Category: Togetherness

Wise words to us all from Luke Jackson, a 13 year-old with Asperger Syndrome, who has written a book full of information and advice for teenagers with the condition called Freaks, Geeks and Asperger Syndrome.

The following is from the section on dating (p176):

If the person asks something like ‘Does my bum look fat?’ or even ‘I am not sure I like this dress’ then that is called ‘fishing for compliments’. These are very hard things to understand, but I am told that instead of being completely honest and saying that yes their bum does look fat, it is politer to answer with something like ‘Don’t be daft, you look great’. You are not lying, simply evading an awkward question and complimenting them at the same time. Be economical with the truth!

Link to more information and extracts from the book.

There’s been a lot of interest about naturalistic approaches to religion recently, largely related to the release of Daniel Dennett’s new polemical book Breaking the Spell.

In a similar vein, the New Times has an in-depth article about much of the empirical research that’s fuelling the debate.

Crucially, this research is not simply tackling the idea that biblical ideas such as creation are incorrect, but arguing that the belief in God or other supernatural forces, itself is a product of evolution.

The article focuses on the work of psychologist Jesse Bering, whose work we’ve featured before on Mind Hacks.

Unlike with the wider evolution debate, however, reaction to such work seems to be muted, even among the religious community.

Even when their afterlife study was featured prominently in a recent Atlantic Monthly article written by Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology and linguistics at Yale, and titled provocatively “Is God an Accident?,” there was scant response.

“I tell you, a couple of years ago, there was a science article on a dog, Rico, that could obey verbal commands,” Bloom tells New Times. “That got me ten times more angry e-mails than this. Souls and gods are one thing, but people care a lot about their dogs. So my rule is: I can write about God but not dogs.”

I suspect, however, that as the issue becomes more widely known (especially with Dennett turning up the ante) this will quickly change.

Link to article ‘The God Fossil’ from New Times.

Circadia has a post about a brief study on how patterns of human love-making change during the day. Unsurprisingly, the most common times are before going to sleep and after waking up.

Notably, the original paper uses the scientific term ‘nycthemeral’ (meaning daily). This must be one of the most lovely sounding words I’ve discovered in quite some time.

Cognitive Daily has just published two fascinating articles on research showing that the angle at which a police interview is filmed can affect how well people judge whether a confession has been forced.

The first article discusses a study which suggests that coerced confessions are much more likely to be picked up by jurors if they are filmed from the side.

The second looks at an extension of the first study, where the experimenters setup and ran a simulated trial (wow!), and found that the camera angle used to film a suspicious confession could influence the jurors’ final verdict.

Interestingly, the researchers used a re-enactment of a real-life interview, from someone who falsely confessed to his girlfriend’s murder under police pressure.

Fascinating work and a great write-up, showing the importance of understanding psychological influences in the process of justice.

Link to ‘Coerced confessions: Is videotaping part of the problem, or part of the solution?’.
Link to ‘Can court procedure mitigate abuse?’.

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind has had a couple of related editions over the last couple of weeks that have tackled the psychology and neuroscience of creative thought.

Psychiatrist and one-time english literature professor Nancy Andreasan discusses the neuroscience of creativity and whether genius is related to particular brain states or measurable mental attributes.

The most recent All in the Mind continues the theme, discussing ‘Outsider art‘ – artworks created by those who have had no formal training and often little or no contact with the mainstream art world.

‘Outsider art’ is often associated with people who experience mental illness, particularly psychosis, and the programme features artist Anthony Mannix who has been inspired by his experience of altered states.

One of the most famous historical examples is Adolf Wölfli, a troubled orphan who ended up in a Swiss asylum at an early age, but began creating books of visual art, music and text that he would continue to develop for the rest of his life.

We’ve featured previous posts on outsider art here and here on Mind Hacks.

The Creating Brain
mp3 or realaudio of programme.
Link to transcript.

Outsider Art
mp3 or realaudio of programme.
Link to transcript.

Asylum, a 1972 documentary filmed in the therapeutic community established by radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, is available for download via this bittorrent tracker.

Laing wanted to establish a community for helping those who were experiencing mental distress without recourse to the uneven power balances present in mainstream psychiatry, where patients can be forcibly detained or drugged.

The result was the Archway Community, where residents were free to come and go and lived together with psychiatrists.

The film is largely without a narrative structure and simply captures some of the people and situations that occur during a seven week period.

The first thing that struck me was how bleak, chaotic and depressing it looked, far from the utopian vision of its founder. The residents are treated with respect, however, and are genuinely listened to, although the surroundings can hardly be described as luxurious.

The film is quite difficult to get hold of, so finding it online is a rare treat.

It isn’t necessarily an easy film to watch, although it gives a fascinating insight into one of the most influential and misunderstood people and projects from the heyday of radical psychiatry.

The film shouldn’t be confused with the other 1972 Asylum which was a low budget horror flick starring Peter Cushing and Britt Ekland.

Link to webpage with torrent of movie.
Link to information about the film.
Link to Wikipedia page on Bittorrent.

The claim that people with autism have an impaired ‘theory of mind‘ (that is, they are supposedly not able to imagine what other people are thinking) is one of the most commonly repeated ‘facts’ about the condition.

This typically infuriates people with autism, especially when it gets translated into the more everyday, and, perhaps, even less accurate claim, that autism involves a ‘lack of empathy’.

It is now being challenged by researchers, such as Professor Morton Gernsbacher, who are comparing the performance of participants with autism on experimental tests of ‘theory of mind’ with individuals who do not have autism but do have similar problems in understanding language.

Gernsbacher is interviewed in a short section on BBC Radio 4’s science programme Leading Edge (starts 15 minutes into the realaudio stream) where she explains that apparent ‘theory of mind’ problems may be due to participants with autism not always understanding the complexity of the verbal instructions in tests such as the ‘Sally-Anne’ task.

Gernsbacher claims that in ‘theory of mind’ tests that use drawing, rather than verbal interaction, autistic children actually do better than non-autistic children.

This echoes findings from studies on non-autistic deaf children (pdf) who seem to show ‘theory of mind’ impairments if they suffer problems with language development, but not if they become fluent in sign-language.

Link to description of ‘theory of mind’.
Link to Leading Edge webpage for 23rd Feb edition (via Autism Diva).
Realaudio of programme (section starts 15 minutes in).
Link to flash heavy website of Morton Gernsbacher’s lab.
PDF of ‘Insights into theory of mind from autism and deafness’ by Peterson and Siegal.

Last week’s edition of ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind was an excellent programme on the science, experience and treatment of epilepsy.

The programme talks to several neurologists about what causes the curious condition and how it is being treated.

Also featured on the programmme is Gail Williams, a 16 year old girl who had epilepsy since the age of 4, an experience which included seeing unusual hallucinations before she lost consciousness.

Gail’s epilepsy was particularly serious, and was eventually given brain surgery which has since stopped her seizures. She describes the experience of the surgery and life before and after epilepsy.

This is one of the most comprehensive and engaging programmes I’ve yet heard on the condition. Half an hour well spent.

mp3 or realaudio of programme.
Link to transcript.
Link to Epilepsy Action information pages.

As recently noted by Christian, news broke last week of a study claiming that orgasm is “400% better” with a partner than with masturbation, based on measures of the neurohormone prolactin.

A couple of critiques have now appeared on the web that examine the experiment, its conclusions and the media handling of the story.

Petra Boyton tackles many of the unmentioned details of the study while Cory Silverberg notes that the study’s conclusions might be overgeneralised given the relatively limited activites that were recorded.

Just like in any other area of science, knowing the details of a sex study is crucially important for understanding its implications.

Unlike other areas of science, however, the details in these studies are, by their very nature, sexually explicit. This can mean that the popular media shys away from giving the crucial information and prefers to focus on the unqualified general conclusions, leaving the public misled both about sexual chemistry and sex research.

Perhaps with sex research, more than for other areas of science, tracking down the original research reports allows for a more critical insight into the researchers’ (or anyone else’s) conclusions.

Link to study abstract in the journal Biological Psychology.
Link to study summary from New Scientist.
Link to ‘Is sex with a partner truly 400% better?’ by Petra Boyton.
Link to ‘Orgasm Study Offers Status Quo and Universal Generalizations’ from Cory Silverberg.

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
   impossible criminals with golden heads and the
   charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
   blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
   Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
   or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
   Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
   daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
   notism & were left with their insanity & their
   hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
   and subsequently presented themselves on the
   granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
   and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
   stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
   Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
   therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
   amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
   pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
   returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
   blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
   man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
   East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid
   halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
   ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
   dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
   mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
   moon

Excerpt from ‘Howl‘ by poet Allen Ginsberg. The poem was dedicated to Ginsberg’s friend, Carl Solomon, whom he met while they were both patients at Rockland Psychiatric Hospital in New York.

Link to full text of ‘Howl’.

Eating disorders, such as anorexia, are traditionally thought to be driven by a distorted body image, so affected people see themselves as excessively overweight (and therefore unattractive) despite being very thin.

A recent study by psychologist Anita Jansen and colleagues has challenged this theory, by showing that women with eating disorders are actually more accurate at judging how attractive they are to others, whereas unaffected women typically over-estimate their attractiveness.

Jansen’s team asked women with and without eating disorder symptoms to have their picture taken, from the neck down, in their underwear. They were then asked to rate their own body for general attractiveness, and say which was the most attractive and unattractive part of their body.

These anonymised photos were then shown to two panels, consisting of both males and females, who were asked to make the same ratings.

The women with symptoms were generally in agreement with the panels, whereas those without rated themselves as more attractive and typically did not agree on which were their most and least attractive body parts.

This shows a lack of a ‘self serving attribution bias’ which is a normal tendency to over-attribute positive things to ourselves and negative things to other people or situations.

A recent review of the research suggested that this bias is usually strongly present in most people. It has been suggested that this may be useful, as it might emotionally cushion us from some of life’s hardships.

People with certain forms of mental illness, particularly depression, tend not to have this bias, however, meaning they actually view the world more accurately – an effect coined ‘depressive realism‘.

Jansen’s study suggests a similar ‘painful realism’ effect may be present in people with eating disorders, although it’s not clear whether this is specific to body perception, or whether it is primarily associated with emotional difficulties that often accompany conditions like anorexia.

UPDATE: World of Psychology has interesting commentary on this research (and post).

Link to abstract of study.
Link to eating disorder information from mental health charity Mind.

As the cold winter evenings drew near
Aunt Marge used to put extra blankets
over the furniture, to keep it warm and cosy
Mussolini was her lover, and life
was an outoffocus rosy-tinted spectacle

but neurological experts
with kind blueeyes
and gentle voices
small white hands
and large Rolls Royces
said that electric shock treatment
should do the trick
it did…

today after 15 years of therapeutic tears
and an awful lot of ratepayers’ shillings
down the hospital meter
sad Aunt Marge
no longer tucks up the furniture
before kissing it goodnight
and admits
that her affair with Mussolini
clearly was not right
particularly in the light
of her recently announced engagement
to the late pope.

‘Sad Aunt Marge’ by poet Roger McGough, from his book Blazing Fruit: Selected Poems 1967-1987 (ISBN 0140586520).

Professor Richard Wiseman talks about an upcoming study on speed dating in a BBC news story and is quoted as saying “This is the first time that speed dating has been used to assess the psychology of compatibility”.

It seems Professor Wiseman has a short memory, as several studies have been published on speed dating, including a paper published last year in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior that was quite widely discussed (funnily enough, just around the time of last year’s Valentine’s Day).

Wiseman’s experiment is to be carried out at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in April and reflects a trend for using speed dating in science education events. It even featured (rather unsuccessfully) in the tepid BBC series Secrets of the Sexes and, in a slightly more informed format, as a segment on Radio 4’s All in the Mind.

Link to ‘Scientists to study speed dating’ from BBC News.

Interesting fact for Valentine’s Day: The retina is the only part of the central nervous system that is visible from outside the body.

So when you’re looking deep into the eyes of your true love, you can say…

“Darling, you have the most beautiful central nervous system I have ever seen.”

And if that doesn’t send shivers down their spine, Ode to Psyche by John Keats is possibly one of the most beautiful love poems to feature the mind and brain, as this excerpt shows:

And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
  With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,
  Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same;
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
  That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
  To let the warm Love in!

Link to full text of Ode to Psyche by John Keats.

Every day from nine to five I sit at my desk facing the door of the office and type up other people’s dreams. Not just dreams. That wouldn’t be practical enough for my bosses. I type up also people’s daytime complaints: trouble with mother, trouble with father, trouble with the bottle, the bed, the headache that bangs home and blacks out the sweet world for no known reason. Nobody comes to our office unless they have troubles. Troubles that can’t be pinpointed by Wassermanns or Wechsler-Bellvues alone.

Maybe a mouse gets to thinking pretty early on how the whole world is run by these enormous feet. Well, from where I sit, I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all-it’s the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.

When people ask me where I work, I tell them I’m Assistant to the Secretary in one of the Out-Patient Departments of the Clinics’ Building of the City Hospital. This sounds so be-all end-all they seldom get around to asking me more than what I do, and what I do is mainly type up records. On my own hook though, and completely under cover, I am pursuing a vocation that would set these doctors on their ears. In the privacy of my one-room apartment I call myself secretary to none other than Johnny Panic himself.

Dream by dream I am educating myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth, than any member of the Psycho-analytic Institute, a dream connoisseur. Not a dream-stopper, a dream-explainer, an exploiter of dreams for the crass practical ends of health and happiness, but an unsordid collector of dreams for themselves alone. A lover of dreams for Johnny Panic’s sake, the Maker of them all.

There isn’t a dream I’ve typed up in our record books that I don’t know by heart. There isn’t a dream I haven’t copied out at home into Johnny Panic’s Bible of Dreams.

This is my real calling.

Excerpt from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by poet and author Sylvia Plath. Plath suffered from severe depression throughout her life, and this piece was based upon her experiences of being in a psychiatric hospital.

Time magazine talks to psychologist Steven Hayes in an article about the development of ‘Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’ – an increasingly popular treatment for mental disorder.

I’m not familiar with the name, but it seems to be a form of mindfulness-based therapy, originally developed by a team at Cambridge University, inspired by Buddhist meditation techniques, and known to be highly effective in treating depression.

The article contains a summary of both ACT and the current most popular and most evaluated form of psychological therapy: cognitive behaviour therapy or CBT.

The Time article is a little overzealous in its enthusiasm, suggesting that ACT outperformed CBT when applied to a wide range of mental disorders, when, in fact, Hayes himself wrote an encouraging but balanced review article in which he stated “there are not enough well-controlled studies to conclude that ACT is generally more effective than other active treatments”.

Nevertheless, the article is an interesting insight into Hayes himself, and a good account of some of the core principles behind modern psychological treatments for mental illness.

Link to article ‘Happiness isn’t normal’.
Link to information on mindfulness-baded therapy from Oxford University.