Count ’em

Wikipedia has a short but fascinating page listing animals by the number of neurons they have. There’s only about a dozen entries on there, but most interesting is that there is an animal with no nerve cells at all.

It’s called Trichoplax and apparently is a “a simple balloon-like marine animal with a body cavity filled with pressurized fluid”.

Apparently humans don’t come top of the pile, as both elephants and whales have more neurons.

However, it’s not the best referenced article in the world, to say the least, so I’m taking this last claim with a pinch of salt for the time being.

If you know better, do update the article with some more reliable sources.

Link to ‘List of animals by number of neurons’.

Wilder Penfield – charting the brain’s unknown territory

Neurophilosophy has a stimulating article on Wilder Penfield, the legendary Canadian neurosurgeon who pionered neuropsychological studies on the awake patient during brain surgery.

Penfield is most famous for his experiments where he electrically stimulated the brain of patients who had part of their skull removed during surgery to record what thoughts, behaviours and sensations arose from the excitation of specific parts of the cortex.

This research is still being done in modern times. My favourite is a 1991 study on electrical stimulation of the supplementary motor area SMA) by (no laughing now) Fried and colleagues.

What is most fascinating is that they found electrical stimulation could trigger the urge to movement or the expactation that a movement might occur, without triggering any movement itself. This stretched from quite vague feelings such as the “need to do something with right
hand” to very specific movement intentions such as the “urge to move right thumb and index finger”.

The gripping and typically well-researched Neurophilosophy article takes us right into the middle of one of these experiments performed by Penfield, and goes on to explain how his work became so influential in science and medicine.

Penfield was a pupil of Harvey Cushing, considered the founder of scientific neurosurgery, who was featured only last week on the same excellent blog.

Unlike Cushing though, who was reknowned for being a bit spiky, Penfield was widely considered to be a warm and friendly individual.

It’s probably the best article on Penfield you’re likely to find on the net, so well worth taking the opportunity of learning more about this key figure in our understanding of the brain.

Link to article ‘Wilder Penfield, Neural Cartographer’.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on Wilder’s operation on his sister.

Unreality TV and the culture of delusions

Today’s New York Times has an interesting article on the tug-of-war over the cultural influence on paranoid delusions and whether contemporary-themed psychosis is a new form of mental illness or just a modern colouring of an old disorder.

The article focuses on the recent interest in the ‘Truman Show delusion’, splashed over the media by two Canadian psychiatrists.

It’s quite hard to judge what they’re aiming to do as they’ve not published a scientific paper, and the article suggests they’re writing a book (is that the sounds of alarm bells I hear?), so I’m solely going on secondary sources.

But if they’re saying that delusions specifically about being in the Truman Show are somehow new and interesting, then they’re right in a way. Popular culture often turns up in paranoid beliefs – I worked with a gentleman once who believed he was in The Matrix – but its not earth shattering. It happens all the time.

If they’re saying that the general experience of The Truman Show – feeling that the world is being controlled, is unexplainably altered, or is uncannily mysterious – is somehow new, then they’re wrong by a good 100 years.

This was described by the German psychiatrist Karl Jaspers in the early part of the 20th century who called it Wahnstimmung, which is translated in the modern English literature as delusional mood or delusional atmosphere.

This is the description from Andrew Sims’ book on descriptive psychopathology Symptoms in the Mind:

“For the patient experiencing delusional atmosphere, his world has been subtly altered ‘Something funny is going on’; ‘I have been offered a whole new world of meaning’. He experiences everything around him as sinister, portentous, uncanny, peculiar in an undefinable way. He knows that he is personally involved but cannot tell how. He has the feeling of anticipation, sometimes even of excitement, that soon all the separate parts of his experience will to reveal something immensely significant.”

Actually, the article has a quote from me, although miscasts my view a little. I’m quoted as saying:

“Cultural influences don’t tell us anything fundamental about delusion,” said Vaughan Bell, a psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College in London, who has studied Internet delusion.

“We can look at the influence of television, computer games, rock ’n’ roll, but these things don’t tell us about new forms of being mentally ill,” said Dr. Bell, who said he had also treated patients who believed they were part of a reality television show.

Actually, I do think that cultural influences are fundamental in understanding delusions, but not in themselves. [Squiggly sound of tape rewinding] It seems the crucial qualification “in themselves” was missed off the quote.

In fact, in the paper I wrote on delusions about the internet I concluded by saying “The extent of influence may not be equal for all aspects of society and culture, although the fact that there is an influence at all, suggests that psychosis is only fully understandable in light of the wider social context.”

To quote John Donne, “no man is an island” and we can only fully understand or thoughts and behaviour, either everyday or pathological, with reference to the cultures we live in. But this doesn’t mean that each aspect of cultural influences us equally on all levels.

Link to NYT article ‘Look Closely, Doctor: See the Camera?’.

The music’s too loud and you can’t hear the lyrics

Today’s Nature has a teeth-grittingly bitchy review of psychologist Daniel Levitin’s new music and psychology book The World In Six Songs that would be entertaining were it not so surprisingly vitriolic.

I’ve not read the book, but when someone is criticising the author’s musical taste as immature, not once, but twice, in the world’s leading science publication, you know the review has gone beyond the point of healthy knock-about into the zone of below-the-belt punches.

What is it about Nature book reviews? We covered one in 2007 where the reviewer got stuck in despite not seeming to have read the book.

Actually, no one does a good book barney like the philosophers, who at least have the good grace to wrap their barbs in dry wit and satire rather than just spitting venom at each other (although they do that too).

If you want to get an idea of Levitin’s basic premise, New Scientist has an online article on the book. It seems to be applying the ‘basic plots’ idea to music.

This is widely discussed in literature where many people have claimed to have identified the seven, eight, twenty, thirty six (you get the idea) basic plots in stories, literature and plays throughout history.

Link to hatchet job in Nature.
Link to NewSci on The World In Six Songs.

Who needs sleep? The evolutionary slumber party

PLoS Biology has a cozy essay entitled “Is Sleep Essential?” that addresses the mystery of the purpose of sleep.

The article looks at sleep across the whole of the animal kingdom to examine how different species sleep and whether there are any animals that don’t sleep at all.

There are no convincing cases of sleepless animals it seems, and the authors, neuroscientists Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi, argue that sleep is therefore likely to be an essential function of living creatures.

The three corollaries of the null hypothesis [‘sleep is not required’] do not seem to square well with the available evidence: there is no convincing case of a species that does not sleep, no clear instance of an animal that forgoes sleep without some compensatory mechanism, and no indication that one can truly go without sleep without paying a high price. What many concluded long ago still seems to hold: the case is strong for sleep serving one or more essential functions. But which ones?

The article goes on to examine the hypotheses that sleep is important for regulating the body’s core functions, the brain, individual cells and that it is common to all species and must involve something that cannot be provided by quiet wakefulness.

More interesting is the question of whether all animals dream – and perhaps most intriguing, if so, how they might dream.

Indeed, it would be interesting to discover whether dreaming is a necessary function of sleep, or whether it is specifically linked to certain neurocognitive processes or even particular creatures.

Link to PLoS Biology article ‘Is Sleep Essential?’ (via Wired Science).

Extracting the stone of madness

Art-science blog Bioemphemera has an excellent piece on how Renaissance artists depicted madness as involving a stone in the head. Numerous paintings from the 16th and 17th century show operations to remove the stone and presumably cure the insane of their ‘folly’.

Despite the widespread depiction of this procedure, many examples of which are wonderfully illustrated in the Bioemphemera post, it’s not clear whether these paintings were documenting widespread practices of medical fakery, or whether they were entirely metaphorical.

Perhaps owing to this element of mystery, and to the striking artworks, the topic is often featured in science and medical journals.

A 1999 article in Trends in Neurosciences is probably the most comprehensive treatment, and makes an excellent complement to the Bioephemera piece.

Link to Bioephemera post ‘The Stone of Madness’.
Link to TINS article ‘Psychosurgery in Renaissance art’.
Link to PubMed entry for article.

Somatosphere

Somatosphere is an excellent new blog on medical anthropology, the study of how culture influences our understanding of health, illness and medicine.

While we tend to think of illnesses as specific encapsualted ‘things’ that happen to the body, it turns out that our culture and psychology has a huge influence on not just what we think of illness, but how we actually become ill.

Culture also shapes what we think of as ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ and this is one of the main driving forces behind how we express physical or psychological distress and expect it to be treated.

Of course, in the West, drug companies are persistently trying to shape our cultural understanding of what constitutes illness to better promote their product.

The picture is taken from an interesting Somatosphere post on methylphenidate (Ritalin) and ADHD. It’s a 1960s advert for the drug showing it was marketed as an antidepressant before ADHD was ever talked about.

The blog is written by several professional medical anthropologists and let’s hope it continues as it’s started as I’m throughly enjoying reading it.

Link to Somatosphere (via Neuroanthropology).
Link to Somatosphere post on Ritalin.

Book review: Sight Unseen

sightunseen.jpg

I cannot recommend strongly enough Goodale & Milner’s book on vision ‘Sight Unseen’. The title refers to the idea they pursue throughout the book that our everyday conception of vision is thoroughly misleading. Rather than vision just being ‘what we experience’, it is, in fact, a collection of specific eye-behaviour links (‘visuomotor functions’) of which our conscious perception of the world is only an evolutionary-recent addition. Goodale & Milner have spent their careers investigating this area and base their narrative around a selection of seminal experiments and case-studies of patients with selective brain injuries. Almost no background knowledge is assumed yet the book takes the reader into the intricacies of the psychology of vision. The triumph of the book is that it gives a flavour of how research proceeds while also managing to provide an intuition-shaking overview of the whole topic. I will never think about seeing in the same way again. This is a rare book which is accessible but will also be of interest to those working in the field. If you have any interest in how a research field develops or in the psychology of vision then you should read it.

Goodale, M. & Milner, D. (2004). Sight Unseen: An Exploration of Conscious and Unconscious Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press

(Full disclosure: I did not get asked to do this review, nor did I receive payment or a free book. I did it because I liked the book. I am actively engaged in research in this area)

Reminiscence rising

I had the pleasure of seeing the initial run-through of the upcoming London play Reminiscence on Friday and was completely blown away.

Inspired by a case study by world-renowned neurologist, Oliver Sacks (from his book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat), Reminiscence is the story of Mrs O’Connor who, in a bizarre neurological twist is transported, via evocative music, to the surreal world of her memories.

As her condition becomes increasingly difficult to fathom, Mrs O’Connor and her doctor go on a journey of discovery to the limits of science’s ability to fully account for what happens in our minds, and to the limits of our mind’s ability to fully recapture the past.

Reminiscence is a stunning piece of total theatre using live music (originally composed and inspired by the folk melodies of Eastern Europe) and spectacular visuals to take the audience on a fantastical, poignant and ultimately moving journey through the mind.

It’s going to be running from 9 ‚Äì 20th September in Jackson’s Lane Theatre in Highgate, and from what I’ve seen, it should be fantastic.

Effy, one of the composers, has managed to sort out some ‘2 for 1’ ticket offers, and says “you can contact the theatre and request two tickets for the price of one on 9 and 10th September (evening performances) and 17th September (matinee performance) but you must quote ‘epilepsy action’ when calling at the box office (020 8341 4421) to obtain this offer.”

I’ve been involved with the play for the last year or so, discussing the dilemmas of neuropsychology with the director, actors and composers.

After meeting the team I knew it was going to be good, but I was quite unprepared for how incredibly inventive and touching it is.

The piece literally plays with the fabric of reality and the original music is woven wonderfully throughout the piece.

By the way, I’m not financially involved in the play in any way, but can’t wait to see the final version as it should be emotionally, visually and musically stunning.

They’ll also be a free panel discussion after the show on the 14th and matinee on the 17th with some of the creative team, myself, and professionals from Headway and Epilepsy Action, all discussing the issues raised by the play – personal, ethical and scientific.

Link to Reminiscence website and details.

Kanizsa kiwi

A brilliant illustration of the Kanizsa triangle made out of kiwi fruit by Flickr user Yves Moreaux.

The Kanizsa triangle is often used to argue that a purely ‘bottom-up’ approach to understanding vision – that says we generate our perception solely from building up from the small details of what we see – is flawed.

In this case, it seems we fill in the outline of the triangle partly based on our prior expectations, because if we follow the contours in the image, there isn’t actually a triangle there.

The triangle illusion is named after the Italian psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa.

Kanizsa was also an accomplished artist who created numerous paintings that played with the concepts of perception.

Link to Yves Moreaux’s brilliant Kanizsa kiwi.
Link to online exchibition of Kanizsa’s paintings.

The alpha and omega of Crick and consciousness

I just found a touching tribute to Francis Crick published in PLoS Biology in 2004 that also describes some little know aspects of his life during his study of consciousness.

One fascinating part of the article discusses his meeting with David Marr, a brilliant young neuroscientist who was fated both to revolutionise our understanding of the brain and die of leukaemia at the age of 35.

The two scientists worked together for only a month, but their meeting obviously last a lasting impression on them both, as they feature in each other’s work and particularly influenced Crick’s thinking on the conscious mind.

David Marr was a young mathematician and physiologist whose doctoral thesis on a theory of mammalian brain function at Cambridge had brought him into some contact with Brenner and Francis. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he began working with Tomasio Poggio of the Max Plank Institute in Tübingen on a computational theory of neuroscience. Following an invitation from Francis, Poggio and Marr spent the month of April, 1979 extending their intense examination of the core problems of visual perception.

They spent hours sitting at the most western end of the Salk Institute, at the cafeteria or in Francis’s office, gazing into the Pacific Ocean with all its daily changes, discussing not only architecture of visual cortex and visual perception, but the ramifications of a good theory of brain function. We know of these conversations, as the probing of Marr by Francis is captured in the final chapter of Marr’s now classic book ‚ÄúVision‚Äù (Marr 1982). (Although Marr speaks of a three-way conversation, judging from our own experiences as Francis’s younger colleagues, the interlocutor simply seems to be Francis.)

Marr had been diagnosed with acute leukemia in the winter of 1978 (Marr and Vaina 1991). The one-month visit to the Salk Institute was an intellectual gift, for eighteen months later, Marr died. Francis had simultaneously lost a young friend and colleague who had brought an “incisive mind and creative energy” (Crick 1994, p. 77) and his best new ideas of a theoretical neurology to the brain (Marr 1969, 1970). And he saw the tragedy of Marr being cut off from solving the big problems for which he was so clearly destined.

During those early years, Francis must have thought that consciousness was tractable‚Äîif only the right way of thinking was brought to bear on it. Francis’s brain was capable of collecting and filing away many disparate data, which he could then combine uniquely and imaginatively, leading to that ‚Äúdramatic moment of sudden enlightenment that floods the minds when the right idea clicks into place‚Äù (Crick 1990, p. 141). Whatever his initial thoughts about the nature of the problem, Francis soon came to realize that the problem of consciousness was even tougher than he imagined, that the ‚Äúclick‚Äù was not happening with consciousness. In 1988, he wrote, ‚ÄúI have yet to produce any theory that is both novel and also explains many disconnected facts in a convincing way‚Äù (Crick 1990, p. 162).

Ironically, for a man who wrote a book called Vision, there seems to be no pictures of David Marr on the internet.

Of course, there are many of Crick, and the PLoS Biology article is an excellent tribute to the multi-talented researcher.

Link to article ‘Francis Crick’s Legacy for Neuroscience’.

Great history of brain surgery programme online

The BBC has just begun broadcasting a fantastic series called Blood and Guts on the history of surgery with the first episode on neurosurgery. If you live in the UK you can watch it again on the BBC iPlayer for a few days more, or otherwise, it has appeared online as a torrent.

It’s not the most coherent trip through the history of neurosurgery, more a collection of highlights (or, in some cases, lowlights), but it’s very well made and has some fantastic historical footage and interviews with modern neurosurgeons.

It covers Harvey Cushing, Phineas Gage, Jos√© Delgado, Walter Freeman and the frontal lobotomy, transcranial magnetic stimulation, deep brain stimulation and the cutting edge of brain surgery today. There’s a particularly interesting bit where lobotomy survivor Howard Dully has a brain scan and you can see the effect of his operation.

If you’re still hungry for more, BBC News website has an article and video clip of neurosurgery while the patient is conscious, and you can even buy the book of the series.

Link to BBC iPlayer archive (for 7 days).
Link to torrent of Blood and Guts brain surgery episode.

The genius of Harvey Cushing

Neurophilosophy has a beautifully illustrated and carefully researched article on Harvey Cushing one of the greatest neurosurgeons of the 20th century and a pioneer in treating previously inoperable brain tumours.

The article has loads of fantastic photos of Cushing at work, and also includes the one of his remarkably detailed drawings, illustrated in the image on the right.

Cushing is particularly famous for his work on the surgical removal of tumours, and for identifying what is now called Cushing’s syndrome, a disorder caused by high levels of cortisol in the blood, sometimes caused by a tumour in the pituitary gland. The tumour can be removed, curing this debilitating hormone disorder.

Neurophilosophy notes that Cushing removed more than 2,000 tumours during his lifetime. As we noted in an earlier article, one of these operations was to remove a brain tumour from the sister of Wilder Penfield, who was one of Cushing’s most famous pupils.

The Neurophilosophy article also has links to loads more photos and even a video of one of Cushing’s last operations.

Link to excellent Neurophilosophy piece on ‘Harvey Cushing photo journal’.

Strip Club Hunter, or the attractions of anatomy

It’s hard to start a paragraph with “I was strolling through London’s red light district the other evening…” without seeming a little dubious, but it’s the truth, so I shall have to begin by sounding suspect.

If your suspicions have already been raised, I doubt that if I say that I became interested in one of London’s biggest strip clubs for its importance in the history of neuroanatomy that I will seem at all convincing. But it was also the case, so I shall I have to also begin by sounding a little implausible.

The photo on the left depicts the neon drenched Windmill Theatre, the first venue in London to have risqué shows displaying the naked bodies of young women to breathless crowds of young men.

In the 1930s the owners realised there was a loophole in the law, and that if the naked girls stood still, they weren’t acting and so weren’t subject to legislation banning nude actors. Decades of titillating ‘living statue’ shows followed, using increasingly inventive ways of presenting the spectacle of the unclothed and unmoving girl.

The theatre and the Windmill Girls, like the one on the right, became legendary, even being the subject of a recent Hollywood movie. Time could not stand still, however, and with changing morals, inevitably, the law changed, and along with it, the theatre. It now operates as a standard lap dancing club in the centre of Soho.

While the Windmill Theatre advertises its pedigree in large strips of red neon, the seemingly nondescript building to the right has nothing but a modest blue plaque to mark its heritage, but it drew similarly excited crowds wanting to glimpse the anatomy of the naked.

The plaque reads “Hunter, William. This was the home and museum of Dr William Hunter, Anatomist (1718-1783)”. While the plaque and the association with one of history’s great anatomists gives it an air of respectability that the gleaming Windmill lacks, it was no less salacious in its day.

For over a thousand years, medical men had used the 2nd century Greek physician Galen as their guide to the structure of the human body. The trouble was, Galen was often wrong and his work had only recently been challenged owing to a taboo over dissecting the dead.

Two local men decided that Galen would have to go, and thankfully for us, they were riotously successful. William Hunter, to whom the Soho plaque is dedicated, is now famed for his contribution to anatomy, and his brother, John Hunter is considered the first scientific surgeon – the founder of modern surgery.

The Hunter brothers were living in a time when the taboo over cutting up corpses was slowly being broken, but dissections were still considered seedy. A kind of edgy horrorshow for the strong of stomach and certainly not for the ladies.

To compound the air of disgust, bodies were acquired on a ‘no questions asked’ basis, and many were rumoured to be from the murdered poor, or from bodies stolen from graves.

On one horrific occasion in 1784, the physician John Sheldon, proprietor of the Blenheim Street School of Anatomy, was presented with his recently deceased sister by one of the school’s regular ‘suppliers’.

But the first of these independent school’s of anatomy was opened by William and John Hunter, on Great Windmill Street, where the famous strip club now stands. William Hunter (shown on the left) actually lived on the same site, with his brother living round the corner, in Golden Square, before moving to a large house in the prestigious Leicester Square where his bust can still be seen.

One of the school’s star pupils was Sir Charles Bell, the noted physician who revolutionised the understanding of the nervous system through his careful anatomical dissections and clinical studies, and whose name still resides in our bodies through numerous eponymous labels and disorders that scatter the neurology textbooks.

The Hunter brothers did more than just tutor, however, they catalogued – virtually every new discovery, anatomical oddity and grotesque pathology they found.

This systematic study led to many new discoveries, particularly in comparative anatomy and the understanding of the nervous system. In fact, you can still visit the Hunter’s collection, at the Royal College of Surgeon’s Hunterian Museum, which, as I’ve noted before, is full of neuroanatomical curiosities.

Great Windmill Street has hosted anatomists, professional and pornographic, for centuries, and still continues its proud tradition, although not necessarily in the form that the Hunters would have imagined.

So that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

Experienced drivers perceive the road differently

Experienced drivers are not only better skilled at the actions of driving, but learn to perceive and attend to the road in a different way

We found that novices eye-movements were different from those of the more experienced drivers in several ways, though the extent of scanning on a particular section of dual carriageway was particularly limited. We have since examined this effect in the laboratory using video-based stimuli replicating the same impoverished scanning in novice drivers (e.g. Underwood, Chapman, Bowden, & Crundall, 2002).

We have also further explored why this might be the case, examining the possibility of whether this was due to the novice drivers having a deficient mental model or whether they were simply overloaded by the requirement to control the car (a process which requires less attention with increased experience), and found that even when car-control demands were eliminated, the effect persisted (Underwood et al., 2002).

Another aspect that appears to be important in understanding this effect is the extent of the inexperienced drivers’ peripheral attention (Crundall, Underwood, & Chapman, 1999, 2002). We found that the less experienced drivers have a smaller field of peripheral vision, and are more likely to miss even abrupt onsets. This is especially the case when they are focusing on something that is potentially dangerous.

For example if the car ahead brakes suddenly, a novice driver will focus so much attention on that car that they may miss the errant cyclist emerging from the side road. More experienced drivers have a wider spread of peripheral attention however, and this appears to be linked to their spread of search.

The paragraph is an excerpt from a commentary on an interesting article on the relevance of lab studies to the real world from the latest edition of the British Journal of Psychology. I’ll post more about the main article shortly, but this snippet just caught my attention, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Link to PubMed entry for commentary paper.

2008-08-22 Spike activity

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

If you’re after a level-headed discussion of the ‘contraceptive pill makes girls go for Mr Wrong’ story, Dr Petra has a great review.

SciAm Mind Matters has a great article by the Cognitive Daily duo on how tone deafness and bad singing may not go hand in hand.

A gentleman with extensive frontal lobe damage ‘loses’ his memory and identity, leading to a curious medical mystery – covered by Frontal Cortex.

ABC Radio National’s Health Report has a fantastic programme and video report on the ongoing problem of adolescent PTSD after the Bosnian conflict.

PsyBlog finds some vintage ‘candid camera’ TV footage illustrating social conformity with a too-good-to-be-true ending.

The burgeoning research on the use of psychedelic drugs in the treatment of medical conditions is covered by The Guardian – with brief podcast discussion.

Facial Frontier – sounds like the title of a porn movie but actually an article on the psychology of facial expression from The National Post.

The Guardian has a great podcast about music and the brain.

A number of new doom and gloom books about the effect of the internet on relationships, mind and brain and due out, report Wired. I predict many words, no hard evidence.

Live Science on a new study on how the ‘visual cortex’ is used in hearing and sound processing.

Another cool example of ‘hijacking intelligence‘ is covered by the Boston Globe that discusses the innovative use of CAPTCHs to solve difficult OCR problems.

We look at faces differently depending on our cultural background, according to new research covered by Wired Science. Full text of study in PLoS One.

The Times has a video of creepily lifelike avatar face animation which apparently ‘heralds new era for computer games’

Cool interactive brain games and learning suite from McGill University.

Science News on how dopamine has been a ‘forgotten’ neurotransmitter for sleep regulation. Forgotten? Huh? Amphetamine?

Levels of <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14563-aggression-written-in-the-shape-of-a-mans-face-.html
“>aggression can be partly predicted from face structure in ice hockey players, reports New Scientist.

MSN Lifestyle has a spectacularly bad and clich√©d article that is full of scientific misappropriation – rather ironically titled ‘The Male Brain, Explained’.