Detecting suicidal intent in the unconscious mind

The Situationist has just alerted me to a fantastic article in the Boston Globe on the development a cognitive test for suicidal thoughts that doesn’t rely solely on the conscious mind.

The test is a variant of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that has been used to look at our automatic associations between different concepts, based on how quickly we can categorise them.

We’ve discussed in it more detail previously but it essentially relies on the fact that if you have an pre-existing association between two concepts, say, the concepts ‘blonde’ and ‘stupid’, making similar associations will be faster than associating ‘blonde’ and ‘clever’ because you’re going to be quicker doing whichever classification best matches associations you already have.

Most of the research has been done on implicit social biases, finding that even people who have no explicit prejudices against blondes, foreigners, men or whomever, might find they automatically associate certain negative concepts with these groups.

However, as the test purely measures associations between concepts, it can be used to look for other implicit biases. In fact, the researchers featured in the Globe piece have used it to test for implicit associations between the concept of self and suicide.

Most suicidal patients will admit they are at risk of harming themselves. Contrary to popular belief, suicidal patients don’t necessarily want to die, they just want the pain to stop and will be upfront if they think professionals can help.

Some, however, may have decided that death is the only relief, or they may be unable to see clear alternatives owing to the effects of mental illness on thinking.

Suicide risk is assessed on the basis of people’s actions and what they say, so a completely determined person can talk their way through a risk assessment.

This new research is testing the IAT as a way of assessing suicide risk, even if the person is denying they are suicidal.

The study, led by Dr. Matthew Nock, an associate professor in the psychology department at Harvard University, is called the Suicide Implicit Association Test…

But critics question whether the test is actually practical, and up until now no one has tried to apply it to suicide prevention. As part of his training, Nock worked extensively with adolescent self-injurers – self-injury, such as cutting and burning, is an important coping method for those who engage in it, though they are often unlikely to acknowledge it. Nock thought that the IAT could serve as a behavioral measure of who is a self-injurer and whether such a person was in danger of continuing the behavior, even after treatment.

In their first major study, Nock and Banaji asserted that the IAT could be adapted to show who was inclined to be self-injurious and who was not. And more important, they said, the test could reveal who was in danger of future self-injury.

It’s an interesting idea and the early results look intriguing, although as the article notes, the proof will be how well it actually works in practice.

One difficulty with risk assessment in psychiatry is its almost impossible to do ‘ideal’ outcome studies because of the ethical implications.

For example, lets say your new risk measure predicts someone will kill themselves. From a statistical point of view, you’d want to wait and see if they do, so you can compare these positive predictions with the negative predictions and get an accuracy measure.

But from a purely humane point of view, you’re going to intervene and try and help the person, meaning risk assessments are not always based on ‘ideal’ statistical information.

The article has an excellent discussion of some of the wider ethical and practical issues involved, drawing on the writers own experience of his brother’s suicide.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘On the Edge’ (via The Situationist).

Waterfalls, adaptation and light

Firstly, you’ll have to excuse the somewhat ‘in house’ nature of this post, as it’s me writing about Christian writing about Tom. It’s an account of Tom giving an address to the Association for the Teaching of Psychology where he conducted a fantastic demonstration of how you can test out whether your brain adapts to certain visual conditions ‘locally’ on an eye-by-eye basis, or ‘centrally’ in eye independent perceptual brain areas.

Moments into the keynote talk, the teachers and I found ourselves blinded by darkness. As our eyes adjusted, we were told to cover one eye with our hands before the lights were raised again. A little wait for our open eyes to become light-adjusted and then the lights re-dimmed. What would happen to our vision this time? The answer depends on whether adaptation to light levels occurs centrally, in the brain, or locally in each eye. The audience tested this, looking through each eye one at a time and discovering the strange experience of having one eye adapted to the light and one to the dark, thus showing that light adaptation occurs locally. Both eyes open led to a strange, grey, grainy, effect. ‚ÄúWhoever said psychology isn’t useful is wrong,‚Äù Stafford said. ‚ÄúYou now have the perfect strategy for visiting the toilet in the night and finding your way back to your bed in the dark.‚Äù

Light adaptation may well occur locally, but what about adaptation to motion? A huge video of a waterfall filled the screen. After a minute staring at the cascading water, the video was stopped and the audience experienced the well-known illusion of the water appearing to flow upwards. But what if the flowing water was watched with just one eye (with the other covered), with the paused video then observed through the previously covered eye? The illusion was still experienced, thus showing that in this case, adaptation to motion had occurred centrally, in the brain.

If you don’t have a waterfall handy, you may be interested to know it’s a form of ‘motion after effect‘ illusion and there’s a similar demonstration online that you can try. If you go to that link, click ‘detach’ and resize the window to get a bigger version.

You’ll need to supply the room and light yourself though. The hall full of teachers is optional.

Link to BPSRD on visual adaptation.
Link to motion after effect example.

Silence, but for the clouds moving across the sky

Lee Tracy is an artist who creates poems out of brain scans.

The image is from a 2006 exhibition called Negative to Positive that was shown in the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago.

Each image is an CT scan of the artist’s brain, mounted in a light box and etched with a statement of the profound to the whimsical.

If you’re a neuroscientist and your lab needs more poetry or you’re an artist and your studio needs more neuroscience, you can purchase the pieces from the artist through Etsy.

Link to Lee Tracy’s poetic CT scans on Etsy (thanks Sandra!).
Link to Time Out review of ‘Negative to Positive’.

Whatever happened to symptom substitution?

Symptom substitution is at the core of Freudian psychology but according to a new article in Clinical Psychology Review there is virtually no evidence for its existence and the concept should be abandoned.

The idea is that if you treat a symptom, say a phobia of social situations, without addressing the underlying conflict, another symptom will just appear because the core problem is unchanged. It is based on the Freudian theory that all symptoms of mental illness are simply a reflection of an underlying unconscious conflict.

Freud was inspired by the first law of thermodynamics that says that energy cannot be created or destroyed just turned into another form. His psychology, and much Freudian-inspired psychodynamic psychotherapy that follows, applies a similar idea to emotions.

In this model, a conflict is caused by a forbidden unconscious impulse being held back by our conscious ego. Supposedly, we want to banish them from our conscious mind to maintain a positive self-image, so we repress them into our unconscious. But because they can’t just disappear they are expressed in other ways – i.e. as neurotic symptoms.

However, this model also plays an important symbolic role in the politics of mental health. It suggests that psychoanalysis is the only truly effective treatment, because it supposedly deals with the ‘root cause’, while drugs, behaviour therapy and CBT just alleviate symptoms and leave the patient open to further suffering.

Rather unusually for a Freudian idea, it leads to a directly testable hypothesis. Psychoanalytic treatment should lead to a better long-term prognosis, whereas we should see other other symptoms appear after treatment with other approaches.

Psychologist Warren Tryon decided to look at the medical literature to see whether other approaches were more likely to result in the appearance of other symptoms, and found no evidence from relevant empirical studies.

In fact, Tryon found only two cases studies that claimed to provide direct evidence for symptom substitution and one of them didn’t even fulfil the definition, it just reported that the same symptoms came back – therefore describing a relapse rather than a substitution.

Despite their being a lack of evidence so far, he does note that not many studies have directly addressed the issue, but proposes a direct test:

The following experimental design could identify genuine psychoanalytic symptoms. Form two groups of demographically matched patients displaying a hypothesized symptom. Provide psychoanalytic treatment to one group and symptomatic treatment to the other group. The hypothesized symptom can be considered to be a bone fide psychoanalytic symptom if patients receiving psychoanalytic therapy get better and symptom substitution occurs in patients receiving symptom oriented therapy. Helping these patients to get better by providing psychoanalytic therapy would provide additional supportive evidence and be ethically responsible. The literature review reported above indicates that the presence of bona fide psychoanalytic symptoms has yet to be demonstrated.

Link to ‘Whatever happened to symptom substitution?’ (thanks Karel!).
Link to PubMed entry for article.

Strippers for taxation reform

Frontal Cortex has an excellent post on the near futility of election coverage and why people tend to vote with what they feel, rather than what they know.

The piece reviews a whole range of studies that have highlighted possible non-issue influences on people’s voting preferences, from the weather to the facial expressions of news presenters.

One other line of research has found that facial structure can predict leadership, allowing people to reliably pick out business leaders or political winners just from a photo of their face.

Advertisers have long known that marketing products on the basis of facts is a lot less effective than marketing on the basis of appeals to emotion, desire and self-image.

While this is often labelled ‘sex sells’, ‘you-can-be-sexy sells’ is just as widely used.

Traditionally, this avenue has not been open to political candidates since it leaves the candidate open to the emotional counter-attack of accusations of impropriety.

After seeing the popularity of the ‘Obama Girl’ video, it struck me that the internet opens up this avenue, as supporters not officially associated with a candidate can now make their own wide-coverage sex sells promotions without ‘sullying’ the name of the official party machine.

As Frontal Cortex notes:

The problem, as political scientist Larry Bartels notes, is that people aren’t rational: we’re rationalizers. Our brain prefers a certain candidate or party for a really complicated set of subterranean reasons and then, after the preference has been unconsciously established, we invent rational sounding reasons to justify our preferences.

Link to Frontal Cortex on ‘Rational Voters?’.

Is banking on neuroscience a false economy?

The Economist has a great article taking a wide-angle view of neuroeconomics, asking whether it actually contributes anything useful to our understanding of economic systems or whether its just a personal psychology of gains and losses that won’t actually scale.

The fiercest attack on neuroeconomics, and indeed behavioural economics, has come from two economists at Princeton University, Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer. In an article in 2005, “The Case for Mindless Economics” [pdf], they argued that neuroscience could not transform economics because what goes on inside the brain is irrelevant to the discipline. What matters are the decisions people take—in the jargon, their “revealed preferences”—not the process by which they reach them. For the purposes of understanding how society copes with the consequences of those decisions, the assumption of rational utility-maximisation works just fine.

But today’s neuroeconomists are not the first dismal scientists to dream of peering inside the human brain. In 1881, a few years after William Jevons argued that the functioning of the brain’s black box would not be known, Francis Edgeworth proposed the creation of a “hedonimeter”, which would measure the utility that each individual gained from his decisions. “From moment to moment the hedonimeter varies; the delicate index now flickering with the flutter of the passions, now steadied by intellectual activity, low sunk whole hours in the neighbourhood of zero, or momentarily springing up towards infinity,” he wrote, poetically for an economist.

Part of the scepticism seems to originate from more general reservations about the results of brain scanning studies being over-interpreted, echoing wider concerns in cognitive neuroscience.

What’s interesting though is that the article mentions that neuroeconomics researchers are turning to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) – a technique that alters brain function for a few hundred milliseconds while people are actively completing tasks.

Because TMS alters brain function, it’s not just showing you a correlation like brain scans do. If task performance changes when you’ve altered that brain area you can infer that the particularly part of the cortex you’ve targeted is causally involved in the psychology of the task.

Along these lines, one recent high-profile study [pdf] managed to alter participants’ fairness behaviour in the Ultimatum Game (a common experimental task) when the function of the upper outside surface of the right frontal lobe was disrupted.

Link to The Economist article ‘Do economists need brains?’.
pdf of ‘The Case for Mindless Economics’.
pdf of TMS study on fairness in the Ultimatum Game.

2008-07-25 Spike activity

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

Neurophilosophy has a beautiful quote from the great Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal.

The miseries of losing one’s sense of smell are covered by an interesting Slate article on this neglected sense.

Cognitive Daily looks at a study which attempts to answer the question ‘Why do more Asians have perfect pitch?‘.

Two novels on identity theft are touched on by My Mind on Books.

The New York Times has an excellent multimedia feature on ‘The Voices of Bipolar Disorder’ where people affected by the condition discuss their experiences.

Delusions reflect Hollywood movie ‘The Truman Show‘.

Nature reviews the latest Disney animated feature about an artificially intelligent robot Wall-E.

The Female Brain or one female’s perspective? Neuroanthropology reports from a recent ‘critical neuroscience’ conference and a discussion about popular books on sex difference.

Scientific American on why anecdotal evidence can undermine scientific findings for most people.

SciAm’s Mind Matters blog on the neural energy drain of decision-making.

The BPS Research Digest looks at a study that reports novelty seekers have a right-sided spatial bias.

The neuroscience of insight is discussed in a tantalising excerpt from a New Yorker by The Frontal Cortex.

Psych Central has an interview with the insightful psychiatrist Daniel Carlat.

BooYaa! Straight-talking judge has some hard words for Eli Lilly in the ongoing court case over antipsychotic olanzapine (Zyprexa).

Misdirected magic

Just one more on the magic. I just got this email from Mind Hacks readers Stefano suggesting that stage magicians that use psychological language actually pollute the public’s understanding of science. He also gives a much better, and, I’m guessing, more accurate explanation of the hand-raising trick in Keith Barry’s TED performance.

As a psychologist, I have to say I dislike the new sort of mentalism that we’re seeing nowadays. Derren Brown (an incredibly talented performer, as you said) tries to portray his show as something more than old-fashioned magic by introducing psychological terms and studies, somewhat erratically. I understand that his use of scientific terminology might be part of the misdirection, but it really makes me cringe to see he perform ridiculous feats and justify it by citing things like the Milgram study, concentration abilities or persuasion techniques. Almost every time he mentions a psychological concept, he either misrepresents it or uses it to explain absurd stuff that he did with stooges or simply old magic tricks.

I didn’t know Keith Barry, but I have to say his TED lecture made me put him on the same category as Derren Brown: old mentalist tricks disguised as “persuasion and psychological techniques”. He even managed to fool you, it seems: the trick that you attributed to hypnosis has nothing to do with it, being achieved simply by the performer applying pressure on the feet of the subject instead of his hand. Notice how he never says where the pressure will be, and his left leg is covered by the table. His other live tricks are equally simple, and have nothing do with psychology, except for the fact that everything you do to an audience – even cheating/fooling them – is part of it.

Stefano makes an interesting point that these acts rely, in part, on misinforming people about psychology. Derren Brown is a classic example where he often gives explanations after the trick so the viewer feels they are being let in on the secret, but which are obviously misleading and so are part of the more general misdirection that the feats are achieved through the ‘power of the mind’.

In terms of the hand raising trick that Stefano mentions, looking back at the video, this seems a much more likely explanation. In which case, this is a ‘theory of mind‘ illusion, where we are fooled into attributing a different mental state to the person picked from the audience than they actually have.

I hope you don’t mind me publishing part of your email Stefano, I did try and email and ask but unfortunately the address wasn’t valid. Do get in touch if you have a website or blog and I’ll happily link to it and many thanks for your interesting commentary.

Dennett on magic and misdirection

While musing over yesterday’s post on the use of psychological language as a form of a magician’s misdirection, I remembered Dennett’s 2003 article [pdf] on consciousness where he uses exactly this as a metaphor for why consciousness doesn’t exist as some scientists think it does.

Dennett argues that the ‘hard problem‘ is a red herring – the whole question of how conscious first person experience arises from the biological function of the brain assumes that consciousness is a single thing that needs explaining.

He suggests that there isn’t a single thing that is consciousness, just a collection of mental components, but the fact we’ve named it as a single thing fools us.

In his article Explaining the “Magic” of Consciousness, he gives a great analogy of how the use of the word ‘the’ was used in a card trick to make it seem completely mysterious even to fellow professional magicians.

The tempting idea that there is a Hard Problem is simply a mistake. I cannot prove this. Or, better, even if I can prove this, my proof will surely fall on deaf ears, since CHALMERS, for instance, has already acknowledged that arguments against his convictions on this score are powerless to dislodge his intuition, which is beyond rational support. So I will not make the tactical error of trying to dislodge with rational argument a conviction that is beyond reason. That would be wasting everybody’s time, apparently. Instead, I will offer up what I hope is a disturbing parallel from the world of card magic: The Tuned Deck.

For many years, Mr. Ralph Hull, the famous card wizard from Crooksville, Ohio, has completely bewildered not only the general public, but also amateur conjurors, card connoisseurs and professional magicians with the series of card tricks which he is pleased to call “The Tuned Deck”…

Ralph Hull’s trick looks and sounds roughly like this:

Boys, I have a new trick to show you. It’s called ‘The Tuned Deck’. This deck of cards is magically tuned [Hull holds the deck to his ear and riffles the cards, listening carefully to the buzz of the cards]. By their finely tuned vibrations, I can hear and feel the location of any card. Pick a card, any card… [The deck is then fanned or otherwise offered for the audience, and a card is taken by a spectator, noted, and returned to the deck by one route or another.] Now I listen to the Tuned Deck, and what does it tell me? I hear the telltale vibrations, … [buzz, buzz, the cards are riffled by Hull’s ear and various manipulations and rituals are enacted, after which, with a flourish, the spectator’s card is presented].

Hull would perform the trick over and over for the benefit of his select audience of fellow magicians, challenging them to figure it out. Nobody ever did. Magicians offered to buy the trick from him but he would not sell it. Late in his life he gave his account to his friend, HILLIARD, who published the account in his privately printed book. Here is what Hull had to say about his trick:

For years I have performed this effect and have shown it to magicians and amateurs by the hundred and, to the very best of my knowledge, not one of them ever figured out the secret. …the boys have all looked for something too hard [my italics, DCD].

Like much great magic, the trick is over before you even realize the trick has begun. The trick, in its entirety, is in the name of the trick, “The Tuned Deck”, and more specifically, in one word “The”! As soon as Hull had announced his new trick and given its name to his eager audience, the trick was over. Having set up his audience in this simple way, and having passed the time with some obviously phony and misdirecting chatter about vibrations and buzz-buzz-buzz, Hull would do a relatively simple and familiar card presentation trick of type A (at this point I will draw the traditional curtain of secrecy; the further mechanical details of legerdemain, as you will see, do not matter).

His audience, savvy magicians, would see that he might possibly be performing a type A trick, a hypothesis they could test by being stubborn and uncooperative spectators in a way that would thwart any attempt at a type A trick. When they then adopted the appropriate recalcitrance to test the hypothesis, Hull would ‘repeat’ the trick, this time executing a type B card presentation trick. The spectators would then huddle and compare notes: might he be doing a type B trick? They test that hypothesis by adopting the recalcitrance appropriate to preventing a type B trick and still he does “the” trick – using method C, of course. When they test the hypothesis that he’s pulling a type C trick on them, he switches to method D – or perhaps he goes back to method A or B, since his audience has ‘refuted’ the hypothesis that he’s using method A or B.

And so it would go, for dozens of repetitions, with Hull staying one step ahead of his hypothesis-testers, exploiting his realization that he could always do some trick or other from the pool of tricks they all knew, and concealing the fact that he was doing a grab bag of different tricks by the simple expedient of the definite article: The Tuned Deck.

pdf of article Explaining the “Magic” of Consciousness.

Sleight of mind

I’ve just watched a video of an immensley entertaining TED presentation by ‘brain magician’ Keith Barry who does an act with various ‘mind control’ or ‘mind reading tricks’.

It reminded me of an early book by Derren Brown, an English magician who has a similar pitch. Brown is better known for his more recent TV shows and books, but some of his early publications are fascinating because they not only discuss his approach, but also shed light on our increasingly psychology-focused culture.

Keith Barry’s TED presentation contains part suggestion that would be well-known to hypnotists (in fact, the arm raising and lowering is used in standard hypnotisability measures) and part stage magic, all wrapped up in the language of psychology.

He starts the presentation by noting that the redirection of attention is an important part of magic and gives an example of our tendency to follow the magician’s gaze.

In fact, this is preceded by a clasping trick which surely demonstrates this, where the audience’s attention, and rather unfairly for the internet viewer – the camera, are diverted away from him reclasping his hands in a different manner.

I’m not going to pretend that all of the tricks in Barry or Brown’s shows are obvious, as some leave me completely baffled and in awe. I suspect only poor magicians will allow their tricks to be apparent even to the most curious of psychologists.

However, in Brown’s now sadly out-of-print book Pure Effect he makes the fascinating point that the narrative itself is part of the redirection, and describes how framing magic tricks in psychological language leads to certain expectations which, of course, make certain redirections more easily achievable.

This classic presentational ploy that Banachek calls ‘psychological direction’ allows for the illusion of enormous skill, as long as you let the participants figure out for themselves that you are employing such methods. I believe I earn their respect by denouncing psychic ‘psychic power’ as woolly guff and I challenge those lobotomised flower fairies who believe in such nonsense, appealing to their intelligence and belief in themselves as sceptical creatures. The other advantage of this angle is that is allows the effect to sit comfortably with a magic routine that suggests that similar ploys are at work.

The two sets become connected by a seductive undercurrent of apparently deft manipulation of the participant’s minds. At first, these techniques are being employed to produce wonderful, artistic and mystical effects. Then the tone darkens, and the performer, almost with an air of reluctance, sensing the correct rapport in the group, casts aside his props and amusements and begins to rely entirely on his knowledge of human nature to delve into the thought processes of the group. The spectators sense this intensifying of the situation, and adjust their interpretation of the event accordingly. What we are seeing is no longer trickery.

Such an approach uses our cultural familiarity and belief in psychological explanations to redirect our thinking to one place, while the magician is working the ‘magic’ below our level of awareness. In other words, most of the magic is done before the trick even starts.

This is what most impresses me about professional magicians. The slight of hand and the perceptual tricks are cool, but its the cognitive magic, the shaping of expectancies through narrative, that makes them seem so wondrous.

UPDATE: I just noticed this rather well-timed article on Wired Science entitled ‘Magic Tricks Reveal Inner Workings of the Brain’ that expands on the topic. Enjoy!

Link to Keith Barry TED ‘brain magic’ presentation.

Head in a vice

Scientific American has an article on migraines that takes a comprehensive look at the science of this painful and hallucinatory disorder.

The piece updates the science on migraines from the traditional but oversimplified ‘constricted blood vessels’ explanation to explore the interplay between nerves, neurotransmitters and lifestyle.

A crucial process seems to be cortical spreading depression that may be responsible, at least in part, for both the intense pain and the aura:

Aura appears to stem from cortical spreading depression—a kind of “brainstorm” anticipated as the cause of migraine in the writings of 19th-century physician Edward Lieving. Although biologist Aristides Leão first reported the phenomenon in animals in 1944, it was experimentally linked to migraine only recently. In more technical terms, cortical spreading depression is a wave of intense nerve cell activity that spreads through an unusually large swath of the cortex (the furrowed, outer layer of the brain), especially the areas that control vision. This hyperexcitable phase is followed by a wave of widespread, and relatively prolonged, neuronal inhibition. During this inhibitory phase, the neurons are in a state of “suspended animation,” during which they cannot be excited.

Neuronal activity is controlled by a carefully synchronized flow of sodium, potassium and calcium ions across the nerve cell membrane through channels and pumps. The pumps keep resting cells high in potassium and low in sodium and calcium. A neuron “fires,” releasing neurotransmitters, when the inward flow of sodium and calcium through opened channels depolarizes the membrane—that is, when the inside of the cell becomes positively charged relative to the outside. Normally, cells then briefly hyperpolarize: they become strongly negative on the inside relative to the outside by allowing potassium ions to rush out. Hyperpolarization closes the sodium and calcium channels and returns the neurons to their resting state soon after firing. But neurons can remain excessively hyperpolarized, or inhibited, for a long time following intense stimulations.

The article is remarkably comprehensive, probably as it’s written by neurologists David Dodick and John Gargus.

Link to SciAm article ‘Why Migraines Strike’ (via 3Q).

Through the looking glass

The New York Times has a great article on the psychology of mirrors that shows that they’re both cognitively challenging and have the power to change our social behaviour.

As a kid I spent hours puzzling over the fact that mirrors seemed to swap left and right but not up and down and it seems that there’s much about mirrors that we just don’t get very easily – such as judging how big our reflection will be. As it turns out, it’s always half our size.

Another curious aspect is that simply the presence of a mirror in a room changes our social behaviour because it seems to make us more self-aware.

Other researchers have determined that mirrors can subtly affect human behavior, often in surprisingly positive ways. Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in nonmirrored settings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V. Bodenhausen and Alan B. Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion.

“When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing,” Dr. Bodenhausen said. “A byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.” Physical self-reflection, in other words, encourages philosophical self-reflection, a crash course in the Socratic notion that you cannot know or appreciate others until you know yourself.

Unfortunately, the article misses out one of the most fascinating scientific findings – the fact that our understanding of mirrors can be selectively impaired after brain injury.

It’s called mirror agnosia and is a condition where people lose their sense of reflection.

In these cases, the patient still has intact knowledge about mirrors, they can describe what they do and how they work, but they can’t seem to put it into practice.

For example, the patient stands in front of a mirror and the researcher holds a pen over the patient’s shoulder and asks him to reach for it. Most people would reach backwards, people with mirror agnosia reach forwards and bang their hand into the glass.

In this study, the researchers noted that “all four patients kept complaining that the object was ‘in the mirror’, ‘outside my reach’ or ‘behind the mirror’. Thus, even the patients’ ability to make simple logical inferences about mirrors has been selectively warped to accommodate the strange new sensory world that they now inhabit”.

Even more curious are cases of mirrored-self misidentification, a delusional variant where patients look into the mirror, see themselves, and believe it is another person.

Here’s a case description from a 2001 study of a patient with the condition:

TH described his reflection as a person who was a ‘dead ringer’ for himself. TH frequently attempted to talk to the person, and said that as the person never replied he could only assume he had something wrong with his voice or tongue. When asked what he thought the person’s personality was like, TH replied that the person had not given him any reason to be suspicious. Asked where the person lived, TH said he lived in an apartment adjoining TH’s own apartment (although there was no other apartment on that block of land).

Link to NYT article ‘Mirrors Don‚Äôt Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes’

Five minutes with psychedelics researcher Bill Richards

Psychologist Bill Richards studies the medical potential of the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin, the active ingredient in ‘magic mushrooms’.

He’s part of the research team at the respected Johns Hopkins Medical School who are studying whether psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy can help people with cancer cope with the psychological impact of their condition.

The project is a hot topic at the moment, partly because the research team are looking for volunteers with a diagnosis of cancer to take part in the pioneering study, and also because several of their recent findings have made headlines.

These have included the widely-reported results from their recent studies where participants reported that some of the psilocybin experiences remained deeply and personally meaningful, even after a year.

Bill has been a clinical psychedelics researcher since the 1960s and so has a wealth of experience with these curious compounds, and he’s also kindly agreed to talk to Mind Hacks about the current pioneering research project.
 

Continue reading “Five minutes with psychedelics researcher Bill Richards”

Oliver Sacks’ Rage for Order

Oliver Sacks’ fantastic 1996 autism documentary Rage for Order is now available on Google Video, where he meets some completely remarkable people and explains some of the more curious features of the syndrome.

The programme explores the sort of interests, behaviours and talents that are associated with autism through Sacks’ irresistible interest in the human condition.

It includes the artist Jessica Park, who creates the most stunningly colourful paintings of buildings with perfectly accurate star constellations in the background (that’s one of her pictures on the left).

It’s a really wonderful piece of television and was part of a six-part series that Sacks’ made called Mind Traveller.

Sadly, the other parts of the series seem to be lost to the internet, but do get in touch if you have a copy as I would to see them.

Link to ‘Rage for Order’ on Google Video.

Encephalon turns gold at 50

The 50th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has arrived, with the best of the last fortnight’s mind and brain writing ably hosted by the excellent Sharp Brains.

Alvaro stars with a tongue-in-cheek request to remind people of the benefits of participating and hosting Encephalon at your blog.

If there’s a particular post your proud of and want to spread the word, or you’re interesting in getting exposure for your blog by hosting the high traffic festivities, just drop an email to encephalon dot host at gmail dot com.

A couple of my favourites from this edition include a completely fascinating post on the compulsive collecting of televisions reported in the medical literature, and another on the function of fearful faces.

The next edition will be hosted on the primed and ready Mouse Trap.

Link to Encephalon 50.