Category: Togetherness

BBC Radio 4’s science programme The Material World has just had a special on the nature of creativity, how it can be defined, measured and encouraged.

The programme discusses the differences between artistic and scientific creativity, and whether creativity necessarilly has to be productive.

The first part of the programme is on nuclear fission, so skip to 13 minutes if you just want the section on creative thought.

Link to webpage of The Material World edition on creativity.
Realaudio of programme.

…the original riddle remains: is the world mad, or is civilization psychopathogenic? – the question, of course, posed by Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1926). And if a civilized society is thus disordered, what right has it to pass judgement on the ‘insane’? Regarding his committal to Bethlem, the Restoration playwrite Nathaniel Lee reputedly declared: “They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.” The issue is still alive.

From Madness: A Brief History (p88) by the late great historian of medicine, Roy Porter.

Link to review of Madness: A Brief History (ISBN 0192802666).
Link to Roy Porter’s obituary (2002).

Psychological treatment for depression, delivered over the internet, is reliable and effective, according to the results of research published recently in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Psychological treatment, particularly a form of therapy known as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), is already known to be an effective treatment, but qualified therapists are relatively scarce.

Some of the techniques learnt during a course of CBT can, however, be passed on via the internet. This has the advantage of being more widely available to help people who may be having problems with distressing thoughts or moods.

One example of this is MoodGym, an open-access web-based treatment for depression, developed by the Australian National University.

Several research trials have shown MoodGym to be effective at alleviating depression when used either by specifically recruited participants, or by other users who happen to have started using the website.

Researchers hope to gain a knowledge about which aspects of therapy can be best communicated online to develop the most effective web-based treatments and therapies.

Link to MoodGym.
Link to British Journal of Psychiatry study summary (via PsychCentral).

Richard Dadd was a promising artist who was admitted to the Royal Academy of Art in 1837. A decade later, Dadd was a patient in Bethlem psychiatric hospital after experiencing an intense psychosis, but was still to create the greatest of his works.

Dadd first started experiencing the beginings of psychosis when travelling in Egypt. He believed that the sound of the traditional Egyptian “hubbly bubblies” contained messages to him from the god Osiris.

Back in England, the artist became one of the rare examples of people who become violent when psychotic, killing his father with a razor. After fleeing from the authorities he was detained after attempting to attack a tourist in Paris.

On return to London, he was comitted to Bethlem Hospital for 20 years, before being moved to Broadmoor Hospital where he lived for the rest of his life.

When in hospital he continued to paint, and created some of the most important and fantastical paintings of the Victorian era.

The most famous, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (jpg – works best full screen) has been the inspiration novels and plays, and even a song by the seminal rock group Queen.

Link to detailed Dadd biography (with early sketches).
Link to brief biography.

Continuing the schizophrenia theme – the latest issue of the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica is a special edition on the link between childhood trauma and schizophrenia.

The new findings support the argument for a bio-psycho-social approach to psychosis and come in the wake of a recent article in Psychiatric News, published by the American Psychiatric Association, about the overmedicalisation of psychiatry, and an article in the October issue of The Psychologist, published here in the UK, subtitled ‘what happened to the ‘psycho’ and ‘social’ in explanations of mental illness?’.

If you don’t have access to the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, Oliver James wrote an essay in Saturday’s Guardian on the new findings and their implications for the treatment of schizophrenia. For example, he says that a review of 13 studies found that between 51 to 97 per cent (depending on the study) of people diagnosed with schizophrenia had previously suffered sexual or physical abuse. His essay says the new findings will shake the intellectual foundations of the psychiatric establishment like an earthquake.

Update:A report on one of the papers from this special issue of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica now appears on the BPS Research Digest here

Schizophrenia is today’s featured article on wikipedia and already activity has hit fever pitch.

It’s an article I’ve been quite heavily involved with over the last few years, and it has proved as much a project in diplomacy and fire fighting as it has in understanding the science and history of this complex diagnosis.

There are many contrasting (and at times conficting) views of schizophrenia and trying to balance all of these approaches to produce a rounded article has been an ongoing mission for the various regular editors of the article.

The article discussion page is full of some of the more memorable and ill-informed additions, including “Medication skipping schizos murder people everywhere” and someone threatening to contact CNN if their edits weren’t included.

Since it has been posted to the front page it has been the subject of both incisive and clarifying edits, as well as vandalism and unfounded sloganism.

Isn’t the internet great ?

Link to wikipedia entry on Schizophrenia.

Researchers from the University of Sydney are asking anyone who has suffered from anxiety or depression to complete an online survey in a research project that is aiming to understand the role of mood and stress in motivating missing persons.

Nearly 2,000 people go missing in the UK every year, with other countries also having significant numbers of people who seemingly ‘disappear’.

It is thought that some people who do become missing may be suffering with problems of anxiety, stress, depression or low mood.

The University of Sydney study is asking people who are currently experiencing such difficulties, or who have experienced them in the past, to complete a short anonymous online questionnaire.

Importantly, you don’t have to have actually ‘gone missing’ yourself, only to have experienced anxiety or depression, although the study asks about the desire to leave your current situation.

The study aims to prevent further occurrences of people going missing through a better understanding of such thoughts and behaviour. It also plans to minimise the suffering of the families of missing people by providing the most appropriate services available.

Link to Missing Persons Study at the University of Sydney.

The UK Parkinson’s Disease Society Tissue Bank is asking people to donate their brains after they die, to aide the fight against Parkinson’s disease.

The service, located in London’s Imperial College, gets only one donation from someone with a healthy brain compared with 25 donations from people with Parkinson’s disease.

Postmortem brains of healthy people are essential so researchers can compare diseased tissue with unaffected tissue and draw valid and accurate conclusions about the condition.

Parkinson’s disease is known to occur when dopamine neurons die in the brain’s nigrostriatal pathway. It is not clear exactly why this happens, however.

Research that compares the postmortem brains of affected and unaffected people is, therefore, an essential part of understanding why this occurs, hopefully leading to the development of new treatments.

So, if you want to help in this essential research, you can will your brain to the Parkinson’s Disease Society Tissue Bank.

Link to UK Parkinson’s Disease Society Tissue Bank (Thanks Dr Petra!).

BBC News describes a suppressed sexual behaviour survey conducted in the 1950s, in the wake of the Kinsey Reports that first described the then shocking truth about the sexual behaviour of American participants.

The British survey followed the Kinsey’s studies by only a few years, but reportedly revealed information considered too uncomfortable to publicise and subsequently remained unpublished (although the BBC story doesn’t indicate who was responsible for suppressing it).

Findings in the survey included:

One in four men admitted to having had sex with prostitutes, one in five women owned up to an extra-marital affair, while the same proportion of both sexes said they had had a homosexual experience.

The techniques used in the study would be considered vastly unethical by today’s standards, and were even dodgy when compared to the research methods used by Kinsey on the other side of the Atlantic.

The research is further discussed in a BBC television programme called Little Kinsey to be shown on BBC Four on Wednesday 5 October, at 2100 BST.

Link to “Britain’s secret sex survey”.

Online boffin club Edge has an article by psychologist Daniel Gilbert that discusses a psychological approach to understanding religious belief.

One of the difficulties with combining science and religion is that science typically deals with predictions that can be falsified by experiment (allowing theories to be created and tested) whereas the main spiritual tenants of religion tend to take the form of non-falsifiable hypotheses.

For example, many forms of the hypothesis that ‘there is a God’ cannot be falsified, as it is not clear what evidence would constitute a refutation.

This is in contrast to many other hypotheses associated with religion, such as creationism, that makes specific predictions that can be falsified – e.g. in one of its forms, that the world was created only a few thousand years ago.

Gilbert starts off his article with a commonly produced but mistaken assumption: “no one has yet produced a shred of empirical evidence for the existence of God”.

Here he mistakes ’empirical’ for ‘experimental’, as empirical evidence is that which is based on experience and observation, of which experiments are only a certain type (albeit ones that are formalised and highly valued).

There is certainly plenty of empirical evidence about. Many religious people will be able to provide examples of how they have personally experienced the effect or presence of ‘supernatural’ influence in their lives, or can provide examples where many people witnessed a supposed example of divine intervention.

The question is not over whether there is evidence, but whether it is valid (the phenomena was genuinely as experienced) and how it should be interpreted (whether it supports the concept of the divine, or a particular idea of ‘God’).

Link to article “The Vagaries of Religious Experience”.

UK mental health charity Mind challenged their members to express the contradictions of mental turmoil and the self through artwork. The resulting pictures are colourful, diverse and striking.

As the initiators were Mind Cymru, the Welsh branch of the charity, the artwork was exhibited at the National Eisteddfod of Wales, Europe’s oldest cultural festival.

Link to Mind Cymru Art Gallery 2005.

An experiment conducted by psychologist Richard Nisbett suggests that Chinese and American people analyse scenes differently. The Americans focused on the main object in the picture, while the Chinese took a more holistic approach, and examined more of the visual context.

Traditionally, Western societies are characterised as ‘individualistic’ and Eastern societies as ‘collectivist’, suggesting that in countries like China and Japan, the focus is on society as a whole, rather than each person’s individual characteristics.

Some have suggested that this reflects the different philosophical traditions of these cultures, with the West tending to approach problems by analytically breaking them down into component parts, and the East looking at problems in their wider context.

Nisbett’s experiment suggests that this tendency may influence mental function even on the unconscious level, as his effect was found when participants were simply asked to view pictures, while their eye movements were tracked with an infra-red camera.

Importantly, the participants were unaware of the full intention of the experiment, and were told they were taking part in a study to test memory for pictures.

Why the picture of the Chinese girl? I just thought she looked beautiful.

Link to write-up from Science (with good example of eye-tracking result).
Link to New Scientist story.
Link to Scientific American story.

The Boston Globe has an exceptionally well researched article on the biology and neuropsychology of homosexuality.

While the search for a single ‘gay gene’ in humans has pretty much been abandoned, a substantial amount of work is now being conducted into the role of genetic factors and the time spent in the womb on sexuality.

One study, conducted by biologist Alan Sanders, is recruiting gay men with gay brothers to investigate any molecular genetic contributions to sexual orientation.

Other research is beginning to find a difference between sexual preference and sexual arousal. Early results suggest that for males, sexual arousal and sexual preference is strongly correlated (men prefer the sex that is capable of arousing them), whereas women are more capable of being aroused by either sex, despite the fact that they may be attracted to only one.

Some studies have found differences in brain structure between gay and straight men. In particular, a small area of the hypothalamus (known to be involved in sexual motivation) was found to differ in size in a controversial 1991 post-mortem study by neuroscientist Simon LeVay.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘What Makes People Gay?’.

The latest issue of open-access medical journal PLoS Medicine has two articles discussing the campaign to destigmatise schizophrenia, and the role of the media in communicating health information.

The first article notes that social stigma, rather than the effects of the condition itself, has been found to be the greatest problem facing people diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The authors examine the effectiveness of campaigns that have tried to tackle the problem, such as the World Psychiatric Association’s Open The Doors campaign.

Such campaigns are controversial in some quarters, however, as they are often based on communicating the idea that schizophrenia is a ‘treatable brain illness‘.

Some research has shown that providing members of the public with a medical or biological explanation for schizophrenia leads people to think of affected individuals as more dangerous and unpredictable than when a social or psychological explanation is given. There is some evidence that a similar effect occurs for professionals.

This might suggest that campaigns based on the biological explanations might have the opposite of the intended effect, although opponents to this view argue that mental illness undoubtedly has a biological component, and education should focus on freeing affected individuals from stigma regardless of how their experiences are explained.

Related to this, PloS Medicine asked a number of health journalists and other professionals to discuss the role of the media in educating the public about health education. The article highlights examples of good and bad practice during recent media frenzies.

This comes in the wake of a previous article, where the ex-editor of the British Medical Journal argued that medical journals have become an “extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies”.

Link to article ‘The Global Fight against the Stigma of Schizophrenia’.
Link to article ‘What Are the Roles and Responsibilities of the Media in Disseminating Health Information?’.

The final paper of the late DNA pioneer and consciousness researcher Francis Crick has been published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Written with his collaborator Christof Koch, it concerns a little known part of the brain called the claustrum. The claustrum is a thin sheet of grey matter that is parallel to and below part of the cortex, as illustrated by images from Crick’s paper here.

Crick and Koch argue that the claustrum is probably connected to all of the cortex, and has a significant role in emotion, suggesting it may be involved in the ‘binding’ of emotion and the senses into a single conscious experience.

They give the example of holding a rose, smelling its fragrance, seeing its red petals and feeling the texture of its stem, now made more poignant by Crick’s passing.

How the brain achieves this (known as the binding problem) is one of the great problems of consciousness research.

Several researchers have argued, most notably biologist Gerald Edelman, that consciousness arises from ‘maps’ of neural activity distributed across the brain.

The co-ordination of this distributed neural activity is something that Crick and Koch aim to explain in their paper, proposing that the claustrum may be the mesh that connects disparate brain areas.

PDF of paper ‘What is the function of the claustrum?’ by Crick and Koch.
Link to summary from The Economist.
Link to press-release from the Royal Society.

Research suggests that the scent of grapefruit causes men to judge women up to six years younger than their chronological age.

Let’s see if the evolutionary psychologists can come up with an explanation for this one!

Link to write-up from WebMD.com
Link to story from ScienceDaily.com