The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover

The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover was an influential article by Lindsy Van Gelder that examined how a case of gender-bending identity faking from the early days of online chatrooms impacted on a virtual community.

I’d read it many years ago when it was published in the book, Computerization and Controversy, but have just found a scanned copy on the net as a <a href="
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/classes/cyberspace/resources/Van%20Gelder%201991%20-%20The%20Strange%20Case%20of%20the%20Electronic%20Lover.pdf”>pdf.

It’s entirely anecdotal but it’s a fascinating read (although has been scanned in sideways, so you’ll have to print it, or rotate it on screen – Acrobat users, you can right click to rotate documents).

What I hadn’t remembered was the identities of the person and the alter-ego:

I soon learned that [Talkin’ Lady’s] real name was Joan Sue Green, and that she was a New York neuropsychologist in her late twenties, who had been severely disfigured in a car accident that was the fault of a drunken driver. The accident had killed her boyfriend.

Joan had spent a year in hospital being treated for brain damage, which affected both her speech and her ability to walk. Mute, confined to a wheelchair, and frequently suffering from intense back and leg pain, Joan had been at first so embittered about her disabilities that she literally didn’t want to live.

Then her mentor, a former professor at John Hopkins, presented her with a computer, a modem, and a year’s subscription to CompuServe to be used specifically doing what Joan was doing – making friends online…

Over the next two years, she became a monumental on-line presence who served as both a support for other disabled women and as an inspiring stereotype-smasher to the able-bodied. Through her many intense friendships and (in some cases) her on-line romances, she changed the lives of dozens of women.

Thus it was a huge shock early this year when, through a complicated series of events, Joan was revealed as being not disabled at all. More to the point, Joan, in fact, was not a woman. She was really a man we’ll call Alex – a prominent New York psychiatrist in his early fifties who was engaged in a bizarre, all-consuming experiment to see what it felt like to be a female, and to experience the intimacy of female friendship.

I first came across the case in Sherry Turkle’s book on the psychology of online identity, Life on the Screen, where she described the story as already having “near-legendary status” in 1995 cyberculture.

There is now a growing body of scholarly work on the psychology of the internet but several episodes seem to have become part of the mythos of the subject, partly because they were used to illustrate psychological points before rigorous empirical work had been started.

Incidentally, I tried to look up the author, Lindsy Van Gelder, on the net but found few details. However, I did find this article from the 1980s where she defends her counter-culture credentials against the fact she owned an IBM PC! (a 5150 if I’m not mistaken).

pdf of Van Gelder’s ‘The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover’.

Decline of a Baghdad psychiatric hospital

The New York Times covers the disturbing state of the Ibn Rushid hospital, one of only two psychiatric hospitals in Baghdad that serves the entire population of 6 million.

The article is equally moving and disturbing as it describes how the local citizens are suffering the effects of war with little available assistance while the doctors resort to desperate measures to try and help.

The hospital’s fortunes have changed markedly during the occupation. Apparently in decline since the days of Saddam Hussein, a 2004 Psychiatric News article described how it had been refurbished after being looted by armed men shortly after the beginning of the war.

It now seems that a sharp decline is in progress once more as medication is increasingly scarce and ECT is being given on faulty equipment without anaesthetic or muscle relaxants.

One aspect of Iraq’s mental health system which has been consistently reported since the occupation is the fact that many Iraqi psychiatrists have left the country owing to violence and kidnapping that has targeted doctors.

Both major Baghdad hospital have been sacked by armed looters and have been affected by nearby fighting.

The NYT article is accompanied by a photo essay that documents a day in the life of the Ibn Rushid hospital.

Link to NYT article ‘War Takes Toll on Baghdad Psychiatric Hospital’.
Link to NYT photo essay.

Virtual paranoia

The Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast has a fascinating interview with psychologist Daniel Freeman who discusses his recent study that used virtual reality to study paranoid thinking.

Freeman has pioneered the use of VR in studying paranoia to try and understand how individual psychological differences contribute to suspiciousness and fear.

Of course, it’s possible to use real life environments to see how exposure relates to paranoid thinking. In fact, the same research group has studied how patients with paranoid delusions react to urban environments.

Those familiar with South East London might be interested to know that stressful urban stimulus in this experiment was a walk down Camberwell High Street (as a resident of Camberwell it is disconcerting, although not entirely surprising, to find out I’m living in an experimental condition used to induce paranoid reactions).

For a scientific point of view, one difficulty with using real-life environments to study paranoia is that they are constantly changing and reactive.

This latter point is important because people who are very paranoid might, for instance, behave in a manner that other people find strange and that attracts attention, or in a way that sparks hostility in others.

One way of getting round this is to expose all participants to a virtual reality environment programmed to be identical, so any differences in paranoid thinking between individuals are almost certainly related to how they interpret the situation and not how the environment reacts to them.

In this latest VR study, the environment was programmed to be neutral (a simulation of the London Underground carriage) but about a third of participants from the general population reported paranoid thoughts.

Some of the paranoid thoughts reported in the paper are really quite striking: “There was an aggressive person ‚Äì his intention was to intimidate me and make me feel uneasy” and “One guy looked pissed off and maybe one guy flicked the finger at me”.

I’ve actually been in the simulation, having taken part in a pilot study for a related project, and although it’s a bit clunky (as you can see from the picture) it’s remarkable how its difficult not to have human reactions to the ‘people’ on the train.

Interestingly, the study found that anxiety, worry and the tendency to have anomalous perceptual experiences were associated with paranoid thoughts, as was ‘cognitive inflexibility’ – the tendency to be unable to see alternative explanations for ideas or beliefs.

In the audio interview, Freeman discusses this latest study in more detail and how it relates to what we know about the psychology of paranoia.

UPDATE: Thanks to PsyBlog for alerting me to the fact that a streamed video from the Wellcome Trust has an interview with Dan Freeman and footage from the experiment itself.

Link to RCPsych to podcast on VR and paranoia study.
Link to abstract of study.

Survivor search robots to comfort disaster survivors

The St Petersburg Times has an article on the new generation of rescue robots that search for survivors after disasters. Their creator, engineer Robin Murphy, is designing robots that will aim to provide psychological comfort to trapped victims until the rescuers can reach them.

Murphy has been designing and deploying rescue robots for many years, assisting the rescue teams after the World Trade Centre attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the Utah mine disaster to name but a few.

Recognising the need to alleviate the psychological suffering of trapped survivors, she’s just won a $500,000 grant from Microsoft to develop robots that attempt to comfort the people they reach.

The Survivor Buddy would act as an emergency companion to people stuck in the crossfire of snipers or under the rubble of an earthquake-ravaged building like the ones now littering China.

She envisions a robot that plays soothing music to trapped victims and features a monitor showing the faces of loved ones and rescuers trying to reach them. It will deliver water and transmit a victim’s vital signs to doctors. And it should be friendly, she said.

Link to The St Petersburg Times on Survivor Buddy (via AI&Robots).

The philosophy of suicide

The most recent edition of ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone discussed the philosophy of suicide, looking at how our concepts of self-killing have changed throughout history and whether there is any such thing as a rational reason for ending our own lives.

The philosopher Albert Camus famously stated that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide”, something that surely struck Socrates as he killed himself by drinking hemlock.

Suicide in its many forms has inspired everything from condemnation to romanticisation, most focusing on the morality of taking one’s own life and whether it can be justified as a reasonable option.

The programme touches on many of these issues and I was also interested to see a link from the page to an entry on suicide from the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Link to Philosopher’s Zone on suicide with audio and transcript.
Link to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on suicide.

How neurotech will change the world, one brain at a time

High end business magazine Condé Nast Portfolio has a feature article on the latest developments in the 120 billion dollar neurotech industry that aims to develop drugs and devices to cure diseases and optimise our brains.

The article takes a broad view of the industry, but also highlights a few areas which are looking hot and gives a guide to the sort of business thinking that motivates both the neurotech giants and the fledgling startups.

It seems the industry is currently a high stakes, high risk investment prospect as the majority of companies do not make money, so investors are betting long-term or hoping they’re backing a blockbuster.

The piece also mentions the work of Zack Lynch of the neurotech industry group NIO, who in partnership with his co-director and wife Casey Lynch, seems to have been lobbying the US government for significant support for the sector:

The couple’s new push is to get more federal dollars channeled toward the industry. Zack has been traveling back and forth to Washington, sometimes taking along neurotech C.E.O.’s, to promote a $1 billion “national neurotechnology initiative” that Representative Patrick Kennedy, a Rhode Island Democrat, recently announced he will introduce in Congress. The legislation asks the federal government to spend $200 million a year for five years on neurotech, including $30 million for the Food and Drug Administration to train more experts, $80 million for the National Institutes of Health to coordinate the neuroresearch efforts that are now run by 16 different institutes, and $75 million to increase small-business grants for neurotech companies.

One issue the article touches on is the deregulation of the industry so they can develop pharmaceuticals for cognitive enhancement of healthy people without having to get their medication licensed for a specific medical disorder.

While some remain suitably demure about the possibilities (at least in public), this is obviously the neurotech holy grail and is undoubtedly high on the long-term goals of the industry.

The article also has a couple of fantastic interactive features accompanying it – one on drugs and the other on implants. Also check the right-hand column for a series of related articles from the same publication.

Link to Cond√© Nast Portfolio article ‘The Ultimate Cure’ (via BrainWaves).

Pharmaceutical product placement rife in TV shows

Treatment Online reviews some recent research showing that there is an increasing trend for pharmaceutical drug brand names to appear in prime-time TV shows in what looks increasingly like widespread product placement advertising.

Unsurprisingly, the main culprits tend to be popular medical shows, where the rate of pharmaceutical name-dropping seems to be increasing.

You might think that drug brand names are just being mentioned so the shows can be realistic and use the names of real medications. But it is possible to mention drugs without mentioning brand names, and this is probably more more realistic.

Medical drugs have two common names. One is the generic name which refers to the compound, one is the brand name, which refers to a specific drug company’s version.

For example, aspirin is a generic drug often sold under the name Anadin. Fluoxetine is the generic drug often sold under the name Prozac.

So, there’s not really any particular reason for TV shows to use brand names (in fact, doctors more commonly use the generic names). But despite this, the trend is growing and there is evidence that some of the name dropping is actually paid advertising through the back door [insert your own suppository joke here].

Industry watchdog Nielsen Product Placement notes that the number of casual references to name-brand pharmaceuticals is higher than ever before and continues to rise with each new TV season. Medical shows in particular lend themselves to this form of non-advertising, and they are among the most popular prime-time programs. Shows like “House,” “Scrubs,” and “Grey’s Anatomy” routinely feature medical environments where sexy doctors and nurses drop references to brand-name drugs in settings both private and professional.

Studies reveal that the authority granted to these characters leaves viewers less likely to notice or question their implied endorsements of the products at hand – and, by the very nature of the fiction, a TV doctor recommending Vicodin is not as overbearing an advocate as the same character might be when marveling over the many great features of his brand-new Hummer.

Some companies actually admit to negotiating placement deals despite the industrywide contention that the vast majority of these references do not fulfill any contract. While these placements are not illegal, necessary federal oversight remains very poor if it exists at all.

Link to Treatment Online on drug company product placement.

Expensive advice more likely to be followed

Hot on the heels of a study that found that simply describing a wine as more expensive made it taste better comes the discovery that the same advice is more likely to be followed if it costs more.

The study was led by organisational psychologist Francesca Gino and is covered by the BPS Research Digest:

Dozens of students were asked questions about American history and received small cash prizes for correct answers. The students were either given the option of receiving advice on the correct answers, or advice was imposed on them. Sometimes this advice was free; other times it was paid for out of the students’ winnings.

Crucially, the advice always came from the same source – in the form of the answer that a student from a pilot session had given to the same question – so the quality of advice was held constant regardless of whether it was free or paid for.

Throughout the study, the participants took more account of advice they had paid for than advice they were given free, even though it was made clear to them that the advice was of the same quality. A final study showed the students took even more account of advice if it was made more expensive.

The full text of the study is freely available online as a pdf, although if you’re not convinced of the findings I’m sure Dr Gino would be happy to supply an additional copy for a small fee.

Link to BPSRD on the behavioural value of expensive advice.

2008-05-16 Spike activity

Frontal lobe damage changes performance on the ‘Pepsi challenge‘. Isn’t the world a better place now we know that?

Philosophy Now reviews ‘Freedom and Neurobiology’ by John Searle.

In an article for Salon, our recent interviewee neurologist Robert Burton gets stuck into a high-tech huckster promoting expensive SPECT scans to diagnose Alzheimer’s and herbal supplements to treat the brain disorder.

Channel N discovers a video lecture by Antonio Damasio on the neuroscience of emotion.

Psychologist Charles Fernyhough turned every moment of the first three years of his daughter’s life into a research project notes The Telegraph as they review the resulting book.

Treatment Online on research that has found that variations in serotinergic neuroreceptors may indicate severity of depression.

13 ways to quickly improve your decision-making are discussed by PsyBlog.

The Age has a fantastic article on the psychology of risk and why we’re so bad at judging it.

“The Change You Deserve”. The slogan for antidepressant drug Effexor, and now, the slogan for the US Republican party!

Furious Seasons notes that a recent study on bipolar disorder being overdiagnosed is being supported by leading bipolar researchers.

APA psychology magazine Monitor has an excellent article on how research with deaf people who can’t sign might shed light on the fundamentals of cognition.

Burgeoning research on the neuroscience of mystical experiences is discussed in the The New York Times.

Pictures of brain tumours!

BBC News reports that music can enhance the taste of wine. If only it could do the same for brussel sprouts.

The brain is not modular: what fMRI really tells us. An article in Scientific American Mind discusses limitations of brain scanning.

Deric Bownds covers a study that finds our facial touch sensitivity is enhanced by viewing a touch.

The excellent ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind discusses the neurobiology of nicotine addiction and concerns about new anti-smoking drugs.

Developing Intelligence covers a fascinating study on time distortion due to visual flicker.

The Wall Street Journal on the possibility of the US Goverment awarding Purple Hearts, a medal for soldiers wounded in battle, for cases of PTSD (thanks Kyle!).

The secret family life of a false memory

Thanks to Aaron and Frontal Cortex for simultaneously alerting us to this fantastic animation that recounts a charming real life case of a false memory.

Families are like incubators for false memories because each family has its favourite stories, anecdotes and foundational myths that get passed on, retold and molded in the retelling, like an intergeneration game of Chinese whispers.

I have many early memories that I simply don’t know whether I genuinely remember, or I just think I do, because I’ve heard stories or seen the photos so many times.

I love listening to families talk about memories, because its fascinating to hear how recollections can vary, each highlighting a different aspect, as well as how they resolve conflicting accounts.

The animation shows exactly this process in action, showing us that remembering is more than just an individual process, it’s often a group activity.

Link to This American Life animation on memory.

Orgasm and brain

Scientific American Mind tackles the neuroscience of orgasm in a feature article which has just been released online.

One of the merits of the article is that it avoids the ‘men are simple, women are complex’ stereotype and presents results from scientific studies that suggest there are both subtle similarities and differences in sexual response.

One problem with the area of sexual neuroscience is that it largely relies on brain scanning studies in humans.

You’ll see from the article that there’s lots of speculation as to what the changes in orgasm-related brain activity mean. It’s largely blue sky thinking though, because it’s always difficult to decide what is happening in the mind from the activity of particular brain areas. Take these paragraphs for example:

But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment—a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.

Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”

It’s like trying to guess what’s happening in a city just by looking at changes in traffic flow. The upsurge in traffic on the high street could mean it’s a busy shopping day, but it could also mean there’s a carnival, or a riot, or funeral, or any other strange or unusual occurrence you might never have predicted.

Brain scanning just finds associations, but to find out whether an area is causally involved in a particular function, or whether it is necessary for the function, research with brain injured patients is one of the most powerful methods.

For example, if you think a brain area is necessary for orgasm, or a certain component of orgasm, a person with damage to that area should not experience what you’ve predicted.

We know that sexual problems are common after brain injury, but virtually no research has been done to see how damage to specific brain areas affects orgasm.

This would be important, both to help us understand the neuroscience of orgasm beyond general speculation, but also to begin to understand how we can help brain injured people regain satisfying sex lives.

Link to SciAmMind article ‘The Orgasmic Mind’.

Undercover genetics and the function of the brain

Science News has an article on one of the most important future topics in neuroscience – epigenetics, the science of how information coded in the genes is used when the brain does its work.

Almost every cell in the body has a copy of the DNA, and therefore has the capability to express any protein.

But you wouldn’t want proteins that are used for digesting food produced in the brain, so the body has various ways of regulating which proteins get expressed at any one time. This is epigenetics.

If DNA is like a blueprint, epigenetics is the committee of civil engineers that coordinate the construction site.

We’ve known from twin studies and molecular genetic research that genes and the environment both influence cognition and behaviour, but these studies only give statistical associations. What they don’t tell us is how this happens.

In a sense, epigenetics is the scientific glue that allows us to understand how genes influence learning and behaviour, but also how learning and behaviour influences the expression of genes.

In other words, its goal is to explain how the environment combines with genetic information in the brain.

Needless to say, much epigenetic research is focusing on mental illness, the classic example of how genetic risk, experience and environment combine with sometimes disastrous consequences.

One of the most interesting aspects is that there is growing evidence that epigenetic information can be inherited. So your experiences may actually cause changes to gene regulation that are then passed on to offspring.

Link to Science New article on epigenetics.
Link to abstract of good review article on epigenetics and cognition.

Brain surgery in ancient Incan society

Neurophilosophy has a fascinating article on the recent archaeological discovery of numerous ancient Incan skulls of which over 1 in 6 showed signs of trepanation – an ancient form of brain surgery where a hole was drilled in the skull.

What’s surprising is just how common it was. 66 skulls from Incan burial sites had a total of 109 trepanation holes. Some, like the one pictured, obviously needed a significant amount of skill and practice to complete.

And with this many examples, the archaeologists could make some fascinating inferences about the purpose and success of these operations:

Andrushko and Verano argue that the Incas performed trepanation primarily to treat head injuries incurred during battle, because the holes are most often found at the front of the skull to the left, consistent with injuries caused by a right-handed opponent during face-to-face combat, and because adult males are overrepresented in the sample. The procedure was evidently used to treat mastoiditis (an infection of the region of the temporal bone behind the ear) as well.

The authors also show that the success rate of the procedure improved with time, as the Inca empire progressed and made advances in medicine. The earliest specimens, dated to around 1,000 A.D., showed no signs of bone growth around the perforations, suggesting that the procedure was often fatal. But specimens dating to around 400 years later suggest a survival rate of around 90%.

Link to Neurophilosophy article on prehistoric Inca neurosurgery.

The complete Husband and Wife rating scales

Our post on the 1930’s ‘wife rating scale’ was picked up by Boing Boing and one of their readers realised she had a copy of the full scale – including the rating scale for husbands – and posted the whole questionnaire online.

You may be interested to hear that husbands could earn a demerit for “Smokes in bed”, but 5 merits for “Tries to keep wife equipped with modern labor saving devices”. A whopping 20 merits could be awarded for being an “Ardent lover – sees that wife has an orgasm in marital congress”.

My favourite is getting a demerit for calling “Where is….? without first hunting the object”.

With the full husband and wife scales now online you can rate each other all the way to marital bliss. Or not.

Link to ‘Tests for Husbands and Wives’.

Phantom extra limbs

Phantom limbs are a well-known phenomenon where sensations and feelings are still experienced from a missing limb. In rare cases after brain injury, an additional phantom limb can appear – causing the sensation of a phantom third hand, arm or leg.

The drawings on the left are from two case studies of people with these ‘supernumerary phantom limbs’ recently published in the journal Neurology. They show an artist’s impression of the body sensations of two patients who suffered brain stem strokes.

Both patients had the experience of having a third arm and a third leg, although the male patients had the leg ‘appear’ along the midline of the body, while the female patient seemed to experience it ‘superimposed’ upon an existing leg.

One distressing element for the female patient was that although the patient could ‘move’ the phantom arm voluntarily, “she described occasional loss of control and feeling strangulated by the phantom arm around the neck”.

Two earlier case studies from neuropsychologist Peter Halligan and colleagues reported similarly disembodied extra limbs, but this time after damage to the right hemisphere of the brain.

As is more common after right hemisphere damage, these tended to have a delusional quality, so they weren’t just sensations – the patients genuinely believe their additional limbs existed.

One gentleman believed that he had a third arm in the middle of his body, and another believed that he had a third hand.

In this last case, the patient reported actually ‘seeing’ the additional limb, similar to this case study of a gentleman who believed he had a third leg protruding from his left knee after suffering a stroke that affected the thalamus:

He consistently maintained that the phantom leg was attached to his knee with a “bone plate” that “had no flesh on it”. However, he reported that the phantom limb itself looked normal and had a shinbone and a foot. It usually “appeared” in the morning when he was helped to put on his trousers. The patient stated that the phantom limb prevented him from turning over in bed, but did not adversely affect him otherwise.

When asked about how he knew about this leg he said that he could see it (despite his severe visual impairment) and feel it with his hand. He believed that the phantom limb belonged to him, although he readily accepted that it was not “normal” to have three legs. Initially he reported that the “leg” was growing from his own knee, but then reasoned that (given its size) he would have noticed it before the stroke.

At other times he believed the leg was attached to him by the nursing staff, but could not explain why. The patient was aware of phantom limb phenomena as his wife was an amputee. He was also aware that a stroke may affect perception and cognition. He did not believe either issue applied in his case.

The experience of a ‘supernumerary phantom limb’ is usually the result of a brain injury and typically resolves over time.

Phantom limbs are thought to arise because the somatosensory cortex, the part of the brain that represents the body’s sensations and feelings, reorganises so that the area previously used to represent the limb is partially ‘re-used’ for other functions, meaning the sensations sometimes get activated when these other functions are active.

Nevertheless, supernumerary phantom limbs are still mysterious, largely due to the small number of cases and diverse brain areas involved.

There is some suspicion that they might be caused because of disrupted communication between parietal lobes, which are known to represent body image, and the sensory feedback from the nerves in the body.

Link to abstract of Neurology case studies.
Link to full text of 1993 case study.
Link to full text of 1995 study.

Lord of the ring artefacts

I’m thoroughly digging the brain section of the Radiology Picture of the Day website. As you might expect, it’s a wonderfully geeky place where radiologists post an image every day, often brain CTs or MRIs, with a little gem of wisdom with each one.

One of the most interesting is the pictured CT scan with a ‘ring artefact’. I’ve contrast enhanced the image so you can see the circle or ring near the centre a little more clearly.

It’s a known imaging problem caused by poor calibration of the scanner.

However, the Radiology Picture of the Day entry notes that these were given special significance by the quacktastic German physician Ryke Geerd Hamer who claimed that his ‘New Medicine’ could cure 98% of all cancers.

He gave these rings the rather immodest name ‘Hamer Foci’ and if they appeared in the brain, apparently this meant cancer was elsewhere in the body.

For Hamer, cancer was simply the body’s reaction to a psychological conflict, and presumably this was what he thought the CT scanner was picking up.

This is despite the fact that CT scans only picture large scale structure on which psychological changes make no recognisable impact.

A curious case of neuroimaging apophenia.

Link to ‘Ring Artefact with Pseudomedical Interpretation’.