Mind Hacks

Is this the most incompetent Wikipedia edit ever? Green Communications, the PR company who promotes the Blue Monday ‘worst day of the year’ bullshit festival, recently tried to ‘anonymously’ delete criticism from the Blue Monday Wikipedia page without realising their IP address was a complete giveaway.

This obviously failed, and they just tried to paste on a whole block of text onto the bottom of the article that started with (and I kid you not):

THE FOLLOWING CONTENT IS ALL FACTUALLY CORRECT. IF YOU DISPUTE IT PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR.

Spank me nanny! Spank me!

Actually, they originally tried to do this from an anonymous IP address that didn’t track back to Green Communications, but then blew their cover by using a registered account to reinsert the text – time under the name ‘Honest Green’ and with the added power caps.

Now, I’m going to assume that the information is ALL FACTUALLY CORRECT so I want to address the last line of their bolt-on Wikipedia press release:

The on-going campaign is run by Wakefield-based public relations company GREEN Communications, on a non-commercial basis as part of its own corporate social responsibility activities.

Let’s make this clear. Green Communications – I applaud your efforts for running non-commercial PR campaigns aimed at promoting mental health. It’s a vastly neglected area that gets scant attention in the press.

However, the reason that the ‘Blue Monday’ / worst day of the year formulae rubbish gets the back up of medical doctors, psychologists and researchers is not just that it’s ridiculous.

It’s that promoting the misunderstanding of science and psychology actually harms people’s ability to make informed choices about their mental health.

It devalues genuine evidence-based work in the area and misleads people as to what they need to consider when trying to manage their own emotions, or, if the need arises, decide on what sort of help or treatment they want when things get too difficult to manage their own.

So, I’d like nothing more than next year, you run a non-commercial PR campaign aimed at empowering and informing people about depression that wasn’t based on misinformation.

You’re an award winning PR company, so I’m sure you can find an equally catchy way of grabbing people’s attention that doesn’t involve obvious drivel.

UPDATE: Just a reminder that you can still enter our Bullshit Blue Monday make up your own nonsense formula competition where you could win a prize!

Link to Bullshit Blue Monday antidote from Ben Goldacre.
Link to Bullshit Blue Monday antidote from Petra Boyton.

A new study has found that laughing gas, a common anaesthetic used by dentists, increases the vividness of imagination and also increases suggestibility, making people slightly more likely to experience hypnosis-like suggestions.

The study, just published in the medical journal Psychopharmacology, stems from the informal observations of dentists that patients under laughing gas (nitrous oxide) sedation are particularly suggestible and the researchers aimed to test this out in more detail.

The researchers randomised patients at a dental surgery to either receive a nitrous oxide and oxygen mix, or just oxygen, with the patients not knowing which they were receiving. Two weeks later they were invited back and given which ever type of gas mix they hadn’t already had.

While inhaling each gas mix, the participants were asked to complete a measure of imaginative ability, rating the clarity and vividness of their visual imagery, as well as being given various suggestions – without the hypnotic induction – from the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale.

This includes suggestions that your hands might move of their own accord, to suggested temporary paralysis, to a suggestion to experience hallucinated sounds – to name but a few.

The researchers found that nitrous oxide boosted imaginative ability considerably, and increased suggestibility modestly but reliably.

The paper discusses the small but interesting literature on which drugs affect suggestibility, and reviews some of the past studies which have tested some quite surprising substances in this way:

Little research has investigated the effects of other drugs upon suggestibility in a controlled manner. Sjoberg and Hollister (1965) administered lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), mescaline and psilocybin separately and in combination to participants and measured imaginative suggestibility before and after drug administration.

Gibson et al (1977) measured the effect of benzodiazepine administration upon hypnotic suggestibility, and Kelly et al (1978) tested the effect of cannabis intoxication upon the imaginative suggestibility of participants initially scoring low to medium on a standardised scale.

Details of these studies and the resulting changes in suggestibility are given in Table 2 [see further down this page for a web version]. The greatest changes in suggestibility, in order of decreasing size, are evident after administration of nitrous oxide, cannabis, LSD, mescaline, combination of [LSD+mescaline+psilocybin] and diazepam.

So it seems that nitrous oxide may have a particular suggestibility boosting effect.

By the way, the study was led by psychologist Matt Whalley, who also runs the excellent Hypnosis and Suggestion website, undoubtedly the best internet resource for scientific information on hypnosis.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to excellent Hypnosis and Suggestion website.

The Neurocritic has an excellent post explaining the science of why some of the most widely reported brain scanning studies on social interaction are flawed.

The new analysis has been led by neuroscientist Edward Vul and we reported on this bombshell last week, but this new post clearly explains the problems for those not wanting to plough through the original academic text.

The paper stems from the observation that some of the correlations between brain activity and psychological states in some of these headline studies are remarkably high, one as high as .88

A correlation is a test of how much two measures are related. A correlation of 1 means that the two measures are perfectly in sync, every change in one is mirrored by changed in the other, whereas a correlation of 0 means that there is no syncing at all. Any number in between gives a sliding scale of how much ‘syncing’ there is .

So a correlation of .88 is pretty impressive and suggest near-perfect syncing. Except that it’s higher than would be possible based on how accurate the two measures are.

Imagine that you have a 10cm rule than can only measure to the nearest centimetre. It means that the accuracy of your ruler is only 90% because it fudges any part-centimetre length down the nearest centimetre.

It would be almost impossible to get a perfect correlation using this ruler, because there’s 10% randomness – or 10% out-of-syncness, in every measurement.

And once you know how much randomness there is, you can estimate the maximum correlation you can get because you know the randomness is not going to reliably sync with anything else.

Edward Vul and his team did this with these headline social brain imaging studies and found that some produced correlations higher than would be possible from what we know of how accurate the brain scanning and psychological measures are. So something must be up.

It turns out that some studies deliberately picked out brain areas based on which voxels [micro areas] already had high correlations, while others only reported correlations from a spot in an area that was already the most active.

In other words, they were only selecting the cream of the crop but were reporting it as if it was the general picture.

Neurocritic goes into this in more detail in relation to specific studies, and it’s well worth checking out for the gory details.

Importantly, the researchers of the flawed studies weren’t trying to ‘fake’ results, there were using a common method which Vul has discovered is flawed.

He has called for the researchers to use a more representative form of analysis and correct their findings. We’ll see what happens.

Link to Neurocritic on ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’.
pdf of Vul’s paper.

This month’s British Journal of Psychiatry has another one of its regular ‘…in 100 words’ series – this month giving a concise guide to ‘psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry’.

It’s written by psychiatrist and historian of psychopharmacology David Healy, who’s had more than his fair share of heat from the drug industry.

Psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry – in 100 words

Little Pharma made profits by making novel compounds; Big Pharma does it by marketing. Doctors say they consume (prescribe) medication according to the evidence, so marketeers design and run trials to increase a drug’s use. They select the trials, data and authors that suit, publish in quality journals, facilitate incorporation in guidelines, then exhort doctors to practise evidence-based medicine. Because ‘they’re worth it’, doctors consume branded high-cost but less effective ‘evidence-based’ derivatives of older compounds making these drugs worth more than their weight in gold. Posted parcels meanwhile are tracked far more accurately than adverse treatment effects on patients.

Link to psychiatry and the pharma industry in 100 words at the BJP.

Two weeks today will be the annual ‘Blue Monday‘ bullshit festival, where Cliff Arnall and his “formula” are wheeled out in an attempt to make us believe that it tells us about the most depressing day of the year. However, Mind Hacks is running a competition that may prove a useful antedote and you can enter.

To be fair, the day is usually quite depressing, but only because we have to put up with the usual rubbish masquerading as science in the media.

The whole idea is still being pushed by a PR agency, but rather disappointingly, the respected UK charity the Mental Health Foundation have seemingly shelled out hard cash for [see update below] the dubious pleasure of using the opportunity to try and promote mental well-being.

Promoting mental health is, of course, a fantastic idea, but using utter gibberish and pseudoscience to do so is like trying to promote a healthy diet by telling people that apples are particularly bad for us on certain days.

So, to help cheer us all up we want you to come up with a formula that describes what total bullshit these formulas are.

Be creative. As with the original formula, don’t feel you have to be chained by the laws of maths, or even logic.

The most creative entry will win a prize. Sent to you where ever you are in the world.

Be careful not to say nasty things about Mr Arnall himself, rumour has it has he a tendency to threaten legal action against people who say things that could be interpreted as casting aspersions on him directly, although it would be perfectly acceptable to point out that his formula is utter nonsense.

You can either include your entry as a comment to this post, post them to your own blog and send us a link, or email me directly via this web form.

Not only will you be helping the public understanding of science through sarcasm, you could win a prize and get featured on Mind Hacks.

We will print the best entries a few days before the date itself.

The game is afoot!

UPDATE Green Communications commented on a later entry to say that the Mental Health Foundation has not paid for this publicity campaign and that it is being completed on a non-commercial basis.

The Boston Globe has an interesting article on how we interact with urban environments and discusses research suggesting that contact with nature has significant cognitive benefits.

It’s a fascinating article that touches on studies that have found a range of benefits for having contact with a natural environment:

Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard…

City life can also lead to loss of emotional control. Kuo and her colleagues found less domestic violence in the apartments with views of greenery. These data build on earlier work that demonstrated how aspects of the urban environment, such as crowding and unpredictable noise, can also lead to increased levels of aggression.

It does, however, contain one misreading that suggests that urban environments blunt our mental sharpness, based on a recent study led by psychologist Marc Berman.

The study actually found that a walk in an urban environment had no significant effect on our mental abilities, although a walk in a natural environment improved them.

Each of these changes was measured relative to an initial assessment conducted indoors and the same pattern emerged when participants just viewed pictures or natural or urban environments.

As far as I know, there is no evidence that urban environments have a negative impact on our cognitive abilities. Comment or get in touch if you know otherwise.

However, we do know that living in an urban environment is one of the most reliable and important environmental risk factors for the development of schizophrenia.

It’s not clear exactly what it is about urban living that raises the risk, although there’s a good commentary by psychiatrist Jim van Os that discusses some of the current explanations.

Link to Boston Globe article on urban impact.
Link to study on the cognitive benefits of interacting with nature.
Link to DOI entry for same.

Mind Bites is a beautiful photography project by artist Will Lion which combines striking images with quotes from cognitive science research.

You can either view it as a Flickr photo set or as an interactive Flash gallery.

The image on the left is one of the more abstract pictures, but the full range contains everything from portraits, to landscapes, to still life photos – with the research quotes taken from studies on memory to hormonal influence on the earnings of lap dancers.

I can’t help thinking these would make great pictures to have in a psychology department which are usually adorned with faded conference posters and dull oil paintings.

The full set of Will Lion’s ‘Mind Bites’ project is both visually engaging and thought-provoking which is the essence of much great art.

Link to images as Flickr photo set.
Link to Mind Bites as interactive Flash gallery.