Mind Hacks

The psychology of being scammed

I’m just reading a fascinating report on the psychology of why people fall for scams, commissioned by the UK government’s Office of Fair Trading and created by Exeter University’s psychology department.

It’s a 260 page monster, so is not exactly bed time reading, but was drawn from in-depth interviews from scam victims, examination of scam material, two questionnaire studies and a behavioural experiment.

Here’s some of the punchlines grabbed from the executive summary. The report concluded that the most successful scams involve:

Appeals to trust and authority: people tend to obey authorities so scammers use, and victims fall for, cues that make the offer look like a legitimate one being made by a reliable official institution or established reputable business.

Visceral triggers: scams exploit basic human desires and needs ‚Äì such as greed, fear, avoidance of physical pain, or the desire to be liked ‚Äì in order to provoke intuitive reactions and reduce the motivation of people to process the content of the scam message deeply.

Scarcity cues. Scams are often personalised to create the impression that the offer is unique to the recipient.

Induction of behavioural commitment. Scammers ask their potential victims to make small steps of compliance to draw them in, and thereby cause victims to feel committed to continue sending money.

The disproportionate relation between the size of the alleged reward and the cost of trying to obtain it. Scam victims are led to focus on the alleged big prize or reward in comparison to the relatively small amount of money they have to send in order to obtain their windfall.

Lack of emotional control. Compared to non-victims, scam victims report being less able to regulate and resist emotions associated with scam offers. They seem to be unduly open to persuasion, or perhaps unduly undiscriminating about who they allow to persuade them.

And here’s a couple of counter-intuitive kickers:

Scam victims often have better than average background knowledge in the area of the scam content. For example, it seems that people with experience of playing legitimate prize draws and lotteries are more likely to fall for a scam in this area than people with less knowledge and experience in this field. This also applies to those with some knowledge of investments. Such knowledge can increase rather than decrease the risk of becoming a victim.

Scam victims report that they put more cognitive effort into analysing scam content than non-victims. This contradicts the intuitive suggestion that people fall victim to scams because they invest too little cognitive energy in investigating their content, and thus overlook potential information that might betray the scam.

Interesting, people who fall for scams often have a feeling that it’s dodgy. The report suggests we trust our gut instincts. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

We like to think that only other people fall for scams, but as I’m working my way through the report it’s becoming clear that those things that we think make us resistant to scams (a keen analytical mind) are not what help us avoid being a victim.

A really fascinating read and a great example of applied psychology.

Link to Office of Fair Trading report page and download.

Grand Theft Neuro

I like Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist and director of science education charity the Royal Institution, but recently she’s lost the plot. Bad Science picks up on her recent crusade to warn everyone about the potentially ‘brain damaging’ effects of computer games and the internet in the face of absent or contradictory evidence.

And when I say I like her, I genuinely do. Not least because she wrote Brain Story probably the finest neuroscience documentary series ever produced, presented the Christmas Lectures in a red leather cat suit, and replied to me when I was a lowly MSc student after I emailed her following a talk she did on consciousness.

But she’s got a bee in her bonnet about computers and the internet, and keeps making headline grabbing pronouncements that are completely divorced from the actual science.

She keeps warning about the ‘neurological dangers’ of electronic media, saying that it might be causing ADHD, obesity, social impairments and the like, despite not citing a single study on the topic.

In this month’s Wired UK she argues that the credit crunch could have been caused by bankers brain damaged by computer games they played as children.

Her arguments almost always take a similar form: computers are about the “here and now” (whatever that means), frontal lobe damage makes people impulsive, children play computer games and experience affects brain development, therefore children could be being brain damaged by computer games.

Apart from the obvious problem with the logic, studies actually on computer use and attention, or computer use and social functioning actually tend to show that people who have experience of electronic media generally show slight benefits in these areas.

This evidence seems to have entirely passed her by. In her chapters on the ‘dangers’ of electronic media in her (surprise, surprise) recently published new book ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century she cites not a single study that shows a negative effect of computers on the mind or brain.

And in fact, Greenfield has promoted, wait for it, some ‘brain training’ software that she claimed improved mental performance.

Now, I’ve got no problem having wacky theories, or even reasonable fears, but if you’re the head of a science education charity you should at least read the literature. Oh, and refrain from promoting scare stories.

Link to Bad Science on Greenfield digital worry mongering.

2009-05-15 Spike activity

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

The BPS Research Digest covers a study finding that people judged as likeable in the flesh also make good first impressions online.

A short but sweet Jonah Lehrer article on the neuroscience of creativity is published in Seed Magazine.

Dr Petra has more on the recent not very convincing ’emotional intelligence boosts female orgasms’ story that got the media’s knickers in a twist.

Will <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227083.700-will-designer-brains-divide-humanity.html
“>designer brains divide humanity? asks New Scientist who seem to like sensationalist headlines about cognitive enhancement.

Furious Seasons asks whether suicidality was covered-up in the landmark STAR*D depression study? A fantastic bit of investigative journalism.

Cruelty and spitefulness are put under the evolutionary spotlight by New Scientist.

Neuronarrative has a good piece on belief in the paranormal and susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy. Interesting in light of Jung’s concept of synchronicity.

Halle Berry neurons, visual recognition and sparse coding are discussed by Discover Magazine.

New Scientist has an almost-there article on how beliefs affect how we experience illness.

How mediation improves attention. PsyBlog continues riffing on it’s attention theme.

Science News reports that school-age lead exposure is most harmful to IQ.

Summertime blues. The Neurocritic covers a study finding that suicide rates in Greenland are highest during the summer.

The New York Times has an excellent piece on ‘high functioning alcoholics‘.

A difference between child and adult brains is a switch from local to distributed organisation, suggests a new study in PLoS Computational Biology.

Dr Shock has a good summary of a recent review article on the neuroscience of exercise.

Smiles in yearbook photos predict marriage success many years later according to a study covered in The Economist.

Neurophilosophy covers a fascinating study on how music affects how we perceive facial expressions.

Walk on the wild side

Frontier Psychiatrist has discovered an account of a curious incident where The Velvet Undergound played to the New York society for clinical psychiatry who had convened a high class dinner to discuss creativity.

But the 70s art rockers had the last laugh when they blasted the audience with distorted noise and bizarre questions, apparently as revenge for Lou Reed’s electric shock treatment he’d been given as a teen to ‘cure’ him of homosexuality.

The account is apparently give in an interview with John Cale, published in this week’s Guardian (although I’m damned if I can find it):

The second the main course was served, the Velvets started to blast and Nico started to wail. Gerard and Edie jumped up on the stage and started dancing, and the doors flew open and Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin with her crew of people with camera and bright lights came storming into the room and rushing over to all the psychiatrists asking them things like:

What does her vagina feel like?
Is his penis big enough? Do you eat her out?
Why are you getting embarrassed? You’re a psychiatrist; you’re not supposed to get embarrassed…

There’s plenty interesting material in Lou Reed’s songs for those interested in the mind and brain.

Of course, the heroin inspired lyrics of Perfect Day, but also the character sketches in Walk on the Wild Side:

Jackie is just speeding away
Thought she was James Dean for a day
Then I guess she had to crash
Valium would have helped that dash

She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side

‘Jackie’ refers to Jackie Curtis one of the gender-bending artists in Warhol’s The Factory. She was a enthusiastic drug user and became psychotic owing to her amphetamine use, apparently genuinely thinking she was James Dean at one point.

Valium, a long-acting anxiety-reducing and sleep-inducing benzodiazepine could have helped, but cutting out the speed probably would have been a better option. Curtis eventually died of a drug overdose in 1985.

There’s a fantastic documentary on Curtis’ life and art called Superstar in a Housedress.

And if you’re interested in the history of rock n’ roll psychiatry fusions, see one of our previous posts on The Cramps playing Napa State Mental Hospital.

Link to Frontier Psychiatrist on New York psychiatry rock chaos incident.

US military pours millions into ‘EEG telepathy’

I get the feeling that DARPA, the American military research agency, only ever select their research projects from sci-fi comics.

Wired reports that their latest multi-million dollar project is to create an EEG-based ‘telepathy’ communication system for the battlefield solder:

Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they‚Äôll read each other‚Äôs minds.

At least, that‚Äôs the hope of researchers at the Pentagon‚Äôs mad-science division Darpa. The agency‚Äôs budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to ‚Äúallow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.‚Äù That‚Äôs on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy.

Before being vocalized, speech exists as word-specific neural signals in the mind. Darpa wants to develop technology that would detect these signals of ‚Äúpre-speech,‚Äù analyze them, and then transmit the statement to an intended interlocutor. Darpa plans to use EEG to read the brain waves. It‚Äôs a technique they‚Äôre also testing in a project to devise mind-reading binoculars that alert soldiers to threats faster the conscious mind can process them.

It’s all getting a bit Rogue Trooper isn’t it?

Link to Wired on DARPA barmyness.

Visual Illusion Contest 2009 winners

The results of the annual visual illusion contest have just been announced and the 2009 winner is a doozy.

Like all the best visual illusions it’s conceptually simple but perceptually striking. In this case a falling ball seems to drop vertically when you look straight at it but seems to glide away at an angle when you see it in your peripheral vision.

Rather nicely, you can switch between the two effects just by looking back and forth. Make sure you click on the ‘Reversal’ button as well for a free-wheeling alternative version.

Visual illusions: the scooby snacks of perceptual psychology.

Link to Visual Illusion Contest website (via @mocost).

The Dark End of the Street

I’ve just found Steven Okazaki’s 1999 documentary Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street on YouTube that follows the chaotic lives of heroin addicts in Southern California.

It’s not polemic and tries as much as possible to simply document, but it’s a dark journey into the void with many of the people involved in the 1990s heroin scene.

It’s not easy to watch, but it is a rare insight into the lives of people who are often hidden in plain sight.

Link to Part 1 (links to other parts on right).

British twins in emotional sex shocker

If you’re all aflutter over the recent news reports that ’emotionally intelligent women have more orgasms’ you may be interested to know that these sexual adventures have been exaggerated in the re-telling.

I really recommend Petra Boyton’s analysis of the study which picks up on what was actually done and where its drawbacks were. As it turns out it was a postal survey of over 2,000 female twins, with a fairly low response rate and not particularly well-pitched questions on sexual experiences.

It also included an emotional intelligence measure, and found a small but statistically reliable link between ‘EQ’ and orgasm frequency during masturbation and sex.

And this is where it gets a bit over-the-top. The authors suggest, rather cautiously in the research article and, rather more strongly in the press reports, that higher emotional intelligence may help women communicate what they want in the bedroom and hence lead to more orgasms.

I shall now present the correlations between EQ and orgasm frequency as reported in the study:

EQ and frequency of orgasm during intercourse 0.13
EQ and frequency of orgasm during masturbation 0.23

If you’re familiar with how to read correlations, you’ll notice that the link is very small.

The correlation was done using a Spearman correlation that ranks everyone by EQ and then ranks everyone by orgasm frequency, and then sees how the rankings match.

A result of 1 mean the rankings are identical, a result of -1 means that one ranking is in exactly the opposite order to the other, and a result of 0 means there is no link at all between the two rankings. So in this case, the relationship is very minor.

And here’s a neat trick you can do with the results of correlations. If you square them, you get the amount of variability or change in one value accounted for by change in the other as a percentage.

This means EQ accounts for 1.7% of self-estimated intercourse orgasm frequency and 5.3% of self-estimated masturbation orgasm frequency.

It’s also worth noting that the relationship is stronger for masturbation than orgasm during intercourse, which kinda pours cold water on the ‘asking for what you want in bed’ angle.

Interesting, these results are statistically reliable, and the small but reliable effect was confirmed by a regression analysis, meaning that they are reasonably unlikely to have occurred by chance.

As Petra notes, it’s an interesting preliminary study that merits further investigation, but even if we could be completely confident in the methods, the effect is nothing to shout about.

Link to Dr Petra on ‘Do high EQ women have better sex?’
Link to study.
Link to DOI entry for same.

The study of a lifetime

It is not often that articles on psychology studies are described as beautiful, but a piece in The Atlantic on the Harvard Study of Adult Development is quite sublime.

The project has followed two groups of men for almost seventy years, tracking physical and emotional health, opinions and attitudes, successes and failures, all in the hope of understanding what makes us happy.

It weaves the staccato train of numerical data with reflections and insights from the men themselves to attempt the impossible – it hopes to record lives.

From their brash early adulthood to their deaths or dotage the stories are brief but profound, sometimes tragic, sometimes joyful, sometimes mundane.

The study itself has generated some remarkable findings, such as the massive impact of relationships, the fading long-term effects of childhood experiences, or the role of defences in managing emotional well-being, but the piece is as much about the life of the project as its conclusions.

It serves as a meditation on the tension between meaning and measurement when trying to understand the individual, and on the potentially futile attempt to extrapolate an experience of a generation to a world of other times, people and places.

But the article also about psychiatrist George Valliant, who has been coordinating the study for over 40 years, and whose life is intricately woven into the project.

The ending of the article is both surprising and poignant, because it questions what we can truly learn from the lives of others.

Link to Atlantic article ‘What Makes Us Happy?’

Delayed gratification and the science of self-control

The New Yorker has a fantastic article on the psychology of delayed gratification and how tempting kids with marshmallows allowed us to understand the life-time impact of self-control.

The piece focuses on the work of psychologist Walter Mischel who invented a test for children where they’d be presented with a marshmallow but told they could have two, later on, if they just waited.

It was an early demonstration of the power of temporal discounting – some kids ate the marshmallow, about a third waited and cashed in their patience for bigger rewards – but this wasn’t, in itself, particularly earth-shattering news.

What was most surprising was that years later, when Mischel followed up the kids in his experiment, the ones who waited, who could delay their gratification, turned out to be more successful in life – better jobs, better exam results, less drug addiction and so on.

This and subsequent research has led us to believe that the ability to delay gratification for better rewards in the future is a fundamental skill in success, probably because it looks at how emotions and motivations interact with a more rational appproach to reasoning. We know what’s best, but can we keep temptation at bay to reach it?

The article is a compelling exploration of this key ability and the subsequent research that has sprung up around it to help explain how we manage to keep those cheap instant hits at bay.

There’s also a great observation in the piece where the author, science writer Jonah Lehrer, describes Mischel as someone who “talks with a Brooklyn bluster and he tends to act out his sentences”.

Link to New Yorker article ‘Don‚Äôt! The secret of self-control’.

The alien hand syndrome – caught on video

I’ve just found a video of someone with alien hand syndrome – a condition which usually occurs after brain injury or stroke where the affected person loses conscious control over the hand and where it seems to move with a will of its own.

In this case, the video was uploaded by YouTube user frankenerin, who asked someone to video her when she was in intensive care after suffering a stroke and having brain surgery while her ‘alien hand’ was still present.

There’s a couple of things to notice in the video. The first is that the clinician asks the patient to do the actions for using scissors and brushing teeth. This is to check the problem is not a form of general ideomotor apraxia, where common action patterns are damaged.

She can do the actions with one hand but not the other, suggesting her strange movements are not due to global action planning problems.

The clinician then asks whether the patient recognises the arm as hers.

This may seem an odd question, but he’s checking for somatoparaphrenia, where patients can deny ownership of a paralysed or action-impaired limb, sometimes saying that it belongs to someone else.

As it turns out, the patient says she generally knows it is hers, but when it is draped across her body in a certain position and making involuntary movements she can think it is someone else’s limb. In other words, she seems to have fleeting somatoparaphrenia.

The video then shows the hand moving of its own accord and the patient having to use the other hand to keep it out of trouble.

Despite looking like she’s in pretty bad shape, frankenerin later posted a wonderful follow-up video where she is back on her feet and feeling fine, although discusses how she’s had to adjust her career aspirations owing to the longer-term effects of the brain injury.

Unfortunately, the Wikipedia page on alien hand syndrome, also known as anarchic hand syndrome, is dreadful, but there’s an excellent 2005 article from The Psychologist by neuropsychologist Sergio Della Sala that covers the neuropsychology of the condition and what it tells us about free will. You can read it online as a pdf.

Link to alien hand syndrome video.
pdf of The Psychologist on alien / anarchic hand.

Encephalon 70 the mysterious

The 70th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just appeared and is ably hosted on Sharp Brains.

A couple of my favourites include a post on Neurotopia on the elegant logic of dopamine, and a fantastic visual illusion from Dr Deb where a picture of a tree hides some wonderfully concealed faces.

There’s a whole stack more great articles in this fortnight’s edition so go check out the rest.

Link to Encephalon 70.

Binge and tonic

There‚Äôs more to alcohol than getting pissed but you‚Äôd never know it from the papers. In a period of public hand wringing over ‚Äòbinge drinking culture‚Äô, our understanding of the ‚Äòculture bit‚Äô usually merits no more than an admission that people do it in groups and this is often implicit in the work of psychologists.

In a recent Psychological Bulletin review on the determinants of binge drinking, psychologists Kelly Courtney and John Polich devote only a few sparse paragraphs to the social issues in an otherwise impressive review, despite the fact that drinking alcohol is one of the most socially meaningful and richly symbolic activities in our culture.

In the UK at least, the social meaning of booze is often hidden behind the ordinariness of day-to-day consumption. If you can‚Äôt quite see past the barrier of banality, try buying one of your male colleagues a Babycham in public view and the symbolism of alcohol will quickly be made apparent.

But it is not just the meaning of drinks which determine the role alcohol plays in our lives, it is the meaning of drinking as well. Sociologists have been exploring this territory for years and we would do well to read their maps, because it shows us how culture influences not only our views on drunkenness, but the experience of being intoxicated itself.

In their classic 1969 book Drunken Comportment, MacAndrew and Edgerton compared alcohol use in cultures around the world, finding that what concerns us most today, drunken disorderliness, is not an inevitable result of getting pissed. A striking example was the Papago people of Mexico, who, during their traditional cactus-wine ceremonies, would imbibe so much as to become ‚Äúfalling-down drunk‚Äù.

Despite the large scale community boozing, the events were exclusively peaceful, harmonious and good tempered. Later, the availability of whisky brought with it the cultural connotations of European-style drinking, meaning it ‚Äòproduced‚Äô an aggressive, anti-social drunkenness, despite it being the same chemical in a different style.

Recent research on binge-drinking in Western youth has indicated that the negative effects, both personally toxic and anti-social, have been reframed as an adventure and bonding experience.

While health campaigns are focusing on risk reduction, research by Sheehan and Ridge with teenage girls in Australia found that any harm encountered along the way tends to be ‚Äúfiltered through a ‚Äògood story,‚Äô brimming with tales of fun, adventure, bonding, sex, gender transgressions, and relationships‚Äù.

Puking in the gutter has been turned into Sex and the City. Not the complete story, of course, but we neglect the culture of alcohol at the cost of failing to understand why binge drinking is in fashion.

This is one of the occasional columns I write for The Psychologist and the editor, Jon Sutton, has kindly agreed for them to be posted on Mind Hacks as long as I include the following text:

The Psychologist is sent free to all members of the British Psychological Society (you can join here), or you can subscribe as a non-member by emailing sarsta[at]bps.org.uk.

He’s also said that he might print particularly good or insightful comments in the magazine, after which fame and fine living will surely follow. If he’s interested in publishing your comment, he’ll contact you first to get permission.

Deeper into the neuroscience of hypnosis

A new article from Trends in Cognitive Sciences explores how cognitive neuroscientists are becoming increasingly interested in understanding hypnosis and are using it to simulate unusual states of consciousness in the lab.

Hypnosis was typically treated with suspicion by mainstream cognitive science, although an important turning point came when a 2000 study demonstrated that people hypnotised to see colour on grey panels showed activity in the colour perception areas of the brain.

Myths about hypnosis are still common, but it is nothing more than a participant’s willing engagement in a process of suggestion. The hypnotic induction, sterotypically the counting backwards and the ‘you are feeling sleepy’ patter, helps but is not necessary.

Crucially, and for reasons that are still unclear, we all vary in our hypnotisability. This characteristic is known to be more stable than IQ, and normally distributed, like many other psychological traits.

In other words, we can all experience the relaxation and focus, and we can all imagine what the ‘hypnotist’ is suggesting, but only more highly hypnotisable people experience the suggestions as involuntary, as if they’re happening ‘by themselves’.

Recent research has suggested that highly hypnotisable people can disengage the process that looks out for rival demands on our attention, from the process that allows us to focus on which of the competing tasks we need to home in on.

In other words, in highly hypnotisable people, suggestions to experience things contrary to everyday reality may be able to take effect because the normal detect and disentangle mechanism has been temporarily suspended.

Combined with carefully crafted suggestions, this ability allows researchers to simulate certain mental states and experiences in the lab.

For example, hypnotically suggested paralysis, blindness or loss of feeling have been used to simulate the symptoms of ‘hysteria’ or conversion disorder, a condition where neurological symptoms appear without any damage to the nervous system being present.

Other studies have used hypnosis to simulate the feeling that the body is being controlled by outside forces, a common symptom in psychosis, or where a patient thinks their reflection in the mirror is another person, a delusion called mirror misidentification.

And we covered a fantastic study last year, where researchers used hypnosis to simulated psychogenic amnesia, a loss of memory just for old information despite the fact that the patients have none of the brain damage associated with the classic amnesia syndrome.

This new in-depth article covers research attempting to understand hypnosis itself, and science that uses hypnosis as a lab tool, and is a great introduction to the neuroscience research in this developing area.

Link to article.
Link to DOI entry for same.

Full disclosure: the authors of the article are research collaborators and jolly nice chaps to boot.

The story of our lives

We live our lives in fragments, but make sense of them as stories. Scattered islands of experience are drawn together in personal travelogues that attempt explain how our erratic journeys brought us to the present moment.

This is perhaps our most natural and chaotic form of self-understanding but also one of the most vexing for psychology. We know our life stories are mostly fiction, despite their personal force, and much modern psychology has demonstrated how we tend to unknowingly self-justify rather than critically self-appraise.

But it is also the area where personal meaning is its strongest, and where our our lab studies fail most obviously in bridging the chasm between evidence and experience.

Nevertheless, some psychologists are trying to make the leap, and Jesse Bering unravels the yarn in a thought-provoking article for Scientific American.

Traditionally, the psychology of life history has a bad reputation. Known as psychobiography, it was originally created by the neurologist Paul M√∂bius who wrote biographies that not only described the events in the lives of great people, but also attempted to explain their psychological drives and motivations.

It was quickly picked up by Freud, who wrote a series of psychoanalytic biographies, on Moses, da Vinci, Dostoyevsky and Woodrow Wilson, that are widely regarded as his poorest works.

Replete with factual errors and implausible interpretations, he nevertheless spawned a tradition of indulgent psychobiography that sullied the practice for years to come.

In recent years, attempts at psychological biographies have re-emerged in more measured and more successful forms. Alan Elms’ 1993 book Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology carefully coaxed the practice into the light, and contains some wonderfully sensitive biographies, including, ironically, of Freud himself.

Bering’s article is interesting because he touches on psychologists who are attempting to understand how personality influences our personal storytelling styles, and how our knowledge of autobiographical memory integrates into this process.

In a wonderfully recursive twist, researchers are now trying to integrate the fragments of lab-based knowledge into the fabric of personal narrative, because everything, ultimately, is a story.

Link to Bering on ‘The Psychological Science of Life History Research’.
Link to details of Elms’ awesome book Uncovering Lives.

The morning after the knife before

In the long history of outrageous drinking stories, this has got to be one of the best.

The Emergency Medical Journal has a case study of a man who woke up in hospital after being admitted for alcohol poisoning. He couldn’t remember what happened the night before but when his hangover didn’t clear a precautionary brain scan revealed a knife blade embedded in his temporal lobe.

A left handed, 22‚ÄÖyear old man was brought to the hospital by friends at 0200 because of alcohol intoxication. Events preceding the admission and motivation for the patient to go to the hospital were unclear. The patient’s relatives confessed to a binge drinking of rum and beer, and then being moved suddenly, probably to avoid police control…

The patient woke up 8‚ÄÖhours after admission, complaining of severe headache covering the whole head and gradually increasing in intensity… Surprisingly, brain computed tomography revealed a right temporal haematoma 34‚ÄÖmm in diameter, with a knife blade that had entered from the temporal fossa and was deeply retained in the right temporal lobe (fig 1).

The foreign body was surgically withdrawn, and postoperative recovery was uneventful. After awakening from surgery, the patient could not remember involvement in an altercation, but witnesses retrospectively confirmed that he was attacked with a knife after drinking with his assailant.

There’s also a lovely sentence in the paper which has an apt typo: “Vigorous stimulations only induced growling and repelling movements of the harms and legs”.

Link to ‘an unusual cause for headache following massive alcohol intake’.