2009-03-06 Spike activity

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

The Economist discusses whether the famous Dunbar number, the maximum limit of human relationships, holds on Facebook.

A person who experienced the identity loss memory disorder dissociative fugue is interviewed in The New York Times.

BBC News reports that Malaysia is attempting to curb its suicide rate by planning to arrest those who attempt suicide.

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel asks what is an illusion, exactly?

Neuronarrative reports on a new study finding people tend to view leaders more favourably once they’ve died!

Drug giant and makers of Seroquel (quetiapine) lied about their data showing that the antipsychotic drug isn’t as effective as its competitors, reports the Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry blog.

The New York Times reports on research showing that interrupting an experience, whether dreary or pleasant, can make it significantly more intense.

The US Army’s group of ‘weaponised anthropologists’, the Human Terrain System, get slammed by a Marine Corps major in a military publication. Wired has the story.

The Onion, on news that a Lovecraftian school board member wants madness added to the curriculum. C’thulhu fhtagn!

Science News reports on a new study that links the genetics of Autism and bellyaches.

A long and confusing article on why minds are not like computers is published in The New Atlantis. Would greatly benefit from the insights from philosophy of mind.

Nature has an excellent article on the sociology of science and why we need a third way after the extremes of hard scientific realism and social constructionism. By the always interesting Harry Collins.

Gender effects in <a href="http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/41304/title/Playing_for_real_in_a_virtual__world
“>children’s play are seen in virtual worlds, reports Science News.

Furious Seasons reports on a recent study looking at the (large) placebo effect in studies of antidepressant treatment for adolescent depression.

Is patriotism a subconscious way for humans to avoid disease? asks the always engaging Carl Zimmer in Discover Magazine.

The Guardian reports on research suggesting that some people who suffer stroke develop PTSD after their experience.

Texting is associated with superior reading skills in children, reports the BPS Research Digest.

The New York Times has an interesting article looking at the psychology of rewarding students for study or good performance in light of mixed evidence of how effective the practice is.

ABC Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor has programme on how errors of grammar, punctuation and inaccurate scientific terminology can complicate important social issues.

Dr Shock covers some interesting research on the pros and cons on using PowerPoint presentations in teaching for learning by students.

Also from Dr Shock an awesome video showing how some stunning 3D illusion street art was created.

The New York Times reports that skin cells from people with Parkinson’s disease have been converted in a test tube to dopamine neurons.

Encephalon 65 faces the facts

The 65th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience carnival has just appeared online, this time hosted at Podcat Black and illustrated with some emerging unbidden from the world.

A couple of favourites include a fantastic post on the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus which outlines some Ancient Egyptian brain surgery and a series of posts introducing the principles of evolutionary neuroscience through the Cthulhu mythos.

There’s many more engaging articles and the pareidolia face images are great fun as always.

Link to Encephalon 65 on Podcat Black.

The cognitive neuroscience of eye contact

Image by Flickr user feastoffools. Click for sourceThe latest Trends in Cognitive Sciences has a fantastic review article on the cognitive neuroscience of eye contact, demonstrating how this fleeting social connection has a powerful impact on the mind and brain.

Past research has shown that making eye contact has an impact on social perception and subsequent behaviour.

The article notes that eye contact has been found to increase the likelihood of recognising someone and helps work out whether someone is male or female.

It also seems to increase general arousal and fixes attention – we’re less likely to notice things happening on the periphery of our vision if we’re staring at a face with eye contact than at a face where the eyes are diverted to the side.

In neuroimaging studies eye contact has been found to increase activity in a group of areas (medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal gyrus, fusiform gyrus) that have often been associated with social interaction across a wide range of studies.

Interestingly, the authors suggest that basic eye contact information might be detected by a specific subcortical mechanism that quickly detects simple light/dark differences, presumably to pick out the direction of the pupil, which then triggers more complex social processing to make sense of its social meaning.

It’s an interesting field, not least because recognising eye contact and following the gaze direction of others are thought to be some of the most fundamental building blocks on which social communication develops in babies.

Children with autism have been found to show radically different patterns of eye contact recognition and gaze direction, and the authors suggest that one cause could be a problem with the these eye contact neural circuits which leads to slow or impaired social understanding.

Link to article on eye contact.
Link to DOI entry for same.

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.