Mind Hacks

The Lancet recently published a fantastic article on one of the earliest cases of phantom limb. It was written by American Civil War surgeon Silas Weir Mitchell but not as a study in a medical journal, but as a short story in a popular magazine.

The story was titled The Case of George Dedlow in which Mitchell gives a careful medical description of sensations coming from a recently amputated limb, a portrait of how the amputation affected the soldier, and some musings on what it means about our relation to reality.

At this stage in the story, Mitchell uses his fictional character to muse on the neurological phenomenon of phantom limbs. Phantom limbs had been described in the mid-16th century by French military surgeon Ambroise Paré, but very little was known about what caused stump neuralgia (in the 1860s, the only treatments were electrotherapy, leeching, irritation of the surface of the stump, and re-amputation, none of which were very successful).

In The Case of George Dedlow, Mitchell speculates freely about what caused absent limbs to itch and feel pain. According to him, sensory impressions were transmitted through nerves to spinal nerve-cells and then to the brain. When a limb was removed, and until the stump healed, nerves continued to accept sensory impressions and to convey these impressions to the brain. If the stump never fully recovered, the result was constant irritation or a burning neuralgia. As Mitchell later explained in his famous textbook, Injuries of the Nerves and Their Consequences (1872), phantom limbs made “the strongest man…scarcely less nervous than the most hysterical girl”.

Somewhat poignantly, it seems Mitchell was haunted by his own phantoms from the war. In his later years he was troubled by ‘ghosts’ and intrusive memories from his gruesome years as a military surgeon.

It’s a fantastic short article that really conjures up the feel of the time as well as giving an insight into this important point in medical history.

Link to Lancet article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to text of short story The Case of George Dedlow.

There’s an interesting letter in this week’s edition of Nature from biologist Lewis Wolpert making the speculative but interesting claim that the development of causal belief may have been a key turning point in human evolution.

Wolpert is responding to a recent Nature essay critiquing the idea that closely related species will have evolved similar psychological processes, suggesting that it is shared selection pressures rather than genetic similarity that more greatly influences mental make up.

He responds by saying that we should focus on some of things that have uniquely evolved in humans rather than shared processes. He cites the ability to understand cause as a key example.

The feature that is peculiar to humans is their understanding about the causal interactions between physical objects (see, for example, L. Wolpert Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast; Faber, 2006). For example, children realize from an early age that one moving object can make another move on impact. It is this primitive concept of mechanics that is a crucial feature of causal belief, and that conferred an advantage in tool-making and the use of tools — which, in turn, drove human evolution.

Animals, by contrast, have very limited causal beliefs, although they can learn to carry out complex tasks. According to Michael Tomasello (The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition; Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), only human primates understand the causal and intentional relations that hold among external entities. Tomasello illustrates this point for non-human primates with the claim that even though they might watch the wind shaking a branch until its fruit falls, they would never shake the branch themselves to obtain the fruit. Some primates are, nevertheless, at the edge of having causal understanding.

Once causal belief evolved in relation to tools and language, it was inevitable that people would want to understand the causes of all the events that might affect their lives — such as illness, changes in climate and death itself. Once there was a concept of cause and effect, ignorance was no longer bliss, and this could have led to the development of religious beliefs.

Link to Wolpert’s letter in Nature.

I’ve just discovered there’s a small medical literature on deaths by Russian roulette, where people put one bullet in a revolver, spin the chamber, put the gun to their head and pull the trigger.

A recent article from the The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology has a 10-year case review covering 24 deaths (wow) from the US state of Kentucky alone and serves as a summary of the research into this fate-tempting and most suicidal of games.

It’s a curious set of studies for which the most reliable finding is that people who die by Russian roulette are mostly young men who were drunk or had taken drugs.

On the more unusual side, one study found a link between participation in Russian roulette and “the types and number of tattoos and body piercing”.

The article also briefly describes a number of previous case reports from the literature, including this one which is remarkable for both mathematical and ultimately tragic reasons:

Playing a variation of traditional Russian roulette with his brother and 2 friends, the victim placed 5 live rounds in the cylinder, leaving one empty chamber, of a .357 Traus revolver. He spun the cylinder, put the gun to his right temple, and pulled the trigger. Postmortem blood toxicology revealed an ethanol level of 0.01% and the presence of diazepam and nordiazepam. The decedent had played Russian roulette on 2 occasions in the previous several weeks, each time placing only one live round in the cylinder.

Link to study on Russian roulette and risk-taking behaviour.
Link to DOI entry for same.

I’ve just found a morbidly fascinating 1984 study on hallucinations in hostages and kidnap victims.

The paper is from the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease and contains case studies of people who have been held captive by terrorists, kidnappers, rapists, robbers, enemy troops and, er… UFOs.

The reasoning behind including two ‘alien abductees’ was to compare hallucinations in verified versus unverified hostage situations. Cases of people who were hostages but did not hallucinate are also included.

The study found that one in four hostages had intense hallucinations, and these were invariably people who were in life-threatening situations. Isolation, visual deprivation, physical restraint, violence and death threats also seemed to contribute to the chance of having a hallucinatory experience.

Case 14

A 23-year-old member of a street gang was taken hostage by a rival gang. He was kept in a warehouse, blindfolded and tied to a chair, for 32 hours. He was severely beaten and forced to record ransom demands on a tape recorder. During captivity he became dissociated – “even when they were hitting on me I just tripped out, got out of my body… it was like I was high on Sherms (phencyclidine).” At one point he felt detached from his body and “floated” to the ceiling where he observed himself being beaten and burned with cigarettes but denied having any pain. He saw colorful geometric patterns in the air and flashes of past memories “like a dream, only I kept seeing devils and cops and monsters… nightmares I guess”. Eventually he was released when his gang paid the ransom.

Some of the case studies are a little disturbing, but it’s worth reading the paper in full if you can, or at least from the beginning of the case studies, as it’s a rarely discussed but remarkably striking aspect of human experience.

Link to article on ‘Hostage Hallucinations’.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

New York Magazine has an article arguing that the concerns about digital technology drastically affecting our minds are just hype. I really wanted to like it but it’s just another poorly researched piece on the psychology of digital technology.

Research has shown that distraction can improve exactly the sorts of skills that the digital doomsayers say will be broken by the high-tech world, but I’ve never seen it mentioned in any of the recent high-profile articles on the predicted digital meltdown.

In fact, there is a fairly sizeable scientific literature on how interruption affects the ability to complete a task, and instant messaging has been specifically studied.

But despite getting lots of opinions from everyone from attention researcher David Meyer to lifehacker Merlin Mann only one single ‘study’ on the distracting effect of technology is mentioned in the New York Magazine article: “people who frequently check their email has tested less intelligent than people who are actually high on marijuana”.

This is quite amazing because not only was the ‘study’ in question not an actual scientific study, it was PR stunt for Hewlett Packard, this isn’t even an accurate description of it (users were interrupted with email during an IQ test and scored worse, big surprise).

The issue actually breaks down into two parts, one is a scientific question: what is the psychological effect of distraction? and the other, a cultural one: have we become a society where high levels of distraction are more acceptable?

As I mentioned, the first question has been very well researched and the general conclusion is that distraction reduces our ability to complete tasks. Essentially, it’s saying that distraction is distracting, which is hardly headline news.

But it also turns out that distraction is most disruptive to stimulus based search tasks, when we are flicking our attention around scanning for bits of information. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when we’re on alert for new and different things, something salient like an instant message grabs our attention and knocks us off course.

More thoughtful tasks involving processing meaning are the least affected. This is interesting because most of the digital doomsayers suggest it is exactly this sort of deep thought that being affected by communication technology.

The other line of argument is that all this distraction makes us less creative because creativity needs focus to flourish.

Although not as well studied, it seems this is unlikely. While we assume that distraction reduces creativity, but lab studies tend to show the reverse.

Distraction has also been found to improve decision making, especially for complex fuzzy decisions – again exactly the sort that the doomsayers say will most be at peril.

These studies find that too much concentration reduces our creative thinking because we’re stuck in one mind-set, deliberately filtering out what we’ve already decided is irrelevant, thereby already discarding counter-intuitive ideas (actually this is something the article does touch on). We can speculate that this may be why a preliminary study found that amphetamine-based concentration drug Adderall reduced creativity.

The cultural issue is perhaps more important, but on an individual level is more easily addressed.

You have control over the technology of distraction. If you can’t concentrate, switch it off. It it is your job to be distracted and it is affecting other essential parts of your role, that is something to take up with your employers.

It’s no different than if you’re being distracted by the sound of traffic and can’t do your job. Maybe you need an office away from the street? If you or your employers can’t do anything about it, maybe that’s just one of the downsides of the job.

What research hasn’t yet shown is that digital technology is having a significant negative influence on our minds or brains. In some cases, it’s showing the reverse.

History has taught us that we worry about widespread new technology and this is usually expressed in society in terms of its negative impact on our minds and social relationships.

If you’re really concerned about cognitive abilities, look after your cardiovascular health (eat well and exercise), cherish your relationships, stay mentally active and experience diverse and interesting things. All of which have been shown to maintain mental function, especially as we age.

Technology has an impact on the mind but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the influence of your health and your relationships.

I’m constantly surprised that the impact of technology is clearly of such widespread interest to merit headline grabbing articles in international publications, but apparently not interesting enough that journalists will actually use the internet to find the research.

It’s like writing a travel guide without ever visiting the country. I’m just guessing the editors have yet to catch on to the scam.

Link to NYMag article ‘In Defense of Distraction’.

PsyBlog has an excellent piece on the counter-intuitive psychology of thought suppression – the deliberate attempt to not think of something that almost invariably backfires.

The article is both fascinating from a scientific point-of-view but also important as a personal mental health resource if you’re one of the many people who intuitively think that the best way of dealing with ‘bad’ thoughts is to try and push them out of the mind.

What psychology research has shown us is that not trying to think of something makes us think of it more frequently (the “don’t think of a pink elephant” phenomenon), and that this counter-productive effect is enhanced for emotion-heavy thoughts and in people with mental illnesses where intrusive thoughts are a problem.

Psychologists often use the metaphor of noisy trains passing through the station. Thought suppression is like standing in the middle of the tracks trying to push the train back. You’re just going to get run over. Instead, people are encouraged to just wait on the platform, observe the train of thought and wait for it to pass.

The ability to act as a ‘detached observer’ to the mind’s distressing thoughts is a useful cognitive skill and one that is cultivated by mindfulness mediation, something that has increasing evidence as a useful treatment for mental health problems.

There’s lots of good research on thought suppression, much of which is covered in PsyBlog article, but this study struck me as particularly inventive:

Wegner and Gold (1995) examined emotional suppression by delving into people’s romantic pasts using a neat comparison between ‘hot flames’ and ‘cold flames’. A ‘hot flame’ is a previous partner who still fires the imagination, while a ‘cold flame’ is a previous partner for whom the thrill is gone. In theory the ‘hot flame’ should produce more intrusive thoughts so people should have more practice suppressing them. Meanwhile because the cold flame doesn’t produce intrusive thoughts, people should have less practice suppressing them.

The results revealed exactly the expected pattern: people found it harder to to suppress thoughts about cold flames presumably because they had less practice.

Link to PsyBlog on ‘Why Thought Suppression is Counter-Productive’.