to say for certain whether, for example, a child is hallucinating or just being whimsical.

But despite these difficulties, there are some kids who do seem to have persistent troubling delusions and hallucinations along similar lines to schizophrenia.

These occasional cases pose something of a challenge for psychiatrists, not least because the first-line treatment for schizophrenia, antipsychotic drugs, have some rather nasty side-effects, but also because very few studies have tested the effectiveness of these medications in children.

One study that has been doing this, however, is the Treatment of Early-Onset Schizophrenia Spectrum (TEOSS) study, which just reported it latest results.

Sadly, they are a huge disappointment for anyone hoping for a easy solution as they showed that the pills generally caused more problems than they solved, produced serious health risks, and were poorly in dampening down the delusions and hallucinations.

From a more personal angle, the LA Times piece is both a rare look at the condition and a rarer look into the emotional life of a family trying to make sense of their child’s unpredictable and sometimes distressing world.

Link to LA Times piece on childhood schizophrenia.

A new study just published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology has found that we are less likely to believe something told to us in a foreign accent because the difficulty of adjusting to the voice unconsciously undermines the speaker’s credibility.

The research was completed by the suspiciously foreign sounding psychologists Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar, both from the University of Chicago, who wanted to separate out the effects of deliberate prejudice about the source from the unconscious effects of ease of understanding.

Their study involved participants listening to potential facts (e.g. “Ants don’t sleep”; “A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can”) which were read out by people with native accents, mild foreign accents or heavy foreign accents, from a variety of countries, after which the listeners were asked to indicate how much they believed the statement.

Importantly, the statements were written out and handed to the readers by a native speaker, so the new information came from a fellow countryman, avoiding any deliberate bias the listeners might have about the source of the information.

The results were clear: statements read out by people with a foreign accent, mild or heavy, were significantly less likely to be believed that those read by a native speaker.

In a second experiment, the researchers informed the participants that the study was investigating the effect of accent on the believability of new information to see if the listeners could eliminate their biases.

It turns out they could for people with a mild foreign accent, but statements read out in a thick foreign were still rated as significantly less true – suggesting that we don’t have full conscious control over our credibility weakening biases.

Although never before demonstrated with accents, this sort of effect is well-known in the psychological literature as the ease of which we can make sense of something is known to be linked to a tendency to view it in a positive light.

The authors discuss the previous studies in this excerpt from the scientific paper (from which I’ve removed the references to make it easier to read and more truthful):

We propose that people believe non-native speakers less, simply because they are harder to understand. In general, the ease of processing stimuli, or “processing fluency,” affects the way stimuli are judged. Stimuli that are easier to process are perceived, among other things, as more familiar, more pleasant, visually clearer, longer and more recent, louder, less risky, and more truthful.

For example, people judge “Woes unite foes” as a more accurate description of the impact of troubles on adversaries than “Woes unite enemies,” because the rhyming of woes and foes increases processing fluency. Similarly, people judge the statement “Osorno is in Chile” as more true when the color of the font makes it easier to read.

As someone living in another country, this would be a significant worry if it wasn’t for the fact that, as anyone has seen my dancing will testify, I usually undermine my own credibility way before I get the chance to open my mouth.

Link to DOI entry and study summary.

Very attractive job seekers may face discrimination from prospective employers of the same sex, according to a new study just published online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Previous research has shown that attractive people are often rated more highly in areas not related to their physical appearance, such as intelligence or job performance, but may be thought of more poorly in social situations by same-sex peers.

Psychologist Maria Agthe wondered how these two effects combine and ran two experiments to see how people asked to sort through applications for scholarship would be influenced by the attractiveness of the ‘applicants’ photos.

In the first experiment Agthe found that attractive applicants were more likely to be rated as highly suitable by people from the opposite sex. The best looking men gained no advantage if they were rated by a man but the most attractive women were significantly under-rated by female evaluators.

But it was the second experiment that gives the finding an interesting twist. Agthe factored in the attractiveness of the assessors and made the situation more work like – the applicants were to be considered for a job.

It turned out that the attractiveness of the applicant had no impact on the best looking assessors – they were simply unmoved by physical appearance – while the averagely attractive assessors were those most likely to mark down very attractive applicants. This held for both men and women.

Agthe suggests that this may be due to social competition and the fact we’re all implicitly aware of the idea that attractive people tend to get the breaks – so we try and minimise the advantage of people who we’re close enough to, in attractiveness terms, to be a threat.

Link to brief write-up from Paracademia where I found the study.
Link to study DOI and summary.

The New York Times has an opinion piece arguing that the rise of behavioural economics has led to the science being championed by politicians who want a soft option to avoid marking hard political decisions.

The authors are economist George Loewenstein and behavioural scientist Peter Ubel who list a range of behavioural economics-inspired policies which they claim have been used to give the impression of substantive action when the most effective form of behaviour change happens through painful tax and regulation.

Our over-reliance on behavioral economics is not limited to health care. A “gallons-per-mile” bill recently passed by the New York State Senate is intended to help drivers think more clearly about the fuel consumption of the vehicles they purchase; research has shown that gallons-per-mile is a more effective means of getting drivers to appreciate the realities of fuel consumption than the traditional miles-per-gallon.

But more and better information fails to get at the core of the problem: people drive large, energy-inefficient cars because gas is still relatively cheap. An increase in the gas tax that made the price of gas reflect its true costs would be a far more effective — though much more politically painful — way to reduce fuel consumption.

For example, the price of alcohol has been found to reliably influence national levels of death from liver disease, drink-driving levels and violent crime but politicians in many countries are loath to raise taxes.

This is not to say that raising taxes is always the preferred option, but the NYT piece raises some uncomfortable points for policy-makers who claimed to be ‘coming down hard’ on certain behaviours while avoiding the most effective solutions.

It’s probably also important to note that they authors don’t dismiss behavioural economics, just that it should complement and not replace other forms of policy-making.

Link to NYT piece ‘Economics Behaving Badly’ (via @mjrobbins).

3QuarksDaily has a fantastic article that examines how certain models became hot property during catwalk season by looking at the behavioural economics of fashion show buzz and why the success of top models is as much down to herd instinct as personal magnetism.

The piece is written by sociologist Ashley Mears, a model herself, who has been studying how the personal demands of the profession mesh and conflict with both the market for beautiful faces and the social world of the fashion industry.

The fashion modeling market also has a formal mechanism in place, known as the ‚Äúoption,‚Äù to ensure all tastemakers get in on the action. An option is an agreement between client and agent that enables the client to place a hold on the model‚Äôs future availability. Like options trading in finance markets, an option gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to make a purchase…

Options serve the symbolic purpose of ‚Äúsignaling‚Äù the model‚Äôs popularity to all other clients. During castings, clients are likely to ask models, ‚ÄúWhich shows are you optioned for,‚Äù thereby letting them know their competitors‚Äô tastes. Modeling agents drum up buzz using options as selling points too, as in, ‚ÄúRussell Marsh just optioned Coco Rocha for Prada!‚Äù To most fashion designers‚Äô ears, such words sound like warm honey; they greatly reduce the anxiety of having to sort Coco from 599 other striking teenagers…

In the language of economic sociology, options are performative; they create what they putatively just describe. In other words, the models have agency (that’s market models we’re talking about, not the fashion models, heaven’s no!). Options enable investors to anticipate other investors’ actions, which spurs herding behavior, where actors decide to disregard their own information (i.e., “That Coco Rocha, urgh!”) and imitate instead the decisions taken by others before them (but Russell Marsh optioned her).

One of Mears’ earlier studies looked at how models manage the stress of being treated as a commodity by the fashion market while trying to maintain their individuality, self-composure and emotional well-being.

Link to 3QD piece ‘How Supermodels Are like Toxic Assets’.

Neuroanthropology tackles a recent psychology article which highlights the fact that the vast majority of research is done on Western students, who, in global terms, are a very unusual subgroup of the human race.

This group has been given the catchy acronym WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) although the problem is not so much that students are being studied but that researchers tend to draw conclusions about ‘human nature’ from this data, seemingly unaware of how unrepresentative they are of the world’s population.

The Neuroanthropology has an interesting take on the debate, noting that although important, the differences highlighted by the original article may also be a result of cultural bias themselves:

For example, when I brought one of my Brazilian subjects to an American university at which I previously taught, his characterization of the American students‚Äô differences from young Brazilians with whom he had more contact focused on none of these traits (W. E. I. R. or D.). He was more struck by their large size (both height and BMI, to put it nicely), their frumpy androgynous clothing (anyone here not wearing a sweatshirt?), their materialism, their clumsiness and physical ineptitude, and their ethnic and personal homogeneity. If my Brazilian colleague were to characterize the oddness of the WEIRD, he wouldn‚Äôt focus on the traits Henrich and colleagues have chosen in their designation…

I don’t think that my point is a fundamental disagreement with Henrich and colleagues, but a concern that the parameter of difference we choose to highlight, even in the simplest designation, might itself be a culturally-generated bias. Anthropologists are well acquainted with having our subjects point to traits that are invisible to the Western research as ‘the crucial’ characteristic for understanding the gap. For example, ‘rich’ may seem an obvious contrast to poverty, but we know that not all ‘poverty’ is the same, nor are all ‘rich’ people able to experience in the same way their material situation. Some economists have argued that inequality is more crucial for understanding the experience of deprivation, for example, than absolute wealth. And poor populations often fix, not on their material deprivation, but on other qualities to describe their difference from the wealthy (or the WEIRD). For example, religious differences, family dynamics, or caste might be salient to people from other cultural backgrounds.

This blind spot seems quite pervasive which is only something that has become clear to me since working in Latin America. For example, most science is published in English and reviewers of scientific papers will often suggest tests or analyses which don’t exist or aren’t relevant to a Spanish speaking population.

Furthermore, journal editors rarely feel it necessary to recruit reviewers familiar with the culture in which the study was completed, assuming that American or European experience applies ‘globally’.

For example, a researcher from London or New York would never have their work assessed by someone who had no knowledge of psychological assessments in those countries but this happens all the time to cognitive scientists from the rest of the world, meaning much less of this work gets published.

There is also the ‘world music’ effect, where anything from America or Europe is considered mainstream where anything from the rest of the world is considered to be about ‘culture’.

The Neuroanthropology piece is an in-depth discussion of the whether psychology research has a truly global vision, and, most importantly, where our unrecognised blind spots may lie.

Link to Neuroanthropology on WEIRD research.
pdf of research article ‘The weirdest people in the world?’

New York Magazine has a truly excellent article on why having children tends to make people less happy. This result has come up in numerous studies but the article carefully explores this counter-intuitive finding in all the depth it deserves, reflecting on the changing culture and expectations of parenting.

The article starts with this lovely bit of academic trivia:

The idea that parents are less happy than nonparents has become so commonplace in academia that it was big news last year when the Journal of Happiness Studies published a Scottish paper declaring the opposite was true. “Contrary to much of the literature,” said the introduction, “our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children.” Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his data, and the publication ran an erratum. “After correcting the problem,”it read,“the main results of the paper no longer hold. The effect of children on the life satisfaction of married individuals is small, often negative, and never statistically significant.”

However, the article questions what it means to say someone is ‘happy’ or ‘satisfied’ with their life and explores whether these studies are genuinely measuring the rich experience of parenting.

The piece explores how cultural expectations of parenting, and indeed, childhood, have changed and what practical implications this has had for day-to-day childcare.

It is one of those rare articles that combines scientific studies with personal experiences, without confusing the two and while using each to complement the other.

In-depth, wonderfully written and worth putting time aside for.

Link to New York Magazine ‘All Joy and No Fun’

Wired’s Danger Room reports on a new study finding that civilian causalities in Afghanistan lead to anti-coalition feelings and an increase in insurgent attacks. Although this would seem to be blindly obvious, the study adds some morbid detail to the picture and provides evidence for some in the US military who had suggested no such link existed.

The study was completed by four economists and it reports its uncomfortable results in stark statistical terms. Interestingly, not all civilian casualties are created equal in terms of their backlash:

‚ÄúWhen ISAF units kill civilians,‚Äù the research team finds, referring to the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, ‚Äúthis increases the number of willing combatants, leading to an increase in insurgent attacks.‚Äù According to their model, every innocent civilian killed by ISAF predicts an ‚Äúadditional 0.03 attacks per 1,000 population in the next 6-week period.‚Äù In a district of 83,000 people, then, the average of two civilian casualties killed in ISAF-initiated military action leads to six additional insurgent attacks in the following six weeks…

But in their study, the researchers found that there’s a greater spike in violence after ISAF-caused civilian deaths than after insurgent-caused ones. “An incident which results in 10 civilian casualties will generate about 1 additional IED attack in the following 2 months,” the researchers write. “The effect for insurgents is much weaker and not jointly significant.”

Which is perhaps not particularly surprising if it is the insurgents who are setting most of the IEDs. However, the research also found a long-term effect of civilian deaths on the radicalisation of the local population.

Link to ‘Civilian Casualties Create New Enemies, Study Confirms’.
Link to study.

ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing has good documentary on the growing practice of ‘sentiment mining’ social media networks where companies attempt to glean emotional reactions or consumer opinions – typically to products – from our spontaneous internet output.

Essentially it’s a form of text mining but applied to social media. For example, a specialist agency might scan for every mention of a product online over the last month and then apply custom analysis to draw out what people feel about it.

This is known as sentiment analysis and it is a booming industry in online marketing which numerous services having recently sprung into existence.

The programme discusses this technology exclusively in terms of marketing and business but military intelligence are also becoming interested in the technology, as news that the CIA recently bought into a social media analysis company indicates.

Link to ABC Radio documentary on ‘sentiment mining’.

ABC Radio National’s Life Matters has a brief segment on the fascinating Couvade syndrome, also known as sympathetic pregnancy, where male partners of expectant women start feeling the physical effects of being pregnant.

This can range from aches and pain, to food cravings, to morning sickness, to full on ‘pseudocyesis’ or phantom pregnancy which involves abdominal swelling and lactation.

The programme discusses some fascinating research that has found that men have raised levels of the hormone prolactin when their partner is pregnant.

Prolactin is most associated with breast-feeding but raised levels can cause lactation in men as well (incidentally, due to the fact that many antipsychotic drugs raise levels of this hormone, male lactation can be an unpleasant side effect of this medication).

The programme mentions that a special documentary about Couvade syndrome for the Australian TV science show Catalyst was just shown on TV, so if anyone discovers a torrent for it, do let me know or post it in the comments.

The documentary’s webpage has some additional material, and, if you live down-under you can watch a streamed version, but sadly its not available outside of Oz.

Link to Life Matters on Couvade syndrome.
Link to documentary webpage.

There’s a fascinating study just published online by the journal Epidemiology that examines how many reports of chemical spills may in fact be ‘mass hysteria’ or ‘mass psychogenic illness‘.

Psychogenic illness is where medical problems appear; like paralysis, irritation, loss of consciousness, headaches and so on; despite there being no damage to the body or a standard cause for the symptoms.

The idea is that they are caused by ‘psychological factors’, which is a fairly woolly way of saying that we can often experience symptoms that normally appear in other disorders simply through psychological distress.

They appear in many forms, most spectacularly in what is now diagnosed as conversion disorder, where people can be, to all intents and purposes, blind or paralysed without having any damage to their eyes or nervous system.

Although these most striking presentations are uncommon, medical symptoms without a clear medical cause are actually very frequent. A study in 2000 found that 11% of consultations to neurologists involved symptoms that were “not at all explained” by medical findings while the symptoms of 19% of the patients were only “somewhat explained”.

Neurology has the benefit that, although nervous system disorders are often difficult to treat, they can be quite precisely diagnosed, so it’s unlikely that its just due to the vagueness of the medical definitions.

And if you think the figures quoted above seem weirdly high, they’re actually the lowest that have been reported. A previous study found 42% of patient with neurological symptoms did not have neurological damage that explained them.

These are usually individual cases that report to the doctor, but mass psychogenic illness is where these symptoms seems to rapidly appear in groups of people through a form of ‘social contagion’.

Previous anecdotal reports have often noted that these cases often appear as suspect ‘chemical incidents’ but where tests show no chemical was ever presented.

This new study analysed 280 medical accounts of suspected ‘chemical exposure events’ reported to the Centre for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards in the UK.

The reports were given to several independent medical toxicologists, who rated them being genuinely due to the effects of a chemical spill, or likely to be due to psychogenic illness because the symptoms didn’t match the chemical or appeared without a chemical actually being present and quickly spread between people.

For example, here’s a summary of one of the cases of ‘chemical incidents’ identified as mass psychogenic illness:

A student alleged that he had analysed the tap water from a college building and found lead levels 12 times the recommended maximum. The student complained of symptoms and reported them to his family doctor. 250 staff and students were advised not to drink the water. Some developed headaches that were attributed to lead poisoning. Testing of the water samples showed lead to be below statutory levels.

Out of the 280 incidents reported to the Health Protection Agency, 19 (about 7%) were rated as being cases of mass psychogenic illness.

Interestingly, these incidents were more likely to take place in healthcare facilities and schools, and were more likely to be triggered by an odour that wasn’t recognised as smoke.

We tend to assume that medical symptoms always have clear bodily causes, but a significant minority are likely caused by expectation and psychological stress.

Bodily symptoms are simply another way in which we can express psychological distress even if we have no idea that this is what is happening.

Link to Pubmed entry for study on mass psychogenic illnes.

The BPS Research Digest has just finished a series of interviews with psychology and neuroscience bloggers that includes some of the best known mind on brain sites on the net.

If you’re a Mind Hacks reader, you’ll probably recognise most of the blogs as we often link to them, but I was struck by the lack of female bloggers.

In the UK, 80% of psychology undergraduates are female and the profession is overwhelming female. I don’t know figures from other countries but my impression is that this is a global trend.

I’m pretty sure there isn’t a vast world of female mind and brain bloggers out there that were missed in the interview series, so it seems psychology writers on the net are mostly male, with some very notable exceptions.

Ladies, don’t be shy. If you’re blogging in the shadows, let us know, and if you’ve ever thought about it, give it a go.

Link to BPSRD ‘Bloggers Behind the Blogs’ series.

This month’s British Journal of Psychiatry has a quietly powerful poem by psychiatrist Sean Spence which highlights the sometimes uncomfortable misconnection between the problems we study and the problems we face.

Spence is well-known for his work in cognitive neuropsychiatry although has had a long-standing interest in treating mental health difficulties in those living on the street.

If Homelessness Were Genetic
by Sean Spence

If homelessness were genetic,
Institutes would be constructed
With tall white walls,
And ‘driven’ people (with thick glasses)
Would congregate
In libraries

And mumble.

If homelessness were genetic
Bright young things
Would draft manifestos
‘To crack the problem’

Girls with braces on their teeth
Would stoop to kiss
Boys with dandruff
At Unit discos

While dancing (slowly)
To ‘Careless Whisper’.

Meanwhile, upstairs, in the offices
Secretaries in long white coats
And horn-rimmed spectacles,
Carrying clipboards,
Would cross their legs
And take dictation:

  ‘Miss Brown, a memo please,
  To the eminent Professor Levchenko,
  “Many thanks indeed
  For all those sachets you sent to me,
  Of homeless toddlers’ teeth.”’

If homelessness were genetic
Rats from broken homes
Would sleep in cardboard shoeboxes
Evading violent fathers,
Who broke their bones,
While small white mice
With cocaine habits
Would huddle in fear,
Sleeping in doorways,
Receiving calibrated kicks from gangs of passers-by

(A “geneenvironment interaction”).

If homelessness were genetic
Then the limping man, with swollen feet,
A fever,
And the voices crying out within his brain
Would not traipse
Between surgery and casualty
Being turned away
For being roofless

Because, of course,
Homelessness would be genetic

And, therefore,
“Interesting”.