Category: Togetherness

Dana’s online mind and brain magazine Cerebrum has a critical and thought-provoking article arguing that mental illnesses like ADHD and child bipolar disorder are too often being used as fig leaves for social problems that we prefer to think of as blame-free genetic disorders that can be treated with simple-solution medications.

The piece is by distinguished psychologist Jerome Kagan, considered one of the founders of developmental psychology, who discusses the various social changes that have encouraged differences and misbehaviour to be medically diagnosed and treated – particularly during the last two decades.

The article is timely, owing to it coinciding with recent revelations from an ongoing trial where parents are suing drug makers over the use of antipsychotic medication in children.

The documents show that pharmaceutical company Johnson and Johnson aimed to carry out research on child bipolar disorder with a specific intention of boosting sales of their medication, as well as countering unfavourable coverage from the media and spinning ‘no result’ studies on the drug.

We usually think of ‘social factors’ as increasing risk for mental illness in the individual, but we also need to remember that there are strong social factors that affect how we think about disorders in terms of their causes, effects and treatments.

One of the strongest social factors is financial pressure, and, as covered by Wired, drug companies are notorious for ‘cooking the books’ in an attempt to bury negative data and spin positive findings in the best possible light.

This has just been reported in yet another damning study on drug company data handling published in the most recent edition of PLoS Medicine.

Link to Dana article ‘The Meaning of Psychological Abnormality’.
Link to PLoS Medicine study on bias in drug trials submitted to the FDA.

The New Yorker has an extended review and discussion of various new books critical of the increasing trend for parents to be overinvolved in their children’s lives owing to the trend for ‘intelligence boosting’ products and activities.

It’s a nicely balanced article that highlights some of the worst trends in ‘overparenting’ while also pointing out some of the flaws with the recent wave of criticism.

To get some perspective, look at “Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood” (2004), by Steven Mintz, a professor of history at Columbia. Mintz’s story begins with the beginning of the United States, and therefore he describes children with troubles greater than overparenting: boys dispatched to coal mines, and girls to textile mills, at age nine or ten.

As for the current outbreak of worry over the young, Mintz reminds us that America has seen such panics before—for example, in the nineteen-fifties, with the outcry over hot rods, teen sex, and rock and roll. The fifties even had its own campaign against overparenting, or overmothering—Momism, as it was called. This was thought to turn boys into homosexuals. For the past three decades, Mintz writes, discussions of child-rearing in the United States have been dominated by a “discourse of crisis,” and yet America’s youth are now, on average, “bigger, richer, better educated, and healthier than at any other time in history.”

There have been some losses. Middle-class white boys from the suburbs have fallen behind their predecessors, but middle-class girls and minority children are far better off. Mintz thinks that we worry too much, or about the wrong things. Despite general prosperity—at least until recently—the percentage of poor children in America is greater today than it was thirty years ago. One in six children lives below the poverty line. If you want an emergency, Mintz says, there’s one

Over-involvement is certainly a risk, however, and this can be seen even in the very beginning of infancy. One of the key skills psychologists talk about in early life is the ability to self-soothe – in other words, learning to independently manage discomfort and strong emotions.

This begins when babies are getting into sleep routines in the months after being born. There is a temptation to attend to the baby and soothe it as soon as it cries but this can have the opposite effect and the child actually sleeps worse because they don’t have the opportunity to learn to settle themselves.

A recent large study helped to confirm this and found that parents that encouraged independence and self-soothing by not attending to their baby at every cry reported that their child had extended and more consolidated sleep.

Link to New Yorker ‘The Child Trap’ article.

A 2005 article from business psychology journal Organization Studies discusses the psychology of being a bastard. It has a serious point, but is just hilarious for the contrast between the academic language and the subject matter.

The serious point behind the article, written by psychologist David Sims, is to look at how people in business organisations make narratives or stories about someone being a ‘bastard’ to demonize them and persuade others of the fact.

This can be to discount someone else opinion, undermine their status, or to create a dragon against which they can valiantly fight for their own glory.

However, because of the subject matter, it’s frequently funny as it analyses the varied types of company bastards as they’re constructed within organisations. Just some of the section headings are pure genius:

Narrative 1: Clever Bastard
Narrative 2: Bastard ex Machina
Narrative 3: Devious Bastard
A Narrative Understanding of Bastards
Making Sense of Bastards

Link to ‘You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations’ (thanks Olwyn!).
Link to DOI entry for same.

Sometimes, medical case studies are powerful as much because of what they leave out as what they contain, as in an uncomfortably moving 1935 case report of a young lady who attempted suicide with a hand gun.

It’s available online as a pdf and the point of the article is to report the remarkable fact that she survived and was apparently neurologically normal afterwards, despite losing a considerable amount of blood and brain tissue.

Scientifically, this is indeed remarkable, but perhaps more striking is the photo, ostensibly of the wound, but haunting because of the what it captures of the young woman.

Her photo is painfully personal, showing a bleak, listless expression and suggesting a difficult life undescribed. It’s a stark contrast to the stripped clean case study that contains only one line of personal detail:

On July 25, 1934, at 1pm, Mrs A., age about 30, attempted suicide at her home in Truckee, California, by shooting herself through the head with a 32-caliber automatic revolver.

Presumably the case report was published before the days when it became customary to anonymise patient photos to protect personal privacy. But these images remind us that this requirement protects the reader as much as it protects the patient, because while tragedy is important to understand in the abstract, it remains difficult to absorb in the personal.

Being able to abstract the data from the tragedy is one of the most important skills of working with people facing difficult situations, but it is barely mentioned in textbooks or training programmes. It’s just something people are expected to develop and discuss if they find challenging.

Occasionally, even the most seasoned professional is caught off-guard, where the full impact of unchecked emotional engagement outflanks the abstraction process.

This 1930s case study reflects that same experience, where the medical facts are drowned out by the immediacy of the human emotion.

pdf of case study ‘An Unusual Brain Injury’.
Link to PubMed Central entry for same.

RadioLab make the most beautiful, compelling programmes. They recently broadcast a truly excellent edition on the War of the Worlds radio dramatisation, which has sparked mass panics, not once, not twice, but three times, over a period of more than two decades.

The most famous adaptation of H.G. Well’s novel was created by Orson Wells in 1938 and the RadioLab team do a fantastic job of taking us through the original radio play and putting exactly in context how it was broadcast and what buttons it pushed in the society of the time to explain exactly why it had such an immediate impact.

One of the most interesting bits is where they read out transcripts of listener interviews where some claim to gave actually seen or smelt the smoke from the battle with aliens, or even seen the alien spaceships themselves. One fascinating bit suggests some listeners thought they were being invaded by Germans.

The stunt was repeated twice, each causing listeners to panic to different degrees. One broadcast in Ecuador caused mass rioting and several deaths.

It’s a completely gripping programme and wonderfully produced, so take some time, listen on some headphones or good speakers, sit back and enjoy.

Apparently a new RadioLab series starts in two weeks, and we’ll keep you updated when it hits the wires.

Link to RadioLab on War of the Worlds.

The Atlantic magazine has an excellent article about the heated issues raised by children who want to be the opposite sex. It’s an excellent piece that captures both the dilemmas of parents and mental health professionals sparked by potentially transgendered children.

I sometimes jokingly suggest that clinical child psychology would be better described as clinical parent psychology, owing to the fact that it almost always involves working as much with the parents’ anxieties as the child’s.

This is particularly important when it comes to behaviours which are not considered, in themselves, to be physically or mentally damaging, but which are socially unacceptable or stigmatised, because the pressure often takes the form of others wishing the child would conform to social norms.

The Atlantic article gives some vivid examples of some of the pressures, as the child, mother, father, professionals, peers and campaigning groups each have different opinions on how to manage a young child that dresses and acts like a child of the opposite sex.

As we discussed in a post about an NPR programme that covered the same territory, one of the big controversies is whether to try and treat the child to identify with their birth sex, or whether to help them cope with the stresses of adjusting to life as a transgendered child.

This is complicated by the fact that follow-up studies have shown that not all children who have cross-gender desires when young maintain them through puberty. However, hormone treatment exists which can delay puberty so it makes it easier for a child to pass as the opposite sex if this is thought the best course of action.

The Atlantic piece is a remarkably well-researched piece that covers a great deal of the mental health debate about the practice and ethics of treating what are known as ‘gender dysphoric’ children, but also gives us a revealing insight into some of the family and social dynamics that affect the individuals.

A compelling and thought-provoking insight into this contested area.

Link to Atlantic article ‘A Boy’s Life’.
Link to previous Mind Hacks piece on ‘gender identity disorder’.

A single instance of unusual behaviour by a minority group may be enough for us to stereotype the whole group according to recent research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Led by psychologist Jane Risen, the researchers ran four experiments that suggest that the reason we tend to think a single notable behaviour is typical of a minority group but not a majority group is because of our inbuilt cognitive biases in how we process anomalous information.

During the study participants were shown a series of sentences that described a group and a behaviour. The researchers found that just one report of a seemingly odd behaviour by a minority group member was focused on for longer and was more memorable.

Furthermore, participants were more likely to think that group membership was more like to be an explanation for the odd behaviour for minorities than in more representative groups.

In a final experiment, participants watched a video interview of either a white or Asian student where, rather unusually, they persistently asked to use the camera in a pushy manner.

Afterwards, the participants were shown a picture of another person, again either white or Asian. In one part the person was holding up words with missing letters than the participants had to fill in to complete the word.

For example, the prompt could have been “D E _ _ N D”, which can equally well be completed as “DEPEND” or “DEMAND”.

This sort of technique is often used in psychology because things that are already active in the mind, such as emotions, concepts or stereotypes, will unconsciously influence the participant to complete the word in one of the two ways.

DEPEND is a positive word, whereas DEMAND is related to pushiness, so if a video of a pushy Asian student only affects word completion presented by another unrelated Asian person and not when presented by a white person, you can see the behaviour has activated a race specific bias.

This is exactly what happened. The researchers confirmed the effect by a follow-up task where participants were asked to select interview questions for an unrelated white or Asian person, where they tended to select questions that enquired about how brazen the interviewee might be for the minority group.

This study was published in 2007 and I’ve only just discovered it. I’m surprised I’ve not heard of it before as it strikes me as an incredibly important study on the psychology of stereotype formation.

The researchers call it ‘one shot illusory correlation’ and I wonder if it also explains the ‘my bad holiday’ effect where people say they “don’t like the British [or whoever], because I went on holiday there once and someone was rude to me”.

Obviously, the person was not a minority in their country, but was in the context of the visitor’s life.

By the way, the paper is also very well written and the introduction is well worth reading solely for it’s engaging introduction to the area.

Link to study article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Psychotic delusions change with the times and a new study looking back over almost 120 years of hospital records has found that it’s possible to track how cultural upheavals are reflected in the themes of madness. Changes in politics, technology and psychiatry all seem to colour the preoccupations of the deluded as reported in the patient records.

A Slovenian research team, led by psychiatrist Borut Skodlar, discovered that the Ljubljana psychiatric hospital had patient records going as far back as 1881. They randomly selected 10 records from every 10 year period to see how delusions matched up to the society of the time.

One key finding was that paranoid and persecutory delusions seem much more common now, with a big jump after the 1960s, in line with other studies that have found that paranoia is much more common in the modern age.

Another interesting finding concerned the widespread availability of radio and television:

A very interesting finding was a significant increase in outside influence and control delusions with technical themes following the spread of radio and television in Slovenia. To the best of our knowledge, no such studies exist with which to compare our results.

Both of these new technical devices, which served as a means to powerfully and quickly disseminate information, apparently became appropriate for ‘serving’ as a means of influence and control in the eyes of schizophrenia patients.

We found this change much more expressed in the case of television, where the increase of delusions of outside influence and control was dramatic. Perhaps an accumulation of both television together stimulated the increase. Or perhaps the two-dimensional auditory and visual nature of television opened up more opportunities to perceive it as a possible source of influence.

One aspect of the study looked not at how wider cultural changes altered the theme of delusions, but how changes in the culture of psychiatry did the same.

Psychiatrist Kurt Schneider listed a number of symptoms which he argued were characteristic of schizophrenia and still form the basis of modern schizophrenia diagnoses.

They include audible thoughts, hearing voices arguing, voices commenting on your actions, feeling that your body, mind or emotions are being controlled by outside forces, thought insertion and withdrawal, thought broadcasting, or delusional interpretations of everyday perceptions.

Interestingly, these ‘first rank symptoms’ were reported much more commonly after they had become widely known in the psychiatric community.

This is one of the key issues in the epidemiology of psychiatry: when the rate of reported symptoms changes over time, is it because they’re just being noticed more, because psychiatrists have moved the goalposts, because patients are learning to report symptoms in the language that doctors use, or that the experiences are more common in the population with all things being equal.

Of course, it can be a mixture of all or some of the above, as culture is one of the key influences on how we experience and express our distress – both physical and psychological.

Link to paper on cultural influences on delusions.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Psychologist Paul Bloom has written a wonderfully eclectic article for The Atlantic magazine about the psychology of pleasure and why it suggests that we have multiple situation-specific selves.

The piece is a little disjointed in places but it is packed full of information and if nothing else you get a good sense of the enthusiasm for this developing field.

One area of pleasure research not mentioned in Bloom’s piece is the fascinating work of Michel Cabanac, who has a theory that pleasure is the decision-making currency of the brain.

New Scientist had an excellent article on Cabanac’s work which you can read online, and makes an excellent complement to The Atlantic piece.

However, Bloom is more concerned with how we resist the temptation of pleasure using ‘self-binding’ – in other words, doing things that will reduce the chances of us succumbing to temptation later on. Like getting someone to hide your cigarettes if you’re trying to give up.

For adult humans, though, the problem is that the self you are trying to bind has resources of its own. Fighting your Bad Self is serious business; whole sections of bookstores are devoted to it. We bribe and threaten and cajole, just as if we were dealing with an addicted friend. Vague commitments like “I promise to drink only on special occasions” often fail, because the Bad Self can weasel out of them, rationalizing that it’s always a special occasion. Bright-line rules like “I will never play video games again” are also vulnerable, because the Bad Self can argue that these are unreasonable—and, worse, once you slip, it can argue that the plan is unworkable.

For every argument made by the dieting self—“This diet is really working” or “I really need to lose weight”—the cake eater can respond with another—“This will never work” or “I’m too vain” or “You only live once.” Your long-term self reads voraciously about the benefits of regular exercise and healthy eating; the cake eater prefers articles showing that obesity isn’t really such a problem. It’s not that the flesh is weak; sometimes the flesh is pretty damn smart.

Link to Atlantic article ‘First Person Plural’.
Link to NewSci piece ‘The Pleasure Seekers’.

This week’s Nature has a fascinating essay by anthropologist Pascal Boyer discussing the quirks of spiritual belief and how they may result from the evolution of our mind and brain.

Boyer is best known for his book Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought where he argued that religion can be understood as where the cognitive abilities we’ve developed through evolution are applied to things like group identity, ritual, or the explanation of otherwise mysterious things, such as weather or disease.

Essentially, Boyer argues that there are cognitive restraints on religious practice and belief, which he illustrates by pointing out some interesting inconsistencies in our intuitive ideas about spiritual agents. According to Boyer, this suggests that our mental capacities define what are supposed to be all-powerful or all-knowing entities.

This clip of Boyer being interview by Jonathan Miller is fascinating because he points out, contrary to popular belief, what most religions are concerned with. He notes most religions do not concern themselves with the creation of the world or the afterlife, while the presence of unseen agents is almost universal.

There is now a growing interest in the cognitive science of religion and one of my favourite articles is by psychiatrist Quinton Deeley who discusses how different form of religious ritual may influence specific cognitive functions to pass on religious teachings and commitments (full disclosure: Deeley is a friend and research collaborator).

Deeley argues that the well-known distinction between ‘doctrinal’ rituals which are frequent and low intensity (such as everyday prayers or practices), and ‘imagistic’ high-intensity, less-frequent rituals (such as exuberant religious celebrations) serve different psychological purposes.

‘Doctrinal’ rituals help create semantic memories of key concepts and emotional response through associative learning, while ‘imagistic’ rituals help create episodic memories of specific situations that may involve altered states of consciousness and the experience of other realities.

Deeley also did a fascinating talk on ‘Ritual, Possession Trance, and Amnesia’ where he discusses some of the neuropsycholgical mechanisms that might underlie trance and possessions states.

Link to Boyer’s Nature essay ‘Religion: Bound to believe?’.
Link to brief interview with Boyer on religion.
Link to Deeley’s article ‘The Religious Brain’.
Link to video of talk ‘Ritual, Possession Trance, and Amnesia’.

Another fantastic quote from Bonk, a book about sex research by science writer Mary Roach, this time about the effects of distraction on female sexual arousal (from p251):

A thousand images can play on a woman’s mind: work, kids, problems with Ultrasuede. One nonpharmaceutical solution is to teach women to redirect their focus and pay more attention to physical sensations – a practice called mindfulness.

A pilot study – meaning it’s a preliminary investigation with no control group – by Lori Brotto and two colleagues at the University of British Colombia had promising results. Eighteen women with complaints about their ability to become aroused participated in mindfulness training. Afterward, there was a significant jump in their ratings of how aroused they’d been feeling during sexual encounters.

If it’s any solace, even female rats have trouble focusing. I give you a sentence, my favourite sentence in the entire oeuvre of Alfred Kinsey, from Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female: “Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male”.

Full disclosure: I was sent a free copy of the book by the publishers about six months ago but I’ve only just got round to reading it.

Link to Mary Roach’s website.
Link to previous Mind Hacks review of Bonk.

I’ve just found a wonderful article on how the Jivaro-Shuar, an indigenous people from the upper Amazon basin, shrink human heads after killing their enemies in battle. It’s from the medical journal Neurosurgery but it’s most fascinating for what it reveals about the complex customs and social relations that surround the practice.

The actual head shrinking is the end point in a raid on an enemies camp which apparently happens periodically, as they are almost always in revenge for being the victim of an earlier raid.

The victim of the revenge raid is not necessarily the perpetrator of the last attack. The new target is picked out by the shaman while under the influence of a hallucinogenic beverage called natéma (apparently a type of ayahuasca).

The significance of this vengeance cycle is remarkably similar to the one described by Jared Diamond in a New Yorker article on violence in the Handa people of New Guinea that we covered earlier this year.

The article does explain the process of shrinking heads, if ever you find yourself with a spare one, as well as the complex ritual and ceremonies that accompany the process and seem to pervade the whole life and identity of the Jivaro-Shuar.

Anyway, on to the head shrinking. After carefully removing the skin from and discarding the skull, a ritual pot is used to heat water.

As the water begins to grow warm, with a command, the headman leads the warriors in the rite: he seizes what remains of the head by its hair and, with the warriors‚Äô hands laid upon his hand grasping the victim‚Äôs head, he dips the head three times in the water. As he does this, he intones, ‚ÄúI dip the head in the boa‚Äôs water.‚Äù The warriors in turn respond, ‚ÄúHe is boiling the head.‚Äù The skin of the head is then placed in the vessel and allowed to steep for 15 to 20 minutes as the participants watch in silence. When the water reaches a boil, the vessel is removed from the fire, and the skin is recovered from the water with a stick and hung up on the tip of a spear to dry….

They retrieve the skin from its place on the spear and bind the hair on its scalp. Eyelet holes are pierced through the base of the neck, transforming the skin into a sort of pouch. The mouth is sewn shut with darts from below as the participants intone: “He is sewing.” The eyelids are sutured closed in a similar manner.

With the enemy’s skin now a pouch with a single mouth, the base of the neck, the skin is dried with heated sand and stones. The sand is heated on a round, hollow plate. The senior member of the party leads the warriors involved in the kill in scooping up the sand with a vessel and pouring it into the head, then shaking the head to drive the sand as far into the pouch as possible. This is repeated for hours as the participants repeat the chant, “I am pouring sand.” A large flat stone is likewise heated in the fire and used, held with the help of a leaf folded for the purpose, on the outside layer of the skin. The head is then complete.

Interestingly, once made, the heads are usually discarded as the significance lies in the process rather than the product.

It’s a completely fascinating article and really worth reading in full.

Link to article ‘The science of shrinking human heads’.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

I’ve just discovered a delightful <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/may/23/germany.features11
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/feb/10/comedy.television
“>article by English comedian Stewart Lee on why British people don¬¥t get German humour. He argues that the English language is full of ambiguities and that many jokes rely on resolving these in ways which are much less possible in the German language owing to the sentence structure.

It reminded me of a more recent article by another English comedian, Simon Pegg, on why Americans sometimes miss the irony in British humour. He argues that it’s not that they don’t understand irony, as the stereotype suggests, but that British people use it in situations which Americans are not familiar with, making it harder to understand as intentional humour.

Neither are scientific and both are really just opinion pieces, but it struck me that there are interesting parallels with the recent series of articles where professional magicians have collaborated with cognitive scientists to understand the consciousness and attention.

The gist was that stage magicians have developed a keen intuitive sense of how the human attentional system works in order to fool it, and cognitive scientists can benefit from this knowledge as it is eminently useful in designing experiments.

As far as I know, no similar collaboration has happened with professional comedians and cognitive scientists studying the psychology of humour, despite the fact that both the articles mentioned above seem to demonstrate an intuitive sense of the what makes things funny.

Richard Herring (a one-time comedic partner of Stewart Lee in a past double act) recently wrote a shorter piece on honing jokes that seemed also to capture some of this intuitive knowledge.

A beautifully chosen, unexpected adjective can transform a comedy routine into poetry, while the banal repetition of a common place noun can make that word, and consequently all language, suddenly appear ridiculous.

If you are a stand-up you can hone your material over successive performances, based on the audience response. Changing a single word or altering the pace or emphasis can make a previously failed witticism work.

You might be saying too much. Let the audience discover the consequences of a comedic notion themselves. A pause can be as effective as a paragraph of exposition.

Finally, remember that you will learn the most through trial and error.

Link to ‘Lost in translation’ on humour and the German language.
Link to article ‘What are you laughing at?’ on Americans and irony.
Link to article on honing a joke.

A micro explanation of autism by Simon Baron-Cohen from this month’s British Journal of Psychiatry as part of their monthly feature which tries to explain a key concept in psychiatry in 100 words.

Autism – in 100 words

Simon Baron-Cohen

Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) occur in 1% of the population, are strongly heritable, and result from atypical neurodevelopment. Classic autism and Asperger Syndrome (AS) share difficulties in social functioning, communication and coping with change, alongside unusually narrow interests. IQ is average or above in AS with average or even precocious age of language onset. Many areas within the `social brain’ are atypical in ASC. ASC has a profile of impaired empathy alongside strong `systemising’. Hence, ASC involves disability (when empathy is required) and talent (when strong systemising would be advantageous). Psychological interventions that target empathy by harnessing systemising may help.

Link to piece in BJP.

The Economist has a good write-up of a recent PLoS One study that found that the perceived ‘human-ness’ of another player in a game altered the extent of activation in brain areas associated with understanding others’ mental states.

The participants were asked to play the prisoner’s dilemma game in a brain scanner and were introduced to four opponents – software on a laptop, a laptop controlled by robotic hands, a humanoid robot and a real human. In reality though, the other players’ moves were all randomly generated.

Dr Krach and Dr Kircher chose the “prisoner’s dilemma” game because it involves a difficult choice: whether to co-operate with the other player or betray him. Co-operation brings the best outcome, but trying to co-operate when the other player betrays you brings the worst. The tendency is for both sides to choose betrayal (thus obtaining an intermediate result) unless a high level of trust exists between them. The game thus requires each player to try to get into the mind of the other, in order to predict what he might do. This sort of thinking tends to increase activity in parts of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex and the right temporo-parietal junction.

The scanner showed that the more human-like the supposed opponent, the more such neural activity increased. A questionnaire also revealed that the volunteers enjoyed the games most when they played human-like opponents, whom they perceived to be more intelligent. Dr Krach and Dr Kircher reckon this shows that the less human-like a robot is in its appearance, the less it will be treated as if it were human. That may mean it will be trusted less—and might therefore not sell as well as a humanoid design.

It’s an interesting extension of a type of study first pioneered by psychologist Helen Gallagher and colleagues where she asked people to play ‘paper, scissors, stone’ supposedly against human and computer opponents in a PET scanning study.

Like with this recent study, all ‘opponents’ were actually just a series of randomly generated moves but the participants showed significantly greater brain activation in the frontal cortex when playing against the supposedly ‘human’ opponent than versus the computer.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests that attributing mental states is a particular way of thinking about something that he calls the ‘intentional stance‘.

For example, we might play a chess computer and treat it if it was ‘intending’ to take our our bishop, or as if it ‘believed’ that getting the Queen out would be an advantage, but this says nothing about whether the machine actually has intentions or beliefs.

Of course, we can apply this to humans, and just because we find it useful to talk about others’ beliefs, it doesn’t mean belief is necessarily a scientifically sound concept.

Link to Economist article ‘I, human’.
Link to full-text article in PLoS One.

Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid member of the PLoS One editorial board.

PsyBlog has a delightful article discussing whether louder music increases alcohol consumption. It turns out it does, and surprisingly, there seems to have been quite a few studies done to examine the effect.

One research group even did a sort of randomised controlled trial on bars and music in a fantastic real-world experiment.

One study by Gueguen et al. (2004) found that higher sound levels lead to people drinking more. In a new study published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, Gueguen et al. (2008) visited a bar in the west of France to confirm their previous finding in a naturalistic setting. Here, they observed customers’ drinking habits across three Saturday nights, in two different bars in the city.

The level of the music was randomly manipulated to create the conditions of a true experiment. It was either at its usual volume of 72dB or turned up to 88dB. For comparison: 72db is like the sound of traffic on a busy street while 88db is like standing next to a lawnmower.

Sure enough when the music went up the beers went down, faster. On average bar-goers took 14.5 minutes to finish a 250ml (8 oz) glass of draught beer when the music was at its normal level. But this came down to just 11.5 minutes when the music was turned up. As a result, on average, during their time in the bar each participant ordered one more drink in the loud music condition than in the normal music condition.

Link to ‘Why Loud Music in Bars Increases Alcohol Consumption’.