The cognitive fallacy of East is East and West is West

New Scientist has an excellent article on East-West psychological differences and why they may be more to do with local lifestyle than broad cultural generalisations.

Experiments that compare the responses of, for example, Americans and East Asians, are often used to support theories that Westerners have an analytical, individualistic world-view, while Easterners have a holistic, collectivist outlook.

This has been reported in studies that have compared how Westerners and Easterners categorise objects (shared features vs functional relationships), reasoning about causes for people’s behaviour (individual state of mind vs social situation) and, most famously in recent years, how people view visual scenes (focus on objects vs focus on background).

However, the NewSci article discusses a number of studies suggesting that these differences may not be to be with broad cultural definitions but to do with the lifestyle of the local population. In fact, these exact same differences can be found within both Eastern and Western cultures.

So it’s not all that surprising, perhaps, that other studies find that local and current social factors rather than the broad sweeps of history or geography tend to shape the way a particular society thinks. For example, Nisbett’s group recently compared three communities living in Turkey’s Black Sea region who share the same language, ethnicity and geography but have different social lives: farmers and fishers live in fixed communities and their trades require extensive cooperation, while herders are more mobile and independent.

He found that the farmers and fishers were more holistic in their psychology than herders, being more likely to group objects based on their relationships rather than their categories: they preferred to link gloves with hands rather than with scarves, for instance (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 8552). A similar mosaic pattern of thought can be found in the east. “Hokkaido is seen as the Wild West of Japan,” says Nisbett. “The citizens are regarded as cowboys – highly independent and individualistic – and sure enough, they’re more analytic in their cognitive style than mainland Japanese.”

Even more surprisingly, the article describes how these same cognitive tendencies are malleable – they can be changed in individuals by simply priming them with individualistic or collectivist concepts.

The article is a thought-provoking challenge to the East – West psychological stereotypes common in both the popular press and the scientific literature and discusses some intriguing studies I was completely unaware of.

By the way, the author is Ed Yong, who writes the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog we often link to.

An excellent article that is highly recommended.

Link to ‘Beyond east and west: How the brain unites us all’.

Finding a Twitter flock

I’m interesting in creating a list of people on Twitter that Mind Hacks readers might be interested in: psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, AI hackers, anthropologists, sociologists, science writers, philosophers – you know the sort.

However, it seems quite hard to track down people by their interests.

So if you follow, or are, someone who posts lots of interesting mind and brain stuff on Twitter, leave a comment on this post, or email me using this web form with Twitter in the title.

My only caveat is I’m not particularly interested in, for example, a psychologist who mostly twitters about their cat, the news, sport or whatever. They need to be a good source of mind and brain insights.

I’ll filter the list and post it up here.

GABA gimmick in a can

Jones GABA a slickly advertised new energy drink that contains the neurotransmitter GABA, described as enhancing “focus + clarity” and putting you “in the zone”. It is backed by ‘one of the world’s leading authorities on natural medicine’ Dr Michael Murray, who seems completely unaware that GABA doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier and so drinking it is unlikely to have any effect.

The active ingredient in the drink is called ‘Pharma GABA’, which, despite the ‘Pharma’ prefix is just powdered GABA, commercially sold, normally as a ‘nutritional supplement’.

This has actually been subject to research, albeit in a poorly controlled trial of 13 people in one experiment, and two groups of four people in another. It used surrogate outcomes (measuring saliva and EEG) rather than actually measuring stress or focus and was completed by the company that sells the product.

But even without this experimmercial, we can be pretty sure that swallowing GABA doesn’t work, because, despite various experiments that have investigated the neurotransmitter, it has never been found to cross the blood-brain barrier in any significant way.

However, this isn’t the first junk food product to include neurotransmitters as a gimmick. We found some Japanese GABA sweets for sale last year.

I have to say, I love the geekiness of having neurotransmitter junk food, but it would be infinitely better if it wasn’t packaged with junk science.

It would also be infinitely better if it was highly caffeinated, but that’s just a personal opinion.

Link to GABA in a can spoilt by the pseudoscience (thanks Sara!)

Psychology and advertising

Here are links to some old posts about psychology and advertising. About three years ago I was writing a lot about this, and I just thought I’d collect them here:

Longer posts:

Is there a science of advertising?
Decoding adverisements
Cognitive psychology & advertising
Music wine and will
advertising influences familiarity induces preference
neuroscience and advertising
where do implicit associations come from?
Book review: Influence (by Robert Cialdini)
Does advertising erode free will?

‘Briefly noted’ and links

the price is right regardless of the cost
When choice is demotivating
Experimental psychology of advertising resources
Why can’t we choose what makes us happy
The Endowment effect and marketing
A quick and miscellaneous list of advertising links

Update: Book review of Ad Nausam, Sir Humphrey teaches questionnaire design

Uncannily beautiful

Below are a couple of strangely beautiful delusions described in a 1993 paper on ‘The reliability of three definitions of bizarre delusions’ published in the American Journal of Psychiatry:

A 22-year-old woman had the delusion that thoughts and feelings emanating from her mother’s unconscious were being carried in raindrops that fell on her air conditioner. When the raindrops hit the air conditioner they made a noise, and simultaneously these thoughts and feelings merged with her own unconscious. This merging had resulted in her own mental illness.

A 27-year-old man had the delusion that the voice he heard throughout the day was that of an invisible girlfriend. His girlfriend gave him advice and told him to do things. At night she would come to him, although still invisible, and they would make love.

Link to PubMed entry for paper.

Rewiring the brain for fun and profit

Wired has just published an excellent two part article on neuroengineering, the practice of altering the brain with electronics or optics.

It looks at a number of interesting projects, from light controlled neurons to magnetic brain stimulation, and focuses on the work of talented neuroengineer Ed Boyden who I had the pleasure of doing a joint talk with at a SciFoo conference.

In fact, TMS gets electricity into the brain peacefully, without either cutting it open or shocking it with millions of volts.

The target area of the brain is treated like the coil in a generator, subjected to rapidly changing magnetic fields until electricity begins to dance across its neurons. Unlike the optical switch developed by Boyden and Stanford’s Dr. Karl Deisseroth, TMS doesn’t reach the deeper regions of the brain, but there are a lot of important and interesting areas in the cortex where TMS delivers its current. It’s also far less precise than the optical switch, although TMS seems positively surgical when compared to the imprecisions of the pharmaceuticals we pump into our bodies.

The second part is probably the highlight, discussing the possibilities of having these technologies more widely available so your average garage hacker can tinker with them (and themselves), and what ethical dilemmas this might cause.

Link to ‘Inside the New Science of Neuroengineering’.
Link to ‘How Neuroengineering May Change Your Brain.

Memory loss at the movies

Neurophilosophy has a great post about how amnesia is represented in cinema, concluding that there’s only three movies that accurately represent memory loss.

The post is based on an article from the British Medical Journal by clinical neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale who has written a number of excellent articles on topics such as epilepsy in music, at movies, and in the saints.

The three films mentioned as accurate depictions of amnesia are the masterpiece Memento, Spanish language film Sé Quién Eres, and, surprisingly, the Disney animated feature Finding Nemo.

The Neurophilosophy article is also illustrated with video clips so you can see some of the films under discussion.

Link to Neurophilosophy on ‘Amnesia at the movies’.

Where is my mind?

Fora.TV has a great video discussion with science writer Jonah Lehrer where he gives a wonderfully engaging talk on the on decision making, meta-cognition and the paradox of choice.

The discussion is an hour long and well worth the time, although for those with pathological impatience or only five minutes to spare, the section on metacognition is a particular highlight.

I also notice from his blog that he’s also just reviewed a recent book on consciousness and embodied cognition called ‘Out of Our Heads’ by philosopher Alva No√´ for the San Francisco Chronicle which is also worth checking out.

Link to Fora.TV interview with Lehrer (thanks Rich!)

Junk food marketers rediscover the Crockus

The following is from a recent New York Times article on how snack food company Frito-Lay have based their latest women-focused campaign on ‘neuromarketing’. Parts of the article nearly made with weep with despair.

[Advertising agency] Juniper Park used neuromarketing in a slightly different way. Ms. Nykoliation began by researching how women’s brains compared with men’s, so the firm could adjust the marketing accordingly. Her research suggested that the communication center in women’s brains was more developed, leading her to infer that women could process ads with more complexity and more pieces of information.

Hang on a minute. Communication centre larger in women? She doesn’t mean… the crockus by any chance?

A memory and emotional center, the hippocampus, was proportionally larger in women, so Ms. Nykoliation concluded that women would look for characters they could empathize with.

Stop sniffing the TipEx.

And research Ms. Nykoliation read linked the anterior cingulate cortex, which processes decision-making and was larger in women, to feelings of guilt. (Experts differ on how directly functions or feelings are associated with various parts of the brain.) Ms. Nykoliation then asked NeuroFocus to review her assumptions and, as Juniper Park developed ads, to test the ads to verify that women liked them.

We should have guessed a ‘neuromarketing’ company would be involved.

Neuromarketing is an interesting research field looking at the neuroscience of buyer decisions but so far there is not a single scrap of data that shows neuroscience can better predict buyer decisions that plain old ‘marketing’.

In other words, if you’re wanting to actually market a product, it’s a huge waste of money. However, that hasn’t stopped various ‘neuromarketing’ companies from springing up and selling their sweet nothings to large corporations for hard cash.

I say a huge waste of money, but it did get them a feature in The New York Times who also posted their commercial online, so maybe it’s not such a daft move after all.

Link to NYT article.

On believing you died during the operation

I just found this interesting paper in the medical journal Anesthesiology on fear of imminent death or the delusion that death has actually occurred, both linked to anaesthetic intoxication.

Despite our repeated explanations that she had suffered a local anesthetic-induced complication, the patient remained convinced that she had died and come back to life. This patient had been a non-practicing Christian who believed in an afterlife. She had not had any previous experience of this kind or know of others who had had. She had had no fear of death in the preoperative period.

The article notes that the delusional belief that one has died has been linked to complications with the use of lidocaine, procainamide, and procaine.

As with the drugs used in the Anesthesiology case study, all of these are local anaesthetics. They are just intended to numb a specific area, so the patient is not ‘put under’ with globally conscious altering substances.

It’s also interesting because the delusion that one has died is also known in the psychiatric literature, usually in the context of diagnoses such as schizophrenia or after brain injury.

In these cases it is known as the Cotard delusion which is usually explained, rather unsatisfactorily, as being caused by a general emotional disconnection from the world, interpreted by the patient’s faulty reasoning system as being convincing evidence that they are dead.

The case studies from the anaesthesiology literature suggest that these beliefs can be triggered in other ways, although the exact process still remains a mystery.

If you’re put off by academic journals, give this article a try. It’s well written, short and fascinating.

Link to Anesthesiology article on death delusions.

Sir Humphrey teaches questionnaire design

Classic British TV comedy Yes Prime Minister has important lessons for those who want to interpret questionnaire data. This clip shows two civil servants discussing a policy suggestion. Bernard Woolley, who we see first, thinks the public are in favour of the policy – the minister has had an opinion poll done. Luckily senior civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby is there to set him straight:

Fans of cognitive biases, note that Sir Humphrey uses at least three in his illustration of a biased questionnaire: framing, priming, and acquiescence bias.

This example exaggerated, but the moral still holds : questionnaires can be designed to encourage the answers you want. People’s opinions are not objective facts like their height and weight, they change depending on the context and on how they are asked.

2009-02-27 Spike activity

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

BBC Radio 4’s science programme Leading Edge covers memory in the dock, and memory and ageing.

New Scientist discusses virtual autopsies and looks inside the skull of a suicide victim with a medical scanner.

One for Spanish language readers: El Pais discusses the neuroscience of religion and spiritual experience with an article entitled ‘Dios habita en el cerebro‘.

Seed Magazine discusses the role of the internet in the recent voodoo fMRI controversy with a mention of Mind Hacks.

Beauty affects men’s and women’s brains differently, reports Wired.

The Times discusses the increasing trend for children with behavioural problems to be given numerous psychiatric diagnoses.

Neuroscientists develop ‘wireless‘ activation of brain circuits, reports press release on EurekaAlert.

Petra Boynton covers the ‘Facebook causes cancer’ debacle and the subsequent unhelpful and misleading contribution from neuroscientist Baroness Greenfield who should know better.

A study on the social benefits of social networking is covered by The Washington Times. Does this mean Facebook cures cancer too?

New Scientist discusses the psychology and neuroscience of suicide.

BBC’s science programme Horizon recently had a programme on the neuroscience of dreaming which is available to view online for another month or so. UK residents only though unfortunately.

The Neurocritic has an excellent critique of a recent imaging study that was rather widely and poorly reported as ‘men think of women in bikinis as objects’.

Does mentioning sex help students learn about other stuff too, asks Cognitive Daily with coverage of an interesting study on exactly this.

Science News reports that people who hold negative attitudes toward the elderly have an increased risk of heart-related ailments later in life.

An interesting study on the role of the 5-HTTLPR gene in attention to fearful or positive images is appallingly spun by New Scientist with nonsense about ‘happiness genes’ and genetic basis for optimism.

The Daily Mash has a <a href="Daily Mash
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/facebook-gives-you-short-attention-span%2c-says…–ooh-what%92s-that?-200902251602/”>satirical take on the ‘Facebook causes cancer / rots your brain’ nonsense.

Research suggesting a possible genetic flag for brain cancer is covered by Science News.

The New York Times reports on a recent small sample size but interesting study on structural brain changes found in childhood abuse victims.

Brain scans replace job interviews within five years, reports gullible Digital Journal.

Neuroanthropology reviews a bunch of great brain books for kids. Yay!

New kind of epilepsy shakes up memory, reports New Scientist who seem to have no idea that transient epileptic amnesia is not new.

Furious Seasons is essential reading at the moment – e.g. catching AstraZeneca ordering it’s Seroquel sales reps to lie about the the drug causing diabetes. In case you didn’t know journalist Phil Dawdy is entirely funded by reader donations and he’s having a fundraiser at the moment.

First gene discovered for most common form of epilepsy, reports Science Daily.

BBC News reports that Alzheimer’s plaques may have a bigger impact on the brain than previously thought.

An interesting study on the interplay between reason and emotion in buying decisions is covered by Frontal Cortex.

Warning of ghosts in the machine

Today’s issue of Science has a letter from neuroscientist Martha Farah and theologian Nancey Murphy warning against ‘non-materialist neuroscience’ becoming the new front-line in the religion wars.

Most religions endorse the idea of a soul (or spirit) that is distinct from the physical body. Yet as neuroscience advances, it increasingly seems that all aspects of a person can be explained by the functioning of a material system. This first became clear in the realms of motor control and perception. Yet, models of perceptual and motor capacities such as color vision and gait do not directly threaten the idea of the soul. You can still believe in what Gilbert Ryle called “the ghost in the machine” and simply conclude that color vision and gait are features of the machine rather than the ghost.

However, as neuroscience begins to reveal the mechanisms underlying personality, love, morality, and spirituality, the idea of a ghost in the machine becomes strained. Brain imaging indicates that all of these traits have physical correlates in brain function. Furthermore, pharmacologic influences on these traits, as well as the effects of localized stimulation or damage, demonstrate that the brain processes in question are not mere correlates but are the physical bases of these central aspects of our personhood. If these aspects of the person are all features of the machine, why have a ghost at all?

By raising questions like this, it seems likely that neuroscience will pose a far more fundamental challenge than evolutionary biology to many religions. Predictably, then, some theologians and even neuroscientists are resisting the implications of modern cognitive and affective neuroscience. “Nonmaterialist neuroscience” has joined “intelligent design” as an alternative interpretation of scientific data. This work is counterproductive, however, in that it ignores what most scholars of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures now understand about biblical views of human nature. These views were physicalist, and body-soul dualism entered Christian thought around a century after Jesus’ day.

As I’ve noted before, I remain sceptical that this will pose much of a threat, largely due to the fact that non-materialist neuroscience is not particularly new – many famous neuroscientists (including the Nobel prize-winning John Eccles) have been explicitly non-materialist with few contemporary ripples.

Unlike evolution, which bluntly contradicts what many religious texts claim, very few holy books describe any concepts of the soul that can be directly contradicted by neuroscience.

However, there is certainly some interest in the neuroscience bashing among Christian fundamentalists, who recently held their first conference on the issue. We shall have to see how successfully they manage to enthuse their flock.

Link to letter ‘Neuroscience and the Soul’.
Link to DOI entry for same.

Brain implants and cognitive side-effect trading

This week’s Nature has an interesting article on the ethics of electronic brain enhancements. It does something quite unusual for an article on technological brain enhancements – it talks about the side effects.

Brain implants and ‘neuroprosthetics’ have been widely covered by the science media in recent years owing to a number of impressive advances but very little discussion has focused on the adverse effects.

In considering the ethics of using brain implants to enhance both the damaged and healthy brain, this article actually touches on some of the research on unwanted effects of deep brain stimulation.

Many patients with Parkinson’s disease who have motor complications that are no longer manageable through medication report significant benefits from DBS. Nevertheless, compared with the best drug therapy, DBS for Parkinson’s disease has shown a greater incidence of serious adverse effects such as nervous system and psychiatric disorders and a higher suicide rate. Case studies revealed hypomania and personality changes of which the patients were unaware, and which disrupted family relationships before the stimulation parameters were readjusted.

Such examples illustrate the possible dramatic side effects of DBS, but subtler effects are also possible. Even without stimulation, mere recording devices such as brain-controlled motor prostheses may alter the patient’s personality. Patients will need to be trained in generating the appropriate neural signals to direct the prosthetic limb. Doing so might have slight effects on mood or memory function or impair speech control.

The author of the piece argues that this does not raise any new ethical questions, as many psychiatric drugs also have side effects.

However, it’s probably true to say that ethical difficulties often arise with regard to specific side effects – talking about unwanted effects in general is a bit too vague to be useful.

Risk-benefit analyses are only useful when you know both the extent and quality of the risks and benefits and this is where it truly gets interesting.

The neuropsychology literature is full of surprising findings about what sort of functions the brain performs, suggesting that specific effects, wanted and unwanted, may have to be traded off against each other.

For example, is the loss of the ability to have an unconscious emotional reaction to a loved one worth a change in pathological gambling behaviour?

This is a hypothetical example based on the role of the ventromedial cortex in both situations, but who knows what sort of effects might need to be weighed up against each other.

Nature Network has an online discussion about the issues the piece raises which also links to the weekly podcast which has an interview with the author.

Link to Nature article ‘Man, machine and in between’.

The life and times of the truth serum

I just found this fascinating photo in a 1932 book on forensic psychology in the Universidad de Antioquia’s history of medicine section. It pictures the inventor of the truth serum, Dr House, administering the drug to an arrested man in a Texas jail.

The book is called Manual de Psicolog√≠a Jur√≠dica (literally ‘manual of legal psychology’) by the pioneering forensic psychiatrist Emilio Mira y L√≥pez and is a curious mixture of psychological theory, mental tests and descriptions of what seem like strange lie-detecting contraptions.

The history of the ‘truth serum’ is recounted in a fantastic article by medical historian Alice Winter from Bulletin of the History of Medicine which describes the Dr House’s invention and the influence it had on society of the time.

Truth serum was the creation of a rural Texas physician, Robert House. House claimed that the drug scopolamine hydrobromide, which was known for erasing the knowledge of painful events, could actually be used to extract intact information. His announcement was seized upon by journalists, police, and forensic scientists as heralding a potentially transformative new technology, and was just as robustly rejected by the legal community.

Scopolamine’s identity as an extractor of “truth” was indebted to certain earlier conventions‚Äînotably, research into altered psychic states such as mesmerism and hypnotism, which sometimes were said to create a confessional state. Scopolamine, in turn, created the shoes that other chemical agents would come to fill when, later in the decade and in the 1930s, the new barbiturates sodium amytal and sodium pentothal were said to have the potential to extract “truthful” memories.

These drugs largely act by reducing inhibition, with the hope that the person will speak more freely, but they have never been found to reliably make anyone more truthful.

Alice Winter was also recently interviewed on SciAm’s Mind Matters blog, in light of rumours that one of the men involved in the Mumbai attacks had been subjected to interrogation under ‘truth serum’.

Link to Winter’s article The Making of ‘Truth Serum’.
Link to ‘What is truth serum?’ from SciAm.