In the trenches

The Boston Globe has a short but interesting article on cerebral folding – the science of why the brain is wrinkled up like a damp walnut.

The wrinkled surface of the brain folds into ‘ridges’ known as gyri and the ‘trenches’ known as sulci. This rippled landscape forms perhaps the most recognisable aspect of the human brain but we still don’t really know why we need this rather odd arrangement.

The standard answer “to fit more brain surface in the skull” really tells us nothing on its own as it’s not clear why the same material in the outer brain layers couldn’t be distributed differently.

Some answers are starting to emerge, however, not least from studies which look at differences in brain folding during the pre-birth growth phase and between people with different neurological conditions.

The article is full of fascinating findings from this research, not least of which is that the brain is smooth until quite late in pregnancy and only starts to fold in the last few months of development.

Premature babies seem to have this process partially disturbed for reasons that aren’t yet clear:

For example, because so much of the folding takes place during the latter weeks of fetal development, premature infants arrive with much of their cortical development yet to be completed. And the folding patterns of preemies relegated to the neonatal intensive care unit don’t match those of their counterparts who spend their full nine months in the womb. New research from Van Essen’s lab shows that even when preemies reach their originally forecasted due dates, their brains are not as large or as folded as those of full-term newborns.

“That means there’s something different in how those brains are organized and in the connections that have formed,’’ Grant said. Perhaps some extra environmental influence in the hospital is disrupting folding or preemies are missing out on some vital influence that their counterparts get in the uterus, though researchers haven’t yet narrowed down what these influences may be.

The article is brief but is packed full of eye-opening discoveries on brain folding. It’s one of those areas were we know so little but what we do know is quite compelling.

Link to Globe article ‘Unfolding the mysteries of the brain’.

The dark side of oxytocin

Oxytocin is usually described as the ‘trust hormone’ owing to its involvement in social bonding but a new study covered by Scientific American suggests it may have a wider role in human interaction as it has been found it increase feelings of envy and gloating.

The study, led by psychologist Simone Shamay-Tsoory, used a familiar format in oxytocin research. It asked participants to play a competitive game while half were given a nasal spray containing the hormone and half were given a placebo spray.

Although they thought they were playing another participant, in reality, they were playing a computer programmed to act in a certain way to elicit competitive emotions:

The computer was programmed to either win more money than the players to trigger feelings of envy, lose more money to elicit a form of gloating known as schadenfreude (delight over another’s misfortune) or to win or lose equal amounts of money. To encourage these negative emotions, the researchers gave the computer player an arrogant “personality”. They did this by asking the volunteers to appraise their chances of winning more money than the other player; although nearly all volunteers predicted 50-50 odds, they were told their opponents gave themselves an 80 percent chance of winning.

When compared with a placebo, volunteers who inhaled oxytocin said they felt greater levels of envy or gloating when they lost or won more money than the computer, respectively‚ findings the researchers detailed online July 29 in Biological Psychiatry. On the other hand, when the volunteers were questioned after the game, inhaling oxytocin apparently had no effect either following gains of equal amounts of money or on mood in general.

The researchers also measured mood in general and found no change, suggesting the increase in negative feelings toward others couldn’t be explained as a general intensifying of emotions.

In their paper, they note several exceptions to the media stereotype that oxytocin is a ‘hug hormone’, citing studies that it increases aggression and territorial defence in some species. Also contrary to the cliché, a recent study [pdf] found it had no effect on empathy for other people’s pain.

They conclude that, rather than being a something that promotes trust and bonding, oxytocin enhances all social emotions, including the good, the bad and the ugly.

Link to SciAm on oxytocin and envy study.
Link to abstract of study.

Seized by Voodoo spirits

I’ve just found a remarkable paper with several cases of epilepsy that were interpreted as voodoo possession. They were all people with roots in Haiti, where voodoo is the predominant religion, and where spirit possession is considered a common spiritual event.

For thousands of years epilepsy has been explained as spirit possession in religions around the world. Epilepsy is also known to trigger intense religious or spiritual experiences in some people but the majority of cases are from the West and so have a distinctly Christian theme.

This 36-year-old woman had several years of recurrent complex partial seizures that manifested as a strong sense of fear and epigastric coldness, followed by loss of awareness, utterances of nonsensical phrases, and complex motor automatisms. The local mambo attributed the events to her being taken by “Melle Charlotte,” a french loa [spirit], with the nonsensical speech being interpreted as a foreign language.

It is said that during the possession by this spirit, a person will speak perfect French or other languages, even though in life, the person has no knowledge of that language. She continued to have seizures despite the mambo’s attempts to conjure the spirit. He explained his failure to the fact that Melle Charlotte is a very particular loa who makes only sporadic appearances. She was not treated with AEDs [anti-epileptic drugs] until she left Haiti at the age of 34.

An EEG revealed a right anterior temporal focus, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed right hippocampal atrophy. Seizures improved with carbamazepine (CBZ), although compliance with medication was a problem, largely because of family interference.

The cases are interesting as they highlight how easily the ‘possession’ theory fits with the unpredictable course of epilepsy and its effects when it seems to briefly ‘take over’ the body and mind of the affected person.

It raises the question of how much observations of epilepsy, a condition that affects approximately 1% of the population, have contributed to the idea of possession throughout the world.

Link to paper on epilepsy and Voodoo experiences.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Like running through hell

The Neurocritic covers some fascinating research on how marathon runners could be a scientific window into the neuropsychology of trauma owing to the fact that they experience extremely high levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

In their study, psychologists Teal Eich and Janet Metcalfe note that cortisol levels recorded 30 minutes after a marathon have been found to be similar to those in soldiers during military training and interrogation, rape victims just after the attack, severe burn injury patients and first-time parachute jumpers.

This suggests that marathon runners could be studied in a more systematic way than would would be ethical with victims of trauma, giving an important insight into the brain under extreme stress.

Eich and Metcalfe were particularly interested in the effect of stress on memory and wanted to see if there were any differences between explicit memory – memories that you can consciously call to mind, and implicit memory – the influence of past information on a task even if you’re not aware of doing any remembering.

They tested a group of runners about half an hour after they completed a marathon and a group who were just about to run a marathon.

In comparison to the about-to-runs, those who had completed the marathon had worse explicit memory but better implicit memory. In other words, their conscious memory was reduced but their unconscious memory seemed to be sharper.

This is interesting because chronically high cortisol levels from trauma are thought to affect the hippocampus, a brain area known to be key in conscious memory. The researchers suggest that a similar process may be temporarily reducing explicit memory in runners.

The authors are a little more cautious in suggesting why implicit memory may have been improved, but one possibility is that cortisol is known to affect fear conditioning – the unconscious linking of fright with the situation it occurred in.

Interestingly, this is known to work differently in men and women. Cortisol boosts unconscious fear learning in men, but not women. The researchers didn’t compare male and female marathon runners directly, but it would be interesting to know whether general unconscious learning that wasn’t associated with fright was also sex-specific in their study.

There’s more on the research over at The Neurocritic and the full text of the study is available online as a pdf if you want an in-depth look at the experiment.

Link to great write-up from The Neurocritic.
pdf of study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Metro psychiatry

Photo by Flickr user thebigdurian. Click for sourceThis month’s British Journal of Psychiatry has a poignant poem by Canadian poet and psychiatrist Ron Charach who muses on ‘Psychiatrists on the Subway’:

Apparently the poem is from his collection Selected Portraits that contains a number of other poems on psychiatry and mental illness.

Psychiatrists on the Subway

One rarely spots psychiatrists on the subway
rubbing the haze of a long day’s sessions
from their lean temples,
or thumbing through paperbacks that deal
with anything-but.

Wouldn’t they like an update on who’s
In the world and how they’re doing?
Or would the ridership be wary of men and women
whose briefcases rattle with the tic tac
of pills, whose ears perk
like armadillos’ at conversations
two seats over?

More likely we locate them in a bad joke,
in a wing-chair beside a firm couch,
a suicide statistic, a product seminar
with deli sandwiches courtesy of Pfizer or Roche
or Eli Lilly;
perhaps on the beach of a convention hotel
with a panorama of thong-clad beauties
who seldom talk revealingly

Before bed a psychiatrist sets his ears
on the night-table
and prays for a night of long silence
from a god who prefers
to listen.

You can hear Charach himself reading poems from the collection, including ‘Psychiatrists on the Subway’ at this page. He reads in a calm deliberate manner which really suits the material.

Link to poem in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Link to Charach reading his poetry.

Laughter the best medicine or a bitter pill to swallow

Photo by Flickr user lintmachine. Click for sourceScience News has a fascinating article on people with gelotophobia, a fear of being laughed at. It seems the phobia might be driven by a problem in perceiving the social meaning of laughter, so even light-hearted chuckles are perceived as scornful snickers.

The piece covers the surprising amount of research on the phobia, tracing the perceptual problems from possible learnt responses during childhood to difficulties in picking up visual cues from body language.

To scientists’ surprise, those that scored high for fear of being laughed at didn’t react more strongly to the sounds of negative laughter than did those with no fear. The gelotophobes did, however, perceive positive laughter, such as hearty or cheerful laughter, as unpleasant or spiteful.

The scientists also measured participants’ moods before and after the experiment. Those with no fear of laughter reported feeling more cheerful after hearing the sound tracks, while gelotophobes reported no change in mood, the researchers reported in the February Humor.

Laughter is a remarkably complex form of social communication that is still not well understood by cognitive scientists although one of the best accessible explorations of the topic was in an edition of RadioLab from last year.

Link to Science News on ‘When Humor Humiliates’.

2009-07-31 Spike activity

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

Polyamory or having relationships with multiple, mutually consenting partners, is discussed in a feature article in Newsweek.

Copenhagen Business School are running an online survey asking for your opinion on the use of neuroscience in business and marketing.

Experimental philosophy and our moral intuitions are tackled in an article for The Psychologist.

H+ Magazine has more on morality and impressing the rules of war on autonomous <a href="Teaching Robots the Rules of War
http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/robotics/teaching-robots-rules-war”>soldier robots.

Malcolm Gladwell discusses the psychology of overconfidence in an article for The New Yorker.

Slate has a somewhat polemic article on the recent dust-ups over the DSM-V ‘new improved flavour’ diagnostic manual due out in 2012. The Psychiatric Times blog also joins the fray.

A quarter of teenage girls mentally ill? Mental Nurse examines a recent article by the statistically challenged psychologist Oliver James.

The Guardian has a review of British psychologist Richard Bentall’s new book on the trouble with psychiatry.

NPR Radio’s Science Friday has a programme on the science of decision-making.

Neuroskeptic has some excellent coverage of a new Cochrane review finding that common plant St John’s Wort is as effective as antidepressants, but seemingly, only if you’re German.

A good cry doesn’t always make you feel better. The not-always-cathartic process of crying is discussed by Jesse Bering in his great SciAm column.

The Boston Globe tackles the cognitive science of driving and how the ageing brain manages the mental demands of the road.

Sports psychology and the mental preparations of top class swimmers are covered by The New York Times.

Discover Magazine asks what urban sounds do to your brain, init?

Calendar calculating savants with autism – how do they do it? asks the brilliant BPS Research Digest.

The Guardian charts the rise of celebrity psychologists and quotes blogger Dr Petra.

Time-space synaesthesia – A cognitive advantage? Interesting new paper in Consciousness and Cognition.

Artist Kerry Tribe has some excellent photos from an exhibition on famous amnesic patient HM.

Time magazine has a piece on how family doctors can often miss <a href="Study: Doctors Don't Always Spot Depression
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1913312,00.html?xid=rss-health”>depression in their patients.

TV can reduce loneliness, says research covered by SciAm’s Mind Matters blog.

Cognitive Daily has some excellent coverage of an experiment that suggests we remember scenes by creating 3D models of them in our minds.

Psychologist Susan Blackmore has a thought-provoking if not somewhat speculative article in New Scientist on autonomous electronic machine memes.

Channel N finds a TED talk by Alain de Botton on the philosophy of tragedy and success.

The moral associations of colours are explored in research covered by The Economist.

Language Log finds a funny comic strip on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Eskimos.

On the dead beat

Photo by Flickr user pareerica. Click for sourceAnyone who thinks science can’t be beautiful or profound should spend an hour in the audio headspace of the latest RadioLab as it tackles life, death and mortality.

It contemplates how death has moved from the heart to the brain, the attempt to weigh souls, delusions of non-existence, digital immortality, neuroimaging for flickers of life, and a man who survived a suicide plunge that has killed almost everyone else who made the leap.

One highlight is a reading of an amazing short story from a book by neuroscientist David Eagleman in which he imagines 40 versions of the afterlife.

In this particular story, people live in a limbo after death where they exist while their names are still remembered by the living. While some leave this realm when they fade the collective consciousness, others become famous and are trapped, slave to their recollected selves that warp slowly over time as the living distort their memories.

Eagleman notes that it was inspired by the neuroscience of memory, which information is kept alive by being constantly re-represented in the brain.

As always, it’s beautifully produced and hits. just. the. right. notes. for such a powerful subject.

There is probably no better way to spend an hour in the underworld.

Link to RadioLab edition ‘After Life’.

Where are our shrinking brain theories?

New Scientist has as article arguing that the expansion in hominid brain size that occurred about two million years ago was due to the ice age which allowed an energy burning, heat generating brain to develop with sufficient environmental cooling.

Actually, it’s worth a read as it’s not as odd as it sounds, but it joins an ever growing list of theories that attempt to explain how our forebears ‘suddenly’ seemed to experience evolutionary brain expansion.

These include:

A diet high in meat.

A diet high in starch.

Social competition.

The development of cooking.

Essential fatty acids and schizophrenia.

An unspecified “special event”.

The trouble with some of these theories is that they typically assume that brain size is always related to greater intelligence, which is not necessarily the case, and they don’t always take into account the ratio of brain to body size, which seems to be more important than just brain size alone.

Interestingly, almost all the interest is on brain expansion and no-one seems particularly interested in the fact that the brain has shrunk about 10% since the Late Pleistocene, about 30,000 years ago.

You can have a great deal of fun coming up with evolutionary theories for that one. Just pick a key human activity that emerged around the same time.

Personally, I blame language, religion and karaoke.

Link to NewSci on brain science and the ice age.

Out of sync

It’s an age old story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. The trauma of the breakup affects his mind so badly he starts to believe he’s in a boy band. The whole band get admitted to an asylum and start hallucinating a long list of cheap clich√©s about mental illness. Yes, it’s the video for ‘N Sync’s 1999 track “I Drive Myself Crazy” which is wrong in just so many ways.

If I was their consulting psychologist, my first thought on observing their behaviour and mental state would be – what the feck happened to your hair?

Is this some sort of bizarre form of public self-harm? Or the result of an unknown type of psychosis?

Call the DSM-V committee.

This is an emergency.

Link to N Sync video ‘I Drive Myself Crazy’.

Rorschach and awe

The New York Times covers the recent flap over the internet publication of the ink blots used in the Rorschach test. While the images are out of copyright and can be legally uploaded, some American psychologists are furious that the validity of the test may be compromised.

The test has been controversial since it was created and partly because of what it symbolises. It is one of the few remaining tests that are drawn from the psychoanalytic tradition and so battles over the Rorschach are always partly battles over the validity of Freudian-ideas.

You can see the influence of these ideas in how it is used. It is a type of ‘projective’ test, where participants are shown the images and then asked to give their impressions. The psychologist writes down what they make of each image and then interprets what they say and do.

These interpretations supposedly give an insight into the person’s personality, loosely framed in Freudian concepts.

The original version of the Rorschach was quite clearly hokum, but over the years the ‘comprehensive system’ was developed by psychologist John Exner which allowed independent clinicians to come to similar conclusions when assessing the same responses.

Not everyone agrees on this and, on the basis of evidence reviews, some argue that the test’s reliability has been exaggerated. But the trouble is, even if it is reliable, it’s still a bit rubbish. It doesn’t seem to correlate well with other mental health measures and has a particular tendency to ‘diagnose’ schizophrenic tendencies in perfectly healthy people.

While the release of the ink blots onto the internet seems to have caused controversy among US psychologists, most European psychologists are likely to be rolling their eyes, as the test never caught on and is largely extinct.

However, the wider issue of test material being released online is of significant concern.

Almost every psychological test relies on the fact that the person being assessed has no foreknowledge of the material. In technology terms, they rely on security through obscurity for their validity.

Currently, this is enforced by the test companies only supplying tests to qualified professionals, charging excessively high prices for each one and enforcing copyright. This is backed up by professional organisations who come down like a ton of bricks on anyone seen to be promoting wider availability.

As anyone involved in security will tell you, this model is doomed to failure in the age of the internet as it only takes one significant breach for the test to be publicly available.

Psychologists need to start designing tests where knowledge of the test material does not have such a profound influence on performance, but unfortunately, this requires a significant shift in current thinking and a huge research effort to validate the tests. Hence inertia weds us to our current doomed methods.

Link to NYT ‘A Rorschach Cheat Sheet on Wikipedia?’

Brain box

Sometimes, it’s just harder to do it without the innuendo. HelmetsRUs have a multi-sport helmet that has a brain painted on the outside.

While we usually tell people to wear helmets to keep the rocks out of their brain, this is the first time you might have to avoid keeping your brain out of the rocks.

I have to say, it’s a bit of a weird product if you think about it. I mean, would you buy a jock strap with your balls painted on the outside?

Obviously, that was intended to be a rhetorical question, but I’ve come to realise that the internet has killed rhetorical questions because you can always find someone who has lived your figure of speech, no matter how bizarre you make it.

Really? You own several you say? Could I interest you in a brain helmet…

Link to brain helmet.

The vision thing

Photo by Flickr user kms !. Click for sourceABC Radio National’s Night Air has a wonderfully atmospheric programme on hallucinations, or maybe visual art, or the sensitivity of blindness, or maybe about how the mind constructs reality.

It’s deliciously unfocussed and the programme glides hazily between neuroscience, art, poetry and visual consciousness.

There’s the occasional moment where the vibe slips off its axis, but otherwise it’s just a shear delight to listen to as it mixes artistic and scientific views on the visual.

Link to Night Air programme ‘Visual’

Autism ‘treated’ with LSD

I’ve just found an intriguing article on how LSD was used as an experimental treatment for children with autism during the 1960s. When I first heard about these studies I did a double take, but there were a surprising number conducted at the time.

Flashback to the 1960s: LSD in the treatment of autism.

Dev Neurorehabil. 2007 Jan-Mar;10(1):75-81.

Between 1959 and 1974, several groups of researchers issued reports on the use of d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) in the treatment of children with autism. This paper reviews that literature to consider how the authors justified these studies, as well as their methods, results, and conclusions. The justification for using LSD was often based on the default logic that other treatment efforts had failed. Several positive outcomes were reported with the use of LSD, but most of these studies lacked proper experimental controls and presented largely narrative/descriptive data. Today there is renewed interest in the use of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic purposes. While this resurgence of research has not yet included children with autism, this review of the LSD studies from the 1960s and 1970s offers important lessons for future efforts to evaluate new or controversial treatments for children with autism.

Sadly I don’t have access to the full text of the paper, but I’ve discovered that the Neurodiversity website has created a list of many of the original studies and has archived the full text of most of them online.

The studies are a morbidly fascinating read and it’s interesting how some studies seem to exclusively report beneficial effects with remarkably flowery language (“They seek positive contacts with adults, approaching them with face uplifted and bright eyes…”) while others report mixed or quite unpleasant reactions (“mood swings which were sharp and rapid from extreme elation to extreme depression or anxiety”).

Link to PubMed abstract of LSD and autism paper.
Link to Neurodiversity paper archive.

Sensing destruction

The New York Times has an interesting article on the role of ‘hunches’ in how soldiers detect roadside bombs.

The article is a little bit cobbled together, alternating anecdote with some indirectly related studies that seem to be included on the basis of speculation, but it does mention one ‘in progress’ study which seems particularly interesting.

In the past two years, an Army researcher, Steven Burnett, has overseen a study into human perception and bomb detection involving about 800 military men and women. Researchers have conducted exhaustive interviews with experienced fighters. They have administered personality tests and measured depth perception, vigilance and related abilities. The troops have competed to find bombs in photographs, videos, virtual reality simulations and on the ground in mock exercises…

The men and women who performed best in the Army’s I.E.D. detection study had the sort of knowledge gained through experience, according to a preliminary analysis of the results; but many also had superb depth perception and a keen ability to sustain intense focus for long periods. The ability to pick odd shapes masked in complex backgrounds — a “Where’s Waldo” type of skill that some call anomaly detection — also predicted performance on some of the roadside bomb simulations.

If you want more details about the study there are good descriptions here and here seemingly taken from military news coverage of the research.

Link to NYT piece on bombs and hunches.

Back to the madness

A new series of the excellent BBC Radio 4 Mind Changers series has just started with a fantastic edition on the Rosenhan experiment – a study that sent seismic waves of controversy through 1970s psychiatry.

Titled ‘On being sane in insane places’ when published in a 1972 edition of Science, the experiment reported on how Rosenhan and his associates had presented to psychiatric hospitals faking a single psychiatric symptom – a hallucinated voice.

All of the pseudopatients were admitted to hospital and diagnosed with mental illness. They then stopped faking only to find that their normal behaviour was pathologised as a sign of a disturbed mind.

Later, when word got out and the hospitals were accused of being ‘bad apples’, Rosenhan promised to send more fake patients but, in reality sent none. The hospitals subsequently branded 41 real patients as fakes.

The Mind Changers programme throws much fresh light on this study by examining never-before-seen documents from Rosenhan’s own archive.

While the study has often been framed as an attack on psychiatric diagnosis, according to Rosenhan, it was never intended to be. He started out wanting to conduct an anthropological study of psychiatric wards.

There’s an interesting bit where the hospital admission notes are read out concerning Rosenhan’s admission to hospital under a fake name:

Admission note 6th February 1969

The patient, David Lurie, is a 39 year-old married father of two… Three to four months ago he started hearing noises, then voices, recently he has been able to discern that the voices say “It’s empty, nothing inside, it’s hollow, it makes an empty noise.”

Compare this with the description from the original text of the study:

After calling the hospital for an appointment, the pseudopatient arrived at the admissions office complaining that he had been hearing voices. Asked what the voices said, he replied that they were often unclear, but as far as he could tell they said ‚Äúempty,‚Äù ‚Äúhollow,‚Äù and ‚Äúthud.‚Äù…

The choice of these symptoms was occasioned by their apparent similarity to existential symptoms. Such symptoms are alleged to arise from painful concerns about the perceived meaninglessness of one’s life. It is as if the hallucinating person were saying, “My life is empty and hollow.”

I’m intrigued that while the paper suggests that the pseudopatients were told to report single word hallucinations, the medical records suggest whole sentences were heard.

I wonder whether the pseudopatients were tempted to embellish their single words or whether the psychiatrists genuinely did weave narratives around the sparse information presented to them.

Either way, as many people have countered, the study is not in itself a very good critique of psychiatric diagnosis. If I go to my doctor and say I’m distressed by hallucinated voices, this is a legitimate symptom of mental illness as far as the doctor is concerned.

However, as psychologist Richard Bentall notes in the programme, much more damning is the fact that once seen as patients, almost everything the fakers did was interpreted as abnormal or pathological in some way.

The fact that diagnosis or clinical opinion is swayed by personal, cultural or professional beliefs is now a well established research finding and this part of Rosenhan’s study remains as relevant today as it was in the 1970s.

Link to crap BBC Radio 4 page with audio archive (via @researchdigest)
Link to full text of Rosenhan’s study.