Possibly your average punter on sport talk radio

I’ve just been reading a fascinating study on ‘dysfunctional’ sports fans who over-identify themselves with their team and become abusive and confrontational during matches. There was one incidental finding which was only based on a small sample but has the potential to explain a great deal about radio phone-ins: dysfunctional fans were overwhelmingly more likely to call into sports talk radio shows.

Here’s the bit directly from the article:

Interestingly, although relatively few people are frequent callers to sports talk radio in this sample (n = 25; 5.5%) of predominantly highly identified fans, a disproportionate number of those who frequently call sports talk radio shows are highly dysfunctional (n = 9; 36%) fans and very few could he classified as less dysfunctional fans (n = 3; 12%).

Perhaps at least as interesting, 68% of this overwhelmingly highly identified sample of fans reported never calling into sports talk radio shows. Of these who never call in, 82.8% can be classified as non-dysfunctional fans…. Consequently, these results have intriguing implications regarding the makeup of the individuals who dominate the sports talk radio airwaves as callers.

More research is clearly needed into this important issue, even if it does confirm what we all already suspect.

Link to summary of study on ‘dysfunctional sports fans’.

Encephalon 79 ends the year

The 79th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just been published online with this edition appearing on the mighty Mouse Trap blog.

A couple of my favourites include coverage of a fascinating experiment on Neuronarrative that managed to induce false memories of completing certain actions and another on the recent badly reported ‘sweets linked to childhood violence’ study – Brain Blogger hits the right notes in its coverage.

There’s a whole lot more in this fortnight’s edition so have a look and see what takes your fancy.

Link to Encephalon 79.

Psychopath junior

The Onion has a satirical piece on how a funny but fictional study has found high numbers of psychopaths among the nation’s children who have “little regard for anything other than their own egocentric interests and pleasures”.

Mateo added that even when subjects were directly confronted with the consequences of their inexplicable behavior, they had little or no capacity for expressing guilt, other than insincere utterances of “sorry” that were usually coerced.

Because children are so skilled at mimicking normal human emotions and will say anything without consideration for accuracy or truth, Mateo said that people often don’t realize that they’ve been exploited until it is too late. Though he maintained that anyone can fall victim to a child’s egocentric behavior, Mateo warned that grandmothers were especially susceptible to the self- serving machinations of tiny little sociopaths.

While The Onion is riffing on how the ego-centric world-view of children has a vague similarity to being a psychopath, there is quite a bit of genuine research on psychopathy-related features in children.

Known as ‘callous-unemotional traits’ (described here) they have been weakly related to future offending and a diagnosis of psychopathy, but as there are many ‘routes’ to adult antisocial behaviour they are not a guarantee of later problems.

Link to satirical Onion piece on childhood psychopaths.

More on hallucinated voices in deaf people

After a post we featured earlier this year on whether deaf people can hear hallucinated voices, I was sent an amazing study that attempted to distil the variety of ‘hearing voices’ experiences in deaf people.

It was published in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry in 2007 (there’s a full text copy available online as a pdf) and attempted to avoid some of the pitfalls of studying auditory hallucinations in people with absent or limited hearing.

Some of the earlier research on deaf people who hear voices has been criticised for assuming that when a deaf person describes a ‘voice’ it automatically means they are having a similar experience to hearing people.

For example, when a deaf person describes the experience as ‘loud’ they may just mean it is particularly intrusive, rather than that it has specific auditory properties.

This later study used a sorting method, were a number of statements about what the experience could be like (some illustrated) were presented to deaf participants and they are asked to select the ones that best describe their experiences.

The data was then analysed using factor analysis – a statistical procedure that, in this case, was used to group participants whose experiences were similar.

Five groups or ‘factors’ were found, and I’ve reproduced the descriptions below as they are a completely fascinating insight into how these experiences appear in their diverse and varied forms.

Factor A: Nonauditory voices with subvisual perception of voice-articulators in the mind’s eye

These experiences were mostly reported by profoundly deaf participants who were deaf at birth or before the development of language.

Voices were reported to be nonauditory, clear, and easy to understand. Participants were certain that they did not hear any sound when voices were present. They did not consider questions about pitch, volume, and loudness relevant to their experiences. Participants knew the identity and gender of the voice but did not deduce this information from the way it sounds. They reported seeing an image of the voice communicating with them in their mind’s eye when voice hallucinations were present. All participants had experienced seeing an image of the voice signing or lips moving in their mind. Imagery of fingerspelling was also seen but was less common. These images appeared to be subvisual in nature and distinct from true visual hallucinations. They were clearly understood as originating internally and several participants stated that the image could still be perceived with their eyes closed.

Factor B: Mixed perception and uncertainty about how voices are perceived.

These experiences were mainly reported by deaf people who had experience of hearing speech and used hearing aids.

The participants were uncertain about whether their voice hallucinations were auditory in nature. Comprehensibility and clarity are variable. The voice used speech/lip movements to convey its’ message and occasionally fingerspelling and gesture. The voice was perceived as sometimes being silently articulated and sometimes having sound. Participants were uncertain if the voice was mouthing with or without vocalisation. Despite this uncertainty, Participant 10 was able to make attributions about voice pitch, volume, and loudness. No primary visual hallucinations were reported, although Participant 10 described seeing a stationary image of her deceased husband when the voice was present. There was less certainty about whether a visual image was present when the hallucinations occurred but participants agreed that the hands/lips of the voice could be perceived but that they were unclear. Strange sensations were perceived in the body both when the voice was present and not present. These included the perception of air currents, electric currents, and vibrations.

Factor C: Poorly defined voices.

These experiences were largely reported by participants who were born deaf in developing countries and spent their early years without hearing aids or formal language, only acquiring sign language as their first language after moving to the UK after the critical period for language development

The voices were poorly defined, hard to understand and unclear, with no definitive statements about exact voice properties but rather a picture of what they were not. There were contradictory responses about whether the voices made sound or not. It was not clear whether participants were completely unable to make judgements about pitch and volume because the voices were not auditory in nature, or because they did not possess a sufficiently developed concept of sound-based descriptions. There was a great deal of uncertainty about voice genesis that may have led the participants to speculate that they might be ‘‘hearing’’ something when they were present. This factor is unique because participants did not perceive imagery of the voice articulators during hallucinations. The gender and identity of the voice were unknown and there was much more uncertainty about which language or modality the voice used to communicate. Participants were unable to articulate voice content but merely described a sense of being persecuted and criticised by an external other.

Factor D: Auditory voices.

These experiences were reported by deaf people who were born moderately or moderately severely deaf and used hearing aids.

Voices were auditory and participants report that they could always hear sounds when the voices were present. Participant 11 was able to make judgements about auditory properties including pitch and volume. Participant 7 was less able to provide qualitative description of acoustic aspects but she was convinced that she could hear the voices. Interestingly, the bilingual participant showed a mixed pattern of voice perception. She experienced predominantly auditory hallucinations but also reported silently articulated sign language hallucinations, with concurrent subvisual imagery of the articulators similar to those experienced by participants on Factor A.

Factor E: Voices and true visual, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile phenomena

These experiences were reported by two deaf participants who were both profoundly deaf.

This factor was distinguished by the presence of true visual, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory phenomena, which occurred separately to voice hallucinations. These included tinnitus, the perception of a black shadow darting through peripheral vision, strange smells emanating from the body, and a petrol taste in the mouth. Other phenomena occurred in conjunction with the voices such as vibrations and electric currents in the body, which occurred only when the voice was present. Participant 25 reported seeing a true visual hallucination of someone signing to her in real space as well as imagery of the voice in her mind’s eye.

Thanks to Mind Hacks reader Sanjay for sending me the study.

Link to PubMed entry for Cognitive Neuropsychiatry study.
pdf of full text of study.

Clown therapy: trick or treat

Photo by Flickr user drp. Click for sourceIf you’re wondering how effective your average clown is, wonder no more. I’ve found a randomised controlled trial that tested the effectiveness of clowns in treating children’s anxiety before an operation, in comparison to midazolam, an anti-anxiety drug.

It turned out, clowns worked the best, but wow, doesn’t the study summary read weirdly.

Clowns for the prevention of preoperative anxiety in children: a randomized controlled trial.

Paediatr Anaesth. 2009 Mar;19(3):262-6.

Golan G, Tighe P, Dobija N, Perel A, Keidan I.

OBJECTIVE: To determine if specially trained professional clowns allayed preoperative anxiety and resulted in a smooth anesthetic induction compared to the use of midazolam or no intervention.

METHODS: This was a randomized, controlled, and blinded study conducted with children 3-8 years of age undergoing general anesthesia and elective outpatient surgery. Patients were assigned to one of three groups: Group 1 did not receive midazolam or clown presence; group 2 received 0.5 mg x kg(-1) oral midazolam 30 min before surgery up to a maximum of 15 mg; and group 3 had two specially trained clowns present upon arrival to the preoperative holding area and throughout operating room (OR) entrance and mask application for inhalation induction of anesthesia. The children were videotaped for later grading.

RESULTS: The clown group had a statistically significant lower modified-Yale Preoperative Anxiety Scale score in the preoperative holding area compared to the control and midazolam group. The clowns’ effect on anxiety reduction continued when the children entered the OR but was equal at this point to the midazolam group. Upon application of the anesthesia mask no significant differences were detected between the groups.

CONCLUSIONS: This study found that the use of preoperative medically trained clowns for children undergoing surgery can significantly alleviate preoperative anxiety. However, clowns do not have any effect once the anesthesia mask is introduced.

The use of ‘clown doctors’ is actually pretty common in Children’s hospitals and, as far as I know, the practice was invented by the American physician Patch Adams.

As for adverse reactions, despite the popular belief in ‘clown phobia’, variously called ballatrophobia, coulrophobia or my favourite – bozophobia, I could only find one case report of this particular anxiety disorder. Interestingly, it was discovered by a clown doctor who got a powerful negative reaction from an adult patient.

However, there is a video of a woman undergoing psychological treatment for clown phobia on that font of medical knowledge, YouTube.

Link to PubMed entry for clown trial.

2009-12-04 Spike activity

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

<img align="left" src="http://mindhacks-legacy.s3.amazonaws.com/2005/01/spike.jpg&quot; width="102" height="120"

Seed Magazine has a video discussion between linguist Noam Chomsky and sociologist Robert Trivers on the use of language in deception. Predictably political in places.

Great piece from Not Exactly Rocket Science on a study showing that believers tend to think God thinks the same as they do – ‘His’ beliefs change when theirs do.

Edge has a fascinating talk on consciousness but seem not to realise they are becoming a self-parody: “Edge organized a Reality Club meeting at The Hotel Ritz in Paris to allow neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene to present his new theory on how consciousness arises in the brain to a group of Parisian scientists and thinkers.”

A randomised-controlled trial of a behavioural programme reported in New Scientist finds early intervention in autism improves social skills and increases IQ later on. To be widely publicised by Jenny McCarthy. Oh no, my mistake.

Dr Petra’s blog was five years old the day after Mind Hacks. She has a fantastic review of the many highlights.

There’s a fascinating piece on portrayals of neurosyphilis in the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry. I never knew Conan Doyle did his doctoral thesis on syphilis.

The BPS Research Digest has an interesting piece on cultural differences in how we justify career changes.

The brain of famous patient with amnesia HM is currently being dissected. The New York Times reports on process and you can watch it live here. I warn you though, it’s really. very. dull.

The Guardian kicks off a tongue-in-cheek evolutionary psychology agony aunt column.

A study on how watching lots of crime shows on TV skews perception of society is covered by Neuronarrative.

BBC News has video of a neurally controlled robotic <a href="Robotic hand
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/video_and_audio/8392111.stm”>cyber hand!

We have difficulty understanding what influences our own judgements, according to a classic experiment covered by PsyBlog.

Wired UK has a piece discussing the expanding drone war in Afghanistan.

I found an odd 1941 article from Time magazine on a psychiatrist teaching magic tricks to patients so they “can become the life of the party”.

Cognition and Culture has a thought-provoking piece by anthropologist Pascal Boyer on why we have death and mourning rituals.

An activist gets GlaxoSmithKlein to stop distributing a leaflet promoting the ‘low serotonin causes depression’ nonsense in Iceland. An interesting episode covered by Neuroskeptic.

New Scientist has a piece on how people with depression show differences in visual discrimination. As always, ignore the headline.

Loneliness is transmittable from person to person, according to a study covered by the Washington Post.

Science News reports that street drug ecstasy is linked to an increase in sleep apnea – temporary stops in breathing during sleep.

A study on our memory for what we’ve told to whom – ‘destination memory‘, is covered by The New York Times. Not sure this isn’t just a variation on source memory, but an interesting article.

Medical News Today reports on a study finding that Facebook profile better reflect your actual personality than your desired personality.

President Trips

Two different types of Barack Obama themed drugs have appeared on US streets. BoingBoing notes that an LSD blotter with the President’s image on it has been found in the wild, while Drug Monkey covers a US Drug Enforcement Administration bulletin reporting Obama shaped ecstasy tablets.

There’s probably some witty political joke to be made here but I’m damned if I can rustle up enough cleverness, so you’ll have to devise one yourself.

See the links below for more images.

Link to BoingBoing on the Obama LSD blotter.
Link to Drug Monkey on Obama ecstasy tablets.

Head shaking competition

I’ve just found a short case study in the British Journal of Neurosurgery of a 12-year-old boy who suffered a bleed in the brain after taking part in a ‘head shaking competition’. Somewhat curiously, the case study notes that he won, and reports his winning time.

The patient was a 12-year-old, developmentally normal, healthy boy who presented to his primary care doctor with 2 weeks of headache accompanied by intermittent nausea and vomiting. The headaches began after the patient entered a ‘head shaking contest’ with his peers. The object of the contest was to vigorously rotate the head back and forth for as long as one could tolerate. The patient won, with a time of approximately 2 min. Afterwards he noted a mild headache that gradually worsened over the course of 2 weeks. When it was at its most severe, the headache was occasionally accompanied by nausea and vomiting. There were no visual disturbances or other focal neurological signs.

On a follow-up, he was found to have a large subdural haematoma, a type of bleed that happens under the brain’s covering which is known as the dura mater, possibly related to an otherwise benign cyst that existed before hand but may have caused damage during the rather vigorous competition.

Link to PubMed entry for case study.

Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth

One of the most regularly recited pieces of popular neuroscience is that women are more likely to use both hemispheres of the brain to process language while men tend only to use one. It turns out, this is a myth – it is simply not supported by the current evidence.

In 2008, a meta-analysis study looked at all the evidence for differences in the balance of language processing in the brains of men and women. It looked at studies on sex differences in handedness, brain structure, on perception of words heard exclusively in the left or right ears, and neural activity recorded by brain scans during language tasks.

When you look at all the studies together, there are no reliable sex differences in word processing or language-related brain activity. Men and women did not differ in how their brains processed language.

I came across this study from a fantastic talk by neuroscientist Lise Eliot, author of the book Pink Brain, Blue Brain that tackles many of the sex difference stereotypes.

She notes how an initial study, published in Nature in 1995, did find results in line with the common myth, but that these results were not replicated.

At the time, however, they got widely publicised – making headlines around the world – and they remain the basis for the common claim despite numerous subsequent studies that suggest this is not the case.

This, notes Eliot, is a common pattern in sex difference research. Results that confirm our steroetypes get widely reported, others are largely ignored by the media.

I really recommend her talk over at Fora.tv and I will look forward to reading the book once I get my hands on a copy.

Link to Lise Eliot on Fora.tv (via Channel N).
Link to PubMed abstract for damning meta-analysis.

Suicidal Tendencies or Kid Rock

The latest edition of The Psychologist is a special issue on the psychology of music and it has a great article on how music has a social influence.

One particularly interesting paragraph deals with link between rock music, suicide and self-harm.

There is indeed some evidence that preference for certain types of music is linked to thoughts of self-harm, but the second paragraph is the kicker: there are various reasons why this association is unlikely a reflection of rock causing these thoughts – an in fact, the act of labelling certain music as ‘causing suicide’ may itself strengthen the association.

The rise of heavy rock with supposedly pro-suicide lyrics in the 1970s and 1980s led to legislation (e.g. attempts to ban sales of CDs featuring a ‘parental advisory’ sticker), public protest (e.g. by the Parents’ Music Resource Center), and many apparently bizarre local actions (e.g. the suspension of a Michigan high school pupil for wearing a T-shirt promoting Korn that featured no lyrics or words apart from the band’s name). The assumption on which these were based, namely that the music causes self-injurious thoughts and actions, is not so far-fetched as might seem, as several studies suggest at least a correlation between music and suicide. For example, Stack et al. (1994) found a link between suicide rates among teenage Americans and variations in subscriptions to a heavy rock magazine; and we (North and Hargreaves, 2006) have found that fans of rock and rap were more likely than others to consider suicide and to self-harm.

Other research, though, is less suggestive of a link. We have also found (North & Hargreaves, 2006) that thoughts of suicide and self-harm precede an interest in rock, so that the latter can’t have caused the former. Similarly, merely describing a song as ‘suicide-inducing’ or ‘life-affirming’ leads listeners to perceive it as such (North & Hargreaves, 2005); by labelling music as suicide-inducing, campaigners and legislators may be helping to create the problem they aim to eradicate. Other research (North & Hargreaves, 2006; Scheel & Westefeld, 1999; Schwartz & Fouts, 2003; Stack et al., 1994) shows that the correlation between suicidal tendencies and an interest in rock is mediated by family background and self-esteem, which raises the issue of which of the latter is the better predictor of the former.

The issue also contains a freely available article on mental turmoil in Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina if you’re after something a little more literary.

Link to The Psychologist article ‘The Power of Music’.
Link to The Psychologist article on the novel Anna Karenina.

Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor for The Psychologist and for those about to rock, I salute you.

Traffic accidents as social interactions gone bad

I’ve just read a fascinating study in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention (yes ladies, I got it going on) that looked at which characteristics predicted the number of traffic deaths in particular American states.

The single biggest predictor was not statewide alcohol problems, safety belt use, number of older drivers or wealth, but the murder rate.

The researcher, psychologist Michael Sivak, argues that this is not because people are using cars as murder weapons, but because the murder rate is a proxy for aggression and “the same aggressive tendencies that contribute to homicides also demonstrate themselves, to a certain degree, in interpersonal behaviors on the road”.

In other words, driving style is a way of relating to other road users and traffic accidents are as much a social problem as a problem with road layout, driving competence or mechanical safety.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

Spice flow: the new street drug pharmacology

Forensic Science International recently published an eye-opening study on a new generation of synthetic cannabinoids that have become popular as ‘legal highs’, provided by a highly organised neuroscience-savvy industry that is ready and waiting with new compounds before the law changes.

The study concerns several legal smoking mixtures, ‘Spice‘ being the most well-known (pictured), which were recently found to contain synthetic cannabinoids.

Cannabinoids are named for their abundance in the cannabis plant, but this class of substance also naturally occurs in the nervous system as part of the normal biological signalling system. In fact, the street drug cannabis has its effect because its various cannabinoids, the most famous being THC, target one or more of the brain’s cannabinoid receptors.

Marijuana and its derivatives are illegal in most countries but the brain’s cannabinoid system is complex and so it is possible to synthesise other types of drugs in the same class as the plant’s active ingredients, which target the same receptor sites, that have similar effects, but which are completely legal.

Although officially labelled as incense and not for human consumption, Spice was typically marketed as one of the many ‘herbal smoking mixtures’ which traditionally have been sold in head shops on the basis of their druggy associations despite having no psychoactive effects to speak of.

However, this brand became wildly popular and in 2008 scientific analysis found that it also contained the synthetic cannabinoids CP 47,497-C8 and JWH-018 which are structurally similar to THC.

I can’t imagine what it was like when this was first discovered. It reminds me of the hair bristling moment in movies when the scientists discover that some form of ultra-advanced technology is behind a spate of odd occurrences.

You see, drugs like speed, heroine, cocaine and ecstasy require legally controlled raw materials but the processing stage is low-tech. That’s why some types of speed are called ‘bathtub crank’, because some of it is literally synthesised in a bathtub, as images of meth lab busts illustrate.

But this is not the case with cannabinoids which require a complex and careful lab process with many stages and sometimes the separation of mirror image molecules (enantiomers) from each other as only one of the ‘reflections’ is desirable.

These are not trivial process. They can’t be done in back rooms and they can’t be done by amateurs.

What’s more, these aren’t just copy-cat syntheses done by your average underground lab who know the illicit process and just want to recreate it. These are new compounds, perhaps reported only a handful of times in the scientific literature and selected for their specific effect on the brain.

The authors of the Forensic Science International paper note “It is evident that the producers of these products have gone about in a very methodical manner to mine the scientific literature for promising psychoactive compounds. Most likely the published CB1 binding affinities were exploited as primary criterion.”

CB1 is a specific type of cannabinoid receptor and is the one most activated by THC, the principal active ingredient in marijuana, and it seems the producers were making their selections based on their knowledge of neuroscience and psychopharmacology.

Several countries have now banned, or are in the process of banning, the synthetic cannabinoids found in Spice and related products. In fact, Germany was particularly quick off the mark and outlawed the products in January 2009.

Now this is where it gets interesting because the researchers note that a new product appeared on the market, containing JWH-073 – another synthetic cannabinoid, within four weeks of the ban. JWH-073 has similar similar effects, but isn’t covered by the law and so remains legal.

The speed at which it appeared suggests that it had been selected and synthesised in advance, in anticipation of the ban:

Our analysis demonstrated that just 4 weeks after the prohibition took effect a multitude of second generation products were flooding the market. The speed of introduction of new products and the use of JWH-073 as a substitute for JWH-018 not only showed that the producers are well aware of the legal frameworks, but that they likely anticipated the prohibition and already had an array of replacement products on hand (JWH-073-positive products are still available on the German market; last checked: June 5th, 2009).

In other words, the legal high industry is packing neuroscientists and heavyweight lab pharmacologists. It is no longer just head-shop hippies repackaging obscure psychoactive and barely recreational plants as a poor substitute for street drugs. The legal high industry has become professionalised.

Seemingly based on the model of the pharmaceutical industry, it is becoming science-led, regulation savvy and is out-manoeuvring the authorities well before they catch up.

To use drug war terminology, it’s an interesting new front because the producers are not trying to evade capture, they’re using the agility of science of evade regulation.

Link to PubMed entry for Forensic Science International paper.
Link to .rar archive with pdf of full text inside (weird huh? via Google)
Link to good EMCDDA page on synthetic cannabinoids.

A trip to the Gothic tower

We’ve mentioned the famous 19th century neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell several time before on Mind Hacks, as he is well known for his early reports of phantom limbs and his creation of the ‘neurosis of modern life’ diagnosis ‘neuraesthenia’.

What I didn’t know was that in 1896 he also wrote an article in which he gives one of the first reports about the experience of tripping on peyote – a cactus that contains the hallucinogenic drug mescaline.

Weir reports that he became interested in the substance after learning about the traditional use of the plant by Native Americans in New Mexico and acquired some to try himself.

His article appeared in the British Medical Journal where he describes his experiences, and it’s quite an amazing document. This is a vivid part where he describes the experience of hallucinating a ‘Gothic tower’:

When I opened my eyes all was gone at once. Closing them I began after a long interval to see for the first time definite objects associated with colours. The stars sparkled and passed away. A white spear of grey stone grew up to huge height, and became a tall, richly finished Gothic tower of very elaborate and definite design, with many rather worn statues standing in the doorways or on stone brackets. As I gazed every projecting angle, cornice, and even the face of the stones at their joinings were by degrees covered or hung with clusters of what seemed to be huge precious stones, but uncut, some being more like masses of transparent fruit. These were green, purple, red, and orange; never clear yellow and never blue. All seemed to possess an interior light, and to give the faintest idea of the perfectly satisfying intensity and purity of these gorgeous colour-fruits is quite beyond my power. All the colours I have ever beheld are dull as compared to these.

As I looked, and it lasted long, the tower became of a fine mouse hue, and everywhere the vast pendant masses of emerald green, ruby reds, and orange began to drip a slow rain of colours. All this while nothing was at rest a moment. The balls of colour moved tremulously. The tints became dull, and then, at once, past belief vivid; the architectural lines were all active with shifting tints. The figures moving shook the long hanging lines of living light, and then, in an instant, all was dark.

The whole article is freely available online if you want to read the entire account which explores the hallucinatory state in some depth.

Link to ‘Remarks on the Effects of Anhelonium Lewinii (the Mescal Button)’.

The Michigan Wildcat

The Providentia psychology blog has an excellent post about old-time champion boxer ‘The Michigan Wildcat’ Wolgast who fought on despite clear neurological damage and eventually suffered boxer’s dementia. He could apparently be found shadow boxing invisible opponents in the sanatorium.

Wolgast won the world lightweight title in 1912 but sustained continuous damage throughout his career and continued way past the point that would be permitted in modern times.

He progressed from minor neurological impairment to ‘dementia pugilistica‘ – a form of dementia caused by repetitive low level damage to the brain.

When his condition gradually deteriorated, Ad Wolgast was readmitted to hospital in 1927. While he remained there for the rest of his life, Ad continued to train in his room.; According to his obituary, that typically involved frequent shadowboxing, bobbing, and uppercuts against imaginary opponents. Ad Wolgast seemed largely unaware of his surroundings except on rare occasions when he would plaintively ask where he was and when he would be allowed to leave. His boxing career may have been long over but it still took two hospital attendants to restrain him whenever he was forced to do something he didn’t want to do. By all reports, his “tough guy” reputation and violent temper earned him numerous beatings in hospital but he always recovered quickly enough. He went blind in the final few years of his life.

Link to Providentia on ‘The Michigan Wildcat’.

Psychosurgery: new cutting edge or short sharp shock

The New York Times has an excellent article on how the development of new and more focused brain surgery techniques for the treatment of mental illness are leading to a tight-rope situation where doctors are trying to balance enthusiasm for a potential new treatment while avoiding its inappropriate use and bad publicity.

The use of neurosurgery for treatment of psychiatric disorders has a bad name. It is associated with the frontal lobotomy and leucotomy procedures which were carried out in large numbers in the 1940s, 50s and 60s on the basis on poor evidence and with very little oversight.

The dreadful excesses of this era have thankfully passed, and, with an increased understanding of brain circuity, it has been possible to trial the effect of very focused surgical interventions on certain neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is the most popular procedure, which is partly because the implanted brain electrode can be very accurately targeted, and partly because, in principle, the effect is reversible as it relies on electrical current for its effect, although the dangers of brain surgery still remain.

Neurosurgical procedures are also being used to permanently alter the brain by making cuts or lesions to specific areas.

This has been used for many years in Parkinson’s disease to treat tremors (the distinctive ‘shaking’) because the circuits that control movement are quite well understand and easy to study because there are many objective and accurate ways of measuring movements.

Although the numbers are still tiny, the same strategy is being increasingly to treat severe mental illness. Searching PubMed for its common scientific name – ‘functional neurosurgery’ – brings up studies where it has been used on everything from addiction to chronic pain.

And this is where people get nervous, because the procedures are quite experimental still and the researchers are well aware of the dangers of being labelled as ‘modern day lobotomists’ if something goes wrong.

As the article nicely outlines, the challenge is not so much the control of symptoms, which is relatively easy, it’s doing this while avoiding of adverse effects, like cognitive impairments, brain damage or additional mental instability.

Link to NYT piece ‘Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk’.