Mind Hacks

Neuropod on stress, genes, hobbits and hearing

The latest edition of the neuroscience podcast Neuropod has just hit the tubes and has sections on stress, genetics and culture in birdsong, the ongoing debate about homo florensis and hearing.

One of the most interesting sections is the part on stress, and accompanies a special collection of articles on stress in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

It also contains the phrase, ‘the frontal lobes are the goldilocks of the brain’, which I can’t help but love.

mp3 of latest Neuropod podcast.
Link to Neuropod homepage with audio stream.

The English and the magical properties of tea

From p312 of anthropologist Kate Fox’s entertaining book Watching the English:

Tea is still believed, by English people of all classes, to have miraculous properties. A cup of tea can cure, or at least alleviate, almost all minor physical ailments and indispositions, from a headache to a scraped knee.

Tea is also an essential remedy for all social and psychological ills, from a bruised ego to the trauma of a divorce or bereavement. This magical drink can be used effectively as a sedative or stimulant, to calm and soothe or to revive and invigorate. Whatever your mental and physical state, what you need is ‘a nice cup of tea’.

If you’re not from the UK, you may be interested to know that what the medical literature calls social support is often referred to as ‘tea and sympathy’ by the Brits.

Actually, the paragraph above is not particularly representative of the book’s careful observations of the English but I can’t resist the opportunity to discuss the mental health benefits of tea.

But even if you’re not particularly interested in the English themselves, the book is also wonderful if you’re intrigued by how social anthropologists think and work.

However, the book is more like sitting in the pub with a social anthropologist than being in a lecture with one, as it’s a combination of an academic approach to the study of the implicit rules of English culture and Fox’s subjective opinion about what these rules mean.

After downing a few chapters, the author gets a little more opinionated and less observational. Although the book is no less entertaining as Fox becomes a bit loaded, you can see she isn’t taking herself too seriously by the end.

Which, as she notes, is a very English trait.

Link to details of Watching the English.

Revenge is sweet but corrosive

Revenge may be a dish best served cold but it will probably leave you with a nasty aftertaste, at least according to an article in the latest edition of the American Psychological Society’s Monitor magazine.

The piece looks at some of the growing number of studies on the psychology of retribution, examining cultural differences in triggers for revenge and explanations for why it is so common.

One of the most interesting bits is where it covers a study finding that while we think revenge will make us feel better after an injustice, it seems to have the opposite effect and makes us feel more unhappy.

The study in question involved participants taking part in a group investment game where, when it came to the crunch, one of the participants deliberately acted selfishly and took a whole lot of the money at the others’ expense.

Then Carlsmith offered some groups a way to get back at the free rider: They could spend some of their own earnings to financially punish the group’s defector.

“Virtually everybody was angry over what happened to them,” Carlsmith says, “and everyone given the opportunity [for revenge] took it.”

He then gave the students a survey to measure their feelings after the experiment. He also asked the groups who’d been allowed to punish the free rider to predict how they’d feel if they hadn’t been allowed to, and he asked the non-punishing groups how they thought they’d feel if they had.

In the feelings survey, the punishers reported feeling worse than the non-punishers, but predicted they would have felt even worse had they not been given the opportunity to punish. The non-punishers said they thought they would feel better if they’d had that opportunity for revenge‚Äîeven though the survey identified them as the happier group.

Link to article ‘Revenge and the people who seek it’.

The benefits of blushing

The New York Times has a short-but-sweet article on the social function of blushing, looking at several studies that have found that a flushed face has a placating and cohesive effect on those around us.

The article reports on studies where blushing has been found to soften other people’s judgements of bad or clumsy behaviour and subsequently reinforces social ties.

Interestingly, it’s not just when someone makes a mistake, one study looked the effect of blushing on friendliness after a blokey bout of name calling and piss-taking:

In a 2001 paper that contrasts teasing and bullying, an act of aggressive isolation, Dr. Keltner and colleagues from Berkeley discuss one experiment in which members of a fraternity at the University of Wisconsin came into his lab, four at a time, to tease one another, using barbed nicknames. Each group included two senior house members and two recent pledges.

The young men ripped each other with abandon, calling each other ‚Äúlittle impotent,‚Äù ‚Äúheifer fetcher‚Äù and ‚Äúanother drunk,‚Äù among many other names that cannot be printed. The researchers carefully recorded the interactions and measured how well individuals got along by the end. The newer members were all but strangers to the more senior ones when the study began.

‚ÄúIt was a subtle effect, but we found that the frequency of blushing predicted how well these guys were getting along at the end,‚Äù Dr. Keltner said. Blushing seemed to accelerate the formation of a possible friendship rather than delay it.

Link to NYT piece on blushing.

What makes a headline suicide?

There’s good evidence that media reporting of suicide can have an influence on the likelihood of further suicides, something known as the ‘copycat suicide effect’. In light of this, a new study examined what makes a suicide likely to newsworthy and whether media reporting reflects the actual demographics of people who kill themselves.

The researchers, led by psychologist Thomas Niederkrotenthaler, looked at all 2005 press reports of suicides in the Austria and compared them to the national suicide statistics.

Additionally, the details of all Austrian suicides are recorded in a national database but not all get reported in the media. This allowed the researchers to see which characteristics of a suicide made it most likely that it would get written about in the press.

It turns out that suicides involving murder or murder attempt were over-represented in the media whereas reporting on mental disorders was under-represented.

In terms of which attributes made a media report more likely, younger people who killed themselves were more likely to hit the headlines, as were foreign citizens.

While hanging is the most common method of suicide in Austria, these cases were under-reported, while drowning, jumping, shooting and unusual methods were more likely to make the papers.

Media reporting of suicide is a serious public health issue because numerous studies, most recently in 2006, have found that these news reports are likely to increase the suicide rate.

For this reason, there are guidelines for journalists writing about suicide, although I sure you can remember cases high profile cases where the guidelines get ditched and the more sensationalist angles get the media focus.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

The Psychologist on virtuality, siblings, giftedness

The June issue of The Psychologist has been made freely available online and has articles on psychology in virtual worlds, sibling rivalry, the neuroscience of giftedness and Albert Bandura’s plan to apply psychology to global problems.

The interface is a little bit clunky (you need to click on a page to see it in readable size) but gives you the full layout of the magazine as it appears in print.

The main articles start here and kick off with one on psychology (and, indeed, psychologists) in virtual worlds, but I always turn to the news section first and it’s a great place for quick updates and summaries of interesting new studies from the last month.

Link to June edition of The Psychologist.

Full disclosure: I’m an occasional columnist and unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist and I want to look like Albert Bandura when I’m fully grown up. True.

Underworld rituals through the lens of autopsy

An upcoming article for the Journal of Forensic Sciences gives a fascinating insight into the rituals and methods of the Sacra Corona Unita (United Holy Crown) Mafia group from Southern Italy through the post-mortem examination of the bodies of their victims.

Many of the victims are members of the Sacra Corona Unita themselves, giving an insight in the organisation’s “mystical approach to all ceremonies among members. Tribal rituals, secret codes, and theatrical punishments transformed the ‘onorata societ√†’ into a kind of distorted Masonic lodge”.

The article recounts the oath of the criminal fraternity and the significance of their tattoos, as well as describing a study on 83 murder victims. Strikingly, each of the victims who were Mafia victims themselves had a ritual object left with them.

As usual in mafia organizations, each member had a nickname, and ritual symbolic objects were found beside the buried bodies that referred to the member’s lifetime. For instance, the horns of a bullock were found beside the body of the son of an SCU member named the “Bull” and a mouse beside the body of a member known to be a police informer, known as the “Prostitute.

The murder and burning of the bodies of the victims conformed to the symbolic code understood by all the members. It made explicit reference to the membership ceremonies that warn that the unfaithful will be burned to ashes (just like the holy picture burned during the ceremony).

This technique, obviously, also has some strategic advantages because it makes the possibility of identifying the victim more unlikely and eliminates any traces left by the executors. This mode of operation is called “lupara bianca” (white lupara): “lupara” is a gun with a sawn-off barrel with a high lacerating power at short distance, “white” means a “murder with disappearance of the body.”

Link to article.
Link to DOI entry for same.

Warning: brain underload

The Times has a long and tiresome article about how the ‘digital overload’ is affecting our brains which is only notable for one thing, it mentions not a single study on how digital technology affects the brain.

Imagine that. You can write 2,000 words for one of the world’s leading newspapers without a single established finding in the whole piece. Not one.

Actually, it’s worse than that, as this article contains an anti-fact. It cites the ’email damages IQ’ PR stunt as the results of a legitimate study when it was a marketing exercise for, ironically, a computer company.

Rather oddly, a recent article from New York Magazine followed exactly the pattern (no relevant studies, email damages IQ gaff), but came to the opposite conclusion.

As we mentioned at the time, the studies on the effect of digital technology support none of this public pant wetting.

Journalists. Have you been affected by the economic downturn? Are you finding that it’s difficult to get your work in print?

Don’t waste your time writing about politics or the economy and be imprisoned by the tyranny of evidence – write whatever the hell you want about technology and the brain and get the world’s finest publications to pay your bills. Your editor clearly can’t tell the difference.

…and breathe. In with anger, out with love.

No, it’s not working.

Link to where do they get these people from?

Rapture of the deep

When scuba divers start swimming deep under water they can sometimes start feeling dreamy, light-headed and mentally fuzzy, an effect nicknamed ‘rapture of the deep’ but better known as nitrogen narcosis.

It is caused by changes in the way nitrogen, one of the gases in the divers’ air tank, dissolves in the body when under high pressure from the depth of the water.

No-one is quite sure exactly how it affects the brain, but many divers have noted the similarity between nitrogen narcosis and being drunk.

Psychologist Malcom Hobbs was intrigued by this connection and conducted a study [pdf], published last year in Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine, to investigate the psychological similarity between the two states.

The experiment compared the subjective experience and effects on problem solving of alcohol and narcosis, but, also rather elegantly, looked at whether the two effects could be caused by a similar neurobiological process by seeing whether people with high alcohol tolerance also had a high narcosis tolerance.

Hobbs divided a group of divers into experienced and novice divers, as those with more experience should be more tolerant to narcosis, and made a further division between those who drank a lot of booze and those who drank very little, to look at differences in alcohol tolerance.

In the first experiment, they found the interesting effect where experienced divers adapted to the subjective effects of narcosis, but not the behavioural effects. While they felt more in control than novice divers, they actually weren’t. This chimes with an identical effect seen in heavy vs light drinkers.

But crucially, Hobbs also found that those affected to a greater degree by nitrogen narcosis are affected to a greater degree by alcohol on both subjective experiences and performance on the problem solving task (and vice versa), indicating that there is cross tolerance between the two states.

This suggests that they may affect the brain in similar ways. Although more research needs to be done on the actual neurobiology of the two states to be sure of the exact relationship, this study suggests that divers may indeed be ‘drunk’ when experiencing the rapture of the deep.

UPDATE: I just got emailed this interesting snippet by an experienced diver friend (thanks Ben!):

Something extra which happens with narcosis (which deviates from the alcohol analogy) is that, unless you’re already dead, the effects are completely reversible with no discernible side effects (eg hangover). One of the tricks divers use if they recognize narcosis (most often in their buddy than in themselves) is that ascending a few metres will often bring immediate clarity.

Even more interesting is that once clarity is achieved, descent back to the narcotic depth doesn’t necessarily bring back the narcotic effect of the nitrogen, which hasn’t really been explained yet. Theories abound regarding rate of descent and physiological effects of increasing ppN [partial pressure of nitrogen] and how it’s dissolved into various tissues.

Divers have known for years about this and have developed practical methods to deal with its effects (decreasing N content in breathing gases, replacing N with other inert gases etc). Actually, it’s known that oxygen also has a role to play in narcosis (as in nitrous oxide) but since some of it is metabolized, it’s effects are considerably less than the inert gas it accompanies.

I quite like the feeling of a little narcosis; but it does make time fly, and unfortunately time is the real enemy underwater!

pdf of full-text scientific paper.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Scintillating zigzags and surrealism

I’ve just found this interesting 1988 article from the British Medical Journal on how surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico took inspiration from visual distortions he experienced as part of his migraines.

According to the article, he clearly recorded experiencing the symptoms of migraine, including the marked visual disturbances, and these can be seen in some of his paintings.

One of the most common visual disturbances in migraine aura is scintillating zigzag edges, but it can also commonly induce sparkling, dazzling, dancing, or flickering lights, fire rings, stars, and moving lines.

There are three sets of de Chirico’s pictures that closely resemble patients’ illustrations of classical migraine attacks. In a set of prints illustrating Cocteau’s Mythologie the jagged effect of the water is very similar to the advancing edge of a scotoma and may be compared to a painting from the national migraine art competition.

The second example, a painting from the 1960, has as its central feature the silhouette of a man with a spiky edge, while figure 4, a lithograph from 1929, shows a black sun motifintruding into an interior scene. Both of these are reminiscent of drawings of negative scotomata by patients suffering from migraine. Other migrainous phenomena, such as the distortion of space, may be discernible in a series of paintings known as “Metaphysical interiors.” This association, however, is more tenuous.

The article is illustrated with some of de Chirico’s paintings and comparison pictures by people who were deliberately attempting to illustrate their migraine aura.

Link to article on PubMedCentral.

Synaesthesia in Frankenstein

One of the new ideas in synaesthesia research is that affected people perhaps don’t develop mixed senses as their brains develop, they just fail to lose them. It seems most children might start with naturally mixed senses before perception becomes segregated through pruning of the fuzzy neural pathways.

I’ve just noted an interesting article in Cognitive Neuropsychology on how this idea actually has long historical routes, and even influenced Mary Shelly’s cryopunk classic Frankenstein.

Although Mary Shelley was only 19 when she wrote her timeless novel, Frankenstein (1818), she combined contemporary philosophical and moral issues with a vision of the danger of emerging sciences that still has relevance today. The specific idea of early unity of the senses, very likely inspired by Rousseau, was articulated by Frankenstein’s creation in his first-person account of his early experiences:

“It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being: all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses. [Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), chapter 11]”

Shelley goes on to present the creature as very humanlike, and it appears here that she wished to show that this extended to the earliest moments of his mental life. With the publication of Frankenstein, the unified-senses idea was thus brought into the popular culture, and Shelley’s words were probably read by some cognitive neuropsychologists in elementary school, even if they paid little heed to the sentiment. The idea also lived on within philosophy and, later, in the science of psychology.

In their professional career, very many cognitive neuropsychologists become acquainted with William James, and indeed the majority should recognize the phrase ‚Äúone great blooming, buzzing confusion‚Äù. Most also recognize this as referring to the world of the infant, but few are probably aware that James was writing about his view that information from different senses is first fused in a child before later segregation.

Link to article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Mad honey

I’ve just discovered there’s a form of neurotoxic honey, genuinely known as “mad honey“, created by bees taking nectar from the beautiful rhododendron ponticum flower, pictured on the right.

The nectar from these plants, prevalent around the Black Sea region of Turkey, occasionally contains grayanotoxins, a class of neurotoxin that interferes with the action potential (electrical signalling) of nerve cells by blocking sodium channels in the cell membranes. This leads to problems with the muscles, peripheral nerves, and the central nervous system.

Mad honey apparently causes “a sharp burning sensation in the throat” and poisoning leads to dizziness, weakness, excessive sweating, hypersalivation, nausea, vomiting and ‘pins and needles’ although severe intoxication can cause dangerous heart problems.

Luckily, most cases aren’t fatal and resolve after 24 hours.

Mad honey was known to the Romans, and was specifically discussed by Pliny the Elder.

Link to brief review article on mad honey.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

The demon drink

Oh dear. It looks like psychologist Glenn Wilson has fallen off the wagon again. From the man who brought you the ’email hurts IQ more than cannabis’ PR stunt before repenting, comes the ‘the way you hold your drink reveals personality’ PR stunt.

This time it’s to promote a British pub chain and God bless those drink sodden journos who have gone and given it pride of place in the science section of today’s papers.

Even the BBC (who should know better but rarely do) have put it in their health section:

Dr Glenn Wilson, a consultant psychologist, observed the body language of 500 drinkers and divided them into eight personality types.

These were the flirt, the gossip, fun lover, wallflower, the ice-queen, the playboy, Jack-the-lad and browbeater.

Dr Wilson, who carried out the work for the [get free advertising somewhere else] bar chain, said glass hold “reflected the person you are”.

I would point out that it’s not published, or even sensical, but is there really any point when the whole premise is so ridiculous that you’d have to be virtually paralytic to take it seriously.

Wilson has actually done a great deal of serious research and is well known for his work on personality but occasionally seems to go on inexplicable media binges on the tab of corporate advertising.

Sadly, we’re the ones left with the hangover.

2009-05-29 Spike activity

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

HBO launches the awesome Alzheimer’s Project online. Video, documentary, facts, stories. Very nicely put together.

Teen mental health and mindfulness are the focus of a recent ABC Radio National Health Report.

The LA Times has more on the ongoing <a href="Psychiatrists rewriting the mental health bible
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-mental-disorder26-2009may26,0,3081443.story”>revision of the psychiatrists diagnostic manual, the DSM.

God bless ’em. The British Journal of Psychiatry publish a letter (scroll down) in which I complain about people ignoring research when talking about ‘internet addiction’ and other fictional monstrosities. The original authors write a lovely reply and I feel a bit sheepish.

The BPS Research Digest has a great post on simulating d√©j√† vu in the lab.

If you haven’t seen it somewhere else, the excellent Mary Roach does a fascinating TED talk on ’10 things you didn’t know about orgasm‘ (although she doesn’t mention that the case of toothbrushing triggered orgasm was due to epilepsy).

People are universally optimistic according to a survey of over 140 countries reported in Science Daily. “At the country level, optimism is highest in Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, and New Zealand and lowest in Zimbabwe, Egypt, Haiti and Bulgaria.”

New Scientist has an interesting ‘science of the female orgasm’ series but drops the ball (if you’ll excuse the pun) with a ‘brain shuts down during female orgasm because I can’t critically evaluate the results of brain imaging studies’ piece.

There’s an interesting discussion on differing conceptions of the self, Jekyll and Hyde, and the modern of historical concept of criminal responsibility on ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone.

New Scientist has an excellent article on eight ancient writing systems that still haven’t been cracked. Where’s Fairlight when you need them?

An article on how meditation alters brain activity and structure appears in Scientific American.

Frontier Psychiatrist has an excellent piece on the concept of a rational suicide.

It’s raining fantastic essays on mind, brain and culture over at Neuroanthropology!

The New York Times has an article on the recent ‘super-recogniser‘ research on people who have spectacularly good memory for faces.

Graph theory slinging, network mongering, sociologically inclined mathematician Steven Strogatz has an excellent short piece in The New York Times on the mathematics of love.

New Scientist reports on a twin study that suggests intellectual confidence is inherited, predicts grades, and is independent from IQ.

The better trust and communication style between father and daughter, the better it is likely to be between the daughter and her partner, according to research reported by the new-to-me but seemingly excellent Child Psychology Research Blog .

The Times Higher Education Supplement notes concerns over the falling numbers of UK medical students who start training to be psychiatrists.

A big budget TV drama series about psychiatrists called ‘Mental‘ has just launched and you can watch the first episode online. Apparently being filmed in Bogot√°, Colombia.

Scientific American has another Jesse Bering column, this time on adolescent girl social aggression, or, in more colloquial terms, bitchyness.

Women are more likely than men to suffer feelings of inadequacy at home and at work and have perfectionist tendencies, according to a US study reported by BBC News.

Cerebrum, Dana’s excellent neuroscience magazine, has a great piece on the limits of neuroimaging.

Replicant Roy Kurzweil furiously responds to recent Newsweek article that apparently contained inaccuracies over his predictions, opinions, incept date.

Advances in the History of Psychology discovers that Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner has posted an electrogroove mashup that incorporates sampled snippets of the recordings of Stanley Milgram‚Äôs famous obedience experiments of the early 1960s. Like a disturbing social psychology 70’s porn soundtrack.

Valuing the unusual illness debate

One of the particular joys of psychiatry is the regular ritual where a small but determined group of researchers try and get their idea for a new diagnosis accepted into the DSM. The most recent outbreak has hit the LA Times where a short article notes the proposal for ‘posttraumatic embitterment disorder’.

The idea for the disorder, where people are impaired by feelings of bitterness after “a severe and negative life event”, is not new. A small group of German researchers have been proposing the disorder in the medical literature since 2003 and have recently released a psychometric scale which they argue can diagnose the condition.

The last incarnation of this debate to hit the mainstream press was discussion over whether extreme racism could or should be diagnosed as ‘racist personality disorder’.

The discussions are interesting because they cut to the heart of how we define an illness. This is usually discussed as if it is a problem specific to psychiatry, as if diagnoses in other areas of medicine are more obvious, but this is not the case.

Implicit in medical diagnoses is the concept that the change or difference in the person has a negative impact.

Importantly, the biological ‘facts’ have little to do with this, because whether something has a ‘negative impact’ is largely a value judgement.

An infectious disease is not defined solely on the basis that it is a bacteria or virus, as we have many bacteria or viruses in our bodies that cause no problems. It’s only when they cause us distress or impairment that they’re classified as an illness.

In fact, there are some bacteria or viruses that are completely harmless in certain areas of the body, but cause problems in others. Like in cases of viral encephalitis where otherwise benign viruses can cause problems when they get into brain tissue.

In some cases the definition is partly based on a comparison to what’s average for a person of this type. Differences in brain structure, such as some white matter lesions, may be considered medical problems in young people but normal in older people.

But there are many human characteristics that we could equally classify as being ‘not normal’ and ‘negative’ but we don’t currently accept as illnesses.

Being left-handed is clearly a statistical deviation from the average, has been associated with a greater risk of breast cancer, an increase in accidental injuries, and has been genetically linked to schizophrenia. But left-handedness is not considered an illness.

In other words, there is no definition of an illness which is divorced from a subjective interpretation of what counts as ‘negative’.

We also have some subjective and fairly fuzzy cultural ideas just about what sort of things count as medical conditions and require attention from doctors. Someone born with a missing thumb – yes, someone born left-handed – no.

Many of these assumptions are not about the properties of the ‘illness’ but about what we think doctors should be doing and what we feel the place of medicine in society should be.

Psychiatric disorders are just another instance of this. So when you hear proposals for seemingly wacky mental illnesses, think to yourself, why is this not an illness?

Importantly, we should do the same for widely accepted mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia or depression. Ask yourself, on what basis is this an illness?

It’s not that all new diagnoses are useful or all existing ones are nonsense, it’s just that the process of questioning highlights our assumptions regarding the relationship between normality, human distress, impairment and the role of medicine in society.

Link to LA Times piece on bitterness as a mental illness.
Link to brilliant Stanford Philosophy Encyclopaedia entry on mental illness.

Winning the vaccine wars

PLoS Biology has an excellent article on the social factors behind how recent vaccination scares sparked off and continue, despite them having no scientific basis and having been repeatedly proved incorrect.

I’m morbidly fascinated by the autism scares because they are meeting of two very different forms of systems in which to think about knowledge.

Broadly, scientists think about how well a belief is supported by looking at its justifying evidence, whereas the antivaxxers decide on the conclusion often based on what they believe about their children and then bend or reject any evidence to fit the mould.

The piece focuses on the American antivaxxers and looks at how the US media amplified the scare story through focusing on personal stories and presenting them heavy weight scientific evidence.

Rachel Casiday, a medical anthropologist at the Centre for Integrated Health Care Research at Durham University, UK, who studied British parents’ attitudes toward MMR, says scientists should not underestimate the importance of narrative. People relate much more to a dramatic story‚Äî‚Äúhe got his vaccination, he stopped interacting, and he hasn’t been the same since‚Äù‚Äîthan they do to facts, risk analyses, and statistical studies.

‚ÄúIf you discount these stories, people think you have an ulterior motive or you’re not taking them seriously,‚Äù she explains. Casiday suggests providing an alternative, science-based explanation or relating emotionally compelling tales about counter-risk‚Äîsuch as helplessly watching a young child die of a vaccine-preventable disease‚Äîin the same narrative format.

While scientists have been (for years now) presenting the facts to people, it has really made very little difference and this is the first article I know of that suggests that science uses the power of the narrative to gets its vaccine safety message across.

UPDATE: I really recommend a post on the Providentia blog where psychologist Romeo Vitelli describes how the first life-saving smallpox vaccinations were opposed by a fledgling anti-vaccination movement that bear remarkable similarities to their modern day counterparts. The series on the historical antivaccination theme will continue, so look out for further posts on the same blog.

Link to PLoS Biology article (via @bengoldacre).