Mind Hacks

I don’t care about the bruises, just mind the clipboard

Psychologist Jesse Bering has an interesting article in Scientific American about dangerous psychology studies where researchers have risked life and limb to carry out some of the more extreme experiments in psychology.

Some of the investigations are quite unethical by today’s standards – two researchers simulating a sexual assault in the street to see how people would react, putting periscopes in public urinals to measure urine flow – but are an interesting insight into studies of by gone years.

Actually, psychologists are wusses in comparison to sociologists and anthropologists who often do ethnographic research in the most extreme of situations.

One of my favourites examples is sociologist Simon Winlow who was in a research group studying violence in the night time economy.

After debating how one could research the sociology of night time violence in all its gory detail, he decided that the only way to fully understand the culture was to get a job as a bouncer and see what transpires.

As it turned out, what transpired was a fair amount of fighting, most of which he wrote up and published as a fascinating insight into the culture of commercial violence.

His paper, ‘Get Ready to Duck. Bouncers and the Realities of Ethnographic Research on Violent Groups’, is fascinating, and full of wonderfully euphemistic academic phrases.

I love: “Before our covert research could begin we debated the safety and ethical issues that would no doubt arise”. Translation: is it ethical to kick nine shades of shit out of your research subjects if they’re fronting up for a scrap?

He wrote the whole lot up as a book, which I’ve not read, but is apparently excellent.

However, he wasn’t the first sociologist to take a beating in the course of his research. In the paper he notes:

Sanchez-Jankowski (1990) in his ten-year study of gangs in Los Angeles, New York and Boston, was the subject of physical attack both as part of initiation rituals, and as a result of being falsely accused of being an informant, while Jacobs (1998) was robbed at gunpoint, and suffered telephone harassment by a crack dealer who was one of his research informants.

To return to Bering’s SciAm piece, it turns out he’s now writing a regular column for the magazine called ‘Bering in Mind’ which is freely available online.

As Bering is one of the most interesting evolutionary psychologists around, it should be a good read.

Link to ‘Dangerous Psychology Experiments from the Past’.
Link to Winlow’s ethnographic study of bouncers and violence.

2009-01-16 Spike activity

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

A third US Army ‘Human Terrain’ researcher has died after injuries sustained in the field, reports Wired.

Scientific American Mind Matters discusses the neuroscience of noisy eyeballs – a curious synaesthesia-like condition.

The BPS Research Digest discusses research finding describing wine’s flavours helps people recognise specific types.

Channel N finds a fantastic video discussion on psychiatry’s clash over meaning, memory, and mind.

Interesting study in the British Medical Journal finds troubled / misbehaving kids have worse longer term health outcomes at a 40 year follow-up.

The New York Times has a brief piece on how tragedy and loss can lead to psychological advantages.

Top 11 compounds in US drinking water described by New Scientist include three psychiatric / neurological drugs – carbamazepine, meprobamate and phenytoin – although the last two are barely prescribed these days.

The Boston Globe has a great infographic explaining some ‘try-it-yourself’ brain tricks – most of which we’ve covered previously but handy to have in sketched out.

A psychologist in Gaza takes time out from being shelled to talk to The New York Times about the effect of total war on the population. I think you can guess the rest.

New Scientist has a short piece on a new cognitive model of surprise.

The evolution of manual dexterity is tracked by Neurophilosophy.

Corpus Callosum picks up on research on the possible antidepressant effects of vitamin D.

Death redefined as lack of engagement with the world by bioethicists mulling brain death and organ donation, reports Wired. Lack of engagement? By that definition I’m dead every dead every Sunday morning.

New Scientist discusses whether we’re over-medicalising sadness and discusses the benefits of negative emotions.

A brief article in The New York Times considers the possibility of developing an anti-love potion.

Scientific Blogging on research showing that too much TV delays language development in children.

More evidence that antipsychotics increase the risk of death by heart attack is covered by Furious Seasons.

Dr Shock discusses new research on the neurobiology of psychosocial stress and depression.

Probably the best ongoing coverage of the ‘Voodoo correlations’ controversy is on The Neurocritic. Do check it out.

Voodoo accusations false, reply ‘red list’ researchers

Some of the researchers under fire from the recent ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’ article have responded to the accusations of misleading data analysis by suggesting that the accusers have misunderstood the finer points of brain imaging, leading them to falsely infer errors where none exist.

In an academic reply, available online as a pdf, and in an article on the controversy published in this week’s Nature, some of the researchers responsible for the ‘red list’ studies set out their case.

As you might expect, the responses are fairly technical points about statistical analysis in neuroimaging research but are generally well made, suggesting that the accusers don’t fully grasp which measures are related or unrelated, that they don’t account for tests which reduce spurious findings, and that they didn’t ask in sufficient detail about the methods used and so have based their analysis on incomplete information.

However, one in particular seems a little hopeful and relates to a central point made by Vul and his colleagues.

Vul suggested that the correlations shouldn’t exceed the maximum reliability of two measures. As we discussed previously, if you have two measures that are 90% reliable (accurate), on average, you wouldn’t expect correlations higher than 90% because the other 10% of the measurement is likely to be affected by randomness.

However, the response from neuroscientist Mbemba Jabbi and colleagues suggest that this should be based on the maximum reliability ever found.

Vul et al. argue that many of the brain-behavior correlations published in social neuroscience articles are “impossibly high” and that “the highest possible meaningful correlation that could be obtained would be .74”. This categorical claim is based on a statistical upper bound argument which relies on the questionable assumption that “fMRI measures will not often have reliabilities greater than about .7”. However, logically, any theoretical upper bound argument would have to be based on the highest reliability values ever reported for behavioural and fMRI data, respectively (e.g. for fMRI, near-perfect reliabilities of 0.98 have been reported in Fernandez et al. 2003).

I think they’ve caricatured the argument a little bit here. Vul’s point was that most studies suggest an average reliability of .7, therefore, it becomes increasingly unlikely as correlations exceed this limit that they reflect genuine relationships.

It’s not a ‘this is strictly impossible’ argument, it’s a ‘it’s too unlikely to believe’ argument.

However, the majority of ripostes, that Vul and his colleagues have misunderstood the analysis process, are quite a counterpunch to the heavyweight criticisms.

As an aside, there’s an interesting comment from neuroscientist Tania Singer on how the study has been discussed:

“I first heard about this when I got a call from a journalist,” comments neuroscientist Tania Singer of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, whose papers on empathy are listed as examples of bad analytical practice. “I was shocked, this is not the way that scientific discourse should take place.”

Since when? The paper was accepted by a peer-reviewed journal before it was released to the public. The idea that something actually has to appear in print before anyone is allowed to discuss it seems to be a little outdated (in fact, was this ever the case?).

UPDATE: Ed Vul has replied to the rebuttal online. You can read his responses here (via the BPSRD which also has a good piece on the controversy).

It’s interesting that Vul’s reply essentially makes the counter-claim that the ‘red list’ researchers have misunderstood the analysis process.

This really highlights the point that neuroimaging analysis is not only at the forefront of the understanding of neurophysiology, but also at the forefront of the development of statistical methods.

In other words, the maths ‘aint obvious because the data sets are large, complex, and inter-related in ways we don’t fully understand. We’re still developing methods to make sense of these. This controversy is part of that process.

pdf of academic reply to ‘Voodoo correlations’ paper (thanks Alex!)
Link to excellent Nature article on the controversy.

Beyond hysteria

I’ve just discovered that the eScholarship Editions site that has 500 academic books freely available online, several psychology and psychiatry books among them, including the excellent book ‘Hysteria Beyond Freud’ which takes a historical look at this fascinating and curious condition.

‘Hysteria’ has meant many things in medical history and originally the Ancient Greeks used it to describe what they thought was a ‘wandering womb’. Its modern meaning implies the presence of what seem like neurological symptoms, such as paralysis, seizures or blindness, but without any detectable neurological damage.

Borrowing an idea from Pierre Janet, Freud popularised the idea that these symptoms were physical manifestations of psychological distress or trauma as a way of diverting the psychological pain from the conscious mind – essentially ‘converting’ the emotional energy to something else.

Although the idea of hysteria ‘psychological defence’ or ’emotional conversion’ has not been well supported by the evidence, it certainly seems the case that striking physical impairments can be unconsciously triggered.

Which is amazing if you think about it.

You could go blind, despite all your visual systems seeming to work perfectly, and you’d have no conscious control over it.

Recent evidence suggests this is possibly due to attentional systems in the brain impairing perceptual functions that occur early in the stream of consciousness, but it’s not clear why this happens.

The modern diagnostic manuals label hysteria as ‘conversion disorder’ or ‘dissociative disorder’ but they’re not necessarily good names because there’s still debate about whether the disorder actually involves ‘dissociation’ or ‘conversion’.

Many clinicians and researchers still use the term hysteria, or describe the symptoms as ‘functional’ or ‘psychogenic’, or perhaps even the more mysterious ‘medically unexplained’.

The picture on the left is called ‘The hypnotized patient and the tuning fork’ and was taken in the Salp√™tri√®re Hospital in Paris in 1889, where much early work on hysteria was conducted by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his colleagues.

It’s featured in a chapter of ‘Hysteria Beyond Freud’ about artistic and photographic depictions of the ‘hysteric’ which contains many such striking images.

Owing to the fact that hysteria is at once a ‘psychological’ and ‘bodily’ condition, images were an early way of studying the condition and popularising it among doctors.

Interestingly, although hysterical symptoms are not consciously produced, they can respond to suggestion. If you’re puzzled by how suggestions can have unconscious effects on the body, think placebo.

‘Hysteria Beyond Freud’ is a fascinating book that tracks the condition through history and there are several other freely available psychology and psychiatry books also available.

Link to chapter ‘The Image of the Hysteric’.

How psychiatrists think

An article just published in Advances in Psychiatric Treatment called ‘How Psychiatrists Think’ discusses how mental health physicians are susceptible to cognitive biases and how it’s possible to reduce the chance of error.

The article was inspired by a Jerome Groopman book we discussed in 2007 called How Doctors Think in which he tackles cognitive errors in medicine but omitted psychiatrists because he felt their thinking process were too complex.

Two psychiatrists, Niall Crumlish and Brendan D. Kelly, decided to take this as a challenge and wrote an article that applied the cognitive science of ‘heuristics‘ to psychiatric reasoning.

Heuristics are mental short-cuts we make to deal with everyday reasoning, and work made famous by Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has shown that these short cuts often lead us astray.

For example, the availability heuristic is where we judge likelihood on how easily something comes to mind – perhaps nudging psychiatrists towards incorrectly diagnosing a rare disorder if they’ve just been to a recent discussion on it.

The authors make the point that although they discuss how general reasoning biases applies equally to psychiatric decision-making, almost no experimental work has been done specifically on psychiatrists, meaning we’re still not exactly sure whether there are any speciality-specific mental errors that might regularly crop up.

However, they do note that there’s good evidence that being aware of these biases helps people overcome them.

Their article is a brief guide to some of the most common cognitive biases in us all, with an interesting insight into psychiatric thinking.

Link to ‘How psychiatrists think’.
Link to DOI entry for same.

Unusual forms of drug addiction, 1933

I’ve just found a curious paper from 1933 on unusual forms of drug addiction that contains some charming old-world views on the diversity of intoxication.

It was apparently presented at the wonderfully named ‘Society for the Study of Inebriety’ and uses the term ‘addiction’ synonymously with general drug use but does describe a number of curious ways of drug taking in different cultures.

…perhaps our author is more to be trusted in his description of the curious method used by the Zulu Kafis when indulging in the drug [cannabis]. It appears that these people place some burning manure on top of a handful of hashish, and, having covered up all with a small mound of earth, they dig air holes in the heap with their fingers.

Each man then lies down in turn and inhales the smoke through these vents. After a few whiffs they retain the vapour in their respiratory organs for a while with the object of inducing a violent attack of coughing and expectoration. It is evident that they like their dope full flavoured and take their pleasures as sadly as an Englishman is reputed to take his!

Full flavoured indeed!

It also notes that the word ‘muggles’ was used as slang for marijuana in ’30s New Orleans. Is there something you aren’t telling us J.K. Rowling?

Link to paper ‘Some Unusual Forms of Drug Addiction’.

How does it feel?

Our Bullshit Blue Monday competition is so popular, even the PR company that promote the day have entered!

In a comment to our original post, one of the founders of Green PR has entered a formula into the competition, and includes a long-winded rant suggesting that our criticisms of the nonsense formula are “snide”, a “‚ÄòLord of the Flies‚Äô-like, vendetta”, and are “too hidebound by logic”.

I’ve added my response below the fold so everyone can enjoy the comedy gold.

By the way, this is your last chance to get your entries in for our competition to invent a formula that describes what total bullshit these formulas are. Either leave it as a comment on any of the Bullshit Blue Monday posts or email me via this web form.

The best entry gets a prize!

Continue reading “How does it feel?”

Freud and the Uncanny Realm of the Unconscious

Chrome Fetus Comics has a wonderfully bizarre online comic entitled ‘Sigmund Freud and the Uncanny Realm of the Unconscious’ where our intrepid psychoanalyst battles the dark forces of the planet psyche.

It actually makes a pretty good stab at describing Freudian theories, or, as well as can be expected in the 50s sci-fi comic book theme.

This isn’t the only comic to feature Freud as a super hero. ‘The New Adventures of Sigmund Freud’ comic is also well worth a look.

Link to ‘Freud and the Uncanny Realm of the Unconscious’ (thanks RA!)
Link to ‘The New Adventures of Sigmund Freud’.

Learning Makes Itself Invisible

This month I am guest blogging at School of Everything, the website that helps people who want to learn meet people who want to teach. I’ll be posting here and there about what psychologists know about learning. Below is my first post…

Once you have learnt something you see the world differently. Not only can you appreciate or do something that you couldn’t appreciate or do before, but the way you saw the world before is now lost to you. This works for the small things as well as the big picture. If you learn the meaning of a new word, you won’t be able to ignore it like you did previously. If you learn how to make a cup of out of clay you won’t ever be able to see cups like you used to before.

This means it is hard to imagine what it is like for someone else who hasn’t learnt what you’ve learnt. The psychologist Paul Bloom calls this the curse of knowledge in the context of being unable to model what other people don’t know, rather than on what you yourself used not to know. If you’ve ever organised a surprise party for someone, or had another kind of secret, you’ll know the feeling. It seems so *obvious* what you are keeping hidden, but usually the person you are hiding it from doesn’t catch on. They don’t catch on because the clues are only obvious to you, knowing the secret, and you find it hard to imagine what they see not knowing it.

The reason this occurs is because of two facts about the mind that are not widely appreciated. The first is that memory is not kept in a separate store away from the rest of the mind’s functions. Although there are brain regions crucial to memory, the memories themselves are not stored separately from the regions which do perception, processing and output. Unlike a digital computer, your mind does not have to fetch stored information when it needs it, instead your memories affect every part of your perception and behaviour.

The second important fact about the mind is related to the first. It is that learning something involves changing the structures of the mind that are involved in perception and behaviour. Memories are not kept in a separate store, but are constituted by the connections between the neurons in your brain. This means that when you learn something — when you create new memories — it isn’t just *added* to your mind, but it changes the structures that make up your mind so that your perceptions, behaviour and potentially all of your previous memories are changed too.

We can see this in microcosm if we look at a small example of what is called one-shot perceptual learning. What do you think this is?

Now probably you don’t know, but I would like you do savour the feeling of not knowing. Try and taste, like a rare wine, what the perceptual experience is like. You can see the parts of the picture, the blacks and the whites, various shapes, some connected to others and some isolated.

If you now look at this popup here then you will have this taste washed out of your mind and irrevocably removed. It will be gone, and you will never be able to recover it. This is why I asked you to savour it. Now look at the original again. Notice how the parts are now joined in a whole. You just cannot see the splotches of black and white, the groups, the isolated parts, again. When you learn the meaning of the whole picture this removed the potential for that experience. Even the memory is tantalisingly out of reach. You can’t recover an experience that you yourself had two minutes ago!

One-shot learning is unusual. Most learning happens over a far longer time-scale, so it is even harder to keep a grip on what it was like to not know. All of us will have had the experience of a bad teacher who simply couldn’t see why we had a problem — they simply couldn’t see that we couldn’t understand or do what was obvious or easy to them. A good teacher has to have the dual-mind of knowing something, but also being able to empathise with someone who doesn’t know it, someone for whom what is obvious isn’t obvious yet. It is because learning has this tendency to make itself invisible that teaching is such a difficult and noble tradition.

Cross-posted at schoolofeverything.com

Link A Mindhacks.com post in which I discuss a similar thing in the context of the role expectations play in our perception.

The reference I took the picture from: Rubin, N., Nakayama, K. and Shapley, R. (2002), The role of insight in perceptual learning: evidence from illusory contour perception. In: Perceptual Learning, Fahle, M. and Poggio, T. (Eds.), MIT Press.

Remote Diagnosis Disorder

I’ve just found this funny post on ‘Remote Diagnosis Disorder’, satirising the tendency for people to diagnose each other with mental disorders on the basis of nothing but whims and prejudice.

People afflicted with this personality disorder suffer from an uncontrollable urge to diagnose individuals as suffering from one or more psychological disorders, specifically individuals which the RDD sufferer has had little or no direct personal interaction with. RDD sufferers often diagnose specific mental illnesses and may go so far as to offer treatment suggestions.

Rather than conducting a formal psychological exam, including a structured face-to-face or verbal evaluation, RDD sufferers are inclined to make snap diagnoses based on data such a very brief personal interaction, the opinions of third parties, asynchronous and/or indirect interaction (such as email), and the imaginary neuro-associations they‚Äôve created for the people they diagnose.

It’s particularly pertinent with the current tendency for media to obsess over the mental health of celebrities often digging up media commentators to give their arm chair ‘diagnoses’.

For example, the media provisionally diagnosed Britney with schizophrenia, histrionic personality disorder, bipolar disorder, post-partum depression, multiple personality disorder, drug addiction and post-partum psychosis, to name only a few that turned up in a five-minute web search.

You may be interested to know that most associations for mental health professionals ban the discussion of specific people in the public eye, because ignorant speculation from afar can be harmful, and if you’ve actually worked with the person you’re bound by medical confidentiality rules.

Link to Steve Pavlina on ‘Remote Diagnosis Disorder’.

‘Human terrain’ style teams to deploy in Africa

Wired reports that social scientists are being sought as contractors by the US Military to support their Africa Command in the form of a “socio-cultural cell”.

Rather than being directly employed by the US Army, as with members of the existing Human Terrain System (HTS), the cells look like they’ll be operated by risk management firm Archimedes Global – who, if the link from the article is correct, have a website that is so generic as to actually be slightly sinister.

The Wired news item cites a job ad, which isn’t online, but clearly describes a Human Terrain style set-up:

According to the job ad, the teams will work support AFRICOM’s Special Analysis Branch, which among other things will provide “operational multi-layered analysis and Joint Intelligence Preparations of the Operational Environment.” Cells will include personnel with expertise in “human terrain, all-source and Geo-spatial analysis.” A second socio-cultural cell will stand up within six months.

I am interested in why the US Military has recently begun to specifically deploy ‘Human Terrain’ teams to understand the structure of society when they already have an extensive PSYOPS service.

I found this fascinating 2004 defence report from the UK Government in the parliamentary records that describes the British military’s “information operations” that suggests that a ‘human terrain’ style focus, including the use of civilian social scientists, is already well integrated:

DTIO [Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations] provides strategic guidance on targeting and the cross-government information campaign, as well as advice to Ministers and the Chiefs of Staff. In DTIO itself, the staff of 98 includes a psychiatrist, an anthropologist and other specialist staff.

At the strategic level the British have been paying an American consultancy firm, the Redon Group, to provide advice on information campaigns for some five years. DTIO also has contacts with a variety of experts in the United Kingdom in universities and other institutions.

And as we discussed back in June, British PSYOPS already includes anthropology in its core techniques.

The report also hints that at the time, the US military was not addressing these issues, with a British Air Vice Marshal suggesting that the American forces were lacking a sensitive knowledge of the local cultures and that the UK forces were better at understanding the needs of the people.

However, it’s interesting that US military chose to address these issues by create a new ‘human terrain’ programme rather than simply assigning their existing PSYOPS units to the task.

Link to Wired on ‘Human Terrain’ teams for Africa.
Link to 2004 UK Government report on ‘Information Operations’.

The dialectics of the borderline

Time magazine has an interesting piece on borderline personality disorder (BPD), a sometimes stigmatised diagnosis that implies the patient has unstable impulsive emotional reactions and tumultuous relationships.

In contrast to popular perception, the ‘borderline’ part doesn’t imply the condition is between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ but that the patient is on the borderline between a psychotic and non-psychotic disorder, as low-level distortions of perception (fleeting hallucinated voices for example) and magical or paranoid thinking are not uncommon.

The stigma of the diagnosis comes from the fact that people with the label are widely considered by mental health professionals to be ‘difficult’ or ‘challenging’. The fact that self-harm is common in this group often leads to informal negative labels indicating that the patient is a ‘cutter’ or ‘manipulative’.

This has been borne out by various studies. Two studies have found that the label of personality disorder is associated with staff perceiving the person as less deserving of care, more difficult, manipulative, attention-seeking, annoying, and more in control of their suicidal urges and debts – even when everything else about them is the same.

A study specifically with psychiatric nurses found that they were more likely to offer belittling or contradicting responses to statements from patients with the diagnosis.

Borderline is, perhaps, one of the mythologised conditions in psychiatry.

The fact that many mental health professionals believe that the condition is ‘lifelong’ and ‘untreatable’ is contradicted by studies that have found that the majority of people who have the diagnosis improve drastically. The most comprehensive study has found that 75% of patients with BPD no longer qualify for the diagnosis after six years.

The article also discusses one of the most promising new treatments – a type of psychotherapy called dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) – that has been found in early trials to improve the emotional tolerance, self-control and day-to-day functioning of patients with BPD.

It was invented by psychologist Marsha Linehan (who according to the article, used to be a nun), based in part on the Buddhist techniques of mindfulness and emotion regulation.

The Time piece is a little overly-dramatic in places, but is generally well-written and avoids the usual clich√©s associated with BPD and is well worth a look.

Link to Time on ‘The Mystery of Borderline Personality Disorder’.

Predictably Irrational and relative value

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind just broadcast an interesting interview with behavioural economist Dan Ariely, where he discusses some of his fascinating work on our cognitive biases and why we find it so difficult to judge what will benefit us most.

I’m pretty sure it’s a repeat, but I mention it as I’ve almost finished the unabridged audiobook of his recent bestseller Predictably Irrational which is thoroughly excellent.

The first thing that strikes me is ‘wow, you’ve done so much interesting research’, as the book is largely about studies he has personally been involved with.

The second thing is ‘damn, I wish I’d thought of that’ as the studies are often cleverly conceived and tackle real-world corners of our reasoning and judgement.

The chapters on anchoring and on decoy options are particularly fascinating and he gives a vivid example of how decoy options work.

He notes that the UK magazine The Economist was offering a web only subscription for $59, a print subscription for $125 dollars, and a print-and-internet subscription also for $125.

It seems no-one would choose the print-only subscription – it seems obsolete – but its mere presence affects our reasoning and boosts the sales the more expensive option.

In a study to test this, Ariely gave participants the choice between these three subscription options, and to another group of participants, the choice only between web-only and print-and-internet subscriptions.

in the three option condition 16 people chose the internet-only subscription, none the print-only subscription and the other 84 chose the print-and-internet option.

As the print-only is obselete, it should make no difference whether it is part of the choice or not, when it isn’t there, in the two choice condition, the reverse pattern emerged. The majority, 68 people, chose the cheaper online option, while only 32 took the print-and-internet option.

In other words, the print-only is a decoy and it makes us think that the print-and-internet option is a better deal because it has something ‘free’, when in reality, this impression is just created because we’ve just been presented with a decoy worse deal

This relates to one of Ariely’s main points that he returns to throughout the book, that we tend to make relative judgements, and manipulating the context can skew our perceptions of value.

It struck me that this is how most people experience pitch and musical notes. A few people have ‘perfect pitch‘ and can label tones without reference to other tones. I wonder if some people have ‘perfect pitch’ with regard to this sort of value judgements.

The Predictably Irrational website is also very good, where Ariely has a regularly updated blog and has created free video summaries of each of the chapters.

All come highly recommended.

Link to AITM interview with Dan Ariely.
Link to Predictably Irrational website.

Personal genomics as a psychological mirror

Psychologist Steven Pinker explores the impact of personal genome sequencing services and how this information may help us understand our behaviours and preferences in an article for The New York Times.

Pinker is known for advocating that many psychological traits and cognitive abilities are highly heritable. He’s recently volunteered to have his entire genome sequenced and made freely available on the internet and so he explores what this information can actually tell us about ourselves.

One aspect of this information is that it can indicate the future course of your life – such as the vastly increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease if you’re the carrier of two ApoE Œµ4 alleles.

Like James Watson, Pinker has opted not to find out his ApoE Œµ4 status, preferring to avoid any additional “existential dread” that the knowledge might cause.

However, other genes predict weaker tendencies and ‘cognitive genetics’, the science of how genes interact with our mental functions, is beginning to blossom:

Dopamine is the molecular currency in several brain circuits associated with wanting, getting satisfaction and paying attention. The gene for one kind of dopamine receptor, DRD4, comes in several versions. Some of the variants (like the one I have) have been associated with ‚Äúapproach related‚Äù personality traits like novelty seeking, sensation seeking and extraversion.

A gene for another kind of receptor, DRD2, comes in a version that makes its dopamine system function less effectively. It has been associated with impulsivity, obesity and substance abuse. Still another gene, COMT, produces an enzyme that breaks down dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, the home of higher cognitive functions like reasoning and planning. If your version of the gene produces less COMT, you may have better concentration but might also be more neurotic and jittery.

The article covers a great deal of ground, aiming to educate about some of the basic principles of genetics as well as tackling the implications of knowing more about our own genetic codes.

By the way, if you’re interested in a thorough grounding in the science of behavioural and cognitive genetics, I highly recommend the somewhat expensive but very well written and remarkably comprehensive book Behavioural Genetics.

Link to NYT piece ‘My Genome, My Self’.

The morbid attractions of sweet anaesthesia

The New Republic magazine has an excellent article about drug addiction among anaesthetists. It tracks the story of one rising star in the speciality who became addicted and discusses discussing why opioid dependence is still a problem in the field.

It’s probably worth stressing that while anaesthetists have the highest rates of opioid addiction among doctors, the absolute rates are still actually quite low.

A 2002 study found level of drug abuse in the US to be 1.0% among faculty members and 1.6% among residents (junior doctors), and ‘drug abuse’ here doesn’t entail addiction – it just describes illicit use of controlled substances.

However, the increased rates of drug use are certainly cause for concern, this is from a review article on ‘Addiction and Substance Abuse in Anesthesiology’ published last year:

Anesthesiologists (as well as any physician) may suffer from addiction to any number of substances, though addiction to opioids remains the most common. As recently as 2005, the drug of choice for anesthesiologists entering treatment was an opioid, with fentanyl and sufentanil topping the list. Other agents, such as propofol, ketamine, sodium thiopental, lidocaine, nitrous oxide, and the potent volatile anesthetics, are less frequently abused but have documented abuse potential. Alcoholism and other forms of impairment impact anesthesiologists at rates similar to those in other professions.

The New Republic article is an engaging look at this issue that manages to tackle both the human issues and the view from the medical literature.

If you’re interested in the history of anaesthesia, ABC Radio National’s In Conversation recently had a fascinating discussion with historian Stephanie Snow, who’s just written a book on the subject called Blessed Days Of Anaesthesia.

It has loads of intriguing nuggets of information, such as the fact that resistance to the introduction to effective pain killing was bolstered by moral arguments as to the necessity of pain, but also scientific theories about the nervous system that suggested it was essential during operations to keep the body functioning.

A fascinating insight into early thinking about the value of pain.

Link to The New Republic article ‘Going Under’ (via MeFi).
Link to In Conversation on ‘Blessed Days Of Anaesthesia’.

(28 Dec 2011: updated links – thanks Tom!)

I struggle, fight dark forces in the clear moon light

A study just published online by the journal Schizophrenia Research has found a marked relationship between insomnia and paranoia in both the general public and in patients with psychosis.

The study, led by psychologist Daniel Freeman, was cross-sectional, meaning they just looked at whether the two things were associated and so it can’t say for definite which causes which.

In other words, it’s impossible to say whether lack of sleep triggers paranoia, or whether paranoid thoughts are more likely to keep us up at night.

However, the study also measured anxiety, known to affect sleep, and it accounted for part but not all of the sleeplessness, suggesting that both paranoia and insomnia probably feed into each other.

Sleep has an interesting relationship to mental illness. While sleeplessness and disturbed circadian rhythms have been linked to mood disorders for many years, sleep deprivation is known to have an antidepressant effect and is sometimes used to treat the most severe cases of depression.

By the way, the title of the post is taken from the lyrics to Faithless’ dancefloor masterpiece Insomnia which also gives a wonderful description of insomnia fuelled paranoia – although I suspect it also refers to the after effects of a night of drugs-based clubbing so probably not exactly what the researchers had in mind.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

Full disclosure: Two of the study authors are research collaborators.